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

by Jeanine Cummins

  Tom spent the remainder of the afternoon at his grandparents’ home. He even let Grandma Polly dote on him more than usual and feed him, though his stomach was so queasy and jittery he was almost afraid to eat.

  Just before four o’clock, Jacquie’s cell phone rang and Kay Crockett delivered the news that the Eighth Circuit Court had issued Richardson a temporary stay. The execution was off. Tom was too stunned to even respond.

  Crockett advised Tom that the state was appealing the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court, and that there was a very good chance it would be overturned before midnight. So after watching Tink’s interview on Catherine Crier Live from New York, Tom, Kay, and Jacquie piled into the rental car to make the drive to Potosi. They had barely checked into the Holiday Inn where they would be staying the night when Jacquie’s cell phone rang with the latest update: Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas had vacated the stay. Richardson’s execution was back on for one minute past midnight.

  Tom felt as if he were in some kind of really twisted, demented episode of Candid Camera. The emotional ups and downs were almost too much to take and, by this time, he was asking himself the same questions countless people had asked him when he had made the decision to come out here, to be a witness to the execution. What do I hope to get out of this? What the hell am I doing here?

  At about ten fifteen P.M., Tom pulled into a gas-station parking lot a few miles outside the penitentiary. He went to the pay phone and dialed Crockett’s number with a finger that went numb from the cold by the time he reached the third digit. He just wanted to make one final check with her before they arrived and be sure that everything was on track. It was dark outside, much darker than it ever got in the city, and between that and the cold weather Tom was beginning to wonder if the people who planned these things didn’t actually conspire to make the atmosphere as creepy as possible. He shook the thought away as soon as it popped into his head. He couldn’t even begin to imagine what it was like for the people who actually planned these executions.

  When Crockett answered the phone, she sounded uncharacteristically tired. “You’re not going to believe this, Tom,” she began. “The execution has been stayed again. I’ll explain all the details as best I can to you when you get here. But basically, the Supreme Court has agreed to temporarily stay the execution pending the outcome of a trial in North Carolina involving a mentally retarded man.”

  “But . . .” Tom began.

  “Yeah, I know,” Crockett cut him off. “Richardson’s not mentally retarded. Doesn’t really seem to matter. His lawyers are basically saying, if there’s a chance their client might be even mildly mentally retarded, then there’s a chance the outcome of the case might affect him. It’s enough for a stay. It won’t hold up in the long run.”

  Tom nodded. “All right, we’re just a couple of miles down the road. What do you think we should do?”

  “Why don’t you come on in and you can sit down for a while with Dora Schriro. She’s the director of corrections for the State of Missouri. She should be able to answer any questions you might have. We also have some psychiatric counselors on hand if you’d like to talk to any of them.”

  Even with the prison under complete lockdown and security at its tightest, Tom and his mother and aunt were in and out of Potosi in under an hour. The cameras and the press didn’t spot him on the way in, but mobbed him on the way out. Guards surrounded him and walked him all the way to his rental car, with Kay and Jacquie in tow. He remained silent — didn’t even provide them with the “No comment” that would have earned him a spot on the nightly news.

  At the Holiday Inn, an exhausted and emotionally drained Kay hit the sack as soon as they walked in the door. Tom and Jacquie lit cigarettes and stayed up all night remembering Julie and Robin.

  Two days later, Tom did his best to settle into his airline seat as his plane taxied down the St. Louis runway for takeoff. The events of the last week had laid to rest a lot of unanswered questions for him. A month ago when he had planned this trip, people had started to ask him, “Just what do you hope to accomplish by going out there, by witnessing the execution?” And Tom really hadn’t known how to answer that question. He had just felt compelled. It had never dawned on him not to go. But when the question came up, he began to soul-search and agonize over it. Why did he want to go? Did he really just want to watch this man die? No. That definitely wasn’t it. He wasn’t bloodthirsty. In fact, the idea of actually, physically watching the execution had not appealed to him in any way. It revolted him. And neither had he hoped for closure, or finality, or any of those comforts that survivors sometimes fool themselves into believing they can obtain by watching their tormentors die. He knew he wouldn’t walk out of the penitentiary after witnessing another death and think to himself, Wow. I feel better now.

  So what had he been hoping for? As the plane sped up and revved its engine for ascent, Tom finally recognized his one desire, his driving reason for coming there that week. He had been hoping for an apology. One tiny, neglected corner of his mind had been holding out a sliver of hope that Antonio Richardson, when faced with his own mortality, would come clean. That he would realize in the last moments before his death that he wasn’t getting anywhere in this world, and that the best he could hope for would be to make peace with his Maker before he went into the next. That was what Tom had been hoping to witness. In the unlikely event that Richardson repented and sought forgiveness at the very last minute — just in case he decided that after all these years, he really was sorry — Tom wanted to be standing by. Tom wanted to forgive him.

  As the plane reached its level flying altitude and Tom left St. Louis behind, he made a decision — to leave the unrealistic hopes he had brought there behind as well.

