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

by Jeanine Cummins

  But these details can’t encapsulate a human. And no amount of writing, pen-chewing, scribbling, or crying could produce a victim-impact statement to satisfy Tink. Eventually she threw the pen down, climbed into bed, pulled the covers over her head and cried.

  When it was Gray’s turn, Hirzy turned out a parade of character witnesses, all singing his praises and begging for leniency in his sentencing. His mother, stepfather, and grandmother all took the stand to proclaim their support for Gray.

  “I do not believe my son is guilty,” Gray’s mother testified. “If I thought my son was guilty, I would not be supportive. We as Christians believe if you sin, you must pay.”

  Several friends testified on his behalf as well, describing Gray as the perpetual entertainer, always singing and dancing and telling stories and jokes. But it was Eva who may have inadvertently sealed her boyfriend’s fate.

  “I love him,” she said. “I still care about him. I don’t feel any differently toward him.”

  That was the moment when Nels Moss stepped up to the stand.

  “Has Marlin Gray ever hit you?” he inquired.

  “Yes,” Eva responded. “But never in the face.”

  Tom answered the phone on the second ring. His father’s long-distance voice crackled down the line to him.

  “Well, the verdict is in,” Gene told his son from a pay phone at the courthouse in St. Louis, “and the sentence is death.”

  There were no words on the line, but Gene thought he could hear his son expelling a deep breath on the other end.

  “Son?”

  “Yeah, okay,” Tom responded in a slow, stunned voice.

  “You okay, kid?” Gene asked.

  Tom was quiet for another moment. The rush of emotion he had expected did not come. He did not feel elated, avenged, or even particularly relieved. What he felt was numb.

  “I’m just glad it’s over, Dad,” he said.

  Three months later, on Wednesday, February 3, 1993, Tom testified at Reginald Clemons’s trial. The trial was held in the same courtroom, and he sat in the same witness box. He probably even laid his hand on the same Bible when he was sworn in.

  Nels Moss prosecuted the case, and Tom’s testimony was almost identical to that of the first trial. Sure, some of the surrounding faces were different and Clemons certainly appeared less cocky, more frightened than Gray had.

  But the only major difference in the two cases was in the strategy of the defense attorney. Clemons’s attorney, Robert Constantinou, seemed intent on creating doubt by casting any and every fact of the case into question. He questioned whether the prosecution’s two main witnesses were telling the truth. He questioned whether the body that had been found and identified as Julie was really Julie. He blamed the press for blowing the case out of proportion. And he even accused Julie and Robin of “living life in the fast lane” and jumping willingly off the bridge.

  All he succeeded in doing was infuriating the jury. Moss closed the trial with these simple words: “These young ladies, filled with so much promise, so much hope, are gone. These young ladies are dead forever.”

  This time, it only took the jury three hours to return a verdict of guilty on all counts.

  Despite Constantinou’s abrasive legal strategy, public sympathy for his client was much greater than it had been for the irrepressible Gray — and that fact was owed in large part to his family. His parents were extremely articulate and outspoken regarding their unwavering support for their son. They were positive that Clemons was innocent, that he was incapable of these atrocities.

  His stepfather Reynolds told a story about an occasion when Clemons had gotten in trouble as a young child. As punishment, Reynolds had told the young Clemons that he would not be allowed to come along on a family visit to his grandmother’s house. On seeing the child’s distress, Reynolds had been moved with pity, but he hadn’t wanted to be inconsistent, to be a push-over parent. So he had struck a deal with his son: if Clemons could memorize the Ten Commandments in the forty-five minutes before the family was to leave for the trip, he could come along. An hour later, the smiling young Clemons was sitting in the back of the family car headed for his grandmother’s house. He had memorized the Ten Commandments and, Reynolds thought, he had also learned a valuable lesson about compromise and forgiveness.

