A former ’80s cult band rocker has been found guilty of strangling his girlfriend after shocking audio of the murder was discovered during the trial.
Alice ‘Alyx’ Kamakaokalani Herrmann, 61, recorded her final moments as Theobald Lengyel, 55, choked the life out of her on December 4.
Lengyel, a former saxophone player in the cult experimental rock band Mr. Bungle, didn’t deny killing her, but argued his actions didn’t amount to murder.
But four weeks into the six-week trial, the three-hour audio file Herrmann recorded on her phone was found – blowing open the case.
Theobald Lengyel, 55, former saxophone player in the cult experimental rock band Mr Bungle, was found guilty of murdering his girlfriend
The file stared with Lengyel playing piano in their home in Capitola, near Santa Cruz, California, then getting angry she didn’t want to go out to play pool.
”Why is it so important to you? Why is it a contest of wills? Have a fun time,’ Herrmann told him after the argument began at 9.09pm.
‘I could mash your f**king brain,’ he was heard saying at 9:53 pm – the first of his threats.
‘When you drink, this s**t happens, we fight,’ Herrmann replied.
Lengyel responded by threatening to kill her dog, Trav, ‘to demonstrate how I could kill you’.
‘You need to go out. You should find another girlfriend. Bye! Bye! Bye, why are you still here?’ Herrmann yelled, ordering him out of the house.
Lengyel then held her down and saying, ‘Are you at my mercy right now? ‘You’re gonna f**king die right now. Are you ready?’
‘OK. How do you want to die? Blunt trauma or something else… think you should be choked to death? How about that.’
‘Stop it. You want your kids to be the kids of a murderer? Come on, stop it,’ Herrmann pleaded.
But Lengyel told her: ‘It’s too f**king late for that.’
Alice ‘Alyx’ Kamakaokalani Herrmann, 61, was killed by strangulation in December 2023
The jury listened in horror as Herrmann was slowly strangled, gasping for air and begging 43 times for Lengyel to stop between 11:32 pm and 11:33 pm.
‘Why should I stop?’ Lengyel told her. It took five agonizing minutes for her to die.
The recording only stopped at 12:11 am when Lengyel realized it was going and stopped it – but crucially did not think to delete the file.
Santa Cruz County Assistant District Attorney Emily Wang told the court in her closing argument that the recording showed what Lengyel did was nothing short of murder.
‘He strangles her for a total of five minutes. We know her heart goes into bradycardia at 11.35pm, and we know that her body lays in the cold ground in that park for 28 days,’ she said.
Wang said Lengyel asking Herrmann how she wanted to die showed he had ‘express intent to kill’.
‘Theobald Lengyel is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt of murder in the first degree of Alice Herrmann,’ she said.
Herrmann’s body was later found dumped in Tilden Regional Park in Berkley.
Lengyel played saxophone in the cult experimental rock band Mr. Bungle
Prosecutors painted a picture of the former rocker as an alcoholic who had a history of anger issues despite his more than $200,000-a-year job in financial technology and his family.
He even allegedly punched his now ex-wife, and pushed his sister to the ground, they testified.
Lengyel was unceremoniously asked to leave Mr Bungle in 1996, but character witnesses at the murder trial in Santa Cruz Superior Court said he remained a charismatic and happy guy.
He had graduated Cornell University with a bachelor’s degree in physics one year earlier, and in February 1999, he met Joleen Welch outside a San Francisco café when she stopped to pet his dog.
The couple spent the next year traveling through Europe, and officially got married in 2001. They then went on to have three children, and Welch said their marriage – which lasted until 2017 – started out good.
‘He was a good father of newborn babies, and he far exceeded my expectations,’ she said when she took the stand on September 10.
But by the late 2000s, Lengyel’s temperament suddenly began to change and he became resentful of his job as a programmer for investment banks.
He told his wife the job was becoming too stressful and time consuming, as he dreamed of a different life for his family, hoping to start a restaurant with their savings, the jury heard.
