A Rip in Heaven: A Memoir of Murder And Its Aftermath

by Jeanine Cummins

  I don’t want to be near you

  For the thoughts we share

  But the words we never have to speak

  I will never miss you

  Because of what we do

  But what we are together

  — Nikki Giovanni

  Inside, Julie’s handwritten inscription read:

  1 April, 1991

  Tom,

  I love you — Don’t ever forget that, no matter where you are, or how much time passes between us. I couldn’t forget you in a million years. Remember me.

  Kisses and Revolution, Jules

  A few miles north of the McDonald’s Riverboat, just around a particularly sharp bend in the river, the Old Chain of Rocks Bridge arose from the water. The majestic Mississippi was reduced to insignificance in the presence of the old bridge. The water lapped timidly around the bridge’s stalwart ankles, concealing the wreck and tumble deep below the surface.

  Perhaps Julie was drawn to the old bridge because, like her, it was steeped in contradictions. It was a place where some people came seeking peace and serenity and others came seeking thrills and danger. It was a place of public solitude, of dilapidated grandeur, of terrible beauty. A place where the carefully painted words of her graffiti were surrounded on all sides by the tangled lines of nature — the dense trees, the gnarled vines, the winding riverbank. It was a place that spoke to her passions, that inspired her. She loved that old bridge with her whole heart and soul, and the poet in her recognized that at this precise moment in time, it probably represented more to her than it ever would again. For she was at a bridge in her own life. She was crossing over from childhood to adulthood, building her future and choosing her battles. She wanted to share this special place and all of its implications with her cousin before their week together was over.

  Julie pulled her little blue car to a stop on Riverview Drive. She had gotten her wish — she and Robin were here to show Tom the beloved old bridge and their poem.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Earlier that evening, forty miles outside the city in Wentzville, Missouri, twenty-three-year-old Marlin Gray had climbed behind the wheel of his girlfriend’s Chevrolet Citation. At six-foot-four and over 200 pounds, he more than filled the driver seat of the little white car. He had smooth, deep-brown skin, big eyes, and straight, white teeth. A strong jawline and chiseled chin finished the aristocratic effect. Gray was a head-turner.

  In the passenger seat beside him, fifteen-year-old Daniel Winfrey could have been his photonegative. Winfrey was an awkward, scrawny kid who hadn’t quite finished growing into himself. In fact, at about five-foot-six and 120 pounds, he had barely started the job. He had pale skin, shoulder-length dirty-blond hair, and acne. Despite his current teenage awkwardness, he wasn’t a bad-looking guy.

  Winfrey had moved with his father, Donald Winfrey, to Linda Lane in Wentzville only three weeks earlier. He was a freshman at Wentzville High School and an average to below-average student, but his worst school-related problem was skipping class. Everyone described him as a polite and respectful young man both at home and at school, but he was easily bored, the kind of person who could be convinced to try just about anything once.

  Winfrey and Gray hadn’t known each other long — only a few weeks, in fact — but they talked and laughed like old friends. Perhaps Winfrey’s initial attraction to Gray had something to do with the fact that his older friend was able and willing to provide alcohol and drugs. But beyond that, Gray had always had an easy time initiating and fostering relationships, and his burgeoning friendship with Winfrey was no exception. After all, Gray had the qualities of a leader and he was the life of the party wherever he went. Girls giggled at his jokes and guys sought his advice.

  But there were a lot of things that Daniel Winfrey didn’t know about his new companion — things that Gray tried his best to hide from everyone, including himself. At Winfrey’s age, Gray had been small in stature and awkward too, so he had developed a cunning that made up for his size disadvantage. That cunning, combined with the fact that he was the beloved youngest of six children — the baby of the family — meant that he was used to getting his way.

