Flesh Collectors (13 page)

With that connection set up, Jeremiah Rodgers next turned to his family. Who could he use there? It was a coincidence that Elijah Waldrop, his brother, had been adopted by a Pace family and that Jon Lawrence came from the same town. But his philosophy was that life is full of coincidences and you’d be crazy not to make the most of them.

Thus began another series of correspondence. Rodgers probably spent more money on writing supplies than any of the convicts in Chattahoochee. This time, Rodgers began writing a series of letters to Elijah Waldrop, who responded.

“We started writing about a month before he got out,” Elijah told police. “I just got a letter from him. I guess he got my mailing address and my phone number from my sister. He [started] calling me three to four times a week.”

Phone calls from prisons have to be collect. Because conversations go all over the country and sometimes internationally, one can’t have some con standing there, plunking quarters into the phone, while a line of murderers, armed robbers and rapists wait patiently on line for their turn. These are not a patient kind of people.

What most prisons do to save time and to prevent turbulence is have the cons make their calls collect. The prison administration contracts with a company in the private sector to provide this service, which it does, at enormous rates, sometimes as high as twenty-five cents a minute. But Rodgers didn’t care. What did he care how many calls he made, or how long they were? He wasn’t paying for it, his brother was.

So they talked. And the con man did what con men do—he gained confidence. It didn’t matter to Rodgers that the person he was conning was his brother. He didn’t know any other way to be.

“I mean, at that time, I didn’t know, I would never think that my brother would do something like this in the future. So I figured I’d give him a chance and he’s, like, ‘well, stay in touch with me. Let’s write and all ’cause I don’t know when I’m gonna get out of jail.’”

Rodgers, of course, knew when he was going to get out of jail. He knew that he could persuade the parole board into letting him out.

“So I gave him a chance and I was writing him letters back and I sent him a picture and he never did send me none in return,” Waldrop recalled. “All he sent me was letters. He was telling me about how he conned people in jail to get by and buy cigarettes at the canteen. Then he calls me up one Thursday afternoon. He was being released the following Wednesday. I told him I’d be there.”

Jeremiah Rodgers’s con was complete. He had managed to convince his brother of his good intentions and love. And when Rodgers walked out of Chattahoochee, there was Elijah Waldrop. The two brothers embraced. Elijah figured Rodgers was coining to Pace to be with him. He was wrong, of course. Rodgers had an agenda.

When he got to Pace, Rodgers was going to look up his old friend Lawrence. He was going to look up Felicia Livingston and see what he could get out of her. And he was going to stay with his brother for a while and see what he could get out of him.

Waldrop took three days off from work to be with his brother. He was really looking forward to getting to know Jeremiah for the first time. Elijah took Rodgers with him back to Pace to meet his parents. Rodgers settled in. One night, Rodgers joined Elijah for a trip over to Elijah’s cousin Sam Webster’s house. The twentysomethings sat around, playing quarters for beer, and then Lisa Johnson came over. She was a friend of Sam’s.

Rodgers and Lisa hit it off. They moved in together with a unique arrangement—Rodgers had the freedom to go out and sleep with other women. To say that Lisa had a problem with self-esteem is putting it mildly.

“He stayed at our house on Polk Avenue for probably a month and then he moved in with Lisa,” Elijah remembered. “When Lisa would piss him off, he would go stay with Jon, and get drunk, or they’d smoke a joint or, you know, just hang out. I said, ‘Well, whatever you do is your business.’ We wasn’t really getting along [at that point].”

Rodgers drifted south, back to Lake County, where he still had friends. He stayed there for a while until he got bored and then returned to Pace, where he lived part of the time with Elijah, part of the time with Lisa, and hung out with Lawrence, just as they had at Chattahoochee. There was something about the way that they mixed, the way they complemented each other. They each had a degree of craziness that was heightened when they were together, and they each got a kick out of that.

“When Jeremiah first went to visit Jon, Jon gave him a Satanic bible,” says Elijah in official records.

“Jeremiah, you better throw that trash out in the yard,” Elijah told him.

