Flesh Collectors (3 page)

“Justin was laughing and carrying on like nothing had happened,” Elizabeth recalled. “The doctors were afraid he was high on the paint fumes. Even when they took the paint off him, he was still so high; the doctors were afraid that when he came down, he’d have a massive heart attack. He kept acting weird.”

Realizing that Justin needed a psychiatric workup, they called a police cruiser to escort him to First Steps, the mental-health facility where he would be tested and diagnosed. Despite the fact that Justin had never been violent, the cops put him in cuffs for transport. The cops figured he was a psychiatric patient; they didn’t want to take any chances if he turned violent. They drove Justin out to First Steps, where the doctors ran all kinds of psychological and physical tests on him, trying to figure out why he seemed so high despite being “off” the paint fumes.

“Mama, I want to get out of here,” Justin said to his mother after he’d been at First Steps for a few weeks.

It was a plaintive cry from her youngest child, but Elizabeth Livingston knew there was nothing she could do to get him discharged. The state had him. The state was the boss, Elizabeth felt. All she could do was get her son through it the best way she could.

“Justin, pretend you’re at the Holiday Inn and you got all these people waiting on you. That’s not so bad, right?”

“Mama, it’s not the Holiday Inn! I can’t get out!” Justin pleaded.

Elizabeth’s heart broke for her son, but there was nothing they could do. She’d had enough tragedy in her life to know that sometimes you just have to let the string play itself out. While Justin was being evaluated, Felicia, his older sister, was having a baby at another hospital in the area. Adding to her stress level, Elizabeth’s father was dying in a West Florida hospital. Every day after she finished her work as school custodian, she had to rush to three hospitals to see three relatives.

It took another two weeks after Justin’s desperate plea, but at the thirty-day mark, the professionals at First Steps finally arrived at a diagnosis.

“They diagnosed Justin as suffering from attention deficit disorder (ADD) and schizophrenia. They gave him medication for both things,” said Elizabeth.

The ADD diagnosis accounted for Justin’s problems in school. According to the
DSM
, ADD is characterized as a “persistent pattern of inattention and/or hyperactivity-impulsivity that is more frequent and severe than is typically observed in individuals at a comparable level of development.”

Justin was lucky; he responded well to the medications. His delusions and hallucinations disappeared. He still had ADD but could focus better. His life, though, had been irretrievably changed. For the rest of his life, he would be subject to major emotional problems unless he took his medication. He took it diligently every night at seven o’clock. And through it all, his mother recalled, he never lost his bright smile.

Justin had endured five years of dental work and the braces had just come off in the winter of 1998. The dental work left him with an eye-grabbing white smile and a dental appliance that he secretly wore in the back of his mouth to finish off the straightening process. It was that bright smile that graced the photos Elizabeth decided to use to find her son. She gave copies to the Santa Rosa County Sheriff’s Office.

“Justin was really a sweet lil’ feller. He was all of six feet and weighed one hundred thirty-five pounds soaking wet. He was easy to get along with. Everybody liked Justin. He had this thing—ADD. It happened … when he became a teenager,” she told the cops haltingly.

In most missing-persons cases, the missing person turns up unharmed. The Santa Rosa County Sheriff’s Office therefore hoped they wouldn’t have to use the photos. They would distribute copies to beat cops, knowing full well that it is only the small minority of missing-persons cases where things get more serious.

But Elizabeth Livingston already knew in her gut that things had gone to the next level. Justin was in trouble and she told that to the police adamantly. Otherwise he would have come home and taken his medication. The last thing Justin wanted was to go delusional again and get confined to First Steps.

After a few sleepless nights and no reports from the police, Elizabeth felt that she had to take things into her own hands. If she was going to find her son, she would have to do it herself. She gathered up the photos she had given the police and pasted them on eleven-by-sixteen poster board. There was Justin’s 1997 Pace High School graduation photograph, in which he proudly holds the diploma that he worked so hard to get, his senior prom shot, a photograph of him and Felicia making funny faces, and his yearbook photo, complete with tux.

