Calling him a “pariah on civilized society,” DuPage County prosecutors began making their case Friday for why a triple killer with a lifetime of violence deserves to be executed.
Beginning at 17, when he wasn’t behind bars, an often-armed Edward Tenney robbed businesses, burglarized homes, escaped from jails and terrorized folks with whom he crossed paths in Illinois and Florida, prosecutors said.
Tenney went to prison a half-dozen times but, prosecutors said, quickly returned to his life of “unlawful disorder” when free.
“He is a pariah on civilized society,” prosecutor David Bayer said. “For Mr. Tenney’s entire adult life, when he wasn’t in jail, he is out stealing, robbing, breaking into businesses, buildings and people’s homes. He batters people. He uses guns almost all the time and unfortunately, as you now know, he murders innocent people.”
Tenney, 50, is serving two life prison terms for the 1993 fatal shootings of 75-year-old Virginia Johannessen and dairy heiress Mary Jill Oberweis, killed 10 months apart in separate robberies in the same Aurora Township neighborhood.
Earlier this week, jurors convicted Tenney of a third murder for shooting Jerry Weber late on April 16, 1992, before robbing him of a wallet containing $6, as Weber tried to free his mired work van from a muddy Aurora field.
“All of these innocent people were killed for this man’s greed and penchant to pray on society,” Bayer said.
The six-man, six-woman jury also found Tenney eligible under the law for a death sentence.
At issue, though, is whether to impose the ultimate punishment.
The defense team, John Houlihan and Mark Kowalcyzk, is fighting in court to save Tenney’s life. His attorneys do not dispute the violent history. They are expected to present mental health experts who will testify that Tenney suffered severe emotional and physical abuse while growing up in a dysfunctional family that led him from an early age to take a “defensive protective stance for what he perceived to be a hostile world.”
They contend Tenney was operating under an extreme mental and emotional disturbance when he killed Weber and could not control his behavior.
“It’s not an excuse,” Houlihan said, “but is offered as an explanation for why these seemingly unfathomable things happened. If we look below the surface, it helps to put it into perspective; to better understand.”
The defendant’s cousin, Donald Lippert, 34, serving an 80-year prison term for his role in all three slayings, testified twice in the trial that he was Tenney’s teenage partner in crime. Lippert, who was too young to receive the death penalty in two of the three murders, is eligible for parole after serving half the prison term.
The cousins were arrested in 1995 for the three murders after police linked them to two guns used in the shootings and robbery proceeds. Lippert confessed, while Tenney still maintains his innocence.
The sentencing hearing, before DuPage Circuit Judge Daniel Guerin, is expected to last one week.
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