File this one under “Things That Truly Make Me Want to Hork”:

A few weeks ago, the nutjobs and lawyers in the “Justice for Reggie” camp enthusiastically insisted that they had discovered “new evidence” that might exonerate Reginald Clemons.  See my previous post here for details.  Now, anyone with more than half a dozen functioning braincells probably arrived (rather quickly) at the conclusion that this long-neglected “rape kit” was unlikely to contain any real evidence.  DNA would have to be pretty stubborn to survive a month-long, 297-mile journey in the Mississippi River.  But you know, stranger things have happened.  So, while the conspiracy theorists did their hoopla, my family and I did our best to keep our hopes on the right side of logic and reason.

Then this came out: Surprise!  There is no new evidence.  The Attorney General’s office has proof that Clemons’s lawyers saw all of this evidence as early as 1994, and there is nothing to suggest that they didn’t also see it prior to Clemons’s trial and murder conviction in 1993.  However.  Now that the “Justice for Reggie” camp has started making all kinds of noise about DNA and new evidence, I say: go ahead and test away!  Go crazy with your testing.  Let’s find us some new evidence, people!  Why not?  The Attorney General’s office seems to have similar ideas, making moves toward re-testing any available physical evidence in this case.  Police found a condom on the bridge, right?  Let’s test it!  If Clemons is innocent, he should want that, right?  Oh, but suddenly Clemons’s lawyers are slamming on the brakes.  Suddenly, they are opposing all re-testing unless, as a precondition to any testing, prosecutors agree to DROP THE MURDER CHARGE if they find DNA that belongs to ANY OTHER HUMAN BEING ON THE PLANET who is not Clemons.  I’ll give you a moment to consider the supreme absurdity of such a request.

Now, why the quick change in gears?  Why was the Clemons gang so excited about re-testing a rape kit from Julie?  And why can’t they muster the same enthusiasm about re-testing all available evidence?  Why oppose re-testing the condom?  Because, during Clemons’s confession, when police asked him to pick out photographs of the girls he raped, he only picked out Robin.  Apparently, he never raped Julie.  (In related news, I wonder if that fact will help him, whenever he does meet his Maker - that he raped only one of my beautiful cousins that night).  So now it all starts to make sense.  Of course he wanted any Julie-evidence re-examined.  He knew they wouldn’t find his DNA on her.  But that condom, on the other hand, could be the nail in his overdue coffin.

And now, for a moment of completely indulgent selfishness.  The part about all of this that really makes my skin crawl.  I was a sixteen-year-old girl when that monster of a man raped and killed my cousins, when he tried to kill my brother.  I was physically incapable of uttering the word “RAPE” for about five years.  Instead, I used wildly inappropriate slang and euphamisms, because I literally could not say rape without breaking down.  I can’t even begin to imagine what my brother went through, or continues to go through, not to mention all of the people in the world who were way closer to Julie and Robin than we were - all the people who really, really lost them.  It’s been almost twenty years.  We’ve all patched up and healed ourselves as best we can.  We keep trying to move on.  I’m about to have my second baby, and I’m about to publish my second book.  This is supposed to be a happy, exciting time in my life.  I shouldn’t feel compelled to write blog posts about semen and DNA and the word and the act of rape.  I should NEVER have to think about these things in conjunction with my awesome, absent cousins.  But here we are again.

I always come back to this point: I don’t really want Clemons to die.  Not really, not most days.  But what I do want, what I really want, is just for him and his people to shut the f*ck up already, and to leave my family some peace.  Some of us still have lives to lead, despite the scars he’s left us with.  We’d like to get on with it.

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The Cummins siblings with their significant others, circa 2004:

Jeanine and Tom Cummins at Tom’s firehouse, 2001:

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Jeanine Cummins, Carolyn Turgeon, and Anton Strout, at the Borders in Atlas Park in Glendale, Queens:

This morning, I had the following conversation with the guy from the DEP who came to read my water meter.

Meter guy:  (gesturing to my belly) Wow!  Congratulations.  You must be due any minute now, huh?

