Flesh Collectors (21 page)

“Do you want to talk about the man sitting in the chair? Would you like to go into that now?”

“Yeah.”

They took a break for a few minutes to change tapes. Rodgers had certainly said enough to be charged with murder in the first degree in the death of Jennifer Robinson. Justin Livingston might be another matter.

There were contradictory parts of his statement in reference to Justin’s death. He claimed that nothing was planned out, and he claimed that more than once. Yet some of his versions of events seemed to show premeditation.

It would be up to the prosecutor to ultimately determine the charges.

According to ex-wife Diane, Sam Robinson was behind bars at the time of Jennifer’s murder.

“The day after Jenny’s body was found, he was arrested for a parole violation. He was behind bars. So he called us from jail and said that [law enforcement] would escort him to the funeral if our family paid his expenses. He said he was very anxious to come. Then apparently, he went in front of a judge and the judge allowed him to leave on his own recognizance,” Diane remembered.

But Sam Robinson never showed up at his daughter’s funeral.

“He never sent cards or flowers.”

No, Jenny was buried without her biological father being present. Where he was, no one knows. “I haven’t seen him since,” Diane continued. As Jenny’s coffin was being lowered into the ground, a weeping Diane Robinson promised herself that she would not judge Rodgers and Lawrence for their actions.

There was a trial to come and who knew how it would turn out? No one knows what juries will do, even in cases of murders as heinous as Justin Livingston’s and Jenny Robinson’s. Still, Diane Robinson was not about to judge them. Let the jury do that. Besides, if she wanted a death sentence and they only got life in prison, then what? Would she be bitter and disappointed the rest of her life?

No, she wasn’t going to put herself into that situation. As much as it hurt, she would be realistic. If the jury gave them a life sentence, she would live with that. If they got death, that was even better because they could never get out on the street again and hurt anyone else. But one thing she was never going to be was the mother of the victim who suddenly shows up at the last minute before execution and forgives her daughter’s killers.

“If I’m well and alive and they do get executed, I plan to show up for it,” said Diane Robinson. “I’m not saying I will watch every minute of their death, but what I am saying is that I will stand there so they can see my face, and as they look at my face, they will think of Jenny. And they will know why they are dying. I just want my presence to stand as silent witness to my daughter’s life.”

But that wish assumed that both defendants would be convicted. Working in the state’s favor was that Florida does not allow a defense of diminished capacity at trial. Therefore, their psychiatric problems could not be used to mount a defense, but they could be used to proffer sympathy from the jury, which sometimes leads to a lesser verdict.

Plus, during the penalty phase, when the jury and judge decided between life and death, all mitigators, the factors in the defendants’ life that go toward explaining their actions and behaviors, could be used, including psychiatric background. What it all came down to was, despite the defendants’ statements, despite the forensic materials that were being gathered for trial, you just never knew in the end what would happen at trial and sentencing.

Part Three

Chapter 14

May 8, 1998

No one has to tell prosecutors in the state of Florida that if they come across a particularly heinous case of murder, their first job is to figure out if the crime is cold and calculated. If it is, there’s a good chance the jury will be death penalty qualified. That means, when the jury is questioned during the voir dire phase prior to trial, they will be asked this question by the prosecutor: “If in the event you find the defendant guilty of murder in the first degree, would you be capable of voting for the death penalty?”

An assent means consideration to be on the jury. A denial means you hit the road. As the chief felony assistant state’s attorney of Santa Rosa County, John Molchan had much experience in this phase of the law.

Unlike wealthier counties, like Hillsborough to the south, which takes in Tampa and has a huge modern complex, the state attorney’s office for Santa Rosa County is housed in a modest redbrick building, a converted century-old bank, which belies the power of some within to decide life and death.

Molchan’s black mustache and black eyebrows give him the sharp good looks of a hero in a film noir. His eyes are just as intensely dark, the kind of guy who wants to see justice done. On the bookcase across from him are pictures of him in an air force flight uniform. He had served, but as a JAG. The flight uniform was just play.

