October 5, 2022 • 62 mins
Chapter 4 of 9
Gilbert and Kelsey analyze the State’s case against Leo Schofield and locate a juror who admits she didn’t believe that Leo was guilty. As the years pass, Leo’s appellate attempts fail, and he falls in love with social worker Crissie Carter who works in the prison. Crissie begins investigating Leo’s case on her own, and recruits a friend in law enforcement to run unidentified fingerprints from Michelle’s Mazda. There’s a match, but the fingerprints do not belong to Leo Schofield.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:11):
Hearns, go next door. Yeah, that's the right place. It's
a private road. Keep out. Kelsey and I are in
a rural area on the outskirts of Lakeland, Florida, looking
for a woman named pam Reynolds. Here I get the
(00:36):
ledger delivered back here. All we have is her address
from nineteen eighty nine, when she was the youngest juror
on the Leo Scopfield trial. I'm not going to open
any gates, though, whoa you know? With hearing your dogs there,
let's give it a try. I'm not hearing anything, okay.
(01:11):
Is this a kind of situation where we want to
leave a note or oh hello? Yeah? Oh hi, um sir.
My name is Gilbert King, and I'm a writer and
I'm I'm looking to see a Pamela Reynolds. Does she
live in this neighborhood? Or who are you now? My
name is Gilbert King, and I'm a writer and I'm
(01:31):
researching a case from the nineteen eighties and there's a
woman named Pamela Reynolds who was who served on a trial.
And I don't know where she lives, but we've we've
tracked it down to back here. But we couldn't figure
out where she might be here. Oh, she's not here. Um,
she was involved in a very big trial back in
nineteen eighty nine. She was, Yeah, she sat on a jury.
(01:53):
She was on the jury. By the end of Leo's trial,
there were only ten jurors that deliberated and eventually convicted him.
Many of these ten jurors were already retired or nearing
retirement ages during the trial in nineteen eighty nine, so
when we tried to track them down thirty years later,
(02:14):
we weren't surprised to find that many had passed away.
But Pam Reynolds was just twenty two years old when
she was called to serve on Leo's trial. We wanted
to find her to ask her what went on in
that jury room, what made those ten jurors vote to
convict Leo. Yeah. We find out that the man we
(02:39):
are talking to is Pam's dad, Kelsey, and I leave
a card with him, but we don't get a call.
So we go back to Pam's house a few more times.
One time her mom is there and she tells us
Pam had a hard time with the trial, has nightmares
about it. We aren't sure we'll hear from her. But
(03:00):
then one day we get a call and Kelsey goes
to meet pam Okay, testing testing, testing. I just made
it to the Lakeland Square mall here to meet Pamela Reynolds.
She lives one of the jurors that leaves trial, and
(03:21):
I'm really hoping I can you find the quiet space
in the mall? Okay, Hi are you, Pamela? I'm good?
How are you so cute? How young are you? Oh?
Thank you? I'm twenty for you? Really? Yeah, well, you
know you were very young at the trial, oh child? Yeah,
(03:42):
that was the way back when I'm the one that
I didn't believe in the capital punishment part where you know,
you sent him up and let him burn them whatever.
I just didn't believe in that. And if you think
about it, I kind of saved the guy's life. If
he's gonna get all? Is he getting out or what
(04:09):
do you? My man? To my feels sorrows steps arenless
in this vasty I see olation. I reach desperation to
(04:49):
the world. Who's holding the star to the word bone
(05:22):
Valley Chapter four, Dog with a Bone. When Pam is
twenty two, she's by far the youngest juror on the case,
and she takes her role seriously. Back then, I was
more quiet and I took notes. I remember taking notes.
(05:44):
She listened to all of the testimony. She watched John
Aguero's aggressive theatrics, Jack Edmonds folksy style, She heard about
Leo Senior's premonition, Alice Scott's eyewitness testimony, Leo's temper and
volatile relationship with Michelle, And after two weeks of testimony,
this is what she thought of Leo. I don't know.
