So long and sorry, darling
I was counting to forever
And never even got to ten
So long and sorry, darling
When we found a rip in heaven
We should have just ascended then
~ ‘Til Tuesday
On April 4, 1991, author Jeanine Cummins’ nineteen-year-old brother Tom and their similarly aged cousins Julie and Robin Kerry went for a late-night walk on the Old Chain of Rocks Bridge outside St. Louis, Missouri to look at the graffiti. While there, they were the victims of random and horrific violence, and as one can imagine, this permanently altered the course of the lives of the entire Cummins family. A Rip in Heaven is Jeanine Cummins’ effort to relay her family’s side of the story – she makes the valid point that our true crime obsessed society focusses much more on perpetrators than victims – and not only does she tell a harrowing story of the attack itself, but its aftermath – missteps and manipulation by the police and media – is a gut-wrenching tale in its own right. From the prologue, Cummins promises thoroughness without pretending to be unbiased (fair enough), and especially for what it commemorates of the bright and beautiful souls of Julie and Robin Kerry, I am glad that this exists.
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 stopped dead in his tracks, causing Robin 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.
To get the negative out of the way: as other reviewers have noted, it was an odd choice for Cummins to have written this nonfiction narrative in an omniscient third person – it is emotionally distancing and doesn’t reinforce the veracity – and it was even more odd for her to refer to herself, exclusively, by her cutesy family nickname, “Tink”. I don’t want to go over the details of the attack, immediate aftermath, or court cases here, but do want to note how chilling it seems that the sisters may have anticipated their own early deaths: Robin coming right out and telling their mom what she would want at her funeral if she were to die young; the poet, Julie, having written these words:
My dreams take me down
To rocks and the cold current below
And I have lost myself
In the water’s wailing drone
That lulls me to sleep
These two young social activist women do sound remarkable and I did see the irony in their families hoping for the death penalty for their killers, while they themselves had been members of Amnesty International (yet, like Cummins, I found it distasteful when AI members of the chapter from their own university held a “die in” in support of their killers; how easily we lose sight of the real victims.) I also want to note that Cummins sounds fair in her descriptions of the four perpetrators: for the most part, theirs were not happy, supported childhoods.
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.
I am also bemused by the fact that Cummins followed this up with American Dirt: what would have prompted her to write about people desperate to get into an America that also threatens random violence, police malfeasance, and life-ruining tabloid media? (And that’s not an attack on the US, I am genuinely curious as to why this author wrote that next?) Also: as this book ends before the completion of the trials and their appeals, I was interested to read those results on Wikipedia. Ultimately: this was very well written, unbelievably heart-wrenching and thoughtfully composed, and I am grateful for the victim-forward balance this brings to the true crime genre.
Enjoyed by audiobook while recovering, face down, from retina reattachment eye surgery
