Guilty. Guilty of murder in the first degree with the special circumstance of lying in wait. That was the verdict reached by a jury of 10 women and two men after deliberating about 3 hours over the fate of Christopher Lee, who killed his lover and next-door neighbor Erin Corwin in June 2014. Lee admitted in court last week that he strangled the 19-year-old woman who said she was pregnant with his baby because he said she molested his young daughter. However, there was no evidence to support his claim of molestation. On the day that Corwin was killed, she and Lee drove into the Rose of Peru mining area east of Twentynine Palms, where Corwin expected to get a marriage proposal. Both Corwin and Lee were married to other people at the time of her death. Instead, Lee strangled her with a garrote he had hidden in his Jeep, then dumped her body down a 140-foot mineshaft where she laid for seven weeks until Sheriff’s investigators found her body.
