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

by Jeanine Cummins

  The family, who had been expecting at least some degree of solace from the news of a discovery, found very little to feel relieved about. Ginna voiced what they were all feeling. “I don’t know why, but I fully expected them to be found together,” she said. “It never occurred to me that one would be found before the other.”

  She was almost angry when a reporter asked her about funeral arrangements.

  “I lost two daughters,” she replied. “We’ll wait for Robin.”

  And so they waited. But when three more weeks went by and the search for Robin still turned up nothing, Ginna made the heart-wrenching decision to go ahead with a funeral mass.

  The joint funeral and memorial mass was scheduled for Monday, May 20, at St. Jerome Catholic Church.

  Ginna was determined to honor Robin’s expressed wishes while planning the funeral, and the result was a service of which both girls would have been truly proud — a celebration of their lives. The church was packed to standing room only, with many of the attendees wearing the requested bright colors instead of the muted browns and blacks more common at such somber events. Soap bubbles were provided to everyone, and Julie’s and Robin’s friends were encouraged to blow them at will throughout the service. Reverend Gene Robertson, who had been one of Julie’s high-school teachers, provided a eulogy.

  “Maybe the world couldn’t handle the Kerry girls,” he said. “Maybe the world wasn’t ready for them.”

  He finished his speech with a call to social action, encouraging the congregation to “carry the torch of justice they carried, to work against war and violence, to work for the homeless.”

  Before the mass ended, many of the mourners opened the single-page pastel-colored scrolls they had been given as mementos of the girls. This is what they found:

  JULIE AND ROBIN KERRY

  May 20, 1991

  These words were taken from the walls of their rooms.

  This is what they believed in.

  This is how they lived.

  Give to the world the best you have and

  the best will come back to you.

  GIVE ME A PLACE TO STAND AND

  I WILL MOVE THE WORLD.

  Only those who risk going too far can possibly find

  how far they can go.

  A modest proposal for peace:

  Let the Christians of the world agree that

  they will not kill each other.

  It will be a great day when our schools get all the money

  they need and the Air Force has to hold

  a bake sale to buy a bomber.

  If love comes from the heart, where does hate come from?

  Children aren’t born knowing how to hate. They must be

  taught. Therefore, the lesson is simple. Let’s not teach our

  children hatred and prejudice, because what they don’t know

  won’t hurt them — or others.

  PEACE IS PATRIOTIC.

  Peace without understanding is merely silent hatred, and a

  silent war is endless, for it kills from the inside.

  Silence = Death.

  GIVE PEACE A CHANCE.

  The future is not something we enter.

  The future is something we create.

  WHO SAYS YOU CAN’T

  CHANGE THE WORLD?

  Julie was laid to rest in a shiny white casket in Calvary Cemetery in north St. Louis County later that afternoon. The procession to the graveyard stretched to well over a hundred cars and the soap bubbles could be seen floating from the open windows all along the line. At the cemetery, Ginna and Rick threw red roses onto the white coffin as it dipped into the earth. The headstone that would be erected simply read: KERRY. JULIE, DECEMBER 16, 1970- APRIL 5, 1991. ROBIN, JANUARY 27, 1972-APRIL 5, 1991. BELOVED DAUGHTERS, SISTERS, FRIENDS. WE LOVE YOU SO MUCH.

  Robin’s body was never found.

  The St. Louis Post-Dispatch headline for Tuesday, May 21, read “Kerry Sisters Remembered as Crusaders for Justice: 2 Whose Lives Ended Violently Are Mourned.” After that, the frequency of headlines about Julie’s and Robin’s murders, or “the Chain of Rocks Bridge Murders,” began to decline. It was a bittersweet phenomenon for the families. The intensity of their grief did not subside with the hoopla and sensationalism. While Ginna felt utterly relieved at the respite from the loathsome spotlight, she also began to fear that now her daughters would be forgotten.