Herrmann, 61, was last seen in Santa Cruz on December 3. Her car was found parked in front of the El Cerrito home of her formerly famous boyfriend
At that point, Welch said, Lengyel changed his vices – from being a pot smoker to an alcoholic, and his drinking increased around 2015.
That year, the family planned to attend an afternoon Giants game, but Lengyel was ‘already drinking’ before they left, Welch recounted.
She told how Lengyel drove drunk and parked at his workplace garage, from where they would walk to the stadium.
But as they walked, Welch said she noticed her husband becoming increasingly intoxicated.
‘He was saying things that… made me feel like I wish he’d lower his voice,’ Welch said.
She claimed that when she expressed discomfort, Lengyel would admonish her, telling her she’s ‘no fun’ or ‘couldn’t take a joke.’
‘I just wanted him to leave,’ Welch said. ‘I was embarrassed.’
So she decided to take her children home, and told her husband not to follow them.
‘I didn’t want to be around him when he was being really drunk,’ Welch explained.
Yet Lengyel showed up at the house later anyway and smashed in the window to the rear door when Welch told him to leave.
He also allegedly pushed Welch against the wall and then onto the couch, where he punched her in the stomach.
‘He was screaming, almost foaming at the mouth, calling me a f**king idiot,’ Welch testified through tears.
Welch went on to describe her ex-husband as ‘scary,’ ‘unpredictable’ and even ‘violent’ when he was drinking.
But when Assistant District Attorney Conor McCormick asked her if Lengyel was only ‘scary’ when he drank, she replied: ‘Not necessarily. There were times I felt scared even when he wasn’t drunk.’
Lengyel allegedly showed officers where to find her remains and turned over his cellphone
Other family members also spoke out about the former rocker’s change of behavior in the years before he started dating Herrmann.
Ariana Frances Allgeier, Lengyel’s niece, even corroborated the story Welch told, saying her uncle confided in her that he punched his wife.
She said she remembers him saying: ‘If she stays with me, I don’t know if I’ll be more disappointed in her or disappointed in me.’
Tess Lengyel, Theobald’s sister, also told how she tried to intervene when her brother got into a shouting match with their stepfather on Thanksgiving 2016, and her brother pushed her onto the floor.
She said she and other family members then emailed Lengyel with resources to encourage him to seek help with his alcohol and anger issues, but her brother ‘adamantly refused,’ calling their resources ‘useless’ and said he ‘didn’t believe in getting therapy and didn’t believe in getting help.’
Still, Tess said, she tried to maintain a relationship with her brother.
But eventually he became too crude.
‘He would call in the middle of the night at very late hours and if I answered, he sounded drunk, and he would say some things that were very rude and vulgar,’ Tess testified, sharing how her brother would call her a ‘stupid b***h’ and a ‘w***e’ in calls and on voicemails.
She was eventually granted a restraining order against her brother in 2017.
Mr. Bungle pose for a group portrait backstage at the Warfield Theater in San Francisco in April 1992, four years before Lengyel was unceremoniously kicked out of the band
Herrmann, who worked for the finance firm Moody’s, was last seen in Santa Cruz on December 3, 2023 and was reported missing by her family on December 12.
Authorities now say Herrmann was strangled when her Apple Watch stopped registering a heartbeat on December 4 at 11.44pm – which was also the last day she logged into her work VPN.
Lengyel then drove to Portland, Oregon on or around December 8 to visit his brother Jed, whom he had previously texted ‘brace yourself, it’s worse than you think’.
He then left his truck at his brother’s house and returned to the San Francisco Bay Area, where he told police where to find Herrmann’s body and turned over his cellphone.
El Cerrito cops later found Herrmann’s Toyota Highlander in front of Lengyel’s home in El Cerrito.
At trial, Brendan Kellman of the Contra Costa Office of the Sheriff testified that he conducted a forensic examination of the vehicle and found ‘several visible bloodstains’ inside.
Lengyel’s sentencing hearings will begin on November 7, and he will almost certainly spent the rest of his life in prison.
