Jeanine Cummins, "A Rip in Heaven".

It seems that my experience with true crime literature has been focused on accounts by journalists, criminals and law enforcement. Jeanine Cummins is the family member of several victims of crime. "A Rip in Heaven" is her "memoir" of events that happened in St. Louis in 1991. Her family was irrevocably changed as her brother Tom was walking with his two cousins Robin and Julie, and they were accosted by four youths, aged 16-23. The girls were raped, and then all three were pushed off a bridge, and fell 50 feet into the Mississippi River. While Tom survived the fall and reported the incident to police, his cousins were missing and presumed dead. This was only the beginning of a tragic saga that would plague an extended family for years.

As Tom Cummins was taken by St. Louis police for witness interrogation, it quickly became evident to his family that he was considered a suspect in his cousins' deaths. It seemed clear to the detectives that Cummins was lying about the events, and he subsequently failed a lie detector test. The horror of his situation is recounted based upon Tom's memories of his interrogation and short incarceration. Although he was initially charged with two cases of murder, the district prosecutor determined that there wasn't sufficient evidence to hold him. Soon after his release, the actual perpetrators were discovered and imprisoned. This criminal party consisted of three African-Americans and one white male- 23-year old Marlin Gray, 19-year old Reginald Clemons, 16-year old Antonio Richardson, and 15-year old Daniel Winfrey. Somehow the police managed to construct a reasonable account of the crime out of the perps' competing testimonies, and it matched Tom's initial testimony.

While the author provides a detailed description of the events immediately surrounding the crime itself, she seeks to balance the story with remembrances of the victims and the aftermath of the incident. Julie and Robin are presented in highly sentimentalized passages that demonstrate how much Jeanine Cummins and her family revere their memories of Julie and Robin. Some of the details get a bit treacly, but I guess this is only to be expected. The tales of how the family pulled together are heartening, while the sufferings that accompanied these events are harrowing- but enlightening. It is clear that the author intends to redress the balance of attention regarding media attention in criminal affairs. It is perhaps insensitive and unfair that the focus is rarely on victims of crimes and their families. Consumers seem much more intrigued by the criminals themselves.

There were a few things that bothered me about Cummins' account of events. It is probably unavoidable, given the nature of the relationship of the author to the material, that she would exhibit some bias. She freely acknowledges this fact in her prologue. However she states certain beliefs as if they were indisputable facts, while in reality there is plenty of evidence to suggest otherwise. One glaring example is her contention that Antonio Richardson is not mentally retarded. This offender was examined by multiple psychiatrists and social workers, before and after the horrible events, and the overriding consensus seems to be that Richardson is (at least) mildly retarded. Besides her emotion, I wonder what Cummins believes qualifies her to make this diagnosis. She doesn't ever claim to have talked to (or even encountered) the man in person. Her motive for doing so is unclear, since she states a conflicted opposition to the death penalty in the afterword.

More bothersome was Cummins conceit that she could realistically imagine the inner states and conversations of the killers, to the extent of writing in third person perspective about events and interactions that she was not privy to. It's disingenuous to adopt such a literary device, and continue to call your work non-fiction. This choice eroded a lot of the credibility I was initially willing to grant her as a peripheral participant of the events she descibes. It's evident that she wants to tell the story of the victims and their family, yet she falls prey to the common blunder of attempting to reconstruct the inner states and motives of the killers. It seems that an effective exploration of the ways crime impacts victims and their faimilies would do best to avoid getting muddled in such speculation. Cummins' choice to approach the material in this way suggests that this book is more about advocacy than objectivity.