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

by Jeanine Cummins

  Gene looked at his son and began to shake his head.

  “Dad,” Tom interrupted, “I’ve got no problem with this. I want to do whatever I can to help and I have no reason not to take the test. I’ve got nothing to hide. I want to do it.”

  “Well, if you’re sure,” Gene responded cautiously.

  “I’m sure,” Tom said.

  By the time Jacquie arrived at Ginna’s house on Petite Drive, all of the siblings had been notified, and those who hadn’t arrived already were en route to St. Louis. The little house was already crowded.

  Ginna had arrived home sometime mid-morning and stuffed two pairs of jeans, two pairs of shoes, two sweaters, and four wooly socks into a backpack before returning immediately to the Old Chain of Rocks Bridge. She arrived home with the still-full backpack in the early afternoon to find that her house was filling with supportive brothers and sisters. The Cummins siblings had never been famous for getting along terribly well. There was a lot of love in the family, but when there are eight siblings under one roof, personalities are bound to clash. Yet that day, despite the intensity of emotion in the house, or perhaps because of it, there were no ruffled feathers. Everyone was given a task, and they all worked well together.

  Kay and Sheila were on phone detail, both making and taking the difficult calls. Tink and Kathy were charged with keeping Jamie occupied, which conveniently kept them occupied as well. One of Ginna’s sisters stayed close to her, keeping her company and helping her sift through family photos. The police had requested recent pictures of Julie and Robin to aid in the search.

  Jacquie was assigned to take care of the first food run. She grabbed one of the kids and disappeared to the grocery store for an hour or so, returning to the house with a trunk full of brown paper bags. There were so many hands there that the car was emptied in one trip.

  Jamie, Tink, and Kathy continued to monopolize the television in the front room with the Nintendo, which was probably a good thing because it prevented them from seeing the increasingly distressing news coverage.

  In fact, there was no news, which didn’t seem to discourage the reporters, who were crawling around the crime scene in ever-growing numbers. The only obvious fact was that, in this case, no news was bad news. By two o’clock that afternoon, it had been at least twelve hours since Julie and Robin had disappeared into the Mississippi. And there was still no sign of them.

  Jacquie came in and stooped to rub Tink’s back where she lay on the floor with the game controller in her hands.

  “Your mom tells me you haven’t eaten anything today, Tink,” she said quietly. “How about a blueberry muffin?”

  Tink shook her head. “No thanks,” she said.

  “Okay, I’ll just leave it here anyway, in case you want it when you finish your game,” Jacquie said, and placed the muffin carefully on the carpet in front of her niece.

  Tink continued to play but after a moment she smelled the sweet stickiness of blueberry muffin. She looked down at it sitting at her elbow and her stomach turned. She threw the controller aside, jumped to her feet, and ran to the bathroom. She was relieved to be away from the thick sugary smell of the muffin and even more relieved to find that the bathroom was miraculously unoccupied.

  She clicked on the light, took one glance at her ashen reflection in the mirror, and then collapsed to her knees beside the bowl to relieve the rush of bile from her stomach. Sweat trickled down from her hairline when she was finished, and she lay her forehead on her right arm where it was still gripping the toilet seat.

  Tink was a bit of a germophobe in ordinary times, and the physical reality that she was now embracing a toilet hit her like a sucker punch. She felt the cold, curved porcelain with her left hand and suddenly realized that this was not a dream. This was not a nightmare. She was not going to wake up. The lingering sourness in her mouth and the bangs matted to her forehead with sweat were proof. Julie and Robin were gone. She stayed on the bathroom floor for fifteen minutes and sobbed.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The polygraph examination room was on a different floor, in a different wing of the building, and Tom was once again separated from his father during questioning. He was pleasantly surprised to find the new room to be considerably more comfortable than interview room number two. The polygraph machine was set up in a nicely furnished office, on a table next to a cushioned vinyl chair with matching cushioned arms.

