Flesh Collectors (20 page)

It seemed that Jon Lawrence had neglected to tell Todd Hand about the actual beginning of their “thrill kill” spree. And since Jeremiah Rodgers was set to talk about a crime that he hadn’t as yet been implicated in, let alone charged with, Hand once again gave him his Miranda rights.

With that done, he asked, “Are you doing this of your own free will?”

“Yes,” Rodgers answered.

“And why are you doing this, Jeremiah?”

“Because I’m telling everything else that happened and this is one of the last things to tell you. It will make a difference; I just want to tell it.”

“Okay,” Hand agreed.

Jeremiah Rodgers then told the cop the story of Leighton Smitherman.

March 29, 1998

It should have been just another weeknight for Leighton Smitherman. An elderly man, he was quietly sitting in his living-room chair watching the evening movie with his wife and daughter. Outside his Pace, Florida, home, it was a quiet night in a residential neighborhood not unlike any other in the Florida Panhandle.

There was one thing out of place, however. A truck that no one noticed was cruising the neighborhood. Inside, Rodgers and Lawrence held an impassioned discussion about whom they should kill, who should be their first victim. They kept up their search and kept cruising.

Slowly they drove by a home where they could see the flickering shadows of a TV set on the opposite wall. The window was open and they could make out a man, with his back to them, watching the television. Lawrence, who was driving, pulled off to a secluded side of the Smitherman property.

Rodgers opened the driver-side door of the truck and slowly got out. In his hand was the Lorcin .380 pistol, a cheap automatic weapon that had taken the place of the traditional single-shot Saturday night special. Selling at gun dealers for $138, the Lorcin .380 handgun regularly tops the ATF list of all guns traced to crime.

Smitherman never heard the sharp
click
of the slide being pulled back as the bullet intended to kill him entered the chamber of the gun. He never heard the sharp
crack
as the pistol fired. What Smitherman did hear was the sound of glass shattering and then suddenly he registered pain in his back. The bullet had actually gone through the window, the back of his easy chair and into his neck, where it had lodged.

Rodgers could hear commotion. He didn’t stop to see if he had succeeded; there was no time. The cops would be there any minute. He ran back to the truck and got in. “Go,” he shouted. Lawrence backed the truck out and drove away like nothing had happened.

Uniformed police from the Santa Rosa County Sheriff’s Office arrived at the same time as the ambulance. While the EMTs attended to Smitherman, who was still alive, the cops canvassed the area, which consisted of a series of low-lying houses and trailers. Nobody saw or heard anything out of the ordinary. Unfortunately, the weather had been dry. There were no significant foot or tire prints outside the house, but police did find, on the lawn in front of the house, a shell casing, which they placed in a plastic sleeve for ballistics analysis.

By the time the police had finished their search, Smitherman had been rushed to the hospital. What had started out as a typical night at home watching TV had turned into a nightmare for Leighton Smitherman. Doctors found the bullet inoperable. To remove it would compromise his life. Smitherman would fare better without an operation.

Within a few days, the entry wound had healed over enough that he could be discharged. There was no bandage, just a Band-Aid. Smitherman could thank God that the criminal had used a gun with a small caliber and a bullet that didn’t do much damage when it went inside his body. Had the bullet been the kind of dumdum employed by many criminals—a hollow-point bullet, for instance—it would literally have exploded on entry, creating greater tissue damage.

“I hope he’s not paralyzed forever,” Jeremiah Rodgers said, concluding his account.

Hand was relieved that Rodgers and Lawrence had not gotten involved with a gang. That would have complicated an already complicated case. But it didn’t make it any easier that they had shot an innocent man.

“That’s everything that did happen. You know, I’m leaving words out, but I honestly can’t remember every word that was said. But that’s the thing that did happen.”

“Okay, I just want to get one more thing straight. Did you bring up the Jennifer topic or did we?”

“I did. On my own.”

“Why?”

“’Cause I feel like a piece of shit for what I did [that’s why]. I took her life, I ruined her life, her family’s life, and after doing all of that, mine don’t seem worth as much, so I don’t care what happens to me in court. I pray to God I get death row. I honestly do.”

