Flesh Collectors (14 page)

They drove down the rutted trail until Lawrence stopped at the spot he had chosen. He cut the motor and they stayed in the stillness for a while. A few minutes later, they got out. They kept the headlights on so they could see what they were doing.

Lawrence had sex with the body again.

“Hurry up, hurry up,” Rodgers urged.

When Lawrence was done, Rodgers pulled the shovel out from the rear of the truck. It was the same shovel they had already used to dig Justin Livingston’s grave. Rodgers moved off a ways and started trying to dig the hole; it was so hard to dig that he got only about six to eight inches deep before he quit. He went back over to the truck just as Lawrence was getting out his scalpel. He also took out a camera and a plastic freezer-type bag.

Back at home, Lawrence had a book on anatomy,
The Incredible Machine
. He had been studying it intently for a while and had circled on the human anatomy chart the lower leg. Lawrence remembered his anatomy now.

Carefully he made his incision at the calf muscle, where it attached to the tendons and bone right underneath the knee. He cut in, going through layers of skin, until he reached the dense muscle and started slicing. The sharpness of the blade aided his labors. The scalpel sliced swiftly through the muscle as Jon pulled it all the way down. He sliced through the connecting tissue at the top and the bottom, releasing the muscle from the fat and skin.

Lawrence stood over the victim. In his bloodied hand, he held the prize. He stuffed it into the Ziploc bag and locked it, then put it into the cooler in the back of his truck.

Rodgers went back to dig the hole, made some progress and quit again. He went in the front of the truck for something and saw on the seat the camera that Lawrence had brought along. Next to it was a Ziploc bag with three packages of Polaroid film. Rodgers took out one of the packages and tore the carton open. He threw it down and then opened the protective wrapping. Once open, he could smell the chemicals of the processing unit built right into the cartridge that he took out and loaded into the camera.

He stood over Jennifer, her lower right leg missing except for bone, and snapped a shot. The picture shot out of the bottom of the camera, but nothing came out; Rodgers had messed it up in some way. He couldn’t get it to work; it kept jamming up. Finally it started working. Rodgers began snapping away.

He took picture after picture of the space where her calf muscle used to be. He took pictures of her body. He set up a shot where he placed a knife between her thighs. On film, it looked like a knife really was sticking out of her vagina. Rodgers continued taking pictures of the mutilation, but he wasn’t content to be the peeping photographer. Rodgers needed to be more of a participant.

They gathered up Jennifer’s clothing, bag, keys. There had been a picture attached to her key chain that had come undone and fallen to the ground. Lawrence bent and looked at it. He recognized who it was instantly. It was a picture of Jenny, but she was a few years younger. Rodgers was not so sentimental. He picked up the picture and the keys and threw them into the woods.

Lawrence put the skin and the fat he had carved from the muscle into a hole near a tree. He covered the hole with dirt and leaves. They looked around and picked up anything they could see, smoothed out any dirt where there might have been blood spatter. Then they got back into the truck. It wouldn’t start.

As hard as he tried, Lawrence couldn’t get it to turn over. Since they had kept the headlights on, the battery had been run down. The electrical system was finished.

The truck was dead. Having no choice, Rodgers and Lawrence walked through the canebrake under the full moon, the only travelers for miles and miles. They walked five miles, but they were in such good shape, they thought they had walked two. They got to a BP gas station just as the sun was coming up. A bedraggled Rodgers called his girlfriend, Lisa. He needed to get to her before she went to work. Lisa had the early shift at her job. He got her just as she was going out the door.

“Come and get me,” Rodgers pleaded.

He shot a woman he had just had sex with. Yet, like any amoral con man, he didn’t hesitate to call up his girl for help. Of course, she said “right away.” While they waited, Rodgers used the three dollars he started the night out with and another buck Lawrence gave him to buy a pack of cigarettes and two sports drinks.

They relaxed for a while until Lisa showed up at 6:40
P.M
. “Where have you been?” Lisa asked urgently. “Why didn’t you come home last night?”

“Leave me alone,” Rodgers answered. “Shut up. Don’t talk to me right now.”

But Lisa kept on nagging, right up until the time she dropped them off at Lawrence’s house. They got Rodgers’s Chevette and drove back up to where Jennifer’s body was. Rodgers wasn’t sure what he was planning on doing.

