September 21, 2022 • 61 mins
Chapter 2 of 9
Leo’s friends and family search desperately for Michelle around Lakeland, Florida. Three days later, her body is found in a phosphate mining pit with 26 stab wounds. Leo is arrested, charged with first degree murder, and faces the electric chair.
For photos, images, and the full transcript of this episode visit https://bit.ly/BVS1E2
To hear the full length version of "Ducking Grady" by Stephon Girard, go to: https://youtu.be/lA6bruIZ0Ak
To read and sign the petition from the Innocence Project of Florida visit bit.ly/BringLeoHome
PLEASE CLICK HERE TO TAKE PART IN OUR LISTENER SURVEY. YOUR FEEDBACK WILL HELP INFORM HOW WE MAKE PODCASTS IN THE FUTURE. AND YOUR COMPLETE AND CANDID ANSWERS WILL HELP US CONTINUE TO BRING YOU UNPARALLELED ACCESS AND INSIGHT INTO THE HEART OF SOCIAL JUSTICE IN AMERICA. SO PLEASE GO TO LAVAFORGOOD.COM/SURVEY
AND PARTICIPATE TODAY. THANK YOU FOR YOUR SUPPORT.
Bone Valley is a production of Lava for Good™ Podcasts in association with Signal Co. No1.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
It's eighteen eighty one. Captain J. Francis le Baron of
the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers is surveying Central Florida.
As he travels up the Peace River in Polk County,
he finds something fossils, tons of them along the sandy
banks of the Peace River, giant shark teeth, whale skulls,
(00:23):
and prehistoric mastodon bones. Captain LeBaron collects nine barrels worth
of fossils and has them shipped off to a professor
at the Smithsonian Institution. A few years later, Captain LeBaron
returns to the region. As he's digging through the sand
bars of the Peace River amongst the bones from millions
(00:45):
of years ago, he makes another discovery. All the bones,
all the decomposition had left Central Florida rich in phosphate,
a mineral left over from the creatures that lived and
died in an around the ancient sea that once covered Florida,
and phosphate, it turns out, is a valuable ingredient for
(01:07):
making fertilizer. They called it white gold. There's interest in
the fossils, but paleontologists don't get the chance to dig
because the mining companies get there first. Soon, Polk County
became the self proclaimed phosphate capital of the world, and
the area was producing three quarters of the nation's supply.
(01:32):
By the late nineteenth century. Railroad tracks had sprung out
in every direction across the region, which helped move all
that phosphate. There was a lot of work and not
enough workers to get the job done, so phosphate companies
paid a fee to the state of Florida in exchange
for prisoners to fill the labor shortage. Black men arrested
(01:55):
for petty crimes were forced to dig ditches and push
wheelbat was full of white rock while under guard. It
had become a new form of slavery. This song is
called Shove It Over, and it's the Latin rhythm, pretty
(02:19):
generally distributed all over Florida. It was a song to
me by Charlie Jones on railroad construction camp near Lakeland, Florida.
This is Zorah Neil Hurston, the novelist who became a
central figure in the African American cultural revival of the
nineteen twenties and thirties known as the Harlem Renaissance. When
(02:40):
I get in the land noise, I'm going to spread
the news about the Florida Boys. Hurston grew up in
central Florida, and in nineteen twenty seven she moved to
Polk County to collect and record stories and work songs
from Black Southerners, songs that were down from generations. Some
(03:03):
of the workers who taught Hurston these songs were setting
down railroad tracks and working in the mines to move phosphate.
Hurston described these men who worked long, hard hours in
Polk County in her memoir dust tracks on a road
they go down in the phosphate mines, Hurston wrote, and
bring up the wet dust of the bones of prehistoric
(03:25):
monsters to make rich land in far places so that
people can eat. But all of it is not dust.
Huge ribs twenty feet from belly to backbone, some old
time sea monster caught in the shallows, shark teeth as
wide as the hand of a working man. It was
these fossils tossed to the side by mining operations that
(03:49):
gave this region its new name Bone Valley. As the
decades passed, phosphate mining evolved. Instead of convicts with shovels,
they started using drag line machines like the one operated
by Michelle Scofield's father, David's psalm. These giant machines excavate
(04:11):
the top soil and produce towering two hundred foot mountains
of white sand called gypsum stacks that loom over the
Polk County horizon. By the nineteen eighties, some of the
mines in northern Polk County shut down after depleting the
soil of its phosphate, and mining operations moved further south,
(04:33):
but you can still see the scars the industry left behind.
The mined out areas were left to be reclaimed by nature.
Dense vegetation grew around these deep mining pits that filled
with water, which is why you see these long, narrow
bodies of water in the region, like the ones in
North Lakeland where Leo, his dad and friends continue their search.
(05:00):
Michelle Schofield, do you hear my man? I have to
my feels, sorrows, deps, surringles in this vastlyty. I see
(05:33):
your relation. I read Deaspration to the worlds only the
Star to the warm Star Bone Valley. Chapter two. Come
(06:24):
be critters. It's been almost forty eight hours since Michelle
went missing. There was no sign of her until one
of Leo's friends saw the orange Mazda just off the
eastbound side of I four, a major highway that runs
through Polk County and connects Tampa and Orlando. Now a
(06:49):
new wave of panic washes over Leo as he and
his father speed to where the Mazda was seen. A
few of Leo's friends and Michelle's dad follow them there.
So we get to the car, We find the car. Obviously,
we didn't touch the car. I didn't want anybody to
touch the car. And we looked at it. We had flashlights,
and you know, obviously it was mine. But there's no
(07:10):
sign of Michelle. It's nearly midnight. Leo knows he needs
to call the sheriff to get someone out here and quick.
The car's right by the Polk City exit ramp on
a rural stretch of the interstate. I didn't even know
where I was at. I mean, I wasn't lost, but
I've never been in this area. So I went up
on the embankment. I climbed the embankment, got up on
(07:31):
the road, and you couldn't see a store from the highway,
but I went up any way to look. And when
I got up to that overpass and walked just a
few feet up behind a tree line. There was a
store up there, and there was a pay phone, so
I went over there and I made a call to
the Sheriff's department, and I told them that I told
him who I was, told him where I was, and
(07:53):
that we had found the car on the side of
the road. They asked me if I was going to
take it home. I said, you're apparently not understanding who
I am. My wife is still missing. I found her car,
I did not find her. I need some help. I'm
expecting we'll be right there, mister Scullfield, you know what
(08:15):
I mean. And Batman shows up and everything gets fixed
and stuff, and it didn't work that way. Finally deputies
arrive and the crime scene unit is called in. They
start inspecting the car. Some stereo equipment in the Mazda
(08:35):
is missing. Leo doesn't want to waste any more time.
He wants to start searching the area for Michelle. I
told Detective Russell, I'm going to be out here in
the ditches and in the medium of iye for looking
for anything. But the deputy tells Leo to wait because
they're going to fly a helicopter over the area at sunrise,
(08:58):
so Leo and the rest of the search party a
few hours sleep before meeting up again. I literally am
there at daybreak, and so the plan was to search
I four. They searched both sides of the highway, including
the Median. Leo, his dad, his friends, and Michelle's family
cover the six plus miles of I four until they
(09:20):
reached the exit for State Road thirty three. There's no
sign of Michelle. Nobody that we knew had from a nobody.
This is Michelle McClusky. She's Michelle Scofield's best friend. It's
mid morning now. When they come on to State Road
(09:40):
thirty three, which connects I four, the highway where the
car was found, to Combe Road, which was Michelle's last
known location, they decide to split up. Leo's father will
start searching one end of State Road thirty three. Leo
and Michelle McCluskey will start at the other end of
State Road thirty three, and they and to meet Leo SR.
(10:01):
Somewhere in the middle. So Leo and Michelle McClusky jump
into her boyfriend's pickup truck. I was just terrified and
just really focused on really trying to find her. It's
slow searching. They walk a stretch of the road, get
back in the truck, pull up a bit, get out
and search again. One of Michelle McClusky and I were
(10:24):
looking in one particular area. There was a shower's car
that went by real fast, headed down thirty three. Told
where my father was looking, and the second car went by.
I said, I'm following this. Something's going on. Leo jumps
in the pickup with Michelle McClusky in the passenger seat
and tries to catch the sheriff's car ahead. In the distance,
(10:47):
he sees an eighteen wheeled truck jack knife in the
middle of the road. Some cards are parked on the shoulder,
almost turned off because it was so congested. I thought
it was a car accident. Yea. I thought this was
going to be one of things where it turns out
to be nothing, and I wish that it would have been.
Leo keeps driving toward the congestion. A helicopters on the
(11:10):
ground at the scene. Somebody's missing, and you come up
on a scene like that and the helicopters shut down
and the anilance is there. You just know, all of
a sudden. Nobody has to tell you what it is.
You know. I saw my father's truck down there on
the side of the road and all these other vehicles,
and then he was coming out of the woods and
(11:32):
he had his hands in his own covering his face,
and I knew they founder and you stop the truck.
I mean, I slowed down enough, and I jumped out
and went running, and everything was blending together and going
super fast. Leo jumps out of the pickup and runs
along the side of the road. Yellow crime scene tape
(11:55):
has already been tied between a pine tree and a
sign that reads no dumping of rubbish. The tape cordons
off a short sandy road that cuts to the tree line.
Beyond it, Leo sees men in suits standing in front
of palmetto bushes, looking down into a drainage canal. Leo
(12:17):
now knows Michelle is back there, and he's trying to
push past the deputies to get to her. His dad
grabs him and keeps him from reaching the canal, to
keep him from seeing Michelle's body. And he kept saying
she's gone, And I was trying to hold on to
(12:39):
some kind of my mind was doing it fabricating some
kind of possibility that you're not right, She's not dead.
It could not possibly end like this. I mean, it's
just unreal. And it was like my whole world was
just fragmenting, and I want it so bad to just
(13:03):
run back there and just grab her. And if I
could just hold her, I'd hold her and she'd still
be alive. And I don't, you just I can't. It
can't end like this. It just it can't end. We
looked too hard. I've been up too long. I'm gonna
save her. I mean, it just just I just lost it.
(13:27):
I ended up punching the ground. I was pulling grass out.
I hit the tree, and I kept saying she's not dead,
She's not dead, and all these people are coming around,
and because I'm flipping out, I end up in between
these cars. The cops come around one side of the
car towards Leo. His dad comes from the other side.
(13:51):
You know, I'm telling him, don't touch me, don't come
near me. I want her out now. I just want
her off. I end up just falling down and sitting
against the front tire of the car. I came in glue.
(14:14):
Michelle's body is floating face down in a drainage canal
off State Road thirty three near an old phosphate mine.
There's a large piece of plywood partially covering her body,
resting on her back and legs. She's still wearing the
red pants she wore to work that day and a
sleeveless white top. Her autopsy would later reveal that she'd
(14:39):
been stabbed twenty six times, and scrapes on her back
were consistent with her body being dragged after she was killed.
