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

by Jeanine Cummins

  Kendra shook her head and stood up from the table, planting a kiss on her husband’s cheek as she did so. She didn’t know what to make of it all either. It was too much to take in. But she had too much to do to sit around pondering it all day. She began unpacking grocery bags while her husband sat still at the kitchen table, gazing absently at the business card the detectives had left him.

  By the time Kendra had the groceries unloaded and was ready to move on to the next chore on her list, Troncalli had roused himself and was outside puttering around the yard. Kendra lugged her vacuum cleaner from its usual spot and dragged it into the center of the living-room floor. As she proceeded with her routine work, her mind was racing with the news that her husband had just shared. She chewed her bottom lip absently as she reached behind the couch to plug in the vacuum. When she flicked it on, its rhythmic hum drowned out the less pleasant thoughts in her head. She stooped to shove the heavy recliner aside and clean beneath it. But as she bent her weight into the chair, something dangling from a low cushion caught her eye and she froze.

  She stood up and flicked the vacuum cleaner off, allowing the purring to come to a stop before she moved again. When she reached under the cushion and tugged on the mysterious article, it came tumbling into full view on her living-room carpet: Tom Cummins’s green Swatch watch lay at Kendra’s feet for a few moments and she eyed it coldly. She hated its import — hated the fact that this watch on her living-room floor proclaimed Marlin Gray’s guilt. But she knew what she had to do.

  Kendra and Troncalli sat together while he dialed the detective’s number from the card.

  “Detective Stuart,” Troncalli said, taking a deep breath to get himself through the next sentence. “I think my wife and I found that piece of evidence you were looking for.”

  The St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s leading headline on Monday morning was “2 Suspects Arrested in Deaths of Sisters: Police Clear Cousin As Case Takes New Turn.” The article briefly described the arrests of two new suspects but did not give the names Reginald Clemons or Marlin Gray.

  The reporter who wrote the story questioned Jacobsmeyer as to why Tom Cummins had previously made statements implicating himself. Jacobsmeyer’s response was that Tom was “obviously traumatized and confused by the entire incident.” Marlin Gray had only been in custody a couple of hours when the paper went to press, so although Tom’s name was being officially cleared, the information available about why was meager and unconvincing. Public opinion in St. Louis had definitely not yet turned to support him.

  Like her cousin Tink, Danni Thess was sixteen, which made her a junior at Wentzville High School. With long blond hair, bright blue eyes, and a starting position on her school’s soccer team, she was a popular kid. Her mother Lisa was Gene’s and Ginna’s sister, and she was extremely proud of her three kids, all of whom were smart, athletic, and well-mannered. Danni had considered arguing with her mother when she insisted that they return to school on Monday, but she knew she’d lose the battle. She had spent most of the weekend alternately hoping and grieving, and she hadn’t gotten much sleep. Like the rest of the family, Danni had been utterly relieved when Tom was released on Saturday, and even further reassured by the previous day’s two arrests. But her heart was still sore with grief and worry, and she was definitely in no mood for classes. She arrived at school that morning feeling tired, paranoid, and generally miserable.

  For once, Daniel Winfrey was actually happy to get to school Monday morning. It had been a long and harrowing weekend, and his freshmen classes at Wentzville High School were a welcome distraction. His girlfriend Amanda still wasn’t quite sure what to make of the whole story he had confided in her, but she could see that her boyfriend was under a great deal of stress. She responded by just trying to behave normally, suffering from a classic case of “If I ignore it, maybe it will go away.”

  Wentzville was a quiet community, so the news of Marlin Gray’s late-night arrest was already buzzing around the halls of the high school early that morning. Danni Thess was uncomfortable. She knew that her friends were just trying to be sensitive, but really, she felt that even bluntness would have been better than the whispers and averted eyes she was encountering every time she turned around. She was determined to get through this day. She wasn’t about to let her family’s newfound notoriety take over her life, and she was starting to get annoyed. Honestly, why didn’t people understand that her family’s grief was more important than all the peripheral hype and sensationalism? She slammed her locker moodily, blew her bangs out of her eyes, and resolutely trudged to her fourth class of the day.

  Detective Walsh shaded his eyes from the too-bright high-noon sunshine as he and Stuart pulled their car into a space in the Wentzville High School parking lot. Another car pulled in right behind them and two deputy juvenile officers for St. Charles County got out. The four men headed inside together.

  A few minutes later, Danni Thess joined some of her class-mates at the window to watch as the police led the new blondhaired freshman out of the school in handcuffs. He hung his head in shame as he walked between the two uniformed officers. But Danni didn’t know that the kid’s name was Daniel Winfrey. And she certainly had no idea that he was being arrested for raping and murdering her cousins.

  Gray’s and Clemons’s names were released to the press later that day. By evening, reporters were going live, swarming the suspects’ respective neighborhoods. Jacquie and Sheila watched the NBC newscast together in Ginna’s living room, feeling somewhat vindicated to see that the media were finally barking up the right tree. Several of Clemons’s neighbors were interviewed, and they all expressed their shock that the quiet preacher’s son had been arrested for such a brutal crime.