The Satanic bible was written by Anton Szandor LaVey. His birth name was Howard Stanton Levey, but Anton Szandor LaVey sounded like a better name for a Satanist. LaVey was born in 1930 and led a knockabout existence until the night of April 30, 1966. During the German Satanic festival of Walpurgisnacht, LaVey had an epiphany.

In what would later be described as a “blinding flash,” he pronounced himself the High Priest of Satan. Thus, he proclaimed that the Age of Satan had begun, and he founded the Church of Satan as a religious institution. His life’s work, the Satanic bible, came out of these modest beginnings. The Satanic bible came out of the Satanism and witchcraft fad of the latter part of the 1960s.

Thinking there was a market for a book on Satanism, paperback publisher Avon Books contracted with LaVey to produce such a tome. The book has since become de rigueur reading for Satanists. In it, LaVey argues for a “new religion separate from the ‘traditional’ Judeo-Christian definitions of Satanism.”

Elijah Waldrop was not about to have anything regarding Satan in his house.

“I didn’t believe in that. Me and my brother got in a little argument about that, but it’s my house, my rules. You live with me, you’re gonna go by what my family believes in.”

On another occasion, Rodgers told his brother, “Jon’s got a friggin’ arsenal; he’s got knives and he’s got plenty of everything.”

When he finally did visit, Elijah was startled by the insides of Jon’s house. There were skeletons all over, posters of skeletons on motorcycles. Swastikas lounged next to pentagrams on Jon’s dresser, next to books about Satanic rituals. Someplace in his mind, Jon thought he could get meaning from hate. Rodgers found Jon’s place rather comfortable.

It was in that trailer that Rodgers’s fantasies of violence and Lawrence’s neuroses took shape in reality. Hour after hour, Rodgers and Lawrence talked about bringing their violent fantasies to life: robbery, rape, mutilation, murder. Rodgers had an idea to construct an underground prison. He told Lawrence that he would “keep people” whom he “did not like” there and do “weird things” to them. Hazy plans to implement their fantasies began to form in their minds.

Plans became reality when they executed a makeshift plot that culminated with their murder of Justin Livingston. Next they talked about killing Jennifer Robinson. They planned it out and then, finally, came the night that Jeremiah Rodgers had his date with her.

Chapter 8

Jennifer Robinson was a smart girl, smart enough to be wondering what kind of relationship her date had with Jon Lawrence, the friend he was bringing along. Or maybe she felt having the friend along would make things safer.

Two things are clear. First, Diane Robinson had not raised her daughter to ride off into the country with two criminals. Jeremiah Rodgers was a con man who would normally trick people into liking him with his charm and good looks. That had worked on Jennifer. Otherwise, she wouldn’t have been with him.

Second, Jon Lawrence, who had already been diagnosed as a functioning schizophrenic, was able to repress his delusional behavior long enough to appear passive, his usual face to society. Despite that face, or because of it, he had thoughtfully brought along Everclear. It is the most potent liquor available. It is considered so dangerous to consume that many states ban its sale within their borders.

The truck headed up to Blue Springs, deep into the most rural section of Santa Rosa County. They stopped at a convenience store, bought some gas, Mountain Dew and Dr Pepper, got back in and went straight out to Blue Springs. They drove as far as they could in the four-wheeler into the canebrake, until it was so impenetrable they could go no farther. They stopped and talked for a minute and finally Rodgers got out of the truck; Jennifer stayed inside.

The windows were open and the threesome passed around a spiked Mountain Dew. Jon didn’t take very much. Apparently, having had the rum earlier, he knew what his limit was. He wanted his head to stay clear for what he had to do. There was a plan to follow and he was determined to do exactly that.

Rodgers felt the same way. He would later remember that he had a “really small sip [of Everclear] but didn’t even touch my blood level at all.” Jennifer, though, was different. She quickly drank, multiple shots with Mountain Dew chasers.

“It’s better if you mix it,” said Rodgers, who had been watching her closely and decided to give her the benefit of his experience. He took back her Mountain Dew and obligingly mixed her a drink. His hand stayed heavy on the Everclear. Then he gave her back the Mountain Dew bottle.

For all of his appeal, Rodgers didn’t have any confidence. He knew he was good-looking; he used that. But he also knew he could be a son of a bitch, and if anyone saw that, they wouldn’t want a damn thing to do with him. Booze was safer. It guaranteed the result. On cue, Jon drifted away into the cane-brake and Rodgers climbed back into the truck.