  Tom’s newfound peace allowed him to shrug off the “documentary” when it aired on Court TV later that year. The rest of his family wasn’t quite so blasé about it. Instead, they were furious. The ninety-minute show included none of the footage that the crew had shot of the Cummins family. All the scenes of Tom at the firehouse, along with the footage of the family telling funny stories and sharing memories about Julie and Robin, had been omitted from the show. The final product focused entirely on Richardson’s family and on his lawyer.

  A film crew had recorded the family and their lawyer, Gino Battisti, during the last weeks and moments leading up to the night scheduled for Richardson’s execution. They had captured every tear, every heartbreaking conversation, every excruciating facial expression they could gather during the Richardson family’s terrible ordeal.

  The Cummins and Kerry families were nowhere to be seen. Apparently the documentary producers had decided that their torment was inconsequential to the story.

  But the real slap in the face came toward the end of the ninety-minute piece. The footage showed a frazzled-looking Battisti pacing the length of his office and running his hands through his hair, waiting for the phone to ring. When it finally did, he pounced on it and the cameras zoomed in on the one-sided conversation. The joy was immediately visible on the man’s features and he collapsed into his chair, laughing with relief. It was the news he had hardly dared to hope for — Richardson’s execution had been stayed. When he hung up, he looked into the camera and, smiling, said, “So the story has a happy ending after all!”

  In the family room at the Cummins house, every mouth hung open in silence.

  Around that same time, while Battisti celebrated his “happy ending,” the Cummins and Kerry families prepared to mark the tenth anniversary of Julie’s and Robin’s deaths. Tom and Kathy planned their weekly beer night to coincide with the anniversary, and Tom invited his new girlfriend along. He had been dating her for only a few weeks, but he had high hopes for this one, and he knew he was going to have to explain his history to her sooner or later. After all, the facts of the story were the Legos of his life — the blocks that had, for the last ten years, been largely responsible for building the person Tom Cummins had become. And the new girlf
riend, Whitney, couldn’t really be expected to know or understand Tom until she knew his terrible story, until she knew about losing Julie and Robin.

  So he took her to Mrs. O’Leary’s early that night, an hour before they were supposed to meet Kathy and her husband. Tom took her hands in his and told her what he had come to think of as his life story. He was nervous, and he stuttered and paused along the way, taking sips during the longer gaps to fill the silence. After all, he had told these truths countless times over the span of ten years, and the reactions he had received varied from hyperventilation to disbelief to complete indifference. Tom had only recently come to understand that this moment, the moment when he shared his story, was the most important and most telling moment he experienced in every new relationship. The listener’s reaction to his tale would provide a kind of a lens into her soul, a microcosm of everything she was as a person.

  When Tom finished his story, Whitney stared back at him with wide, waterlogged eyes. “Whatever you need, if you need anything at all, I’ll understand,” she said.

  And Tom knew that his years of therapy had finally ushered him across a very important threshold. For the first time in a decade, Tom was really, truly making a fresh start. He hoped that one day maybe Ginna could do the same, but even as he wished for that, he recognized how different, how consuming her pain was. Tom was finally making peace with his lot in life. His therapist was right, dammit: this wasn’t his fault. It didn’t matter what other people thought. It didn’t matter that the media still referred to him as only “the victims’ cousin.” He knew he was a victim in his own right. He knew it, his family knew it, and now his new girlfriend knew it too.

  For the first time since April 5, 1991, Tom felt free of blame, of self-reproach, of anxiety over what others thought of him. And in place of all those demons, the small shoots of grief were springing up in him. But they were the seeds of a pure grief, not laced with rage or distorted by fear. He was finally free to just miss his cousins without any other baggage disrupting that. And it almost felt good. He really missed Robin. And, oh God, how he missed Julie.

  When Kathy and her husband appeared a few minutes later, Tom ordered drinks for them and then dialed Tink’s cell-phone number in New York. He instructed Tink to find herself a drink, and they all waited while Tink popped the cork on a bottle of red wine in her apartment.

  “Are you ready?” Tom asked, into the phone.

  He lifted his shiny glass then, clinked his sister’s in midair, and let a single tear slide down his cheek unchecked.

  “To Julie and Robin,” he said.

  AFTERWORD

  We forget our victims.

  As a society, we have a certain fascination with murder and violence. It’s not necessarily unhealthy — we are a curious people. We want to know why atrocities happen; we want to understand the causes of wickedness. We go looking for answers in books, in therapy, in our media. Unfortunately for the answer-seekers, corpses can’t talk. The dead can’t tell their own stories.

  So instead, as Doug Magee so eloquently explains in the introduction of his book What Murder Leaves Behind,

  In the aftermath of murder, we turn our attention to the murderer. That, of course, is where the action is. The chase, the arrest, and the trial are all served up to us as the story, and we rarely protest . . .

  In the time immediately after the murder we may catch a minute or two of a husband or a wife or a parent, squinting in the hot television lights, pausing to cry, and then trying to put words to some of the worst feelings imaginable. But we usually only glimpse these families and we only do so when they fit in with the larger story; the families remain peripheral to the activity surrounding the murder.