Me:  Not really.

MG:  Oh.  I just thought (gesturing to my belly again).  You know, because you’re…

Me:  Massive?

MG:  Well.

Me:  I just carry big.

MG:  Huh.  Well you know, my niece, she’s due at Easter - like three weeks from now.  And (gesturing to my belly again) she looks just exactly like this.

Me:  Yeah.

MG:  So when are you due?

Me:  July.

MG:  WOW!

Me:  I think it would be best if you leave now.

Nineteen years ago next month, Reginald Clemons and his three cohorts raped and murdered my beautiful cousins Julie and Robin Kerry.  They tried to kill my brother Tom, too.  He survived, and it was his brave testimony, and other indisputable evidence, that brought my cousins’ murderers to justice.

Cut to last night: my telephone rang quite late and, as I have always done, ever since April 4, 1991, when greeted by a late night phone call or doorbell, I panicked.  My heartbeat quickened, I started to sweat, and I imagined every possible terror or trauma that could warrant a late-night phone call.  Indeed, it was my brother, calling with news from that long-ago night when our lives changed immediately and forever.  It’s always like this - I don’t know why it’s still surprising.  After two decades, our lives can still be sent spinning with one phone call.  The latest news?  Apparently, a “rape kit” has surfaced, that was never seen before, either by prosecutors or the defense team.

I use quotes to describe the “rape kit” because frankly, I cannot imagine how it might contain physical evidence that would have any bearing (one way or the other) on the legal outcome of the case.  Robin’s body was never found.  Julie spent three weeks in the Mississippi River before she was found, almost 300 miles downriver.  St. Louis medical examiners had to use dental records to identify my vibrant young cousin.  You don’t have to be a forensic scientist to conclude that it’s very unlikely any DNA evidence could have survived those three weeks in the water, and found its way into a rape kit.  But I can hope.

Perhaps the bigger question is: how did this “rape kit” go unnoticed by both prosecutors and defense attorneys for almost twenty years?  It certainly seems astonishing.  And I’m sure that the sad and crazy* people in the “Justice for Reggie” camp are turning cartwheels about now.  New evidence!  New trial!  Maybe.  I think it would be a minor miracle, but hey - I’m Catholic.  I believe in miracles.  But I can guarantee you there is one man who is not jumping for joy right now.  Reginald Clemons, who’s been lying to his mama for twenty years, is sitting in a cell somewhere in Potosi State Penitentiary, shitting himself.  He knows that there is a very slim chance that maybe, just maybe, a tiny drop of DNA did manage to survive those three weeks in the river.  And maybe that tiny drop has, by the grace of God, also managed to survive two decades in cold storage.  He probably also knows that the legal use of DNA technology was so new as to be almost non-existant in early 1993, when he was tried and convicted of murdering Robin and Julie.  He knows that the people who’ve been pointing to the absence of DNA evidence here as proof of his innocence are misguided.  He knows that DNA evidence, should it exist, will not exonerate him.  He knows.  He is guilty.  He knows.  He is a rapist and a killer.  He knows.

Only time will tell now, what will happen next.  My family will hunker down for the inevitable media mayhem and mud-slinging.  We’ll suffer while Julie and Robin are reduced, once again, to technicalities, while the story becomes Clemons’ once more.  We will cringe and seethe at the allegations of racial inequity here.  We will maintain the (rather inconsequential) knowledge that Julie and Robin were Puerto Rican and Lebanese.  We will not argue absurd shades of skin tone, of pigment.  We will thank God for the very susbtantial support and encouragement we receive from the African American community in St. Louis, despite how the media likes to paint the picture of a case divided neatly along racial lines.  And we’ll hang on to our memories and our knowledge and our faith, and we will make it through whatever happens next.  Because after twenty years, what else can you do?

*When I say “sad and crazy” people, I do not mean they are all both sad and crazy.  I mean that they are all either sad (as in the case of his family) or crazy (as in the case of Danny Glover and his ilk).