Flesh Collectors (17 page)

In the end, Jennifer Robinson’s death came down to this:

PATHOLOGIC DIAGNOSES:

I. GUNSHOT WOUND TO THE POSTERIOR ASPECT OF THE HEAD

A. INDETERMINATE RANGE PENETRATING GUNSHOT WOUND

B. LACERATION AND CONTUSION OF THE BRAIN

C. FRACTURE OF THE BASE OF THE SKULL

II. INCIDENTAL FINDINGS

A. POSTMORTEM DECOMPOSITION—MODERATE

B. POSTMORTEM INCISION AND REFLECTION OF THE FRONTAL REGION OF THE SCALP

C. POSTMORTEM EXCISION OF THE MUSCULATURE OF THE RIGHT POSTERIOR CALF

EVIDENCE SUBMITTED: HEART’S BLOOD, BLOOD FOR SEROLOGY; FINGERNAIL CLIPPINGS; VAGINAL, ORAL AND RECTAL SWABS AND SMEARS; BILATERAL FINGERNAILS; TISSUE; BLOOD FOR TOXICOLOGY

CAUSE OF DEATH: GUNSHOT WOUND TO THE LEFT POSTERIOR SCALP MANNER OF DEATH: HOMICIDE

Jon Lawrence’s actions enabled him to enter a very select category of criminals. In
The Illustrated Book of Sexual Records
, author G.L. Simons cites several cases in which sexual pleasure is derived from cannibalism, including Gilles Garnier and Andrea Bichel, who murdered and mutilated young victims and kept pieces of flesh as a souvenirs.

Jonathan Lawrence fit the definition of a sexual cannibal. It gave him pleasure that he was going to eat Jennifer’s calf muscle, whether as a steak or beef jerky. He had deliberately stripped the fat and flesh away so all that was left was the tasty muscle. As for indulging his sudden penchant for having intercourse with a corpse, Lawrence was once again engaging in a rare sexual act—necrophilia.

Jon Lawrence got sexually aroused having sex with a dead body.

According to G.L. Simons, there are only three passages from Grecian antiquity that make reference to necrophilia. Until the middle of the nineteenth century, there was no word to describe the act itself. In 1860, the word “necrophilia” was finally coined by Dr. Joseph Guislain of Ghent. Guislain wrote
Traité sur l’Aliénation Mentale
. A classic text on mental illness, in it he defined necrophilia as the opposite of what a vampire does. Instead of the dead bothering the living, it’s the other way around.

Word of the heinous double murder passed across the Florida Panhandle from TV to radio stations, radio stations to newspapers. Reporters worked their sources to find out about this incredibly sensational case in Santa Rosa County, but they were limited by distance and budget.

Unless a story is
really big
, local media don’t have the budget to allow their reporters to travel, let alone local media in the Panhandle, one of the state’s less affluent areas. And so, the arrests of Rodgers and Lawrence, the modern Leopold and Loeb, went under the radar. Even the Associated Press gave the story little coverage. Perhaps the national media found Lower Alabama, the Redneck Riviera, not worthy of note on the nightly news.

That turned out to be a break for Diane Robinson. She was not inundated with offers to be on
Dateline, 20/20, 48 Hours or
any of the other tabloid TV shows. Amazingly, considering the “cannibalistic” quality to the story, not a line about it appeared in either the
National Enquirer
or the
Star
. Magazines?
Penthouse, Playboy, Maxim
, they all missed it. So the only phone calls and interviews came from local media and, pretty soon, the interest died down.

The bottom line was that the murders might have been the worst thing that could have possibly happened to Santa Rosa. Many a locality that has hosted a sensationalized national murder case has seen business suffer as a result. But fortunately, the county caught a break because the story went under the radar.

And yet with it all, the county and every person in it was shaken to their core by the murders. They were the most horrific crimes in anyone’s experience. Perhaps the only thing comparable in the Panhandle was the depredations of serial killers Ted Bundy and Danny Rolling. Jonathan Lawrence and Jeremiah Rodgers were clearly in that category. Rolling was then on death row; Bundy was dead, having been executed in the electric chair.