  It’s true. But the larger social injustice is not that the victims’ families are peripheral to our attentions. The larger wrong is that, because of their death-imposed silence, we forget about the victims themselves.

  On April 5, 1991, Julie and Robin Kerry died. That is the singular monumental fact of this story. As such, it should remain pivotal to all pertinent discussions. Yet during the ensuing years, my family has watched helplessly while the press has demoted Julie and Robin to little more than background details. Meanwhile, their murderers became media darlings.

  I wrote this book because I felt incensed. I wrote it because I wanted to do something to try to change the reality that Julie and Robin’s rightful place in our collective memory is being usurped by the very thugs who killed them. This is a huge injustice in our society — and it’s one that I only noticed because it happened to my family, to people whom I love and miss.

  Trying to voice that message by writing this book is one of the scariest things I’ve ever done, and I’ve questioned myself at every turn. I’ve questioned my ability to sufficiently express these issues, and more important, I’ve questioned my right to do so. I know that, by the very nature of what is written in these pages, this book is inherently upsetting to some of the people who knew and loved Julie and Robin most in the world, and the last thing I wanted to do was to cause more pain to people who have already endured such staggering sufferings.

  But in the end, I was bound by my feeling that Julie and Robin had been reduced to nothing more than “victims” in the media, that apart from the people who did know and love them, the only thing people remember about them is that they were raped, and they were killed. I felt that by writing this, I might be able to portray their love and the dignity with which they endured that horror. But even more important, I thought that in a very small personal way, I could give them back some of the details they were so proud of in their lives. Maybe this is one of my lofty pipe dreams, but I still believe in it. I wanted people to hear the names Julie Kerry and Robin Kerry, and to learn a little bit about them, even if that little bit was merely a shadow of the real Julie and Robin. So I pray that somehow, Julie’s and Robin’s loved ones will understand that those are the reasons I was compelled to speak up, the reasons I had to write this book. In the meantime, I need to be very clear about the fact that this is my version of events; this is my very personal memory stone to my cousins. I do not for a moment endeavor to speak on anyone else’s behalf.

  Capital punishment is a giant and terrifying issue. Its ramifications are truly unknowable, and so, shrouded in darkness, it looms over our national consciousness like the Grim Reaper. Although I never had the opportunity to discuss the death penalty with Julie or Robin, I know that they were both against it. What no one can ever know is whether that terrible night would have altered those views or not. There’s no point in wondering.

  What I do know, however, is how the issue affects those of us who are still here. I’ve struggled with it myself over the years. I’ve had many moments when all I wanted in the world was five minutes alone in a room with a butcher knife and my cousins’ rapists. But I also faced the moment, worse even than those vengeful ones, when Richardson’s execution was imminent. There was no peace in that impending death for me. I was horrified by the thought of him dying. Yet when his execution was stayed, I raged again — I wanted him dead. And then moments later, I hated myself for my own viciousness. The emotional roller coaster is indescribable.

  The worst thing an oppressor can ever do to a victim is to inspire such hatred within the victim that she becomes capable of the same kind of monstrosities that oppress her. This threat of an alteration in the victim’s very soul is far more terrifying to me than any potential physical brutality. If I allow my revulsion for my cousins’ murderers to dictate a blood lust to me, then the thugs of the world have won. And the Julies and Robins have lost.

  So I don’t desire Richardson’s, Gray’s, or Clemons’s execution — I don’t want to watch these men die — but it’s no feeling of mercy for them that keeps me on this side of the fence. As far as my concern for them goes, I’d be content to know that they had been locked away all those years ago and that they would never get out, that they would never rape or murder anyone again. I’d be equally content if
I found out they all dropped dead in their cells one day. I don’t care what happens to them. Julie and Robin aren’t coming back.

  But the sad fact is that death row keeps these men present in our lives. If Antonio Richardson were serving life without any possibility of parole, Ricki Lake wouldn’t want to interview him. Court TV would have no reason to do a ninety-minute special on him. Nobody would feel sorry for him, and he would not be allowed to cast himself in the role of victim the way he has.

  I can’t argue against the death penalty out of compassion for these men because I haven’t really managed to find any compassion for them yet. Maybe I would if I thought they were sorry — if they expressed any real remorse for what they’ve done. I can only say that capital punishment hasn’t solved anything for me. It hasn’t helped me heal, and I don’t expect it to.

  Yet the traditional rhetoric frustrates me. We’re still putting the focus in the wrong place. Maybe the death penalty is wrong, not just because of the humanitarian issue, but because it further alienates the families who have already suffered so much. Because it rubs salt in the wounds of grief. Because it trivializes the people who should matter the most. Because it allows the murderers the opportunity to wear a badge they don’t deserve — the badge of the victim.

  I don’t want to end this book on an angry note. I’m not all that angry any more. Writing this has allowed me to move past a lot of that. Now I fling it out there in hopes that it will be received the way I intended it — as a love letter to my cousins, as a voice for my brother. Along the way, if it contributes any small change to the way a reader thinks about victims, well, then I’d like to think that Julie and Robin would be proud. After all, who says you can’t change the world?