Julie was knocked off balance as one of the men grabbed her from behind by her arms, and the cigarette fell from her grasp in a violent arc, leaving a shower of orange sparks in its wake. Julie and Robin were being dragged struggling and screaming away from their cousin Tom. Robin kicked at her assailant behind her but couldn’t make contact. The world turned sideways as Tom found himself cheek-to-concrete, his face squashed against the cold deck of the bridge, with a shoe in the crook of his neck.
“Man, this is not your lucky day,” the voice said, though Tom could no longer see the face it belonged to. “You’re in trouble. You’re in big trouble.”
The man instructed Tom to lie perfectly still, said that he would shoot him in a heartbeat if he moved his head or tried to look around. Tom’s mouth hung slightly open, but he was speechless. He made himself lie perfectly still despite his heart hammering in his squashed throat. A moment later, the foot was removed cautiously from his neck and Tom struggled to breathe deeply and remain still.
Another voice joined the one that now hovered over him. In the distance, Tom could hear the retreating screams of Julie and Robin, who were being dragged away. Both called out “Stop it!” and “Leave me alone, please don’t hurt me.” Tom was struck with horror at the realization of what was happening to his cousins. He jerked his head up just in time to see a silhouette forcing Julie down onto the bridge deck. Gray’s foot was back on Tom’s neck instantly.
“I’ll shoot you, motherfucker!” Gray threatened again, pushing Tom’s face back into the pavement with his foot. “You move your head again and I swear I’ll shoot you, fat boy.”
A few minutes later, Tom felt the boot release his neck, and in response he let his muscles go slack, resolving himself to be still. As he lay stretched out on the bridge with the giant Gray towering over him, Tom struggled for calm. Just stay calm and think, he said to himself. He had always believed that when people found themselves in situations like this, their only hope for survival was calm, smart thinking. But now he realized how difficult that was. He couldn’t think — he could barely come to grips with the reality of what was happening. Only the pebbles embedded in his cheek convinced him that he wasn’t caught in some nightmare.
One of the other men came to stand guard over him then, while Gray made his way toward the girls. Tom started to cry as he heard Julie continuing to struggle and scream. Robin had become eerily quiet.
“Do you wanna die?” he heard one of the men asking Julie. “Take your pants off or I’ll throw you off this bridge. One. Two. Three.”
Tom heard his cousin sobbing and his own shoulders started to heave as well. Whoever had come to relieve Gray from his guard duties now leaned in close to Tom’s face, so close that Tom could feel hot breath and spittle as the voice spoke to him.
“I ain’t never had the pleasure of poppin’ somebody before,” it said.
As the attack went on, Tom tried to concentrate on the sounds of the water, or the traffic on the adjacent bridge, anything to block out the muffled noises of his cousins’ torture. His watchman changed once again and this time the newcomer was Winfrey, easy to recognize because he was the only white kid in the group. He made himself comfortable, sitting in the small of Tom’s back and immediately asking if he had any money. Tom replied that he did and then Winfrey instructed him to empty his pockets very slowly. Tom removed the little bit of money he was carrying from one of the pockets of his nylon ski jacket and the keys to his grandfather’s house from another. Winfrey instructed him to put the stuff on the ground in front of him and Tom complied. From his perch on Tom’s back, Winfrey could easily feel the lump in Tom’s back jeans pocket and decided to help himself to Tom’s wallet. Upon opening the wallet, Winfrey panicked.
“What the hell is this fucking badge, man?” he demanded.
“I’m a fireman,” Tom replied, as calmly as he could. “I’m a fireman. I’m not a cop.”
This seemed to pacify Winfrey, who removed the badge from Tom’s wallet and examined it in the moonlight before slipping it into his own pocket. He also pocketed Tom’s driver’s license and several photographs before sliding the now-empty wallet back into Tom’s jeans. Winfrey seemed to be enjoying his role of sentinel, relishing the obvious fear he was inflicting.
“You know,” he mused aloud, as he got up from his perch on Tom’s back for a stretch, “it’s a good thing my buddies aren’t faggots or they’d probably fuck you too.”
