State v. Adams
| Decision Date | 01 October 2015 |
| Docket Number | No. 2011–1978.,2011–1978. |
| Citation | 2015 Ohio 3954,45 N.E.3d 127,144 Ohio St.3d 429 |
| Parties | The STATE of Ohio, Appellee, v. ADAMS, Appellant. |
| Court | Ohio Supreme Court |
Paul J. Gains, Mahoning County Prosecuting Attorney, and Ralph M. Rivera and
Martin P. Desmond, Assistant Prosecuting Attorneys, for appellee.
John B. Juhasz, Youngstown; and Maro & Schoenike Co. and Lynn A. Maro, Boardman, for appellant.
{¶ 1} This is an appeal as of right from a judgment affirming an aggravated-murder conviction and death sentence. A Mahoning County jury convicted appellant, Bennie Adams, of aggravated murder in connection with the rape and murder of Gina Tenney and unanimously recommended a sentence of death. The trial court accepted the recommendation and sentenced Adams accordingly. The Seventh District Court of Appeals affirmed the conviction and sentence.
{¶ 2} Although we affirm the conviction for aggravated murder, we vacate the sentence of death and remand the matter for resentencing in accordance with this opinion.
{¶ 3} The state called 18 witnesses to testify at trial. The defense presented no witnesses of its own but did recall and briefly question one of the state's witnesses. The evidence that follows was presented to the jury.
The burglary and the murder
{¶ 4} In the autumn of 1985, Gina Tenney was a sophomore at Youngstown State University. She lived alone in a second-floor apartment in a converted house on Ohio Avenue in Youngstown.
{¶ 5} Adams lived in the same house in a downstairs apartment with his girlfriend, Adena Fedelia. The duplex had an interior common staircase.
{¶ 6} Around 1:00 a.m. on December 25, 1985, Tenney was getting ready for bed when, as she told a friend, she "heard someone at the door with the keys like they were trying to get in." Tenney called her ex-boyfriend, Mark Passarello, who came and stayed with her until about 3:00 a.m. on Christmas morning.
{¶ 7} Shortly after Passarello left, Tenney again heard someone at her door. The person knocked over the chair Tenney had placed against the door and entered the apartment. Tenney called the police to report an intruder in her apartment. The responding police officers found footprints in the snow leading from her apartment to 275 West Dennick Avenue in Youngstown.
{¶ 8} The investigation was assigned to Detective William Blanchard of the Youngstown Police Department. On December 26, 1985, Blanchard met with Tenney at her apartment. Looking at her apartment door, Blanchard saw "slight" but "noticeable" evidence of a forced entry.
{¶ 9} Blanchard followed up on the report of footprints by traveling to 275 West Dennick and interviewing a resident there, Ed Tragesser. Tragesser claimed to know nothing about the break-in. Blanchard testified that Tragesser was never ruled out as the burglar but that there was no evidence to sustain charging him with any crime. Blanchard, however, suspected that Adams may have been the burglar based on what Tenney had told him.
{¶ 10} Tenney's friend, Penny Sergeff, also suspected that Adams was the burglar.
{¶ 11} According to Sergeff, the outside door to Tenney's building made a loud screeching noise when it was opened or closed. But Tenney had not heard the door screech the night of the burglary, which suggested to Sergeff that the burglar had not come from outside the apartment building. Sergeff shared the information about the screeching door with the police, but never explicitly communicated her suspicions about Adams at the time she initially spoke to the police.
{¶ 12} Less than a week after the break-in, on the morning of December 30, 1985, Tenney's dead body was discovered in the Mahoning River. Upon identifying Tenney's body, homicide detectives called Blanchard into the investigation.
The investigation and arrest of Adams
{¶ 13} From the outset, Blanchard considered Adams a person of interest in the homicide.
{¶ 14} Blanchard and two homicide detectives traveled to the duplex on Ohio Avenue. They knocked on the exterior door for "a number of minutes" until Adams emerged from his apartment and admitted them into the common area.
{¶ 15} Upstairs, the police officers found the door to Tenney's apartment locked. They observed no blood on the steps. Blanchard saw no new evidence of forced entry.
{¶ 16} The investigators decided to call the building's owner for the key to Tenney's apartment. They then knocked on Adams's apartment door for permission to use his telephone; Adams let them in.
{¶ 17} While one detective placed the call, Blanchard and Lieutenant David Campana talked to Adams, asking him when he had last seen Tenney, whether anything suspicious had been happening lately, whether anybody else was around who might know something, and whether he was alone. Adams indicated that he was alone in the apartment and told detectives that he did not know where Tenney might be.
