A guilty verdict has been rendered out of Santa Cruz for a Bay Area man who murdered his Capitola girlfriend.Theo Lengyel was found guilty of first-degree murder of his 61-year-old girlfriend, Alice Herrmann. "It’s over, but it’s not. It’s not really. It’ll never really be over," a friend of Herrmann, Amy Miyakusu, said. The verdict comes off new evidence presented last week to the jury, an audio recording from Herrmann’s phone which captures the horrifying moments of her death. Herrmann was an accomplished professor with a doctorate in neuroscience and a lover of the outdoors. She was on the Santa Cruz Outrigger team alongside her friends Miyakusu and Theresa Mulder. "She was a beautiful person, sweet, caring," Mulder said. "I never heard her say a bad thing about anybody."Before the guilty decision by the jury, prosecutors had alleged that Lengyel strangled Herrmann to death and left her body in Tilden Regional Park in Berkeley. However, halfway through the trial, new evidence was discovered. A graphic three-hour-long audio recording on Herrmann’s phone. The recording captured a heated argument between the couple and Hermann’s death. "I don’t see how you could listen to something like that, what was being spoken by the defendant, the words he was using, the tone of it. The frankly sort of banal nature of this argument that led up to it, and not come to the conclusion that, we always believe was correct, which was first-degree murder," Steven Ryan, inspector with Santa Cruz County District Attorney Office, said.Prosecutors say in the recording, you can hear Herrmann pleading for her life, gasping for air as she is being strangled, and begging Lengyel to stop 53 times. You can also hear him tell her she is going to die. "I’ve never heard anything that has affected me as much as that audio. Especially after spending the last nine months of my life really trying to understand this woman," Ryan said. "To listen to that audio for the first time, that’s something that won’t leave me soon."For her friends sitting in the courtroom, the audio was a heartbreaking moment. "I walked out. I couldn’t listen to it," Miyakusu said. "One of the hardest parts, actually, was hearing the beginning when she was speaking normally in her normal voice because I haven’t heard that voice in ten months," Mulder said. Her friends said they believe this recording was likely the condemning moment for Lengyel. "I think that was what clinched it," Mulder said. “And I am so thankful that she had the foresight to start that recording and it just shows you how intelligent she was."It only took the jury a day to come to this guilty decision. Now, Lengyel’s sentencing will be scheduled for November. See more coverage of top Central Coast stories here | Download our app | Download Very Local