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

by Jeanine Cummins

  Other witnesses that first day included Sam Brooks, one of the two uniformed officers who had been first on the scene that night and found Tom huddled under the stop sign at the St. Louis Waterworks. Also called to the stand was Dr. Michael Graham, the chief medical examiner who had identified Julie’s body. A police technical artist and an evidence technician who had both worked extensively on the case were also on the day’s roster. The testimony was often grim, but Ginna listened unflinchingly, absorbing every word.

  The next day was Saturday, October 10, and the Post-Dispatch headline that morning read: “Death Penalty Sought in Killings of ‘2 Beautiful Young Children.’ ”

  “Although [Cummins] was briefly a suspect in the case,” the article explained, “he was scheduled to testify as one of the state’s two key witnesses. His testimony was scheduled for today . . . The other main prosecution witness is to be Daniel Winfrey, who was the youngest defendant. In a deal with prosecutors, Winfrey, 17, of St. Charles pleaded guilty Sept. 30 to two counts of second-degree murder. Like the other defendants, he had been charged with first-degree murder. Winfrey also pleaded guilty to rape, robbery, assault and felonious restraint.”

  Because of the deal he cut, Winfrey would not stand trial. Instead, his guilty plea would earn him a thirty-year prison sentence. Winfrey’s family was suitably horrified at the thought of their son spending thirty years in prison, but they were even more horrified by his participation in the murders. They seemed to recognize that punishment was inevitable and right, and they had encouraged him to accept the plea bargain.

  Winfrey’s parents had been divorced when he was a child and, although they provided him with as much love and guidance as possible, he spent a lot of his childhood bouncing back and forth between their homes. He was in the fifth grade when he started dabbling in alcohol and marijuana. But it was a terrible accident on April 22, 1988, that really launched Winfrey down the slippery slope to delinquency. That day, Winfrey had been attending a Boy Scout trip with St. Charles Troop #392 to Fort Leonard Wood, an armed-forces and military-police training ground, when disaster struck. Winfrey and two of his friends had been playing with an aluminum irrigation pipe and when they stood the pipe on end, it brushed a power line. The 7,200-volt shock killed one of the boys and severely burned the other one.

  At the time, Winfrey was considered to be the luckiest one involved because he escaped without major physical injury. But emotionally the near-death incident was too much for the young boy to handle and it scarred him. Whether that occurrence left him with a severe case of survivor’s guilt or a thrilling sense of invincibility is impossible to say, but one thing was certain: his behavior and psyche deteriorated rapidly. Soon after the accident he acquired a whole new set of friends, and he began attempting stupid and dangerous stunts in earnest. He seemed to find a thrill in anything ominous. He also began skipping school and his drug experimentation became a full-fledged drug habit.

  Despite his worsening problems, on the surface Winfrey had remained as polite and pleasant as always. Both of his parents worked and they were good people with solid values. They thought of their son as a nice, smart kid who just had a few emotional problems. They kept an eye on him, but by and large they trusted him. The adults in his life took note of his issues, but the red flags were really not all that red. No one recognized the depths to which Winfrey was sinking. His assistant principal said that despite Winfrey’s poor attendance and bad grades, he was smart and showed a lot of potential. In fact, when the school board discovered that he had never officially completed the eighth grade, they reviewed his case and allowed him to remain in high school, owing largely to his high level of maturity. During the months just previous to Julie’s and Robin’s murders (the early months of 1991), Winfrey’s mother, Susan Crump, considered putting him into a drug rehabilitation program but procrastinated, hoping her son would pull himself together. She had no way of knowing that within two years, she would be feeling lucky that her child had the opportunity to accept thirty years in prison instead of going on trial for his life.

