Books like A Rip in Heaven

“They came into the clearing suddenly and the moon opened up above them, lighting the cracked and broken concrete that stretched like the decaying bones of giants between them and the abandoned Old Chain of Rocks Bridge. Tom [Cummins] stopped dead in his tracks, causing Robin [Kerry] to stumble into his back. He willed himself to move forward but he felt stuck, mesmerized by the menacing old bridge that loomed up before him. The massive steel structure was wild with leaves, and the undergrowth near the base was dense and uninviting. A few enormous hanging vines dangled from the top of the bridge’s skeleton, and they shifted and swayed eerily in the darkness…”- Jeanine Cummins, A Rip in Heaven: A Memoir of Murder and Its Aftermath True crime is a somewhat seedy literary genre. At the bookstore, it is usually tucked away in a far corner, in the same way an old video store hid the adult fare behind strings of beads. It is hard to explain away a fascination with true crime, because it’s typically a deep wallow in the worst kind of depravity trafficked in by humans. The titles tell the tale: A Need to Kill; Sleep My Darlings; The Gainesville Ripper. Not exactly subtle. Not exactly Crime and Punishment. At its best, true crime teaches us something about humanity, and not simply its capacity for evil. At its best, it is about the detective who won’t quit; the family of the victim who won’t forget; the innocent man who won’t stop trying to prove his innocence. At its worst, however, it can be boiled down to this: If it slays, it pays. I am a somewhat-abashed fan of true crime. I read it a lot – more than “a lot” if I’m being honest – but am forever questioning the allure. Part of it, I think, is that it allows people living a safe, stab-free existence to peek at the dark side of the soul. It’s the same compelling need that allows local newscasts to exist. A Rip in Heaven is true crime, but it approaches the genre from a unique angle. Its focus is on a man named Tom Cummins, who was not only the victim of this particular crime, but also spent time as the chief suspect. The twist is that the author, Jeanine Cummins (who has recently found herself in the center of a different kind of storm), is Tom’s sister. Thus, the potentiality is there for a rare kind of intimacy in the narrative, with Cummins given the opportunity to both look in from without, and out from within. The crime at the center of A Rip in Heaven is rather infamous. On April 4, 1991, Tom and his cousins Julie and Robin Kerry went for a late-night walk on the Old Chain of Rocks Bridge outside St. Louis, Missouri. On that bridge they met Marlin Gray, Antonio Richardson, Reginald Clemons, and Daniel Winfrey. The two groups had a conversation and parted ways. A short time later, Gray’s party decided to rob Tom, Julie, and Robin. The robbery escalated immediately to a gang rape and – finally – murder, as Tom, Julie, and Kerry were pushed from the bridge into the swirling river below. Somehow, Tom survived. He pulled himself out of the river, made it to the side of the road, and flagged down help. The police arrived. They took Tom’s statement. They took him downtown for questioning. The questioning got tougher, and tougher, and tougher. Before the new day was through, Tom Cummins was in jail for murder. Accused of killing the two girls because of his incestuous, obsessive love for his cousin Julie. He failed a polygraph, which sometimes happens when you haven’t slept or ate for 30 plus hours and you spend the night fighting for your life in the black waters of the treacherous Mississippi. But when the police get their man, they get their man. And boy, do the police hate admitting they got the wrong man.(I will add, here, that I am friends with a guy whose father worked the Kerry-Cummins case as a detective. Being somewhat nosy, and a former defense attorney, and an imbiber of intoxicating beverages, I have talked to him about this particular incident, and this book. Without getting into details, I will say that there are some disputes from law enforcement over their general portrayal). In this way, A Rip in Heaven is not simply a nightmare of rape and murder, it is the nightmare of the labyrinthine, stacked-deck system of American justice, where single-mindedness and myopia can crack open a case – or steamroll an innocent bystander. These factors could have made an incredibly compelling book. To be fair, A Rip in Heaven is not bad. However, one of its great strengths – the participation of its author – ultimately devolves into a nagging weakness that left me unsatisfied. There is an underlying confusion to the proceedings, with A Rip in Heaven being sold as a memoir but – for long stretches – presenting itself as straight-up reportage.On the plus side, Cummins’s closeness to the story gives us access we otherwise wouldn’t have had. She can tell from firsthand experience how she and her family reacted to the deaths of the cousins and the arrest of her brother. She obviously had entrée to the most important witness in the case: Tom Cummins, the only surviving victim. It is also clear that she kept up with the case over the years, watching the trials, talking to the attorneys, and closely monitoring the toll a criminal case can take on a victim’s family. Cummins is also a skilled writer, with the ability to draw you in and sweep you along. For example, in the immediate aftermath of the murders, and following Tom’s arrest, Cummins does a wonderful job in conveying the tenseness of an interrogation, with