Flesh Collectors (18 page)

It was the media. By monitoring the police shortwave frequencies, they had found out that the cops had found another body, the second in two days. They drove quickly to the scene. Video lights cut into the darkness. Pencils hovered over pads, and reporters crowded the police lines. TV journalists were doing standups in front of live TV feeds. Hand looked at them, then over at Rodgers, who was under guard in a police cruiser. Hand walked over and got in.

“We’re going,” Hand said. He drove through the police lines and past the reporters, who clambered to the side of the car to see who or what was inside. The object of all their attention snoozed quietly in the backseat.

Elbert Lawrence heard that his son was under arrest for murder. Likewise, Elizabeth Livingston learned her son’s corpse was found. Maybe it was some primitive urge to see the scene of the crime, to make it real in both their minds. Whatever it was, independently, they got in their cars and drove up to the crime scene in Chumuckla. Cory Liddell, Elizabeth’s boyfriend, accompanied her.

When the relatives got there, they ran into each other almost immediately. While the press was off getting interviews with the cops and the forensic experts, Elizabeth squared off with Elbert in the shadows. She glanced over at Cory, who surreptitiously raised his shirt. Nestled underneath, secured by his waistband, was a revolver. If Elbert did anything, he was ready.

Ironically, without even knowing it, the cops were in the middle of a family beef. While they investigated and answered questions for the press, they were oblivious to the drama that might have led to future headlines taking place just a few feet away.

The pent-up emotions of the past few weeks flew from Elizabeth’s mouth in a stream of impassioned invective with Elbert the target. She hated this man and she hated his progeny and wanted the Lawrences to disappear off the face of the earth forever.

“I got something to apologize for,” she told Elbert. “Your son that blowed his brains out.” She was referring to Wesley. “I wish it had been Jon!”

Elizabeth remembered Elbert’s face contorting in rage. She knew that Cory had his gun. If Elbert made any move … but he didn’t. They just exchanged words. Then Elizabeth and Cory walked over to the crime scene itself and saw the hole that Justin had been put into. She finally broke down and Cory helped her back to the car. They got in and drove away. Elizabeth returned to a life that was irretrievably shattered by the murder of her son.

Fresh from the crime scene, the body was placed on a cold metal examining table at Sacred Heart Hospital’s morgue. It was the same hospital Justin had been born in and been taken to for his kidney problems. The hospital had taken care of him on those two occasions and would do so now.

Working with the ME, the CSTs and detectives began the cold, systematic process of stripping the body. The victim’s boots, blue jeans, cowboy shirt and underclothes were all taken off and carefully cataloged as evidence. During the process of inventorying the contents of his pants pockets, they found items in his wallet that identified him as Justin Livingston. With the victim stripped down, it was time to begin the actual autopsy with the initial physical examination.

When a person dies, his body begins to decay. Decomposition, or “decomp,” as cops call it, happens more quickly in certain parts of the body, like the eyes. Factors like what kind of clothing the victim was wearing at time of death, burial depth, carnivores, humidity, rainfall, temperature and the actual trauma to the body influence the rate of decay.

There is also bacteria to consider. Alive, we can fight most microorganisms. Dead, the body is a breeding ground for bacteria, and they go to work on the tissues immediately. By thirty-six hours maximum, the body begins to smell like rotting flesh; the skin gets more and more greenish red. Gases form in the body cavity and beneath the skin. In some instances, the body explodes from the buildup.

Florida’s weather and environment are particularly hard on dead bodies. It makes being an ME in the state a truly challenging experience. With a humid, subtropical climate through much of the state all year, the Gulf Coast’s tendency to get hurricanes often, and with abundant, lush tropical vegetation seemingly everyplace, bodies break down immediately.

There was a case down south in Hillsborough County where a serial killer axed to death two women and then threw their bodies in a secluded pond. As reported by Kent Allard in his book
The Mad Chopper
, when the cops found the women two weeks later—and this was in May—the bacteria in the water had eaten away their faces, so there was nothing there to aid in identification. Their skin had literally slipped off their bodies. In Justin’s case, likewise, a strange thing had happened. He had been naturally mummified.

