Virginia Johannessen had lived alone in the same house in Aurora, Illinois, for about forty years. When her brother, Francis Reines, could not reach her, he drove over on January 5, 1993, let himself in through the back door, switched off the alarm, and found her sitting in a chair in the corner of the living room. She had been beaten with a hammer and shot in the head and chest. The house had been ransacked. A check on the table beside her was dated January 2. Her car turned up in a supermarket parking lot a mile away with a hatchet-hammer inside it that carried no fingerprints. It would take five years, two other prosecutions and one wrongful conviction before a jury was asked to decide that the man who killed her was Edward Tenney, and another nine before that verdict was final.
The first people accused were three young men, Michael Turner, Corey Jenkins and Lester Salter, charged in 1994. They spent six months in jail and were acquitted after a nine-day trial. In 1995 a fourth man, Lionel Lane, was tried and convicted. Oscar Dorrise, who had shared a cellblock with Lane, testified for the state that Lane told him he had shot an older lady in the head in a house in Aurora. Lorie Mohle, who lived with Lane on the victim's road, testified that on the evening of January 2 she was driven to a store with Lane, Salter and Jenkins, that the three got out on Felton Road saying they would be right back, that she heard a gunshot and walked home with her children, and that Lane later told her the three of them had done it and that Salter had fired.
Then, on October 1, 1993, Mary Jill Oberweis, fifty-six, a widow from the Aurora dairy family and a neighbor of Johannessen's, was beaten and shot to death in a home invasion. Edward Tenney, born July 30, 1959, an Aurora man with earlier convictions for burglary and armed robbery who sometimes went by the name Christopher Nelson, was arrested for it in 1995 with his cousin Donald Lippert. Lippert confessed, and told investigators the two of them were responsible for three killings in and around Aurora: Oberweis, Johannessen, and Jerry Weber, twenty-four, who had stopped with a flat tire on April 17, 1992, and was robbed of six dollars and shot dead at the roadside in DuPage County. Lippert received sixty years for his part in the Oberweis killing. About three months after Lane's conviction, the state moved to vacate it, and he was freed.
Tenney was indicted on six counts of first-degree murder, three for Johannessen and three for Oberweis, found fit to stand trial, and tried separately for each. The Oberweis trial came first and ended in conviction and, later, a sentence of natural life. The Johannessen trial in Kane County, in 1998, turned on Lippert. In exchange for his testimony he was to receive eighty years across Kane and DuPage counties, with the possibility of a guilty-but-mentally-ill finding; his competence was contested and the trial court held a hearing before letting him testify. He said he remembered January 1993 only vaguely. His account was that they walked to the house, that Tenney broke a basement window and pulled out the frame, that he himself crawled in and straight back out, frightened by the dark and the noise of a washing machine, and that he was sent round the front to keep watch. He also testified that Tenney went back and beat the woman when he found she was still alive after being shot. No fingerprints were found on the window or frame.
Tenney's defense was that Lane, Salter, Jenkins and Turner were the real killers, and his lawyers tried to put the evidence that had convicted Lane in front of his jury. By then neither Lane nor Mohle could be found, though both sides looked. Mohle's sworn testimony from Lane's trial was read to the jury, but the judge cut the part in which Lane admitted the killing. The jury convicted in under five hours and took about an hour to return a death sentence, finding three aggravating factors: two or more murders, a killing in the course of residential burglary, and a cold, calculated and premeditated murder.
On April 18, 2002, the Supreme Court of Illinois reversed the conviction and ordered a new trial. Justice Freeman wrote that Lane's statement had been made in circumstances giving considerable assurance of its reliability, that it was corroborated by evidence independent of Mohle, including a break-in, stolen property and a woman alone in the house, and that excluding it was an abuse of discretion that denied Tenney a fair chance to present his defense. The court observed that Lippert had been thoroughly impeached, that there was little corroboration that Tenney had been at 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 bar, and it made no finding on his guilt. A concurring justice would have ordered a new trial for the further reason that Illinois's death penalty law was unconstitutional. The Oberweis conviction took its own route through the appellate courts, which affirmed the conviction in 2002 and returned the sentence for reconsideration.
The retrial in 2007 ended as the first trial had, in a conviction for Johannessen's murder. In late December 2007, days before he was to be sentenced, guards at the DuPage County jail in Wheaton found a hole dug in the wall of his cell. He was charged with criminal damage to state property and moved to a higher-security unit, and prosecutors said they would consider an attempted escape charge. In January 2008 a judge sentenced him to life, and he was serving two life terms, for Oberweis and for Johannessen. At the same time he was awaiting a hearing on murder and robbery charges in the Weber killing, with trial expected late in 2008 and prosecutors saying they would seek death. Published accounts do not agree on what followed: one records a sixty-year sentence for Weber, while reporting from January 2008 had that case still waiting for trial. Johannessen's age is given as seventy-four in contemporary reporting and seventy-six elsewhere.