Even the state didn’t yet know what would happen to Lawrence and Rodgers. Jennifer was now accounted for, but Justin was still missing.

Chapter 11

May 11, 1998

Despite the DNA tests used frequently in criminal cases, when a suspect is booked, the first thing the cops do is take his fingerprints. Even in this high-tech generation, it all still starts with the decidedly low tech.

Charles Darwin, the father of modern evolution, actually had a connection to the innovation of fingerprinting. It was Sir Francis Galton, his cousin, who back in 1892 published a book called
Fingerprints
. In it, Galton argued scientifically that fingerprints were unique to every person on the planet. Galton estimated that the odds of fingerprints from two individuals being exactly the same were 1 in 64 billion. He laid out a description of the various pattern types, those distinctive swirls, in each individual’s fingerprints. He had been studying fingerprints since 1888.

Galton had made his contribution. He was telling law enforcement all over the world that prints could identify criminals. That still meant the cops had to adapt the technique. Once done, cops used them to catch crooks almost immediately.

A year before Galton published his discovery, Juan Vucetich, an Argentine policeman, in 1891, used Galton’s model to create the first fingerprint files in the world. In 1892, Vucetich became the first police officer in history to use fingerprints for the purposes of positively identifying a criminal.

Nine years later, in 1901, England started to use fingerprints to identify criminals. The idea didn’t spread to American law enforcement until 1903, when New York State’s penal system began to use fingerprints to identify criminals in its prisons. Among them were the legendary Sing Sing [Ossining] and its even more infamous “Big House,” which housed the electric chair. The feds caught on in 1904, when they began to use fingerprints at their federal penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kansas.

When Jeremiah Rodgers entered the booking area for Santa Rosa County, his prints were taken just like every other suspected criminal in the past ninety-four years. It was eight o’clock in the morning and Todd Hand was sipping a hot cup of coffee at his desk in the detective squad room.

“Hey, Todd.”

He looked up. It was Mitch Tomlinson. They chatted for a few minutes and then Hand went out to meet Jeremiah Rodgers in the jail’s booking area. The booking area was a large, windowless room, painted green like the rest of the sheriff’s offices.

Rodgers was stiffening up his fingers involuntarily as the cop tried to print him.

“Relax,” said the cop taking the print.

The cop rolled the pinkie of his left hand on the fingerprint card, which already had nine of its squares filled up with prints. This was the last. When the cop had finished, he politely handed Rodgers a paper towel to wipe the ink off his hands. Then Todd Hand reread him his Miranda rights.

While the initial Miranda warning is legally enough to make anything a suspect subsequently says admissible, it is just as easy for a suspect to deny ever being issued those rights and claim something to the effect of “Your Honor, I confessed and cooperated under duress.” To prevent this from happening, at each stage of the investigative process, detectives are supposed to reissue the Miranda warning.

Todd Hand looked Jeremiah Rodgers over. Rodgers was trying to act cool, detached, but his constantly shifting eyes betrayed his unease. Hand knew that Rodgers had been talking to the Lake County cops.
Let’s just see
, Hand thought,
how much cooperation he’ll extend to me
.

“Look, Jeremiah, we could use some help here,” said Hand, beginning the second round of questioning.

“Sure,” Rodgers replied.

“Good. Thanks. I want you to show us where Justin Livingston is.”

When Diane Robinson had asked him where Jennifer was, Rodgers had clammed up and feigned ignorance. But that was before his arrest for murdering Jennifer. He had little to fall back on now except his charm, which had gotten him far in the past Maybe it would get him even further.

As for Hand, it wasn’t so much that he was trying to trick Rodgers into a statement. He just had to find Justin. He had a child just like Elizabeth Livingston and Diane Robinson did. He knew how they felt. He couldn’t just leave them not knowing the truth.

“I’ll help,” said Rodgers with a smile. “Let’s drive up toward Chumuckla.”

Twenty minutes later, Jeremiah Rodgers was sitting in the front seat of a four-passenger unmarked police car. It was a Chevy, his favorite kind of car. Hand drove. In the rear were his partner Joe McCurdy, and Detective Todd Luce from Lake County. After delivering Rodgers, Luce had decided to stick around and see what happened.

