ST. LOUIS • Circuit Attorney Jennifer Joyce said Monday she will retry Reginald Clemons, whose first-degree murder conviction and death sentence in the killing of two young sisters on the Chain of Rocks Bridge were voided by the Missouri Supreme Court in November.
Joyce said she would seek the death penalty again.
Clemons had been fighting his death sentence for the murders in 1991 of Julie Kerry, 20, and Robin Kerry, 19. In a 4-3 decision written by Chief Justice Patricia Breckenridge, the state’s high court in November sent the case back to circuit court, giving Joyce 60 days to refile charges.
Joyce filed charges of first-degree murder, rape and robbery.
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“It’s our belief that Mr. Clemons was a participant in these murders and rapes and robbery,” she said in an interview. “So it’s our job to proceed if we have the evidence, and we believe we do.”
She said modern DNA testing has corroborated the state’s cases against Clemons and two other men convicted of murder in the case, Marlin Gray and Antonio Richardson.
The testing was completed in 2011 as part of the examination of the case by a special master appointed by the state Supreme Court. DNA consistent with the Kerry sisters was found on a condom discarded at the scene. And DNA consistent with the Kerrys, Gray and Clemons was found on Gray’s pants.
Joyce said two counts of rape had been filed against Clemons along with the original murder charges, but at the time the law prohibited prosecutors from trying him for both capital murder and rape.
The original suspect had been the Kerry sisters’ cousin, Thomas Cummins, then 19, of Maryland, who was visiting their family in Spanish Lake and had made the nighttime visit to the abandoned Mississippi River span with them. He confessed during a police interrogation but later said his statement was coerced. In 1995, Cummins received a $150,000 settlement from St. Louis police on his claims that a false confession was beaten out of him.
Joyce said the DNA analysis did not find Cummins’ DNA on any of the evidence. After the women were raped, they and their cousin were forced to jump from the bridge. Only Cummins survived.
A flashlight at the scene led investigators to Antonio Richardson, who incriminated Gray, Clemons and Daniel Winfrey. Winfrey testified in exchange for a 30-year term and has been paroled. The others were sentenced to death.
Gray was executed; Richardson’s penalty was later changed to life without parole. Clemons was weeks from being executed in June 2009 when the 8th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals blocked it. The Missouri Supreme Court then agreed to consider the case.
After his arrest, Clemons confessed to raping one of the sisters, but, as with Cummins, later claimed his confession had been coerced.
Ginny Kerry, the mother of the victims, said in an interview that prosecutors were “doing what we want them to do.”
“We all met with the Circuit Attorney’s Office weeks ago, and we want the new trial to go on,” she said. “Why would we want him being set free for killing my kids? He’s guilty, he’s always been guilty, and he knows he’s guilty.”
Clemons’ attorney, Joshua Levine, with the Simpson Thacher & Bartlett law firm in New York, said, “We’re disappointed that the circuit attorney has decided to pursue a retrial, but we have no further comment at this time.”
The Supreme Court’s decision to throw out the murder conviction cited the findings of Michael Manners, a retired judge appointed by the state’s highest court as special master to review the case.
Manners found that Clemons had failed to prove his innocence, but concluded that St. Louis prosecutors wrongly suppressed evidence. He also found that detectives had beaten Clemons into confessing to the crimes.
Manners said in his report that the jury might never have been allowed to hear Clemon’s taped confession had officials disclosed a probation officer’s statement that he saw injuries to Clemons’ face after an interrogation,.
The probation officer also claimed that one of his supervisors and the lead prosecutor in the case attempted to convince him to change his written report of the injury. He refused, but the report was altered anyway to remove any reference of it.
Clemons remains in prison on a 15-year sentence for his conviction in 2007 of assaulting a Department of Corrections employee.