Chain of Rocks Bridge Murders: Defendants, Confessions, and Outcome

The Chain of Rocks Bridge murders were the April 4, 1991 rapes and killings of sisters Julie and Robin Kerry, thrown from a closed Mississippi River bridge near St. Louis by four young men who also forced the sisters’ cousin, Thomas Cummins, to jump. Cummins survived. Julie’s body was recovered weeks later near Caruthersville, Missouri; Robin’s was never found.¹ One of the four men was executed, one had his death sentence overturned and eventually pleaded guilty, one had his death sentence commuted to life, and one served a reduced sentence in exchange for testifying against the others.

What Happened on the Bridge

Julie Kerry, 20, and Robin Kerry, 19, walked out onto the old Chain of Rocks Bridge on the evening of April 4, 1991, with their cousin Thomas Cummins. Julie wanted to show him a poem she had painted on the structure, a roughly 20-meter piece titled “Do The Right Thing.” The bridge had been closed to vehicles since 1968.²

On the bridge, the three cousins had a brief conversation with four men: Marlin Gray, Reginald Clemons, Antonio Richardson, and Daniel Winfrey. The men then surrounded them. Cummins was ordered to the ground. Both sisters were repeatedly raped. All three victims were forced through a manhole in the bridge deck down to a concrete pier below, where the sisters were pushed into the Mississippi. Cummins was forced to jump and survived the fall.³

Who the Kerry Sisters Were

The sisters were from Spanish Lake, a suburb north of St. Louis. Julie was a college student studying English literature, a poet and songwriter, and a member of Amnesty International who had worked on HIV/AIDS advocacy and charity walks for the homeless. Robin shared her sister’s activism and was known for a more combative approach to social justice. Together, the sisters had raised $600 to provide food and gifts to needy families in St. Louis before their deaths.² Julie was also, her friends later said, a staunch opponent of the death penalty.⁴

The Four Defendants and What Happened to Each

Daniel Winfrey

Winfrey was 15 at the time of the crime. On September 30, 1992, he pleaded guilty to two counts of second-degree murder, two counts of forcible rape, three counts of felonious restraint, and one count of first-degree assault. In exchange for “truthful testimony” against the others, he was sentenced on April 16, 1993, to concurrent terms totaling 30 years.⁵ He was paroled in June 2007; his parole was later revoked, and after a second release and second revocation, he was denied parole in subsequent hearings.⁶

Marlin Gray

Prosecutors regarded Gray as the ringleader. He was convicted in 1992 on two counts of first-degree murder and sentenced to death on December 9, 1992. The Missouri Supreme Court affirmed his conviction in 1994, holding that deliberation could be inferred from his role in planning the robbery and rape, threats made to kill the victims, and his post-crime conduct praising a co-defendant as “brave” for pushing the sisters off the bridge.⁷ The prosecution conceded that Gray was not physically present on the pier when the sisters were pushed; he was convicted under an accomplice liability theory.⁴

Gray was executed by lethal injection at the Eastern Reception, Diagnostic and Correctional Center in Bonne Terre, Missouri, at 12:07 a.m. on October 26, 2005, at age 38.⁸ Amnesty International, Missourians to Abolish the Death Penalty, and U.S. Representative William Lacy Clay Jr. petitioned Governor Matt Blunt for clemency; Blunt denied the petition, and the U.S. Supreme Court rejected Gray’s final appeals on October 25, 2005. Gray maintained his innocence, declined a final meal and a sedative, and used his last words to say, “This is not a death, it is a lynching.”⁴

Antonio Richardson

Richardson was convicted of first-degree murder for the death of Julie Kerry and second-degree murder for the death of Robin Kerry. During the penalty phase, the jury could not reach a unanimous verdict on punishment, and under Missouri law the trial judge then imposed the sentence and chose death.⁹ The Missouri Supreme Court later set that death sentence aside to align with a 2002 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that juries, not judges, must impose death sentences. Richardson’s sentence was commuted to life without the possibility of parole.³

Reginald Clemons

Clemons was convicted of first-degree murder in 1993 and sentenced to death. Rape charges were not tried separately but were used as a sentence enhancer to secure the death penalty.⁶ The Missouri Supreme Court affirmed his conviction in 1997.¹ His case would then continue for two more decades before ending in a plea.

Contested Confessions

The confessions at the heart of the case were disputed from the start. Clemons said police slammed his head against a wall and beat him until he lost consciousness, forcing him to confess. He filed an Internal Affairs complaint and later retracted the confession. Medical records from days after his arrest noted facial swelling and muscle pain.¹

Thomas Cummins made similar allegations. He testified that Lieutenant Steven Jacobsmeyer threatened to “put him in the hospital” and that detectives choked him and slammed his head against a wall during interrogation.¹⁰ Cummins later received a $150,000 settlement from the City of St. Louis for his police brutality claims, paid after the defendants had already been convicted and sentenced.⁴

Cummins himself was a strange and central figure. When he first appeared before police the night of the crime, investigators noted that he had clean, dry, parted hair and no visible injuries, despite having claimed he jumped 80 to 90 feet into the river. His father, Gene Cummins, told police he doubted his son’s account, citing his adolescent history of “elaborate stories.”¹⁰ At the 1993 trial, Cummins nonetheless testified that the defendants participated in a group rape of his cousins and that Richardson pushed the sisters off the bridge, and his account became a cornerstone of the prosecution’s case.

