Jurors in ’85 slaying view scenes

Photo

The Ohio Avenue duplex where Gina Tenney lived above Bennie Adams

By Ed Runyan

The current tenant of the victim’s apartment inadvertently put up a ghoulish Halloween display.

YOUNGSTOWN — Jurors in the capital murder trial of Bennie Adams visited the Ohio Avenue duplex where Adams lived downstairs from a 19-year-old Youngstown State University student he is accused of killing Dec. 29, 1985.

They also visited the part of the Mahoning River near the West Avenue Bridge, where the body of the student, Gina Tenney of Ashtabula, was found the next day.

And they visited the Dollar Bank on Belmont Avenue in Liberty where witnesses saw Adams using an ATM machine at about 9:30 p.m. the day Tenney died.

But the visits, called a jury view, are the only things that were completed Tuesday in the trial.

Instead of hearing opening statements and testimony, Judge Timothy E. Franken of Mahoning County Common Pleas Court postponed those until 9 a.m. today.

The reason was because a witness in the trial became ill over the weekend and had to be hospitalized, Judge Franken said from the bench.

He said he would give the lawyers another day to determine whether the witness would be able to testify later or whether it will be necessary to tape the person’s testimony and show it to the jury, the judge said.

Adams, 51, of Hollywood Avenue, is charged with aggravated murder and could be sentenced to death if convicted of killing Tenney, who was raped and strangled.

On the day Tenney’s body was found, police were initially unable to gain access to her apartment. Adams let them into his apartment and helped them contact the landlord.

The landlord had a warrant out against him, so when he arrived, police arrested him and borrowed a coat from Adams. In a coat pocket, they found an ATM card that belonged to Tenney.

Adams was arrested in the theft of the card and was a suspect in the death but eventually was released for lack of evidence. At the time, police were not able to identify suspects by using DNA.

Evidence from Tenney’s rape and murder was preserved by the Youngstown Police Department for 22 years and was used by the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation last year to link Adams more closely to the murder, police said.

Adams was charged with killing Tenney last October — three years after being released from prison after serving 18 years for kidnapping, raping and robbing a Boardman woman during the summer of 1985.

The scene at the Ohio Avenue duplex may have struck some jurors as odd.

On the second-floor balcony outside of the apartment where Tenney lived was a ghoulish Halloween display showing a woman figure with an ax in its back and blood splatters nearby. A second figure is shown nearby. Cobwebs and other Halloween standards are also there.

Stephanie Redman, the 23-year-old waitress living there, said she is a “Halloween fiend” and decorates every year.

She said she learned of the Tenney case just a week or two ago, when Youngstown detectives came by to look at the apartment’s layout.

Redman said she has lived in the apartment for three years.

Debi Kelson, who lives in the apartment where Adams lived, said she has lived there four years and didn’t know until recently that her apartment was the one where Adams lived.

“That came as a real surprise,” Kelson said. She has lived in Youngstown all her life and remembers when Tenney died. Redman, from the East Side, was only a few months old when it happened.

Redman said she could have put up a display that wouldn’t have reminded people of the real-life horror of her apartment, but she never figured that anyone would ever know that her apartment was the one where Tenney lived. She had never heard of a jury view, she said.

She said she also was not aware of how Tenney died and doesn’t know whether Tenney died in the apartment or somewhere else.

“I was just decorating my home, and I wasn’t meaning to offend anyone,” she added.

runyan@vindy.com