(06:05):
To me, he just didn't I didn't feel like he
did it or whatever. When Kelsey sent me this interview
to listen to, I was not expecting to hear that
Pam didn't think Leo did it, but she still voted
to convict him. I try to imagine Pam going back
into the jury room after the trial to deliberate on
(06:26):
Leo's case. I can see her sitting at a table
surrounded by people she probably considered to be the adults
in the room. It was scary because I was the
only young one on the jury too. Pam was told
during the juror questioning process that a guilty verdict must
be unanimous. She knew that even her single vote to
(06:48):
a quit Leo would have been enough to deadlock the
jury and trigger a mistrial. When the jury was deliberating,
Pam went along with the majority to convict Leo. Then
since to Judge Davis read their verdict in court, and
she watches Leo tell the jury that they've made a
big mistake, that he's an innocent man. Pam and the
(07:09):
other jurors go back to deliberate again, this time to
recommend either life in prison for Leo Schofield or the
death penalty. When forced to consider voting to put Leo
to death, Pam finds herself outnumbered again, but this time
she can't bring herself to go along with the majority.
I remember one part where they wanted to send him
(07:33):
up to be, you know, on that electric here, but
I didn't want it to so they changed that for
me because of me. I thought that was interesting. All
that was needed to sentence a defendant to death in
Florida at the time was a simple majority of jurors
voting in favor. This is different from a conviction, which
(07:55):
requires a unanimous vote. But instead of going along with
the jardi, Pam speaks her mind and says she doesn't
believe Leo should be executed. She thinks the other jurors
felt a little sorry for her, or maybe they admire
this twenty two year old for sticking to her beliefs.
For whatever reason, Pam says, they switched their votes, but
(08:18):
they changed it for me so that way, you know,
it wouldn't bother me. I guess maybe I thought it
was nice all those jurors that did that. Instead of
voting to send Leo to the electric chair, they vote
for life in prison. Pam maybe the single most important
reason why Leo didn't die in the electric chair. I
just hope he gets out if he's you know, I mean,
(08:42):
if for sure, if he's not guilty, I mean they
need to get him out there. I mean thirty years
that's awful for a guy. Shoot. Hi, I'm Jason Flom,
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(09:03):
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(09:51):
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(10:14):
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(11:00):
on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hitting Record,
Testing Testing. All right, ready, Okay, I'm ready. After Kelsey
(11:20):
and I read through Leo's transcript, we still don't have
a clear picture of the stage theory. There seem to
be so many gaps in their timeline from the night
Michelle disappeared, So let's break it down. We'll start with
the times both the state and the defense agree on.
At ninety five PM, Leo's at Buddy Anderson's house when
he gets the call from Michelle. She says she's clocked
(11:43):
off work and is about to drive over in the
Mazda and pick him up. Leo tells her to meet
him at Vince Rayner's house should take her about fifteen
minutes to get there from Sparky's gas station where she's
calling from, But about three hours later, Michelle still hasn't
shown up Vinces, so Leo calls the Sheriff's department. The
(12:04):
call went through at twelve forty three am. It's recorded
and documented, and Leo can be heard talking with Vince
while he's on hold for chucking Fish's in jails and
not they're got chance coming back to the chefs upon
file missing Twisting. Assistant State Attorney John Aguero uses this
twelve forty three am call to establish Leo's state of
(12:25):
mind that night. He suggests that you can hear the
anger in Leo's voice that Leo was so furious at
his wife he'd end up stabbing her twenty six times
within the hour. Listen closely. I doubt very they should
be just fucking arm from when she is, God help
her to. I can't afford a fucking worry about this
(12:45):
kind of most shit, you know. That's why it's a
little problem. Fucking tut me out. I don't know why,
but they just think I hate their failing fucking hate it.
She was on her way here an. I've listened to
this call so many times, and I've tried to hear
(13:08):
it the way Aguero wanted the jury to hear it.
But Leo's furious, but I just can't. To me, he
just founds scared or worried. After this call to the
Sheriff's office, Aguero says that Leo leaves Vince's house and
then somehow someway, he locates Michelle and the Mazda. Aguero
(13:30):
doesn't offer any theory about how we're where this reunion
between Leo and Michelle occurred because he has no witnesses.
But according to Aguero's timeline, this reunion had to have
happened between about one am and one thirty because at
around one thirty am, Leo's neighbor, Alice Scott, enters the picture.
(13:50):
Since Alice is the only witness who claims to have
seen anything related to the murder itself, Aguero's case hinges
on her testimony of where and when Michelle was killed.