  Tom knew that Winfrey had jumped at Moss’s offer, and like the rest of the Cummins and Kerry family members, he had very mixed feelings about it. He knew that Winfrey’s testimony would help their case, but he hated the idea that this kid was being at least partially excused for his actions. Tom also knew that in order for a jury to accept Winfrey as a believable witness, Moss would have to make him appear repentant and somewhat less culpable than the others, whether he really was or not. Either way, Tom knew that his feelings on the matter were unimportant in a practical sense — he couldn’t change anything. So on that second day of the trial, Tom was up before his alarm went off, and he showered and shaved quickly. He was dressed in his best suit and tie and ready to go long before the circuit attorney’s office investigator showed up to drive him to the courthouse.

  Tom had requested that none of his family be present in the courtroom during his testimony. He was nervous enough without having to face the pained expressions of Rick and Ginna and the others. The year and a half that he had spent in therapy since the murders had not been terribly successful in convincing him that he was entirely blameless in his cousins’ deaths. He still faced torturous questions daily: What made me think they would let us live if we cooperated? Why didn’t I do something to fight them? What if . . . What if . . . What if? Tom wasn’t ready to face the possibility of seeing these same questions, either real or imagined, written in disgust on the faces of Julie’s and Robin’s loved ones.

  So the courtroom was quieter, emptier than it had been the day before. The morning was gray and overcast as Tom followed the investigator into the courthouse and down the long, echoey corridors to the witness room where he would wait to be called to the stand. The investigator told Tom to make himself comfortable, and left him alone in the room. Tom made a beeline for the green plastic ashtray that sat in the center of one of the round linoleum-covered tables. His first cigarette of the day was a much-needed one, and he despaired to see his hands shaking as he lit up. The hour passed like a year and he was on his eleventh cigarette when the bailiff banged on the door and opened it. It was time.

  Tom stubbed out his smoke with still-shaking hands and followed the bailiff out of the room. His heart was in his throat. He stared at the bailiff’s heavy black boots as they clonked down the abandoned hallway. In a moment they arrived at the heavy wooden double doors and the bailiff swung the right-hand one open for Tom, who tottered in weak-kneed. He focused his gaze now on his own highly polished shoes as he made his way toward the witness box. His tongue was heavy and tasted like tar as he promised to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help him God. So help me God, he repeated in his head as he stepped up into the glossy oak witness box, wishing he hadn’t smoked quite so many cigarettes that morning. When he finally looked up, the only faces he recognized were those of Nels Moss and Marlin Gray.

  Gray looked just as Tom remembered him, except that he was dressed in what looked to be an expensive suit. He still had the cocky air of a man who expected to be the center of attention, a man who could always win people over with a smile or a story. Gray glanced quickly and uninterestedly at Tom, as if he had never laid eyes on him before, and then returned his blasé gaze to some papers on the table in front of him. He looked almost bored, Tom thought. Almost as if this whole proceeding were just a waste of his precious time. Tom realized that any fear, any trepidation he had previously felt about facing this moment was gone, utterly replaced by a seething hatred for this man. Tom’s jaw jutted out and his stomach pitched as he struggled to get hold of his emotions. He placed his hands firmly on his knees to control his sudden desire to race to the defense table and beat the living crap out of the smirking Marlin Gray. The room spun a bit, and in an instant Nels Moss was standing in front of Tom, his blue eyes piercing him, pinning him to his seat, steadying him. Tom’s eyes clamped onto Moss’s face as onto an anchor, a lifeline, and he focused there.r />
  “Would you state your name for the record, please?” Moss began.

  “Thomas Patrick Cummins.”

  Tom’s testimony lasted four and a half hours. The worst moment, just as Tom had expected, came when Moss asked him about his time in the river.

  “Did [Julie] get close to you at any point?” Moss asked.

  Tom paused for a long moment while a lump in his throat constricted his voice and tears sprang to his eyes. He would not cry. He would not let this animal see him cry.

  “Yes,” he responded, with an audible crack in his voice. “After I went under the first time and I came back up. When I came up, Julie was right next to me and she grabbed ahold of me and I panicked. I ... I shook her off. I pushed her away.”

