Lengyel murder trial ends with fiery barbs between defense, prosecutors

The murder trial of Theobald Lengyel, the musician-turned-tech worker alleged to have killed Capitola’s Alice “Alix” Herrmann, concluded Wednesday with defense counsel Annrae Angel rebuffing prosecutors’ characterization of Lengyel as a violent alcoholic and emphasizing the stringent legal bar required to convict someone of murder in the first or second degree. 

Jurors will now decide whether Lengyel is guilty of murder, and if so, in which degree: Prosecutors sought to charge him with murder in the first degree, the most severe charge. However, jurors are allowed to decide to convict him of lesser included charges only, meaning a murder in the second degree, manslaughter or a not-guilty verdict could result. Lengyel pleaded not guilty. 

Angel also admitted that the revelation of a recording of Herrmann’s death, undiscovered by investigators until halfway through the trial, had changed the tenor of the proceedings.

“I feel kind of, from my perspective, that we’ve been in two different trials,” Angel began. “We were in the trial initially that we were all experiencing together and that we expected.

“And then the audio tape surfaced and everything changed,” she continued. “And at that point, a lot of the stuff that we were thinking about and listening to beforehand almost didn’t seem to matter anymore.”  

The audio tape refers to an app on Herrmann’s phone that recorded three hours of audio on the night that Lengyel allegedly strangled her to death in her Capitola home. After its discovery on Sept. 22, that recording was allowed to be admitted as evidence late in the trial over defense objections. 

Last week prosecutors played the entirety of the recording for jurors. Six minutes were replayed on Wednesday during prosecutors’ closing remarks. 

Lengyel, 55, lived in El Cerrito, north of Berkeley, and gained fame early in life as the horns player for the popular alternative band Mr. Bungle, formed in Eureka in 1985. Lengyel was a founding member and played in the band until 1996. Lengyel graduated from Cornell University with a physics degree in 1995, and post-band transitioned to a lucrative career in financial technology, including work for AXA Rosenberg and Barclays. 

In 2017, as Lengyel was finalizing a divorce, he met Herrmann through work. Herrmann, 61, was an avid outdoorswoman and member of a local canoeing group, and had a Ph.D. in neuroscience. The two of them often split time between Herrmann’s home in Capitola and Lengyel’s in El Cerrito, and neighbors in both cities testified about their largely unremarkable interactions with Lengyel. Herrmann dated Lengyel until her death in December 2023; her body was found in Tilden Park in Berkeley after Lengyel told detectives where to find her.

Lengyel defense: Witness testimony tainted by hindsight

Angel argued that some witness testimony might have been suspect, motivated by anger to fabricate or involving distorted memories, and gave detailed reasoning as to why. This included testimony from four family members about a purportedly violent incident, possibly instigated by Lengyel, that occurred at a family Thanksgiving seven years prior. Angel noted that each witness remembered the sequence of events slightly differently, and in ways that did not logically align.

Likewise, Angel suggested that some witnesses’ testimony was perhaps tainted by hindsight.

“Everything is now going to seem weird and different through that backward-looking lens,” knowing that Herrmann was killed, Angel said.

Angel noted that many witnesses seemed not to see anything “off” about Lengyel at all, including Herrmann’s own siblings. 

“When Conrad Herrmann testified, he said the relationship that he saw over the five years with Alix and Theo was pretty normal, and he didn’t really see any problems,” Angel noted. 

Prosecutors hoped to paint a portrait of Lengyel as someone with a pattern of violence, rather than someone who killed Herrmann in the heat of passion, as the latter impression could result in a lesser charge than first-degree murder. 

Indeed, both Angel and the prosecutors, Santa Cruz County Assistant District Attorneys Conor McCormick and Emily Wang, explained to jurors the legal threshold that would make Lengyel guilty of murder in the first degree — the charge that the prosecutors sought, and which Angel argued there was insufficient evidence for.

Wang, who gave prosecutors’ initial closing statements on Tuesday and Wednesday morning, argued that the prosecution team had proved beyond a reasonable doubt that Lengyel’s actions were “willful, deliberate and premeditated” as well as having “express and implied intent” to kill Herrmann, and that therefore he was guilty of murder in the first degree. A jury must agree that those five criteria are met in order to convict someone of murder in the first degree. 

Lengyel’s defense strategy has been unusual from the beginning. The defense has been forthright about the fact that Lengyel killed Herrmann. “Theo Lengyel killed Alice Herrmann,” Angel told jurors. “I told you that from the start.”

Lengyel eventually agreed to turn over his phone to police, investigators told the court. Lengyel also told Herrmann’s brother, Eric, that her body was buried in Tilden Park, and Eric Herrmann relayed that information to Detective Zack Currier of the Capitola Police Department, Currier testified.

Text messages and phone conversations suggest Lengyel was initially resigned to his fate. Indeed, on Dec. 30, 2023, Lengyel called police from Fast Eddy’s Billiards in Capitola, and told them he was “confused as to why he wasn’t arrested yet,” one detective said.

But the specifics of how he killed her will determine what Lengyel is charged with.

“You’re going to be deciding whether or not this is first-degree murder, or whether it was something else because of provocation,” Angel said. Paraphrasing the law, she read to jurors: “Provocation may reduce a murder from first degree to second degree, and may reduce a murder to manslaughter.” 

Angel suggested that the three-hour audio recording from the night of Herrmann’s death did not tell the full story of what might have been seen as “provocations” from Herrmann in the context of their intimate relationship. 