So sometime around one thirty am, Alice Scott is supposedly
sitting at her bathroom window when she sees Leo and
Michelle drive up in the Orange Mazda and walk inside
(14:12):
their trailer. Alice Scott's statements are not consistent. Her story
about what she saw that night changes each time she
tells it, but in the version she gives a trial,
she says, when Leo and Michelle get home, they start fighting,
and this apparently goes on for about twenty minutes, then
all goes quiet. Alice says she sees Leo walk out
(14:36):
of the trailer, get in the Mazda, and drive off.
She says he's gone for another twenty minutes. After he returns,
Alice says Leo spent five or ten minutes in the
trailer before bringing out the heavy object. He puts the
heavy object, what's assumed to be Michelle's body, in the
back of the Mazda and drives off. It's around two
(14:59):
twenty am when Alice says she sees Leo carrying the
object out, but two twenty is another important time. That's
when David Salm, Michelle's dad, told police that Leo showed
up at his house, woke him up, and told him
his daughter was missing. So the times don't line up.
The statements of Alice Scott and David Psalm put Leo
(15:21):
in two places at once. At two twenty am, and
then Leo's mom testifies she had driven Leo to David's house.
So Aguero basically says that Leo gets in touch with
his parents and they immediately agree to become accessories to
a murder, and then right away they come up with
this master plan. They're going to get rid of Michelle's
(15:45):
body and craft a false alibi so to recap. According
to Aguero, Leo and Michelle start fighting at one thirty
and it goes on for about twenty minutes. He says,
Leo kills his wife in a fit of raid and
drives away to call his parents for help. Then Leo
goes back to the trailer, puts the body in the Mazda,
(16:07):
and drives off. He meets up with his parents, switches vehicles,
and shows up at Michelle's dad's house with his mom,
and Aguero said, this all happened within one hour. That
just doesn't make sense to me. Then around three AM,
Leo and his mom drive up to two patrol cars
(16:28):
parked at a gas station on Cumbey Road. Both Leo
and the state agree on this. It's documented in the
police reports, but according to Aguero, they're not actually outlooking
for Michelle. He says the Schofields are just driving around
in the middle of the night to fake an alibi.
When Leo and his mom saw the police officers, Aguero
(16:51):
says they were really on their way to meet up
with Leo Senior at the Canal to help get rid
of Michelle's body. Aguero brings the Lafoons to the stand
to support this version of events. Remember Randy and Mary
Laffoon are the couple that lived down the street from
Leo and Michelle. At first, they say they didn't see
or hear anything on the night Michelle was murdered. But
(17:14):
then fifteen months later, Aguero talks to them at the
suggestion of Alice Scott, and suddenly they say they remember
seeing the Mazda or Leo Senior's pickup truck near where
Michelle's body was found. How is it that, fifteen months
after the murder, they now remember all these details that
they didn't remember until Aguero spoke to them. The Lafoons
(17:40):
also changed their story depending on who they're talking to,
and they can't remember specific details or dates. And then
there's the issue of the crime scene or the supposed
crime scene. Leo and Michelle's trailer, the place where Leo
supposedly stabbed Michelle twenty six times. The medical examiner says
(18:01):
she would have lost five pints of blood. Alice Scott,
Leo's neighbor, says she sees Leo bring a carpet cleaner
inside his trailer the next morning, and she sees him
cleaning the carpet through his open front door. If this
is true, Leo must have done a remarkable job scrubbing
the scene because not a single trace of Michelle's blood
(18:24):
is found in the trailer. No blood on the walls
or ceiling, no blood on the carpet or seeped into
the floorboards. Not one speck of blood was found in
the kitchen or the bathroom either. One of the crime
scene technicians testified that the carpet did not look clean,
and that he found no evidence that it was recently cleaned.
(18:46):
If it had been, there should have been some kind
of detergent on the carpet, but there wasn't. To address this,
Aquero pivots, he suggests that Leo could have steamed all
the blood out of the carpet using water alone. I'm
pretty sure this is impossible. Plus wouldn't there be blood
(19:07):
in the carpet cleaner. The state never mentions any effort
to locate the cleaner and test for blood. And I
find it hard to believe that any crime scene technician
walked into that trailer and concluded that a brutal stabbing
took place there. Nine or ten investigators went in to
search the trailer, but the only thing they took out
(19:28):
was a three by four inch piece of carpet. It
had a small stain on it. They tested it and
said that they couldn't even determine what kind of stain
it was. Could have been blood, or it could have
been vodka or rust. They were in there for four
or five hours and that's all they found. And when
asked why they didn't remove more of the carpeting in
(19:51):
the trailer to see if any blood had soaked into
the padding beneath it, the crime scene technician testified they
didn't do that because it would have ruined the flow.
