Flesh Collectors (12 page)

The prophet Elijah bent over the snorting bull and called on the God of Israel for help. Suddenly a burst of flame instantly consumed the animal. Taking this as a sign that the God of Abraham was exceedingly unhappy with their transgression, the people rose up and slew the prophets of Baal. God then brought forth rain, ending the drought and the “spell” that Jezebel had whipped up was broken.

The Rodgers family named Jeremiah after the Bible’s apocalyptic prophet who, in the end, lost. His own people viewed him as a traitor because he would not support fighting the Babylonians. Instead, he had called for surrender. The kings he worked for rejected this advice. Declared an outlaw, he was placed under guard, from which he watched Jerusalem’s destruction by Nebuchadnezzar.

Like their biblical namesakes, the brothers Rodgers had digressive fates. Their parents decided that they couldn’t afford to keep both boys. A decision was made to put Elijah up for adoption, while Jeremiah stayed behind. Elijah was adopted by the Waldrop family of Pace and moved north. While Elijah adjusted well, not so Jeremiah Rodgers.

“What I’ve been told from my dad and my grandma down South was he [Jeremiah] went back and forth between my mom and my dad because he was all the time stealing cars,” Elijah Waldrop told police.

Rodgers had an extensive record of grand-theft auto.

“Then, when he was either thirteen or fourteen, he went to a juvenile camp. He moved on from there, on up to jail, and stayed in jail six to seven years,” Waldrop later told Assistant State’s Attorney Ron Swanson.

In May 1993, Jeremiah Rodgers was arrested and charged with grand-theft auto. He was convicted in August and sentenced to four years and six months of hard time. It was while he was behind bars that prison officials noted certain problems with his personality and transferred him to “the mattress factory” for evaluation. It was a derisive nickname for Chattahoochee that went back to the nineteenth century.

In 1841, Florida officially passed from Spanish to United States control and became a U.S. territory. There were a few primitive county jails in the territory, but nothing like a penitentiary to house convicted felons.

In Chattahoochee, the Florida Panhandle town forty-one miles east of the state capital at Tallahassee, an arsenal had been built prior to 1830. During the Civil War, the place was used to muster Confederate troops who then headed north to fight for slavery and states’ rights. After the Civil War in 1868, the U.S. government ceded the arsenal and its grounds to the state of Florida. It was a gracious gesture by a former foe.

Florida turned the arsenal into the state’s first penitentiary. Set up on a paramilitary model, its activities were overseen by the Florida adjutant general. About 125 years before Jon Lawrence got there, Chattahoochee beckoned Calvin Williams to her damp, stone corridors in November 1868. Williams, convicted of larceny and sentenced to one year, became Chattahoochee’s first prisoner.

He was long gone by 1876, when the state officially closed the prison, transferring the prisoners to other institutions. The buildings at Chattahoochee were then converted into the Florida State Hospital, for “insane” and emotionally disturbed patients. Florida already had a tradition of selling its inmates’ services as slave labor to anyone who could pay the price. Seeing a new workforce to be exploited, the patients were made to make mattresses, which were then sold to private industry. That’s how Chattahoochee got its nickname, “the mattress factory.”

By the time Jeremiah Rodgers and Jonathan Lawrence got there in 1993, Chattahoochee was quite literally a tourist attraction. Though still a hospital that treated the mentally ill, tourists drove through the hospital’s grounds. They admired the hospital’s administration building. Dubbed “the White House,” it was the original officer’s headquarters of the arsenal. The original arsenal powder magazine, built between 1832 and 1839, to store arms for the U.S. War Department during the Indian Wars, was in the process of being restored by English artisans.

Rodgers and Lawrence hit it off immediately and became fast friends. Lawrence would listen quietly to Rodgers’s boastful comments, while Rodgers put up with Lawrence’s moody silences. There was something about their personalities that just meshed, like two becoming one. The doctors found Lawrence in particular to be an interesting patient.

During his time at Chattahoochee, Lawrence was evaluated repeatedly. The diagnosis was the same every time—mentally ill and suicidal. The evaluations began to report that he experienced intermittent command hallucinations—that is, his hallucinations were prompted by the commands of some unseen force. Along with a smorgasbord of previous diagnoses, Lawrence now had a new one: schizotypal personality disorder.