“Provocation doesn’t have a time limit on it,” Angel said. “It can be instant. It can be long. It can be a sudden quarrel or in a heat of passion. So provocation can go on and on, and I believe that is what was happening.” 

Angel mentioned the significant financial problems that Lengyel was having, and that Herrmann had begun to help him pay his mortgage — a fact she seemed to resent, as she wrote in her journal.

Angel highlighted moments in the audio in which Herrmann mocked Lengyel and called him names. “This context is important,” Angel said.

Finally, Angel talked about the language around “voluntary manslaughter.”

“A killing that would otherwise be murder is reduced to voluntary manslaughter if the defendant killed someone because of — like I said earlier, a sudden quarrel, which we don’t have here — or in the heat of passion.” 

She argued that these “elements” all applied — “The defendant was provoked,” and that “as a result of the provocation, the defendant acted rashly and under the influence of intense emotion that obscured his reasoning or judgment.”  

Angel mentioned that both Herrmann and Lengyel were drinking that night, and explained how the law stipulates that intoxication might “negate” the conditions of premeditation and deliberation required for a first-degree murder conviction. 

Prosecutors replay recording of alleged murder

On Wednesday morning, Wang and prosecutors replayed part of the recording of the moments leading up to Herrmann’s death. On the recording, Herrmann yells, “Stop it” repeatedly amid sounds of her screaming and gasping. “Why should I stop?” Lengyel shouts at her in the short clip. 

In the courtroom, Lengyel held his head in his hands and looked down as Wang replayed the recording of Herrmann’s final moments.

“You just heard two separate episodes of strangulation,” Wang said. The first one, which lasts “about a minute and 11 seconds happens right after [Lengyel] asks her, ‘How do you want to die, how about I choke you to death?’”

“So he lays out for her what it is that he’s going to do, and then he does it,” she continued. This fact, Wang said, suggested premeditation and deliberateness in his actions.

“You cannot listen to that without finding … express intent to kill,” Wang said, invoking a legal term that constitutes one of the criteria for convicting someone of murder in the second or first degree. 

In her final remarks, Wang reiterated what prosecutors saw as “evidence of premeditation and deliberation,” calling back to previous witnesses who had testified. Wang recalled the testimony from Brad and Aida Gray, a couple who knew both Herrmann and Lengyel. Brad Gray testified about an interaction with Lengyel in March 2019 in which Lengyel allegedly told him, “If I murdered someone, I could get away with it because I would bury the body in Tilden Park.” 

“‘What kind of plan is that?’” Wang said, recounting Brad Gray’s testimony. 

“Again, the defendant doesn’t say, ‘I’m just joking, I’m messing around.’ He says, ‘Well, there are areas in Tilden Park where people don’t go.’” 

“So, 4.5 years before he murdered Alix, he has a plan,” Wang said. She described this as a hint that Lengyel had some premeditation. “He had had that thought, and he had a plan on how to get away with it.” 

The Grays’ testimony was marked as suspicious by Angel in her closing statements. Angel noted that the Grays had eagerly reached out to the prosecutors in the second week of the trial because they believed from reading media coverage that the trial was tilting too much in Lengyel’s favor. That, along with the couple admitting cocaine and alcohol use on one of the nights they recalled in court, suggested they might have fabricated a more dramatic account that would fit prosecutors’ narrative, Angel suggested. 

Wang also sought to reiterate the “pattern of violence” narrative that the prosecutors frequently returned to. Wang described Lengyel issuing “many threats to kill” Herrmann prior to strangling her. 

“Before he even assaults Alix, he’s talking about the way that he could kill her, by mashing her brain in,” Wang said, paraphrasing Lengyel’s words on the recording. 

Wang concluded her statement by paraphrasing the words exchanged in Herrmann’s final moments and exhorting jurors to find Lengyel guilty of first-degree murder.

“Before he [Lengyel] assaults and restrains her, she tells him to ‘get out’ 27 times,” Wang began. “Before he assaults and restrains her, he threatens to kill her seven times. As she’s restrained, he threatens to kill her 33 times. The last five minutes of her life, she’s struck five times. She yells ‘stop it’ 48 times. He strangles her for a total of five minutes. We know her heart goes into bradycardia [a slow heart rate] at 11:35 p.m. And he executes a plan that he formulated 4.5 years ago. And her body lays in cold blood at that park for 28 days.

“That is all the evidence you have in this case,” Wang finished. “It all points to one conclusion: Theobald Lengyel is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt of murder in the first degree of Alix Hermann.” 

Following Angel’s closing statement, Assistant DA McCormick gave the rebuttal argument, in which he tried to counter the defense counsel’s narrative to the jury. In particular, he disputed the idea that Herrmann had “provoked” Lengyel in any way. 

“We never really got what the provocation was, just that it’s in there,” McCormick said. “You just gotta find it as a fact. You gotta find that provocation which would justify killing a woman in her own home after she told that man to get out of her house over 30 times because she has to work tomorrow, because she has to go to sleep, because she has responsibilities.” 

When McCormick finished his rebuttal argument, Santa Cruz County Superior Court Judge Nancy de la Peña gave instructions to the jurors to begin their deliberations. Jurors will now decide the fate of Lengyel.

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FOR THE RECORD: This story has been updated to clarify testimony by Capitola Police Detective Zack Currier about how police learned of the location of Alice Herrmann’s body.

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