Authors: Fred Rosen

Flesh Collectors (26 page)

“I’m just coping,” she said, “and waiting for the day when the men who killed my son are brought into the death chamber at Starke,” Florida’s prison where executions take place. “I hope me and Diane go see ’em be put down like dogs.”

It looks like she will get her wish.

Elijah Waldrop

Elijah Waldrop was devastated by his involvement in his brother’s case. “It ruined my whole life,” Waldrop told police afterward. “People come in the shop [where he works] and you hear people [gossiping] about them two guys that got arrested. I have to call some of my friends over there to finish the job so I can do something else, ’cause I can’t stand hearing about it. I just go to pieces.

“I’m trying to be a man about this, but it don’t help none. Not when you knew the people personally. You went to school with ’em and partied with ’em. You talked to ’em on a friend level. I’ve known Justin ever since we was little kids, ten, eleven years old. And none of this would have happened if I hadn’t went and got [Jeremiah] out of jail and brought him up here.”

Waldrop thought he was his brother’s keeper.

“Them assholes don’t know the value of a human life! They don’t understand. They don’t have no kids. If my brother ever hurt my daughter, I woulda killed him.”

Waldrop was just one of many victims of homicide. The ones most people hear about are the dead ones. But the ones that survive—the friends, brothers, sisters, parents—they are victims too.

“I’d paid a price for it. He has no place in none of my family’s heart. I have to live the rest of my life with all this in my head. I’ll never get rid of it. I hear about it at work. I dream about it in my sleep.”

And then Elijah Waldrop thought for a moment and admitted:

“Jeremiah wanted to show me them bodies. I’m glad I didn’t now. I’m damn well glad that I didn’t, ’cause I’d probably be dead too.”

Some adopted children yearn to know their biological family, thinking it would give them some sort of closure to something missing in their adopted family. Ironically, Elijah, who was adopted, had been afforded that closure, but at great price.

“Even though he is my blood brother, he might see it wrong for me turning him in. But I don’t think he’d never give up. I think he’d-a went on and he’d-a made it down south and he’d-a killed all my blood family. And that would have been that much more I have to live with the rest of my life.

“Now my daughter’s gotta grow up with ‘your uncle’s a murderer.’ I don’t want him nowhere around me or my family ever again,” Waldrop stated to police.

Todd Hand

Rodgers and Lawrence made Hand look twice at being a cop and the kind of people he came into contact with. Todd Hand was probably the only one with the right idea—he got out of town.

The peripatetic Hand left Santa Rosa County and took a job farther south with the Florida Department of Environmental Conservation. His beat was the Everglades and other state lands, where he tried to make sure they were not polluted by environmental lawbreakers.

Jonathan Lawrence

In March 2003, Jon Lawrence’s appeal before the Florida State Supreme Court was turned down. While noting his mental incapacity and neurological problems, the court said he was responsible for his crimes and should be executed, just as the trial court said.

Jeremiah Rodgers

While awaiting execution, Rodgers had once again put his considerable writing skills to good use, advertising on Web sites for pen pals, writing: “I’d like to correspond with a lady-friend, to possibly form a bond of friendship.”

That was Jeremiah Rodgers’s ad, designed to lure unsuspecting victims into corresponding with a convicted murderer. Whether or not he had responses was not clear. Apparently, it remained his business. Death row prisoners have the right to write as much as anyone else. Unless he committed a crime, he was doing nothing illegal in his advertisement.

Until getting a “fish,” Rodgers spent his time waiting for his eventual death. With everyone acknowledging that he was the one who killed Jennifer, despite his denials, of course, there was little or no chance the courts will show him any mercy on appeal. They haven’t yet, and there’s no reason to think the courts will change their mind.

Image Gallery

Mug shot of Jon Lawrence.

Courtesy of Florida State Department of Corrections