Corinna Novis was twenty and lived in Redlands, California. On November 7, 1986, she cashed a check at the First Interstate Bank drive-through window near the Redlands Mall, and a man and a woman took her. Her body was found eight days later in a shallow grave in Fontana; she had been strangled or suffocated. The couple kept her car and switched its license plates, and the next day the woman cashed a check on Novis's account for fifteen dollars. They kept looking for someone else to rob.
The man was James Gregory Marlow, an ex-convict from Kentucky who had done time at Folsom prison and called himself the Folsom Wolf. He was born in 1956. Cynthia Coffman, born in St. Louis, had left a husband and children behind and moved to Arizona. She met Marlow in May 1986, just after he got out of jail for stealing his sixth wife's car. Within weeks they were traveling together, using methamphetamine, and at the end of July they married in Tennessee. By June, both said later, the relationship had turned violent. Coffman had a tattoo that read "Property of the Folsom Wolf."
On November 12, five days after Novis was taken, they walked into Prime Cleaners in Huntington Beach and abducted Lynel Murray, nineteen, a college student who worked there, at gunpoint. They took her to a seaside motel, where she was raped and strangled in the bathtub. Two days later, on November 14, Marlow and Coffman were arrested at Big Bear, in the San Bernardino Mountains. Coffman confessed. Marlow later said he had dug Novis's grave with a shovel that police found at the Bavarian Lodge.
Marlow told an investigator that the killing of Novis was "a 50-50" thing and that Coffman "got the ball rolling." Coffman's defense was that she had been a battered woman acting under his control. The jury in San Bernardino County did not accept that from either of them, and on August 30, 1989, both were sentenced to death for Novis's murder. Coffman was the first woman sentenced to death in California since the state restored capital punishment in 1977. On March 10, 1992, Marlow pleaded guilty to the murder of Lynel Murray and was sentenced to death again, this time in Orange County; Coffman received life without parole in that case. The California Supreme Court upheld both death sentences on August 19, 2004.
Two earlier deaths are laid to the pair: Sandra Neary, thirty-two, of Costa Mesa, on October 11, 1986, and Pamela Simmons, thirty-five, of Bullhead City, Arizona, on October 28. Neither was charged, and Bullhead City has carried the Simmons case as unsolved. Some later accounts also list a man, Gregory Hill, killed that July, which would make five, but his death is not described in any court record. California carried out its last execution in 2006, and a moratorium has been in place since 2019.