  His nostrils flared as he spoke these words and he was so grateful that his family, that Ginna and Rick, were not in the courtroom to hear this confession. He wouldn’t allow himself to explain that moment in any further detail. He didn’t want to describe how the two of them had clung together and sunk, how he had come to within an instant of taking his lungs full of water and dying right there with Julie, embracing each other to the last. He couldn’t bring himself to describe his moment of panicky awakening, how he had pushed Julie off of him just in time, shoving her toward the surface and then pulling himself up after her. In that terrible instant when he had released himself from Julie’s grip, he had been wrong in his faith that she would make it, that they would survive the ordeal together. And now he didn’t want to make explanations. Julie was gone, and he had survived. That was the fact. Irreversible.

  The rest of his time on the stand was easy in comparison. Hirzy, despite her best efforts to rattle Tom, could not make a dent in his psyche. If only you knew what I’ve been through, he thought. You think after all this, you can scare me? So Hirzy’s hostile questions failed to have their desired effect on Tom, who answered her calmly and matter-of-factly in every instance.

  “When you met Julie down in Florida back in 1990 you spent a lot of time with her, didn’t you?” she asked.

  “Yes, I did.”

  “You became very fond of her, didn’t you?”

  “We became close friends.”

  “You wanted to have sex with her, didn’t you?”

  “No, I did not.”

  Those same questions that had seemed so jarring, so intrusive and accusatory when posed by St. Louis City’s homicide detectives a year and a half before, took on an air of ridiculousness here in the crowded, fluorescent courtroom. Tom couldn’t even muster any shock for them. He shook his head while he answered.

  Still, he was emotionally drained by the time he was dismissed that afternoon. Tom did read the newspaper the next morning, when The Post-Dispatch printed the headline “Visit Grew into Night of Horror: Testimony Describes Kerry Sisters’ Deaths.”

  Tom’s subpoena kept him pacing the halls of Drury’s Hotel for almost three full weeks. He had memorized the hotel restaurant’s menu and the hours it was open. He lingered over his daily meals as the only breaks in the monotony. Every day he looked forward to the simple, friendly greetings of the bartenders and waitresses.

  On Wednesday, October 14, while Tom chain-smoked and watched mind-numbing talk shows in his hotel room, Winfrey entered the St. Louis courthouse wearing handcuffs and shackles. Likeable he was not, but believable he was. The jurors hung on his every word while he described the night of the attacks, including his own participation, in grave detail. Gray continued to look unconcerned and focused his attention on a notepad in front of him.

  Out of the four assailants, Winfrey was the only one who had publicly apologized to his victims, and to his credit, the kid really did seem genuinely regretful. But when he took the stand that morning and Moss began to question him about the attacks, any forgiveness that might have been growing in the hearts of Julie’s and Robin’s loved ones was frozen there.

  “I threw her on her back with her coat over her face,” Winfrey testified, though he could not identify the “her” as either Julie or Robin. To him, the girls were just nameless, faceless victims. “Her hair was kind of short. I got on top of her and pulled her coat over her face. Tony and Reggie told them both to shut up or they would kill them. I told them to just relax.”

  From her seat in the first row of the courtroom, Ginna shuddered.

  Five days later, Gray took the stand himself. His direct examination proved to be uneventful — he carried himself well. The jurors saw a handsome, articulate, and soft-spoken young man who adamantly denied any involvement in the rapes and murders of the Kerry sisters. When Hirzy questioned him about his arrest, Gray even broke down and cried while he described how badly the police had treated him.

  It wasn’t until Moss began the cross-examination that things turned really ugly in the courtroom. Gray was too smart for his own good, and he couldn’t seem to keep himself from being a smart alec on the stand. He challenged every statement Moss made, claimed that everyone from Tom to Eva to Winfrey was lying, and declared that he had been joking when he told people that he had murdered the girls. When Moss began a sentence about the girls being pushed off the bridge, Gray cut him off.