  These warm memories of Clemons’s loving, Christian upbringing sparked some compassion for his family in the media. In an editorial column that appeared in The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Bill McClellan described his own commiseration with the family. He said Clemons “seemed like a good kid who had fallen under the influence of Gray, four years his senior. Every parent’s nightmare, I thought. My heart ached for Clemons’ mother.”

  But that empathy was not enough to outweigh the jurors’ shock at Clemons’s barbaric crimes. Less than a week after the trial closed, all twelve jurors agreed that Clemons’s crime was “wantonly vile” and “unreasonably brutal.” They recommended his execution.

  A month before Antonio Richardson’s trial was scheduled to begin, the prosecution decided to offer him a deal. Despite the convictions of both Gray and Clemons, Moss was hesitant to pursue the death penalty for Richardson because of his age at the time of his crime. So after much deliberation, the state approached Richardson’s lawyers. Richardson could plead guilty to two counts of murder in the first degree in exchange for a life sentence. Richardson’s court-appointed attorney, Kris Kerr, advised him that under the circumstances it would be very much in his best interest to accept the deal. Richardson agreed.

  On the morning of February 19, 1993, on the very day that Richardson was prepared to accept the deal, a man named Bob Williams came to visit him in jail. Williams represented a group that called itself the Coalition for Justice. This group was promoting the idea that Gray, Clemons, and Richardson were all innocent victims of a racist, unjust legal system. Williams cited the fact that Winfrey — the only white assailant charged — had gotten off with a lesser plea than Richardson was being offered. He ignored the fact that Winfrey hadn’t participated in the rapes, and convinced Richardson that the difference in the two offers was racially motivated. Williams also focused a great deal of energy directing blame at Tom Cummins. Richardson liked Bob Williams’s arguments, and in court later that afternoon, he rejected the deal.

  A month later, Richardson’s trial began and Williams was on the courthouse steps armed with flyers that read NO STRUGGLE NO PROGRESS in huge block capitals. The flyer had a cartoon depicting a giant named “The Justice System” wielding a whip over the cowering masses. It referred to Julie’s and Robin’s murders as the “Chain of Rocks Bridge Mystery Case.” The text, complete with typos, read:

  Antonio Richardson’s, like the others, is a political trial where the rules of evidents do not apply. Where the juries were allegedly controlled; where the facts about the trial have not been reported in neither the newspaper nor on television, in order to hide the truth from the public.

  Antonio Richardson, last of the defendants, who’s fighting back against the ruling class frame-up trials of these young working class youths: three who are African- Americans, and one is white.

  They are all innocent. . . . Thomas Cummins the first cousin of the two sisters who disappeared, cannot walk on water. He could not have survived a fall of 70-90 feet into 54 degree water of the Mississippi River, swim for 30 minutes and suffer no ill effects.

  The flyer would serve to set the tone for the trial and enrage everyone who had known Julie or Robin. Tom, who had developed an extremely thick skin by this point, simply scoffed at the ridiculous developments. In his heart he knew that he and Julie and Robin embodied the ideals of the “working class” more than anybody, and he wasn’t about to let an idiot like Bob Williams take that knowledge away.

  On the morning of Monday, March 22, Tom sat filling his usual ashtray in the witness room and making small talk with Ron Whitehorn, owner of the infamous flashlight. Ron’s daughter Stephanie was on the stand testifying w
hile Tom and her father sat chatting. Ron had just told Tom how glad he was that this was the last trial and his daughter could put this all behind her after today, when the door opened and a bailiff escorted the shaking Stephanie Whitehorn into the room.

  As soon as the bailiff was gone, Stephanie bent to whisper something furtively into her father’s ear. Tom looked away and took a deep drag on his current cigarette. The girl was obviously distraught about something and wanted a private conversation with her father. He didn’t want to eavesdrop. But Ron’s next comment was impossible not to hear.

  “I’ll kill the little fucker,” he shouted.

  Tom looked up and caught the look of crazed anger on Ron Whitehorn’s face. Stephanie looked more terrified than ever, but Ron pulled her close and hugged her.

