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He sees his father coming out of the woods with his hands over his face, and he knows something happened. His father just grabs him and says, she's gone. She's gone.
I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a nonfiction author and journalism professor in Austin, Texas. I'm also the co host of the podcast Buried Bones on Exactly Right, and throughout my career, research for my many audio and book projects has taken me around the world. On Wicked Words, I sit down with the people I've met along the way, amazing writers, journalists, filmmakers, and podcasters who have investigated and reported on notorious true
crime cases. This is about the choices writers make, both good and bad, and it's a deep dive into the unpublished details behind their stories. We might have our first Pulitzer Prize winner on our show Today, author Gilbert King digs into cases of wrongful conviction, and today we're talking about his outstanding podcast, Bone Valley season two. Gilbert explores the nineteen eighty seven murder of Michelle Schofield in Florida.
It's a story of justice forgiveness and the possibility of redemption. So this story is Lakeland, Florida, nineteen eighty seven. Can you tell me what nineteen eighty seven is like? I was thirteen, So what was it nineteen eighty seven like in Florida or in the nation.
I was a little bit older than that, but I went to college down there. So I used to drive through Lakeland, and I remember Lakeland is just this kind of hard rock capital of Florida. They used to have Lakely Civic Center had this heavy metal fetish. I guess you'd say they had. Everybody would show up, you know, my crew, you name it. They were there and it was like the place. And so you know, just driving past your radio ads, you know, these are the days
before cell phones and concerts were really huge. A lot of metal bands were big, and they were all playing in Lakeland. Lakeland is kind of like the poor stepchild between Tampa and Orlando. It's a smaller little town and it's right off eye for the car door between Orlando and Tampa, and so it's a little bit more rural too.
I mean, back then, a lot of orange growths, a lot of phosphate business, agriculture, whereas you know, Tampa and Orlando were a little more thriving in terms of urban centers, so that was pretty much it. Lakeland was just I've got every part of America really, you know, it was just had everything you could imagine, but it was more of a rural community and you know, the nineteen eighties, there's no cell phones. It's just a little bit of
a different vibe. And I really love the heavy metal aspect because Leo Schofield, who's at the center of it, is this Boston kid who moves down to Florida with the parents, doesn't really want to leave New England, but there he is. He's got the thick Boston accent and he's a heavy metal dude, long hair. He's aspiring musician. He plays lead guitar. He's in a band.
Called Rhino Okay, so, and he is not an outcast in this town which we hear from sometimes it sounds like he fits right into this place.
Well in some ways he does, because he's got this music connection and he's a very good guitarist, so bands wanted him and he plays the part really well. You know, he's thin guy, long black hair, twenty years old. He's just good at what he does. But on the other hand, he comes down here from Boston and he's like, I don't get the cowboy hats. I don't get these gator shirts, you know, like I don't have a pickup truck. I'm not that kind of guy. Like I'm a motorcycle riding
you know. Jean's vest heavy metal dude. So he really had to look for his tribe, so to speak. And he does find it in these bandmates. That becomes his thing. But you know, he doesn't feel comfortable there. He drops out of high school, starts doing odd jobs. He's all about doing the music. He sees that as his.
Career, okay, and he ends up meeting a young woman is Michelle from Lakeland, Florida.
Also yes, she got born and raised in Lakeland. She grew up there, you know. And Leo first meets her. I think she's sixteen years old. He's going there to give this friend to his Manny guitar lessons. And Mannie is kind of like Michelle's boyfriend, except Manny's got his eyes on a lot of other girls. He's not really paying attention. It was kind of like this good looking serfer dude, and you know, Michelle is just one of
his many girls, I guess you would say. But Leo just is struck by her immediately when he meets her. But Manny gets himself into some trouble and goes off to a juvenile facility for some kind of I don't really know what it was. It involved a gun, nobody was killed or anything like that, but he's looking at
a long, lengthy sentence. And when he finally goes away to this juvenile detention center in Florida, Michelle is kind of lonely and she meets Leo, and you know, they start hanging out as friends and coming to concerts and stuff like that. But as time goes by, see they're spending a lot of time together. They're clearly interested in each other. And so with Manny gone, Leo decides, Okay, I guess we can do this, and you know, right away they're practically living together.
Wow, and so young too. What do we know about Michelle personality wise? What kind of family she came from, any of that stuff?
Yeah, she comes with a broke from a broken family. Her mom and dad divorced. Mom moves back to Texas, gets in a really bad car accident and has some kind of brain damage. So it's Michelle and her two older brother, a younger brother and an older brother, and they're living in Lakeland. But you know, the dad is works in the phosphate minds. He runs a dragline. He's got really long hours. So they're kind of got a lot of freedom, and Leo's not used to that kind
of freedom. Leo's parents are very involved, but Michelle can pretty much come and go as she pleases. They looked at their father, David, as a sort of like a roommate rather than a father. You know, he was pretty lax about that. But the kids weren't in trouble or anything. They were, you know, good kids. But they're really on their own. Michelle was working in fast food or she was selling Amway products, you know, even at fifteen, sixteen years old, so she's off pretty much on her own.
And when she meets Leo, they you know, they're they're dating right away, and they decide they just want to get their own place because they both have jobs. And so they get a trailer in a low income area of Lakeland and move in together and start living their life that way.
And tell me again, as far as aspirations. Do either of these kids have aspirations? I know that it sounds Leo really wants to stay in music, right, Yeah.
Leo's definitely like he's got heavy metal on his mind. He's in this band, right, I know they're practicing all the time. Michelle not so much. She's still trying to figure things out. You know, at this point, she just turned seventeen, and you know, she does like metal music and she does like to sing, but she's really figuring herself out. But you know, the relationship with Leo and she sort of falls into the homemaker role at early. It's at seventeen. I mean, she's just she's got that down,
works a job. She gets this new job at Tom's restaurant. She's a waitress there, and and everything's going, you know, well with her, except you know Leo. And Leo's kind of a volatile guy, and that's sort of a key
to the whole story. He's got a temper. You know, he talked to his bandmates and like at one point there was one girl that he was dating and in the middle of a concert he saw her flash another guy lift her top up and let that sets Leo off, you know, he runs off the stage, throws his guitar into a bonfire, storms into the woods. He's a very temperamental guy. And you know, they talk him back out, come back to the concert. Come on, Leo, it's okay. They pull the guitar out of the bonfires, still got
burn marks on it. He still plays it, you know. And so that pretty much describes Leo, who's like I think he's like nineteen or twenty at the time when this happened.
Wow, okay, I was going to ask what the general impressions are a family and friends of their relationship. Is he volatile with her very much?
