Trial Begins for Man Who Admitted Killing Girlfriend

When Theresa Lawson’s decomposing body was found stuffed in a plastic-lined cardboard box nearly two weeks after she disappeared, her boyfriend promptly confessed that he had struck and killed her during an argument.

Now a Torrance Superior Court jury will be asked to decide whether Lawson’s death was an accident, as boyfriend D. C. Trainer Jr. insists, or murder.

In opening statements Tuesday, Deputy Dist. Atty. Phillip Millett told jurors that Lawson’s body was found Feb. 17 with an electrical cord wound tight around the neck.

“My position is that Mr. Trainer willfully and deliberately murdered Theresa Lawson,” Millett said. “I’m sure the defendant’s position is that it was all a horrible mistake and not nearly as awful as it seems.”

Defense attorney William MacCabe said Trainer will testify that he struck Lawson, 35, in the head with a vase on Feb. 4 only after she hit him with a wine bottle in a drunken rage.

When she fell to the ground and did not move, Trainer, 34, believed he had killed her, MacCabe said. Panicked, Trainer stuffed Lawson into the three-foot-square box and stashed it in the garage of the Redondo Beach apartment the couple had moved into just two weeks before, MacCabe said.

“He was confused and frightened and didn’t call for help,” MacCabe said. “There are some things we’ll never figure out why.”

Among those things, MacCabe acknowledged, is why--several days after the fatal argument-- Trainer rented a moving truck, loaded up his belongings and the body, hooked Lawson’s sports car in tow and drove to his hometown of Pasadena, Tex.

Before leaving Redondo Beach on Feb. 12, Trainer told several of Lawson’s alarmed friends that she had taken a trip to Palm Springs but would be back in a few days, both lawyers said.

Suspicious, one of her friends reported Lawson missing on Feb. 15.

Two days later, after arriving in Texas, Trainer borrowed a backhoe from his father’s heavy equipment business and dug a deep pit in the ground, Millett said. He told relatives who complained of a foul odor coming from the truck that he planned to bury two dead dogs he had brought along, Millett said.

Trainer’s father, alerted by a call from Lawson’s mother that the woman was missing, found Lawson’s body when he insisted on seeing what was inside the box before it was buried, Millett said.

A coroner will testify that Lawson may have been alive when she was stuffed inside the box, MacCabe said.

“He’s going to tell you that the cord around her neck had nothing to do with her death,” MacCabe said. “He’s going to tell you in his opinion she was alive when she was put in the box and she was so placed in this box that air could not go into her lungs. He will tell you that she suffocated.”

Millett, however, said in an interview after the opening arguments that the coroner’s testimony will not be so decisive.

“The coroner is very iffy on everything that he does say,” Millett said.

Ultimately, jurors will have to decide how they believe Lawson died, he said.

“How she died,” he said, “may very well determine what the nature of this crime is.”