  On June 23, 1991, more than eleven weeks after Julie’s and Robin’s deaths, The Post-Dispatch ran a brief article about the indictment of Gray, Clemons, Richardson, and Winfrey. It stated that all four men were charged with murder, rape, and robbery, and that the two juveniles had both been certified for trial as adults. The article identified them as “the four suspects previously charged with the murders of Julie and Robin Kerry, who were raped and thrown off the old Chain of Rocks Bridge into the Mississippi River.” For the first time in print, Julie’s and Robin’s rapes and murders were not labeled “alleged.” St. Louis, by way of its media, had finally accepted Tom’s truth.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Over a year later, in September 1992, Nels Moss sat in a Gaithersburg, Maryland, hotel suite on a floral-print couch with his tennis-shoed feet propped up on the crowded coffee table in front of him. The room was cluttered with manila file folders, each one containing various facts and documents related to the puzzling case he was there to work on. On his lap, one of the folders lay open, displaying photographs of the Old Chain of Rocks Bridge. He shook his head while he flipped through pictures.

  “It just doesn’t add up,” he muttered, closing the folder and tossing it on a pile of others to answer the knock at his hotel-room door.

  Tom Cummins and his father Gene stood in the narrow hotel corridor, and Moss welcomed them each with his professional smile and a firm handshake. Gene’s relationship with his son had evolved dramatically in the last year; they had developed a much greater sense of equality between them. Despite that fact, Gene still felt protective of his son. Tom was clearly comfortable with Moss and eager to get to work, but Gene hesitated to leave his son alone with anyone who was on the same payroll as the St. Louis Police Department. Only after several not-so-subtle gestures from Tom did Gene excuse himself, telling Tom to call him when he was ready for a lift home.

  After Gene left, Moss remained quiet for a few moments, shuffling through file folders and getting himself organized for the interview. The official business at hand was called “witness preparation.” The purpose of Moss’s visit to Gaithersburg was to meet with Tom, to explore his memories in depth, and to instruct him on what to expect at the upcoming trial. Moss had first met Tom in late April 1991, over a year before, and less than a month after the deaths of the Kerry sisters. Tom had flown back to St. Louis to attend four separate lineups, and he had nailed the identification of each suspect without the slightest hesitation. So Moss couldn’t explain why it was that he just didn’t quite believe the kid.

  In the aftermath of their arrests, Winfrey, Clemons, Richardson, and Gray had all done enough talking and finger-pointing to implicate themselves and each other. And in each of their cases there was enough evidence to corroborate most of Tom’s story. But there were just so many details, so many little facts that didn’t quite fit. Moss had his work cut out for him.

  Commencing his interview with Tom, he took scrupulous notes and stopped often to ask for clarity as Tom related the intimate details of his gruesome story. When Tom began to describe the manhole he was forced through, and the iron bar he had used as a step in climbing down, Moss stopped him.

  “Hang on a second now,” he said, pitching his legal pad and ballpoint down on the couch beside him. He opened the folder containing the bridge photographs. “Describe that part to me again now.”

  “Well, there was a bar, like an iron bar, a few feet down under the manhole that you could step on to help yourself down. It was at an angle, sort of diagonal across the hole,” Tom explained, somewhat perplexed by the lawyer’s in
terest in such a seemingly minor detail. “And then when I jumped down, I saw my cousins lying there and I just stood there for a second until the guys told me to lay down beside them.”

  “Now when you say you stood there, were you actually kind of crouching, or you were standing to your full height?” Moss prompted.

  “No, I was standing. Standing up straight,” Tom responded.

  Moss shook his head and scribbled furiously on the legal pad.

  “What’s the matter?” Tom asked.

  “How tall are you?” Moss asked then.

  “I don’t know. Five-nine, five-ten,” Tom said. “Why?”

  Moss threw his pen down again.

  “I’ve been to the manhole — I was just there a few weeks ago. The bar is not at the angle you describe and I couldn’t stand up straight on the catwalk. The bridge deck was too low above my head. I had to crouch considerably. Are you sure you’re remembering these facts correctly? Is any of this a bit hazy?”

