A 34-year-old man killed a 60-year-old homeless woman in a Huntington Beach shed next to his family’s mobile home and then decapitated her, hog-tied her body and buried her in a backyard where she was discovered weeks later, a prosecutor told an Orange County Superior Court jury on Wednesday, Jan. 29, at the outset of the man’s murder trial.
A lingering strong odor, and the allegedly strange behavior of Antonio Padilla, prompted his family to make the 911 call that led to the discovery of Gina Lockhart’s body on the 7900 block of Slater Avenue, Senior Deputy District Attorney Janine Madera said during her opening statements in a Santa Ana courtroom.
The combination of Lockhart being decapitated after her death and the body being buried for several weeks made it difficult for an autopsy to determine an exact cause of death, Madera said.
But the pathologist who carried out Lockhart’s autopsy did not rule out the possibility that Lockhart had been suffocated or strangled.
Madera did not outline a potential motive for the death, and acknowledged that there was no evidence of a previous connection between Lockhart and Padilla. But the prosecutor told jurors that after Lockhart’s death, Padilla is suspected of using a “large knife” to decapitate her.
Deputy Public Defender Daniel Kim, who is representing Padilla, noted during his own opening statements that the autopsy left the exact cause of Lockhart’s death inconclusive. The defense attorney told jurors that Lockhart was an alcoholic in poor health and, shortly before her death, had made trips to an emergency room for seizures and for alcohol poisoning.
“The larger questions that will remain all the way until the end of the trial is, ‘How did Lockhart die?’” Kim told jurors.
Lockhart frequented the area around Beach Boulevard and Slater Avenue, and was well known to local workers and residents.
“She was a veritable fixture,” Madera said. “People may not have known her name, but they knew her when they saw her.”
The last person who reported seeing Lockhart alive was a food-truck worker, who testified to witnessing Lockhart on the ground moaning and holding her stomach on the afternoon of June 30, 2022.
The prosecutor said Padilla, now 37, lived in the backyard shed in a nearby trailer park, while his parents and sister lived in an adjacent mobile home. A day or two after the Fourth of July Padilla’s family members began smelling a strong, noxious odor outside the home.
On July 10, Madera said, Padilla’s sister woke up and saw her brother digging what appeared to be a deep hole in their backyard and filling it with concrete and dirt. Padilla’s mother saw him with what appeared to be bloody and maggot-infested blankets, the prosecutor said.
The mother called 911, and an officer told her it was probably a dead animal and suggested she clean the area. While using bleach in the shed, the mother found bloody clothes and blankets, a patch of hair attached to part of a scalp and dirty shoes with no shoe laces.
On July 16, the mother called police again, telling them what had been found in the shed and described seeing Padilla digging.
Police unearthed Lockhart’s body. Her hands and legs had been bound behind her with shoe lace and her head was found underneath her body.
Padilla’s sister later told police that she had recalled sometime in late June when she hear what sounded like an older woman screaming for help, the prosecutor told jurors.
In March of last year, while awaiting trial, Padilla displayed photos of Lockhart’s head and her body on the door of his cell, where they were visible to other inmates and to guards, the prosecutor said without elaborating as to where the photos came from.
“Displayed for the whole (jail) module as a trophy,” she told jurors.
Kim raised doubts as to the evidence tying Padilla to Lockhart’s death.
The defense attorney told jurors that Padilla’s sister initially denied to police that she had heard anyone scream. It wasn’t until two years later, Kim said, that the sister recalled hearing the screams, and appeared to temper that by telling investigators that it may have been a dream or a nightmare.
The defense attorney also appeared to raise suspicion of Padilla’s father. The shed was the father’s “man cave,” Kim said, and Padilla only used it sporadically. And the defense attorney added that the father had planted tomato plants on top of the area where Lockhart’s body was found.
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