The phone rang and Pat Collier picked it up. She was Molchan’s secretary and worked in the connecting office. She instantly knew the voice on the other end of the line. “Hi, honey.” It was her husband, Steve Collier, captain of the county’s police force.

“It’s Steve on line one, John,” Pat shouted in.

Next door, Molchan picked up the battered black phone on his desk.

“Hi, Steve, what’s up?” said John.

I hope it’s just a social call
, thought Molchan. It was Friday and things had been unusually busy lately; he could use a weekend off.

“Hi, John. Listen, the Justin Livingston missing-persons case is active. Todd Hand has developed some leads.”

A short while later, Hand called Molchan. “He told me this wild story about Polaroid pictures and a girl being murdered.”
It always happens on a Friday
, Molchan thought.

On the first floor of the Santa Rosa County State’s Attorney’s Office, the receptionist is housed in an office behind a large sheet of bulletproof glass. At three o’clock in the afternoon, she looked up. Through her glass partition, she saw Todd Hand walking through the front door. He was accompanied by a guy who couldn’t be more than twenty-one. The guy kept his head down. The receptionist recognized Hand and waved him upstairs.

At the top of the stairs, Hand and his charge walked down a narrow corridor, then cut into an office on the right. Pam Collier greeted him. “Hi, Todd, John’s waiting for you.” She noted the surly-looking fellow by his side. “This is Jon Lawrence,” said Hand.

A minute later, Molchan looked up as Hand came through the door. Molchan stood up to his full height of six feet two inches. His broad frame seemed to fill the entire space behind his walnut desk. That’s when he saw the young man with Hand was handcuffed. He looked familiar. Hand had the kid wait outside, guarded by a deputy.

Hand took out the cut-up Polaroids and placed them on Molchan’s desk. While Lawrence cooled his heels outside, Molchan looked over the pictures and listened to Hand’s crazy story. At the end, Molchan sat down and looked out the window, at the Blackwater River. A bridge spanned the river. Beyond that, the area got less and less populated until you were up in the hills.

“Arrest Lawrence as a principal for murder,” Molchan finally said. “Take him out to the scene, if you can get him to show you. Oh, Todd, one more thing.”

Hand stopped in the doorway.

“What?”

“I know him—Jon Lawrence. I’m the one that put him in jail.”

John Molchan had come to Santa Rosa County in 1989. At that time, he was a felony division assistant taking on whatever felony cases his bosses gave him. In 1993, he got assigned the Lawrence “hate crime.”

“It was kind of a very strange kind of crime,” Molchan remembers. “Jon was one of those individuals you looked at and just wondered what was he about. I treated it very seriously.”

Though Jon Lawrence was a juvenile, Molchan pushed for hard time in the state penitentiary. The judge gave it to him. “But I just didn’t know what to do with the kid. It troubled me because I knew he was going to get out.”

What Molchan saw in Lawrence was a very troubled youth, a young man with hate in his heart, who needed to be isolated from society. Molchan wasn’t a social worker; he was a prosecutor. But he was fair. It never occurred to Molchan that he hadn’t given Jon Lawrence a chance. If anything, he had actually given Lawrence a chance to surmount his emotional ills.

Despite Chattahoochee’s former dicey reputation, it had become a respected institution in treating the mentally ill. Lawrence had undergone therapy and had been medicated; the doctors had tried everything to mediate his psychoses. And they failed.

Molchan never doubted Hand’s theory that Rodgers and Lawrence had a symbiotic relationship that enabled them to do together what they could never do alone. From the previous case, he knew Lawrence to be a strange guy: “But I did not at any time think he would do something like
this.
”

The prosecutor went back to the other murder case he was working on. Molchan was married with children. Since he only lived two miles away from his office, it was easy for him to get back and forth when he had a particularly busy agenda, as he did that weekend. There was a new shooting that Friday night, where an old man was robbed and shot. On Saturday morning, Molchan had come into the office to begin his paperwork on the shooting when he got a call from Todd Hand.

