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 one count each of murder and robbery 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.

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