  “You’re gonna be all right, baby girl,” he said in a much quieter voice. “Don’t you worry about a thing — I won’t let anything happen to you. We’ll get this sorted out.”

  Stephanie just nodded and snuffled against her father’s shoulder.

  “Would you mind getting the bailiff?” Ron said to Tom then.

  When Tom and the bailiff returned to the witness room about a minute later, Stephanie still looked rattled but she was considerably more composed.

  “What’s going on?” the bailiff asked as he entered the room.

  “That monster in there threatened my daughter on the stand,” Ron replied.

  The bailiff looked at Stephanie.

  “What happened?”

  “He mouthed the words, I’m gonna get you,” she explained.

  “I’ll get the prosecutor,” the bailiff said, and he banged open the door and was gone.

  After a stern warning from the judge, the remainder of Richardson’s trial passed without further interruption. The trial was the shortest of the three, with testimony lasting only three days. On Thursday, March 25, 1993, less than two weeks before the second anniversary of Julie’s and Robin’s deaths, the last of their murderers was convicted. Antonio Richardson would join Clemons and Gray on Missouri’s death row.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Tom didn’t exactly expect his life to get back to normal after the last trial. There could be no normal for him now, or ever again. He had been enrolled in an intensive counseling program since 1991 with a wonderful therapist whom he had come to trust and admire. Her specialty was dealing with the survivors of violent crimes and their families, and Tom had come to depend heavily on her wisdom and words. When he brought up the idea of returning to school, she encouraged him. And about a year later, Tom enrolled himself in the criminal justice program at the University of Maryland. He wanted to be Nels Moss. Julie would be proud, he thought.

  In early April 1995, four years to the week of Julie’s and Robin’s murders, Tom settled a civil lawsuit against the city of St. Louis for an undisclosed amount of money. The police, who were accused of trying to force Tom to confess, settled the suit out of court when they learned that Nels Moss intended to testify on Tom’s behalf. The settlement, much like the death warrants, did little to satisfy Tom. As far as he was concerned, the damage was irreversible and the settlement was nothing but blood money. But Tom got something much more valuable than money out of the lawsuit: a friendship with his civil attorneys Pete Bastian and Frank Carlson.

  Tom had first met the two lawyers back in 1992, during the long days of his confinement in Drury’s Hotel for Marlin Gray’s trial. He was a little embarrassed to admit how much he had enjoyed their company — not just because they were such a welcome respite from the tedium, but also because, when Tom told them his story that first night, Pete and Frank seemed to understand what he had been through. Tom never did achieve the title of “victim” in the media, and he had actually long since given up wanting it. But the refreshing thing about Pete and Frank was that they regarded him not only as a victim, but as a survivor of extraordinary circumstances.

  “Tom, you gotta stop beating yourself up over this,” Frank said to him over their steaks. “The fact of the matter is — you survived. And it’s a good thing you did, or no one would ever have known what happened to Julie or Robin. These four monsters would still be walking around out there. You survived in that river. You survived the police. You survived the media. And you are the one whose testimony is going to send these four guys where they belong. You oughtta be damn proud of yourself.”

  They were words of encouragement that Tom sorely needed to hear. He was sure that neither Frank nor Pete had any idea how much their support helped him to heal. But over the years, every time Tom visited St. Louis, he made sure he called them. He came to depend on them for their company and friendship as much as for their legal advice. On the night they settled his civil suit, they took him to their favorite local bar and fed him a lot of Guinness in their attempts to make the mood a celebratory one. Tom swallowed the stout and his tears and felt grateful for the support of his two lawyers, his friends.

  After that, the legal developments slowed to a crawl. Attorneys for Clemons, Gray, and Richardson issued appeal after appeal on behalf of their clients, but little would change for years on end. Tom worked at the firehouse and attended his criminal-justice classes. He bought himself a house not too far from his parents’. After four years he earned his degree.

