Flesh Collectors (16 page)
Authors: Fred Rosen
Hand was a rare sort of cop. It wasn’t enough to just put the evidence together. He knew that most homicide cases are not “whodunits” but “whydunits.” What was the motive and what made Jon Lawrence tick? He really needed to know in order to understand.
“Jon, did someone remove her clothing or was her clothing removed before she was shot?”
“I think her clothes were still on her.”
“Who removed her clothing after she was shot?”
“Let’s see, Jeremiah took her shirt off and bra off her. I think her pants were already down some, so I uncovered her right leg and just cut her calf off.”
There it was again! Lawrence was copping once more to mutilating Jennifer’s corpse by cutting the calf muscle out of her body. It was too brutal to be imagined, but he was freely admitting his perversion. As soon as Rodgers’s initial statements about Lawrence cutting out the girl’s calf muscle were relayed to the police, Hand knew why. It was that moment where everything made sense. He remembered the problems Jon Lawrence’s mother had had with her leg. In some sick way, Lawrence was trying to help her.
What struck Hand, though, was that Lawrence didn’t think there was anything perverted about it. His tone when describing what he did to her body was the same as a rational person describing what they had for lunch yesterday afternoon.
“And what did you do with the clothing?”
“We burned it.”
“Why’d you cut [the calf] off?”
“I don’t know.”
“When you cut it off, what’d you do with it?”
He needed to go over this again. Criminals add more details every time they repeat their story and therefore more of the truth.
“I put it in a ZipLoc bag and put it in some ice and stuck it in a cooler and took it home.”
“Why did you take it home?”
Hand knew they had discussed this before. But he needed to know more.
“To see if it was anything like deer meat.”
“You were gonna eat it?” Hand asked, being careful not to show his disgust.
“Yes. We were gonna make two little pieces of steak and then the other was like deer jerky. Just to see if it tasted the same.”
“Where’s the flesh now?” Hand asked.
“In the refrigerator,” Lawrence replied.
“The cut on the girl’s forehead, how did it get there?”
“Jeremiah made a little cut on her forehead with a scalpel. Just to see what the skull part looked like behind her forehead.”
Hand remembered a description of one of the pictures Elijah Waldrop had given police.
“Who stuck the knife between Jennifer’s legs after she was dead?”
“Jeremiah. He took a picture.”
May 11, 1998
Jennifer Robinson had been missing for four days. Her family was still holding out hope, though. Diane Robinson could barely function. Elizabeth Livingston was a little better off and managed to get out of the house to get some air.
“We went up to the Burger King for dinner,” Elizabeth recalled, “and, while there, were all set to tack up some new posters of Justin, just like we had before. Only this time, I saw this flyer someone had already put up. There was this picture of the girl, a young girl with flaming red hair. She had come up missing and the last persons she had been seen with were Rodgers and Lawrence.
“I said to a friend, ‘Those two are the connection. But where are Justin and Jenny Robinson? What did they do with them?’ Normally, my short term memory isn’t that good, but I memorized that phone number. When I got home, I dialed it. The person that answered said that the mother couldn’t come to the phone then. The police had found a body and they thought it might be Jenny.”
Like everything that happened in Pace, Diane found out about her daughter through the grapevine, one person talking to another, the same way Southerners have been doing it for generations.
“Lisa Johnson’s mother worked with my sister at a place around here called Vanity Fair for fifteen years,” Diane remembered. “My sister went over to Lisa Johnson’s house to ask her if she knew what had happened to Jenny. Lisa’s mom told her, ‘Jenny is dead. They found her body.’
“When she got back, I saw my sister get out of the car. I could tell from her expression what she was going to say, so I turned away. My dad told me my son passed out in the front yard. The shock was too much to handle.”
Diane recalled someone telling her that they had found the body and needed help identifying it. It was Detective Janet Philips of the sheriff’s department who had gone to the Robinson home to deliver the bad news. She asked if Diane had Jenny’s picture to help with identification and if she had any distinguishing marks or scars.
“I immediately thought of the scar on Jenny’s leg. When Jenny had been fifteen, her boyfriend had a dog that didn’t like her. It was a little bulldog. It bit her on the right calf and left a scar.”
Maybe Philips wrote it down, maybe not. Made no difference. Jennifer’s right calf no longer existed, except as a pile of meat in a Ziploc bag nestled in Jon Lawrence’s freezer.
Hearing the news from Philips that Jenny was dead, Diane felt like she had been broken into a million pieces. “Jenny was extremely tenderhearted,” she said, crying. “You never had to spank her, just get on to her and she’d fall apart Animals—any stray—she had to feed.”
It had taken eighteen hard years to raise her and she had done a damn good job—and just like that, Jennifer was gone. Diane felt pain like she never had in her life. “It’s like you are busted in a million pieces. You can’t get antibiotics for it. Nothing I can do but take it. The pain is so tremendous.”
“At the request of the Santa Rosa County Sheriff’s Office under the auspices of the Medical Examiner’s Office of the First Judicial District of Florida, an autopsy is performed upon the body identified as Jennifer Robinson,” Jenny’s autopsy report began.