  By the time he was eighteen, Gray had begun to construct, in his own mind, an image of himself that he liked. Whenever that image didn’t quite correspond with reality, Gray simply altered the reality to suit him. And he was frighteningly good at this deception. He was a gifted man in many ways: extremely intelligent, articulate, persuasive, charismatic, and funny, with great people skills — a natural performer. And everyone around him believed in the act. As far as his friends were concerned, Gray wasn’t just a casual weekend member of the Army Reserves, he was a soldier who had heroically served his country. And he wasn’t an informant who turned in a friend to save his own butt, but rather “a drug operative who worked with a MAG unit, helping to set up stings and clean up our streets.”

  His girlfriend Eva was a pretty young girl — tall, slim, and unassuming, with long shiny brown hair and a wan face. She was one of Gray’s most ardent admirers. She was also his meal ticket. Gray’s diverse interests didn’t include anything that earned a pay-check. He was content to hang out with his friends, driving around in Eva’s car while she worked, or relaxing at the friend’s house where the couple was currently living.

  On the evening of April 4, Gray dropped Eva at a friend’s house in Wentzville, telling her he was going to run a few quick errands and he would come back for her in an hour or two. Gray didn’t really have anything pressing on his agenda. He had a few friends to see, but really he just wanted a few hours alone with the car, to relax and go for a spin. When he spotted Winfrey on the street not long after he had dropped Eva off, he invited his friend into the car and the two of them set off.

  It was a clear day, warmer than usual for early April, the kind of weather when people finally shed their winter coats to go looking for springtime adventures. Gray and Winfrey were bored with the Wentzville routine, with their girlfriends and the same old scene. They wanted to do something different, so they rolled the windows in the Citation all the way down and started driving. When Gray stopped at a gas station for cigarettes, Winfrey stayed in the car. He was too young to buy smokes and he didn’t want to arouse questions from behind the counter. Winfrey had been hanging around the neighborhood with Gray since he and his father had moved in a few weeks earlier, but this was their first outing together and he was excited — he didn’t want to do anything to jeopardize the evening. The duo headed east on I-70, aiming for Northwoods in St. Louis, with a vague notion of tracking down Gray’s old friend Reginald Clemons.

  It was just about six o’clock when the oddly matched pair pulled up at Clemons’s home. Clemons and Gray had met when they lived in the same neighborhood years before and they’d been friends ever since. Clemons was a shy and quiet young man of nineteen. He was of medium height with a trim build, coal-black hair, and a neat black mustache. His entire appearance could be summed up in the word “tidy” — not at all unlike his life, really.

  His parents, Vera and Reynolds Thomas, were both ordained ministers at a Christian church called the Life Victory Center, where Clemons had attended weekly services when he was young. Clemons’s childhood had been stable and well balanced; the Thomases were devoted and active parents, loving but disciplined. His mother had married his stepfather when Clemons was just six years old, and Reynolds treated the children as if they were his own. The constant presence of a strong father figure from that young age had been a good influence on Clemons.

  In response to their solid parenting, Clemons was an agreeable and respectful child. He had always been fascinated by mechanics and was always dissecting things so he could see how they operated, challenging himself to put them back in working order. When he was nine years old, he had taken apart his stepfather’s watch, staying up all night to put it back together. When Reynolds woke up in the morning, the watch was there on his nightstand — as good as new.

  That mechanical
interest stayed with Clemons throughout his childhood and he aspired to own his own shop repairing lawnmowers, small engines, and motorcycles. But with no job and no capital, he began working from home after graduating from technical school. In March 1991, he ordered business cards for himself: REGINALD CLEMONS: SMALL ENGINE REPAIR.

  Harold Whitener, the owner of a small tire and brake shop in Pine Lawn, became a kind of a mentor to Clemons, encouraging his young friend’s ambitions. In Whitener’s opinion, Clemons was a follower.

  A follower.

  Of all the words and stories that have been employed to describe Reginald Clemons over the years, that one is the most important. It is the key to understanding Clemons’s psyche and the role he was about to play in a brutal and vicious crime.