  The detective who was to administer the test was friendly. Again, he was in plain clothes, and Tom wasn’t even sure if he was a detective. He introduced himself by first name instead of as Detective So-and-So, as all of the other homicide guys had seemed so fond of calling themselves. He began the conversation by telling Tom how sorry he was for everything he had been through. There were pictures covering the walls and desk of the large office, and the examiner led Tom around on a little tour, pointing out his favorites and naming his daughters for him.

  “I can’t imagine what I would do if anything ever happened to them,” he said. “Your poor cousins. I’m so sorry for you.”

  Tom nodded, but didn’t know what to say. Condolences were new to him. He didn’t know quite how to respond yet.

  “Here we all are out on our family boat last summer. That was taken up at the Lake of the Ozarks. The kids love it out there. We always have such a great time,” the man mused.

  The idea that just yesterday Tom had been on his own family vacation, one that had gone horribly, tragically wrong, suddenly seemed to dawn on the man. “Oh, how insensitive of me,” he began.

  But Tom cut him off. “No, no it’s fine. You have a lovely family,” he said.

  The examiner thanked him and led him over to the vinyl chair and the contraption on the table. He spent the next several minutes explaining the physiology of the machine to Tom. One cord would be strapped around his midsection to record his breathing. A second would be attached to his finger to record perspiration. And lastly, a cuff around his arm would measure both blood pressure and heart rate. Any major or rapid fluctuation in these measurements would indicate that a lie was being told. Tom said that he understood.

  “We don’t want the questions themselves to shock a response out of you, so what we’ll do is go over the list of questions together before I administer the test,” the examiner explained. “There will only be ten to twelve questions total. Some of them will be extremely straightforward. Your name, your age, things like that, to kind of establish a baseline. And then, interspersed with those questions, I will ask you the more difficult questions, the meaty things, like ‘Did you do anything to hurt your two cousins?’ And when you respond, I want you to do so slowly and quietly. You should keep your eyes closed during the exam and relax — breathe as deeply as you can. I don’t want the physical act of answering the questions to be recorded on the machine. Just answer slowly and methodically. Got it?”

  Tom nodded.

  “Now before we get started,” the examiner continued, Velcroing Tom into all the appropriate devices, “we have to calibrate the apparatus. In other words, I need to see how the machine reacts to you specifically when you tell a lie. So here’s what we’re gonna do.”

  He picked up a deck of cards from the corner of his tidy desk and lifted the top ten cards off the deck.

  “I want you to pick one of these cards, look at it, and then put it back in the pile. Then I’m going to show you each card individually and ask you: ‘Was it this one?’ I want you to respond ‘No’ every time. Afterwards, I will be able to tell you which card was yours because the machine will indicate to me which time you were lying.”

  “Okay,” Tom said. “Sounds easy enough.”

  Tom was absolutely stunned a few minutes later when the examiner correctly identified his secret card. Tom had not perceived any physical change in his body during his lie, yet the examiner had identified his card without hesitation. Never in a million years would Tom have suspected that a straight shooter like this guy, a family man with a boat in the Ozarks and a viny
l chair in his office, would mark a deck of cards in order to trick a witness into a false sense of security. Tom was completely convinced that the polygraph was infallible. And he was more eager than ever to begin.

  At no time during the examiner’s description of the polygraph did he tell Tom that the machine’s accuracy rating falls anywhere between 48 percent and 90 percent, depending on which study you read, or that the rate of false positives has been found to be as high as almost one in every four. He also didn’t tell Tom that, among the factors contributing to the lie detector’s unreliability, sleep deprivation is by far the worst — that virtually no one in a heightened state of sleep deprivation could feasibly pass a polygraph test.