Part of him wanted to kill his old buddy Jon Lawrence. Part of him was just lost, having no idea how to proceed. By the time they got back, Rodgers still didn’t know what he was going to do.

When they came back, the body was in the same place; no one had been there. Rodgers was driving. He parked right behind Lawrence’s truck. Lawrence got out and immediately started bagging her clothes up. Rodgers took more pictures of Jennifer lying where she had fallen after Lawrence had gotten through with her. Before he got to the last few shots, Rodgers decided to do a little cutting of his own.

He took the scalpel and carefully made incisions on the right and left sides of Jennifer’s forehead. Slowly he kept cutting, put the knife down and peeled the scalp up, detaching it from the skull, until it was two flaps of hairy skin pushed halfway up her skull.

Rodgers was satisfied. It would be the final shots. He had her posed the way he wanted, her scalp practically torn from her face, standing up in thick sections of flesh and hair. He snapped a few more shots and watched as the pictures came out and developed.

After he took the last shots, Rodgers saw that Lawrence had already finished the bagging process. The girl’s clothes were in two bags. Rodgers put it on top of the hole. Lawrence got some oil and poured it all over the clothes. Rodgers struck a match and burned it. He remembered that he had been smart enough to take the money out of the clothes that she had been carrying—twenty dollars.

And then they went home. The following day, May 9, 1998, Hand arrested Jon Lawrence. Jeremiah Rodgers went on the run.

Chapter 9

Years ago, police used to put out an all-points bulletin (APB) when a suspect was wanted. The APB would go out across a statewide and sometimes nationwide network of teletype machines. Later, faxes would be added to the mix along with the basic telephonic and shortwave communication that still forms the foundation of information exchange between law enforcement agencies

With the rapid growth of the Internet through the 1990s, the APB gave way to the be-on-the-lookout-for (BOLO)—instant bulletins conveyed electronically to police department computers nationwide. While the terminology, as well as the technology, may be different, the methodology of the bulletin is the same: be on the lookout for X criminal who may be in your area. The BOLO that the Lake County Sheriff’s Office received on May 9 from the Santa Rosa County Sheriff’s Office said: “Be on the lookout for Jeremiah Rodgers on suspicion of murder.” Since Rodgers had access to Lawrence’s arsenal, “subject may be armed and dangerous; approach with caution” was added to the BOLO. It concluded with Rodgers’s description.

Police began contacting their snitches in the area with Rodgers’s description. Detective Alex Bruck and Sergeant Wendell Garratt met with Lieutenant Stu Schwartz in the Umatilla area of Lake County to discuss the Rodgers BOLO. Schwartz told his detectives that the Rodgers family lived in the area. It was possible Rodgers was trying to reach them. Schwartz gave Bruck and Garratt the fugitive’s description and the make and model of the car he had stolen and was thought to still be driving. The detectives hit the streets. Rodgers’s father was in town. They decided to pay him a visit.

On the way out to see Rodgers’s father, they drove by a downtown bar called Love, Sydney. In the darkened smoky interior, Jeremiah Rodgers was relaxing at the bar. It was a friendly place, where he liked to hang out when he was in town. He knew the owner. Soon Rodgers decided he’d better get going. When he left, another man joined him at the door and they went out together.

Every town has its snitches. The word is still used by police in a derogatory way to describe informers, low-end criminals who can’t make it any other way but by informing once in a while on their fellow criminals. And inside Love, Sydney was one of the town’s informers who recognized Rodgers. He saw Rodgers leave with “an older white male driving a gold-colored vehicle.”

Unlike in the movies, cops don’t spend a lot of their time doing surveillance work. It costs a lot of money to put two or more cops in unmarked cars and stake out a location on the chance that something might happen. But when a case is about to break, as this one was, it certainly paid to go the stakeout route, which was how Garratt and Bruck found themselves in an unmarked car staking out Jeremiah Rodgers’s father’s house.

Nothing happened. After a while, the detectives went across the street and knocked on the front door. They spoke with Rodgers’s dad, his stepmother and sister.

“That bar is mine,” said Rodgers’s dad. “Jeremiah stopped at my bar to have a drink.”