  Tom shook his head emphatically.

  “No, there are certain moments, or certain facts that might be foggy in my memory, but this isn’t one of them. The bar was at an angle — on a clock face, the angle would have been maybe eight o’clock to two o’clock or thereabouts. Like this,” Tom indicated a severe diagonal with his arm. “And I definitely stood up straight. The two guys stood up straight too, when they moved us all down off the catwalk and onto the pier. Definitely — there was loads of room.”

  Moss shook his head again and rubbed his hands tiredly over his face. “Look,” he said, passing one of the photographs to Tom. “This is me standing on the catwalk under the manhole.”

  Tom stared quizzically at the photo of Nels, standing bent from the shoulders beneath the low roof of the bridge deck.

  “There’s just no way you could have stood up under there. Is there something — anything — that you’re not telling me? Or that maybe you don’t remember clearly?”

  Tom shook his head again, and scrutinized the photograph. He was at a loss. “Huh,” he said awkwardly. “Weird.”

  “And see — here is the manhole as photographed from above. You can see that the position of the iron bar is clearly not at the angle you describe. It’s horizontal.”

  Tom took the second photograph from the lawyer and studied it for a moment, noting the wrong angle of the bar, and shaking his head again. Moss passed him another photo of the manhole, this one taken from farther out and showing more of the surrounding bridge deck. Tom spotted the problem immediately. “It’s the wrong manhole,” he stated.

  Moss looked up from his folder. “What?”

  “That’s the wrong manhole — you’ve got the wrong manhole. The one we went through had a graffiti hopscotch board leading up to it.”

  Moss looked skeptical, but took up his pen and started writing anyway. “I don’t see how that’s possible. This is the manhole that the police department has been focusing the investigation on since day one. It’s the one that Richardson indicated during his early witness-style cooperation. Isn’t it the same one you pointed out to the detectives on that first morning? When you did the walk-through on the morning of April fifth?”

  “Nope,” Tom answered. “Definitely the wrong manhole.”

  Moss had less than a month left before the trial of Marlin Gray was scheduled to begin. His star witness was a kid who had been the first suspect in the case and who had previously made what police now referred to as “statements implicating himself.” And now, on top of everything else, that witness was telling him that the police investigation he had been relying on was, in fact, unreliable. Moss didn’t know what to believe. The only seemingly indisputable facts in the case were that the Kerry sisters, who by all accounts had been remarkable young ladies, had been brutally murdered on April 5, 1991. And now it was his job to try their murderers.

  Before Moss wrapped up the interview that evening, he asked Tom’s opinion about the idea of offering one of the four suspects a deal. Tom was hesitant.

  “Well, it’s like this,” Moss explained. “We’ve got a good case, a strong case. But I would like it to be even stronger. A jury might find your testimony to be questionable because you were the first suspect in this case. And beyond that, I have to do some further investigation into the stuff we talked about today. If we can’t reconcile your details to our evidence, that’s going to pose a problem. So, in order to cover all our bases, I think we should offer one of these guys a deal. Now one fact that has been consistent in every version of events from that night is that Daniel Winfrey — the youngest defendant — did not participate in the actual rapes. I’d like to offer him a life sentence and turn him state’s evidence. I think he could be our nail in the coffin. Now I know the kid was no angel. But he was fifteen, and he had only met two of these other guys that day. He wasn’t necessarily the career dirtball that the others might have been.”

  Apart from their names and faces, Tom didn’t know anything about the four men who had murdered Julie and Robin. He wasn’t interested in their personalities or résumés, and he certainly didn’t like the idea of cutting any of them a deal. But after some discussion with Moss, he eventually agreed that if it was absolutely necessary, then Winfrey should be the one to get the offer. Moss left Gaithersburg to return to St. Louis the next day with plenty to keep him busy until the trial began.

  When he called Tom a few days later to tell him he had been back to the bridge, Tom wasn’t at all surprised to learn that Moss had verified all of his details about the manhole. He was, however, surprised at the ever-professional Moss’s sudden candor.

