Flesh Collectors (4 page)

It was Todd Hand’s first day at his new job as detective. He strode purposefully into the detective bureau of the Santa Rosa County Sheriff’s Office in Milton, Florida, and reported in to his lieutenant, Josh Randall. Randall was getting a good man. Hand had a total of fifteen years of experience as a cop.

In the squad room after his meeting with the lieutenant, Hand looked around. The place was narrow and cramped and smelled of mildew. Everything in Santa Rosa County smelled from mildew. Not only did the Blackwater River cut right across it, the county itself had a southern border on the Gulf of Mexico, from whence mighty storms rolled in during hurricane season in the fall.

“You can use this desk over here,” said Joe McCurdy. McCurdy was a detective with a big ol’ country boy demeanor. He led Hand to a battered wooden desk. Hand sat down and McCurdy came back with a folder.

“Here you go.” McCurdy placed the folder on the desk in front of Hand. “You can take care of this one. Welcome to the Santa Rosa County Detective Bureau.” Hand looked at the folder. Written in bold letters on the front was the name Justin Livingston. Hand opened it and began reading:

“10 April, 1998. The complainant, Elizabeth Livingston, stated that her son, Justin Livingston, didn’t come home last night or this morning. The complainant stated she had last seen her son at 10:00 AM on 04-09-98. At that time, he was lying in bed at his residence. The complainant didn’t know what her son was wearing when he left the residence.”

So far, nothing out of the ordinary. The report continued:

“The complainant stated that her son was mentally disabled. He takes medication for paranoid schizophrenic [
sic
]. The complainant stated that Justin has missed three doses of his medication. If he doesn’t receive his medication, he becomes very paranoid. After becoming paranoid and depressed, he makes attempts to harm himself.”

Great
, thought Hand.
Not only is this kid mentally disabled, he’s suicidal and paranoid when he’s not on his “meds.
”

“For all I knew, this kid had found some girl, gone down to [the nearby party town] of Fort Walton and was having a good old time,” Hand later said.

Hand knew that over the years, research in criminal justice has found that over 80 percent of missing-persons cases are solved successfully—that is, the missing person shows up on his own, unharmed. That leaves 20 percent unaccounted for, meaning those people are in trouble. It is within this latter group that Todd Hand sincerely hoped Justin Livingston had not fallen into. Chances were that Justin Livingston would eventually show up alive and well.

If Justin fell into the 20 percent grouping, the first twenty-four hours he was missing were all important. If he was abducted but alive, it was during that period of time the cops had the best shot of catching up with him because the trail was warm. After that, it diminished to the point of cold freeze, which was exactly where Todd Hand was picking it up. Hand opened the file again.

“According to the complainant, Justin wasn’t depressed or upset about anything. The complainant stated that Justin hangs out at two different residences in the area. These locations were check [
sic
] with negative results.” The investigating officers Reed and Malloy got a statement from the mother in which she said that Justin went walking off in the afternoon. She didn’t know where he went. He just never came home. That was the last she’d seen of him.

Even in this age of forensic magic, cops still rely on their knowledge of the territory they patrol, their beat, to solve crimes. In Santa Rosa County, Hand was confronted with a society that locals had affectionately nicknamed Lower Alabama or the Redneck Riviera. The smarter locals knew that meant that quite a few of their neighbors were rather backward country folk who had yet to make the evolutionary climb into the twenty-first century.

Such snide observations aside, Hand had the immediate obstacle that he wasn’t a local. He knew nothing of the kinds of local social mores that a smart cop relies on to solve cases. Milton was a new beat. He’d have to pick up on the way people acted, what was considered normal versus suspicious.

Hand drove out to see Elizabeth Livingston in an unmarked gray ’96 Mercury Sable. He found her in her trailer, still fretting. It was three days after Justin had disappeared.

“Did you do anything?” Hand asked.

“Like what?”

“An argument?”

She answered no.

“Does he have any enemies?”

Again a no.

While they were chatting, Livingston heard brakes squealing outside her trailer, up the driveway across the street. She convinced Hand to run over and look for tire marks, signs of anything wrong. Maybe Justin had been hit with a car and was lying dead someplace.

“She told me that the night Justin didn’t show up, the guy who lived in the house across the street had a big fire going. Justin stopped there earlier before he went to Jon Lawrence’s home,” Hand later said.