Jennifer Robinson’s autopsy was conducted at Sacred Heart Hospital. The body was photographed from all angles on the slab. What remained of her clothing was taken off and bagged for evidence. So were fingernail clippings, swabs from all her body cavities, scalp and pubic hair samples. The pubic swabs would confirm Jennifer’s most recent sexual contact. What wouldn’t be clear is which contact took place premortem or postmortem.
She was measured at 5 feet 3½ inches and weighed in on the autopsy table at 144 pounds. Perfectly normal. On the other hand, there was the matter of Jenny’s scalp. Her fourteen-to-fifteen-inch long, blondish red hair when brushed upward no longer covered what was clearly a postmortem incision to her forehead.
“This is characterized,” the autopsy report continued, “by a transverse incision measuring 8¾ inches in length which extends to the underlying bony skull.”
After she died, Rodgers dug his scalpel into Jenny’s forehead. It went in deep enough to impact with her skull. Then came the really grisly stuff.
“A right angle incision up the mid aspect of the frontal region for a distance of 3¼ inches is present with an undermining of the skin and reflection of the scalp toward both the left superior and right superior direction.”
Rodgers had plunged the knife so deep in her head that Jennifer Robinson’s scalp was cut and peeled back over her skull. It was a particularly gruesome piece of mutilation.
Further examination showed “marked postmortem decomposition of the head and face characterized by myiasis.” The latter was a nice, clinical way to describe what was really going on. “There is complete destruction of the soft tissue of the eyes.”
Maggot larvae had made a home in Jenny’s tissues and were eating it up. Regarding the buildup of gases in her body, the report noted that the abdomen was “slightly protuberant. There is a postmortem puncture of the right upper quadrant of the abdomen performed at the scene for body temperature measurement.”
Then the medical examiner (ME) Dr. Cumberland, got to the stuff that centered on the lower extremities or legs. Once again, the extensive damage to Jennifer’s body, the horrific mutilation yielded to less sensational clinical language.
“The right lower leg is the site of postmortem incision and excision. Extending from just below the knee-cap to just above the ankle from a distance located 6¾ inches above the base of the right heel to 19 inches above the right heel, there is a complete excision of skin and skeletal muscle to the underlying tibia and fibula.”
Lawrence had done such a good job of cutting out Jennifer’s calf muscle that nothing remained from the knee down to the calf, except the two bones that made up that part of the anatomy. As for her upper extremities, ants had scratched her arms and forearms. They had also damaged her back. Jenny, who had taken so much pride in her nails, probably would have been proud that the ME wrote that they were “well manicured.”
While the mutilation appeared to be the worst part of the crime, it wasn’t, in fact. It was certainly indicative of the criminals’ perverse pleasures, but mutilating a corpse or moving it, as they had done in both murders, was actually a relatively minor crime. What was more relevant was the method of death and the cause of death. These are not the same thing.
For instance, if someone threw a blood clot and died from it, the cause of death would be a blood clot to the brain, but unless the autopsy showed how that blood clot formed and why, then the method of death has to be listed as unknown. In Jennifer’s case, the bullet wound was the clincher.
The ME looked at the ⅜-inch-wide gunshot wound behind her left ear. The bullet had traveled into Jennifer’s skull, where it was “recovered in the right frontal region of the brain 2½ inches below the vertex of the skull and 3¼ inches to the right of the midline.” What was most telling was the description of the wound track—that is, the way the bullet traveled once it entered the body:
“The gunshot wound track is from back to front, left to right and inferior to superior.”
In clinical language, the ME was stating that Jennifer Robinson had been shot from behind. She never knew what hit her. A further examination of the skull showed no evidence of bludgeoning, and further examination of her body showed nothing out of the ordinary. All of her organs were normal. There was no evidence of gunshot wounds or any other physical trauma anywhere else on the body. Most important for any future prosecutions for either Lawrence or Rodgers was this note about her genitalia:
“The vaginal vault is atraumatic.”
That meant that there was no evidence that Jennifer had been raped. Whatever sex she had—and it wouldn’t be until the vaginal swabs were analyzed that this would be confirmed—was consensual or apparently consensual. The latter could have been the case if she was drugged. A “tox” screen of her blood would tell that tale. Initially, though, it did not appear that, in life anyway, rape was a component of this crime.
“In particular, no evidence of traumatic or foreign body type perforation of the vaginal vault wall is noted.”
That meant that the photograph Elijah Waldrop had been shown by Rodgers, of a knife sticking up from Jennifer’s vagina, was a posed shot. No one had stabbed her. One of the murderers had simply placed the knife between her thighs. There being no evidence of cuts, the knife was held there simply by pushing her legs together tightly.
“No lesions in the esophagus.”
Nobody had stuffed anything down her throat. Killers sometimes get their kicks doing that. The rest of the autopsy proved what Diane Robinson and her family already knew: Jennifer was a healthy girl who should have had a long future ahead of her. It was all there in the autopsy report:
The heart weighs 250 grams and has a normal shape.
