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Trial scheduled in slaying of YSU female
The judge says he wants no surprises as the trial begins.
YOUNGSTOWN — The death-penalty murder trial of Bennie L. Adams will proceed as scheduled Aug. 13, Judge Timothy E. Franken told lawyers at a pre-trial hearing.
Adams’ trial in the Dec. 29,1985, strangulation death of Gina Tenney, 19, a Youngstown State University student, who was his neighbor, will be the first death-penalty trial in Mahoning County in more than four years.
Adams, 50, of Hollywood Avenue, was indicted last fall on charges of aggravated murder with a death penalty specification, aggravated robbery, aggravated burglary, kidnapping and rape in Tenney’s death after a DNA match was found in evidence police had preserved for 22 years.
Tenney’s body was found floating in the Mahoning River near West Avenue on Dec. 30, 1985.
“I expect you to be ready, no stalling, no delaying,” Judge Franken told Martin P. Desmond, assistant county prosecutor, and Adams’ lawyers, Lou DeFabio and Tony Meranto, at the Friday hearing.
“On the opening of trial, we’re not going to be opening new packages with surprises in them,” the common pleas judge said.
Robert Jackson, jury commissioner, said he has received 77 completed questionnaires from 350 his office mailed to potential jurors in the case and that he will make a follow-up contact with those who haven’t responded.
Besides the 12 jurors to be selected, four alternates will be seated in this case, the judge said.
Desmond said Boardman police have been unable to find their reports on another case, in which Adams served 18 years in prison for kidnapping, raping and robbing a Boardman woman. Desmond also said the transcript from the 1986 trial, in which Adams was convicted of those offenses, was lost in a courthouse attic fire during the 1990s.
Desmond said he wants to introduce that case into the trial to show similarities between Adams’s behavior in that case and his alleged behavior in the Tenney case.
Judge Franken will hear arguments during an all-day motion hearing beginning at 8 a.m. Thursday concerning a defense request to dismiss all charges other than the murder charge.
The defense has said in court papers that the six-year statute of limitations applies on all of the non-murder counts.
The last death-penalty case tried in the county was that of John Drummond Jr., 30, of Allerton Court, who remains on death row after having been sentenced to death by Judge Maureen A. Cronin in February 2004.
A jury convicted Drummond in the death of 3-month-old Jiyen C. Dent Jr., who was fatally injured by an assault rifle bullet that hit him in the head as he sat in a baby swing in his East Side residence.
milliken@vindy.com