  Clemons was the kind of young man who could easily and wholeheartedly accept whatever environment he found himself in. Clemons’s parents were good people, Christian people. They supplied their son with rules, with morals, with principles. And what did Clemons do? He followed those rules, adhered to those morals and principles. He grew up with good people, so he was good people. When Clemons’s friends and neighbors called him “nice” and “quiet,” they were right. He was nice because they were nice; he was quiet because he was unsure of himself. He preferred to imitate and mirror the qualities that surrounded him than dig deep to find out what qualities lay within his own person.

  Unfortunately, the very characteristic that led him to embody the goodness that surrounded him also led him to embrace evil when he met it. He adapted to his environment. It’s not an unusual phenomenon. It’s why sitcom producers include laugh tracks in television programs. When people hear laughter, they laugh.

  On the surface Clemons was probably the “nicest guy” among the four companions who were gathering that evening, the most respectful, well-mannered, on-the-right-track young man. But he was also, psychologically, the scariest. And he was treading a very dangerous line. He had surrounded himself with the wrong kind of people — people whose characteristics, when he adopted them as he inevitably would, could get him into a whole lot of trouble. People like Antonio Richardson.

  Antonio Richardson was Clemons’s sixteen-year-old cousin and, to put it mildly, Richardson was just plain bad news. Although Richardson had grown up just around the corner from Clemons, their childhoods could not have been more different. Where Clemons had received love, discipline, and constant attention, Richardson had grown up in squalor and neglect.

  Richardson was born in September 1974 to eighteen-year-old Gwendolyn Williams. Richardson was Gwendolyn’s second son, and by the time he was a year and a half old, Gwendolyn had three children in diapers. Gwendolyn was particularly ill-prepared for the tasks of single motherhood. She had never finished high school, and when she was employed (which was sporadically) her job was a part-time gig at the local White Castle fast-food restaurant. She and her three boys lived in a dirty, one-bedroom, AFDC-subsidized apartment on Edgewood Avenue. The majority of their meals came by way of food stamps, and at bedtime each night, the family shared two beds and a couch. Often the three young boys were left alone in the apartment; Gwendolyn repeatedly abandoned her sons for weeks on end.

  Before he had dropped out of school, Richardson had been every teacher’s worst nightmare. His academic and social progress were virtually nonexistent. In 1987, when he was twelve years old, he stopped going to school altogether. He had no interest in learning anything, he could barely read, and he was fed up with his teachers’ attempts to discipline him. He had been truant for one month (about the same amount of time as his mother’s most recent abandonment) when a neighbor phoned the Division of Family Services to report the squalid conditions in which Richardson and his two brothers were living.

  Richardson was re-enrolled in school and then suspended a short time later for bringing a toy gun to class. His behavioral and academic problems did not improve. He made his first appearance before the juvenile court system at age thirteen on a theft charge. Over the next two years, Richardson’s life continued its sad, erratic pattern of occasional schooling, frequent abandonment by his mother, and constant troublemaking. By the age of fifteen, Richardson had cultivated a fairly serious drug- and alcohol-abuse problem. In 1990 he was diagnosed as alcohol dependent and he began exhibiting the symptoms of lethargy, confusion, despondency, and stupor that are connected with alcoholic encephalopathy.

  That year, the fifteen-year-old Richardson permanently dropped out of school and enrolled in the Job Corps. One year later, on the evening of April 4, 1991, Richardson’s future looked as grim as his past, and he couldn’t much tell the difference anyway. Spending time with Clemons was a comfort to him; his older and quieter cousin was a calming presence for the rambunctious and angry Richardson. For Richardson, Clemons’s home, just around the corner from the cramped and dingy apartment where he had grown up, was like an oasis from another galaxy.

  That evening, Richardson and Clemons were wrestling around like two kids on the living-room floor, with the television as background noise, when the doorbell rang. The two cousins, like everyone else in town, had spring fever. So when the two newcomers arrived at the house, they were a welcome diversion. Although Gray had never met Richardson, he still took it upon himself to make all necessary introductions.