By 2012, Cummins had reversed himself. At an evidentiary hearing that year he testified as a defense witness, saying his original confession had been “coerced and scripted” by St. Louis police. The ACLU noted that Cummins had initially confessed to the crime himself but was never charged.¹¹ DNA evidence from the scene did support his account that the sisters were subjected to a group sexual assault.¹⁰

Prosecutorial Misconduct and the Brady Violation

Nels Moss, a veteran St. Louis prosecutor, tried the case against Clemons, Gray, and Richardson. During the penalty phase of Clemons’s trial, the judge had specifically ordered Moss not to use analogies involving Charles Manson, John Wayne Gacy, or any other “horrible and well-known scenario.” Moss violated the order, telling jurors that Clemons’s lack of a criminal record could also be said of “John Wayne Gacy, Charles Manson, the fellow that killed the seven—” before being cut off. The court found Moss guilty of criminal contempt for “deliberate violation of the court’s order” and fined him $500, but declined to declare a mistrial.¹

A 2003 Center for Public Integrity investigation found that Moss’s conduct had been formally challenged in at least 24 cases. In seven, judges reversed convictions, declared mistrials, or issued other rulings against the prosecution; in the other 17, judges found prosecutorial error but let the proceedings continue. Moss was never publicly sanctioned by his supervisors or the state bar.¹²

The decisive misconduct in the Clemons case, though, was the suppression of evidence. After years of post-conviction litigation, the Missouri Supreme Court appointed Judge Michael Manners as a special master. In a report issued in August 2013, Manners found that prosecutors had withheld evidence that detectives beat Clemons into confessing. A bail investigator named Warren Weeks had observed a significant bruise or bump on Clemons’s face shortly after the police interrogation and documented it on a pretrial release form, but the notation was later scratched out. Manners concluded the suppression was not harmless error, though he did not find that Clemons had established actual innocence.¹³

On November 24, 2015, the Missouri Supreme Court, in an opinion by Chief Justice Patricia Breckenridge, granted Clemons a writ of habeas corpus and vacated his convictions and death sentence. The court held that the state had violated the rule in Brady v. Maryland by deliberately suppressing material evidence favorable to the defense. “In the absence of the undisclosed material evidence,” the court wrote, “the jury’s verdicts are not worthy of confidence.” The state was given 60 days to elect to retry Clemons or see the case dismissed.¹⁴ In January 2016, St. Louis Circuit Attorney Jennifer Joyce announced that Clemons would be retried and that prosecutors would again seek the death penalty. After Joyce left office, the Missouri Attorney General’s office took over.⁶

Race and the Question of Unequal Outcomes

The Kerry sisters were white. Three of the four defendants — Clemons, Gray, and Richardson — were Black. Winfrey, the fourth, was white. It was Winfrey who received the plea deal and a 30-year sentence in exchange for testimony; the three Black defendants were all sentenced to death.¹⁵

The ACLU described the case as “infected by blatant racism,” reporting that Winfrey told another inmate “no one is going to believe a bunch of niggers.” The organization identified failures ranging from racial bias and police brutality to prosecutorial misconduct, a coerced confession, lying witnesses, ineffective defense counsel, and no physical evidence tying Clemons to the killings.¹¹ Amnesty International also campaigned on Clemons’s behalf, urging Missouri to take the death penalty off the table.¹⁶

How the Case Ended

With a retrial scheduled for January 8, 2018, Clemons reached a plea agreement. On December 18, 2017, he pleaded guilty to two counts of second-degree murder, two counts of rape, and one count of first-degree robbery. Prosecutors dropped the possibility of a death sentence, and he was sentenced to five consecutive life terms.¹⁷ Under the terms of the plea, Clemons admitted that he “did nothing to physically prevent the girls from being pushed into the river and stayed at the manhole preventing their escape.” He did not admit to being the person who pushed them.³ The plea closed a case that had lasted more than 26 years. Clemons remains in prison.

The Kerrys’ uncle, Eugene Cummins, spoke about the family’s long experience with the case in 2005, telling reporters of Gray: “What he did hurt my family years ago, but he no longer has the power to hurt my family.”⁴

The Bridge Today

The Chain of Rocks Bridge, a mile-long span that opened in 1929 and once carried Route 66 traffic across the Mississippi, closed to vehicles in 1968 when Interstate 270 opened upstream. The nonprofit Trailnet restored it and reopened it in 1999 as part of the Route 66 Bikeway. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2006 and is open daily to pedestrians and cyclists.¹⁸

1
Justia. State v. Clemons, 946 S.W.2d 206
2
The Guardian. Julie and Robin Kerry – Victims
3
St. Louis Public Radio. Reginald Clemons Pleads Guilty to Chain of Rocks Murders
4
Clark County Prosecuting Attorney. Marlin Gray
5
FindLaw. Winfrey v. Missouri Board of Probation and Parole
6
St. Louis American. Reginald Clemons Pleads Guilty in Chain of Rocks Murder Case
7
vLex. State v. Gray, 887 S.W.2d 369
8
The Marshall Project. Marlin Gray
9
FindLaw. Richardson v. Bowersox
10
St. Louis American. The Mystery of Thomas Cummins Remains
11
ACLU. Reggie Clemons
12
Center for Public Integrity. Breaking the Rules
13
Death Penalty Information Center. Special Master in Missouri Finds Prosecutors Hid Evidence of Coerced Confession
14
vLex. State ex rel. Clemons v. Larkins, 475 S.W.3d 60
15
ACLU. Reggie Clemons and the Parade of Horribles
16
Amnesty International. Reggie Clemons
17
FOX 2 St. Louis. Reginald Clemons to Plead Guilty in Old Chain of Rocks Bridge Case
18
National Park Service. Chain of Rocks Bridge