Officer Richard Kachadourian, who talked to Leo and his father
the morning after Michelle disappeared, hears about it on the news.
(15:03):
I remember coming to work one night and there was
on television and she was found not far from where
I'm sitting right now. He feels bad for the Scofields
and picks up the phone to offer his contolences. Leo
Senior answers, and it was definitely a very peculiar conversation.
(15:25):
He talked about a premonition that he had. What Leo
Senior told him was so odd. Kachadourian decided to write
an official report about the call. His report reads, mister
Scofield advised writer that he received a premonition the night
prior to the discovery of his daughter in law, possibly
from the Lord, advising him where Michelle could be found.
(15:49):
He told me on the phone at night that he
discovered the body, and the body was in the water,
and that she was looking at him, and that she
was smiling at him. Michelle was smiling, Leo Senior said,
as if saying thank you for finding me. This is
especially odd because Michelle was floating face down and had
plywood on top of her. It was strange, and that's
(16:12):
how I thought of it. It became extremely strange and
I got I mean, it frightened me. But it's a
certain degree. And if you know that landscape, you just
don't happen upon. You just don't drive down that road
and happen upon anything that's really dense vegetation, snake infested water.
I mean, you either have to know something's there, or
(16:34):
somebody directed you there, or you knew something was in
that area. You know, in hindsight, Gilbert, what I feel
he was doing was confessing. That was definitely one of
the oddest phone calls in my life. Hi, I'm a
(17:00):
flam CEO and founder of Lava for Good podcasts, Home
to Bone Valley, Wrongful Conviction, The War on Drugs, and
many other great podcasts. Today, we're asking you, our listeners,
to take part in a survey. Your feedback is going
to help inform how we make podcasts in the future.
You're complete and candidate. Answers will help us continue to
bring you more insightful and inspiring stories about important topics
(17:22):
that impact us all. So please go to Lava for
Good dot com slash survey and participate today. Thank you
for your support. Bone Valley is sponsored by Stand Together.
Stand Together is a philanthropic community that partners with America's
boldest changemakers to tackle the root causes of our country's
(17:43):
biggest problems, including the broken criminal justice system. Christina Dent
is one of many entrepreneurs partnering with Stand Together to
end the War on Drugs, the underlying cause of many
problems such as over incarceration and the criminalization of addiction
communities across the country. As a foster mom, Christina came
(18:04):
into contact with the War on drugs when she saw
how it was ripping apart the family she worked with.
She witnessed how kids were affected and how mothers wanted
something better for their families, but didn't have the tools
to get there themselves. Christina Dentz started a nonprofit called
End It for Good because she knew there was a
better solution to help these families. She's working to end
(18:28):
the War on Drugs in Mississippi and build consensus around
the state to help families struggling with substance abuse problems
find a different path forward than the one they've been given.
Stand Together has many more stories like this one, as
it partners with thousands of change makers who were driving
solutions in education, healthcare, poverty, and the criminal justice system.
(18:52):
To learn more about the War on drugs, listen to
the War on Drugs podcast on Apple Podcasts or wherever
you get your podcast. There is a piece of wood
board that was covering the body. I do have that,
so I'll bring that out about it for months. It's
(19:13):
just so funny that it's here. Kelsey and I are
talking to Shane Kent, who runs the evidence room in
the basement of the Polk County Courthouse. Shane's in his
early forties with tattoos, engaged piercings. He's gonna show us
all the physical evidence from Michelle Scofield's murder. How I's
gonna go down is I'm gonna try to keep control
(19:35):
out of all the evidence. Sure, I'm gonna gonna be
the only one hand limit. If I drop off piece,
let you look at it, examine it, if you want
to take pictures of it. The only thing that I
do not recommend any any pictures being taken is of
the victim is any kind of nude, because some of
the wounds are in her chest, in her bare chest
is exposed. So okay, understand, okay, all right, if you
(19:58):
want to, guys, have a seat. I'll start bringing Every
time someone asked to see the evidence from a homicide,
the state Attorney's office is notified and they can send
someone down to observe. So we have an armed officer
with us, and she's going to be watching as we
look through all the evidence. Oh, Kelsey and I sit
(20:25):
side by side at the table and Shane starts bringing
out the evidence. The plywood that was covering Michelle's body
in the canal where she was found found on top
of the body in that little maps of lakeland mounted
on foam boards, Michelle's time card from Tom's restaurant. See
(20:45):
there's a downy bottle that they the blood smeared downey
fabric soften her bottle that was found in the back
of the Mazda. The downy bottle very much looked like
a downey bottle from the eighties. You know, it wasn't
like the one you'd be able to buy at the
store today. You know, for me, this all happened before
(21:06):
I was born, So seeing some of that stuff, I
was able to like better place in time, like, oh
my gosh, okay, this happened and it was nineteen eighty seven.
Then Shane brings up Michelle's clothes. Each piece is contained
in a clear plastic bag. Her jacket, her top, her
(21:27):
bra and underwear, and the red pants that she and
more to work. That was all there as well. And
this is the gray jacket, the jacket and the top.
They'd been slashed and there was a lot of dried
blood on those items. I look at Kelsey. We both
(21:53):
know what's next. Shane starts with photos of Michelle as
she was found floating faced down in the canal under
the plywood. A few more like that without the plywood.
Then he brings out the photographs from the autopsy, there
are pictures of her face, her head tilted to one side.
(22:15):
She looks like she could be sleeping, except she isn't,
and the wounds are horrific. We've been studying this case
for months now, but in documents the crime can feel abstract,
with Michelle described only as the victim. By this time,
(22:36):
we've met Leo, some of Michelle's friends and family, and
now she's no longer some stranger or the victim on
an autopsy table, and your heart just breaks trying to
imagine the pain and devastation they felt when Michelle was killed.
That's all I can think about seeing these photos. That's everything. Yeah,
(23:11):
that's so cool. Not a lot of cases are, no,
I know, right, I'm gonna need to decompress. Yeah, I'm sure. Yeah,
(23:31):
Kelsey and I aren't saying much. On the way back
to the parking garage, the summer heat is stifling. It's
the end of the workday, so there are people all
around us. We get to our car where we debrief.
I mean, I was thinking about her and like the
(23:53):
pain she must have felt, and how scared she must
have been in those last moments. I think, you know,
there's also the proximity and age I I was thinking about,
(24:13):
you know, also like myself and and all of my
friends who are young women and could potentially be in
a situation like that. H m hm. I can take
(25:00):
her down. Grief and heartbreak overwhelm everyone close to Michelle
in the days and nights after her body is discovered.
(25:20):
When it comes time to arrange her funeral, Leo is
in no shape to help. My dad took over everything.
I could not make a solid decision for me for anything.
I couldn't decide what closed for her to where. I
couldn't decide what color the casket should be, what kind
of casket should be on those things were so far
in to me. How do you decide what kind of
casket you put your dead wife in? But there's one
(25:41):
detail Leo does care about. Michelle's dad wants a closed
casket wake, and I just could not leave her without
seeing her again. I just could not do it. So
Leo makes an arrangement with the funeral home. They'll hold
the wake with a closed casket, But an hour or
so before they'll let Leo c Michelle one last time,
(26:04):
the funeral director tells him that to view Michelle they'll
need a high necked shirt to cover her wounds. And
I was flower gasted, like what wounds one of Michelle
was murdered. I was originally on the impression all the
way up until the wake that she was drawn, and
(26:29):
that's when my father said they were stabbed wounds. With
Leo in his debilitated state, no one had wanted to
tell him exactly what happened to Michelle. Obviously I knew
somebody had gilder. Why or how was beyond my ability
to think stabbing her. It's beyond that, you know, It's
(26:51):
just it's just beyond that. And for me, that was
the whole thing. Cast again, we live in it all
over again, a different scenario, somehow worse than the drowning.
At the weak, Leoh was given the private moment he
(27:14):
wanted to see Michelle one last time and walked into
the viewing area. I have never seen a dead body.
I've never been to a weak, I've never had any
experience like that, so I really wasn't prepared for any
of that. And she was laying in the gasket, and
(27:37):
I told myself that I wanted to see it because
I wanted to kiss her one more time. She was
so cold. I couldn't do it immediately. I felt her hand.
She was ice cold, and she didn't even look like her.
I mean, Michelle without life was not Michelle. I did
(28:00):
manage too long. It took a while. I managed the kisser.
It didn't help. I kept thinking, I gotta just figure
out a way. I gotta go back. All I gotta
do is get back to this minute when I was
looking for instead of going this way. If I just
(28:22):
go that way, I could have ran into the car,
you know, but just any just that minute, if I
could just get back to there, I could I could
make it all go away. And you can't go back there.
There's no way to go back. My life has been
chasing that going back ever since. After the wake, there's
(28:50):
Michelle's funeral. The church is filled with young people and
they've come to remember Michelle. We met in fourth grade,
and I don't know, we just we hit it off
like right away, you know, as little kids. This is
Michelle McClusky. She was Michelle Scofield's best friend. As kids,
(29:11):
they did gymnastics in the front yard, listen to music,
and then as they grew into teenagers, they would go
to the roller skating rink almost every night. They also
played a lot of sports with boys in the neighborhood.
She seemed to be kind of good at almost everything.
I remember always thinking how strong she was. She could
do things physically that a lot of girls our age
(29:32):
couldn't do. She was kind of russ and tumble, you know.
She had an older brother and a younger brother. She
rustled with them and stuff like that. But she was,
you know, she wasn't like a tough girl or anything
like that. She was very, very sweet and feminine and
like always liked to do her nails and have her
hair done and that kind of stuff too. When we
(29:56):
were younger, they lived in a small mobile home. It
was a single wide mobile home and it was so small,
but Ricky had a full drum set in living room.
Ricky is Michelle's older brother. The whole family loved music, playing, singing,
you name it. Ricky and his father, David, both learned
the drums. Michelle's grandfather played the banjo, of course. Then
(30:19):
we started listening to lock and Roll, and if you
met her, you would never guess that she liked heavy
metal lock you know what I mean. Kelsey and I
reached out to Jesse Sam, Michelle's younger brother. Today. He's
an artist and we met him at his studio in
Port Canaveral. It has big garage doors that open onto
the marina. Dozens of his metal sculptures hang from the
(30:42):
walls and ceiling. He keeps a picture of Michelle at
one of his workstations. She was she was trying to
do more musical stuff too. You know, she was really
good at singing and stuff like that, and I think
she was just trying to find her voice, you know,
and was kind of suppressing it because everybody has to
work and for the bill, you know what I mean.