Hand had a feeling he might get what he wished for, but he didn’t say that. Instead, he asked, “Would you like to say anything to Jennifer’s family if you could?”

“To Jennifer’s mom, which is the only one that you know I spoke face-to-face with, I just want her to know that I regret so much the decision I made and I’m sorry.”

Sorry doesn’t bring Jennifer back
, thought Hand.

“I wish there was a way I could take it back, which there isn’t. The only thing that I can do is tell the whole story and get my punishment. I can get my full punishment and that’s the only thing I can change.”

Somehow, it sounded more like Jeremiah Rodgers was asking for mercy than admitting to a crime. What he was saying really was not good enough. If the state wanted to get Rodgers in the death chamber, it needed to establish one thing—premeditation.

Premeditation is legally defined as a homicide planned in advance, and is considered more dire than the will to murder, because it persists over a period of time.

“Jeremiah, did you and Jon plan this whole thing out?” Hand asked carefully.

“Yeah.”

A good defense lawyer would argue that the things they brought along the night Jennifer was killed might have been used for other purposes. They just happened to be used in the spontaneous act of killing and burying her. What Hand needed to establish for a murder-one indictment was that Jeremiah Rodgers and Jon Lawrence didn’t just happen to have the stuff along with which to commit murder, but that they took enough time, beforehand, to plan out the crime and brought that stuff along for that reason.

“The plan was him to shoot her,” Rodgers explained, “but however it ended, I’m the one that did it. I can’t explain that part; he just didn’t do it and I did.”

“Did at any point in time, did you or Jon make a list of how you would [kill her]?”

“Jon made a list of the things he would bring.”

Hand remembered the list they had confiscated from Jon’s house during the search. He smiled inwardly at the thought of being scared by the possum on the floor.

“He kinda planned by hisself when I was at home or wherever I was at, and he showed me the list before we even met up with Jennifer and took her out,” Rodgers revealed. “And on the list, as far as I know, was the scalpel, the ice; there was a rope, the knife, I think.”

“Camera?”

“Camera.”

“Who got the film?”

“Jon did.”

“Are there any other pictures other than the ones you had when you turned yourself in?”

Hand was giving Rodgers the benefit of the doubt. He was a fugitive who tried eluding a police dragnet by driving at high speed across an open highway. That hardly qualified as “turning yourself in.” But the subsequent Mexican standoff—with armed cops on one side and Rodgers on the other, threatening to commit suicide and then giving up his gun—was enough so Hand could spin the story now so Rodgers had “given up.”

“Are there any other pictures?” Hand repeated.

“I had all of ’em.” Or so he thought. “I don’t know how [Jon] ended up with the ones that were cut up. I don’t know how he got those.”

“Did you have sex with her after she was dead?”

“No, only when she was alive.”

Hand didn’t know whether to believe him or not. The truth was, they would never know for sure.

“Do you remember taking a picture of Jon in the woods?”

“No, but I’ll be surprised if you tell me there is a picture like that.”

“Okay, when we first talked to you today, we told you we wanted to talk about Justin Livingston. Do you have anything you want to say about him?”

“Yeah, if you don’t mind.”

“Okay, we’ll get another tape.”

While they were changing cassettes, Hand had a chance to think further. What Rodgers didn’t know, because he had little experience with Florida’s criminal-justice system, was that admitting to premeditation was the most seriously aggravating factor, more so than the crime itself. Florida’s system of criminal justice calls for the trial jury to consider all aggravating and mitigating factors and then recommend life or death to the judge, who then pronounces final sentence. Nine times out of ten, the judge goes with the jury’s recommendation.

“The public side of Jon was one of subordination, treated as an inferior, even by his own family,” said Hand. “Jon wanted to be acknowledged, respected, powerful. Rodgers was Jon’s route to that acknowledgment. With him there to talk and complete the social interaction, Jon could achieve what he had always wanted, to be ‘the Man.’ Their relationship was symbiotic. Rodgers relied on Jon to do the dirty work and the crazy shit.”

