Auto Dealer’s Killer Gets 32 Years to Life

A woman who admitted that she shot Santa Paula car dealer Tony Bridges twice in the heart during a robbery has been sentenced to 32 years to life in prison for murder and other charges.

Veronica Lira, 26, was sentenced Monday after pleading guilty to charges that she killed Bridges, 45, with his own derringer while taking cash and jewelry from him on Dec. 18, 1991.

Ventura County Superior Court Judge James McNally also ordered Lira to pay $8,600 in restitution to Bridges’ family. She will serve at least 20 years in state prison for murder, grand theft and use of a gun before she is eligible for parole, Deputy Dist. Atty. James Ellison said.

Bridges’ naked body was found by a farm worker Dec. 26 in an El Rio cilantro field where it had been dumped face down and covered with tumbleweeds.

Several days later, investigators found Bridges’ white 1989 Chevrolet Cavalier on Hayes Avenue in La Colonia, with gunpowder residue on the passenger seat.

Eventually, authorities said, Bridges’ Seiko watch, diamond rings and gold necklace were found in pawnshops in Oxnard and the San Fernando Valley, along with a Rolex watch that Lira had taken in a robbery eight days earlier.

As the case developed, investigators said, they learned that Bridges led a double life--as a respected member of Santa Paula’s business community and as a cocaine user who skimmed $300 to $400 at a time from his dealership to feed his addiction.

“My feeling is that there was some shared responsibility on both sides” for the murder, said Deputy Public Defender Richard Holly, who represented Lira.

Holly said it was almost preordained that Bridges--who had been arrested in 1990 as he drove around high on cocaine, carrying a loaded derringer--would die prematurely. The district attorney declined to prosecute that charge because of a technicality, he said.

Bridges’ behavior “doesn’t justify or excuse that Lira committed the crime, but there was shared responsibility,” Holly said. “This might never have happened if somehow he had received the help he needed early on. . . . This tragedy could have been avoided.”

Ellison, the prosecutor, ridiculed that theory.

“The defense attorney has tried to portray that picture from the beginning, that he somehow was the reason for his own death, and I think that’s just a bunch of bunk,” Ellison said Tuesday.

Ellison said Lira confessed to police that she killed Bridges in a panic as she robbed him.

“As she took his wallet out, she felt a hard object under his jacket, she felt this gun,” Ellison said. “She said she started freaking out because she felt this gun, she panicked and squeezed the trigger.”

The bullets penetrated Bridges’ right ribs near his upper arm and struck his heart, Ellison said.

But powder burns found on Bridges’ skin could not have penetrated the leather jacket that Lira said he wore, and no one has ever found the two Hollywood men she said helped in the robbery, Ellison said.

“We don’t know what the motivation was,” he said. “If any of us who had been involved in the prosecution knew the dynamics of this, it would have been a lot easier case to prepare for.”

Holly said Lira committed the robbery because “she was angry with him.

“She wanted to make him feel badly for what he had done to her, which was he’d taken advantage of her on several occasions,” Holly said.

Lira had sent exotic dancers from her fledgling out-call service to Bridges’ home, along with some cocaine, to dance and have sex with him, Holly said.

“He had not paid all the money that was owed,” Holly said. “She had been embarrassed because she was unable to pay her dancers. . . . She wanted to make him feel bad, so she set up this robbery.”

But when Lira discovered the gun, “it quickly got out of hand, out of control,” Holly said. “Tony Bridges’ eyes were darting around, he was probably very frightened.”

The gun went off in the nervous Lira’s hand, and Bridges died, Holly said.

Now, as she awaits assignment to a state prison, Lira has expressed great sorrow over the slaying, Holly said.

“She’s had a lot of remorse and she’s ready to serve her sentence,” he said. “She’s relieved it’s over with.”