But I think that that was really her kind of
creative thing, that she how she could express herself. Jesse
(31:07):
and Michelle went to a lot of heavy metal shows
together when they were growing up. He's only sixteen when
Michelle moves in with Leo. He comes home one afternoon
when he hears that Michelle's body has been found. I
think I had come home, and I think my grandmother
actually told me, because I don't think my dad was there.
(31:29):
I was hoping not to witness his state of being
at that moment, because you know, he just you know, crumpled.
We asked Jesse if he thinks his dad, David Psalm,
would talk to us, but Jesse tells us that his
(31:50):
dad doesn't even like to talk to him about Michelle.
It's still too painful. As a matter of courtesy, I
mailed David a letter telling him what I'm doing and
offering him the opportunity to speak with me or to
ask any questions. But I don't hear back from him.
(32:12):
In the days following Michelle's funeral, Leo is having a
hard time processing these new details of his wife's death.
Now he's forced to think about the violence Michelle experienced
in her last moments. I know Michelle, and there's no
way that anybody who knew her was capable of doing
(32:35):
this to her. It's not possible. And so I'm looking
for some monstrous thing that you can't describe in a
human form, you know, it's just a monster. Leo and
Michelle's friends are also trying to make sense of Michelle's murder,
(32:58):
and they're trying to figure out who might be responsible.
It's a time, you know, we were the suspect of
a lot of different people. You know, you just sit
around in your mind you you try to who could
have done something you know as terrible as that. This
is Dave again, the bass player in Leo's band, and
his wife Liz. There was a couple of people that
(33:20):
we wondered about. My first reaction when we got the
phone call that night at the same time that this happened,
just before, there was like five girls in the area
that had been killed. One of them was even right
down here off Cumby Road, dumped on the railroad track.
Cumby Road is the street where a lot of teenagers
hang out in Lakeland. A lot of crime happens here,
(33:43):
a lot of theft fights, sometimes murders. It also happens
to be where Tom's Restaurant is, where Michelle was working
the night she went missing. So my first reaction was, oh,
my god, it's got to be that same guy. He's
come over here. So I just that was my first reaction.
It was that serial killer that had been run around
(34:04):
I four corridor. But their minds always returned to those
closest to Michelle, and word was getting around about how
Leo's dad claimed a premonition had led him to Michelle's body.
The Sheriff's department was looking at that and thinking, yeah,
that don't sound right, you know, And to be honest
(34:26):
with you, there were times when we kind of suspected
he may have because there again, at a time like adem,
it's such a terrible thing, you know, you try to
figure out who in the world would have done something
like that, you know, That's what the Polk County Sheriff's
Office would have to figure out. Two experienced detectives were
assigned to the Michelle Schofield case, Detective Weeks and Detective Putnam.
(34:51):
I could try to describe them, but it might be
better coming from the long time reporter for the Lakeland Ledger,
Susie Shottlecatti. I'm just coming cops then, So I do
remember having a lot of murders going on at that
point and a lot of things that went unsolved. Susie
has been reporting on the courts in Polk County for
(35:12):
over thirty five years, and she's married to a retired
detective with the Sheriff's office. She knows just about everyone
in Polk County. First I asked her about Detective Robert Weeks. Oh, yeah, weebel. Yes,
it's not a short guy. He's kind of built like
a Weebel, you know, Weebel's mobble. Then I asked Susie
(35:35):
about weeks as partner. Detective Putnell, Oh god, Richard Putnell
doctor death, Oh God. He has the personality of a
dial tone. I mean they called him doctor Death because
he was always at a crime scene. But he was
the typical chain smoking, rumpled suit, tall, lanky detective. I mean,
(35:57):
he was just what you would imagine an old, crusty
smelled like smoke all the time detective. You know. Kelsey
and I tried reaching out to these detectives without luck.
We sent email, left phone messages, and knocked on doors.
It was almost like word had gotten out about what
we were doing. Very few people from the Sheriff's office,
(36:20):
active or retired, wanted to talk to us. But there
was one guy. His name is Grady Judd. He's the
actual sheriff now, and it's fair to say that he's
the face and the voice of Polk County. This is
a wonderful, safe community. I love the people here, and
in turn, the community here overwhelmingly cares for each other
(36:43):
and looks out for each other. It's a good place.
Sheriff Grady Judd is a white man in his mid sixties.
He wears glasses and a green uniform with his Sheriff's
star pinned to his chest. He's known for his camp
be tough on crime press conferences, which often involved props
and pictures and often go viral on social media. In
(37:04):
two thousand and six, his deputies chased someone's suspected of
killing a police officer into the woods and shot him dead.
After the autopsy, Judd was asked why deputies fired sixty
eight bullets into the suspect. That's all the bullets we had,
or we would have shot him more. He said, we
don't choose to shoot people. They choose for us to
(37:26):
shoot them. And if you choose for us to shoot
at you, we're gonna shoot at you a lot. That's
a guarantee. When we met him, some Lakeland rappers had
just released a new song, Ducking Grady Judd, and they
made a music video that pokes fun at evading cops
in Polk County. The sheriff loved it. We got him,
(37:57):
and by the way, we're going to do an encore together.
It's already scheduled. I told him. I said, they said,
can we do an encore? And I said, yes, I
love it because the first one I didn't have anything
to do with it. They pulled my clips off the YouTube.
And this one I'm gonna have a cameo appearance. And
they said can we can we shoot part of it
with your swat vehicle and I said, We're sure you can.
(38:23):
Judd is so popular in Polk County he recently won
his fifth consecutive term as sheriff, running unopposed. He tells
us he grew up in the Cumby area, that same
part of Lakeland where Michelle worked and where bodies were
turning up. They used to call me a Comby critter.
When I was a kid, I'd run around talking about
being the sheriff, and they'd say, they're not gonna elect
(38:45):
some kid from Cumby Road to be the sheriff. I said, yeah,
they are, They're gonna lect me. No, they ain't gonna
elect a Comby critter. Well they did here I am Grady.
Judd was just eighteen when he joined the Sheriff's office,
but since he was too young to legally purchase ammunition
for his service weapon, his father had to buy it
for him. Judd quickly rose up the ranks and just
(39:07):
a few years before Michelle Scofield's murder, he was supervising
forty four employees, all older than him, and Judd is
the first to admit that it's a pretty bad sign
when a kid in his twenties is running the criminal
investigations unit. You know, I like to think that I'm
sharper than the average bear, but that's just a personal
(39:27):
opinion of me. But the reality is, we should have
had people with institutional wisdom running a criminal investigations division
back in the day, and we didn't. So we had
a young, upstart college kid who read a lot and
was intuitive when the real mature leaders weren't there. In
(39:50):
Polk County in the nineteen eighties, violent crime was rising dramatically,
and Grady Judd was alarmed and frustrated by the growing
number of unsolved homicides. Back then, they didn't really have
the resources to keep up. We didn't have DNA, we
didn't have cell phone tracking, we didn't have stores and
(40:12):
intersections with cameras. On top of that, Grady Judd says
they didn't have many experienced homicide detectives back then, and
there were too many murders for them to handle. They'd
start working one murder, but then another murder would come
along and they'd have to stop what they were doing
to move on to the next one. The year Michelle
was killed, the Sheriff's office handled twenty seven homicides, its
(40:35):
second worst year for murders in a decade. There were
nine recent murder cases that had gone cold, and now
detectives from the Polk County Sheriff's Office had another killing
on their hands with very little evidence to go on,
making matters worse. A month before Michelle's murder, Polk County
Sheriff Dan Daniels, a self avowed white supremacist, was forced
(40:58):
out of office by the governor on the same day
Michelle's body was found. There was an overhaul of the
department and massive reorganization underway. Many officers in the Polk
County Sheriff's Office resigned. I didn't because my goal was
to make this organization better, not run from a challenge.
(41:22):
But it was tumultuous during those days. With the Sheriff's
department in turmoil, Detectives weeks and putnall do what they
can with the resources available to them. The first thing
they do is canvas Leo and Michelle's neighborhood knocking on doors,
and they begin to hear stories from neighbors of arguments
and loud noises coming from the young couple's trailer, but
(41:44):
nobody had seen or heard anything unusual on the night
Michelle disappeared until Detective Weeks shows up at the trailer
of Ricky and Alice Scott, who live across the street
from Leo and Michelle. Ricky didn't see anything, but he
says he's concerned about his wife getting involved in the investigation. Alice,
(42:09):
who's in her mid thirties, stays up late and she's
the neighborhood busybody. She's been known to call the cops
on kids for riding bikes on her lawn, and she
tells Detective Weeks that yes, she did see something suspicious
on the night Michele disappeared. She says she heard a
noise and looked out her bathroom window. The Schofields pulled
(42:32):
up to their trailer in the Mazda. She watched as
Leo and Michele went inside. Then Alice says she hears
a scream. She says she stays at the window waiting
until Leo emerges from the trailer. He's carrying something large
and heavy that he places in the back of the Mazda.
(42:56):
He closes the hatch, starts the car, and dry Five's away.
With that single statement, Alice Scott puts the investigation's focus
squarely on Leo. Eyewitness testimony is not your best evidence
because people in a traumatic event, perception can be skewed.
(43:23):
They mean well, some don't mean well. Some there's an
ulterior motive. But for the most part, your eyewitnesses mean well,
but they're scared to death and their perceptions may not
be exactly as it occurred. But if somebody didn't talk,
(43:43):
it was hard to solve a murder. Back then, as
detectives weeks in Putnell interview Leo and Michelle's friends and
former roommates, they learned that the young couple had a
volatile relationship. There were stories about loud arguments in the trailer,
Leo screaming at Michelle, some noises that sounded like slaps,
(44:05):
red marks on Michelle's face, stories of Leo dragging Michelle
by the hair. As the days turned to weeks after
Michelle's murder, Leo can feel people looking at him differently,
word is getting out now that there's a witness pointing
to Leo as the main suspect. At one point, Leo
(44:28):
calls Michelle's dad, David's psalm. He said that he was
informed by Deck the weeks to U not have any
contact with me until this was over, that they believed
that I did it. And I said to him, you
don't believe that, David, And he said I don't know.
(44:50):
And I was silent for a few seconds, and I said, okay,
all right, And that was the last time I suppose
to him honest and his pain. But when he said that,
it really really hurt, because you should know me better
than that. But he needed something to hang that had
(45:13):
on him, you know, something that makes sense, like we
all did. And but when he said that, I really
really started feeling the way coming down. And it's not
just Michelle's dad who turns his back on Leo. Michelle's
friends are talking to detectives too. Michelle was a very
very beautiful girl, and she always dated very nice looking
(45:38):
boy And when I met him, he just didn't seem
like the kind of person that I would think she
would be interested in. He was kind of small bill,
kind of grungy, and he just didn't seem that attractive
to me. It just it just rubbed me weird. I
just didn't understand what she was so interested about, you know,
(46:00):
I don't know. Michelle McClusky was the maid of honor
at Leo and Michelle's wedding, but she still had her doubts.
