Canadian Couples Take Stand in Huffman Case

For hefty, white-haired John Tenove, 64, material things have never seemed worth fighting for.

So the retired photographer from Edmonton, Canada, spoke with a tone of deep regret about his role in the events that led to the death Feb. 27 of actor David Huffman in shadowy Palm Canyon of Balboa Park.

“All my life I’ve had times when if I could change the course of events I would,” Tenove said Monday outside the San Diego courtroom where 16-year-old Genaro Villanueva is on trial for murder. “Certainly this time,” he said.

Tenove, his wife, Christine, and another Canadian couple told Superior Court Judge Norbert Ehrenfreund and a jury of the simple detective work and sense of civic duty that led them to help police crack the mystery that surrounded the killing of the actor. At the time of his death, Huffman, 40, was appearing in the Old Globe Theatre production “Of Mice and Men.”

Villanueva’s attorney, Allan Williams, has conceded that the illegal alien fatally stabbed Huffman with a screwdriver when the actor pursued the young Mexican as he tried to flee a Balboa Park parking lot after breaking into the Tenoves’ motor home. The stabbing occurred as the two men struggled in the canyon, Williams said early in the week-old trial.

Jack Beamer, a farmer from Chipman, Canada, testified that the two couples from the province of Alberta--the women are sisters--were visiting Balboa Park as part of a winter vacation in San Diego and the Southwest.

Shortly after 9 a.m. on Feb. 27, they parked their vehicles--the Tenoves’ 26-foot motor home and the Beamers’ rental car--in a lot near the Organ Pavillion, he said. The Beamers headed to the Aerospace Hall of Fame, and the Tenoves went to visit the Reuben H. Fleet Space Theater & Science Center.

When Beamer and his wife, Tillie, returned about two hours later, they saw a man in the Tenoves’ motor home. “I said, ‘What the hell are you doing in there?’ (or) something like that,” Beamer testified.

The shouts apparently caught the attention of Huffman, who was sitting in his van nearby, playing the bagpipes. Huffman asked Beamer if there had been a break-in. When the answer was affirmative, the actor jumped in his van and took off after the intruder, who was walking briskly across the parking lot in the direction of Palm Canyon, Beamer said.

Beamer described how he drove after the van, found it stopped at the roadside with its warning lights blinking and waited for the Good Samaritan to return. When he did not, Beamer eventually returned to the motor home and told the Tenoves what had happened.

“We discussed it amongst ourselves and decided there was nothing we could do about it,” said Beamer, noting that nothing seemed to be missing from the motor home. “We didn’t realize what had happenned.”

The story did not end there for the vacationing Canadians.

Christine Tenove testified that, from San Diego, she and her husband went to visit a relative in the Los Angeles area, while the Beamers drove to Yuma, Ariz. Flipping through a newspaper later in the week, she saw a story about a killing in Balboa Park.

“I made a comment about it being a dangerous place,” she said. “We were robbed and somebody was being murdered at the same time.” The Tenoves had a burglar alarm system installed in the motor home while they were in Los Angeles.

The couples discussed the article when they met up again in Indio, five days after the slaying. They decided “we should go to the police in case it might be informative,” Christine Tenove said.

In fact, when Villanueva was arrested a week later, police said the information the Canadians provided had broken open a baffling case. Their eyewitness account helped police develop a composite sketch of the suspect, leading to Villanueva’s arrest March 11 at the India Street house where he lived with relatives while attending San Diego High School.

In a brief interview, Beamer said the couples had no second thoughts about their decision to contact authorities, though it turned their vacation into a police drama that has brought them back to San Diego three times in the last 10 months.

“We just thought it was our duty to do so,” he said.