Flesh Collectors (22 page)

While Heldmeyer and her associates contemplated what to do, Lawrence and Rodgers were about to be split up. Because their statements were contradictory, in which they made the other chiefly responsible for the murders, there was no choice but to try them separately. As to whether or not the state would seek the death penalty, that was left up to the homicide committee in the state’s attorney’s office in Santa Rosa County. Composed of upper-echelon personnel from that office, including Molchan, they met to consider their decision.

Molchan looked at the initial facts of the case. The notes that Hand and McCurdy had found in Lawrence’s home showed that the murder of Jennifer Robinson was premeditated. The list of items Lawrence wrote out that he had to take along with him the night they killed her showed, to Molchan anyway, that Lawrence had made a rational decision to carry out the crime. Rodgers knew all along he was going to be the triggerman; it was no accident that he was the one who happened to lead Jennifer down the hill to see those bogus marijuana plants and then shot her when her back was turned. It was as cold and calculating an action as Molchan had ever seen in his prosecutorial career.

This was cold-blooded murder, mated with mutilation and necrophilia. While the two latter crimes didn’t amount to much more than abuse of a corpse, which is a low-level felony, it served to establish a pattern of premeditation and brutality that warranted the maximum penalty the law allowed. Molchan recommended to the panel that they seek death for both defendants.

On the surface, there didn’t appear to be any mitigating circumstances. These were lawyers voting, not psychiatrists, not psychologists, not social workers. They did not consider whatever in the pair’s backgrounds drove them to commit these heinous crimes. That was not part of their job. Their job was to enforce the law. And Florida state law clearly stated that what Rodgers and Lawrence were accused of was murder of the most heinous sort.

The homicide panel voted unanimously to seek death.

Prior to trial, Jon Lawrence was examined by Dr. James Larson and Dr. John Bingham. While they found him competent to stand trial, they had some huge caveats. Dr. Larson said of Lawrence that while competent to stand trial, he “does suffer from a mental disease or defect.”

More specifically, he diagnosed him as having “(1) Major depressive disorder, recurrent with possible mild psychotic features, in adequate remission, and (2) Personality disorder, not otherwise specified with schizoid and antisocial features.” Ominously Larson reported that although “defendant is adequately stabilized at this time, he can be expected to have intermittent bouts of depression, anxiety and suicidal ideation [ideas].”

Dr. Bingham found that Lawrence was experiencing “considerable emotional turmoil and has somewhat of a schizoid and avoidant type of lifestyle (self-isolating, relationships constricted out of fear of criticism and rejection). Although he does not present with [
sic
] any symptoms of psychosis at this time, it is likely that he has experienced brief acute psychotic episodes in the past.” If Lawrence suffered from psychotic episodes, that meant that in some way he occasionally broke free of reality.

Lawrence was “marginally able to manifest appropriate courtroom behavior,” Bingham continued, “and testify relevantly because he spoke in a barely audible voice, stared at the floor and presented a submissive demeanor. He could not present information in a chronological order, and he suffered from depression and restricted affect.”

Jon Lawrence was either an expert deceiver or he really was a schizophrenic barely able, if at all, to stand trial. For its part, the state believed him to be the former.

January 1999

Attorney Denise “Denny” LeBoeuf was appointed as counsel “learned in the law of capital cases” to represent Jeremiah Rodgers in federal court. She would be his death penalty specialist.

Shortly after her appointment, LeBoeuf began to immerse herself in the case. She went down to the sheriff’s jail and introduced herself to Rodgers, who was held there. She spent time interviewing him and continued to see him regularly. The latter was essential. She needed to develop the relationship of trust that is so critical in death penalty cases.

It was a race now. While the feds had still not committed to seeking death at trial, they could very easily, and they had a very strong case. The only chance Rodgers had to avoid death, should the government seek it, would be to develop the mitigators that could convince the court to give him life instead. That’s why LeBoeuf spent so much time with Rodgers. LeBoeuf began reviewing some four thousand pages of mental health and medical records concerning Rodgers. Finally she began preparing a case budget in order to obtain the expert and investigative resources she would need to prepare the case in mitigation, given her client’s history and the circumstances of the offense.