According to
www.factmonster.com
, “natural mummification occurs in favorable soils and climates, particularly cold, arid areas, ice, and peat bogs.” The five-hundred-year-old bodies of Inuit women and children had been found intact and frozen in West Greenland.

Once in a while, though, mummification happens in more hospitable climates, where the air and earth cooperate to preserve. While Justin Livingston wasn’t that old, considering he had been killed and buried in Florida, the CSTs caught a break.

Justin had been buried in the most rural part of the county. It was a slightly higher elevation, slightly cooler at night and not as humid because it was inland and not directly exposed to the Gulf of Mexico’s moist air. While it was understandable when they dug Justin up that he had certainly decomposed some, his body had mummified, slowing down the decomposition so there was a body fit to perform an autopsy on.

After Justin was placed on the slab, his picture was taken from every angle. His fingernails were clipped and placed in plastic evidence bags. After the ME carefully explored his mouth, they took casts of his teeth for identification purposes. They placed clippings of scalp and pubic hairs in evidence bags.

Beginning the physical examination, Dr. Gary Cumberland noted that there was no neck injury, no chest injury, no pelvic or genitalia injuries. Parts of his neck, legs and arms had mummified. However, his back was a different matter.

The coroner’s sketch illustrated Justin’s wounds from four angles, all on one sheet of paper. For quick, analytical purposes, it’s an incredible low-tech tool for understanding a crime. In Justin’s case, the sketch was particularly graphic. There were twelve stab wounds across his upper back, in two ragged horizontal lines.

Time to open him up.

Dr. Gary Cumberland used his scalpel to open up Justin’s back. He was going to look inside and see what kind of damage the stabbing had done. Solving a murder is a matter of eliminating possibilities. Establishing extensive, fatal damage from the stab wounds would go a long way toward corroborating Rodgers’s story.

Looking through Justin’s chest cavity, Cumberland could trace the damage. There were two stab wounds in the right posterior [rear] chest wall.… One stab wound enters the right lung.” That was the first stab wound, which Rodgers thought had hit bone and had, instead, hit the lung. It was the force of that blow that brought Justin to his knees and accounted for the wheezing that he displayed as he died.

“The other [wound] goes through the inferior aspect of the right lung, perforates the right hemidiaphragm and extends into the liver for a depth of 1 ½ inches.”

That was the second stab wound, the one where Rodgers knelt on the ground next to the critically wounded Justin and finally got up the nerve to stab him again in the back, holding on to the hilt and pushing the blade down, burying it inside Justin’s body. The blade had gone more than half a foot inside the chest cavity. It had gone in so deep, it had penetrated the liver.

As for the other ten wounds, “the stab wound track results in perforation of pleural spaces, penetration of both lungs.” The left lung had completely collapsed. In the body cavity, Cumberland discovered “a combination of dried fat and dried blood material present in the pleural spaces bilaterally.” In other words, Justin had bled internally. Had he not died from the trauma of the stab wounds, he would have eventually bled to death. Justin Livingston never had a chance after the first two stab wounds.

Examination of all the internal organs showed the aforementioned damage to the lungs and liver, but nothing else unusual except for this note under “Urogenital System: The right kidney is surgically absent.” At some point prior to his murder, Justin had a kidney surgically removed.

Unless the toxicology report turned up something, it was possible to already say that the victim had died from multiple stab wounds, with the two in the right posterior chest wall being the most fatal. Concluding his autopsy report, Cumberland came to the following conclusions:

PATHOLOGIC DIAGNOSES:

I.  TWELVE STAB WOUNDS TO THE POSTERIOR BACK (THREE STAB WOUNDS ENTERING THE RIGHT PLEURAL SPACE POSTERIORLY).

A. DEEPEST MEASURED DEPTH OF PENETRATION FROM THE SKIN SURFACE IS 6 ½ INCHES.

B. PENETRATION AND FOCAL PERFORATION OF BOTH LUNGS AND THE RIGHT HEMIDIAPHRAGM AND RIGHT LOBE OF LIVER.

II. INCIDENTAL FINDINGS.

A. STATUS POST RIGHT NEPHRECTOMY

B. MARKED POSTMORTEM DECOMPOSITION

CAUSE OF DEATH: TWELVE STAB WOUNDS TO THE POSTERIOR THORAX

MANNER OF DEATH: HOMICIDE

Hand read over Justin’s autopsy report. Under his incidental findings, the doctor had mentioned “nephrectomy.” He looked the term up in a medical dictionary: “Nephrectomy—surgical removal of a kidney.” It meant that Justin Livingston had only one kidney.