Yeah? Yeah, they're They're known to fight, and Leo's got a temper. And you know, roommates who'd come into the trailer and all say the same thing, like they'd hear the door shut, they'd hear crashing, slamming, throwing things around, and you know they nobody ever saw That's the thing like that, nobody really ever saw Leo hit her or anything like that, but they assumed it was happening, something was going on, and like he had a really bad temper, and most of his temper was based around the fact
that Michelle didn't have a driver's license. She had a learning permit, so she wasn't supposed to be driving the car, but Leo had to get a car, and so she would often take the car and go out and disappear, and Leo had no way of knowing where she was, and it would scare him because one time she got and pulled over by police and they kind of let
her go with a warning. But you know, she would just take the car all the time and go off with friends, and Leo saw that as a problem because she didn't have insurance and she wasn't really licensed, and so Leo just said, just check in with me, let me know where you are, And that was one of the things that they thought about the most.
Has anybody interpreted that in intead of him being kind of just concerned about her getting picked up of the police or wrecking the car or doing any number of things that someone might has that been interpreted ever as him being increasingly controlling over a young woman that he married.
Also, Yeah, and he admits it too. You know, he just said, I was immature, I didn't really know, I was not ready for a relationship. What ended up happening was because they were fighting they decided to go to a church. They had a fellow painter that Leo was doing odd jobs with, and he said, you ought to come and check out this Baptist church, and so Leo did and they went together and they liked it. But one of the things the church said is you're living
together in sin, you got to get married. And they have really only known each other for a few months, and they kind of felt some pressure from the church to sort of, you know, solidify their relationship by marrying. And Leo was like, you know, I love her. I was nineteen twenty. Do I want to spend the rest of my life? Leo said, you know, frankly, I do. I really this is a good different girl from me.
I really liked her because I wasn't sure a Shell was ready for marriage though, and we talked about it and she said she's ready. And so they decided to get married very quickly, put together within a matter of I think two weeks, borrowed some clothes from like other parishioners who had recently got married, and they put together this wedding really quick, and the next thing you know, they're newlyweds and living in this trailer together comeby section of Lakeland.
So how long are they married before what happens happens?
Right, So they get married in August of eighty six. They're living in this trailer. Six months later is when Leo goes into band practice. One night, he worked all day with the drummer's father. He did, like laid down lines for a cable company, and they had band practice this night, February twenty fourth, nineteen eighty seven. You know, they don't have a phone in the trailer, so all their calls are sort of calling at Vince's house, and whenever they call, they had to call from a payphone
at a gas station. But on this particular night, Leo's waiting at band practice. Arrangements like, after you finish your shift to Tom's restaurant, come by the band practice, hang out with us, then we'll go out and grab something to eat. That was the plan. But Michelle's shift ended at eight pm and Leo doesn't hear, so he's kind of already getting worried. Look, she knows to call here, she knew the number. Where is she? Nobody really knew. But at nine forty five pm, finally Michelle calls, and
she calls on the payphone. She says, look, I finished my shift at eight, I went home, I did the laundry, I fed the dogs, and now I'm ready to come over. And Leo's like, great, thank you for calling. This is like you know, He's saying to her, like, this is great. Now we don't have to have a fight because you called me and everything worked out. I know where you are and she should be there within about ten or
fifteen minutes, and she said she'd be right over. The phone call ends with both of them saying I love you. Ten fifteen minutes pass no sign of Michelle. An hour passes, no sign of Michelle, and now Leo is starting to panic because this is not like her usually when something like this happens. She said I'll be right over or she's calming, but she hasn't shown. And now it's like eleven PM, eleven thirty, and Leo's getting really worried. He calls his father and said, Dad, you got to come
get me. I don't know where Michelle is. She said she'd be right over. I don't know if her car broke down, if she got an accident. He starts making some phone calls. There's three hours that pass, and Leo is just hanging out with his friends and there's no sign of Michelle.
Tell me where she made that phone call from again, I'm sorry.
She made it from a gas station called Sparky's, which was right across the street from Tom's restaurant where she was working, and that was sort of the closest one to their house, so they used to use that one the most.
So she never ended up going back to the trailer. She was supposed to go straight from the restaurant. Is that right?
She was supposed to come straight from the restaurant. But she did say, like, I had to do someth like just some laundry at my dad's house earlier that day, and I went back and folded it. And then they had two little puppies, and so she went back and walked them and fed them and did some stuff. And she stayed till like nine forty five, that's when she got back to the gas station. It was a little late for Leo's taste, but he knew he was supposed
to be. He knew he was going to be practicing to at least ten anyway.
So just for a practical question for later on, are there people who see her making this phone call from Sparky's to him at whatever time that was.
No because Sparky's is closed at this hour. She had gone in there earlier after a shift change. She got three dollars worth of gas and she bought a coke. And so she told Leo on the phone. She made thirteen dollars in tips because she called at the friend's house, and there are a lot of witnesses there who like kind of heard the conversation. There was like no doubt
that that had happened. Even the state later on said, you know, we agree that that happened, you know, and they could mark time at nine forty five, and so yeah, there was no real dispute about that call.
Okay, So she vanishes, but she has the car, the family car, right.
Right, And that's the thing. So Leo just like, I'm going to just trace the steps, and so they try. He tries with his father around eleven thirty. They drive out closer to midnight. Actually they're driving around trying to retrace the steps, driving by friend's house and seeing if they could see any sign of a car. They drive past Leo's trailer. They don't see it. There there's no
sign of them. This is worrying. So they go back to Vince's thinking, all, right, now, the time before cellphone, she couldn't check in with Vince, right, So they go back to Vince's house and say, well, that's where she was likely headed. We should go back there. And they get there and there's still no sign of her, and Leo is getting really worried. At this point, his father waits out in the truck in the driveway. Leo goes inside and decides he's got to start making some calls.
At twelve forty three am, he calls the Sheriff's office, Oh County Sheriff's office, and he reports her missing. And it's kind of frustrating because at this point she's eighteen years old now, so it's not like it's a child that's missing. They take the information, but there's not much they can do it. They check in the jail to see if maybe she got arrested for driving, you know, without a license. She wasn't there. There's no sign of any accidents are in the neighbors, so there's nothing going
on like that. Leo made some phone calls to the hospitals just to see if there had been any kind of accident and no sign of her, and the sheriff's office just takes all the information but basically says, there's not much we can do. We'll put out a bolo, you know, be on the lookout for but you know, there's not much we can do. But if we do see her, the books we can do is really tell her we're looking for. So that's not enough for Leo.
The Leo wants action. He's really worried. After he hangs up the phone, he goes out with his father and they start looking around again.
How many people are in Lakeland? Tell me how big of a place this is? Again?
Well, I mean the population today I think is over one hundred thousand. Yeah, but you know, a little bit smaller back then. There is a city of Lakeland, and that's sort of where they are. But Lakeland is a polk county is right in the middle of Florida, and it's huge. It's bigger than the state of Rhode Island. And most of it is just rural, you know, farmland and stuff like that. But they're in the city of Lakeland.
Okay, Now, will you tell me what is possible of these things in nineteen eighty seven, because I'm just not sure. That's way too modern of a time for me. Does Sparkys or anybody near Sparkys like Tom's, do they have any kind of exterior security cameras or anything.