“We found her,” said Hand over the phone. “We found Jennifer Robinson.”

Hand said that Lawrence had given a statement and had taken them to the Robinson crime scene. Molchan went out after the CSTs had been given a chance to go through the area. Hand and McCurdy gave him a tour of the crime scene. What Molchan was looking for, though, were not clues to build a case. Rather, the race to get Rodgers and Lawrence into the death chamber had begun.

“I can see things for the death penalty,” said Molchan about viewing a crime scene. If the murder looks cold and calculated, serious consideration is given to death. Looking over the crime scene, what struck him was how similarly everyone was reacting. These were professionals. They couldn’t look away. They
had
to look.

The death pros—the CSTs, the EMTs, the cops—all of them looked grim; some looked shocked. Even the hardened death pros felt nausea in their stomachs when they saw Jennifer’s scalp and how it had been cut back from her skull.

The rest of that weekend passed slowly. Molchan remembered he was at the office all day Saturday and didn’t get home till midnight, Sunday morning, May 10. It was Mother’s Day, and he had remembered. Though he had wanted to get something better, he had thoughtfully brought home flowers and a card for his wife, who was already asleep. He put them aside and took off his slacks and polo shirt. He was tired and it was hot and humid.

The next day, Sunday, Mother’s Day, he took off from work to spend with his family. By Monday, they had Rodgers in custody. As to be expected, he had blamed everything on Lawrence. What had started out as a random shooting, the archetypal random act of violence, had literally turned into a federal case. Since Justin’s murder had occurred on naval property, a government reservation, it was a federal crime. Molchan called Michelle Heldmeyer, assistant United States attorney for the Northern District of Florida.

The U.S. attorney is the prosecuting body of the United States Attorney General’s Office. U.S. attorneys are assigned to each state to handle federal prosecutions. Because of its vast size, Florida had three of these offices covering the southern, middle and northern districts of Florida. The northern district office is based in Tallahassee. Heldmeyer worked out of the satellite office across the bay in Pensacola. She would take care of the prosecution of Jon Lawrence and Jeremiah Rodgers for the Justin Livingston homicide. Her first decision was whether or not to seek the death penalty.

The attorney general’s office decided to indict the duo on capital-murder charges while holding off the decision whether to actually seek the death penalty or not. It just so happened that on January 26, 1998, just a few months before the murder of Justin Livingston, the federal government had implemented changes to its capital-murder statute:

18 USC Sec. 3005

01/26/98

TITLE 18 - CRIMES AND CRIMINAL PROCEDURE

PART II - CRIMINAL PROCEDURE

CHAPTER 201 - GENERAL PROVISIONS

HEADING

Sec. 3005. Counsel and witnesses in capital cases

STATUTE

Whoever is indicted for treason or other capital crime shall be allowed to make his full defense by counsel; and the court before which the defendant is to be tried, or a judge thereof, shall promptly, upon the defendant’s request, assign 2 such counsel, of whom at least I shall be learned in the law applicable to capital cases, and who shall have free access to the accused at all reasonable hours.

They had been indicted for a capital crime—the murder of Justin Livingston on a federal reservation. Under the new law, Rodgers and Lawrence were guaranteed not one but two attorneys, “one of whom must be learned in the law applicable to capital cases.” Therefore, one of the attorneys had to be a death penalty specialist. That only left who got the job to defend them in federal court.

In 1995, the board of directors of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL) voted to fund a position of death penalty resource specialist within the highly acclaimed Southern Center for Human Rights. The position’s primary responsibility was to coordinate greater involvement of NACDL members in the fight against the death penalty and on behalf of efforts to bring about its abolition.

Part of the resource specialist’s responsibilities was to recruit NACDL members to respond to the needs for representation in capital cases at the trial, appellate and postconviction levels. Within the NACDL, this became known as the Federal Death Penalty Resource Counsel Project. It was from this pool of defense attorneys who specialized in death penalty cases that Rodgers’s and Lawrence’s lawyers for the federal end of their cases would come.