Elizabeth wrote this copy across the poster:

MISSING—ENDANGERED

Justin Kyle Livingston

D.O.B. Feb. 23, 1978, missing since April 9, 1998, 7 PM.

6ft tall—135 lbs.

Black Hair/Brown Eyes

Tall/Thin/Always Smiling

Last Seen By: Roy lee, Jon & Ricky Lawrence, & Jeremiah Rodgers on West Spencer Field Road (Pace)

Looking at his graduation picture, Elizabeth remembered that Justin had required special tutoring, which necessitated transporting him to another school in the county.

“Justin was taking some special courses up at Laughlin and he’d get picked up by this bus. The initials on the side were SLD. Justin said [kidding] that was for ‘slow-learning dummies,’” Elizabeth related, laughing at the memory.

Traveling up to the Wal-Mart on Route 90, Elizabeth made copies of the poster and distributed them to friends and family. They scattered around town, posting them wherever they could. Elizabeth had already been to four locations around Pace herself when she arrived at the Corner Store. It was a convenience store a few blocks up from her home. Inside, an attractive red-haired girl was behind the register. The girl had only recently started there. Elizabeth seemed to recall that she was related to the man who owned the store.

“I’d like to post this outside if I could,” said Elizabeth, holding the copy of the poster.

“Sure,” said the girl behind the counter. “No problem.”

“Thank you,” said Elizabeth politely. “You went to Pace too, right?”

“I still am. Graduating this semester,” said the girl brightly. “I’m Jenny Robinson,” she said, extending her hand in greeting.

Elizabeth shook hands.

“My son, Justin, graduated in 1997. Do you know him?”

The girl said she didn’t. Outside, Elizabeth stapled Justin’s poster to a utility pole. She looked at the picture of her son laughing with her daughter and making those funny faces and remembered the day he died temporarily. It had been a long time ago.

“When Justin was two and a half, he had to have a kidney removed. It was when a hurricane came through,” said Ms. Livingston, speaking in a Deep South drawl that made “hurricane” sound like “herrican.”

What happened was that Justin had a fever that spiked at 106 degrees. Touching his hot skin, Elizabeth realized something was wrong; her baby wasn’t breathing. He had flat-lined. The ambulance had already been called but was delayed because of the wailing wind and heavy sheets of wind the hurricane was throwing down from the heavens. There was no time to wait.

Elizabeth Livingston had some training in CPR and so she began massaging her son’s chest. She made sure that her downward strokes on his little baby chest were not enough to fracture a rib, but concentrated simply on getting the heart working. By the time the EMTs arrived, little Justin was breathing on his own again, thanks to his mother’s heroic efforts.

After being rushed in an ambulance to the hospital, the doctors ran all kinds of tests on Justin. They came to the conclusion that one of Justin’s kidneys was not functioning properly. He needed a nephrectomy, or kidney removal. Without such a procedure, the kidney would continue to malfunction, pouring toxins into the body. Justin would die and this time there would be no bringing him back.

“They said he had something strange in his urine,” Elizabeth recalled. She agreed to the operation; it was performed; Justin survived. Now Elizabeth could only hope he was still alive. She finished tacking up the poster.

A week later, in the middle of April, the police still had no leads and Justin had not come home. Elizabeth was trying to get her mind off her worries and was outside weeding her garden. She looked up from some chickweed to see Jeremiah Rodgers and Jon Lawrence stride up to the fence that ringed her home.

“You gotta take our names off that poster,” Lawrence complained.

“Yeah,” Rodgers added, “you got no right to put our names out there on that there poster. We want you to take our names off now.”

Elizabeth found their request rather strange.

“There was some kind of strange vibe about them. Everyone else whose name was on the poster understood and was cooperative, but those two, they were downright rude.”

She told them that she was just trying to find her son, that she was terribly worried about him. They didn’t want to hear it. Once again, they insisted she take their names off her posters.

“Get away,” she said curtly.

Not waiting, she went into the house and slammed the door.
Oh, Lord
, she thought,
a Lawrence is involved with my baby’s disappearance. Something has happened to Justin. I’m sure of it now
.