I remember not being sure that it was a good
thing for her and being concerned, you know, but she
she always convinced me it was okay. If they were
(46:23):
not getting along or she was unhappy or anything like that,
she didn't tell me. But after Michelle went missing, Michelle
McClusky remembers one moment in particular, after her first night
of searching for her best friend, when questions about Leo
started to creep in. We spent that whole day looking
for her and stuff. And it was sometime late into
(46:44):
the night and we went back to their house and
I fell asleep on the couch and then I heard
a noise or something. I woke up and he was
standing in the living room, just the front door open,
just kind of looking outside. And that was the first
time that I thought what if, like what if he
(47:08):
did something to her? And it made me kind of
scared that I was there along with him. Soon, Michelle
McClusky would learn that Leo's neighbor, Alice Scott, told detective
she heard Michelle's scream then saw Leo carrying something heavy
to the Mazda. If that was true, it would mean
(47:28):
that Michelle McClusky was sleeping at the crime scene where
her best friend had been violently murdered the night before
by the man she was now alone with being in
the house the next day. And there's no blood, nothing's broken,
no holes in the wall, you know, there's no signment
anything like that happened in their house. So I just thought, well,
(47:53):
that just doesn't make sense. I had decided there was
no way he could have done it because blade would
have been all over the house and it wasn't. But
what Michelle McClusky didn't know was that busybody. Neighbor Alice
Scott told police that she saw something else. The day
after Michelle's schofield went missing, Leo bringing a carpet cleaner
(48:19):
into the trailer. Detectives Weeks and Putnell continue to question Leo,
(48:41):
and he can feel the pressure mounting and because he
feels that he has nothing to hide. He never even
thinks to bring a lawyer along. The fact that you're
questioning me about the murder of my own life was
extremely uncomfortable. I've told this story a zillion times. It
doesn't change. I don't have any answers to what actually
(49:04):
took place because I wasn't there to be in that position.
It's beyond trying to prove your innocence. It's beyond that
there's a there's a sludge that covers you when you're
being question for such a thing. When I'm talking about
robbing a store or a cocaine charge or something, and
(49:26):
I'm talking about a murder, which is bad enough. This
is the murder of my wife, whom I love, and
now I'm for us to prove that to someone I've
never met before and obviously doesn't have any idea who
I am. Leo asked to take a lie detector test.
He wants to prove his innocence, and Detective Weeks obliges.
(49:48):
Weeks brings in a guy from the Florida Department of
Law Enforcement. The examiner focuses on three questions. Did you
stab Michelle? Leo answers no, Did you stab Michelle with
a knife. No, did your mother lie about your activities
that night? No? The polygraph examiner tells Leo he flunked,
(50:14):
tells him, I think you killed your wife. Armed with
the lie detective results, Weeks and Putnell continue to interview
people close to the couple. Weeks and his team are
gone around spreading all kinds of stuff. My friends are
looking at me strange. I can feel it, you can
feel a difference. And on top of everything, I lost Michelle.
(50:37):
Months pass with Leo as the main suspect, yet no
evidence is turning up that connects him to Michelle's murder.
The clothes he was wearing that night had no blood
on them. Detectives don't have a murder weapon. They have
an alleged failed polygraph. But polygraph tests don't actually detect lies.
They really only measure anxiety. US Supreme Court ruled that
(51:01):
polygraph tests are not reliable and their results are not
admissible evidence. In Florida, the detectives have statements about Leo's
temper and his relationship with Michelle, and a statement from
Alice Scott, who claims to have seen something the night
Michelle disappeared. Still, the state Attorney's office is looking over
(51:21):
all the evidence, and they don't think detectives have enough
to arrest Leo. Yet there's other evidence, like the fingerprints
found in Michelle's Mazda. There were just two sets of
prints that were lifted from inside the car, and when
they didn't match Leo or Michelle or Leo Senior, the
Sheriff's office stops looking for possible matches. But what's strange
(51:44):
is that Leo and Michelle's prints aren't even in the car,
which they should have been because it's their car. When
I first saw that in the Florida Department of Law
Enforcement's report, I wondered if someone wipe down the fingerprints.
Crime scene technicians also exa and Leo and Michelle's trailer.
If Alice Scott's eyewitness statement is true that she heard
(52:05):
Michelle's scream then saw Leo carrying something heavy like a
body and place it in the Mazda, that makes the
trailer the scene of the crime. The medical examiner concludes
that Michelle lost approximately five pints of blood, but they
don't find anything you'd expect to find in the trailer
after someone has been stabbed twenty six times inside, there
(52:30):
is no blood, just like Michelle McClusky noticed, and no
signs that the carpet had been cleaned, which there should
have been if Leo used the carpet cleaner. Alice Scott
claims she saw him bringing into the trailer the day
after Michelle disappeared. Instead, most of Michelle's Scofield's blood was
found in the dirt near the canal where her body
(52:52):
was discovered. Nearly half of female homicide victims are killed
by their partners, and the major already of those homicides
are carried out by a male partner, so it makes
sense that detectives would be suspicious of Leo, but there's
no physical evidence connecting Leo to the crime, so the
case stalls for months with no arrest. By the end
(53:18):
of nineteen eighty seven, with no new developments, the murder
of Michelle Scofield is going cold. The Polk County Sheriff's
Office now has ten unsolved murders on the books, but
there's a new homicide prosecutor, Assistant State Attorney John Aguero.
His job is to get the evidence from the detectives
(53:39):
and convict someone for the murder of Michelle Scofield. He's young, smart,
and very aggressive. Aguero takes a look at the Michelle
Scofield case file and he thinks he sees something. He
reads Officer Katchadurian's report about his conversation with Leo Sior,
and Aguero thinks there's something weird going on with the father.
(54:01):
A vision from God led him to Michelle's body in
a phosphate drainage canal that can't even be seen from
the road. Aguero is certain that Leo's father is somehow involved.
His so called vision from God that called him to
Michelle's body is just too suspicious to ignore, so Assistant
(54:22):
State Attorney John Aguero sends detectives weeks in Putnell back
out for a few more rounds of questioning with Leo,
and there's a new focus. No, it's not about me anymore,
and they're both good cops, and they're going to talk
about my dad. But the detectives don't get what they want.
Leo says he doesn't know anything about Michelle's murder, and
(54:42):
if Leo thought his dad had something to do with it,
he'd give up any information he had. Not long after this,
Leo is a passenger in a serious car crash where
he breaks his neck. He's hospitalized then released, but has
to wear a metal neck brace for a while. He
decides he's done with Florida. By this point, Leo's parents
(55:06):
have moved back to Massachusetts. Leo tells Detective Weeks he's
moving back up north, gives him contact information in Massachusetts,
and ask the detective to let him know if they
learn anything new about Michelle's murder. It's now May of
nineteen eighty eight. Michelle has been dead for more than
fifteen months. John Aguero, the prosecutor, is frustrated by the
(55:31):
investigation's lack of progress, so he decides he wants to
talk to the neighbor Alice Scott himself. Alice points Aguero
to Randy and Mary Lafoon, a neighborhood couple that delivers
newspapers around Lakeland. Detective Weeks interviewed them both a year before,
but they said they didn't notice anything unusual on the
(55:52):
night Michelle disappeared. But now under Aguero's questioning, the couple
tells the prosecutor they remember seeing an orange Mazda and
a pickup truck just like the one Leo's senior drives.
They were parked right where Michelle's body was found, and now,
fifteen months later, they say they saw those vehicles in
(56:14):
the early morning hours of February twenty fifth, nineteen eighty seven,
the night Michell disappeared. Aguero might not have the evidence
to charge Leo's senior yet, but with the statements from
Alice Scott and the Laffoons, he thinks he has enough
to charge Leo. So in June of nineteen eighty eight,
Leo is indicted for first degree murder, a charge punishable
(56:37):
by death in Florida. Aguero notifies police in Massachusetts and
he gets on a plane with Detective Weeks to take
Leo into custody. Leo knows they're coming, but before he surrenders,
he goes up to the roof of an apartment building
he and his dad are painting, and he takes what
could be his last look over the neighborhood he grew
(56:59):
up in. He's just a few stories up and his
father joins him, And of course, I've never been arrested
for anything, so I'm I'm pretty scared. I'm in a panic,
and Dad's not saying anything. I actually went out on
the roof and I went out and I stood on
the edge of the thing, and I'm not gonna lie.
(57:20):
I honestly stood there thinking and I should just drop
off of it and be done. You know, I'm not
gonna let these people take me through hell. You know
you're not listening to the truth, don't care about the truth.
And my dad said something really crazy. He said, if
(57:41):
you did it, jump Leo's wife has been murdered, his
friends have mostly abandoned him, and now his own family
is cracking under the pressure. If all you can think
is that I did it, then obviously you're not caring
who killed Michelle. I did not kill Michelle. And at
(58:06):
some point I just decided I'm going to stand for
my wife. Leo goes to the office of a local
lawyer who has arranged for the arrest, and they wait.
Then Leo noticed his movement outside the window. He turns
to the lawyer. I said, they're outside your window. And
(58:27):
the swat team was outside the window with their rifles,
so I know they had sarmed at the building. And
no sooner did I say that they came in the office.
They kicked in the door and this came right off
in there, and weeks was there Aguero was there and
they picked me up, handcuffed me. I told Weeks, you're
(58:53):
making a mistake. I kept saying that you're making a mistake.
He didn't respond to that at all. Leo is brought
before a Massachusetts judge who tells him he can fight
extradition to Florida if he wants, but Leo waves that right.
He says he'll go willingly and gets in a car
(59:16):
with the prosecutor, John Aguero. I told Aguero were driving
to Logan Airport in Massachusetts. He asked me, how do
you like the car? We're going to Red Cadillac and
he said, how do you like the car? I said,
and I like it? It's nice. I'm gonna make you
drive me back in it. You're driving me to Massachusetts
(59:40):
in a red Cadillac. Leo was escorted onto the plane
for the flight back to Florida by Detective Weeks and
John Aguero. Leo is just twenty two years old, and
tonight he's going to be sleeping in the Polk County jail.
I remember asking we because he sat by me on
(01:00:02):
the plane and I asked him to not stop looking,
to continue looking, and he said, why would I do that,
and I said, because I'm not guilty of killing Michelle.
And he said, well, if I believe that, you wouldn't
be here. That's when Leo turns to the other man
(01:00:26):
sitting by him, Prosecutor John Aguero. Leo catches a glimpse
of something shiny on Aguero's tie. It's a tie clasp
with some kind of design. Leo leans in to get
a closer look. It's old, sparky Florida's electric chair. Bone
(01:00:52):
Valley is a production of Lava for Good Podcast in
association with Signal Company Number One. Our executive users are
Jason Flam and Kevin Wurdis. Karak Kornhaber is our senior producer.
