Editor's note
This is an excerpt from the new Post-Dispatch book, “Mobs, Mayhem & Murder: Tales from the St. Louis Police Beat” by veteran reporter Tim O’Neil.

Today: The Chain of Rocks Killings
Tuesday: The Ghastly
Secret in the Trunk
Wednesday: The Mob War
Thursday: Blinded but Not Defeated




Julie and Robin Kerry, students at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, had used bright white paint two years earlier to spread their words across the narrow concrete roadway of the old Chain of Rocks Bridge, an abandoned span across the Mississippi River nine miles north of downtown. Closed in 1968, it had become a hangout for young people, drifters and troublemakers. The poem, a plea for peace and racial harmony, was near the center of the structure, high above the river's main channel.

Julie was 20, an English major and budding poet. Robin, 19, was a freshman. Both were on the honor roll. They were graduates of Hazelwood East High School and the middle two of the four daughters of Dr. Richard Kerry, a dentist, and Virginia Kerry, who had divorced in 1987. The women lived with their mother in Spanish Lake, barely two miles from the bridge.

Their cousin Tom Cummins, 19, was a rookie firefighter for Gaithersburg, Md., a distant suburb of Washington. They piled into Julie's 10-year-old Chevette compact and drove to the bridge shortly before midnight. To reach it, they had to work through a chain-link fence and underbrush. The isolated bridge was far from safe, but the women were exuberant by nature. They were inspired by the movie, "Dead Poets Society," a tale of headstrong students whose theme was carpe diem — "seize the day." The three went straight through the darkness to the poem.

Four other young people were drawn to the bridge that night. Marlin Gray, 23, of Wentzville, had driven into north St. Louis County with a troubled 15-year-old neighborhood sidekick, Daniel Winfrey. They picked up two other teens, Reginald Clemons, 19, of Northwoods, and Antonio Richardson, 16, of Pine Lawn. The four walked up the bridge a few minutes behind the three cousins. Richardson carried a foot-long flashlight he had stolen from a police officer's house.

On the main span, the two groups met and made small talk. Gray's group bummed Marlboro Lights from the cousins, then headed back to the Missouri bank. Still on the bridge, Gray told his friends, "I feel like hurting someone." They decided upon rape and robbery.

Meeting their prey near the Illinois side, they made more small talk, then followed the cousins back toward Missouri. Just west of the bridge's distinctive sharp turn, the four attacked. Gray, at 6-foot-4 and 200 pounds, knocked down Cummins and jammed a foot onto his neck. Gray said he had a gun. Richardson and Clemons grabbed and raped the sisters; Winfrey sat on Cummins during Gray's turn at rape. The predators shoved the women down a manhole and onto the first concrete pier west of the main pier under the roadway's turn. They ordered Cummins to follow.

Gray headed back toward his car, leaving his young followers to complete the crime. Richardson forced the women to stand at the edge of the pier, then pushed them 60 feet into the water. Richardson turned to Cummins and shouted, "Jump, or..." He jumped.

The Mississippi was in spring rise, only 12 feet below flood stage. A full current swirls around the piers and stays rough as it runs over the shallow, submerged "chain of rocks" just downstream. Foundering, Julie Kerry grabbed Cummins. As they went under, he pulled away from her.

He never saw her again. Cummins made it to the bank near the city waterworks. He stumbled to Riverview Boulevard and flagged down a trucker at 2 a.m. He told detectives his story, but they didn't believe him. With incorrect information on the height of the bridge, they thought he couldn't have survived the fall without more injury. Mindful of a case the year before, when a Boston man falsely accused a black man of murdering his wife, they were suspicious of Cummins' story that three black men and one white man had attacked him and his cousins.

Police interrogated him off and on for 15 hours, accusing him of lying. Cummins suddenly said, "If you say I did it, then I did it." He recanted immediately, but police booked and fingerprinted him. He had been awake for 36 hours.

On April 6, 1991, the Post-Dispatch ran a photograph of a long flashlight with the marking "Horn 1" that police had found on the bridge. Ron Whitehorn, a police officer in North County, called downtown and told detectives that Antonio Richardson had stolen his flashlight. Police picked up Richardson, who admitted he was on the bridge during the attacks and pinned the crimes on his buddies.

Officers arrested the others, who each confessed in self-serving versions. Gray said he had been back at his car smoking marijuana when the others walked up and announced what they had done. But Cummins, the women's cousin, had remembered two of the attackers' names from the small talk. Gray had introduced himself as Marlin from Wentzville.

Cummins' story had been true.

Three weeks after the crime, fishermen near Caruthersville, Mo., 297 river miles downstream from the old bridge, found Julie Kerry's body in the water. After waiting three more weeks for any sign of Robin Kerry, the family held a Mass for the sisters at St. Jerome Catholic Church in Spanish Lake, where they had gone to grade school. Friends remembered the motto on their bedroom wall: "Who says you can't change the world?"

One month later, all four suspects were indicted as adults on charges of murder, rape and robbery. Marlin Gray's trial came first, in October 1992. Prosecutor Nels Moss Jr. played Gray's 48-minute taped statement admitting rape. Winfrey, by then 17, testified for Moss after pleading guilty of second-degree murder. Cummins described the attacks. "I heard her scream as she fell, and I heard a loud splash," he said of his cousin, Julie.

A crying Gray claimed police had beaten the confession out of him. The jury found him guilty and recommended execution.

Clemons' trial followed in February, with the same result. Richardson's came the next month. The jury found him guilty but could not agree on punishment, so Circuit Judge Jack Koehr gave him a death sentence.

Cummins filed suit in federal court, seeking $1.1 million from police. He said they coerced his statements and falsely arrested him. He accepted a confidential settlement in 1995 for what one of his lawyers said was a "substantial" sum.

Richardson's appeal, claiming a harrowing childhood and an IQ that made him borderline for mental retardation, became an international cause for opponents of the death penalty. In 2003, the Missouri Supreme Court reduced his sentence to life, echoing a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that a judge cannot impose a death sentence without a jury recommendation.

In 2004, Cummins' sister, Jeanine Cummins of New York, published a book, "A Rip in Heaven, a Memoir of Murder and its Aftermath." It is a narrative of the crime and the agony it inflicted upon her family, particularly her brother.

Gray went to Missouri's death chamber on Oct. 26, 2005, declaring his execution a "lynching." Winfrey, who drew 30 years, was paroled in June 2007. In 2008, Clemons was awaiting an execution date.

Julie Kerry's grave is in Calvary Cemetery. Robin Kerry's body was never found. Their parents still have homes in North County.

The bridge was opened in 1999 as a public trail. The poem that the Kerry sisters had painted with a friend, Hollee McClain, on the main span west of the state-line marker, has faded away.

toneil@post-dispatch.com | 314-340-8132