No, there's no cameras back then at all. There's just really nothing back then. No cell phones, no mounted cameras, you know, on the street lights or outside stores, so there's nothing to check on that. I think it's a lot of why a lot of my friends who are mystery writers set their stuff in the eighties, because you don't have the chips that tell you where you were doing. It was an easier time to have a crime because
they're just tougher to document. And so you know, I ended up talking to the sheriff of Paulk County, Grady Judd, who you'd probably seen. He goes viral a lot. He's like a tough talk in Lauren Ordered, Florida sheriff, and we interviewed him and I said, look, I need you to put your historians hat on, because you were in the sheriff department in the eighties yourself as a young deputy. And he said, you know, it was just impossible to
solve crimes unless somebody spoke up. Back then, you just didn't have cameras, you didn't have cell phone data, you didn't have any of that stuff. Unless somebody saw something, you know, a lot of cases would go unsolved. And at this particular time in Lakeland, they had a white supremacist sheriff who was forced out of office by the governor, and a lot of detectives and deputies kind of quit.
This was right at the time of you know, Michelle disappearing, right and so it was they were in a lot of turmoil there.
They did.
They didn't have a lot of manpower, and so they're kind of short shifted, and so that was played into it too. They just they were getting a lot of unsolved murders right around the time because they just couldn't keep up with them.
I had just talked to a detective in a different city. I'm in Texas, and he said, you know, when somebody goes missing, you really should tell the police immediately. Everyone thinks you have to wait twenty four hours or forty eight hours, but especially if it's somebody at risk and outside the norm, you really should talk to them sooner. What about Michelle when do they start thinking this is this is more than just a wife who wandered off somewhere.
I would say immediately. I mean when she doesn't show up, Leo has like a couple of calls to the sheriff's office. He's checking in and they're like, mister Schofield, we told you there's nothing we can do unless we run into her,
you know. But he's really frustrated. He wants a search, and they're saying, we don't do searches, like we're not there yet, and so it's basically putting together friends and family retracing the roads like the you know, Leo's out all night that night with his father and his mother, driving around. They show up at like Michelle's father's house at two twenty in the morning, knocking on the door. You know, we can't find Michelle. We can't find Michelle.
Mielle's father comes out to the search. He's driving around town. He sees two deputies cars parked at a gas station. He runs over there and says, I'm looking for my wife. You know, did you see have you heard anything? And they're like, we don't have any report of any missing person. He's getting really frustrated, like called this in a couple of times. Nobody's doing anything, and you know, they're basically saying, there's nothing we can do, and so it's really frustrating.
It's a search by friends and family. So the next morning they kind of put together search to they're all out looking. They put together flyers, they're distributing them all over town. They're doing like everything you could imagine that can be done. And Leo's like not sleeping. He's frantic, you know, he's looking everywhere, calling friends, trying to see where Michelle could be.
What do the people at Tom's, at that restaurant she worked out? What did they say her night was like? They said it was basically like any other night. She was originally going to work till five. They extended her shift to eight because it was kind of busy. You know, they all saw her leave, They.
Saw her go across the street to Sparky's, and even the clerk at Sparkys was in her. She remembered that she remembered Michelle coming in after work and buying the coke and the gas when they asked her later, So there's no doubt about that. And then she she only lived a couple miles away, so she went back to the house, fed the dogs and all that. So the people at Tom's didn't really have anything to add, nothing suspicious.
Did anybody look at Leo sooner rather than later? Maybe her family, even though I know they were not as involved as Leo's family.
Is, surprisingly not right away, because Leo was the one who was like sort of the impetus behind the searching. He was the one pushing everybody and so, and you know, he was constantly calling the police, like constantly checking in with them. His behavior didn't really rattle anyone. In fact, they kind of said to him HERU like, calm down, She's gonna be all right. She runs off sometimes she's
done this before, you know that. But Leo was really particularly worried about this time for some reason, because she called and said she'd be right over. This didn't seem like one of those things where she was off with friends. And to be frank, they could not find any reports or any evidence that she was out of friend nobody. None of her friends had seen her, and that's what they thought was really strange, Like she disappeared, but there was no accounts of like, yeah, I'm having a fight
with Leo. I just had to get away, like she's nowhere to be seen, like no one could find her, and that all her friends are now searching.
How many days does this go on before something changes?
It extends into a second day, So she goes missing, twenty four hours goes by, nothing goes into the second day.
One of Leo's former bandmates, it was a guy named Chris Peck and he worked in Orlando and he was driving home from work and he saw what he thought was Michelle's Mazda station Wagon broken down on the side of the road, or at least park there, and he was tempted to stop and write a haha note because Leo's car would constantly break down and he wanted to just leave a note on the lunshield like ha ha, you broke down again, something like that, And so he
was thinking about that, but it was on the other side of the highway and he was trying to get home. But he gets down to Lakeland and coincidentally pulls into that same Sparky's and sees a flyer with Michelle's picture on it saying missing, Help find me. And at that point he's like, oh no, and so His first thought is he sees the detective's number for the Polk County Sheriff's office, and he calls there and tells them that he just saw the car that Michelle was driving. But
they're like, not really searching. It doesn't really register, and so the next thing he does is called Leo and tries to get a message to him, you know, like I just saw your car on the side of I four, And he gets it over to Leo's parents and finally they get back to him later that night and he tells him I saw the Masta on the side of I four at this exit. And so Leo, his father, a couple of friends they rush out to the scene
and there's the Mazda. It's broken down about seven miles outside of Lakeland on the way towards Orlando, and it's just sitting there and they look at it. They already know like, don't touch it. They're smart enough about that. So there's a gas station up on a hill right near the exit. Leo walks up the hill and calls the Polk County Sheriff's office and says, you know, I found the car. My wife is not here. She's nowhere to be found. You've got to send somebody out here.
