Flesh Collectors (15 page)

Rodgers claimed that he had absolutely, positively no idea what was going to happen. He just figured a little drinking, a little sex, and that would be that for the evening; then that damn Jon …

“So I walked away from the truck,” Rodgers repeated, “and Jon shot her. I didn’t know he was going to do it.”

He had no idea that was going to happen. He shouted out to the cops that after Jon shot her, he put the girl’s body in back of his pickup truck.

“Then Jon took a scalpel and cut the meat from the girl’s leg.”

Cops meet strange people all the time in the course of their work. But discussions with suspects about cutting “the meat from the girl’s leg” are rare.

“Jon put the meat from the girl’s leg in a plastic bag,” Rodgers continued. He figured the worse he made Jon seem, the more it would lessen his own culpability.

“Jon was going to … eat it. I helped him bury the body.”

From the sound of things, Rodgers had been so scared of the big bad Jon that he had helped him in his unholy work. He was innocent, caught in circumstances beyond his control.

“I want to help put Jon in jail,” Rodgers stated, “and I’ll help you guys find the bodies because you won’t be able to locate them [without me].”

So that was it: Rodgers was angling for a deal, anything to keep himself out of the death chamber.

“I also got some information for you guys about another guy that was shot while sitting in a chair and watching television.”

Bruck and Garratt continued their afternoon dialogue with Rodgers. It took a few hours, but at the end of that time, Rodgers had told them enough so that he knew that he was worth more to the cops alive than dead. He felt comfortable enough to lower his gun and surrender.

“Get out of the car and get on the ground with your hands behind your back,” the cops ordered.

Rodgers did as he was told. The detectives cuffed him.

“You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to the presence of an attorney. If you cannot afford one, one will be appointed for you by the court. Do you understand these rights?”

“Yes,” Rodgers answered.

It was a routine he was painfully familiar with, and not from watching TV, but from real life. It was time for Rodgers to turn informer.

Criminals turn informer for a variety of reasons. The most common is to save their skins. On rare occasions, it has something to do with a guilty conscience. Sometimes they get a reduced sentence for helping the state prosecute someone else. Rodgers was placed in a squad car and transported to the Lake County Sheriff’s Office.

Detective Todd Luce of the Lake County Sheriff’s Office called Todd Hand to tell him they got Jeremiah Rodgers. Referring back to the original BOLO on Rodgers, he said they had been in armed pursuit of the suspect. When they finally stopped him with the Stop Sticks, he had “refused to exit the vehicle and held officers at bay for several hours with a .380 pistol.” Luce said that during the standoff, Rodgers threw several Polaroid pictures out of the car window and stated, “This is what this is all about” and “I want to get Jon in jail.”

While Hand held down the fort, Corporal Mitch Tomlinson and Detective Cliff Armstrong were dispatched to Lake County to bring Rodgers back. The two cops drove down and had a preliminary chat with Rodgers, during which he began revealing some of the details of the murders of Justin Livingston and Jennifer Robinson.

Of course, Rodgers made sure to emphasize Jon’s culpability and not his own. He also claimed that the basis for their friendship was that while they were in Chattahoochee, guys were always trying to beat up on Jon.

Rodgers was Jon’s protector.

A good detective does not elicit statements using Neanderthal tactics. Once, cops could physically intimidate suspects into confessions and have those confessions stand up under appeal. No more. Even in politically conservative times, judges are bipartisan in their support that statements and confessions must be elicited legally.

Of course, trickery is allowed. So is emotional intimidation. That’s how a good cop gets a murder suspect to confess. He develops a nonjudgmental rapport with the suspect in the same way that a therapist does with a patient.

Hand needed to get everything Jon Lawrence said on tape. That would be necessary for a conviction, but the stakes, in a sense, were even higher. He needed to make sure that he persuaded Jon to tell him where Jennifer’s body was buried. In addition, there was no apparent motive for the murder, and while motive isn’t necessary for a conviction, it helps in convincing a jury.

That evening at 8:50, in the green interrogation room of the Santa Rosa County Sheriff’s Office, Hand once again read Jon Lawrence his rights as he and Joe McCurdy sat down for a conversation.