Driving slowly through Pace, Hand passed by the Lawrence compound. Hand asked him about possible “evidence locations.”

“Jon’s toolbox in his truck. Also the abandoned house on the property, especially the last bedroom on the end. There’s a .270-caliber rifle, .380 ammunition, two knives and other stuff,” Rodgers answered.

Slowly Hand tooled the car up toward Chumuckla.

“How many weapons did you use to kill Justin?” Hand asked.

“Two. Two knives,” Rodgers answered.

“Did you guys use rubber gloves?”

“No.”

Good
, thought Hand,
that means if we recover the knives, their prints will be on them
.

Rodgers answered Hand’s questions in that same flat monotone that Lawrence had used to describe Jenny’s murder. It was exactly what to expect from a sociopath who has no conscience to contend with.

“When was Justin killed?”

Rodgers thought for a moment.

“Must have been April ninth, around eleven o’clock at night.”

“Where?”

“The Spencer Field helicopter landing area.”

They had moved the body. That complicated things. If a crime is committed on anything but federal land—county, city, state, town, etc.—the prosecution is handled by the state. There are, however, two ways for federal law to take precedence in a criminal proceeding.

The first way is if the suspect is alleged to have violated federal as opposed to state law. Under ordinary circumstances, murder falls into the category of a state crime, but Rodgers said that Justin had been killed on Spencer Field. That was a federal installation. Any crime that took place on federal property was punishable under federal law.

Actions that violate both state and federal laws may be prosecuted in either or both jurisdictions without violating the constitutional prohibition against double jeopardy. Rodgers and Lawrence were probably looking at federal time if they were convicted for killing Justin, since the action, apparently, was committed on federal land. But right then and there, adjudication was a long way off. First they had to
find
Justin.

Jeremiah Rodgers led Hand and company out into the deepest recesses of the county, out into the canebrake, which whistled softly in the wind. When they got to Sandy Landing, north of Chumuckla, they parked and got out of the car. They made their way down some dusty paths and then suddenly Rodgers stopped and looked down. Hand looked at his watch. It was 10:30
A.M
.

“There,” said Rodgers, pointing.

To Hand and the others, the mound of dirt looked like a possible grave site. But they couldn’t just go digging. That would destroy evidence. They needed to bring in the professionals again. Hand contacted the FDLE and requested that the CSTs come to the site and begin processing what Hand felt certain was their second crime scene—though in order of when the crime actually took place, the first.

One hour and twenty minutes later, at 10:50
A.M.,
FDLE crime scene investigators Laura Rousseau, John Millard and Chuck Richards, accompanied by the medical examiner Dr. Gary Cumberland, arrived at the scene. After exchanging the usual pleasantries, they went to work.

With Hand and the ME supervising, the CSTs began using the trowels to remove the dirt from what they strongly suspected was the grave of Justin Livingston. During this process, several articles and pieces of foreign material were discovered by the CSTs. Then they came across a snake skin boot. Digging around it, they saw that it was attached to a leg.

Crime scene technicians began to photograph the grave from every angle. They slowly excavated. There was no hurry, because the victim was dead. As they dug down farther, they took measurements of the grave and the victim’s placement in it. Photographs were taken for documentation. The trowels bit into the earth and suddenly the earth began to fall away around Justin’s face.

Justin had been in the warm, damp ground for a full month. But rather than having decomposed into some blob of flesh, his face looked instead like some ancient piece of parchment. His eyes were closed; his hair was matted against his skull. The CSTs proceeded to remove any foreign objects from around the body and cataloged them. The excavation continued until they had Justin free from the earth.

To avoid contamination between the victim and the ground, the CSTs placed a white canvas sheet next to the grave. The body was removed and quickly lowered onto the sheet. Briefly the ME examined the body.

The face looked like parchment because partial mummification had taken place. For that to have occurred, the ME knew, the victim had to have been dead for quite a while. Finally the sheet was folded up by the body-removal unit. After the man they figured was Justin Livingston was driven away and taken to Sacred Heart Hospital for autopsy, Hand looked up from the grave, where the CSTs were still working, and saw a commotion.