A woman accused of killing a retired nurse in the parking structure of the Promenade on the Peninsula mall in Rolling Hills Estates was struggling to find funds to send her and her daughter on a trip to Florida for her daughter’s team cheer competition, a prosecutor told a Torrance Superior Court jury during opening statements of the woman’s trial on Wednesday, Nov. 12.
But a public defender representing Cherie Lynnette Townsend, 47, told the jury there would be no scientific evidence to prove that her client committed the crime, nor did investigators find the murder weapon.
Townsend faces a charge of murder in the stabbing death of 66-year-old Susan Leeds of Rancho Palos Verdes, who was found bloodied and barely breathing in the driver’s seat of her SUV on May 3, 2018. She died minutes later.
Townsend, in a note found on her phone by investigators days before the murder, wrote “In this moment, I am completely broken” because her then-14-year-old daughter was set to “compete in the biggest event of her life” and Townsend was about $2,000 short of traveling expenses,” Deputy District Attorney Paul Thompson told the jury of six men and six women.
As part of a birthday present for her daughter, Townsend offered to take two of her friends with them to Florida. They gave her about $350 in cash so Townsend could by the tickets and fly them out, Thompson said.
“She made promises that she was not going to be able to keep,” Thompson told the jury. “She never bought the tickets.”
Prosecutors contend Townsend sat in the parking structure at the mall for more than two hours when Leeds, who shopped at The Gap and grabbed takeout from Rubio’s, returned to her SUV, which was parked across from Townsend’s gold Chevrolet sedan.
“What Ms. Leeds didn’t know that day,” Thompson said, “was that she would go into the parking lot and encounter the defendant.”
Thompson told the panel that after Leeds got into the driver’s seat of the SUV around 12:13 p.m., Townsend went around another car and attacked her from behind. The attack was captured in the distance on a surveillance camera — but the footage was blurry.
Townsend allegedly then got into her car and drove out of the structure, cutting off a white SUV as she exited, then running a red light and making a left turn.
Sheriff’s deputies arrived at 12:26 p.m. and found Leeds with 17 stab wounds, Thompson said. Her throat had been slashed. A black purse Leeds was carrying in surveillance video from the mall on her way back to her SUV was gone. In it, Thompson said, was a blood glucose monitor.
Townsend allegedly drove westbound on Indian Peak Road before turning northbound onto Hawthorne Boulevard, Thompson said. Leeds’ cellphone, meanwhile, pinged off towers going in the same general direction.
Townsend’s cellphone was found by detectives underneath Leeds’ SUV at the scene.
Townsend’s car, captured on Automated License Plate Readers, showed that she briefly drove back toward the mall after she realized her cellphone was missing, but did not go back to the parking structure.
Townsend later went to a Verizon store in Carson to try to shut off her phone, Thompson said.
Townsend was arrested two weeks after the homicide, with her car taken by detectives as evidence. Her public defender, Elizabeth Landgraf, told the jury that the car was searched, with the seats and floorboards removed, and no blood evidence was found inside. Detectives also didn’t find any belongings of Leeds in the car.
She also said Townsend’s DNA was not found among some 40 samples taken at the murder scene except on her cellphone under Leeds’ SUV. A bloody fingerprint found near the interior by the seatbelt was inconclusive because it did not have enough ridge detail.
“Cherie Townsend was excluded from all of them, meaning (her DNA) was not at the crime scene,” Landgraf said.
Townsend never confessed to the crime, Landgraf said.
Thompson also spent much of his opening statement going over comments Townsend made to family, friends, other cheer moms and detectives before and after the murder, as well as her Google search history, in which she specifically entered searches for Promenade on the Peninsula, gyms on the Palos Verdes Peninsula and whether there was an Equinox gym at the mall.
She told a friend she wanted to start a GoFundMe to try to collect money for the costs — but did not because she feared her children would be embarrassed.
After Leeds was killed, Townsend allegedly messaged another cheer mom on Facebook that “something huge happened today, I cannot get into it right now, but I could not get on that plane tonight.”
Townsend was released six days after her initial arrest after the District Attorney’s Office asked for further investigation. Detectives arrested Townsend again in August 2023, but never disclosed what the additional evidence was that led to her second arrest.
Townsend was interviewed twice by sheriff’s detectives in 2018 and 2023, with Thompson highlighting changes in her story. In 2018, Townsend told detectives she went to the mall to shop for some things for her daughter, but never entered the mall because she had car issues.
In 2023, Townsend said she went to the mall to shop for her son, who was about to go to prom, and when asked if she had car trouble, she said no.
Landgraf, before asking the jury to find her client not guilty, said that after all the evidence is presented, the jury would “have a lot of questions that the prosecution can’t answer and that is reasonable doubt.”
The trial was expected to take weeks to complete.