Brit Spangler is our sound designer. Roxandra Guidi is our editor.
Fact checking by Maximo Anderson. Our producer and researcher is
(01:01:16):
Kelsey Decker. Our theme song, The One Who's Holding the Stars,
is performed by Leebob and the Truth. It was written
by Leo Schofield and Kevin Herrick in Florida's Hardy Correctional Institution.
Bone Valley is written and produced by me Gilbert King.
You can follow the show on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.
(01:01:37):
At Lava for Good. To see photos and documents from
our investigation and exclusive behind the scenes content, visit Lava
Forgod dot com, slash Bone Valley
It's eighteen eighty one. Captain J. Francis le Baron of
the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers is surveying Central Florida.
As he travels up the Peace River in Polk County,
he finds something fossils, tons of them along the sandy
banks of the Peace River, giant shark teeth, whale skulls,
(00:23):
and prehistoric mastodon bones. Captain LeBaron collects nine barrels worth
of fossils and has them shipped off to a professor
at the Smithsonian Institution. A few years later, Captain LeBaron
returns to the region. As he's digging through the sand
bars of the Peace River amongst the bones from millions
(00:45):
of years ago, he makes another discovery. All the bones,
all the decomposition had left Central Florida rich in phosphate,
a mineral left over from the creatures that lived and
died in an around the ancient sea that once covered Florida,
and phosphate, it turns out, is a valuable ingredient for
(01:07):
making fertilizer. They called it white gold. There's interest in
the fossils, but paleontologists don't get the chance to dig
because the mining companies get there first. Soon, Polk County
became the self proclaimed phosphate capital of the world, and
the area was producing three quarters of the nation's supply.
(01:32):
By the late nineteenth century. Railroad tracks had sprung out
in every direction across the region, which helped move all
that phosphate. There was a lot of work and not
enough workers to get the job done, so phosphate companies
paid a fee to the state of Florida in exchange
for prisoners to fill the labor shortage. Black men arrested
(01:55):
for petty crimes were forced to dig ditches and push
wheelbat was full of white rock while under guard. It
had become a new form of slavery. This song is
called Shove It Over, and it's the Latin rhythm, pretty
(02:19):
generally distributed all over Florida. It was a song to
me by Charlie Jones on railroad construction camp near Lakeland, Florida.
This is Zorah Neil Hurston, the novelist who became a
central figure in the African American cultural revival of the
nineteen twenties and thirties known as the Harlem Renaissance. When
(02:40):
I get in the land noise, I'm going to spread
the news about the Florida Boys. Hurston grew up in
central Florida, and in nineteen twenty seven she moved to
Polk County to collect and record stories and work songs
from Black Southerners, songs that were down from generations. Some
(03:03):
of the workers who taught Hurston these songs were setting
down railroad tracks and working in the mines to move phosphate.
Hurston described these men who worked long, hard hours in
Polk County in her memoir dust tracks on a road
they go down in the phosphate mines, Hurston wrote, and
bring up the wet dust of the bones of prehistoric
(03:25):
monsters to make rich land in far places so that
people can eat. But all of it is not dust.
Huge ribs twenty feet from belly to backbone, some old
time sea monster caught in the shallows, shark teeth as
wide as the hand of a working man. It was
these fossils tossed to the side by mining operations that
(03:49):
gave this region its new name Bone Valley. As the
decades passed, phosphate mining evolved. Instead of convicts with shovels,
they started using drag line machines like the one operated
by Michelle Scofield's father, David's psalm. These giant machines excavate
(04:11):
the top soil and produce towering two hundred foot mountains
of white sand called gypsum stacks that loom over the
Polk County horizon. By the nineteen eighties, some of the
mines in northern Polk County shut down after depleting the
soil of its phosphate, and mining operations moved further south,
(04:33):
but you can still see the scars the industry left behind.
The mined out areas were left to be reclaimed by nature.
Dense vegetation grew around these deep mining pits that filled
with water, which is why you see these long, narrow
bodies of water in the region, like the ones in
North Lakeland where Leo, his dad and friends continue their search.
(05:00):
Michelle Schofield, do you hear my man? I have to
my feels, sorrows, deps, surringles in this vastlyty. I see
(05:33):
your relation. I read Deaspration to the worlds only the
Star to the warm Star Bone Valley. Chapter two. Come
(06:24):
be critters. It's been almost forty eight hours since Michelle
went missing. There was no sign of her until one
of Leo's friends saw the orange Mazda just off the
eastbound side of I four, a major highway that runs
through Polk County and connects Tampa and Orlando. Now a
(06:49):
new wave of panic washes over Leo as he and
his father speed to where the Mazda was seen. A
few of Leo's friends and Michelle's dad follow them there.
So we get to the car, We find the car. Obviously,
we didn't touch the car. I didn't want anybody to
touch the car. And we looked at it. We had flashlights,
and you know, obviously it was mine. But there's no
(07:10):
sign of Michelle. It's nearly midnight. Leo knows he needs
to call the sheriff to get someone out here and quick.
The car's right by the Polk City exit ramp on
a rural stretch of the interstate. I didn't even know
where I was at. I mean, I wasn't lost, but
I've never been in this area. So I went up
on the embankment. I climbed the embankment, got up on
(07:31):
the road, and you couldn't see a store from the highway,
but I went up any way to look. And when
I got up to that overpass and walked just a
few feet up behind a tree line. There was a
store up there, and there was a pay phone, so
I went over there and I made a call to
the Sheriff's department, and I told them that I told
him who I was, told him where I was, and
(07:53):
that we had found the car on the side of
the road. They asked me if I was going to
take it home. I said, you're apparently not understanding who
I am. My wife is still missing. I found her car,
I did not find her. I need some help. I'm
expecting we'll be right there, mister Scullfield, you know what
(08:15):
I mean. And Batman shows up and everything gets fixed
and stuff, and it didn't work that way. Finally deputies
arrive and the crime scene unit is called in. They
start inspecting the car. Some stereo equipment in the Mazda
(08:35):
is missing. Leo doesn't want to waste any more time.
He wants to start searching the area for Michelle. I
told Detective Russell, I'm going to be out here in
the ditches and in the medium of iye for looking
for anything. But the deputy tells Leo to wait because
they're going to fly a helicopter over the area at sunrise,
(08:58):
so Leo and the rest of the search party a
few hours sleep before meeting up again. I literally am
there at daybreak, and so the plan was to search
I four. They searched both sides of the highway, including
the Median. Leo, his dad, his friends, and Michelle's family
cover the six plus miles of I four until they
(09:20):
reached the exit for State Road thirty three. There's no
sign of Michelle. Nobody that we knew had from a nobody.
This is Michelle McClusky. She's Michelle Scofield's best friend. It's
mid morning now. When they come on to State Road
(09:40):
thirty three, which connects I four, the highway where the
car was found, to Combe Road, which was Michelle's last
known location, they decide to split up. Leo's father will
start searching one end of State Road thirty three. Leo
and Michelle McCluskey will start at the other end of
State Road thirty three, and they and to meet Leo SR.
(10:01):
Somewhere in the middle. So Leo and Michelle McClusky jump
into her boyfriend's pickup truck. I was just terrified and
just really focused on really trying to find her. It's
slow searching. They walk a stretch of the road, get
back in the truck, pull up a bit, get out
and search again. One of Michelle McClusky and I were
(10:24):
looking in one particular area. There was a shower's car
that went by real fast, headed down thirty three. Told
where my father was looking, and the second car went by.
I said, I'm following this. Something's going on. Leo jumps
in the pickup with Michelle McClusky in the passenger seat
and tries to catch the sheriff's car ahead. In the distance,
(10:47):
he sees an eighteen wheeled truck jack knife in the
middle of the road. Some cards are parked on the shoulder,
almost turned off because it was so congested. I thought
it was a car accident. Yea. I thought this was
going to be one of things where it turns out
to be nothing, and I wish that it would have been.
Leo keeps driving toward the congestion. A helicopters on the
(11:10):
ground at the scene. Somebody's missing, and you come up
on a scene like that and the helicopters shut down
and the anilance is there. You just know, all of
a sudden. Nobody has to tell you what it is.
You know. I saw my father's truck down there on
the side of the road and all these other vehicles,
and then he was coming out of the woods and
(11:32):
he had his hands in his own covering his face,
and I knew they founder and you stop the truck.
I mean, I slowed down enough, and I jumped out
and went running, and everything was blending together and going
super fast. Leo jumps out of the pickup and runs
along the side of the road. Yellow crime scene tape
(11:55):
has already been tied between a pine tree and a
sign that reads no dumping of rubbish. The tape cordons
off a short sandy road that cuts to the tree line.
Beyond it, Leo sees men in suits standing in front
of palmetto bushes, looking down into a drainage canal. Leo
(12:17):
now knows Michelle is back there, and he's trying to
push past the deputies to get to her. His dad
grabs him and keeps him from reaching the canal, to
keep him from seeing Michelle's body. And he kept saying
she's gone, And I was trying to hold on to
(12:39):
some kind of my mind was doing it fabricating some
kind of possibility that you're not right, She's not dead.
It could not possibly end like this. I mean, it's
just unreal. And it was like my whole world was
just fragmenting, and I want it so bad to just
(13:03):
run back there and just grab her. And if I
could just hold her, I'd hold her and she'd still
be alive. And I don't, you just I can't. It
can't end like this. It just it can't end. We
looked too hard. I've been up too long. I'm gonna
save her. I mean, it just just I just lost it.
(13:27):
I ended up punching the ground. I was pulling grass out.
I hit the tree, and I kept saying she's not dead,
She's not dead, and all these people are coming around,
and because I'm flipping out, I end up in between
these cars. The cops come around one side of the
car towards Leo. His dad comes from the other side.
(13:51):
You know, I'm telling him, don't touch me, don't come
near me. I want her out now. I just want
her off. I end up just falling down and sitting
against the front tire of the car. I came in glue.
(14:14):
Michelle's body is floating face down in a drainage canal
off State Road thirty three near an old phosphate mine.
There's a large piece of plywood partially covering her body,
resting on her back and legs. She's still wearing the
red pants she wore to work that day and a
sleeveless white top. Her autopsy would later reveal that she'd
(14:39):
been stabbed twenty six times, and scrapes on her back
were consistent with her body being dragged after she was killed.
Officer Richard Kachadourian, who talked to Leo and his father
the morning after Michelle disappeared, hears about it on the news.
(15:03):
I remember coming to work one night and there was
on television and she was found not far from where
I'm sitting right now. He feels bad for the Scofields
and picks up the phone to offer his contolences. Leo
Senior answers, and it was definitely a very peculiar conversation.
(15:25):
He talked about a premonition that he had. What Leo
Senior told him was so odd. Kachadourian decided to write
an official report about the call. His report reads, mister
Scofield advised writer that he received a premonition the night
prior to the discovery of his daughter in law, possibly
from the Lord, advising him where Michelle could be found.