“Okay, here’s a waiver,” said Hand, nonchalantly pushing forward a piece of paper attached to a clipboard. “Do you know what a waiver is, Jon?”

“Uh, I think so,” Jon answered.

“What’s a waiver mean?” Hand asked him.

“Uh, I can’t really describe it.”

Hand was asking Jon Lawrence to sign a form waiving his constitutional rights to counsel. If he didn’t sign it, nothing he said in the interview could be used against him.

“How about if I try to describe it and you can agree or disagree? A waiver is you already know what I’ve told you, but having in mind what I told you, you still wanna talk to me. Does that make sense to you?” Hand explained.

“All right,” Jon answered.

“Okay, it says here, ‘have read this statement of my rights shown above and understand what my rights are. I am willing to answer questions and make a statement. I do not want a lawyer at this time. I understand and know what I am doing. No promise or threats have been made to me and no pressure of any kind has been used against me.’ Is that true?”

“Yes,” Jon answered.

“Okay, I think I’m trying to help you; I just need you to sign that, so we can talk.”

Jon signed it.

“Okay, Jon, you signed the statement, is that correct?”

“Yes.”

And then he began talking to Jon about Jennifer.

“How could you see her in the dark?”

“’Cause it was a full moon. I remember looking at it.”

“Okay, then what happened?”

“I don’t remember really too much.”

“Did anybody cut her?” Hand said slowly, the anxiety rising a little in his throat. “This is important, Jon; you gotta tell me the truth.”

“Yeah, I cut her calf.”

Hand asked if he cut from behind her knee down to the back of the ankle.

“Uh, yeah, or more.”

“Well, how’d you cut her? What did you use to cut her?”

“A little razor blade. Like the scalpels I have.”

Lawrence said he had the scalpels for cutting all different kinds of things. He said he kept them in his truck’s toolbox along with bandages for cuts, saws for wood, shovels for digging, rope and a box of surgical gloves.

“Why’d you keep a box of surgical gloves in your toolbox?”

To Hand, the answer was obvious—to commit a crime without leaving prints or DNA. Jon claimed that he used the gloves when he cleaned the entrails of animals. He admitted that he thought he used the gloves when he cut up the victim’s calf, but he wasn’t sure. Hand knew that forensics would tell for sure.

“Could you show us the general area, Jon, where Jennifer is?” Todd Hand asked.

“It’s near the Coon Hill Cemetery. It’s on logging roads, down at the Landing.”

Too vague.

“If we took you out there, could you show us?”

“I think so. I was real drunk. I can’t remember.”

“Will you do that now?” Hand requested. “If I drive out, will you show us?”

Jon thought for a second.

“Okay,” he answered.

“Okay, do you have anything else to say before we head out?”

“I can’t think of anything.”

“Did you have anything to do with killing her?” Hand suddenly asked.

“No,” Jon answered nonchalantly.

The interview was over and Jon Lawrence was taken back to his cell. Hand sat there for a while, thinking. He could not tell Diane Robinson any of this, of course, until they found the body and identified it, but Hand knew he was close to finding Jennifer Robinson. He also knew that attempting to process a crime scene in the dead of night was not a practical idea. Despite the artificial illumination that the CSTs would bring in, nothing matched daylight.

Chapter 10

It wasn’t a long drive for Todd Hand and Joe McCurdy from their office—a left turn out of the parking lot, down a few hundred feet of winding blacktop roadway, a left turn through a barbed-wire fence, then pulling up before an ugly building with even more barbed wire atop stone walls, bars and fences all over the place. It was 8:49
A.M
., May 9, when Todd Hand and Joe McCurdy picked Jon Lawrence up at the Santa Rosa County Jail.

“The girl’s just up a ways from Blue Springs,” said Lawrence as he got in.

He had had time to think and had a better idea where Jennifer was buried. Hand tooled the car out into the county, down deep, dark roads, through the opaque jungle of the Panhandle. Finally they pulled off Ebenezer Church Road in northern Santa Rosa County.

“That way,” said Lawrence, pointing down a small fire line off the main road. “Here,” Lawrence said, and Hand braked. They got out slowly in a small clearing, Hand putting on his sunglasses; it would be easier to see things in the bright sunshine without squinting.