  The four young men fell in easily with each other, and their group dynamic established itself quickly. Outwardly, Gray was clearly the leader among them. He was the outspoken one, the one from whom all the others took their cues. But Clemons was also a few years older than the two other boys, and he exuded a certain quiet authority — more because of the age gap and his appearance than from confidence or any real leadership abilities. Authority was a role that Clemons wasn’t used to, and it was largely a product of the others’ imaginations. So while Gray was the mouthpiece, telling his fantastic stories and hatching his crazy schemes, the others glanced to the stable and composed figure of Clemons for signs of approval before responding. For their part, the two younger boys got along well with each other, joking about girls and what a waste of time school was — the universal realities of teenage existence.

  Gray suggested that they move their party out from under the watchful eyes of Clemons’s family, and the other three readily agreed. Soon afterward, Gray’s friend Mike and his wife Chrissy welcomed the makeshift party into their home; they enjoyed having company and almost always had a full house.

  Clemons unwound visibly upon leaving his mother’s home; although he was still quiet, when he did speak, his language was noticeably looser, less refined than it had been just a few minutes before, peppered with words he didn’t use at home. Even his posture altered — now he sat slumped on the sofa, with a beer between his knees and one arm flung casually across the back of the couch.

  While they watched hockey and drank beer, Winfrey remained the shiest of the group, perhaps because he was the smallest, the youngest, and the only white kid. Nonetheless, he felt comfortable with his new companions. Soon, any trace of his former timidity left him and, with the help of the beer and a little marijuana, it wasn’t long before he was talking and joking with the others. He even joined one of the others in a game of darts.

  Only Richardson appeared completely unaffected by their change of environment, and that was easily explained. He simply didn’t possess the “good behavior” mode that the others had felt compelled to employ at Clemons’s family home.

  So the four companions wiled away most of the evening in Mike’s and Chrissy’s comfy little home on San Diego Drive. Gray spun stories and sang songs that he had made up or might have heard somewhere. He danced and passed a fresh joint around and did his best to entice a laugh whenever possible. But by eleven o’clock that evening, their hosts were growing tired and they started tossing out hints that it was time for the party to wind down.

  Gray was reluctant to abandon the party just yet — he had other plans. Besides, the supply of beer and pot had yet to run short, so he suggested a late night tr
ip to the Old Chain of Rocks Bridge. The two younger boys glanced at Clemons, who said nothing but nodded, almost imperceptibly. And the party was on.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The Old Chain of Rocks Bridge first opened in 1929. Serving as the Mississippi River crossing, it was an integral part of America’s fabled Route 66. Initially it was privately owned and operated as a toll bridge with a five-cent crossing fee, but it was later bought by the City of Madison, Illinois. The old bridge is a peculiar sight — its fifteen sections stretch to over a mile in length, but it’s only twenty-four feet wide, with a curious twenty-two-degree bend in the middle. In 1968, the “new” Chain of Rocks Bridge opened, parallel to the old structure — a modern highway river span and one that was free to cross. The City of Madison had no choice but to shut the old bridge down.

  Although it was never officially accredited as a landmark, the Old Chain of Rocks Bridge was widely recognized as one, and the City of Madison was loath to have it torn down. A couple of decades came and went while the old bridge stood silently straddling the Mississippi and gathering rust. Every couple of years, some politician would put forth an idea to renovate the old structure or tear it down for safety’s sake, but the cost for any improvement was always prohibitive. Local affection for the old bridge, combined with the enormous price tag of demolishing it, kept it standing. By 1991 the bridge, though structurally sound, was in a terrible state of disrepair, and it had become a favorite local hangout for teenagers and graffiti artists from both banks.

  “I can’t wait for you to see the poem,” Julie whispered excitedly as she dropped her keys into the pocket of her jacket, hopping lightly from foot to foot. Her eyes sparkled in the moonlight and her dimples seemed deepened by shadows.