The Everclear did what alcohol has done for generations. It broke down her defenses and allowed Rodgers to take advantage of her. Rodgers would later claim that she fellated him first. Rodgers leaned back and enjoyed himself. This was how he had wanted things to start.

After they were done, they continued playing around until Rodgers got hard again. He pulled down her pants. Rodgers would remember that he went inside her and began pounding, pounding, until he came inside her. He claimed the sex was consensual.

On cue, Lawrence came back and leaned up against the side of his truck. Rodgers had had his fun. It was time to go. They all got in and Lawrence gunned the motor. The truck started up, a sharp and rising howl in the dark stillness. It was about 2:00
A.M
. Lawrence proceeded back the way they had come, the headlamps picking out the rutted ground, brush and undergrowth, avoiding bad spots as they went.

“Pull over there, Jon,” Rodgers shouted.

Lawrence pulled over obediently and stopped. Rodgers turned to Jennifer excitedly.

“You have to see this,” he pitched. “There are these pot plants!”

“Pot plants?” Jennifer asked.

“Yes!” and Rodgers got out and walked down the hill to the plants, until he was out of sight. After about a minute, he came running back up.

“They’re still there! Come and take a look. I found them awhile ago while I’d been walking around up here.”

Jenny decided she needed to see this find.

“Right down there,” said Rodgers, pointing off into the darkness.

Rodgers waited until she had just passed him, then reached into his waistband and pulled out the pistol. He followed Jennifer down the hill, ready to shoot her in the back of the head. He picked the gun up to aim and … couldn’t do it.

Jennifer had gotten to the bottom of the hill. Her senses were clouded by the Everclear; she would have been barely able to stand straight. She may have given a few cursory glances around, but in her drunken stupor it’s doubtful she would have really recognized a marijuana plant, let alone a con man.

As they walked back up the hill, Rodgers cleared his mind. Again he raised the pistol, leveled it and aimed. Jennifer was only a few feet from the truck. Once she touched the door handle, that would have meant Rodgers’s nerve had run out. She would live and drive home to her mother and her brother and her family and her new postgraduation life as a tank driver or day-care proprietor or whatever she wanted to be.

The pistol discharged with a sharp crack into the night. The bullet entered in the back of her head, over her left ear, and embedded deep in her brain. She sagged, and by the time she hit the ground, her heart had stopped beating.

Shooting her near the truck was not part of the plan. The idea was just to shoot her. Of that, he and Jon had agreed beforehand. But it was a good idea to do it at the top of the hill, in case the body had to be moved. If he’d shot her at the bottom, that would have meant dragging a 145-pound deadweight up a hill, which would leave a lot of evidence if the cops ever found the scene.

Lawrence, whose back had been to Jennifer, turned at the sound of the shot. He saw Jennifer suddenly sitting there on the ground, kind of lying backward. Rodgers was looking down at her. After a while, he looked up with a surprised expression of awe on his face.

“Damn Jon, I got her!”

They bent down and moved Jennifer’s body to the back of the truck onto the tailgate. Then Lawrence went to work on her. He took out a knife, which he had carefully packed ahead of time, and cut off her clothes. Stripped naked, with a bullet hole in the back of her head, Jennifer then had her legs sexually spread by Lawrence.

Rodgers walked down toward the creek. When he looked back up, he could see the silhouette of Lawrence in the clearing. It was a full moon and as bright as the time before the sun was completely down. Everything seemed like a dream to Rodgers. He saw Lawrence pull his pants down and shove his erect penis into her dead body.

Rodgers didn’t really care for necrophilia; he stayed where he was for a while, watching, until Jon was done. Rodgers walked back up as Lawrence pulled up his pants.

From out of the darkness, they heard a rumbling sound. It was from the other side of the stream but still close by, the unmistakable roar of a boat motor.

“I got a good place where we can bury her,” Lawrence said.

Quickly, before anyone on the other side of the river might see what they were doing, they loaded the body into the truck. They were scared—if they were discovered now, that would be it. But no one saw them, no one heard anything.