Think about that. The state claims that Michelle was stabbed
twenty six times in there, they can't find any blood,
and they're worried about damaging the floor in a single
(20:11):
wide trailer. When I look at the reports and the photos.
I'm convinced that detectives and crime scene technicians knew what
their own eyes were telling them. The trailer was not
the crime scene. And then there's the Mazda. It's found
broken down on I four, more than six miles away
(20:33):
from where Michelle's body is discovered. Aguero offers no explanation
for that. Who was driving and where were they going?
Aguero never presents a theory to answer any of those questions.
Maybe he could have crafted a more coherent story if
he wasn't tied to the testimony of Alice Scott, o'guero's
(20:54):
star witness, the neighborhood busybody. And let's be straight, Alice
Scott is not a credible witness. Her story changed multiple
times throughout the investigation and even during the trial. And
I've always wondered about this. If Alice was the type
of neighbor to call the cops on kids riding bikes
(21:15):
on her lawn, why wouldn't she call the police the
night she heard her neighbor screaming bloody murder at two am?
And how is it that none of Leo's other neighbors
reported hearing anything like that when they were questioned by police,
and then Alice's husband, Rickie Scott, would tell a newspaper
reporter twenty years after Michelle's death that even he didn't
(21:38):
believe Alice's story, he says he knew how she twisted
the truth. Ricky said, quote, she took a little something
and exaggerated like she always did. And Alice's sister in law,
Linda Sells, would tell the same reporter that Alice will
say anything to be the center of attention. On top
(21:58):
of that, when Alice herself was confronted by the reporter
on the inconsistencies in her story, like that she couldn't
see what she said she saw from her bathroom window,
she changed her story yet again. Twenty years after Michelle's death,
Alice said that her vantage point from the bathroom window
wasn't good enough, so she'd walked onto her porch to
(22:21):
observe the commotion. This is not what she said at trial.
She also told the reporter quote, if Aguero had done
what he was supposed to and executed Leo Scofield, we
wouldn't have to be dealing with this mess now. For
(22:42):
Prosecutor John Aguero, defending the state's timeline, wasn't going to
be easy, and he knew it, but destroying Leo's alibi
defense by challenging Leo Senior's credibility would be much easier.
Leo's father and the alleged vision from God that led
him to Michelle's body three days after she was killed,
(23:03):
had become the elephant in the courtroom. Aguero argued that
Leo Senior knew exactly where the body was, and since
he couldn't call God as a witness, he just let
Leo Senior's premonition hang in the courthouse, heir for the
jury to ponder. John Aguero was stuck on Leo Senior's premonition.
(23:24):
John was very a very straightforward man. Officer Richard Kachadourian
of the Lakeland Police Department was on duty when Leo
and his father first went down to the station to
report Michelle missing. He also heard firsthand of Leo Senior's
premonition when he called to offer his condolences to the family.
Kachadourian remembers that even after the trial ended, John Aguero
(23:47):
was still focused heavily on Leo Senior. Every time I
went to State Attorney's office, I would meand of the
hall a little bit, and John would be at the
desk of his classes on and I stick my head
in and John, how you do anything new? And we
chit chat for a minute, and he told me said,
mister Scoffield dodged the bullet on this one because he
(24:08):
felt mister Scoffield was involved in this, at least in
the disposal of the body. He told me a number
of times, Richard, when I get the time, I'm going
to go back into an historical case and put him
in jail. The narrative about Leo Senior and his strange
vision rippled through the press and the community. It's often
(24:30):
the first thing people mentioned when we asked them about
the Scofield case. The whole thing has struck me really
about this case was the father. This is Joe Zarbo.
He was working at the Polk County Sheriff's office in
nineteen eighty seven. Obviously he's involved in it. Somehow. Joe
was at the crime scene that day Michelle's body was found.
(24:54):
Not long after Michelle's murder, he left his job as
a deputy and became a private investigator. In nineteen ninety two,
while Leo was trying to get his case looked at again.
Joe's Arbo was brought in to re examine Leo's case,
and one of his first steps was to interview Leo
in prison. I know that one time during the interview,
I believe he was he started to cry a little
(25:16):
bit and he asked me to do you believe me?