  “When they were allegedly pushed off the bridge,” he corrected the prosecutor with a smirk.

  But if Gray was quick, Moss was quicker. At the conclusion of the cross-examination, Moss sought clarification about some details that had been covered earlier, and Gray became irritated and expressed his impatience.

  “I’m about to lose my life and I’m up here arguing with you about the same stupid points over and over again,” he complained from the stand.

  “At least you have the chance to argue,” Moss retorted. “Julie and Robin didn’t.”

  Two days later, on October 21, someone identified only as a courthouse regular was quoted in The Post-Dispatch, saying, “Even when you separate the sin from the sinner, [Gray] came across as a terrible guy.”

  Tom was only halfheartedly following the case in the papers. He had developed a severe mistrust of the media over the last year and a half, and while he was anxious for the end of the trial, he preferred to wait for news from Moss rather than read a version of events recorded by an outsider. Being stuck in the hotel was really starting to grind on him, but he was wary of being accosted in public, so he suffered inside rather than chance any public excursions. So when Moss rang him the afternoon after Gray’s testimony to tell him that he was free to return to Maryland, Tom was packed and en route to the airport in under an hour.

  Gene and Kay planned to stay on for the conclusion of the trial and contact Tom with the outcome as soon as the verdict was delivered. The very next day, Tuesday, October 20, Moss and Hirzy made their closing statements.

  “He was their leader,” Moss proclaimed, stabbing a finger at Marlin Gray. “His signature is on their bodies.”

  The jury deliberated for just four hours and fifteen minutes before returning their verdict. Gray looked as smug as ever as he stood to hear the judgment. His smirk was quickly replaced by an expression of shock and then tears as the jury’s foreman read the list of verdicts. Marlin Gray was guilty on all counts.

  For the families involved, the penalty phase of the trial was awful in a surreal way. Jurors cried when Moss played a recording of Julie singing a song she had written, called “Trouble in America.” The Kerry and Cummins families, along with many of Julie’s and Robin’s friends and loved ones, were invited to give victim-impact statements, to articulate the devastation caused by the murders. It was an impossible task. Julie and Robin were gone, and no amount of eulogizing could even begin to communicate that kind of loss. Still, they wrote letters, they read poems, they did what they could.

  As the testimony continued throughout the day, the jurors learned about Julie’s and Robin’s attachment to organizations like Greenpeace and Amnesty International. Each bit of testimony triggered a rush of memories for Julie’s and Robin’s loved ones. At the mention of Amnesty International, Jacquie remembered
the way the girls had actively celebrated Nelson Mandela’s release from a South African prison the previous year, at a time when, to most American teenagers, “apartheid” was little more than a word on the evening news. And while the jury heard about Julie’s and Robin’s extensive volunteer work and the money they both scraped together to donate to their favorite causes, Sheila chose to remember their less martyr-like, more human qualities — the way Robin liked to tease her boys, for instance, and Julie’s impatience.

  Libby Hodges, an African-American and one of Julie’s closest friends, took the stand to state that she felt “the whole black race has been betrayed” by the murders. “I feel like everything I believe in has been violated,” she said.

  Several weeks earlier at the desk in her college dorm room in Towson, Maryland, Tink had sat down to try to articulate on paper what Julie and Robin had meant to her. She spent several hours musing over her cousins’ altruism, but nothing she wrote down seemed to capture what she wanted to say. As the crumpled balls of paper piled up on her floor, Tink thought about Ginna’s refrigerator, to which Julie had taped a checklist of how to create an environmentally friendly household. She and Robin had developed a strict recycling plan for the family; they saved Camp-bell’s soup labels so inner-city schools could buy computers, and they exchanged old newspapers for tree seedlings to help with the ozone problem. No aerosol anything was allowed in the Kerry household, nor paper plates, towels, or napkins. Julie and Robin were practicing preachers.