(15:49):
He told me on the phone at night that he
discovered the body, and the body was in the water,
and that she was looking at him, and that she
was smiling at him. Michelle was smiling, Leo Senior said,
as if saying thank you for finding me. This is
especially odd because Michelle was floating face down and had
plywood on top of her. It was strange, and that's
(16:12):
how I thought of it. It became extremely strange and
I got I mean, it frightened me. But it's a
certain degree. And if you know that landscape, you just
don't happen upon. You just don't drive down that road
and happen upon anything that's really dense vegetation, snake infested water.
I mean, you either have to know something's there, or
(16:34):
somebody directed you there, or you knew something was in
that area. You know, in hindsight, Gilbert, what I feel
he was doing was confessing. That was definitely one of
the oddest phone calls in my life. Hi, I'm a
(17:00):
flam CEO and founder of Lava for Good podcasts, Home
to Bone Valley, Wrongful Conviction, The War on Drugs, and
many other great podcasts. Today, we're asking you, our listeners,
to take part in a survey. Your feedback is going
to help inform how we make podcasts in the future.
You're complete and candidate. Answers will help us continue to
bring you more insightful and inspiring stories about important topics
(17:22):
that impact us all. So please go to Lava for
Good dot com slash survey and participate today. Thank you
for your support. Bone Valley is sponsored by Stand Together.
Stand Together is a philanthropic community that partners with America's
boldest changemakers to tackle the root causes of our country's
(17:43):
biggest problems, including the broken criminal justice system. Christina Dent
is one of many entrepreneurs partnering with Stand Together to
end the War on Drugs, the underlying cause of many
problems such as over incarceration and the criminalization of addiction
communities across the country. As a foster mom, Christina came
(18:04):
into contact with the War on drugs when she saw
how it was ripping apart the family she worked with.
She witnessed how kids were affected and how mothers wanted
something better for their families, but didn't have the tools
to get there themselves. Christina Dentz started a nonprofit called
End It for Good because she knew there was a
better solution to help these families. She's working to end
(18:28):
the War on Drugs in Mississippi and build consensus around
the state to help families struggling with substance abuse problems
find a different path forward than the one they've been given.
Stand Together has many more stories like this one, as
it partners with thousands of change makers who were driving
solutions in education, healthcare, poverty, and the criminal justice system.
(18:52):
To learn more about the War on drugs, listen to
the War on Drugs podcast on Apple Podcasts or wherever
you get your podcast. There is a piece of wood
board that was covering the body. I do have that,
so I'll bring that out about it for months. It's
(19:13):
just so funny that it's here. Kelsey and I are
talking to Shane Kent, who runs the evidence room in
the basement of the Polk County Courthouse. Shane's in his
early forties with tattoos, engaged piercings. He's gonna show us
all the physical evidence from Michelle Scofield's murder. How I's
gonna go down is I'm gonna try to keep control
(19:35):
out of all the evidence. Sure, I'm gonna gonna be
the only one hand limit. If I drop off piece,
let you look at it, examine it, if you want
to take pictures of it. The only thing that I
do not recommend any any pictures being taken is of
the victim is any kind of nude, because some of
the wounds are in her chest, in her bare chest
is exposed. So okay, understand, okay, all right, if you
(19:58):
want to, guys, have a seat. I'll start bringing Every
time someone asked to see the evidence from a homicide,
the state Attorney's office is notified and they can send
someone down to observe. So we have an armed officer
with us, and she's going to be watching as we
look through all the evidence. Oh, Kelsey and I sit
(20:25):
side by side at the table and Shane starts bringing
out the evidence. The plywood that was covering Michelle's body
in the canal where she was found found on top
of the body in that little maps of lakeland mounted
on foam boards, Michelle's time card from Tom's restaurant. See
(20:45):
there's a downy bottle that they the blood smeared downey
fabric soften her bottle that was found in the back
of the Mazda. The downy bottle very much looked like
a downey bottle from the eighties. You know, it wasn't
like the one you'd be able to buy at the
store today. You know, for me, this all happened before
(21:06):
I was born, So seeing some of that stuff, I
was able to like better place in time, like, oh
my gosh, okay, this happened and it was nineteen eighty seven.
Then Shane brings up Michelle's clothes. Each piece is contained
in a clear plastic bag. Her jacket, her top, her
(21:27):
bra and underwear, and the red pants that she and
more to work. That was all there as well. And
this is the gray jacket, the jacket and the top.
They'd been slashed and there was a lot of dried
blood on those items. I look at Kelsey. We both
(21:53):
know what's next. Shane starts with photos of Michelle as
she was found floating faced down in the canal under
the plywood. A few more like that without the plywood.
Then he brings out the photographs from the autopsy, there
are pictures of her face, her head tilted to one side.
(22:15):
She looks like she could be sleeping, except she isn't,
and the wounds are horrific. We've been studying this case
for months now, but in documents the crime can feel abstract,
with Michelle described only as the victim. By this time,
(22:36):
we've met Leo, some of Michelle's friends and family, and
now she's no longer some stranger or the victim on
an autopsy table, and your heart just breaks trying to
imagine the pain and devastation they felt when Michelle was killed.
That's all I can think about seeing these photos. That's everything. Yeah,
(23:11):
that's so cool. Not a lot of cases are, no,
I know, right, I'm gonna need to decompress. Yeah, I'm sure. Yeah,
(23:31):
Kelsey and I aren't saying much. On the way back
to the parking garage, the summer heat is stifling. It's
the end of the workday, so there are people all
around us. We get to our car where we debrief.
I mean, I was thinking about her and like the
(23:53):
pain she must have felt, and how scared she must
have been in those last moments. I think, you know,
there's also the proximity and age I I was thinking about,
(24:13):
you know, also like myself and and all of my
friends who are young women and could potentially be in
a situation like that. H m hm. I can take
(25:00):
her down. Grief and heartbreak overwhelm everyone close to Michelle
in the days and nights after her body is discovered.
(25:20):
When it comes time to arrange her funeral, Leo is
in no shape to help. My dad took over everything.
I could not make a solid decision for me for anything.
I couldn't decide what closed for her to where. I
couldn't decide what color the casket should be, what kind
of casket should be on those things were so far
in to me. How do you decide what kind of
casket you put your dead wife in? But there's one
(25:41):
detail Leo does care about. Michelle's dad wants a closed
casket wake, and I just could not leave her without
seeing her again. I just could not do it. So
Leo makes an arrangement with the funeral home. They'll hold
the wake with a closed casket, But an hour or
so before they'll let Leo c Michelle one last time,
(26:04):
the funeral director tells him that to view Michelle they'll
need a high necked shirt to cover her wounds. And
I was flower gasted, like what wounds one of Michelle
was murdered. I was originally on the impression all the
way up until the wake that she was drawn, and
(26:29):
that's when my father said they were stabbed wounds. With
Leo in his debilitated state, no one had wanted to
tell him exactly what happened to Michelle. Obviously I knew
somebody had gilder. Why or how was beyond my ability
to think stabbing her. It's beyond that, you know, It's
(26:51):
just it's just beyond that. And for me, that was
the whole thing. Cast again, we live in it all
over again, a different scenario, somehow worse than the drowning.
At the weak, Leoh was given the private moment he
(27:14):
wanted to see Michelle one last time and walked into
the viewing area. I have never seen a dead body.
I've never been to a weak, I've never had any
experience like that, so I really wasn't prepared for any
of that. And she was laying in the gasket, and
(27:37):
I told myself that I wanted to see it because
I wanted to kiss her one more time. She was
so cold. I couldn't do it immediately. I felt her hand.
She was ice cold, and she didn't even look like her.
I mean, Michelle without life was not Michelle. I did
(28:00):
manage too long. It took a while. I managed the kisser.
It didn't help. I kept thinking, I gotta just figure
out a way. I gotta go back. All I gotta
do is get back to this minute when I was
looking for instead of going this way. If I just
(28:22):
go that way, I could have ran into the car,
you know, but just any just that minute, if I
could just get back to there, I could I could
make it all go away. And you can't go back there.
There's no way to go back. My life has been
chasing that going back ever since. After the wake, there's
(28:50):
Michelle's funeral. The church is filled with young people and
they've come to remember Michelle. We met in fourth grade,
and I don't know, we just we hit it off
like right away, you know, as little kids. This is
Michelle McClusky. She was Michelle Scofield's best friend. As kids,
(29:11):
they did gymnastics in the front yard, listen to music,
and then as they grew into teenagers, they would go
to the roller skating rink almost every night. They also
played a lot of sports with boys in the neighborhood.
She seemed to be kind of good at almost everything.
I remember always thinking how strong she was. She could
do things physically that a lot of girls our age
(29:32):
couldn't do. She was kind of russ and tumble, you know.
She had an older brother and a younger brother. She
rustled with them and stuff like that. But she was,
you know, she wasn't like a tough girl or anything
like that. She was very, very sweet and feminine and
like always liked to do her nails and have her
hair done and that kind of stuff too. When we
(29:56):
were younger, they lived in a small mobile home. It
was a single wide mobile home and it was so small,
but Ricky had a full drum set in living room.
Ricky is Michelle's older brother. The whole family loved music, playing, singing,
you name it. Ricky and his father, David, both learned
the drums. Michelle's grandfather played the banjo, of course. Then
(30:19):
we started listening to lock and Roll, and if you
met her, you would never guess that she liked heavy
metal lock you know what I mean. Kelsey and I
reached out to Jesse Sam, Michelle's younger brother. Today. He's
an artist and we met him at his studio in
Port Canaveral. It has big garage doors that open onto
the marina. Dozens of his metal sculptures hang from the
(30:42):
walls and ceiling. He keeps a picture of Michelle at
one of his workstations. She was she was trying to
do more musical stuff too. You know, she was really
good at singing and stuff like that, and I think
she was just trying to find her voice, you know,
and was kind of suppressing it because everybody has to
work and for the bill, you know what I mean.
But I think that that was really her kind of
creative thing, that she how she could express herself. Jesse
(31:07):
and Michelle went to a lot of heavy metal shows
together when they were growing up. He's only sixteen when
Michelle moves in with Leo. He comes home one afternoon
when he hears that Michelle's body has been found. I
think I had come home, and I think my grandmother
actually told me, because I don't think my dad was there.
(31:29):
I was hoping not to witness his state of being
at that moment, because you know, he just you know, crumpled.
We asked Jesse if he thinks his dad, David Psalm,
would talk to us, but Jesse tells us that his
(31:50):
dad doesn't even like to talk to him about Michelle.
It's still too painful. As a matter of courtesy, I
mailed David a letter telling him what I'm doing and
offering him the opportunity to speak with me or to
ask any questions. But I don't hear back from him.