  So Tom closed his eyes as he had been instructed and began to breathe deeply, in through the nostrils and out through the mouth. The first thing he noticed with his eyes closed was how much quieter it was in this section of the building than up in the busy, squawking homicide room. He wondered why he hadn’t noticed that before. The machine was humming quietly on the table beside him and the sound of his own deep breaths soon began to lull him into semi-consciousness. The volume and suddenness of the examiner’s first question startled Tom fully awake.

  “Is your name Thomas Patrick Cummins?”

  “Yes,” Tom spluttered.

  Everything was quiet again, but Tom could hear his own heartbeat in his ears. He considered stopping the test, telling the examiner that he had been asleep before the first question. But he wasn’t sure what the protocol was or if it would be inappropriate to interrupt the test. So instead he tried not to worry about being startled by that first question and he tried to distract himself by thinking about other things. He wondered if he would get in trouble if he opened his eyes. He simply couldn’t stay awake with them closed like this. He had been awake for over thirty-four hours by now. The lull between questions couldn’t have lasted longer than fifteen or twenty seconds, but it was long enough for Tom to drift off again.

  “Did you murder your cousins?”

  The question actually scared him this time. It wasn’t just the startle response of being roused either. There was something in the questioner’s tone. Something accusatory. Tom tried to regulate his breathing. The palm of his free hand was now damp with sweat, he noticed, and he was sure that the little perspiration tester strapped to his finger was sucking up plenty of liquid. He told himself to relax, take a deep breath, and answer the second question.

  “No,” was his response.

  He had regained control of himself, he felt. This guy must know how tired I am, Tom thought. His head lolled while the seconds ticked by and he awaited the next question. In a moment he was asleep again and the test continued like that for the duration. When it was over and the last question was answered, Tom knew how badly it had gone before he even opened his eyes. He looked over at the examiner on the other side of the machine for reassurance.

  “Well, it looks like we’ve got a real fucking problem here,” the detective spat.

  Tom opened his mouth to speak but found nothing to say. He watched as the examiner threw his notepad and pen down on the table and stood up. He came around the machine and bent to within inches of Tom’s face. He was red with rage.

  “You heard me. I said we’ve got a real fucking problem here,” he shouted. “I want you to tell me the fucking truth right fucking now. You can lie to the boys upstairs all you like, but you can’t lie to the machine, and you can’t fucking lie to me, you cock-sucking piece of shit. I will get the truth outta you, so you may as well start telling it now.”

  Tom shook with fear and the machine hummed and scratched a little more loudly on the table beside him. Tears sprang to the corners of his eyes and all thoughts of manhood or bravery or helpfulness fled from him. He broke into childish sobs.

  “I . . . I don’t know what you mean,” he pled. “I swear, I am telling the truth. They hurt us — they hurt all of us — they threw Julie and Robin in the river. I swear. I was just trying to help.”

  The detective sneered at Tom in disgust and pushed back from the vinyl handles of the chair as he spun away.

  “You make me sick,” he said, and returned to his seat on the far side of the table. “Now we’re gonna do this again, scumbag. Except this time you’re gonna tell me the truth.”

  In Ginna’s house on Petite Drive, the overall mood was becoming increasingly desperate. Jamie, Tink, and Kathy had developed sore thumbs from the hours and hours of Nintendo and had decided to kick a soccer ball around in the front yard for a while. It had grown into a warm and sunny day, yet the three cousins had managed to avoid the outdoors entirely. Somehow the festiveness of the sunshine seemed to further illuminate their grief. Once outside, all three of them sat down on the front step, lethargic. Tink bounced the soccer ball up and down on the concrete between her knees.

  “Julie’s really great at soccer, you know,” Jamie said quietly.

  “Yeah, I know,” Tink answered, squeezing tears from her eyes and putting her arm tightly around her little cousin.