  Neighbor Buffie Garnett was particularly outspoken. “He was a nice type. You know, he was real quiet. He liked to hang around everybody but he was real quiet. I just saw him the other day and he told me he had a job and everything and I just can’t believe he could do something like this. He was sweet and understanding — I never did think that he could do something like this,” she said.

  Another neighbor, Patricia Gully, had known Clemons since he was about four years old, and she called him “a considerate, friendly child.” She had never known him to argue with other children, to be vulgar, or talk back to adults. In fact, she said, he was always a perfect gentleman.

  Yet another neighbor, Mardelle Meckfessel, echoed this sentiment in her stories about the many times that Clemons had helped her to mow her lawn or carry leaves for her. “And he’d never take a dime for doing it,” she said.

  On camera, the neighbors gathered solemnly on their doorsteps and shook their heads while the kids rode their bikes in the street and the grown-ups swapped fond memories of the suspects.

  The report then switched over to a shot of an exhausted-looking Eva sitting on her front step wearing jeans and a baggy sweater. Her smile was obviously more a nervous response than anything else. Sandra Hughes, the reporter who sat beside her, was pristine in a tailored gray suit, and neither of the two women looked at ease in the other’s company. Only the wreck of Eva’s world and the reporter’s compulsion to satisfy public curiosity brought them together.

  “I don’t like what he did,” Eva said into the microphone’s foam top while Hughes held it out to her, “but I really loved him and I guess he was just going through harder times than I really understood.”

  Hughes interrupted her, after a quick attempt to check her surprise at Eva’s reaction. She had expected the protests of innocence these types of interviews usually elicited. Eva didn’t seem convincing, or even convinced herself, about her boyfriend’s innocence.

  “So, do you think that he really did do this or do you think that he didn’t?” Hughes pressed.

  Eva faltered momentarily, wrestling with her nervous smile as she responded, twisting a strand of hair around her finger as she spoke.

  “Honestly, knowing what I know of Marlin, I’d say no, it’s not his personality, it’s
not in his personality to do something like this, but knowing all the facts, um . . . they say . . . um, they say that he did.”

  As Hughes wrapped up the interview and turned the story back to the studio, one of the anchors shook his head and remarked, “You know, Sandra, police are saying that this case has taken more turns in such a short period of time than any case they can recall.”

  “You’re very right,” Hughes responded. “It’s absolutely incredible.”

  Tom and his family were not in St. Louis to witness the eventual public clearing of his name, and it was probably just as well. They were back in Gaithersburg by the time Thursday’s St. Louis Post-Dispatch printed a quote from the captain of the St. Louis City Police Department in answer to a question about why an innocent person might make an admission of guilt.

  “Generally speaking, it’s a person with a weakness of personality or character that would do such a thing. Some people would be very easily intimidated by the police and some would not,” the captain explained, trying fiercely to defend the conduct of his officers, even if such defense came at Tom’s expense.

  In Gaithersburg, the Cummins family had a 850-mile cushion from such insensitive remarks, and they were busy grieving and trying to piece their lives back together anyway. Their friends proved to be unequivocally supportive. Neighbors took turns bringing by casseroles and cookies. Kay’s friends wouldn’t let her cook, and one day three of them even showed up with cleaning supplies and gave the house a frenzied scrubbing. It didn’t really need much work, but they wanted so much to show their support for the grieving family.

  “We knew he didn’t do it. We never questioned him for a minute,” Gene’s friends at church all said. “We just knew it was a terrible mistake.”

  And at the firehouse, Tom’s shift handled the tragedy with the black humor and unflagging loyalty that only firefighters can muster.

  “Oh, shit, are you back?” Tom’s lieutenant teased him upon his strange and surreal return to Rescue 2. “We thought we got rid of your ass.”

  Tink and Kathy had a slightly more difficult time readjusting to being around other people. While their closest friends rallied around them with support, neither of the girls was immune to the whispered rumors flying around their high school. More than once they were subjected to sympathetic smiles and condolences, quickly followed by nasty remarks that were accidentally overheard in the school’s crowded hallways. “Yeah, their brother molested and killed their two cousins,” whispered those who had seen the early sensational coverage of the story and missed the subsequent news about Tom’s innocence. The media coverage seemed to have been even more lopsided in Gaithersburg than elsewhere, where word of a local county firefighter killing his two cousins was front-page news, but the less spectacular truth that four scumbags had actually murdered the two girls merited only minor headlines.

  In their backpacks, both Tink and Kathy carried prepared statements that Gene had typed up for them in case any of the ever-persistent media tried to hound them at school or at soccer practice. Kathy turned to a couple of very good childhood friends for support, while Tink became introspective and consulted her diary. Both girls found it difficult to muster any interest in the mundane world of their academics, and they rushed home daily after soccer practice, hoping for news of their cousins, instead of hanging around chatting with their friends as had been their former habit. The interests of their friends seemed petty to them now. Tink even found herself snapping at a friend one day who complained she was having the “worst day of her life” after a disappointing grade on a test, a broken fingernail, and a fender-bender. Tink glared at her friend and responded, “If this is the worst day of your pampered little life, you should count yourself lucky.”

