Glen Ellyn woman's patricide trial begins

For close to a month, Christy Lentz lied to family, friends and police investigating the whereabouts of her father after she had shot him twice in the back of the head and stuffed his body into a garbage can, prosecutors said Thursday.

During opening statements at Lentz's murder trial, Assistant DuPage County State's Attorney Alex McGimpsey said the 35-year-old Glen Ellyn woman went to great lengths to conceal the 2006 murder of her father. All the while, his corpse was decomposing in the warehouse of the Villa Park machine shop he had built more than two decades before.

Decomposition was so bad that investigators initially couldn't tell what killed 58-year-old Michael Lentz Sr. of Winfield, the prosecutor told jurors.

Christy Lentz's defense attorney Rick Kayne didn't deny any aspects of the cover-up; instead he painted the father as a "violent alcoholic" with a history of being an abusive husband and father who met his end during a fight over the company's tax debt with his daughter who shot him after he pulled a gun on her. Kayne said the father had hit her five or six times before he was shot.

"He owed close to $100,000 to the government, and he blamed Christy," Kayne told jurors. "She was defending herself from a man she loved and feared."

McGimpsey said the defense claim of self-defense doesn't add up. He told jurors that the father was shot twice in the back of the head, one bullet penetrating his skull and embedding in a wall three and a half feet above the floor in his office.

"Mike Lentz was shot twice, execution-style, in the back of the head while sitting at the desk in his office," he said. "One of the two bullets went through his head and lodged in the wall, which is consistent with Mike sitting at his desk."

McGimpsey walked jurors through the series of deeds he said Christy Lentz committed in order to conceal the murder. She covered the bullet hole in the office with paperwork and cut out a piece of blood-soaked carpet from his office and covered that with a throw rug, he said. Then she stuffed her father's body into a garbage can and set it on fire, but the smoke was too much and she extinguished the blaze, McGimpsey told jurors. She drove her father's truck to Wisconsin where he owns a cabin and abandoned it and tossed personal effects around the front yard of the cabin. When the stench of his decomposing body became unbearable at the shop, McGimpsey said Christy Lentz went to a store and bought dozens of air fresheners and fans.

But Kayne said all those actions show how frightened Christy Lentz was.

"Her acts are those of a scared, abused, single mother whose father blamed her for everything," he said.

Prosecutors called a detective from the DuPage County Sheriff's office as their first witness to detail the missing persons investigation into the father's disappearance and Christy Lentz's helpfulness with that case.

The trial is expected to last two weeks and continues today.