The fire, it turned out, was nothing—just the neighbor burning some leaves. Another neighbor, Lincoln Hayes, had been involved in a drowning death in Los Angeles, but he was in the Everglades when Justin disappeared and his whereabouts were accounted for. What complicated the investigation further was that Justin’s apparent normality meant that no one gave him a second look.

Hand’s investigation would later show that Justin “had the mental capacity of a twelve-year-old. He was very immature, even for a twelve-year-old.” Hand questioned the neighbors, looking for the last people that saw Justin in the neighborhood. It took a while, but finally he came across a neighbor, Jim Kelly, who had seen something.

“I saw a guy in a pickup truck let Justin out early in the afternoon,” Kelly told Hand. “Justin went into his trailer, came out, got back into the pickup and the guy drove off.”

When she heard the truck’s description, neighbor Leslie Shepard said it matched the one driven by Ricky Lawrence. He lived with his brother Jonathan a few streets over. Hand hit the Merc’s gas and tooled over to what the cops would come to describe derisively as “the Lawrence compound.”

The Lawrence compound was three run-down buildings on a one-acre square of suburban property in a lower-middle-class neighborhood in Milton. It was set off from the street, with access by a narrow, weed-strewn driveway. A bolted-up cattle gate blocked the entrance. Without a warrant, Hand couldn’t proceed any farther.

Hand checked with some other neighbors. They told him that Ricky Lawrence worked for the Delgaudio Wood Chipping Company in town; Hand called him there.

“I’m trying to find Justin Livingston,” Hand told Ricky Lawrence over the phone.

Ricky replied that he was working on his truck the day Justin disappeared. Justin came over in the afternoon. For some reason, he was all duded up in snakeskin cowboy boots, a Levi’s green-striped cowboy shirt and Levi’s boot jeans. Justin usually dressed casually. Seeing him all dressed up was unusual.

Despite his fancy outfit, Justin helped Ricky do some mechanical work on the truck. When Ricky was satisfied, he closed the hood and took it for a test drive. Justin came along and told Ricky about a tape that he wanted him to listen to. That’s when Ricky drove him over to his trailer. Almost instantly, Justin was in and out of his trailer with the tape and Ricky drove off.

So far, Hand wasn’t surprised. Until that afternoon, Justin Livingston had been alive and well—and well dressed at that, if you liked cowboy dress.

After picking up the tape, Ricky claimed that he drove back to the Lawrence compound. He and Justin hung around for a while until Jonathan Lawrence and his friend Jeremiah Rodgers showed up, along with Uncle Roy, who lived in a bus on the property. Then Justin drove off with Rodgers and Lawrence.

“That was the last time I saw Justin,” Ricky told Hand.

Back at the office, he called Jonathan Lawrence. He got his answering machine and left a message. Lawrence called him back quickly.

“Me and Jeremiah drove off with Justin, and then went back to the Airstream to watch a movie,
The Shining,
” Lawrence told Hand.

That’s the film based on the Stephen King novel of the same name where Jack Nicholson plays a homicidal maniac named John, who, in the film’s penultimate moment, axes a door down to kill his wife, after which he sticks his head through the splintered door and announces with glee, “Heeere’s Johnny.”

Lawrence liked that scene because his name was Jon too, albeit spelled differently. But he identified with Nicholson’s raging homicidal maniac.

“Justin really wanted to watch it,” Lawrence continued. “Jeremiah had a little marijuana, so we smoked together. Justin was a weedhead.”

When the movie was over, Justin got up, Lawrence claimed.

“Me and Jeremiah said we was gonna take a ride. Justin, he said he was going down to the video store to get a video.”

Lawrence said he watched as Justin walked down the block, toward the highway where the video store was located. That was the last he saw of him.

“What’s Rodgers’s number?” Hand asked Justin, who promptly offered him Lisa Johnson’s number. Lisa was Rodgers’s girlfriend. “They lived together,” Lawrence later said.

“I remember that on Justin’s twentieth birthday, he had gone to services with me and he raised his hand that day in church to say something. The theme of that day’s service was ‘Staying Alive,’ Elizabeth Livingston recalled.

She fell back on her faith now to sustain her in her search for Justin. Elizabeth needed to; she was falling apart. She expected the worst, though didn’t want to admit it.