Hand and McCurdy walked with Jon Lawrence down a rutted trail. They looked off to the side and saw it. It was just a mound of freshly dug dirt in the center of the fire line.

“Over here,” said Lawrence.

He pointed down at some ashes. “This is where I burned her clothes,” Jon Lawrence said. He took a few steps and pointed at the burial mound. “There’s her body.”

Hand and McCurdy went back to the car. From the trunk, they extracted yellow tape with
CRIME SCENE
printed in big black letters. They strung the tape in a large perimeter around the trees that stood like silent sentinels along the fire line.

“Look at that,” said Lawrence, pointing at the dirt. “That’s Jeremiah’s footprint.” Hand checked it out. It was a footprint, all right, that would need to be cast for later identification. Hand was too far out into the boonies to use his cell phone, so he called into headquarters on his police radio.

As they were waiting for the forensic specialists and other police to arrive, McCurdy saw a guy driving around the area in an all-terrain vehicle (ATV). They were popular with the kids in the county who liked to explore and camp. The guy, whose name was Lawrence Tierney, said that he was camping in Blue Springs with four of his friends. Blue Springs was just a short walk through the woods.

When McCurdy got to their camp, he saw four juveniles. They had seen and heard nothing the night before. “Pack your belongings and leave the area,” McCurdy told them. The last thing they needed was kids contaminating the crime scene.

A short while later, the crime specialists arrived. The crime scene, the area directly around the mound of dirt, was photographed from every angle. Evidence markers were placed on the ground next to any evidence that they found. Then it was time to begin digging. Actually, excavating is a better description.

In the distant past, the discovery of a body buried in a shallow grave would bring two husky uniformed cops to the crime scene to start digging. Only when they lifted the body out of the grave would the coroner come in. If that happened today, the detectives would be fired.

Now the CSTs use small trowels to excavate the dirt over the grave. The dirt is placed either on a sheet set up to collect it, or a metal screen. The screen filters out the dirt leaving foreign objects behind.

After gingerly digging down a few feet, the CSTs saw a face begin to appear out of the dirt. The CST’s took out fine brushes and began brushing the dirt off Jennifer’s face.

Skin that once glowed with health had the unmistakable green pallor of death. It looked like maggots were clogging her eyes, nostrils and mouth. Half her scalp was up over her forehead. The brush continued to gently stroke Jennifer’s face, clearing it of the detritus of death.

Insects from the vicinity were gathered up. The idea would be to match what was present at the scene with the ones that were well along with their work on Jennifer’s body. Soil samples were also taken.

The CSTs got down on their hands and knees and scanned the ground. From what Lawrence had told Hand, they were able to approximate where the killing took place. Searching that area, they marked anything they came up with, with a small yellow evidence marker. Of particular note was a live round of ammunition collected from the ground near the left side of Jennifer’s makeshift grave. If it fit a Lorcin .380, they’d have a match to the alleged murder weapon.

The evidence was collected and put in bags and carefully marked. Ever since the O.J. Simpson trial, law enforcement has made a concerted effort to show a proper, custodial chain of evidence. Otherwise at trial, mistakes could easily lead to an acquittal. While the CSTs continued to work, Hand, McCurdy and Lawrence drove a little farther into the canebrake.

“Over here,” said Lawrence. They stopped. “This is the place where Jennifer was shot.”

Lawrence was passive, acquiescent. It was a studied response to authority. He also knew how to manipulate, to gain sympathy. He began talking about his and Rodgers’s time together in Chattahoochee.

“We’d previously talked about robbing banks and kidnapping,” he said casually. “But we mostly talked about Dr. Sanguillen at Chattahoochee. Jeremiah said he wanted to kill Dr. Manolo Sanguillen. Boy, I wish he was here now.”

Evidently, Sanguillen and Lawrence had formed a good therapeutic bond.

“Dr. Sanguillen used to lock Jeremiah up a lot. Jeremiah talked about peeling his skin off or cutting him or sewing him back up. Jeremiah said he also wanted to pick people and take them to a cabin and torture them. He wanted to have an underground prison to keep people that he did not like and do weird things to them.”