Edward Tenney was born on July 30, 1959. He was convicted of three murders committed during robberies in and around Aurora, Illinois, between April 1992 and October 1993, and had earlier convictions for burglary and armed robbery. He went by the name Christopher Nelson, and his own cousin, who was with him, knew him by it.
Jerry Weber, twenty-four, had a flat tyre on April 17, 1992. He was robbed of six dollars and shot dead at the side of the road in DuPage County. Tenney received sixty years for it.
Virginia Johannessen was killed at her home in Aurora on January 2, 1993. She had lived at the same address for about forty years and lived there alone. She was beaten with a hammer and shot in the head and the chest, the house was ransacked, and her car was taken. Her brother Francis Reines had been unable to reach her, drove over on January 5, let himself in through the back door and disarmed the alarm, and found her sitting in a chair in the corner of the living room. A cheque on the table beside her was dated January 2. Her car was found in a supermarket car park a mile away with a hatchet-hammer inside it, carrying no fingerprints.
Mary Jill Oberweis, fifty-six, was beaten and shot dead during a home invasion in Aurora on October 1, 1993. Tenney received a life sentence for it. His cousin Donald Lippert, who was with him, received sixty years.
He was indicted on six counts of first degree murder, three for Johannessen and three for Oberweis, and was tried separately for each. The Oberweis conviction came first. At the Johannessen trial the jury took under five hours to convict and about an hour to return a sentence of death.
The case against him on the Johannessen count rested on Lippert. In exchange for his testimony he was to receive eighty years across Kane and DuPage counties, with the possibility that the court might sentence him as guilty but mentally ill; his competence to testify was contested and the trial court held a hearing before allowing it. He said he only vaguely remembered January 1993. His account was that the two of them walked to the house, that Tenney broke a basement window and pulled out the frame, that he himself crawled in and then crawled straight back out because he was frightened by the dark and the noise of a washing machine, and that he was sent round to the front to keep watch. No fingerprints were recovered from the window or its frame.
What makes this case unusual is that someone else had already been convicted of the Johannessen murder. Lionel Lane was tried for it and found guilty. His conviction was then vacated, on the prosecution's own motion, once Tenney was charged with the same killing.
The evidence that had convicted Lane still existed, and Tenney's lawyers tried to put it before his jury. Oscar Dorrise, who had been in the same cellblock as Lane, said Lane had told him he had shot an older lady in the head in a house in Aurora; he had given that same evidence for the State at Lane's trial. Lorie Mohle, who lived with Lane on the same road as the victim, had testified that on the evening of January 2, 1993 she was driven to a shop with Lane and two of his friends, Lester Salter and Corey Jenkins, that the three men got out of the car on Felton Road saying they would be back shortly, and that she heard a gunshot and walked home with her children. Lane had told her that he, Salter and Jenkins had done it, and that it was Salter who shot the woman.
Neither Lane nor Mohle could be found by the time of Tenney's trial, though the defence and the prosecution both tried. Mohle's sworn evidence from Lane's trial was read to the jury, but the trial court cut out the part where Lane admitted the killing and cleared Tenney.
On April 18, 2002 the Supreme Court of Illinois reversed the conviction and ordered a new trial. It held that Lane's statement had been made in circumstances giving considerable assurance of its reliability, that excluding it was an abuse of discretion, and that the statement was critical to Tenney's ability to present a complete defence. The court's own assessment of the case against him was that Lippert had been thoroughly impeached, that there was little corroboration that Tenney had gone to the house at all, and that the evidence was not overwhelming. It also held the evidence sufficient to convict, so a retrial raised no double jeopardy problem, and said expressly that it was making no finding about his guilt.
Murderpedia's record gives the 1998 death sentence as having been commuted to life imprisonment. That does not sit easily beside a conviction reversed in 2002, and the accessible record does not carry what happened at the retrial. Both are set down here as they stand.