And then he laughed, almost as if he were expecting Tom to laugh with him at the funny joke he had made.
Tom clenched his jaw and his fists, but remained silent. He wouldn’t take the bait — wouldn’t dignify the monstrous remark with a reply. But despite his resolve to stay silent, bile rose up in Tom’s throat and his stomach gave a violent spasm. For a moment he was afraid he would throw up — right there where he was lying with his face pressed into the cold bridge deck and Winfrey’s foot on his back. But Tom remembered the threat of the gun and stayed frozen to the bridge, unmoving.
A few more minutes passed and then Tom heard voices, distant but clear, discussing whom to kill first. He heard footsteps as Clemons approached Tom and kicked him hard in the side without warning. Winfrey, now standing nearby, laughed at Tom’s writhing and spluttering.
Clemons, encouraged by the audience, announced, “Man, that didn’t hurt,” and kicked again, harder. Four or five more kicks and Tom was not responding. He knew this was nothing compared to what Julie and Robin had just gone through. Clemons seemed to be getting annoyed at the lack of a suitable response from his victim. So he stopped the kicking and placed his foot instead on the back of Tom’s head, crushing his face and lips into the concrete.
“I just fucked your girl,” he said then, trying a more calculated approach to his torture. “How does that make you feel?”
The remark was cruel, designed to inflict the maximum pain, and it worked. Tom’s stomach convulsed inside him again. But he refused to give Clemons the satisfaction he was seeking.
“They’re my cousins,” he replied stoically, unashamed of the tears that now trailed down his face.
“Oh, y’all cousins,” Clemons drawled, laughing. Removing the foot from the back of Tom’s head, he gave his victim one more kick for good measure, and ordered, “Get up.”
Clemons and Winfrey got Tom into a standing position and walked him, bent double at the waist, toward where he had last seen his cousins. Tom hadn’t heard a peep from either Julie or Robin in quite some time and he was now fearing the worst. The two men walked him about fifty feet down the bridge, toward the Missouri end, and then stopped abruptly. Because of his stooped posture, Tom could clearly see that they were now standing near one of the open manholes. The graffiti leading up to the manhole was a hopscotch board, with the gaping black mouth of a hole as the board’s final jumping space. In light of the attacks, the inappropriate childlike quality of the artwork struck Tom bitterly and flooded him with a whole new wave of terror and grief. He still couldn’t see any sign of his cousins.
One of the men now guarding Tom kicked him in the foot and asked him what kind of shoes he was wearing.
“Nike Airs,” Tom replied.
“What size?”
“Ten and a half.”
“You’re a rich fat boy and you’re gonna die.”
Immediately there were hands, grappling at the back of his neck, pulling the collar of his coat up over his head, and forcing him to lie down again on the bridge deck. Tom recoiled and trembled all over, expecting a bullet, waiting for the loud bang that would signal his death. But there was no bang and in a moment he was lying on his stomach again. One of the hands was on the back of his now-hooded head.
“You know what?” a faceless voice declared. “I like you. I’m gonna let you live. I think I’m gonna let you live.”
Tom could barely hear the voice and its sugary promises over the hammer of his own heart and the rush of his own blood in his ears. But now there was another voice and they argued.
One reasoned that they definitely had to kill him and the other maintained that he had already promised the rich kid that he could live. Tom thought about the eighteen dollars he had given to Winfrey and wondered who this rich kid was they were talking about.
The debate raged above him and then Winfrey’s voice was there again, closer and clearer, directed at Tom.
“So, do things like this happen in D.C.?”
Friendly. Tom could almost swear that, in his sick little way, this kid was actually just making conversation with him. The kid who had just helped rape his cousins. The kid who had just robbed him and was about to participate in his murder wanted to have a friendly chat first.
“Things like this don’t happen to me,” Tom responded. It was all he could think of to say.
“Things like this never happen to me,” Winfrey replied sardonically. “Well, you’re in St. Louis now. Welcome to the city.” And Tom could actually hear the kid giggling.