And you know, the cops are like, well, are you going to drive the car home then? And he's like, you don't understand she's missing. We just found her car. It takes a while for it to sink in and finally, you know, detectives finally show up and they think what they see what might be blood in the back seat, like in the back hatchback, and so they're still careful not to touch anything, but they point that out, you know, to the detectives. At this point, now it's going to
be a full blown search. The police are going to get involved, but they sort of say, you know, wait till morning. Okay, it's past midnight. Now we're going to do a helicopter search of the area in the morning. Go home and rest and come back at the break of dawn and then start searching. And so that's exactly what happens. The helicopter goes out in the morning, starts searching the area. Leo, his father, the friends, they all
kind of split up. But now because they know where the car was, it's very easy to trace that back. They're going to trace it back to Tom's restaurant. The last place she was seeing seven miles away, so that's what they do. They sort of split up along I four early in the morning, and they're working both sides, looking in ditches, looking in the meat, in no sign
of anything. They finally get back to the road where Tom's is and they're there and they split up again, and this is the point where Leo is searching with
his Michelle's best friend. Her name is Michelle McCluskey, and they see a cop car speedby with the lights on, siren blaring, so Leo thinks, okay, that's it, and then they see a second one and then Leo's like, all right, we got to go follow that car, and so they jump in the car Leo's with Michelle's best friend, and they're speeding toward it, and they see a truck kind of jackknifed on the road and Leo's like, oh, they're
speeding to an accident. They get a little bit closer and he sees his father's car on the side of the road in the same spot. Leo jumps out of the truck, still moving, and he sees his father coming out of the woods with his hands over his face, and he knows at this point something happened and he rushes over to his father. His father just grabs him and says she's gone, she's gone, and Leo's kind of freaks out. He's like, they tell her she's a water and Leo's like, get her out, get her out? How
do you know she? Like, he's just freaking out. The detectives, the police kind of hold him back. They won't let him go over there, and so he's kind of freaking out. There's a very famous picture of Leo, like he tears his shirt off and he's just pacing up and down the street, and that's kind of like the image we use on the Bone Valley themes. Like Leo is just totally distraught. He knows his wife is back there, they won't let him go see, and he's just unprepared for this.
How did his father find her? How did that even happen? If they're kind of in a wooded area, that becomes a big part of the case.
You know, they find Michelle, and then after Michelle has found, Leo's father found her, and so what does he start saying? He said, God let me to the body. It was God, help me find her. They kind of spun it into like Leo's father woke up in the middle of the night, had a premonition at the body, and went right to the site, and that's how it got spun locally. But you know what happened was it was a logical, methodical search backwards from the car towards Sparky gas station. And
this was on the way. And if you look at the aerial shots that the helicopter did, like, if you're going that way, that's a place you're going to go into. It has a driveway into it, there's lots of beer bottles and garbage. It's a place where kids hung out. And so Leo's father is working backwards from ifour This is the first cut that leads back to this dark area, and he starts looking around back there and he sees a jacket right near the water, there's an old phosphate pit.
He sees a jacket laying there kind of looks like could be Michelle's jacket, and so he walks to the jacket and that's when he sees Michelle floating face down in the water, and she's got like a piece of plywood over most of her body and she's just laying there, and that's when he freaks out. He runs out into the truck he fled, you know, waves down a truck and says, y's your radio. Call the police, and he says, my daughter in law is back there.
So was the theory until we see this plywood and find out a little bit more about this. Was the theory that she wrecked her car, then went back to Sparkeys to get help, and then something happened to her in between the car, the seven miles of the car, and then Sparky's is that what it would be?
You know, they never really get to that theory because they can't explain why the car is like seven miles away. They don't have any explanation for that broken down on the side of the road. They really start looking about canvassing the neighborhood. And as they start canvassing the neighborhood of the trailer where Leo and Michelle lived, some of the neighbors are saying that, oh, they used to fight over there all the time, and so now they're like,
h well, it's the husband. And then there's a witness across the street from the Schofields trailer. Her name is Alice Scott. And Alice Scott is kind of the busybody neighbor. In fact, the prosecution calls her that, and she basically says that she saw Leo carrying something out heavy into the back of the Mazda the night she disappeared, and so this becomes the biggest break for the police. They're thinking, if that's true, the trailer must be the crime scene.
So because Alice says she saw Leo come out of there after a fight, carrying something heavy and putting in the back of the car and driving away, they start using that as the theory of how the crime took place. All based on Alice Scott's testimony and statements.
Tell me a little bit more about what investigators see when they go back there and they see her floating with you said a piece of plywood above her, and you said, is this a pond or what kind of body of water is this?
It's an abandoned phosphate pit. So there used to be a phosphate mine that was there, and they filled it with water and it just left it. It's basically reclaimed land at this point, but it's filled with water. It more or less looks like a lake. But it runs parallel to this road, so it seems more like a canal, but the way they call it back then was called a drainage pit. And so they find Michelle fully clothed everything but her shoes, and she's laying in this water.
And when they pull the ply would offer and bring her out of the water, they quickly find out that she's been stabbed numerous times. Later on the corner would say twenty six times. She'd been stabbed in the front and back and parts of her neck. So it was a brutal, brutal killing. And so they examined the crime scene basically that area, and they find like a large
clump of blood and it matches Michelle's blood. So it's right in the sand, in the dirt, right in that area of cut right back in that woods back there near the near the water, and so you know, they find that there, and they find the body, but they don't really put it together, like they look at it sort of, well, if Leo was seen carrying something heavy, she must have been killed back there, and this was probably the dumping site, and that's kind of what they
settled on. They settle on the trailer as being the crime scene. The big problem with this is they cannot find one drop or speck of blood in the trailer for someone who have stabbed someone twenty six times inside that trailer then carry her out. Is pretty clear that there's going to be some form of blood, like it's just impossible to clean up that kind of mess. But they don't find any blood, and so that's kind of
a problem for the state. And the other problem is that Alice Scott is kind of a suspect witness's you know, she's been institutionalized in mental institutes for delusions. Her husband is saying begging the police not to talk to her because she tends to get overly involved in these kind of things and they doesn't want her to do it.
He doesn't want her doing this, but she doesn't. She starts talking to police and her descriptions become more clear and more violent, and she's the only witness who had heard anything that night. It takes about sixteen months for the state to arrest Leo Schofield because they're just they're not really confident they have a strong case here. There's
no physical evidence connecting Leo. There's a lot of alibi witness because he's with friends most of the time, so they're trying to narrow down that period from when it would have happened, and Alice Scott says, I looked at a clock. I saw this. It was between two thirty and three am. Well, Leo's accounted for, he's with police and he's with Michelle's father at that hour, So like
kind of worried about this. But they have a really good prosecutor named John Aguero, who's an expert at putting together circumstantial cases, and when he starts to talk to Alice Scott himself, he finds that the timeline is starting to come together under his questioning.
In my other show Buried Bones with Paul Paul Hols, I learned something this was several years ago. When they find a victim and it's a woman and she is fully clothed, I assume, as I think a lot of people do, that there was no sexual assault, until Paul says, sometimes the offender redresses them. So did they find any signs of sexual assault or anything like that on Michelle.
No, they said that she was not sexually assaulted. There was no evidence of that. That's really interesting. I'd never heard that before.
Yeah, I hadn't either.
Yeah, particular case, there was nothing like that, which led them more towards Leo, because like, why would Leo have sexually assault you know, it's not that kind of This was a rage crime. That's what they're arguing. Shoot, Leo was so mad that Michelle was late that for some reason he decided to stab her twenty six times. That's
that's pretty much how the case came together. Miraculously, Alice Scott led them to two more neighbors who after a year and a half, suddenly remembered that they saw Leo's father's car or the Mazda at that pit area that night, even though they talked to police twice and that never came up. There was a lot of things that never came up in the initial statements that fifteen months later, they came up in John Aguero's office when he was questioning him. That was a key to the case.
You said, twenty seven stab wounds. Were there signs of defensive wounds or were they located in one particular place.
