Fred Rosen - Flesh Collectors. Cannibalism and Further Depravity on the Redneck Riviera

Flesh Collectors

Cannibalism and Further Depravity on the Redneck Riviera

Fred Rosen

For Don

It is not funny that a man should be killed, but it is sometimes funny that he should be killed for so little, and that his death should be the coin of what we call civilization.

Raymond Chandler,

The Simple Art of Murder

Prologue

1998

It was spring and large oak, pine and magnolia trees were beginning to bloom on the streets of Milton, Florida. Almost every yard was ablaze with the colorful blooms of the azalea and the camellia. It was always that way, even in the early 1800s when legendary highwayman Joseph Hare held sway in the area.

Census estimates put Miltons present-day population at over seven thousand residents for the roughly five-square-mile city. The county seat for Santa Rosa County, Miltons downtown is a collection of dilapidated early-twentieth-century buildings that are struggling to decide whether to collapse against the weight of a century of river air and hurricanes.

On one side of the town is the Blackwater River. A few miles south is the Gulf of Mexico. In between are neat one-family ranch homes, trailers, and up on the main drag of Route 90, Hungry Howies Pizza & Subs, Leather Works Plus, Papa Johns Pizza and Bills Tattoos and Piercings. Theres more of the usual suburban collection of fast-food joints and shopping malls. Wal-Mart is a major hangout.

Tropical storms and hurricanes regularly roll in from the Gulf during the early fall. The torrential rains combined with the soft ground make the whole area a swamp, but the late fall and winter months more than compensate with warm temperatures and tropical breezes. A whole culture has grown up around the area that the locals call the Redneck Riviera or Lower Alabama. Despite hurrican season that lasts from August through September, the Gulfs warm water and beaches bring the area millions in tourist business from Alabama, which is directly north.

Down Norris Road is Pace, the towns high school. Its corridors are festooned with multicolored crepe paper in the schools patriotic colors of red, white and blue, celebrating the teams athletic accomplishments. While the schools in the county boast a decent 16.7 to 1 student/teacher ratio, Paces average SAT scores, at 1056, are only slightly above the national average. The kids from Pace do not have an easy road ahead of them.

A few miles away, on Spencer Field Road, is Spencer Outlying Field. A federal installation where navy copters do touch-and-go landings, Spencers copters are served by the deployment of two-thousand-gallon JP5 fuel-servicing trucks. The airfield is a vast piece of scrub brush in the middle of Santa Rosa County, smack-dab in the middle of Milton. If a local were looking to dump a body, he would think this is a good spot. Considering the fields vastness, he could suppose the corpse might not be discovered for days.

Pace, Florida, a few miles down the road from Milton, is another small town in the Florida Panhandle. The Panhandle is an area of scrub brush and canebrake that extends east from the Alabama border, under Georgia, to the Atlantic Ocean. Pace was no different from any of those other townsthe kids were just as desperate to escape as their parents had been.

Somethe few who really excelled in the high schoolmight be able to use a college education to escape from their modern-day whitewashed ghetto. Others used business ability to become successful enough to get out of town. Still, others used their charm and good looks to net husbands and wives of greater fortune.

In Pace, everybody knows everybody. This is the South, with families going back generations, since before the Civil War. These people have great-grandfathers who fought for the Confederacy. The present-day inhabitants are still bearing the brunt of the poverty and hopelessness that followed their ancestors defeat at Union hands. Buried deep within this proud community are a few families of which the others are warynot very many, but a few never-the-less.

When a Pace resident says so-and-so came from a bad line, he knows the entire family history stretching back generations. Such was the case with the surname Lawrence. It was spoken in hushed tones. By the time the spring of 1998 was over, the Lawrence name would once again be spoken with dread, and for good reason.

Two people would be dead and horribly mutilated. One would be a victim of savagery and betrayal of the most heinous sort, the other necrophilia and attempted cannibalism. The killers would join Leopold and Loeb, who strangled poor Bobby Franks in 1924, and Hickock and Smith, who, in 1959, massacred the Clutter family of Kansas in cold blood, to make the list of American historys infamous duos. Nearly forty years after Hickock and Smiths exploits, they made the savagery of their predecessors seem mild in comparison.

Their names were Rodgers and Lawrence. To some, they were known as the flesh collectors.

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

Chapter 1

April 9, 1998

It was the kind of balmy night that made it hard to sleep. There was excitement in the air that crackled like the campfires spread throughout the Florida Panhandle. In cities, kids hang out on street corners; in the Panhandle, at campfires.

At first glance, Jeremiah Rodgers and Jonathan Lawrence didnt seem any different from the other twentysomething slackers in the Panhandle who stood around a campfire that night. Like most of their friends, they had gotten through high school with no particular destination in mind. Not having any special trade or skill, they were someplace in the middle, not knowing their way in life. Only these guys were different.

Both men had a variety of mental problems that had led to their being institutionalized in their early twenties. That, alone, distinguished the two of them from the general populace. But what made them even more unique was that they had been institutionalized at Chattahoochee, the once-infamous state mental hospital that specialized in treating the criminally insane.

Jeremiah Rodgers, nearly twenty-one years old, was a muscular, 57 slick-talking tattoo artist with a pencil-thin mustache that made him look like an oily version of Errol Flynn. He also resembled a sawed-off version of Eric Roberts, who played the sleazy husband in Star 80. His close older friend, almost twenty-three-year-old Jonathan Lawrence, was a pensive, moody man with a bland, round face that concealed the depravity he carefully kept hidden. Physically unattractive, he was a stocky five feet seven inches and 166 pounds. Over the years, he had learned how to handle a knife with amazing dexterity.

Looking for the answer to lifes questions, they stood gazing into the fire that they had kindled awhile before. They listened to the wind in the canebrake as it made a mournful, rustling sound. They smoked a joint and thought back to just a few short hours ago.

That afternoon, Lawrence had called twenty-year-old Justin Livingston, his cousin. Justin visited frequently. Rodgers hated Justin. The big kid looked normal but wasnt. Rodgers didnt care that Justin took a variety of antipsychotic medication without which he could not function. He didnt care that Justin was one of lifes lost souls and always would be. Not only did Rodgers not care, he wanted to take the guy out! Justin had been a thorn in Rodgerss side for too long.

Justin would come over to Lawrences house asking for smokes, Pepsi, beer, whatever he could hustle. And Lawrence would always give his cousin something. Then Justin would sit down and enjoy his treat. The big kid had no common sense, and Rodgers just wanted him to get lost. Permanently. Lawrence, the quieter of the two, agreed with his partner.