“I suspected everyone,” Elizabeth said later. “I’ve had to go through a lot of murder in my family. Seven, in fact—seven family members been murdered. It’s our family curse. Justin’s daddy himself was murdered ten years ago.”

Elizabeth had been in the process of divorcing her husband, Jimmie, the decade before. She was already separated from him at the time but had to go see him about something. She took a friend, Jeff Hunter, along for protection because Jimmie could be unstable. Sure enough, Jimmie started an argument and the two men fought. When it was over, Jimmie Livingston lay dead on the pavement, stabbed to death.

Elizabeth was determined that the “family curse” not befall Justin. But the fact that Justin was last seen with the Lawrence family worried her considerably. Elizabeth and the Lawrences were blood kin, but that did not distort her view of them. She knew that being related biologically to somebody didn’t make them a better human being.

“My mother on her deathbed, she told me never to have anything to do with the Lawrences,” recalled Elizabeth Livingston. “I am related through my first cousin’s son. My mother was a Lawrence. Her brother’s son’s son.”

Elizabeth Livingston had been correct in taking the responsibility for her son’s search effort into her own hands.

No detective had been actively working the case. It was not a priority for the simple reason there was no indication of foul play. There was no crime scene to look at for answers. Cursory questions of his acquaintances had shown nothing. No one knew where he was.

As for Rodgers and Lawrence, they had not yet been questioned extensively. There were certainly better suspects in Pace and Milton, men who had been tried and convicted of violent crimes who had served time and were now out on the street. Why should anyone suspect two former mental patients without any history of violent crime?

It would take a really good cop to put it together.

Chapter 3

1997

Michael Keaton and Todd Hand were kidding around on the set of
Desperate Measures
. Hand was the thirty-seven-year-old director of security for the film in which Keaton played a killer who just happened to be a bone marrow donor for a cop’s critically ill young son. For Keaton, playing a killer for only the second time in his career, it turned out to be a colossal flop. It was one in a string of disappointing films he did after playing Batman. For Todd Hand, the film represented the end of his personal three-year Pennsylvania odyssey.

Hand had been traveling aimlessly since he divorced his wife three years before in Florida. He followed her north after their divorce because she had custody of their child and moved back to Pennsylvania. Hand came from central Pennsylvania; he had only immigrated to Florida after his graduation from Penn State with a B.S. in criminal justice. Once in the Sunshine State, he had pursued a career in law enforcement, rising to become a detective in Polk County. He gave up all that to be near his child.

The problem was, being a cop wasn’t just his vocation, it was his avocation. He just loved it. It wasn’t surprising, then, that he drifted through a series of dead-end jobs. His heart wasn’t in any of them. Finally he got work in private security. The hospital set in
Desperate Measures
was actually a downtown building in Pittsburgh that the producers dressed up to look like the film’s San Francisco hospital setting. Most of the shooting took place at night.

One night after he had kibitzed with the affable Keaton between takes, Hand went back, alone, to his office. He sat there in the darkness and wondered where his life was going. Like his acting friend’s alter ego Bruce Wayne, Hand had some personal problems that needed sorting out.

Hand could have stayed in private security. He enjoyed schmoozing with Keaton and his costar Andy Garcia. Considering the difficulty of the case about to come his way, he probably should have stayed. However, he couldn’t get being a cop out of his blood. So, he decided that his daughter had matured enough that he could tend to one of his own needs.

Looking at a map of Florida, he literally picked Santa Rosa County out at random. He thought it might be a good place to work. After
Desperate Measures
wrapped, he packed up his car with everything he owned and drove south. He figured it wouldn’t take him long to rise through the ranks from street officer to detective.

April 16, 1998, Milton, Florida

Santa Rosa was only too happy to hire Hand as a deputy on patrol. Hand figured that considering his experience, it wouldn’t be long until he made detective. He was right. In six short months, he was promoted to the detective bureau, hung up his uniform and put on a sports jacket and slacks.