(32:12):
In the days following Michelle's funeral, Leo is having a
hard time processing these new details of his wife's death.
Now he's forced to think about the violence Michelle experienced
in her last moments. I know Michelle, and there's no
way that anybody who knew her was capable of doing
(32:35):
this to her. It's not possible. And so I'm looking
for some monstrous thing that you can't describe in a
human form, you know, it's just a monster. Leo and
Michelle's friends are also trying to make sense of Michelle's murder,
(32:58):
and they're trying to figure out who might be responsible.
It's a time, you know, we were the suspect of
a lot of different people. You know, you just sit
around in your mind you you try to who could
have done something you know as terrible as that. This
is Dave again, the bass player in Leo's band, and
his wife Liz. There was a couple of people that
(33:20):
we wondered about. My first reaction when we got the
phone call that night at the same time that this happened,
just before, there was like five girls in the area
that had been killed. One of them was even right
down here off Cumby Road, dumped on the railroad track.
Cumby Road is the street where a lot of teenagers
hang out in Lakeland. A lot of crime happens here,
(33:43):
a lot of theft fights, sometimes murders. It also happens
to be where Tom's Restaurant is, where Michelle was working
the night she went missing. So my first reaction was, oh,
my god, it's got to be that same guy. He's
come over here. So I just that was my first reaction.
It was that serial killer that had been run around
(34:04):
I four corridor. But their minds always returned to those
closest to Michelle, and word was getting around about how
Leo's dad claimed a premonition had led him to Michelle's body.
The Sheriff's department was looking at that and thinking, yeah,
that don't sound right, you know, And to be honest
(34:26):
with you, there were times when we kind of suspected
he may have because there again, at a time like adem,
it's such a terrible thing, you know, you try to
figure out who in the world would have done something
like that, you know, That's what the Polk County Sheriff's
Office would have to figure out. Two experienced detectives were
assigned to the Michelle Schofield case, Detective Weeks and Detective Putnam.
(34:51):
I could try to describe them, but it might be
better coming from the long time reporter for the Lakeland Ledger,
Susie Shottlecatti. I'm just coming cops then, So I do
remember having a lot of murders going on at that
point and a lot of things that went unsolved. Susie
has been reporting on the courts in Polk County for
(35:12):
over thirty five years, and she's married to a retired
detective with the Sheriff's office. She knows just about everyone
in Polk County. First I asked her about Detective Robert Weeks. Oh, yeah, weebel. Yes,
it's not a short guy. He's kind of built like
a Weebel, you know, Weebel's mobble. Then I asked Susie
(35:35):
about weeks as partner. Detective Putnell, Oh god, Richard Putnell
doctor death, Oh God. He has the personality of a
dial tone. I mean they called him doctor Death because
he was always at a crime scene. But he was
the typical chain smoking, rumpled suit, tall, lanky detective. I mean,
(35:57):
he was just what you would imagine an old, crusty
smelled like smoke all the time detective. You know. Kelsey
and I tried reaching out to these detectives without luck.
We sent email, left phone messages, and knocked on doors.
It was almost like word had gotten out about what
we were doing. Very few people from the Sheriff's office,
(36:20):
active or retired, wanted to talk to us. But there
was one guy. His name is Grady Judd. He's the
actual sheriff now, and it's fair to say that he's
the face and the voice of Polk County. This is
a wonderful, safe community. I love the people here, and
in turn, the community here overwhelmingly cares for each other
(36:43):
and looks out for each other. It's a good place.
Sheriff Grady Judd is a white man in his mid sixties.
He wears glasses and a green uniform with his Sheriff's
star pinned to his chest. He's known for his camp
be tough on crime press conferences, which often involved props
and pictures and often go viral on social media. In
(37:04):
two thousand and six, his deputies chased someone's suspected of
killing a police officer into the woods and shot him dead.
After the autopsy, Judd was asked why deputies fired sixty
eight bullets into the suspect. That's all the bullets we had,
or we would have shot him more. He said, we
don't choose to shoot people. They choose for us to
(37:26):
shoot them. And if you choose for us to shoot
at you, we're gonna shoot at you a lot. That's
a guarantee. When we met him, some Lakeland rappers had
just released a new song, Ducking Grady Judd, and they
made a music video that pokes fun at evading cops
in Polk County. The sheriff loved it. We got him,
(37:57):
and by the way, we're going to do an encore together.
It's already scheduled. I told him. I said, they said,
can we do an encore? And I said, yes, I
love it because the first one I didn't have anything
to do with it. They pulled my clips off the YouTube.
And this one I'm gonna have a cameo appearance. And
they said can we can we shoot part of it
with your swat vehicle and I said, We're sure you can.
(38:23):
Judd is so popular in Polk County he recently won
his fifth consecutive term as sheriff, running unopposed. He tells
us he grew up in the Cumby area, that same
part of Lakeland where Michelle worked and where bodies were
turning up. They used to call me a Comby critter.
When I was a kid, I'd run around talking about
being the sheriff, and they'd say, they're not gonna elect
(38:45):
some kid from Cumby Road to be the sheriff. I said, yeah,
they are, They're gonna lect me. No, they ain't gonna
elect a Comby critter. Well they did here I am Grady.
Judd was just eighteen when he joined the Sheriff's office,
but since he was too young to legally purchase ammunition
for his service weapon, his father had to buy it
for him. Judd quickly rose up the ranks and just
(39:07):
a few years before Michelle Scofield's murder, he was supervising
forty four employees, all older than him, and Judd is
the first to admit that it's a pretty bad sign
when a kid in his twenties is running the criminal
investigations unit. You know, I like to think that I'm
sharper than the average bear, but that's just a personal
(39:27):
opinion of me. But the reality is, we should have
had people with institutional wisdom running a criminal investigations division
back in the day, and we didn't. So we had
a young, upstart college kid who read a lot and
was intuitive when the real mature leaders weren't there. In
(39:50):
Polk County in the nineteen eighties, violent crime was rising dramatically,
and Grady Judd was alarmed and frustrated by the growing
number of unsolved homicides. Back then, they didn't really have
the resources to keep up. We didn't have DNA, we
didn't have cell phone tracking, we didn't have stores and
(40:12):
intersections with cameras. On top of that, Grady Judd says
they didn't have many experienced homicide detectives back then, and
there were too many murders for them to handle. They'd
start working one murder, but then another murder would come
along and they'd have to stop what they were doing
to move on to the next one. The year Michelle
was killed, the Sheriff's office handled twenty seven homicides, its
(40:35):
second worst year for murders in a decade. There were
nine recent murder cases that had gone cold, and now
detectives from the Polk County Sheriff's Office had another killing
on their hands with very little evidence to go on,
making matters worse. A month before Michelle's murder, Polk County
Sheriff Dan Daniels, a self avowed white supremacist, was forced
(40:58):
out of office by the governor on the same day
Michelle's body was found. There was an overhaul of the
department and massive reorganization underway. Many officers in the Polk
County Sheriff's Office resigned. I didn't because my goal was
to make this organization better, not run from a challenge.
(41:22):
But it was tumultuous during those days. With the Sheriff's
department in turmoil, Detectives weeks and putnall do what they
can with the resources available to them. The first thing
they do is canvas Leo and Michelle's neighborhood knocking on doors,
and they begin to hear stories from neighbors of arguments
and loud noises coming from the young couple's trailer, but
(41:44):
nobody had seen or heard anything unusual on the night
Michelle disappeared until Detective Weeks shows up at the trailer
of Ricky and Alice Scott, who live across the street
from Leo and Michelle. Ricky didn't see anything, but he
says he's concerned about his wife getting involved in the investigation. Alice,
(42:09):
who's in her mid thirties, stays up late and she's
the neighborhood busybody. She's been known to call the cops
on kids for riding bikes on her lawn, and she
tells Detective Weeks that yes, she did see something suspicious
on the night Michele disappeared. She says she heard a
noise and looked out her bathroom window. The Schofields pulled
(42:32):
up to their trailer in the Mazda. She watched as
Leo and Michele went inside. Then Alice says she hears
a scream. She says she stays at the window waiting
until Leo emerges from the trailer. He's carrying something large
and heavy that he places in the back of the Mazda.
(42:56):
He closes the hatch, starts the car, and dry Five's away.
With that single statement, Alice Scott puts the investigation's focus
squarely on Leo. Eyewitness testimony is not your best evidence
because people in a traumatic event, perception can be skewed.
(43:23):
They mean well, some don't mean well. Some there's an
ulterior motive. But for the most part, your eyewitnesses mean well,
but they're scared to death and their perceptions may not
be exactly as it occurred. But if somebody didn't talk,
(43:43):
it was hard to solve a murder. Back then, as
detectives weeks in Putnell interview Leo and Michelle's friends and
former roommates, they learned that the young couple had a
volatile relationship. There were stories about loud arguments in the trailer,
Leo screaming at Michelle, some noises that sounded like slaps,
(44:05):
red marks on Michelle's face, stories of Leo dragging Michelle
by the hair. As the days turned to weeks after
Michelle's murder, Leo can feel people looking at him differently,
word is getting out now that there's a witness pointing
to Leo as the main suspect. At one point, Leo
(44:28):
calls Michelle's dad, David's psalm. He said that he was
informed by Deck the weeks to U not have any
contact with me until this was over, that they believed
that I did it. And I said to him, you
don't believe that, David, And he said I don't know.
(44:50):
And I was silent for a few seconds, and I said, okay,
all right, And that was the last time I suppose
to him honest and his pain. But when he said that,
it really really hurt, because you should know me better
than that. But he needed something to hang that had
(45:13):
on him, you know, something that makes sense, like we
all did. And but when he said that, I really
really started feeling the way coming down. And it's not
just Michelle's dad who turns his back on Leo. Michelle's
friends are talking to detectives too. Michelle was a very
very beautiful girl, and she always dated very nice looking
(45:38):
boy And when I met him, he just didn't seem
like the kind of person that I would think she
would be interested in. He was kind of small bill,
kind of grungy, and he just didn't seem that attractive
to me. It just it just rubbed me weird. I
just didn't understand what she was so interested about, you know,
(46:00):
I don't know. Michelle McClusky was the maid of honor
at Leo and Michelle's wedding, but she still had her doubts.