The
DSM
defines schizotypal personality disorder as follows:

“The essential feature of Schizotypal personality Disorder is a pervasive pattern of social and interpersonal deficits marked by acute discomfort with, and reduced capacity for, close relationships as well as by cognitive or perceptual distortions and eccentricities of behavior.”

People with this type of disorder “may believe that they have magical control over others … are often suspicious [and] paranoid.…”

As for Rodgers, he had fantasies of killing one of his doctors, Manolo Sanguillen. They just seemed to have a personality difference. Sometimes Sanguillen would have to put Rodgers in isolation for disobeying rules. Rodgers hated that, naturally. He manifested his feelings in fantasies of peeling off Sanguillen’s skin and sewing him back up afterward sans anesthetic. It would be pain, pure pain; that’s the way Rodgers wanted it.

But as it turned out, it would be a member of the Lawrence family who killed first.

In 1994, while Rodgers and Lawrence were in Chattahoochee, Jon Lawrence was in the day room, the place where prisoners congregated during the day to play cards or watch TV. Looking up at the TV screen, Lawrence recognized his uncle Gary Lawrence. Uncle Gary was in handcuffs. He was doing the “perp walk.” The reporter in Santa Rosa who was covering the story said Gary Lawrence had been arrested for murder.

On the morning of July 29, 1994, a contractor named Charles Haney found a charred body by the side of the road in a new subdivision within Santa Rosa County. Pensacola was expanding into the suburbs, and if Santa Rosa played its cards right, it could be one of those counties that benefited from the burgeoning population’s need for affordable housing. Murder, though, is not good for business.

The Santa Rosa County Sheriff’s Office worked hard to solve the case. Unknown to them at the time, their quarry was an outlaw named Gary Lawrence. He had been released from prison on January 10, 1994, after serving a three-year term for grand-theft firearm, a holdup with a gun.

After his release, Gary met Angela Bruner and they married. For newlyweds, they had an unusual arrangement—they didn’t live together most of the time. In early July 1994, Lawrence finally moved in with his wife.

Angela had gotten friendly with a man, Sam Wheeler. He drove her to work on the hot, humid morning of July 28. He was scheduled to pick her up around noon. When he showed up, he was drunk. They drove to a mutual friend’s house, where Wheeler went inside to lie down on the couch and sober up. Soon after, Gary showed up to get his wife.

He noticed Angela went in to check on the guy several times while the others stayed on the porch drinking. Gary later said that he “was tired of seeing Angela going in to Sam and talking to Sam.” He threatened to beat Sam and “sling him through the window.” Lawrence and Angela argued about that.

Wheeler finally sobered up. Gary politely confronted him with his concerns. Wheeler listened respectfully and they shook hands. Apparently, the jealousy crisis had passed. Together, the three left and arrived back at Angela’s apartment at 5:00
P.M
.

Just after arriving, Gary Lawrence drew out a bowie knife and threw it on the ground. He walloped Sam in the face and body; Sam did not fight back. Angela and her sixteen-year-old daughter, Kimberly, finally separated them. Gary and Sam then walked around the yard and talked it over.

“It seemed like everything was all right,” Gary would later remember.

Why Sam would remain in what was an obviously dangerous situation can only be imagined. Two hours later, the three were hanging out again in Angela’s apartment like nothing had happened. Sam lay down on the couch while Lawrence and Angela sat together, whispering. The two told Kimberly and a visiting friend, fifteen-year-old Julia Powell, to go into Kimberly’s bedroom and stay there. Once the teens had gone, the married couple gathered together several weapons, including a metal pipe and a baseball bat. From the bedroom, where they had taken refuge, the girls heard pounding noises.

“Stop hitting, Gary,” they heard Sam say.

What the girls didn’t know was that on the other side of the door, Gary had beaten Sam so hard with the pipe that it had bent in half.

“I can’t move,” the girls heard Sam utter.

Gary Lawrence put the pipe down and picked up the baseball bat. Coldly, he beat Sam with it, until finally Sam didn’t move anymore. The court record states that the teens were then called in “and required to assist in the cleanup.” They saw that a mop handle had been stuck down Sam’s throat.