No, there was a couple of bruises on her, but they didn't really notice any signs of defensive wounds or anything like that. They did notice, and they preserved it for a while, some fingernail scrapings that they believe, but you know, they didn't just DNA backed. They preserved it, but later the prosecutor destroyed it back in the nineties, got rid of all of it. But so that's all they really have is they have an eyewitness and a
very circumstantial case. There's nothing physical connecting Leo to the crime. The one thing that kind of jumps out of the state but doesn't seem to jump out to Leo's defense attorney, is that they find fingerprints in the car that have been unidentified. They don't belong to Leo, they don't belong to Michelle, they don't belong to Leo's father. They just become unidentified and they sit in the file for many,
many years as unidentified fingerprints. But because Leo's defense attorney did no pre trial investigation and he did no depositions of witnesses, he was known as a trial by ambush attorney. Like he just didn't like to be prepared. He liked to be spontaneous and I'll just take care of those witnesses on the cross examination, and that's how I win
my cases. And he was very charming, southern, kind of looked like Colonel Sanders, but he was really ill prepared for this kind of case when it gets a little more scientific.
Hmm, Well, I'm going to channel poll Holes one more time. Because the fingerprints inside the car, he would say, if he were here, he would say, well, where are those fingerprints? You know, if it's a random like a gas station attendant who's doing something, and it makes sense maybe it's on the inside of a window or something like that, that's one thing. But if it's a place where a stranger really probably shouldn't be, like the trunk of the car or you know, some other area, that might make
a difference. Do we have any idea where those random prints were?
Yeah? Absolutely. And what's curious about it is that they don't find any of Michelle or Leo's prints in the car at all.
Okay, so somebody wiped it down, right, Yeah.
That's what they're thinking, right, somebody must have wiped it down. But they find two fingerprints, ones on the inside driver's door and inside the car, and the other one is in the back, the back of the hatchback, and there's a television rental receipt and the television rental receipt was touched and fingerprints, but they didn't match anyone Leo or anyone. So that's where they find these prints that are unidentified.
But also the stereo was tampered with, so the speakers in the back were missing, as well as the equalizer underneath the car stereo. The equalizer was taken out for whatever reason, they tried getting the stereo up, couldn't get it out, so they took the equalizer and the speakers in the back. So that does kind of explain why there might be, you know, fingerprints in the back of the hatchback, unidentified fingerprints.
So if we are not thinking Leo is a suspect and we're thinking something else, would this be She breaks down, someone comes up to her, wants to steal her stuff, she puts up a fight, he stabs her and tosses her in this phosphate pit. And that's kind of the way this goes because now you have I didn't realize there was stuff missing, So now there is a motive for a stranger right.
Right, And you know, nobody can explain why the car is seven miles away like broken down, like it doesn't really fit any theories of anything.
You know, is it in the right direction though, Gilbert, like, is it going where it's supposed to be going before it breaks down toward the friend's house.
No, it's going to totally opposite direction, and it's far far away, like in an opposite direction, and like the state isn't going to end up saying that Leo and his father and his mother were in on this conspiracy. One of them killed Michelle and they decided to all act together and get rid of the body and get rid of the car. And you know, that was what the theory was, and so that really was about attacking the alibi.
Do we have any information about the blood that what they thought was blood in the back seat? Did it turn out to be blood and Michelle's blood? There was Michelle's blood was found on the downy fabric soft in her bottle, a little smear of it. It's just a little bit, but enough to get a sample and to show that it was Michelle's blood. There was also a little bit of blood on the back rug in the hatchback, but only a little bit, but they couldn't identify.
It as Michelle's There wasn't enough of it there. But they said it was definitely human blood and that's the only blood that was found in the car in eighty seven. Were they doing blood typing? Is that what it would have been? It was blood typing, aba oh and that kind of thing, and they could tell it wasn't Leo's. They knew that it wasn't Leo's. It was definitely Michelle's based on the blood typing.
So Leo's suspicious. They look at the alibi and what are they saying about his alibi? And I think all these people are lying on his behalf or that he slipped out and slipped back in and it was no big deal.
There's one period where Leo goes out with his father for about an hour and he's driving around town. It's like right after the right after the Leo calls the sheriff reporting Michelle missing. They go back out and do the same kind of thing, and then they go back to Leo's parents trailer because Leo's father is not feeling well. I mean, he's got a cast on his leg. He's just not really up for this, and so he goes to bed and the mom goes out with Leo, and
that's when they go over to Michelle's father's house. They start tracing them as they're out to like three something in the morning doing this. Finally they go back home, drops off his mom, and Leo's like, I'm going to my friend Buddy's house. I got to get his car. We're going to go out searching him freaked out. So the state's theory is that somehow, and they can't and say how this happens, somehow Leo must have run into Michelle while they're out searching, and then he says goodbye
to his father. He gets in the Mazda with Michelle and they go back to the trailer, getting a huge fight. Leo stabs are there, carries her out. That's the theory they go on. You know, the timeline doesn't really work because there's some other witnesses that show up in the police reports verifying that Leo was calling there and exactly the time he said he was, and he couldn't have been doing it from the trailer. So there's a two am call that Leo made to Michelle's grandmother that was
confirmed by both you know, the state acknowledged it. It's in the police reports, but Leo's lawyer doesn't see it. And so the state doesn't bring it up.
So now we I think understand the way this trial is going to go. He's getting real road in, right. It seems pretty clear there are all these witnesses that can give him an alibi. His dad luckily finds Michelle to be able to recover her body and everything. But now everything is turning on this guy's character. And he's a young husband who's been her fighting, and you know, all of this stuff. And of course, you know, you can't ignore that he's from a very lower income area.
And you know, we're not talking about middle class, upper class citizens in this in Lakeland. We're talking about very low socioeconomic area where they're obviously not going to be a priority. And it seems very clear that this kid is violent and acts violence and he's the one who did it. Open and shut.
Yeah, pretty much. Horror thing is when you look into this case, Lakeland, this area had an unbelievable public defender's office. They were really good, really great trial and they had extraordinary records of getting acquittals in death penalty cases like acquittals. I mean, they were really good. And Leo starts out with the public Defender's office but when they lock them up and throw them in jail, he's talking to these other inmates, and that's a public pretender. Your life's on
the line. You can't do that, you know. You got to get somebody good, you know. And it's a death penalty case. And because Leo had gotten in an accident the summer before he broke his neck, he's a passenger in a car, he had a fifty dollar settlement coming his way. And so this hotshot lawyer named Jack Edmund said, that's exactly my fee, and sign this paper and you know, and that's what happens. So that's how Leo ends up, not with the Public Defender's Office, which he says was
the biggest mistake of his life. He ended up with a lawyer who was completely unprepared and just got steamrolled by the prosecutor.
Is this a capital case in Florida? Must be in eighty seven.
Yes, this county went for the death penalty as much as you could.