  “I’ve gotta tell you, Tom,” Moss said, “I had my doubts about you. In all sincerity, I was really on the fence when we talked last week and this stuff wasn’t adding up. I was afraid you might have been hiding something. And this case has been so bizarre all along that I’ve never known quite what to believe. But I want you to know that I do believe you now — one hundred percent — and I’m placing all my faith in you. I’m sorry I doubted you. Now let’s nail these bastards.”

  Marlin Gray’s trial was scheduled to begin on Monday, October 5, 1992. Owing to the extensive media coverage of the case and widespread public sympathy for Julie and Robin, it took the prosecutors and defense attorneys four days to seat a jury. Kay, Gene, and a very nervous Tom flew into St. Louis that Thursday. Kay would be staying with her parents for the duration of the trial. Tom and Gene, who had both been subpoenaed, would stay at a hotel in downtown St. Louis, not far from the courthouse. This was not a social visit and Tom didn’t want to spend time with any of his family in St. Louis while he was there. He was anxious and uncomfortable, and he was afraid that hanging out with the family might distract him from the ugly task at hand. But neither was he prepared for the loneliness and boredom of spending the entire trial cooped up in a hotel room with the company of his father being the only diversion.

  Tom would only be permitted in the courtroom during his own testimony, so he and his father were not present on Friday morning, October 9, when the trial opened. But Kay sat in the packed courtroom near Jacquie, Ginna, and Sheila, and took meticulous notes during Moss’s opening statement. She was struck by Marlin Gray’s appearance. She hadn’t expected him to be so handsome. At a trim and muscular six-foot-four, he was immaculately groomed and cut a dashing figure in his exquisitely tailored suit. He smiled charmingly and assuredly at each of the jurors as they filed in. Kay was revolted by the very sight of him. And she was almost equally revolted by the sight of his defense attorney, Dorothy Hirzy, whom Kay described in her extensive notes as “a dead ringer for Cruella De Vil.”

  After opening statements, Ginna was the first witness called to the stand. She was dignified and soft-spoken, and she avoided eye contact with her daughters’ murderer. She talked about spending time with Julie and Robin on the evening of their murders. She talked about what they were wearing that night and about Julie’s car. She didn’t talk about the aching hole in her heart that had been growi
ng for a year and a half. She didn’t talk about her daughter Jamie’s loneliness and confusion. She didn’t talk about crying herself to sleep every night, or her very personal terror — how her trauma seemed to get worse and worse every day while the rest of the world moved on without her and somehow expected her to eventually recover.

  Julie’s best friend Hollee McClain took the stand later that afternoon to talk a little about her friendships with Julie and Robin. Her voice wavered momentarily as she proudly read their bridge-painted poem, “Do the Right Thing,” aloud from the stand. For those in the courtroom who had previously been unfamiliar with the poem, the irony was breathtaking:

  DO THE RIGHT THING

  United We Stand

  Divided We Fall

  It’s Not a Black-White Thing

  We as a New Generation

  Have got To Take a Stand

  Unite as One

  We’ve got II

  STOP

  Killing One Another

  You don’t have to be Black or White

  To Feel Prejudice

  To Fall in Love

  Experience Pain

  Create Life

  To Kill

  To Die

  You just have to be Human

  Do The Right Thing

  As Hollee read the simple poem, the crowded courtroom collectively reached into purses and pockets for tissues and handkerchiefs. Family members grasped hands with each other and held their heads high while Julie’s words rang out through the breathless room, and all of their thoughts drifted back to a time when both girls were alive, back to the night when Julie and Robin and Hollee had first painted that poem on the bridge. In Ginna’s memory, her girls were still alive — young and vibrant and idealistic. In the picture in her mind’s eye she saw them, breathing deeply, inhaling the fresh night river air as they watched the stars growing bright above them. They were champions of youth, and their lives seemed infinite like the skies beneath which they stood on their beloved bridge, painting.