Satisfied that Sam was dead, Gary and Angela discussed how to get rid of the body. In the end, Lawrence decided to burn it. They went through Sam’s pockets and belongings, taking out anything that could ID him. Angela used bleach on the rug and sandpaper on the wood frame of the couch to remove Sam’s blood that had spattered there.

It’s a common ritual murderers follow, trying to use bleach to cover up their crimes. The problem is, when you kill a person by battering them, their blood flies all over the place. When criminalists examine a crime scene, it is now standard practice to spray Luminol. It’s a chemical that glows under ultraviolet light. Just one drop of blood missed and the Luminol can not only find it, the sample can then be used for DNA typing.

The couch cushions saturated with Sam’s blood and the weapons were thrown into a pond behind the apartment. It was, all in all, a pretty good job of disposing of incriminating evidence. The problem was, the murder had been spur of the moment, but too many people knew there was bad blood between Gary Lawrence and Sam Wheeler.

After the Santa Rosa cops identified the burned body found by the contractor as Sam’s, they got to Gary Lawrence pretty quickly. They interrogated Lawrence, who confessed to killing Wheeler. A jury found him guilty of first-degree murder, conspiracy to commit murder, theft of less than $300 and grand-theft auto. At the penalty phase, on March 17, 1995, Lawrence presented testimony from his brother, a psychologist and a psychiatrist who all argued for mercy. The jury was unmoved. By a vote of a nine-to-three majority, he was sentenced to death.

If Jon Lawrence had been devastated earlier because of his father’s incarceration for sexually abusing his half sister, his psyche took another hit when his uncle was sentenced to death for murder. It seemed like there was no hope for the Lawrence family, no good that was coming from them. Lawrence could only hope that in some way he could change the family luck.

While he was in Chattahoochee, and his bond was formed with Rodgers, he began confiding to his fellow inmate about his family. He told him about his mother, Iona, and his father, Elbert. He told of the Lawrence clan of Pace, which went back generations to Confederate times. And he told of the numerous cousins he had in the area. Rodgers perked up at that one. It made no difference that his friend was confiding in him; whatever knowledge he could get that could give him an edge over somebody, he would use it, even if it meant betraying a confidence or a friend.

Jeremiah Rodgers listened attentively when Jon Lawrence told him of the Livingston family. Maybe there was something there to relate to, the various and similar deprivations that the Rodgers and Livingston families had suffered through. Rodgers got particularly attentive when Lawrence described his cousin Felicia. She was Justin’s older sister and a good-looking girl at that. Felicia stayed in Rodgers’s mind for quite a long time.

In August 1995, the Florida State penal system let Jonathan Lawrence go. The fact that he was now a functioning schizophrenic made no difference. No legislation existed to keep him behind bars. Nothing in his record indicated a propensity for violence, except of course his background. That left his newfound buddy, Jeremiah Rodgers, all alone in Chattahoochee.

While Jon Lawrence went home to Pace, Jeremiah Rodgers passed another year in the hospital, a psychopath who charmed everyone with his smile and good looks. When he was approaching his release date, he decided to put his charisma to work. He decided to try it on a female first. Jeremiah Rodgers began writing a series of letters to Felicia Livingston.

Jeremiah Rodgers is a good writer—one of his many skills is the ability to turn a phrase, despite an inferior formal education. He knew it too, because his letters to Felicia Livingston were not the only time during this case that he used his writing talents to his advantage.

In his letters to Felicia, he described in sympathetic terms the damage he had caused people and his painful regret. Using the twelve-step jargon prisoners learn from support groups, Rodgers said that he was taking responsibility for his life while knowing that God really controlled it. He explained how he was going to make amends to the people he had hurt.

Rodgers said that when he got out of prison, he wanted to start a whole new life. Maybe settle down someplace and get married and have kids. He was a talented tattoo artist and massage therapist. Maybe he could broker those skills into some good-paying jobs. It was as convincing a con as any Jeremiah Rodgers had ever done, and it worked.

Of course, Felicia was fooled. She wrote him back that she would look forward to seeing him when he came to visit. Rodgers had previously made it clear in one of his letters that after he got out he intended to come out to Pace and stay with his buddy Lawrence for a while until he got situated. Of course, he never told Felicia that, in his mind, getting situated meant finding some woman he could leech off with his good looks, body and smile.