A Kane County judge Wednesday refused to allow attorneys for convicted killer Edward L. Tenney to hire a statistician to determine how much, if any, pretrial publicity may affect a jury pool for Tenney’s coming trial. He is accused of murdering Aurora Township widow Virginia Johannessen.
Tenney’s lawyer Herb Hill is seeking a change of venue for his client, he said, because of the reams of publicity about the shooting deaths of Johannessen and Jill Oberweis in separate, but similar, incidents inside their Felton Road homes about nine months apart in 1993.
Tenney was convicted in October of murdering Oberweis, widow of a prominent Aurora dairy executive, and is also charged in the 1992 killing of 24-year-old Jerry Weber, who was found shot to death in the DuPage County portion of Aurora.
Circuit Judge Donald C. Hudson said, based on interviews with potential jurors at the start of the Oberweis trial, knowledge of the cases was not widespread.
Hudson said he would consider a potential change of venue at a later date but would not allow Kane residents to be surveyed.