So the trial goes on, it sounds like already you're teasing that that Jack Edmunds, his defense attorney, is dropping the ball, and ultimately I'm assuming we end up. Is this a bench trial or is this a jury.
It's a jury.
No one tell me about the verdict.
Yeah, I'll just tell you the biggest. Well, he made a lot of mistakes, but the first mistake he did was he allowed the state to open its case with twenty one bad character witnesses in a row. And most of them just got up there and said, he's volatile, he fights all the time, he does this, he punches walls, he's like screaming all the time. Just shit, that was
really prejudicial. There were some witnesses that came in and talked about like his relationship with Michelle, that probably would have been, you know, admissible, But because Jack Edmond didn't object to anything, he didn't preserve the record so that stuff could no longer be challenged. And I think, you know, I've let some judges, some prosecutors read the trial transcript and they all said the same thing, like this trial was over before this defense even got their case off
the webings. This was just the way you start, Like, you couldn't imagine that the judge didn't even step in and say this has got to stop. It's twenty one straight bad character witnesses, you know, and it's all this four or four evidence, this stuff that's like should not be admissible in this to this extent. But because he didn't know, and you know, he said, I'm not really much of an evidence guy. I just know how to
win trials. It wasn't really the guy you want for the law, and so he let it all in without objection. So that kind of started off in a really bad way because the testimony made Leo look like, you know, a violent monster. The worst part of it, I think was that there was a next door neighbor to Alice Scott who happened to be her sister in law. She
was much more credible. Her name was Linda Sells, and basically what she ended up saying was like, yes, we did see Leo carrying something heavy out and we joked around about it, me and Alice because you know, we said, oh, I wonder what's going on in there, and they made jokes about it. But she said that was a week
or two before Michelle disappeared. That was not that same night, because I didn't work that night and I wasn't coming home from work as Alice described and having that conversation with her in the driveway, and you know, it was later shown that she did not work that night. She was inside. So whatever Alice claimed she saw, she probably did see. But it was like a week or two before Michelle went missing. And you know, I asked Leo about that. I said, you know, carrying something heavy? Was
it was alluded to being a body. In fact, she does say at one point I saw him carrying the body, and Leo said, look, you know I did carry something out. I was not that night because Michelle had the car, but I did put an amplifier back there. And it's like, she goes, I had a blanket over it. He said, you know, you knew what it was not. It was not a body. It was a box, you know, like that was what it was. And so Leo's like, you're
lying by saying it's a body. But prosecutor was able to get away with that, and frankly, like the defense really dropped the ball in this one, because if you look at Linda sells his testimony, it's very clear like Alice is saying, I'm not good with dates. She says that a bunch of times, and Linda is like, I am good with dates. We saw that a week or two before. That was not the same night and so that was like the state's whole case. That was their
main witness against Leo. That made the crime scene the trailer, and it was a different night and there's no blood in the trailer. Still, Leo ended up getting convicted.
To simplify what they think the motive was, It's that Leo is a young, angry, volatile, sometimes violent asshole who's mad that his wife is not driving fast enough to get to this party and maybe she's out doing something else. Is that pretty much it? And he snaps and tracks her down and does this.
Yeah, pretty much. I think I look back at it, like you look at his behavior and then you co parent to you know, we know of some of these cases that we see today where the spouse claims that wife went missing, we don't know where she is. Leo's behavior is consistent for the three days, like he's the one out there saying, we got to look, we gotta do this. He's calling the police, consert he's putting himself
in front of police. Think about this. Within fifteen minutes, when the state says that Leo killed Michelle and carried her out to the car, he shows up at Michelle's father's house saying, I need your help to find Michelle, Like fifteen minutes after he just butchered the daughter. Twenty minutes after that, he's over in front of police, standing in front of this saying I need help finding my wife.
You know, this is how much really cleaning could he have done in that time, you know, like the one witnesses, I'm pretty sure he's wearing the same exact thing for those two days. He never changed, And so they took the clothes in and examined him and didn't find a speca blood there either. And this isn't someone who's got like ninety pairs of shoes and jeans and stuff like that. So and so there's just nothing physically connecting to him to the case. But he gets convicted. Fortunately for Leo,
he the jury spared his life. And you know, I ended up tracking down the juror because most of them are like, you know, elderly Florida retired people. They're all dead. But this this one woman was twenty two at the time, and we tracked her down and she says, yeah, I didn't I didn't think he was guilty, but I just
went along with the others. Oh my gosh, I know, and then, like she said, the quiet part out loud, right, But then when it came time to the death sentence, she kind of held firm because they were ready to send him to his death. Yeah, and she said, you know, I think they just changed it because of me, because they didn't want to upset me anymore, and so they decided to give him life. So like that that juror
might have saved Leo's life too. You know, it's just a strange thing that we were able to track her down and talk to her.
So tell me when things start to change, when people other than you realize that this is not Leo, this is actually somebody else.
Well, this is the crazy part of the story. So Leo, you know, settles off to prison. He's there a few years. Some some like older veterans tell him, you, look, you got to get your education. You got to be useful. You have to prove to the state that you are worthy to be released. That's what you need to be working on. They just pounded his head. Follow the rules, don't get involved with bad people, work on yourself, work on your education. And that's what Leo does. He gets
his high school degree. Then he goes on gets college degrees, multiple college degrees. But in the early days, he gets assigned as a teacher's aid in the prison. And this is in the early nineties, so he's like twenty five years old, and this kind of six foot tall, blonde social worker is who he's assigned to help. He's the teacher's aid for her, and remarkably, they fall in love in the prison and they get married and they're still
married today thirty years later. But Chrissy gets into conversations with Leo, and Leo's like, look, I just want to tell you I'm here. I was convicted of murdering my wife. I want you to know that that's the hill I'm going to die on it. I don't want to play games with you. I am wrongfully convicted. And he's like, I'm not going to try and talk you into anything. If you want, go to your own research look into
my case. And she does. She's got a college degree, and she starts looking into the case over many, many months, and she becomes convinced that Leo's innocent. And the one thing she settles on which obsesses her for years, is that these unidentified fingerprints are in that car, and she just wants to figure out who these prints belong to, and so that becomes her mission. This goes on for years and she's trying to get a hold of the Prince. What can she do that Leo's no longer represented by
a lawyer. What can she do? She doesn't know. Flash forward to two thousand and four. Michelle's been dead for seventeen years now, Leo's still in prison. Chrissy finds a friend who is a detective at a sheriff's department and she's just begging her friend, Cinda, please just run these prints. My husband is in prison. Chrissy is just relentless, like a bulldog, and Sinda, just to get her to shut up, basically says, fine, give me the Prince. So takes the
fingerprint cards. By this point they have the APHIS system automatic fingerprint identification system. She runs the Prince through, thinking this will be it. It's a tow truck driver, and which the story is going to be over. Your husband's a murderer, That's what she's thinking. They run the Prince through. A couple of days later, they get a hit and it's a young man who lived in Lakeland, very close to where Leo and Michelle lived who's in prison for
a murder right now in the same area. And when they look extensively into his criminal records, they find another murder that he probably committed but he got acquitted of the year before, and he's extraordinarily violent. He's in and out of juvenile detention facilities, has an arrest record from the age of ten up until he's finally incarcerated at
the age of nineteen for another murder. So now they're looking at this guy's like, this isn't a tow truck driver, This isn't a detective, It isn't any of those things. It's not you know, some stereo fief for something that stumbles it. It's an actual murderer. Can we start an investigation? And that's where you see the state really double down, like you would think that new evidence of a known killer whose fingerprints are found in his car the last
place Michelle's been. It takes six years to get Leo into a hearing to look at this new evidence. It's just like slow walking it. It just takes forever, and you start to recognize that's what finality looks like. They do not want to revisit this and possibly lose this conviction. That's where the case really turns. The young man's name is Jeremy Scott.