The detective would subsequently find out that Justin had the kidney removed in 1981 because of disease. Because he had only one kidney, he was that much more vulnerable to Rodgers’s and Lawrence’s assault. Even had the knife missed the liver and hit the kidney, what ordinarily would not be a fatal wound in most people would be fatal in Justin’s case, because he had just one. Hand looked at the graduation picture Justin’s mother had given him.

The picture was a small, wallet-size shot. It was the picture his mother gave police when Justin had first been reported missing. Looking at it, Hand couldn’t tell that Justin was “slow.” He had the same smile as any kid being photographed before graduation. Despite his intellectual and emotional problems, Justin had managed to graduate high school, which was no small achievement for a child with his problems.

But with that childlike demeanor, which under ordinary circumstances might just make him the butt of jokes about the mentally retarded, came a childlike innocence. Justin trusted people, just like a child does. Even when he was dying, he still couldn’t believe what was happening to him. That he died friendless and alone and was placed in a nameless grave did not inspire hope that in some way his death would be avenged. That his own cousin Jon, who had been his friend his whole life, was the murderer only made it that much more tragic.

For the cop, a basic question remained: Who had done what to Justin Livingston? Rodgers’s version of events had them killing him at the copter-landing field in Milton. He admitted to stabbing and suffocating him. But what was Jon Lawrence’s part in all of this? Until Hand spoke with Lawrence again, he couldn’t be sure.

Chapter 12

May 12, 1998, 3:48
P.M
.

Jon Lawrence found himself again in the green interrogation room with Hand and McCurdy.

“Okay, Jon, what I want to talk about a little bit today is an incident involving you, Jeremiah Rodgers and Justin Livingston,” Hand began casually.

“Tell me a little bit about how you knew Justin?”

“I think he was my cousin,” Lawrence answered. “He lived a couple of roads down; he used to come over and see me a lot.”

Through patient questioning, Hand established that Justin came to Lawrence’s house on the day he disappeared. Around eight or nine, the action began.

“From my house, me and him and Jeremiah rode up to Sandy Landing,” Lawrence said. “We drove a pretty good ways up to Chumuckla.” Lawrence claimed the purpose of the trip was “to just sit around out there and talk”

Not likely
, Hand thought.

“Did Justin plan to go with you from the beginning?”

“He asked if he could ride with us, so he jumped in the back of the truck. I guess he just wanted to ride back there.”

“Did you stop anywhere before you got to Sandy Landing?”

“I think we stopped at a Tom Thumb store.”

“Why?”

“I wanted to buy some chips, Doritos 3D’s style; I always wanted to try some of ’em, so I bought us a bag.”

“Justin rode all the way to Sandy Landing?”

“Yeah, he was just sitting up against the tailgate. He didn’t really wanna get up front, and it was kind of a long night, still kinda cold.”

According to Rodgers, Justin had been killed on the copter field and then they moved the body to a different spot for burial. So, of course, Justin was sitting up against the tailgate and he was cold—he was dead. It would be interesting, Hand figured, to see where Jon Lawrence was going with his account.

“What did you and Jeremiah talk about while y’all were driving out?”

“We didn’t really say too much.”

“Did Jeremiah talk about Justin on the trip?”

“I don’t think he mentioned anything about him.”

“What happened when you got to Sandy Landing?”

“We were all standing around out there for a pretty good while, just looking up at the stars. Jeremiah was trying to get him to look up.”

“What was the purpose of getting him to look up?”

“I’m not sure, but he just punched him in the chest and told him to lie down.”

“What’d he punch him in the chest with?”

“I think just his fist.”

Jon Lawrence was telling the truth, a fact borne out by the autopsy report: there was no stab wound to Justin’s chest. Rodgers’s purpose in getting Justin to look up was to distract him long enough to punch him to the ground without a struggle.