The debate about Tom’s death continued nearby but he wasn’t listening. Then suddenly there was silence, and it was much louder and scarier than the argument had been. A heavy arm on the back of his shoulder and one or two of the four men maneuvered Tom toward the open manhole, with its demented hopscotch board. Tom could see a little bit through a gap in his coat and he was sitting now, feet dangling into the manhole, as one of the voices commanded him to go through onto the lower deck below. As he descended onto the catwalk, Tom could make out the tiny shivering figures of Julie and Robin, unclothed and lying side by side on the sub-deck below the manhole. Tears of relief started to his eyes and the lump in his throat was instantly massive and constricting, hindering his jagged breath. One of the voices instructed Tom to lie down with his cousins and he did so, grateful to be reunited with them.
There was just light enough to see and Tom could make out the shape of Julie stretched out to the right of her sister Robin, both lying on their backs with their eyes closed. Julie was chanting softly, almost inaudibly, a continuing stream of quiet and comforting words for her sister. A lullaby for Robin.
“It will all be over soon,” she kept saying. “It’s going to be okay.”
Meanwhile, a few feet over their heads, the four assailants were discussing what to do next with their victims. The three cousins weren’t listening to the hushed conversation above them — they were too numb and too ravaged to be really alert. Tom lay on his stomach with his right arm along the right side of Robin’s little body. She was quivering and Tom was filled with a seething, helpless rage.
“Don’t worry, Robin, it will all be over soon,” Julie kept repeating. “It’s going to be okay.”
And Tom took comfort in Julie’s encouraging words, although they were meant for her sister. Three or four minutes passed like that before the murmuring voices above them ceased. Clemons and Richardson appeared in shadow, dropping down from the manhole and landing with matching, echoey thuds on the catwalk near where the cousins lay huddled together.
“Get up,” one of them commanded.
Tom and Julie both got up slowly. Between them, Robin remained flat on her back, unflinching — rigid with fear and loathing. She didn’t move. The men remained a few feet away, cloaked in the bridge’s shadowy darkness.
“Let’s go. Out onto the concrete,” Clemons ordered. Still Robin seemed not to hear. It was as if her ears had shut down, her mind unwilling to be an accomplice to any further victimization of her body.
Tom was out on the concrete now, and his mind was numb. His thoughts felt thick and heavy as he watched the bright brown water moving fast beneath him. It didn’t seem that far to him — the distance looked survivable, and for the first time since this horrible ordeal had started, he began to feel that the end was in sight. He heard the two men above, still shouting at Robin to get up, and he turned to go back for her, determined to help her endure these last terrible minutes until it would all be over. But even as he turned, he felt slow, as if we were stuck in one of those terrible dreams where you try to scream but can’t, try to run but can’t.
As Tom faced the catwalk, Clemons grabbed Robin’s little body and literally threw her down to the pier beside her cousin. She appeared tiny, almost weightless, as her body hurtled onto the concrete beside her cousin and she struggled to get to her feet. She staggered toward Tom and tenuously regained her balance beside him on the pier. All of her clothes were gone and she was barefoot, but she didn’t even seem aware of these facts. She put both of her arms around her cousin’s left elbow and pressed into his side for warmth, for comfort, for a brief moment’s delivery from her terror.
He wrapped his arms around her and did his best to shelter her with his body. She stared despondently down at her little toes against the gritty concrete of the pier in the cold April moonlight. The cuts and scratches on her poor battered feet were the least of her injuries.
Behind her, Julie alit on the pier covered by nothing but the green plaid flannel shirt she had been wearing all day. She had aged decades since their family dinner just a few hours before, and Tom was stunned by the change in her. Automatically, Julie moved to her sister’s side, cuddling into her, trying to protect and console her.
The three cousins lined up like that and waited, breathlessly, helplessly, for their sentence to be passed down from the shadows. Tom was the farthest out over the water, with Robin beside him, and then Julie closest to the catwalk. Clemons remained safely tucked up into the shadows of the sub-deck, and Richardson ventured only far enough out onto the pier to establish his presence. With one hand he still clung to the steel sub-deck of the bridge.