  Gene had been calling the house periodically throughout the day to inform his wife of any updates down at police headquarters, but by and large there was very little to report. Jacquie, Sheila, and Kay had all been seated at the kitchen table during Gene’s most recent call. It seemed that he was mostly just sitting around waiting for Tom to finish answering a growing list of questions. Tom was exhausted, definitely, but he was determined to help and there was no way Gene would be able to convince him to come home if he felt he could still be of some use for the police. Kay agreed that they should stand by their son, allow him to do what he felt he had to do. But still, she worried about him and a part of her wanted to insist that he leave and come home. Sheila and Jacquie exchanged nervous glances during the conversation.

  “Can I talk to you alone for a minute?” Jacquie mouthed to Sheila.

  Sheila nodded and stood. She bent and hugged Kay for a moment, kissing the top of her head before following her little sister out of the room. Finding a quiet corner in the house was no easy feat at this stage. Jacquie shuffled down the long hallway into Robin’s room, where she waited for Sheila and then closed the door behind them.

  “Tommy’s been down at that police station for an awfully long time,” Jacquie began, searching her sister’s face for agreement as she spoke. “Sheila, I really think we should get him a lawyer.”

  “I couldn’t agree more,” Sheila said. “It’s so awkward though — I don’t want Kay and Gene to think we suspect him of something. Getting Tommy a lawyer might just panic everybody.”

  The two youngest of Gene and Ginna’s siblings stood quietly in the little room, with their arms folded in front of them and the wings of all of Robin’s ceramic and paper creatures surrounding them on every wall and surface. There was nothing more to say. The subject that everyone was avoiding had finally been broached.

  “I think we have to do this,” Sheila resolved.

  “We do,” Jacquie answered firmly.

  Just then Sheila’s face fell as she gazed over her sister’s shoulder and out the front window of Robin’s room. Jacquie turned to see what she was looking at.

  “Oh my God,” they both gasped, and before Jacquie could even turn around, Sheila had flung open the door of the room and was running down the narrow hallway. She jumped across people seated on the living-room floor and grabbed the doorknob on the front door. She stepped out into the blinding sunlight and stalked across the lawn to where Tink, Kathy and Jamie stood huddled together, surrounded by a reporter and a camera crew. Their soccer ball sat motionless on the grass a few feet away.

  “And how are you holding up? The dead girls were your sisters, is that correct?” the reporter was saying, waving a padded microphone in little Jamie’s confused face.

  “Dead?” she was saying.

  Tink stood behind her cousin with her arms on Jamie’s shoulders. She was horrified but stunned. She didn’t know what to do. Kathy was trying to maneuver h
er body in between the cameramen and Jamie, but they were persistent and she was having trouble.

  “Girls, get in the house,” Sheila hollered as she came storming across the lawn.

  The three cousins turned toward their aunt with relief and scampered into the house.

  “What the hell is wrong with you people?” Sheila shouted. “Don’t you think that little girl is going through enough right now? You want a quote for your evening news? How about this for a quote: Get the fuck out of here and leave my family alone!”

  Sheila was glad her two little boys weren’t there to hear her cursing like this, but this kind of anger was completely new to her. And the bitterness of her language didn’t even begin to express the raw fury she was really feeling.

  “You’re just sick. You didn’t get enough footage down at the bridge, no bodies to show on the six o’clock news, so you come to a little girl’s house and accost her on her own front lawn where she’s in the middle of trying to comprehend the most devastating tragedy that can ever befall a family. We are grieving here. Leave us alone. Get out, get out, get the fuck out of here now!”

  She was screaming now and waving her arms over her head at the quickly retreating news team. Jacquie had followed her out the front door and closed the girls inside, but had stayed on the front step when she saw that Sheila needed no help in chasing them off.

  Sheila felt like finding a big rock and heaving it through the back window of the white news van as it squealed its tires and drove away. Her shoulders slumped as the van drove off and she felt the emotional exhaustion that follows such an outburst. The prickle of tears didn’t come until after the van was out of sight, but she still stood staring into the street.

  “Well, I don’t think they’ll be coming back here in a hurry,” Jacquie commented from the front stoop.