{¶ 18} Just then, the detectives heard a loud bump, a sound like a door hitting a wall. Adams then said, "I never said he wasn't here" or words to that effect. Blanchard and Campana went into a back bedroom, where they found Horace Landers hiding behind a door.
{¶ 19} Campana recognized Landers and remembered that there was an outstanding misdemeanor warrant for him. Campana and Blanchard immediately arrested Landers and handcuffed him.
{¶ 20} Landers was wearing trousers, but was bare-chested. Knowing that they would have to take him outside into the cold, Blanchard looked around and saw a shirt on the bed, which he draped over Landers's shoulders. But Blanchard thought that he should put something else on Landers. He saw a jacket on the floor three or four feet away, just outside the door to the bedroom where they had found Landers.
{¶ 21} As Blanchard searched the jacket for weapons, Landers told him that the jacket belonged to Adams. Simultaneously, Blanchard felt a hard object in the pocket and pulled it out. The object was an ATM card from Dollar Bank bearing the name Gina Tenney. Blanchard testified that he also found a folded Mahoning County welfare card in the name of Bennie Adams in the pocket.
{¶ 22} The police officers immediately arrested Adams. When they searched him, they found a blue tissue in his pants pocket with two cigarette butts wrapped up in it.
{¶ 23} Fedelia, whose name was on the lease, consented to a search of the apartment she shared with Adams. In a bathroom wastepaper basket, police officers found a ring of ten keys with the letter G on the keychain. One of the keys fit Tenney's apartment door and another key fit her automobile.
{¶ 24} In the kitchen, Blanchard found a potholder with hair and dirt on it in a wastebasket. Police officers later found a matching potholder atop the refrigerator in Tenney's apartment.
{¶ 25} Police officers also found an unplugged television on a bed in Adams's apartment. The serial number on the television matched the number on an empty television box later discovered in Tenney's apartment. A wall unit in Tenney's apartment contained an empty space for a television, and a cable-television line dangled in the space.
{¶ 26} In Tenney's apartment, Blanchard saw no broken glass, broken furniture, or other indication that the home had been ransacked. A plate of food and a beer bottle were on the kitchen table. At trial, Blanchard claimed a "vague recollection" of "some disarray," but he could not recall what he had observed. His contemporaneous investigative notes did not mention disarray or overturned furniture.
{¶ 27} Tenney's friends told police investigators that Adams had been bothering Tenney for some time before her death. Sergeff and Marvin Robinson, another one of Tenney's friends, testified that when they visited Tenney, Adams often stood in his doorway watching them or peeked out through the curtains. According to Robinson and Sergeff, Adams started calling Tenney late at night, asking her to invite him up to her apartment. The calls continued even after Tenney asked him to stop, and Tenney eventually changed her telephone number.
{¶ 28} Robinson also described an incident in which someone slipped a card in an envelope under Tenney's back door addressed "to a very sweet and confused young lady" and signed "love, Bennie." Police officers found the envelope in Tenney's apartment but did not find the card.
{¶ 29} According to her friends, after the Christmas break-in Tenney's emotional state changed from frustration with Adams to fear of him. For the next few nights, she asked a friend to stay over because she was afraid to be alone. Sergeff testified that Tenney specifically had said that she was afraid of Adams, a detail Sergeff did not include in her police statement given shortly after Tenney's death.
{¶ 30} At trial, Tenney's friends described their interactions with her during the last two days of her life. Sergeff and Tenney spent the evening of December 28, 1985, watching television in Tenney's apartment. At some point, Passarello, Tenney's ex-boyfriend, came over, and Sergeff asked him to drive her home. Passarello then returned to Tenney's apartment. Passarello testified that Tenney did not feel secure in the apartment. He stayed the night, and the two had sexual relations.
{¶ 31} Passarello left the next day after lunch and went home to his apartment. Tenney left separately at the same time to meet a friend, Jeff Thomas, for an early afternoon movie.
{¶ 32} After the movie, Thomas and Tenney had dinner near the theater. Thomas testified that they talked about work and school, but Tenney kept bringing the conversation back to "the situation that was going on where she was living." She told Thomas that she was very concerned about "the man downstairs." Thomas described her as "apprehensive" and "borderline fearful." Thomas and Tenney parted around 4:30 or 5:00 p.m.
{¶ 33} Tenney's mother, Avalon Tenney, testified that her daughter had called her the day before she died and told her that she was afraid of Adams.
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