PANAMA CITY — The man suspected in the slaying of his pregnant wife is ready to continue to trial after undergoing competency restoration in a state mental hospital.
It’s been six months since Gary Wesley Tennyson was deemed mentally incompetent to proceed to trial and more than a year since Dean Stokes found his the body of his daughter, Glenda Tennyson, wrapped in a blanket in a shed behind the couple’s Lynn Haven home.
During a brief hearing Friday, Prosecutor Larry Basford and Tennyson’s defense attorney, Kim Dowgul, agreed two doctors have examined Tennyson and found him competent to proceed. Judge Michael Overstreet ruled the proceedings can go forward.
A doctor for the defense reported that Tennyson continues to experience delusions and hallucinations, but his medications are managing those symptoms, Dowgul said. Though the case is unlikely to go to trial this year, Dowgul wants to continue setting court dates so she can closely monitor her client’s condition.
According to police records:
Gary Tennyson had been using drugs and his mental health was deteriorating in the months before Glenda Tennyson was killed in May 2012. He had been committed a few months earlier.
Glenda Tennyson had convinced a judge to order his commitment again in the days before she died, but the order slipped through the cracks despite at least contact with deputies between the day the order was issued and the day she was killed.
The Medical Examiner’s Office discovered Tennyson was pregnant with twins when she died.
Gary Tennyson faces life in prison if convicted as charged.