Jury finds ex-banker murdered islander

So many people on Nantucket knew the details of the case or the victim's family that it took four days to find 12 jurors for the island's first murder trial in 23 years. But once the jurors were seated and heard the evidence, it took them only five hours to reach a verdict.

Yesterday, they found Thomas Toolan III, a former Citibank executive from Manhattan, guilty of first-degree murder in the 2004 stabbing death of his former girlfriend, Elizabeth Lochtefeld, 44, a successful businesswoman, in her Nantucket home. Toolan, 39, who contended he was temporarily insane due to drugs and alcohol, was automatically sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

In court, Lochtefeld's sister, Catherine, read a statement in which she said, "Beth's cup was full of enthusiasm, curiosity, adventure, and laughter; it overflowed with love and forgiveness." Then, perhaps drawing on that example of forgiveness, she expressed compassion for Toolan's family, as well as her own.

"We do not rejoice that Mr. Toolan's parents have, for all purposes, lost their son, even as Beth's parents have lost their daughter," Catherine Lochtefeld told Judge Richard F. Connon before sentencing. "Yet we are relieved that this troubled, vengeful, and dangerous man will never be able to harm another innocent person."

Michael D. O'Keefe, the district attorney for the Cape and Islands, said the statement struck him as remarkably selfless.

"This was a terrible tragedy certainly for the Lochtefeld family, but it's also a tragedy for the parents of this defendant who would have to suffer through the loss of their son, and this was very eloquently expressed by the family members in their statement to the court," O'Keefe said in a telephone interview. "To recognize that fact, it just shows the kind of people that the Lochtefelds are, that they had the ability under these circumstances to be aware of that."

In returning a guilty verdict, the jury rejected arguments by Toolan's lawyers that his history of alcohol and drug abuse had damaged his brain and made him unable to control his behavior. Toolan had been fired from jobs for alcohol abuse.

But to prove such an argument, O'Keefe said, the lawyers would have had to show "extremely powerful evidence of mental disability . . . and it wasn't present in this case."

Prosecutors said Toolan hunted down and killed Lochtefeld on Oct. 25, 2004, three days after she spurned his offer of marriage following a brief courtship. Furious at the rejection, Toolan held Lochtefeld hostage in his apartment on the Upper West Side, but she escaped after he fell asleep. She then fled to Nantucket, where she and her parents owned homes.

Toolan attempted to follow her to the island by air, but was stopped when security screeners at LaGuardia Airport found a knife in his coat pocket. The next day, Toolan boarded another plane to Nantucket, rented a car, bought a fishing knife at a local store, and drove to Lochtefeld's home. He stabbed her 23 times, prosecutors said. Her body was found on the floor of her cottage.

Toolan was arrested in Rhode Island within days. His murder trial was the first on Nantucket since 1984, when Robert Aguiar, a local fisherman, was convicted of shooting lobsterman David King.

But Toolan's trial was unusually difficult to commence. Beginning June 4, Connon, the judge, dismissed dozens of potential jurors who said they knew about the case or were friendly with the Lochtefelds. Testimony in the case lasted eight days.

Lochtefeld was adventurous and entrepreneurial, relatives said. She had studied aikido in Guam and traveled on the Trans-Siberian Railway after college in the 1980s.

She had also launched several businesses, including a building code consulting firm started in her Manhattan apartment that grew to employ a dozen people.

"Her intelligence and achievements were remarkable," Catherine Lochtefeld said in court yesterday. "We can never forget the sorrow brought on by her death -- sudden, violent, undeserved, and alone."

Michael Levenson can be reached at mlevenson@globe.com.