It sounded good on paper. But the court did not approve any of the defense requests for expert and investigative assistance for more than one month after the budget was submitted. When they did finally, on February 23, 1999, it was for what the defense termed “a very limited amount of money.”

Still, the money granted was enough for Rodgers’s defense to retain Dr. Lee Norton, one of the top mitigation specialists in the country. His job was to discover the mitigators, the factors in Rodgers’s background that, through no fault of his own, led him down the path of destruction. If enough mitigators could be found, a judge might have reason to sentence him to life in prison instead of death.

Unfortunately, Norton’s investigation was being curtailed by a deadline—Rodgers was scheduled to go on trial in federal court on March 15. Norton needed more time to develop the mitigators. Without that, Rodgers didn’t stand a chance. To help with the case, LeBoeuf had been consulting with Texas attorney Richard H. Burr. In an effort to gain Norton more time, he mounted a pretrial declaration.

“As I have previously informed the Court,” he wrote the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida, Pensacola Division, “my practice has been devoted entirely to the trial, appellate, and postconviction representation of defendants in capital cases since 1979.”

Because of his experience, Burr had been retained by the Federal Death Penalty Resource Counsel Project as an adviser and consultant to court-appointed and federal defender attorneys engaged in the defense of capital cases in the federal courts. He was working on the Rodgers cases with LeBoeuf. He told the court that Norton found, during his investigation, “facts about extreme physical, psychological and sexual abuse, abandonment, neglect, exposure to inappropriate sexual behavior, and self-loathing that, together, can lead to an understanding of Mr. Rodgers’s drive to self-destruct if it is developed fully and followed by appropriate psychological, psychiatric, and neurological evaluation. Once that is understood, it is likely that the connection between Mr. Rodgers’s lifelong history of traumatization and the offenses that he is accused of can be understood and presented as powerful mitigation.

“Many mental health and medical practitioners have treated him over the course of his short life. The opinions concerning his behavior have varied widely and have never been based upon accurate and complete knowledge of his psychosocial history. As a result, there has been much misdiagnosis, misunderstanding, and mischaracterization of Mr. Rodgers for much of his life.”

It was an eloquent argument, essentially for mercy, before the case had even gone to trial. Burr argued not only for more time for Norton but for LeBoeuf too.

“Ms. LeBoeuf has been required to prepare an extremely complex and difficult case in mitigation, with the assistance of a mitigation specialist in just over four weeks. Since the death penalty was re-instituted in late 1988, no other lawyer in any other federal death penalty case in the country has been required to do this kind of work in such a short period of time.”

Back across the bay in the federal building in Pensacola, the U.S. attorney was made aware of the decision by the state to seek the death penalty.

Both the state and federal governments became aware that a conviction on the Livingston murder in federal court would be used as the significant aggravating factor at Rodgers’s and Lawrence’s state murder trial for killing Jennifer Robinson. In other words, if he was found guilty of the Livingston death in federal court, the state would use that to show that their homicidal rage led to Jennifer’s murder and mutilation. They would wind up in the death chamber, which was the ultimate goal.

March 28, 1999

In Richard Burr, Rodgers had one of the best death penalty attorneys in the country. He didn’t show up unless there was a real chance a defendant was going to die without his help. Lawrence too had a death-qualified team working for him.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Michelle Heldmeyer made Rodgers and Lawrence the same offer. Plead guilty to killing Justin and she’d take the death penalty off the table. Instead, they would be sentenced to life. Of course, the killers’ attorneys knew what the feds were doing. They knew a murder conviction in federal court would be used as a death penalty aggravator in state court. But what choice did they have? They had to take the deal. The whole point was to save the duo from death.

Clad in an orange prison jumpsuit, wearing a passive expression that belied the depravity beneath, Jon Lawrence had come into federal court to enter a plea. The Associated Press reported: “One of two Florida Panhandle men charged with killing two people and burying the bodies in shallow graves has pleaded guilty to murder in one of the cases. Former mental patient Jonathan Lawrence, 23, of Pace, entered the plea Friday to avoid a death sentence, but he could still face execution if convicted of the other murder.”