And I told him, I said, it doesn't make any
difference whether I believe here. I don't know if he
did it or not. Leo. I can't prove it. I'm
not here trying to get Leo off. I'm just looking
at the whole thing all over again, you know, as
a fresh set of eyes. But Joe's Arbo also couldn't
(25:37):
shake Leo's senior's premonition from what he said, God told
me where she was. I mean, it was just weird.
Especially weird was where he found the body. It was
well off the road a little bit, you know, at
that time. I can remember there was a lot of
heavy brush between the roadway and where she was found.
(25:58):
It's not something that you're to be walking down the
street and look over and see a body laying there. Okay,
have you gone out through the crime scene or where
it was? And these are definitely not the same, but
I mean, yeah, we'd been there if you were to
count those poles off just It was one of the
(26:20):
first places Kelsey and I went to in Lakeland. We
brought along the police reports with all the distances measured out.
It was one of those sweltering afternoons in Polk County
when you get out of the air conditioned car and
you're blasted by the heat and humidity of the Florida summer.
Kelsey and I are walking along State Road thirty three
trying to locate the exact spot where Leo Senior found
(26:42):
Michelle's body. You see any water, Yeah, there it is.
It isn't hard to find, Okay, So that's got to
be That's got to be the body of water. I've
heard it described as a fishing pit, spate mining pit,
whatever it is. That's definitely the water. And it's exactly
(27:05):
one hundred and fifteen feet from State Road thirty three.
So I guess in there is where Michelle's body would
have been found about in nineteen eighty seven. It's the
horrible place to end up. We've talked to a lot
(27:28):
of people about this place and it comes up constantly
in the trial testimony, the prosecutor, John Aguero, goes to
great lengths to paint a picture of how remote the
location is. But if you look at the aerial photos
taken on the day Michelle was found, it's not as
off the beaten path as the state makes it seem.
In the photos you see a long, narrow body of
(27:50):
water that runs parallel to State Road thirty three. It
can't be seen from the road because of the tree
line and the thick palmetto bush is guarding it. But
there's a dirt paths Why does the driveway that cuts
from the road and leads right to the edge of
the canal. The dirt road opens into a clearing behind
the tree line right by the place you pull off.
(28:13):
There's a sign there that says no dumping of rubbish.
You can see it in the photos. I mean they
tied the crime scene tape to that sign. There's garbage everywhere,
empty beer bottles, cigarette butts, old tires, plastic tarps, and
in the photos shown at trial, there are tire tracks
and footprints in the soil right next to Michelle's bloodstains.
(28:37):
When Jack Edmond asked one of the crime scene technicians
why no one bothered to analyze the tire tracks or footprints.
He was told there were just too many. It would
have taken too long. Even Aguero has to pivot in
his closing argument from the description of this place as
remote and hard to find. He admits that, yes, the
location where Michelle's body was found is both a lover's
(29:00):
for teenagers as well as a fishing spot. There's just
multiple stories told about this one little location, and I
think there's some validity on both sides. But it's definitely
like a place that people would go like, people would
go back there and fish there was like, yeah, there
was trash back there. If you believe the defense, it
(29:23):
makes perfect sense that Leo Senior would look there. When Leo,
his dad, and Michelle's friends and family went searching for her,
they were methodical, working backwards from where the Mazda was
found on I four, heading towards Sparky's gas station. They
were all searching in ditches off the side of the road.
It seems like any member of the search party could
(29:45):
have found her, but all that was lost on the jury.
The second Leo Senior told his own story about his
vision from God. I looked into this phenomenon, people saying
that God led them to finding a dead body. It
turns out this kind of thing isn't uncommon. There are
plenty of reports from homicide cases where witnesses claim that
(30:06):
a higher power led them to the discovery of important
evidence or even a body. I think these visions are
similar to the stories you hear from people who just
miss a flight that crashes, killing everyone on board. How
can you not attribute some kind of divine intervention to
such a traumatic event. Still, telling people that God led
(30:27):
him to that spot does sound weird. There's no denying that.
And so the suspicion around Leo's senior's vision or premonition
was its own gift from God to the prosecutor. It
made up the bulk of Aguero's closing argument, and all
the innuendo around Leo's father was a devastating blow to
(30:49):
Leo's case. And there was one other thing Joe's Arbo
was left wondering about. There was something that keeps popping
into my head that Leo's father made a move on Michelle.