Todd Hand intended to interview Jonathan Lawrence in person later, but for now, his primary task was to account for Justin’s movements. If he could do that, he thought, he could track him down.

Hand called Lisa Johnson’s, got a machine, identified himself and left a message for Rodgers to call him. That done, he drove over to the video store that Lawrence said Justin had been going to when he disappeared. The place was called Alternate Video. It not only stocked the usual Hollywood movies, it had special sections devoted to well-known directors and film genres. Its manager, Ike Clayton, said that the Livingstons had an account with them, but neither Justin nor his mother had rented videos for a while.

Hand had Clayton pull the surveillance tape from the store security camera. Justin wasn’t on it. Hand spoke to the two counter people who were working the night Justin disappeared. He described the young man carefully. Neither could recall Justin being there.

Hand called Rodgers and Lawrence again and left messages to call him back. Lawrence would later call him back, but not his friend.

That pissed Todd Hand off. Though there really was no reason yet to suspect that anything had happened to Justin, Hand decided to hit the Florida law enforcement on-line database at the sheriff’s office. Here’s what came up on Rodgers:

Name: JEREMIAH MARTEL RODGERS

Race: CAUCASIAN

Sex: MALE

Hair Color: BROWN

Eye Color: BROWN

Height: 5’07”

Weight: 179

Birth Date: 04/19/1977

Aliases: JEREMIAH RODGERS, JEREMIAH M. RODGERS, JEREMIAH MARTEL RODGERS

Identifiers: FINGERPRINT CLASS—22PIPO1718POPIPI14

Scars, Marks and Tattoos: HEAD (“X”), LEFT ANKLE (“ROSE”), RIGHT HAND (“FIRECRACKER”)

Prior Prison History: (Note: Data reflected covers periods of incarceration with the Florida Dept.of Corrections since January of 1983):

ARRESTED GRAND THEFT AUTO, 5/19/1993, SENTENCED 8/16/1993, LAKE COUNTY, PRISON SENTENCE LENGTH, 4 Y 6M 0D [PART OF SENTENCED SERVED AT CHATTAHOOCHEE]

Lawrence’s file wasn’t much different:

Name: JONATHAN H. LAWRENCE

Race: CAUCASIAN

Sex: MALE

Hair Color: RED OR AUBURN

Eye Color: BROWN

Height: 5’07”

Weight: 166

Birth Date: 04/12/1975

Aliases: JON LAWRENCE, JONATHAN LAWRENCE, JONATHAN HUEY LAWRENCE, JONATHAN LAWRENCE, JONATHAN H. LAWRENCE

Identifiers: FINGERPRINT CLASS—POPIPIPIPIPIPIPIPIPI

Scars, Marks and Tattoos: BOTH WRISTS

Prior Prison History: (Note: Data reflected covers periods of incarceration with the Florida Dept.of Corrections since January of 1983)

ARRESTED CRIMINAL MISCHIEF/PROP. DAMAGE, 05/18/1993, SANTA ROSE COUNTY, SENTENCED 11/02/1993, PRISON SENTENCE LENGTH, 4Y 0M 0D [PART OF SENTENCE SERVED AT CHATTAHOOCHE]

Chattahoochee was the state’s once-notorious mental hospital.
Holy shit, what a bunch of nuts around here
, Hand thought. Since they had been in different prisons before being transferred to Chattahoochee, Hand figured they had met up there. Noting Lawrence’s mental history, Hand reasoned that the wrist scars might be from suicide attempts. He wouldn’t know until he looked at Lawrence in short sleeves. Yet, despite their records, there was still no indication of foul play.

“Rodgers and Lawrence and their checkered past was interesting to me,” said Hand later. “Their record of crimes and record of confinement in a mental hospital made them
damn
interesting. And that’s when the Justin Livingston sightings started happening.” Hand later explained.

Cops started funneling him lead sheets, reports from locals who claimed to have seen Justin standing on a street corner, at a local bar, or hiding out on the streets to get away from his mom. None of the leads checked out. Hand began to realize that in the Milton community everyone wanted to help, but in their zeal to do so, people overreacted.

Because Hand wasn’t a local, he didn’t know that such “helpful” sightings were not uncommon from the country folk who populated the area. And then, there was this one anonymous caller. The fellow called and left a message on Hand’s phone.