Do you believe in intuition? How about fate? Whatever you call it, 19-year-old Robin had it.
Robin told her mother for the first time when she was 9 years old that she would die young. She wanted to talk to her mother about what she hoped her funeral would be like. Her mother refused.
When Robin was 16, her mother listened to her wishes out of respect, hating the conversation. Three years later, the girl’s mother was glad she knew what her daughter wanted. She used Robin’s wishes to memorialize she and her older sister, Julie, after they were murdered.
I’ve always loved true crime novels, but I didn’t think I was going to be able to finish reading about the crime depicted in A Rip in Heaven: A Memoir of Murder And Its Aftermath by Jeanine Cummins.
I’m not sure if I struggled with the book because of the vivid storytelling or the fact that the victims were teenagers who were innocent and naive to what was about to happen to them. Either way, Cummins’s story of her family’s brutal, senseless ordeal left me sick to my stomach.
The murder occurred April 4, 1991 during a family vacation to St. Louis, Mo. Tom, 19, and his two female cousins were attacked while walking on the abandoned Old Chain of Rocks Bridge. The girls were raped, and the four assailants pushed the three cousins off of the bridge. Tom was the only survivor, and the first suspect.
The majority of the memoir, which is written by Tom Cummins’s sister, is about her family’s struggle to survive the crime and its aftermath.
The book makes you question how often the justice system fails, how people can disregard one another so easily and how many times the media does more harm than good. Perhaps more than anything, the book makes the reader question your beliefs in fate.