I remember not being sure that it was a good
thing for her and being concerned, you know, but she
she always convinced me it was okay. If they were
(46:23):
not getting along or she was unhappy or anything like that,
she didn't tell me. But after Michelle went missing, Michelle
McClusky remembers one moment in particular, after her first night
of searching for her best friend, when questions about Leo
started to creep in. We spent that whole day looking
for her and stuff. And it was sometime late into
(46:44):
the night and we went back to their house and
I fell asleep on the couch and then I heard
a noise or something. I woke up and he was
standing in the living room, just the front door open,
just kind of looking outside. And that was the first
time that I thought what if, like what if he
(47:08):
did something to her? And it made me kind of
scared that I was there along with him. Soon, Michelle
McClusky would learn that Leo's neighbor, Alice Scott, told detective
she heard Michelle's scream then saw Leo carrying something heavy
to the Mazda. If that was true, it would mean
(47:28):
that Michelle McClusky was sleeping at the crime scene where
her best friend had been violently murdered the night before
by the man she was now alone with being in
the house the next day. And there's no blood, nothing's broken,
no holes in the wall, you know, there's no signment
anything like that happened in their house. So I just thought, well,
(47:53):
that just doesn't make sense. I had decided there was
no way he could have done it because blade would
have been all over the house and it wasn't. But
what Michelle McClusky didn't know was that busybody. Neighbor Alice
Scott told police that she saw something else. The day
after Michelle's schofield went missing, Leo bringing a carpet cleaner
(48:19):
into the trailer. Detectives Weeks and Putnell continue to question Leo,
(48:41):
and he can feel the pressure mounting and because he
feels that he has nothing to hide. He never even
thinks to bring a lawyer along. The fact that you're
questioning me about the murder of my own life was
extremely uncomfortable. I've told this story a zillion times. It
doesn't change. I don't have any answers to what actually
(49:04):
took place because I wasn't there to be in that position.
It's beyond trying to prove your innocence. It's beyond that
there's a there's a sludge that covers you when you're
being question for such a thing. When I'm talking about
robbing a store or a cocaine charge or something, and
(49:26):
I'm talking about a murder, which is bad enough. This
is the murder of my wife, whom I love, and
now I'm for us to prove that to someone I've
never met before and obviously doesn't have any idea who
I am. Leo asked to take a lie detector test.
He wants to prove his innocence, and Detective Weeks obliges.
(49:48):
Weeks brings in a guy from the Florida Department of
Law Enforcement. The examiner focuses on three questions. Did you
stab Michelle? Leo answers no, Did you stab Michelle with
a knife. No, did your mother lie about your activities
that night? No? The polygraph examiner tells Leo he flunked,
(50:14):
tells him, I think you killed your wife. Armed with
the lie detective results, Weeks and Putnell continue to interview
people close to the couple. Weeks and his team are
gone around spreading all kinds of stuff. My friends are
looking at me strange. I can feel it, you can
feel a difference. And on top of everything, I lost Michelle.
(50:37):
Months pass with Leo as the main suspect, yet no
evidence is turning up that connects him to Michelle's murder.
The clothes he was wearing that night had no blood
on them. Detectives don't have a murder weapon. They have
an alleged failed polygraph. But polygraph tests don't actually detect lies.
They really only measure anxiety. US Supreme Court ruled that
(51:01):
polygraph tests are not reliable and their results are not
admissible evidence. In Florida, the detectives have statements about Leo's
temper and his relationship with Michelle, and a statement from
Alice Scott, who claims to have seen something the night
Michelle disappeared. Still, the state Attorney's office is looking over
(51:21):
all the evidence, and they don't think detectives have enough
to arrest Leo. Yet there's other evidence, like the fingerprints
found in Michelle's Mazda. There were just two sets of
prints that were lifted from inside the car, and when
they didn't match Leo or Michelle or Leo Senior, the
Sheriff's office stops looking for possible matches. But what's strange
(51:44):
is that Leo and Michelle's prints aren't even in the car,
which they should have been because it's their car. When
I first saw that in the Florida Department of Law
Enforcement's report, I wondered if someone wipe down the fingerprints.
Crime scene technicians also exa and Leo and Michelle's trailer.
If Alice Scott's eyewitness statement is true that she heard
(52:05):
Michelle's scream then saw Leo carrying something heavy like a
body and place it in the Mazda, that makes the
trailer the scene of the crime. The medical examiner concludes
that Michelle lost approximately five pints of blood, but they
don't find anything you'd expect to find in the trailer
after someone has been stabbed twenty six times inside, there
(52:30):
is no blood, just like Michelle McClusky noticed, and no
signs that the carpet had been cleaned, which there should
have been if Leo used the carpet cleaner. Alice Scott
claims she saw him bringing into the trailer the day
after Michelle disappeared. Instead, most of Michelle's Scofield's blood was
found in the dirt near the canal where her body
(52:52):
was discovered. Nearly half of female homicide victims are killed
by their partners, and the major already of those homicides
are carried out by a male partner, so it makes
sense that detectives would be suspicious of Leo, but there's
no physical evidence connecting Leo to the crime, so the
case stalls for months with no arrest. By the end
(53:18):
of nineteen eighty seven, with no new developments, the murder
of Michelle Scofield is going cold. The Polk County Sheriff's
Office now has ten unsolved murders on the books, but
there's a new homicide prosecutor, Assistant State Attorney John Aguero.
His job is to get the evidence from the detectives
(53:39):
and convict someone for the murder of Michelle Scofield. He's young, smart,
and very aggressive. Aguero takes a look at the Michelle
Scofield case file and he thinks he sees something. He
reads Officer Katchadurian's report about his conversation with Leo Sior,
and Aguero thinks there's something weird going on with the father.
(54:01):
A vision from God led him to Michelle's body in
a phosphate drainage canal that can't even be seen from
the road. Aguero is certain that Leo's father is somehow involved.
His so called vision from God that called him to
Michelle's body is just too suspicious to ignore, so Assistant
(54:22):
State Attorney John Aguero sends detectives weeks in Putnell back
out for a few more rounds of questioning with Leo,
and there's a new focus. No, it's not about me anymore,
and they're both good cops, and they're going to talk
about my dad. But the detectives don't get what they want.
Leo says he doesn't know anything about Michelle's murder, and
(54:42):
if Leo thought his dad had something to do with it,
he'd give up any information he had. Not long after this,
Leo is a passenger in a serious car crash where
he breaks his neck. He's hospitalized then released, but has
to wear a metal neck brace for a while. He
decides he's done with Florida. By this point, Leo's parents
(55:06):
have moved back to Massachusetts. Leo tells Detective Weeks he's
moving back up north, gives him contact information in Massachusetts,
and ask the detective to let him know if they
learn anything new about Michelle's murder. It's now May of
nineteen eighty eight. Michelle has been dead for more than
fifteen months. John Aguero, the prosecutor, is frustrated by the
(55:31):
investigation's lack of progress, so he decides he wants to
talk to the neighbor Alice Scott himself. Alice points Aguero
to Randy and Mary Lafoon, a neighborhood couple that delivers
newspapers around Lakeland. Detective Weeks interviewed them both a year before,
but they said they didn't notice anything unusual on the
(55:52):
night Michelle disappeared. But now under Aguero's questioning, the couple
tells the prosecutor they remember seeing an orange Mazda and
a pickup truck just like the one Leo's senior drives.
They were parked right where Michelle's body was found, and now,
fifteen months later, they say they saw those vehicles in
(56:14):
the early morning hours of February twenty fifth, nineteen eighty seven,
the night Michell disappeared. Aguero might not have the evidence
to charge Leo's senior yet, but with the statements from
Alice Scott and the Laffoons, he thinks he has enough
to charge Leo. So in June of nineteen eighty eight,
Leo is indicted for first degree murder, a charge punishable
(56:37):
by death in Florida. Aguero notifies police in Massachusetts and
he gets on a plane with Detective Weeks to take
Leo into custody. Leo knows they're coming, but before he surrenders,
he goes up to the roof of an apartment building
he and his dad are painting, and he takes what
could be his last look over the neighborhood he grew
(56:59):
up in. He's just a few stories up and his
father joins him, And of course, I've never been arrested
for anything, so I'm I'm pretty scared. I'm in a panic,
and Dad's not saying anything. I actually went out on
the roof and I went out and I stood on
the edge of the thing, and I'm not gonna lie.
(57:20):
I honestly stood there thinking and I should just drop
off of it and be done. You know, I'm not
gonna let these people take me through hell. You know
you're not listening to the truth, don't care about the truth.
And my dad said something really crazy. He said, if
(57:41):
you did it, jump Leo's wife has been murdered, his
friends have mostly abandoned him, and now his own family
is cracking under the pressure. If all you can think
is that I did it, then obviously you're not caring
who killed Michelle. I did not kill Michelle. And at
(58:06):
some point I just decided I'm going to stand for
my wife. Leo goes to the office of a local
lawyer who has arranged for the arrest, and they wait.
Then Leo noticed his movement outside the window. He turns
to the lawyer. I said, they're outside your window. And
(58:27):
the swat team was outside the window with their rifles,
so I know they had sarmed at the building. And
no sooner did I say that they came in the office.
They kicked in the door and this came right off
in there, and weeks was there Aguero was there and
they picked me up, handcuffed me. I told Weeks, you're
(58:53):
making a mistake. I kept saying that you're making a mistake.
He didn't respond to that at all. Leo is brought
before a Massachusetts judge who tells him he can fight
extradition to Florida if he wants, but Leo waves that right.
He says he'll go willingly and gets in a car
(59:16):
with the prosecutor, John Aguero. I told Aguero were driving
to Logan Airport in Massachusetts. He asked me, how do
you like the car? We're going to Red Cadillac and
he said, how do you like the car? I said,
and I like it? It's nice. I'm gonna make you
drive me back in it. You're driving me to Massachusetts
(59:40):
in a red Cadillac. Leo was escorted onto the plane
for the flight back to Florida by Detective Weeks and
John Aguero. Leo is just twenty two years old, and
tonight he's going to be sleeping in the Polk County jail.
I remember asking we because he sat by me on
(01:00:02):
the plane and I asked him to not stop looking,
to continue looking, and he said, why would I do that,
and I said, because I'm not guilty of killing Michelle.
And he said, well, if I believe that, you wouldn't
be here. That's when Leo turns to the other man
(01:00:26):
sitting by him, Prosecutor John Aguero. Leo catches a glimpse
of something shiny on Aguero's tie. It's a tie clasp
with some kind of design. Leo leans in to get
a closer look. It's old, sparky Florida's electric chair. Bone
(01:00:52):
Valley is a production of Lava for Good Podcast in
association with Signal Company Number One. Our executive users are
Jason Flam and Kevin Wurdis. Karak Kornhaber is our senior producer.
Brit Spangler is our sound designer. Roxandra Guidi is our editor.
Fact checking by Maximo Anderson. Our producer and researcher is
(01:01:16):
Kelsey Decker. Our theme song, The One Who's Holding the Stars,
is performed by Leebob and the Truth. It was written
by Leo Schofield and Kevin Herrick in Florida's Hardy Correctional Institution.
Bone Valley is written and produced by me Gilbert King.
You can follow the show on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.
(01:01:37):
At Lava for Good. To see photos and documents from
our investigation and exclusive behind the scenes content, visit Lava
Forgod dot com, slash Bone Valley
Host
Gilbert King
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang
Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com