The three cousins held fast to each other and cooed quietly, but there were no real words exchanged between them, just the barely audible sounds of tenderness. It was Richardson’s voice that barked at them to stop touching each other and face forward. The stripping of this last little comfort was almost too much for Robin to bear, and her body seemed to crumple under the weight of despair as she dropped Julie’s right arm and Tom’s left.
“And spread out!” Richardson added.
The three cousins shuffled apart from each other. And that’s when it happened.
Despite the brutality of the last hour, the pushing hand came as a shock to all three of them. The terror on Julie’s face as she plummeted over the edge of the precipice was a terrible sight to behold. Robin found herself unable to even cry out as she watched with utter horror as her sister fell. Tom let out a choking gasp and turned to face Richardson, who without a moment’s hesitation struck Robin violently on the back and sent her stumbling forward. Screaming, she followed her sister into the muddy water below.
Tom’s mouth hung open in silence as he stared at the smug-looking Richardson. Tom’s eyes locked onto the merciless face that smirked down at him in the moonlight, the threat of the gun still glinting in those cold, pitiless eyes. Tom was dumbstruck, confused, terrified.
Richardson sneered as he spoke: “Jump, or . . .”
Tom didn’t wait for the second choice, the gun. He didn’t waste a split second. He didn’t answer, didn’t even breathe. He stepped soundlessly out over the water and into the air, falling, waiting for a bullet in the back of the head.
CHAPTER FIVE
The Mississippi River is the fourth longest river in the world. As a watershed, it drains about 41 percent of the continental United States, plus two Canadian provinces — that’s roughly 1.25 million square miles. Every second, the mighty river spits out 2.3 million cubic feet of water into the Gulf of Mexico, carrying 159 million tons of sediment with it each year. At St. Louis, the old bridge’s name, Chain of Rocks, refers to an actual string of huge boulders that jut up from the riverbed, stirring the rushing water into a tumultuous frenzy. Local legend claims that, during dry periods, Native Americans used to cross the river by hopping from boulder to boulder. Today, that same chain of rocks makes the St. Louis stretch of water one of the Mississippi’s deadliest. In 1991, it was common knowledge among locals, including Julie and Robin Kerry
, that the Chain of Rocks Bridge was a sure thing for local suicide-seekers.
Of course, Tom Cummins, the tourist from Washington, D.C., did not know this as he leapt wildly from a concrete pier, arms and legs flailing, on the north side of the Chain of Rocks Bridge. After he jumped and well before he hit the water, he had time enough to form the thought, My God, this is a long way down. And then, a moment later, Holy shit, I’m still falling — I still haven’t hit yet.
When he finally did hit the water, he went in feet first and immediately plunged deep into the river, hurtling toward its bed with astonishing speed. Underwater, he opened his eyes and spotted the faintly glowing green of the surface that seemed like miles above his head. He started swimming, executing an overhead pull and kicking with all his might, straining toward the elusive air above. When he broke the surface, he spent a moment just breathing, filling his aching lungs.
The first sight that struck him as he fought to stay afloat was the menacing giant of a bridge above him. The river was swift, moving much more powerfully than he had expected, and as Tom struggled to remove his coat, he realized that the current had already carried him underneath the bridge and he was looking at it from the south side. It was truly a massive beast, that bridge, and the reality of how far he had fallen both terrified and encouraged him. He would never have been able to jump if he had really known how high up he was. They would have had to shoot him.
There was debris everywhere in the water and, now that he had gotten his bearings and assured himself that he had survived, Tom began to scan the water for his cousins. There were logs and branches moving all around him with frightening speed, and in the dimness, as he bobbed up and down in the rapid current, he thought he glimpsed Robin a few feet off to his left. The current rolled up between them and when he looked again at the place where he’d seen her, she, or the log that resembled her, was gone. Julie appeared behind him then, about ten or fifteen feet off to his right, and he spotted her clearly, despite the clash of the rugged water around his face. He shouted to her, receiving a mouthful of dank river water for his efforts, but she heard him and turned her moon-white face toward him, terror-stricken in the frothy water.
A Rip in Heaven: A Memoir of Murder And Its Aftermath Page 6