Trial details Tenney’s last days

Gina Tenney was bubbly and liked ‘The Flintstones’ character Pebbles.

By ED RUNYAN

VINDICATOR STAFF WRITER

YOUNGSTOWN — To hear Martin Desmond, assistant Mahoning County prosecutor, describe the evidence pointing to Bennie Adams as the person who strangled and killed Gina Tenney on Dec. 29, 1985, you’d wonder why the case went cold 22 years ago.

Police had witnesses who saw Adams in Tenney’s car the night she was killed, trying to withdraw money from a Liberty automated teller machine using Tenney’s ATM card.

They had a television belonging to Tenney that was found in Adams’ apartment. Inside a wastebasket in Adams’ apartment, they found a potholder containing red hair like Tenney’s, plus her car keys.

And they had statements from Tenney’s friends, saying the bubbly 19-year-old Youngstown State University sophomore had changed her phone number in the weeks before her death because “the man downstairs” had been calling her and making her fearful.

And they had the predecessor to DNA evidence: blood typing. It indicated that the blood type of the DNA found in Gina Tenney’s body was the same as that of Bennie Adams and 4 percent of the black, male population.

What they didn’t have was today’s DNA evidence.

And when Brenda Girardi of the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation testifies later in the trial, jurors will know that DNA recovered from Tenney’s body, when analyzed by BCI in 2007, proves it belonged to Bennie Adams, Desmond said.

Anthony Meranto, one of Adams’ two defense attorneys, said Desmond’s remarks were like the “sauce” of a dish, not the “meat.”

Testimony will not back up Desmond’s claims that several of Tenney’s closest friends and relatives remember Tenney expressing fear of Adams, Meranto said.

“He [Desmond] said ‘afraid’ five or six times,” Meranto said of his opening statement to jurors. “But you didn’t hear ‘afraid’ — not one time — 22 years ago,” Meranto said.

He added, “You’re going to hear memories that have gotten much better in the 23 years since Gina Tenney died.”

Meranto spent most of his cross-examination of witness Penny Sergeff a short time later asking her to find any reference in her police statement to her or Tenney having any fear of Adams leading up to Dec. 30, 1985, when Tenney’s body was found in the Mahoning River near the West Avenue Bridge.

Sergeff, who was Tenney’s closest friend from junior high through high school in Ashtabula and moved to Youngstown about six weeks before Tenney’s death to be close to her friend, acknowledged that she didn’t say those things directly to police.

But because of an attempted break-in four days before Tenney’s death, because Adams had made numerous unwanted phone calls to Tenney and tried talking to her often, Tenney was afraid, Sergeff said.

“She was afraid to be alone,” Sergeff said, saying friends had stayed with her at night for a couple weeks leading up to her death.

“Show me one place in that statement where you say she was afraid of Bennie Adams?” Meranto asked.

“I think it’s clearly implied,” Sergeff said.

Jeff Thomas, who worked with Tenney as a student assistant during the summer and fall of 1985, testified that he and Tenney saw the animated movie “101 Dalmatians” at the Eastwood Mall in Niles the day she died. They went to a nearby Pizza Hut restaurant afterward, and she left Niles around 5 p.m.

Several times at Pizza Hut, Tenney mentioned her concerns about “the man downstairs,” Thomas said.

“She was apprehensive, concerned, borderline fearful, but not gravely afraid,” he said.

That day Tenney wore a “Flintstones” sweat shirt featuring the character Pebbles. She liked the character because childhood friends thought she looked like Pebbles because of her red hair, Thomas said.

He said Tenney was a good student assistant because she had a “bubbly,” “real positive” attitude and was “very approachable.” A student assistant’s job was to contact freshmen students to give them tours and answer questions, he said.

Avalon Tenney, the girl’s 82-year-old mother, testified vaguely to her daughter being afraid of Bennie Adams, but couldn’t recall many details.

She testified at an earlier hearing that her daughter called her in the evening Dec. 29 asking her mom to pick her up because she was afraid of Adams.

Avalon Tenney said her daughter stayed at her apartment during Christmas break instead of coming home because she wanted to “go with her friends.”

Detective William Blanchard of the Youngstown Police Department testified to finding the ATM card and television in Adams’ apartment and police charging Adams with receiving stolen property.

A grand jury refused to indict Adams on that charge, and Prosecutor Gary Van Brocklin in Mahoning County and Dennis Watkins in Trumbull County refused to prosecute Adams for the homicide, Blanchard said.

runyan@vindy.com