  Then, in May 1998, Tom received a long-dreaded phone call from St. Louis. Daniel Winfrey was up for parole. As had become his habit whenever something disconcerting happened in his life, Tom picked up the phone and called both of his sisters and then his parents. After he filled the whole family in on the update, it was decided: Tom and Tink would be the family representatives to fly to Missouri and give a statement to the judge.

  While Tom had flown in and out of St. Louis countless times in the last seven years, for Tink it would be the first trip back. She was twenty-three years old now, and she had never been to her cousins’ grave. It was an emotional homecoming, to say the least. Their first port of call was the Old Chain of Rocks Bridge. The intervening years had been kind to the old bridge and Tom hardly recognized it when they pulled up. There was a trailer perched on the edge of a small parking area, and a sign that said VISITOR’S CENTER. The bridge had been converted into a state park — a walking and bike path for families. There wasn’t a trace of the dense undergrowth that Tom, Julie, and Robin had fought their way through all those years ago. The whole structure had been patched and painted. The manholes in the roadway were now filled and the surface of the bridge was newly paved. Tom was dismayed.

  “We won’t be able to see the poem,” he said softly as he and his sister took their first tentative steps onto the bridge.

  The pair were silent and solemn as they made their way along the bridge, past moms pushing strollers and dads carrying toddlers on their shoulders. A few kids laughed and darted about in the sunshine, but Tom and Tink had heavier hearts as they paced the old structure, eyes downcast. When they came to the spot where Tom thought the poem had been, they paused and stood by the railing for a few moments. There wasn’t much to say. But then something caught Tom’s eye.

  “Holy crap, look at that!” he said.

  Tink’s eyes followed where her brother pointed, a few feet away on the bridge deck. She could make out the faintest trace of a J shining unmistakably through the new layer of pavement. It was Julie’s J. Beside it, her peace symbol was also largely intact. For the most part, the rest of the poem was illegible, but they were able to make out partial words here and there. They both felt comforted that a bit of the poem, a piece of Julie and Robin, was still visible at their beloved old bridge.

  From there, Tink and Tom drove straight to Calvary Cemetery, stopping only at a florist’s shop on the way. When they got out and found their cousins’ shared headstone, the tears they had been saving all day finally came. Tink knelt and placed two red roses beside the names of Julie and Robin Kerry. Her brother knelt beside her to make his own offering: he left them two Marlboro Lights. They both spoke a few private, tear-choked words to their
cousins in the quiet of the old graveyard, and bent to kiss the headstone before leaving.

  Tom and Tink’s meeting with the judge in Jefferson City, Missouri, was scheduled for the next day. Their aunt Jacquie and cousin Gabbi attended with them. The judge was very kind. The families would not be permitted to testify at the actual parole hearing, he explained, because Winfrey had been moved to a secret location. Winfrey’s demographics and the crimes he was charged with had made him the perfect target for jailhouse torment. His seven years in jail so far had been extremely hard-served, and the authorities had had to move him more than once because of his treatment by fellow inmates. Tink and Tom couldn’t muster a whole lot of sympathy for him.

  “The main point that I want to articulate,” Tom said, beginning his address to the judge, “is the fact that, despite his cooperation with the investigation, despite his testimony at trial, despite his lesser culpability, Winfrey is a double murderer, and he’s only served seven years. He was not just a good kid who accidentally stumbled into a scary situation. I understand that he kinda came across that way at trial; he had to. But he made comments during the crime that indicated he was excited and that he enjoyed what was happening. The whole thing was just one big adrenaline rush to him. While those animals were raping Julie and Robin, this kid actually sat on my back, laughing and telling me it was a good thing his buddies weren’t gay or they would probably rape me too.”

  Tink’s mouth hung open speechlessly while her brother talked. She had never really been exposed to the details of the case. She had never wanted to be — and she was visibly stricken by her brother’s words. The judge stood up from behind his big mahogany desk and offered her a tissue. She gratefully accepted, noticing for the first time that there were silent tears sliding down her cheeks.