Of course, he had done nothing wrong. Rodgers certainly didn’t have access to the cop’s BOLO on his son.

“I talked to him on the phone,” Rodgers said, “and told him to leave. We don’t get along.”

He told the detectives that Jeremiah had threatened him with harm in the past. Rodgers chipped in with some names of people his son might attempt to contact. The stepmother gave Bruck and Garratt a recent photograph of Rodgers. A short time later, a deputy came out into the field to deliver a photograph taken from the state prison system’s on-line public-access database.

It was the mug shot of Jeremiah Rodgers. A quick check back with one of their informants who had knowledge of Rodgers’s presence in the county disclosed that he had switched cars. Still preferring to drive Chevys, he was now driving a blue Chevy Corsica. He was spotted on State Road 42.

Bruck and Garratt began driving east on State Road 42. A few minutes later, Rodgers whizzed by at the wheel of the blue Corsica, going in the opposite direction. Garratt turned his car around and hit the gas. The police car shot forward in high-speed pursuit, its eight-cylinder engine humming.

Up ahead, Rodgers had seen the sudden U in his rearview mirror and put the pedal to the metal. Bruck got on the car’s retro shortwave and advised police dispatch that they were in hot pursuit of suspected murderer Jeremiah Rodgers.

A marked Umatilla police car received the call. Miles up the road, it sped to a stop at the intersection of State Road 42 and State Road 19. That didn’t stop Rodgers. He drove right around the car, leaving some perplexed cops in his wake. He kept going south on State Road 19, not sure where he was going, but just figuring he had to keep going.

Bruck and Garratt ordered Lake County patrol cars to put down Stop Sticks. Stop Sticks are sticks of rubber covered with hollow, pointed tacks used specifically to slow speeding cars. Because the rubberized, lightweight, transportable construction makes them easy to mobilize, the cops had the Stop Sticks completely across State Road 19 almost immediately.

By the time Rodgers saw them, it was too late. The tires passed over them and the front right tire punctured all the way through.

Damn
, Jeremiah thought,
damn
!

About a mile farther down the road, the Corsica finally rolled to stop across the center median, a little south of the town of Umatilla. The cops knew Rodgers might be armed, so they didn’t approach immediately. Bruck and Garratt arrived to take charge at the scene. They maneuvered their car close to the Corsica, parked and advanced slowly from opposite directions.

Consulting the photograph that his stepmother had given him, Garratt quickly identified Jeremiah Rodgers as the man behind the wheel. He also identified the gun that Rodgers had pointed at his own head as a Lorcin .380.

It was not a bad gambit on Rodgers’s part. By acting suicidal, Rodgers forced the cops into a defensive rather than offensive posture. When given a choice, a police officer’s innate decency will make him want to save a life rather than take one. Rodgers wasn’t sure if the cops would shoot him immediately or not. While standard procedure was not to shoot unless they felt threatened, Rodgers knew that if he was shot and killed, no one would blink.

He figured the cops were after him for killing Jennifer, but he had also helped kill Justin Livingston. Slowly he rolled down his window.

When no one shot him, Rodgers figured he had gotten it right. He appeared to be more of a danger to himself than anyone else. Now it was time to see what he could get for lowering his weapon. It was a negotiation, no different from any business negotiation, except at the end of it, despite all efforts to the contrary, someone could get hurt.

The cops couldn’t take a chance of the gun going off accidentally; they had to get him to put it down. And so they started talking. Bruck and Garratt tried to talk Rodgers into throwing the pistol out the window.

“Listen,” Rodgers yelled back.

The detectives said they were listening.

“Look, I know about a guy and, uh, a woman too, a girl.”

From the BOLO, Bruck and Garratt knew Robinson was wanted for questioning regarding the homicide of a young female. What the hell was he talking about? Had this guy killed a man as well?

“It was out in the forest, in Santa Rosa County. Me and my friend Jon took a girl into the forest on a date.”

He was back to talking about the girl again.

“Me and Jon, we took her into the forest after a date. I walked away from the truck.”

“Jon shot the girl in the head,” Rodgers claimed. “I didn’t know he was going to shoot her.” Rodgers was pleading with the cops.