Is he related to Alice Scott?
No, And that's the first thing they look into and they find no relation there. But it's pretty troubling that they have this prince come back to him. So they send a cold case detective up to the jail to interview him, and basically he's in a defensive mode because his original crime sent him to death row and he got off because he was an abused child and had
all these mitigating factors. So they gave him life and they tell him, your fingerprints were found in this murdered victim, and they show him pictures and he claims to not know anything about it, and he says, was the stereo take it? And they're like, yes it was, and he says, yeah, I used to steal stereos. And so when they finally get into the hearing in twenty ten, John Aguero, the prosecutor, is also the prosecutor who sent Jeremy Scott to death row.
So this same prosecutor prosecuted Leo and Jeremy. So now you have these two guys that are both connected to the death or to Michelle Scofield, which one of them did this? Right, That's what this defense is trying to argue. It's the guy that's really violent that did this. But the state is saying, well, John Aguero talked to him in his office, no witnesses, no police, no tape recorder, and they come up with the story that he's a stereo thief.
He just found this car on the side of the road and was like, I'm going to take this right now, where's that nobody's here. Yeah, that's what I would have said too, absolutely.
Yeah, just Jeremy's bad luck that he happened to break into a car of a girl who'd been murdered an hour earlier. Right, But that's what they're going with. And they go into this evidence you are hearing, and a Polk County judge rules that, yes, that makes more sense that he's a car stereo thief, forget his background. You know. One of the things that comes up in this is that they interview Jeremy's girlfriend, Jamie, and Jamie says, oh, that place the cut where Michelle's body was found, that's
where he used to take me to have sex. That's where we used to hang out, So what are the odds that this guy's fingerprints is found in the same place that Jeremy used to hang out take his girlfriends to. There's this part of the story that just sort of gets ignored and they just say no. I think they called it extremely serendipitous that his fingerprints were found in the car of a murdered victim. But he was a stereo thief, so that's what they're going with.
It sounds like they can't get over the fact that they don't think she's been sexually assaulted. We know that somebody can be sexually assaulted without seeing these outward damages or penetration or anything like that. But for what they're saying, it's well, I mean, what's his motive He got the stereo, right, what would be the motive of dabbing this woman twenty seven times? He didn't rape her? Is that the impression you get or is it something different? Yeah?
In fact, they use it in a real strange way. They're like, you know, she's an attractive gal, like any stranger would have raped her, but like if that's a husband, he's not gonna you know, Like that's why it's just a stabbing, and that's the argument they put forward. You know, it doesn't really make a lot of sense, but that's what they're still trying so hard to say. This is not a stranger, this is not some psychotic this is
a passion killing. That's when you see stabbings a bunch of times, like it's a husband and wife a fight. Like that's what they go with. And you know, the defense, to their credit, Jack Edmund blindly says, you know, like, I think what we have out there is a ravenous maniac who stabbed Michelle and enjoy a robbery. And but you know, he didn't even look to see the fingerprints.
He could have argued that. Another strange thing is that one of the investigators in the Michelle Schofield murder was the lead investigator for the for the murder that Jeremy got acquitted of, and he was absolutely convinced that they had the right guy. But the Public Defender's office was so good they got Jeremy off because basically they found no fingerprints on the murder weapon, and the jury ended up saying that kid didn't seem smart enough to wipe
fingerprints down, so I don't think he did it. And so they acquitted him. But this particular detective like, why didn't you look at those prints and say, who are some known violent felons in the area. They could have done a manual comparison, and that was never done, or I'm going to say it was never done. The worst side of it is that it was done and it
didn't like what they found. I didn't find any evidence of that, but I'll tell you there was a pack of Marlboro Reds sitting very close to the bloodstains that was photographed by police but never processed, never fingerprinted. I always found that very strange. It's the only object that's photographed at the scene that was never tested. And you know, if you look back at Jeremy's other cases, he smoked Marlboro Reds and he left him at two other seats.
To me, it's just like I want to believe the best that it was just incompetence, But sometimes I look at this stuff and go, come on.
Well things, I mean with Jeremy for people to say, you know, maybe his book smarts are not as adept and you don't need that to get away with a crime, I mean, you don't. I think it's some of the most intelligent killers I have ever written about were some of the stupidest criminals, and then vice versa. So a stereo thief has to be at least street smart to be able to get away with that. You know, I know he was in jail, but still and then you
know the other part. Paul and I talk about this on the other show, about the idea of overkill, which I think is way overblown. I think there is pure rage anger, and it can be at a total stranger. It does not have to be some intimate anything. Absolutely, and Paul actually says it that I asked you about the defense wounds, because he said, sometimes people stab that much. You know, it doesn't matter if they're passionate or not. It's the person keeps moving and you don't have a choice.
You're so scared that they're alive and they're gonna hurt you. That's why they keep stabbing. It's not anger at that specific woman. It can be anger at anybody, or it could just be like he's scared he hasn't done the job yet. So I think way too much. There's so much assumption going on in this case of yours.
Oh yeah, I agree with you. Completely about that. Like, I just feel like to call this a passion killing, it has to be someone. Now you don't know that, Like there's no way to know that. There's plenty of stabbing victims that are total strangers, but in this particular case, you know, it's pretty shocking that it comes back to Jeremy Scott, who is in and out of prison, in jail all the time, but on this particular night where Michelle, we know he's in Lakeland, he's living in Lakeland, not
too far. In fact, his trailer he's staying in, his grandmother's trailer is located almost exactly between Tom's restaurant where Michelle last worked and the place she was found. It's right in the middle of that. And we're only talking a few miles, so you know, there you have it, and this is a place he's known to hang out at.
And no alibia I assume for Jeremy Scott that night.
No, I've looked at the thing. Like, Jeremy's not a really good liar either, And so when he's trying to put a story in place about they ask him how to tell that's how you stole the stereo, and he describes it and you just like, if you do this enough, you start to see weird things. He says, something really curious. He says, well, I drove past the car, and then I went to this gas station and I saw this trash can there, and I stopped at the trash can, and then I met a U turn and I decided
to go back and steal the stereo. Why would you mention that trash can Like this is just something that's really.