Did you ever hear anything like that? No, we didn't,
But there is something disturbing in Leo Senior's past. In
(31:13):
April nineteen eighty seven, a couple months after Michelle was murdered,
Leo Senior was arrested and charged with sexually abusing a
minor in Rhode Island. And this behavior it wasn't a
one time thing. This is a pattern with Leo's father.
He's serving a prison sentence in Idaho for a similar charge.
(31:34):
I think this is one of the reasons Aguero was
so fixated on Leo Senior. John Aguero began his career
prosecuting child abuse cases, and he'd seen a lot of them.
He knew the type. Perhaps, in Aguero's mind, Leo Senior
was such a bad guy, he just had to have
been involved in Michelle's murder too. It even came up
(31:58):
a trial during a bench conference because of Leo Senior's
arrest in nineteen eighty seven. Aguero was aware of the charges,
but he was reminded by the judge that he was
prohibited from bringing it up before the jury. Leo Senior's
history of sexual abuse, while devastating, is not evidence that
he committed murder or helped dispose of the body, and
(32:22):
it certainly is an evidence that Leo had anything to
do with Michelle's death. It's nineteen ninety three. Leo has
(32:49):
now been in prison for four years. He's trying to
make the most of his time there so he gets
his ged and he's thinking about enrolling in paralegal courses
through the University of Florida. He's also started working as
a teaching aid for a life skills class where inmates
learn communication skills, resume writing, and how to balance a checkbook. Really,
(33:11):
Leo is running the class while the teacher supervises. One day,
Leo learns that his supervising teacher has moved on and
the prison is bringing in someone new to run the program.
Leo shows up to work. He has a little office
in the prison and he gets a call from the
guy who runs the education program. He called from the
(33:33):
intercomics in my computer, He says, God, please stop at
my office. He's about to be introduced to the new
life skills teacher. Leo says that most of the teachers
hired by the prison system are retirees, so he was
expecting a seventy five year old lady. When he makes
it to the education program office, the guy who runs
(33:54):
the program points Leo to the new teacher, so the
head of education assigned him to be my aide. This
is Chrissy Carter. She's a social worker and the New
Life Skills teacher. And I saw Chrissie for the first
time and cous she was thirty one years old, and
she was absolutely stunning. She's tall, blond, and she's no
(34:15):
old lady. The next time I saw him actually came
into a class. There was another teacher there giving a test.
Leo was there helping that teacher organize the test. So
he and I sat at the front and started talking,
and I liked him, and we had stuff to talk
about that was interesting, and the two hours just kind
(34:37):
of flew by. He's pretty funny, very sincere. He seemed different,
you know. And one of the things I never do
was ask anybody why they're in or what's going on
with that. But somehow the topic of his case came up.
Leo tells her he's been convicted of killing his wife, Michelle,
but that he's an innocent man. In the chain gang
(35:01):
inmates will play games from girls and they'll say they're
getting out and such and such a time, and then
that time comes up, they're not getting out. They'll make
up some story, and I was not going to do
that with her. I'd already lost my life and wasn't
in a mood for a game, and I was very broken,
and so I just laid it all on the line
for you know, everything that was happening, and I told
(35:22):
her this is the hill that I have to climb.
I was like, Okay, what is this all about. Chrissy
wants to believe him, and she likes him. She watches
him teach the class and they continue to get to
know each other. At the same time, Leo is also
getting ready to go back to court. Those first few
(35:45):
years in prison, he'd had plenty of time to think
about his case and what went wrong. He began spending
time in the prison library learning about possible next steps
in the legal system for someone who claims to be
wrongfully convicted. He started researching the appeals process, and he
came to the realization that his defense attorney, Jack Edmond,
(36:07):
made a number of crucial mistakes at trial. So Leo
starts to write up his own legal brief. It claims
that Jack Edmond had provided ineffective assistance of counsel during
the trial. Basically, he didn't do his job properly, and
as a result, Leo's conviction should be thrown out. The
(36:29):
court grants Leo a hearing to argue his case. He
tells Chrissy and she decides to attend. Leo is given
a court appointed lawyer to help prepare the argument. Together,
they point to twelve mistakes that Jack Edmond made in
Leo's defense. Here are the three most crucial mistakes. First,
(36:55):
Edmond didn't meet with Leo until the night before his
trial began. The witnesses the evidence Leo's timeline, and Leo
didn't learn about the evidence the state had against him
until the trial began. He had no idea what was coming. Second,
Edmund failed to object to the twenty one witnesses the
(37:16):
prosecution called to testify about Leo's character. These witnesses, again
twenty one in total, gave testimony that had nothing to
do with evidence that could prove whether or not Leo
committed the murder. Instead, they testified that Leo was someone
who had a temper. It should never have been allowed
(37:36):
to open the state's case. Courts have decided this kind
of testimony is deeply prejudicial to juries. There is one
exception to this rule, judges may allow testimony of prior
bad acts when they occur between a defendant and the victim.
