Jury convicts Edward Tenney of 1992 murder

A DuPage County jury found Edward Tenney guilty Wednesday of the execution-style murder of a young Aurora father killed three weeks after his second child was born.

After a clerk read the guilty verdict, the slain man's widow, Sharon Weber, and her mother-in-law, Karen Bond, shared tears of joy.

They waited nearly 18 years for this moment.

"It's a very happy day," said Weber, who thanked prosecutors and jurors. "I feel like today my husband really got the justice he deserves and the person that was guilty was named and will be held accountable."

The jury deliberated more than four hours over two days before convicting Tenney, a three-time killer, of a crime that brought such pain, it reverberates still. Members begin hearing evidence Thursday in the trial's next two phases to decide if Tenney is eligible for a death sentence and, finally, whether his execution is the appropriate punishment.

Tenney was convicted of opening fire on Jerry Weber late April 16, 1992, before robbing him of a wallet containing $6 in a muddy field at Sheffer and Vaughn roads, in Aurora.

Tenney, 50, showed no outward reaction upon learning his fate. The jury has not been told yet he is serving two life prison sentences for the 1993 shootings of two Kane County women, killed in separate home invasions, including dairy heiress Jill Oberweis.

The defendant's cousin, Donald Lippert, 34, serving an 80-year prison term for his role in all three slayings, testified he watched Tenney kill Weber without provocation after they spotted him trying to free his white work van from the mud. His murder remained unsolved for three years.

Police were led to Tenney in October 1993 when they arrested him on an unrelated burglary warrant at his girlfriend's apartment, about a mile from the murder scene, and recovered one of the two murder weapons. It wasn't until May 1995, though, that police recovered the other gun and Weber's wallet from other members of Lippert's family, who lived with Tenney back in 1992 and said they still were storing some of his belongings.

The defense team of John Houlihan and Mark Kowalczyk argued the Lipperts were far from reliable witnesses. But the truth was evident in even minor details, countered prosecutors David Bayer, Robert Berlin and Michael Pawl.

Tenney also penned a 1999 handwritten letter to Donald Lippert that read, in part, "I still can't see why you ran your mouth. All you had to do was keep quiet. No evidence then."

Sharon Weber, a widow at 21 who gave birth to the couple's second son just three weeks earlier, discovered her husband's bullet-ridden body the next morning when he failed to return home from gathering flagstones for their backyard garden.

She and Bond said they support the prosecution's pursuit of the death penalty.