Sonora man accused in 1979 killing of Bay Area bar owner
A Sonora homeless man who was known to keep mostly to himself at his campsite off Stockton Road and help out others whenever he could is now in Santa Clara County Jail as the suspect in the alleged murder of a Sunnyvale bar owner 41 years ago.
Thomas Hinnard, 69, was contacted the morning of Feb. 12 by Sunnyvale Department of Public Safety investigators with assistance from Tuolumne County Sheriff’s deputies in the area known as Camp
Hope near downtown Sonora and taken in for questioning before being placed under arrest later that afternoon.
The Sunnyvale Department of Public Safety put out a news release on Friday detailing how fingerprint evidence that had been misplaced until a detective re-examined the case in 2018 led them to the arrest of Hinnard on suspicion of the 1979 murder of Keith Judd, a 45-year-old father of two who owned Lakewood Lounge in the Santa Clara County city.
Hinnard was reportedly being held on no bail as of Monday with a hearing scheduled for April 9 to enter a plea, according to Santa Clara County Superior Court records.
“Sometimes an arrest may take years or even decades, but our detectives are relentless and work hard behind the scenes to help bring justice to victims and their families,” the news release said. “We are proud of the work that is constantly being done by our detectives and gratified that we can provide some answers to Keith’s family.”
The news release stated Judd arose early the morning of July 19, 1979, to clean up and count the money from the previous night, when he was brutally attacked and robbed by an unknown assailant who entered the bar.
Judd was reportedly found lying in a pool of his own blood and struggling to survive when an employee arrived about 5:30 a.m. that morning. He was transported for medical treatment after the arrival of Sunnyvale police officers, but died from his injuries that were believed at the time to
have been caused by some sort of blunt object.
Several fingerprints were found in the area where the murder occurred, as well as footprints located in Judd’s blood. A patron of the bar was identified as a suspect and placed under arrest later that week, though the charges were dropped by the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office at the time due to insufficient evidence.
Capt. Craig Anderson, of the Sunnyvale Department of Public Safety’s investigations unit, said that Hinnard was not the suspect identified at the time but declined to give the other man’s name due to the charges against him being dropped.
In 2018, Sunnyvale Det. Matt Hutchison began a detailed review of the case and located fingerprint evidence that had been misplaced for many years. The fingerprints were sent to the Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Office for examination and returned with a match for Hinnard.
Anderson said the fingerprints were matched with Hinnard from a previous arrest, though he didn’t know the specific charge or arresting agency. The Tuolumne County Sheriff’s Office said there’s no record of Hinnard being arrested or suspected of a crime by their agency, though the first contact with him that they have on file was in April 2000.
Hutchison learned through his investigation that Hinnard had lived in Sunnyvale at the time of Judd’s murder, was known to have been a patron of the Lakewood Lounge, and worked at an Exxon gas station in the same shopping center as the bar.
Hinnard was interviewed by Hutchison on a couple of different occasions leading up to the Feb. 12 arrest and had made statements found to be incriminating, including knowledge of cash being stolen and that an ax handle was used to bludgeon Judd that had never been publicly disclosed.
Anderson said their own department wasn’t aware of an axe handle potentially being used until Hinnard’s statements and later checked with other former patrons who corroborated that Judd kept an axe handle behind the bar which he would use to bang on the bartop when things got rowdy, but it was never located at the scene.
There were also 22 of Hinnard’s fingerprints found on a refrigerator 3 feet from where Judd was allegedly attacked in a back office that the public did not have access to, Anderson confirmed from a statement of probable cause that was cited by other Bay Area news outlets.
The fingerprint evidence was determined to have been misplaced in a separate cold-case file, Anderson said.
“What we think was a detective sometime in the past 40 years might have had two or three cold cases on his desk and taken the fingerprint evidence out of the Keith Judd case and accidently put it in another box,” he explained. “When Det. Hutchison was going through all of the cold cases, he determined that the fingerprints actually belonged to the Keith Judd case. It wasn’t so much a chain of custody concern, it was inadvertently put in the wrong box.”
An article from the San Francisco Chronicle stated that court records showed Hinnard told investigators that a police officer had told him that Judd “got his brains beat in” when he went by to check on the crime scene.
The same article stated that Hinnard was asked whether he would recount exactly what happened or take it to his grave, to which he reportedly replied, “Take it to my grave.”
“It tore my heart out to see they had arrested him for such a thing,” said Hazel Mitchell, of Jamestown, who knew Hinnard through her work with the local homeless community for her organization Give Someone a Chance. “I worked with him very closely with my case management and never thought for one moment this would be the case with Tom.”
People at Camp Hope informed Mitchell that Hinnard had been arrested by law enforcement officers from Santa Clara County, though she said she didn’t learn why until the news broke on Friday.
Mitchell said she first met Hinnard more than two years ago and found him to be kind, soft spoken, and would rarely accept her charity. She also said that Hinnard frequently helped her with her efforts and once handled the money during a sale at her organization’s warehouse, but didn’t take any of it.
“He’s a very gentle person. It’s hard for me to believe he would do that to anybody,” she said. “Of course, I didn’t know him then, but even if somebody wronged him, he didn’t lose his cool.”
Hinnard was also known for having multiple health issues in recent years as a result of his lifestyle, including two collapsed lungs, a broken neck and mild heart attack.
Jan Alderman, a former nurse who was homeless with Hinnard from about 2016 until she moved to a trailer in the Big Hill area about a year ago, said that his life revolved around his two dogs that are currently being cared for by another man at Camp Hope.
Alderman said she also doesn’t know much about his life or how he got to Sonora, but he would sometimes talk about working as a firefighter for a time and having a problem with drinking in his younger years.
“I’ve spent my entire career talking to people in crisis in the emergency room and know how anybody’s life can change in an instant,” she said, adding that she didn’t know all of the details about his arrest until it hit the news. “I didn’t want to spread any rumors of any kind because he’s been so kind to so many people, helping all kinds of people in need along the way.”
Among those people were Nancy Rogerson and her granddaughters, ages 7 and 12, who would refer to Hinnard as an uncle.
Rogerson and her girls were homeless for more than a year and lived mostly out of a room at the Sonora Gold Lodge, with Hinnard helping to sometimes pay part of their rent. She said they were “shocked” to find out about what he’s been accused of doing more than four decades ago.
“The only time I’ve ever seen him get upset was when the girls weren’t paying attention and were going out into the street and he raised his voice,” she said. “He’s helped everybody, he’s helped us, he’s helped Jan, people who would need something.”
However, for Judd’s family, the news of Hinnard’s arrest has reportedly brought a sense of relief they never expected to get.
Brian Judd, who was 19 at the time of his father’s murder and couldn’t be reached for comment Monday, reportedly told CBS SF Bay Area that he had mostly given up hope of ever getting justic. He also reportedly told the station that his main regret is his late mother, who died two years ago, will not get to see the resolution.