its subtle deceits and coercions. Tom’s rapport with [Detectives] Ghrist and Stittum remained friendly and professional throughout the interview. He continued to call them “sir.” An old-fashioned habit, no doubt, but one that had been successfully and irreversibly instilled in him by his father.Criminal Interrogations and Confessions… is this country’s leading manual on conducting police interrogations. It was the textbook most often quoted in Chief Justice Warren’s famous Supreme Court opinion on the Miranda case. And according to that manual, detectives are warned that: “Any suspect who is overly polite, even to the point of repeatedly calling the interrogator ‘sir,’ may be attempting to flatter the interrogator to gain his confidence.”But even if Tom was aware of this fact, it probably wouldn’t have done much to change his behavior because, as far as he was concerned, he was not a suspect…This is gripping material, seamlessly capturing both the big picture (police interrogation tactics generally) and small picture (police interrogation tactics, as applied). Ultimately, though, Cummins’s spandex-tight proximity – and the manner in which she narrates – works against her project’s virtues. The problem begins with Cummins’s decision to tell a personal, partly-autobiographical tale in the third-person. That is, she lays out the story with a sheen of detached objectivity, which gives a certain level of authority to the information she provides. At no point – other than in the brief prologue and brief afterword – does she remind the reader that she is close to this story, indeed, that she is a part of it. Her conceit is taken so far that she refers to herself (rather obnoxiously, I thought) by her childhood nickname of Tink. (I don’t know why this bugged me, but it did; there’s an inappropriately-whimsical whiff of Harper Lee-ish-ness to the name that stood out in these otherwise dour, true-life proceedings). Cummins’s choice to disappear from her own story for long stretches becomes a liability as things progress. Specifically, this occurs around the time that Tom is cleared as a suspect. Following this turn, there are a series of pleas and trials that result in convictions of the four men on the bridge. Compared with the story of Tom’s interrogation, these trials are dealt with relatively briefly. Certainly, there is no great attention to detail, no appreciation of the various nuances of the separate cases. This is rather surprising, since the resultant criminal trials are perhaps the most complex and interesting facet of the whole case. Without getting into the details, of which there are many, it will suffice to say that the convictions of the four defendants are controversial. Nevertheless, Cummins has almost nothing to say about this aspect. Most glaringly, she almost entirely glosses over claims of police abuse made by two of the defendants. Despite the fact that these claims were central to later appeals, Cummins glibly passes over this subject by referring to a St. Louis Post Dispatch headline that read: “Attorney, Mother Say Suspects Were Beaten: Two Young Men Accused Police of Brutality.” The way this bombshell is presented, the reader has no choice but to accept that this headline was a fabrication – or at best an exaggeration – a pitiful attempt at smoke-and-mirrors cooked up by two murderers, the murderers’ families, and their gutless, morally bankrupt attorneys. Perhaps, if Cummins hadn’t been so close to the story, she would’ve realized these claims were likely true. Why? Oh, I don’t know. Maybe because it happened to her brother! Tom Cummins was a young white firefighter from a stable middle class family. He accused the cops of physical and mental abuse. Now, if the cops treated Tom like that, how the hell do you think they treated two black men from the wrong side of the tracks, accused of raping two girls and pushing them off a bridge? This isn’t a political statement, or an anti-law enforcement statement; it is a statement of common sense, as well as a logical deduction drawn from the known facts. This elision is sloppy at best, disingenuous at worst. The mistake is compounded by Cummins’s resolute, superficially neutral presentation. At other points in the book, she withholds evidence of the crime itself, and neglects to inform the reader why the police actually suspected Tom in the first place. However, since she’s adopted this approach, the reader does not suspect a thing. (Aside, for those obsessed: Tom made a statement to the police about his female cousin that, while not inculpatory, was close to maxing out on the creepy scale. This missing fact, as well as others, can be found in an epic legal opinion written by a special master to the Missouri Supreme Court. https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.documentc...). One of the best parts of A Rip in Heaven is Cummins’s concluding chapter. Here, she discards the reportorial ruse and addresses us as a person whose brother lived through a horrible event, and whose cousins died in it. Her insights in this short section are worth far more than the affected indifference and glaring incompleteness that dominates the rest of her book. Cummins’s advantage in writing this book is that she lived the subject matter. For whatever reason, she decided to suppress that. Consequently, Cummins got caught halfway between subjective participant and objective reporter. A Rip in Heaven suffers from the resulting confusing, lacking both journalistic honesty on the one hand, and empathetic feeling on the other.