Small, very detailed, So kind of give me the broad strokes of how this goes. I know you got heavily involved with this. You obviously feel like Leo is innocent in Jeremy at a minimum needs to be better investigated. But Leo's still in prison.
Well several years after. Jeremy doesn't get any help with his parole. That's what he always said, Like they promised you're gonna help me with my parole, and nothing ever happened. And that prosecutor died. Jhona Guerro died. He said, now I'm telling the truth. He was mad, and he wrote a letter to Leo's lawyer and confessed to killing Michelle. So I'll tell you everything, how I did it and everything. And he did that, and ultimately I interviewed him in prison,
and he told I was walking down Comby Road. I saw a girl at a payphone at this gas station. She recognized me, he said. I didn't know who she was, but she must have seen me in town or something like that. And it was kind of raining. She said,
why are you all wet? He says, I need a ride, and he said where he was going, and he led her to the cut and he led her back there and she says, there's no houses back here, and that's when a knife comes out of his jacket pocket and she starts panicking and screaming and fighting him, and he attacked her. And after he attacked her, he said, I smoked some cigarettes trying to figure out what to do. Then I just dragged her into the water, and I took the car and was going back to my mom's house,
which is in that direction. Car broke down. Why did it break down? He said, Michelle got so scared that she drove the car out of trying to drive out of the cut, and he slammed it into park and something happened mechanically to the car that is consistent with somebody doing that slamming a moving car into park him for four years. Since then, he's never denied killing Michelle. Ever,
he goes into extreme detail. He also confessed to killing somebody else that he'd gotten away with, and it absolutely matches. He drew me a map of all his movements and he just said, I want to help Leo. He doesn't belong in prison. I'm the one who killed his wife.
So now what I mean, do we have a new problem. We must have a new prosecutor on Lakeland at this point.
Nope, there is somebody new, but they've just doubled down. This case is so obvious at this point it feels even embarrassing talking about the trial because it has nothing to do with the facts. Jeremy Scott is clearly the killer in this case. In fact, Leo and Jeremy. Leo finally got out last year on parole. He's still convicted murder in the eyes of the state, but he's out on parole at least. And he believes that Jeremy coming
clean is what did it. Because our podcast came out and it was just, you know, obvious to everyone who listened that Jeremy Scott is the real killer and it's not a case of like some guy saying I'll take the fall. He was there, he lived there, and he talked about details that you know, nobody should have known, and I looked into his case. I've been writing to him, talking to him even to this day, and he's admitted to all the murders he's committed, even though he only got caught on one of them.
Can the Innocence Project in New York get involved with this or is there a project involved?
The Innocence Project of Florida has had the case, but basically they've just doubled down and said, you know what a jury has spoken, the appellate courts has spoken. You know, it's the same thing that every wrongful conviction has. Yes, juries have ruled against you, and the pellate courts have
ruled against you. There's powerful people, I can tell you in Leo's corner, including the chairman of the Criminal Justice Committee, who actually testified at Leo's hearing saying this is an abomination and makes him sick to his stomach that this man is still in prison for this crime. He's got some very powerful people out there, but there's an island in this one circuit that just will not let go of this and they're just they will not let the conviction go.
That's unbelievable because I mean that is you know, demanding relief because of new evidence, not I mean, I know it's things that Jack Edmund missed as his defense attorney. But at the same time, this is no this is somebody who's confessing that's unreal and there's no DNA right because everything got thrown.
Out, everything was destroyed, and you know, it's just it's it's a really embarrassing I think to just look at this case and look at the facts of it and just see that the state is just still taking this position. You know that they ended up saying that Jeremy Scott because he once said that he didn't do it, and now he says he does he did do it, that you can't believe a word he says. So they have to throw it all out with the bathwater. It's like, how about doing an investigation?
Yeah, did he talk to anybody else about this who's not currently in prison or when he I mean, is there anybody who corroborate what he's saying.
There's one person that we believe, but you know, the state just attacked him. He was like the jailhouse lawyer, and after he found out that that his fingerprints were found there, he worried that he's going to get sent back to death row. He apparently confessed to this other jailhouse lawyer. But you know, they just destroyed that guy's credibility on the stand and made it seem like this
is just a bunch of crazy people talking. And you know, granted, Jeremy, he's off his meds, he's upset in court, and you know, they make him look kind of crazy that he's sitting in a git in a psych cell, eating off his fingers, and so they made him just seem like a not credible witness, and so that's easy for them to dismiss him.
But I think it's one of the laziest things you could do, because if you sit down with that guy, you know, he tells you the things he did, and he's you know, he's coming clean about his.
Life, okay, And a couple of sentence says, what did you learn from all of this?
You know, I guess I learned that you don't really guaranteed to get truth in a courtroom because how a lot of stuff is just inadmissible and a verdicts don't really have to do a truth. I find if you look at our second season, it really gets to the bottom of it. We you know, we go back into this case, but we do it from a different side.
We do it from Jeremy's side, and it's all about my conversations and my relationship with Jeremy and all the remorse when Leo Schofield doesn't show remorse in a parole hearing because he says, I have a claim of innocence that I've never wavered from. I cannot apologize for killing someone I did not kill. All the remorse is Jeremy's remorse. He like cried in our interview. You know, He's like, I think about Michelle all the time. I'm torment. This is my punishment. I go to bed and see the
faces of the people I killed at night. That's my punishment. I think anybody who listens to him will just side. The state has this completely backward.
And I think our listeners know how rare it is to get some kind of a confession like that to be able to play on a podcast and really build the case that you've built. I know that Leo is out, but this is hanging over him and will until he dies unless you know, this gets expunged or somebody can help in some way. And so you know, I'm pulling for you because you did some hard work on this and I know how personal you're taking this, So I hope it works out for both of you really with this.
Yeah, you know, I've been through this with my stories in the past, and eventually, like it's undeniable, it just needs to be handled by the right person to come along. And there are some really good people and Leo's corner that are not quitting on this, and Leo isn't either. He just says, this is about justice for my dead wife. I don't want her in all of eternity believing that something like I did this. It's not the truth, and he goes, I have to just get justice for my wife.
If you love historical true crime stories, check out the audio versions of my books The Ghost Club, All That Is Wicked, and American Sherlock, and Don't Forget. There are twelve seasons of my historical true crime podcast, Tenfold More Wicked right here in this podcast feed, scroll back and give them a listen if you haven't already. This has been an exactly right production. Our senior producer is Alexis M. Morosi. Our associate producer is Christina Chamberlain. This episode was mixed
by John Bradley. Curtis heath is our composer. Artwork by Nick Toga. Executive produced by Georgia Hardstark, Karen Kilgarriff and Danielle Kramer. Listen to Wicked Words on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Follow Wicked Words on Instagram at tenfold more Wicked, and on Facebook at wicked Words Pod