So testimony about Leo hitting Michelle or dragging her by
the hair that could have been admissible, but the cosecutor
(38:00):
John Aguero, was supposed to file something called a notice
of intent so the judge could review the testimony and
decide whether or not it should be allowed. In Leo's case,
John Aguero never did that. He introduced the testimony anyway,
and Jack Edmond failed to object, And finally Edmond failed
(38:23):
by not calling Michelle's aunt Cathy to the stand. There
were a number of important witnesses Edmund should have called
but didn't, Leo and Michelle's landlord who could have refuted
the carpetcleaner testimony, and hospital and sheriff dispatchers who could
have corroborated Leo's efforts to find his wife. But none
of these witnesses were as important to Leo's case as
(38:46):
Michelle's aunt Cathy. She'd been on the receiving end of
a call Leo made to Michelle's grandmother. This call was
crucial not because of what was said, but because of
when it took place. Too am. That's the time Leo
told Detective Weeks he made the call, and that's the
time Aunt Cathy said she spoke to Leo. Detective Weeks
(39:09):
confirmed this and it's documented in his report. This is
critical because two am is also the time Alice Scott
told police she heard screaming from Leo and Michelle's trailer,
but Leo did not have a telephone in his trailer,
so he couldn't have made the call from there. Leo
claims he was at his parents' house all the way
(39:32):
across town when he made that call. This phone call
could have been a major piece of evidence corroborating Leo's alibi.
All these points against Edmund are presented at the hearing.
Jack Edmund even testifies and he admits that he didn't
understand all the rules of evidence, so he falls on
(39:52):
his sword and admits to the court that he failed
to effectively represent Leo's scofield at trial, but none of
it matters. Leo's motion is denied, and I believe that
I'm convicted because they didn't like who I was. I
don't believe anybody on that jury really believes I'm the murderer.
(40:14):
He didn't show any evidence of that. They believe that
I was such a bad guy, it didn't matter. After
the hearing, Leo is handcuffed and transported back to prison,
and Chrissy approaches Leo's attorney, Bob Doyle. She asked if
she can speak to him privately. So we went to
a little coffee shop, and I was telling him, you know,
(40:37):
here for Leo and interested in his case and looking
at it, and you know, I told him that I was,
you know, I like this guy. Chrissie tells us to
Leo's lawyer, Bob Doyle because she's hoping he'll lead her
in the right direction, even if that means she should
run away from Leo as fast as she can. But instead,
(40:58):
Doyle tells her this, don't believe him, because you want
to look at the case. Chrissy leaves the coffee shop,
goes back to the Polk County Courthouse and walks into
the clerk's office. She asked to see the files on
Leo's case. I just started looking and asking and looking
(41:21):
and asking some more. As Chrissie starts digging and asking questions,
she starts seeing all the discrepancies. She was especially hung
up on the state's timeline. How was it possible for
Leo to be accounted for by friends, family, and deputies
on the night Michelle had gone missing and still slip
away to murder his wife, dispose of the body, and
(41:43):
clean up a crime scene. Well, when you start looking
at the case, you start putting the pieces together. Nothing
is adding up. She reads the trial transcripts, then she
begins digging into the sheriff's reports and the files from
the state attorney's office. Obviously, she asked questions about Leo
and Michelle's relationship. So she'd visit the prison to ask
(42:05):
Leo about the case and about Michelle. No question was
off limits, nothing was too difficult for him to share. Well,
it might have been difficult, but he was willing. After
talking to Leo, she'd go back to the clerk's office
to do more research. Then back she'd go to run
more questions by Leo, and his answer would always confirm
(42:29):
that that was impossible for those things to have happened,
or clarify that maybe I didn't understand right. She kept
doing this for months, going back and forth between the
court files and visiting Leo at the prison. After a while,
Chrissy became certain that Leo couldn't have done this, but
not only that, she realizes she's developing feelings for Leo.
