Facts of the Crime:
Sentenced to death in Shasta County on October 6, 1995 for the murder of a bartender during a July 15, 1993 robbery.
While other defendants may have avoided the death penalty for killings committed during “barroom holdups,” Justice Joyce L. Kennard wrote, the calculated and callous manner in which Thomas Howard Lenart killed Oberta Toney makes the death penalty proportionate to the crime.
Police in the small city of Anderson discovered Toney’s body after Eleanor Gallardo, a patron of the Anderson Lounge, reported struggling with a gun-wielding man who was apparently alone in the dimly lit bar when the patron entered it around noon. She wrestled a single-action revolver from her assailant, but was unable to make an identification.
Several patrons who had been in the bar that morning said that Lenart was still there when they left. Police also found Lenart’s fingerprint on a beer bottle at the bar. They determined that the gun that Gallardo wrestled away had been taken from the barn of a local resident who rented a unit on his property to Lenart’s ex-wife, and that Lenart had visited the property on a couple of occasions in the weeks prior to the murder.
After learning that Lenart had paid his cable and utility bills and his rent in cash on the afternoon of the murder, police obtained a warrant to search his apartment. They found coin wrappers, burnt fragments of a check that the owner of the bar testified as having been taken the day of the robbery and murder, and a pair of cowboy boots on which were found drops of blood that may have come from the victim.
Forensic testimony said the victim was kicked in the head, possibly with the tip of a cowboy boot. The cause of death was determined to be two gunshot wounds to the head, inflicted from no more than four feet away.
Lenart was also linked to the crime through a strongbox, which his girlfriend found in her storage shed. A former girlfriend identified the box and some jewelry in it as hers, but said that other jewelry in the box was Lenart’s and that she had never before seen the coin wrappers in the box, which were of the type used by the Anderson Lounge.
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