That was Hand’s operating hypothesis on how the murders were committed. Until he found otherwise, he would go with it.

May 13, 1998, 2:53
P.M
.

“Jeremiah, do you recall that we read you your Miranda rights earlier and you signed a waiver to those rights?” Hand began.

Rodgers had signed the waiver before they began talking about Jennifer. Rodgers said that he remembered signing it—Hand didn’t need to explain to him like he had with Jon—and agreed to talk “on this particular subject.”

“Tell us what you wanted to tell us, and if we have any questions, we’ll stop you along the way, but go ahead and tell us what you have to tell us.”

If Rodgers knew that the more he talked, the more he was putting his head in a noose, he didn’t show it. Hand leaned forward to listen.

“The day all this happened with Justin, me and Jon, everything was on impulse. Nothing was planned at all. We were all sitting around, me, Jon and Justin were sitting around his truck in his yard watching Rick, Jon’s brother, and Roy Lee, Jon’s uncle, work on Rick’s truck. That’s when the idea came up between me and Jon to do what happened to Justin.”

“What was the conversation like between you regarding Justin?”

“There was no talk, but, you know, the three of us were standing around Jon’s truck, he looked at me, and when Justin was looking away, he made a face and took his hand and went across his throat and gave me a questioning eye and I shrugged my shoulders as if I didn’t care. Jon knew what it meant; I knew what it meant.”

Jeremiah Rodgers had to say it.

“What did you mean?”

“It meant that we were gonna take Justin out and do something to him. That wasn’t planned yet.”

According to Rodgers, they just took advantage of the situation. It was a spur-of-the-moment thing when he stabbed Justin after they broke into the helicopter-landing field.

“Okay, while he’s facing down, and when I got my nerve up, I stabbed him [the second time] between the shoulder blades with the entire blade going through. And I left the knife there for a second and he tried to get up and he got to his hands and knees, so I got up and backed away a little bit with my hand still on the knife.”

Then Justin collapsed, and Rodgers pulled the knife out and walked away.

“I turned away from him and I threw the knife down. Jon grabbed the knife.”

But Lawrence didn’t have the nerve right then to do anything.

“He wouldn’t die for a long, long time,” Rodgers continued.

“Was he suffering?” Hand asked quietly.

“Yeah, I think so. I didn’t have it in me to stab him again. I tried to,” but he couldn’t. The boy, though, refused to die. “I thought,
it’s too late to turn back
. I can’t stab him again, so I didn’t know what else to do but take my flannel shirt off. I knew he was still alive until I put my shirt around his neck and twisted it to suffocate any air going to him.”

“Did you twist it real tight?”

“Tight enough. As tight as I could. And when it got twisted all the way, I kept it in my left hand and I just backed away, and then I looked the other way and I just held it.”

He didn’t want to see Justin’s last moments on earth.

“And I held it for, like, three or four minutes; then I let go. Jon came over and knelt down beside him and stabbed him about seventeen times in the back.”

Rodgers then described the whole process of getting rid of the body—from driving the truck through the fence to burying Justin. Hand wanted to know if they ever returned to the grave.

“Yeah, it was a few days to a week later, me and Jon went back out there to see if it’d been messed with. If anybody had found it, and [if] it was the same as when we left it.” But everything was the same; no one had discovered Justin’s final resting place.

“What did you do with the flannel shirt that was used to strangle Justin?”

“Jon kept that. Jon kept everything. He said he was gonna wash the knives. Said he was gonna wash the shirt. I left everything with him.”

“Did you guys have some kind of agreement after you killed Justin as far as what your story was?”

“No, we didn’t plan on any questions coming up.”

Why should they? They had taken care to bury Justin in a particularly secluded spot. Except for the natural anxiety any murderer has of being discovered, there really was no cause to think that it would actually happen.

“We planned on [Justin’s disappearance] being forgotten and that was it.”

“Did anyone else other than you two people have any knowledge of you killing Justin?”

“No.”

“Is there anything else you can remember about it [that] we may not have talked about?”

“That’s beginning to end. Everything that happened, everything exactly,” answered Rodgers, sitting back in his chair.