  The weeks passed slowly and the Cummins family began to feel more cut off than comforted by the 850 miles that now separated them from St. Louis. Grandma Polly collected every newspaper clipping she could find and sent them weekly to Kay. All the backwards facts and misinformation she had read about her own family over the past two weeks had taught Kay to become an extremely discerning reader. Still, when she sat down with the first of her weekly installments of articles, she was comforted to see Julie and Robin characterized as “young women committed to world peace and fighting race hatred” in one Post-Dispatch article. And she was more annoyed than upset when she read the April 12 article under the headline, “2 Rape Suspects Charge Brutality.” Well, they should know a thing or two about brutality, she thought bitterly.

  Kay did find herself increasingly irritated at the Post-Dispatch’s extensive weekend coverage of the brutality charges, though. Saturday’s headline read “Attorney, Mother Say Suspects Were Beaten: Two Young Men Accused Police of Brutality.” By Sunday the headline was “Friends Defend Suspects in Sisters’ Killings: ‘Something Doesn’t Add Up,’ Says Stepfather of One of 2 Charged.” Both lengthy articles were peppered with descriptions of Gray and Clemons, of their hobbies and personalities, and each devoted only one brief paragraph to a mention of Julie and Robin.

  “Marlin Gray’s song would echo in the night air as he stood on the old Chain of Rocks Bridge, high above the Mississippi River,” began Sunday’s article. “He loved to sing and dance there, his friends say. The echo was a big draw, and dancing was his passion. Years ago in St. Louis, he won a Michael Jackson dance look-alike contest.”

  Clemons was described by his friend Harold Whitener as “a good kid trying to find his place in this crazy world.”

  A good kid? Kay thought, as she tried to digest the article. She had two dead nieces and a broken son, one daughter who was still barely eating or talking, and another one who practically jumped out of her skin every time the phone or doorbell rang. She herself was wrestling with nightmare images that assaulted her every hour of the day. And these guys had the nerve to complain about brutality? Get them alone in a room with me, she thought. I’ll show them brutality.

  But the most upsetting article yet was the one entitled “Search For Sisters May Take Weeks.” Kay pushed that one to the back of the stack before returning the entire collection to its fat envelope. It had already been almost two weeks since her nieces’ disappearance, and hope was rapidly waning that they would ever find the girls. She dreaded Tink and Kathy coming home from school with their inevitable daily question, “Any word, Mom?” The answer was no, there was no word. And there might not be for a very long time. In fact, there might never be.

  Kay felt better prepared for the next batch of articles when they arrived, and they were easier to read anyway. On the front page of The Post-Dispatch on Monday, April 15, a large color photograph showed a group of Julie’s and Robin’s friends embracing each other on the Old Chain of Rocks Bridge. The headline read “Bridge Was Special Place For Sisters: They Shared An Interest In Poetry, People.” The article was a beautiful eulogy to the girls, and quoted Julie’s poetry several times. It focused largely on their social activism and altruism. Ginna was also interviewed, telling some of her favorite anecdotes about her daughters and their inexhaustible energies. The article even quoted Julie’s mantra, “Who says you can’t change the world?”

  “Robin, who loved vintage clothing, would have made a wonderful model for Coco Chanel,” the article stated. And that may have been very true — Robin, with her high cheekbones, waiflike figure, and smoldering eyes, probably would have been a great Chanel model. But if she’d been alive to hear such a compliment, she probably would have rolled her eyes and gagged herself in the sarcastic horror that was her trademark.

  While Kay leafed through newspaper articles in Gaithersburg, Ginna sat in her too-quiet home in St. Louis, combing through Julie’s poetry. Though she had always been her daughter’s biggest fan, Ginna had developed an even greater admiration for Julie’s talent now, and the weight of her daughter’s words wrapped her like a heavy blanket. Her poems seemed eerily prophetic:

  we are nearly saints now

  and the river is wider still

  and half the ri
ver ahead of us.

  the river cares nothing for our troubles

  the river — cold, menacing, indifferent, dangerous

  the water itself — life, baptism/rebirth, a moving

  force, a changing presence,

  dilutes other liquids, consumes us but it is us;

  we are made of it

  when you watch the water while you’re

  standing in it, it makes you very dizzy.

  rivers are boundaries

  crossing one means foreign land, strange people

  dark woods to be encountered

  but it is also an escape

  from both physical and psychological

  fears, guilt, shame — all of which I have.

  therefore, bridges are a good thing? if so, then

  why don’t we cross the river by bridge?

  crossing a bridge means a new life within

  and without, means also solving problems,

  moving up in the world of maturity

  crossing by foot means maybe someone is chasing

  you, maybe you’re isolated and can’t

  find a bridge, maybe you didn’t know

  what you were getting into.

  When it finally came, the news that a body had been found was received with very mixed feelings in all quarters. Three weeks after the murders, a fisherman in Caruthersville, Missouri — almost two hundred miles downriver from St. Louis — hauled the body of a young woman wearing a gold Seiko watch out of the treacherous Mississippi. The next day, Dr. Michael Graham, forensic pathologist and chief medical examiner for the City of St. Louis, used dental records to identify Julie.