With his hair cropped close to his scalp, Lawrence had stood with his head bowed in court as he entered his plea. As part of the deal, he had to state before the judge his complicity in the crime.

“I stabbed my cousin Justin,” he admitted in court.

In the visitors’ gallery, Justin’s mother, Elizabeth Livingston, was noticeably absent. She had gone to clean Justin’s grave “because he had been tugging at my heart all day long.” She said to a reporter who contacted her that she considered Jon Lawrence to be the “devil possessed.” It was a comment that Lawrence probably found much to be proud about.

Nothing in Lawrence’s plea required him to cooperate in the case against Rodgers. But Rodgers did not know the specifics of Lawrence’s deal. His trial in federal court for killing Justin Livingston was supposed to begin on April 5. He subsequently entered a guilty plea too. This is how the federal record reads: “The defendants for the apparently motiveless murder of Justin Livingston on federal property, met while in a state prison mental-health facility. The government’s theory is that this was a thrill killing. Rodgers allegedly shot a man through a window a month before in an unrelated killing. All parties are white. Apparently, the United States Attorney did not request permission to seek the death penalty; nevertheless the Attorney General directed a capital prosecution. Both Lawrence and Rodgers pled guilty in exchange for the government’s agreement not to seek the death penalty. State capital prosecutions are pending.”

Just like that, Justin Livingston had found justice … of a sort. It had been just as easy for the feds to take the plea in exchange for life; why bother seeking death when the state will do it for you? This was Florida, after all.

Somewhere, Diane Robinson had a dim awareness of what was happening. She might have heard from somebody that Rodgers and Lawrence were about to have their cases heard in the federal courts for killing Justin, but she didn’t really care. Diane Robinson didn’t really care about much of anything anymore. It had been almost a year since her daughter was murdered and she spent her days shuffling from couch to bed and back. She had broken down. She was listless, had no appetite, no desire. She had no idea of whether she would come out of it, or die too.

Chapter 15

If ever two killers seemed bound for the electric chair, it was Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb. There was such a public outpouring of sympathy toward Bobby Franks’s family and a corresponding flow of bile toward Leopold and Loeb, a fair jury would be hard to come by.

The man who showed up in Chicago, in 1924, to try and save the boys’ lives had unruly hair, a rumpled jacket, egg-splattered shirt, suspenders and tie askew. He combed his thin gray hair across his forehead, but a cowlick always wound up dropping over one eye. His name was Clarence Darrow.

Since the 1890s, Clarence Darrow had been the country’s most prominent defense attorney. He was distinguished not just by his legal brilliance, but by his impassioned defense of things he believed in, such as unions, free speech and civil liberties. It had been Darrow for the underdog, stretching back into the nineteenth century. And here he was in the twentieth, still defending the cases no one else would touch.

Darrow was as clever as he was compassionate. After considering the evidence against his clients, Darrow formed a plan of attack. He changed their plea from not guilty to guilty. The boys admitted to kidnapping and murder, felony offenses punishable by death under Illinois law. The decision to change the plea was made primarily to prevent the state from getting two opportunities to get a death sentence.

Leopold and Loeb had been charged with kidnapping and murder, both death offenses in Illinois. The state had planned to try the boys on one charge at a time. If they failed to get conviction on the first charge, they would get a second bite of the apple with the second. Darrow decided not to give the state that chance.

Considering Darrow’s cleverness, he probably would have found a way to help Rodgers and Lawrence when the federal and state governments coordinated their prosecutions. In the case of Leopold and Loeb, Darrow’s entering of the guilty plea meant the case moved automatically to the sentencing phase. Under Illinois law, the death penalty could only be imposed by the presiding judge, John R. Caverly. Darrow felt Caverly was a “kindly and discerning” man. It would be Caverly alone who had to impose the death sentence on the teenagers. Darrow would not let him forget that when he argued for his clients.