A Murder Victim Sent Her Killer to Prison By Recording the Crime

In late 2023, Hawaiian-born scientist and software engineer Alice “Alyx” Kamakaokalani Herrmann activated an app on her iPhone during a blowout argument with her longtime partner and wound up capturing agonizing audio of her own murder.

Over the course of three torturous hours, Herrmann can be heard in the harrowing recording being taunted and tortured by her boyfriend of five years, a former musician and data engineer named Theo Lengyel.

Verbal bickering between the California couple was soon supplanted in the audio by the sounds of Herrmann’s screams. The 61-year-old woman is also heard in the recording gasping for air. Repeatedly, she begs Lengyel to stop the attack and spare her life.

“You’re gonna f------- die right now,” Lengyel promised as his grip tightened around her neck. “Are you ready?”

Lengyel, a founding member of avant-garde rock troupe Mr. Bungle, strangled Herrmann to death inside her Capitola home on December 4, 2023. Later, he buried her remains at Tilden Regional Park in San Francisco’s Bay area, beneath a pile of rocks. When Herrmann didn’t show up to a family obligation, her family reported her missing. Herrmann’s body wouldn’t be found for nearly a month.

Less than two weeks after Herrmann’s murder, Lengyel waltzed into Capitola Police headquarters with the chief assistant public defender for Contra Costa County, seemingly ready to turn himself in, The Berkeley Scanner reported. But he left soon after upon learning there was no warrant out for his arrest.

Then, on December 30, Lengyel called the investigation’s lead, Detective Zack Currier, from Fast Eddy's Billiards, saying he was “confused on why he wasn't arrested yet. He said that he was baffled by it,” Currier explained, “and that Capitola Police Department had done some blunders.” He refused to discuss what happened to Herrmann and was caught that same evening by security cameras, letting himself into her home through the back door. Inside, Lengyel found a search warrant police had left behind and fled in Herrmann’s car.

On January 1, 2024, police arrested Lengyel after pulling the stolen vehicle in the coastal town of Davenport.

Herrmann’s killing capped what prosecutors characterized at trial as years of verbal, sexual, psychological and physical abuse dispensed by Lengyel. In February 2024, Lengyel pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder charges.

The chilling audio recovered from Herrmann’s phone was played in full for the jury during Lengyel’s 2024 criminal trial. Prosecutors also presented jurors with digital forensic evidence from her Apple Watch, which showed her heart stopped on the night of the murder not long before traffic cameras caught Lengyel behind the wheel of Herrmann’s Toyota Highlander. An El Cerrito Police Department detective later testified that he found dried blood in the vehicle in multiple places.

Today, Lengyel sits behind bars, serving 25 years to life for murdering Herrmann.

“Abusive relationships like this one almost always involve coercion,” Dr. Chitra Raghavan explains to A&E Crime + Investigation. “In a coercive relationship, you have less and less opportunities to meaningfully negotiate without retaliation, and essentially, your position in the relationship has been fully shrunk.”

According to Raghavan, a professor of psychology at New York’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice, where she also serves as the director of forensic mental health counseling, coercive relationships subsist on fear and almost always involve some pattern of abuse.

“The running theme through coercive, abusive relationships is that one person is afraid of another, feels that they don’t have autonomy or that they need to walk on eggshells around their partner,” Raghavan tells A&E Crime + Investigation. “The coerced partner begins to realize that, if they object to something, there will be retaliation that becomes so exhausting, they just stop voicing themselves.”

Prosecutors argued at trial that Lengyel, then 56, became enraged and unhinged when Herrmann, who once worked at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, would not accompany him to an event at Fast Eddy’s Billiards, a local pool hall.

Instead, Herrmann simply told him she wanted to stay in because she had work the next day. “I could mash your f------ brain,” Lengyel responds in the audio, which was captured with the Just Press Record app. It is unclear if she recorded the interaction on purpose.

Lengyel then threatens to kill the couple’s dog, in order “to demonstrate how I could kill you.” Prosecutors said Lengyel had Herrmann pinned down inside her home, and told her she was “at my mercy right now.”

Lengyel—who played keyboards, clarinet and saxophone for Mr. Bungle between 1985 and 1996—repeatedly asked Herrmann if she wanted to live, according to officials. During the hours-long attack, she’s heard in the recording yelling “stop it!” at him more than 50 times.

“Okay, how do you want to die?” Lengyel is later heard asking Herrmann. “Blunt trauma or something else? Think you should be choked to death?” Afterwards, investigators said Lengyel fabricated text messages and calls from Herrmann’s phone, to make it appear as if she were still alive.

Her brother, Eric Herrmann, told The Berkley Scanner that Alyx—which is pronounced “Aleex”—was an environmentalist who loved being outdoors. She was also a competitive ocean outrigger canoeist.

“With canoeing, you get to combine exercise, community and the Hawaiian aspect all in one,” Eric told the outlet. “She just fell into it and loved it.”

Alyx was also a talented musician who started college at 16, he told the Berkeley Scanner.

“She was fearless,” Eric explained. “Everyone talks about how she would uplift everyone around her. Her spirit was just very strong. She didn’t feel the need to talk about herself. Ultimately, she wanted to deal with things by herself. And that is reflected in what actually ended up happening.”

Relatives told The Berkeley Scanner there had been “some incidents” between Lengyel and Herrmann “that raised questions,” but that there was never any indication things might turn tragic.

“We all wish she had reached out and talked to more people about what was going on,” Eric said. “Family and friends are crushed and still in shock and disbelief at what happened.”

But in coercive control relationships, the abused partner rarely seeks help, Raghavan explains.

“Coercion, like abuse, can come in different forms,” he says. “It can be visible and invisible. You’re essentially restricting the person, creating fear and dread in them, and leaving them very little agency.”

Violence in coercive relationships comes from the perpetrators desire to “reinforce that I am capable and I will use violence or threaten you with violence if challenged,” Raghavan says. “These people need to control because they desperately want things to go their way, and they feel disrespected or harmed if things don’t go their way. Without that control, they believe their lives with fall to pieces.”