(42:51):
We got along really well, you know, it seemed like
we were kind of liking each other a little bit.
But he's in prison, you know, so the relationship hip,
the dating thing was like a little awkward in addition
to the obvious, you know, physical restrictions and living your
life in a fishbowl. Every kiss, every hug, everything we say,
(43:13):
everything has been under someone's watch. There's no hiding when
you're in a relationship with someone in prison. We decided
about four years into the relationship that we were gonna
do this forever, prison or no prison. We were doing it.
So we had to do an application to get married
(43:33):
in prison. I had to write a letter about why
I wanted to marry him, you know, dear sir, I
want to marry him because I love him, you know, sincerely.
So we picked a date and my friend and I
went shopping and I picked out a dress and went
to the prison chaplain and walked in my dress that
(43:55):
we'd picked out, and we got married. So there you go. Obviously,
Chrissy did not choose a simple life. She's struggling to
explain this choice. But at the same time, she didn't
(44:17):
want to hide who she was, and so she called
her friends to tell them about this man that she
had married. One of them was her work friend, Cinda Williams. Actually,
I had on all of the crime skinst children cases
that came to our Sheriff's office, and that's how I
met Chrissy. Sinda was an investigator in Hendry County when
(44:39):
she first met Chrissie. Chrissy was the social worker Sinda
worked with on child abuse cases. Then their career path diverged.
Sinda went to work for the State Attorney's office in
Palm Beach County, almost two hours east of Hendry, but
they kept in touch and then one day Sinda gets
this call from Chrissy and she said, listen, I need
(45:03):
to talk to you. And I'm like, sure, what, And
I figured it was about a case and she said, um,
I've met somebody. And I'm like, well, that's great, Chrissy,
who is it? And she goes, well, his name is Leo.
And I said okay, and she said, and he's incarcerated
at the Henry County Correctional Facility and I'm like what.
(45:28):
And then I said, well, why is he you know,
why is he in prison? And she said, well, he's
accused of murdering his wife. And I was like stunned,
and I said, you know, what are you doing? That's
you know, kind of nuts. I said, you know, you
have so much going for you. You're smart, you're you're
(45:48):
you know, going forward in your career. Why would you
do something like that? And she said, well, because I
believe he's innocent. And I thought to myself, a lot
of people say these things all the time him and
so I was just kind of thrown by it. Because
she believed so strongly that he was innocent. I think
that she wanted me, as her friend, to validate that,
(46:13):
but Sinda wasn't going to be able to do that.
I told her, point blank, Chrissy, I cannot help you
with this. It puts me in a terrible position. Remember,
sindas a cop, she has to think about her career.
She can't be helping out a friend whose partner is
in prison. Quite frankly, didn't know what to say, and
there wasn't anything that I could do because Leo had
(46:36):
been he had had a trial, and he had been
convicted and he had been sentenced to prison, and there's
no way that I could have gotten involved in that.
At that point, when she knew I was involved with
someone in prison, she cut ties with me. For her,
that was a big no no. She wanted her reputation
(47:01):
and her experience and to not have any cloud around her,
and she told me at the time that's why she
was doing It was very, very painful. I was worried
about her across the board. Did it see amount of
character for her? Yes, even though I think Chrissie is
(47:24):
very caring and very accepting of things, I kind of
thought that that's that she was being sucked in. That's
how I felt. Sinda tries to keep her distance, but
Chrissie keeps giving her updates on new things she's learning
about Leo's case, and every time I spoke to her,
(47:44):
I always thought she's gonna tell me, Okay, I can't
do this anymore, and you know this is not working out,
and I'm just gonna, you know, forget about it. But
she never did. By this point, Chrissy is completely obsessed
with Leo's case. She does everything she can to investigate
it on her own and then she reads something in
(48:07):
the reports. She sees that there's evidence that can be
analyzed for possible DNA. Trying to get the DNA tested
took three years, hearings and hearings and hearings. I think
three thousand dollars that I had to pay for by myself.
I'm a social worker, you know, my salary was social
(48:28):
work salary. She's finally able to get Michelle's fingernail scrapings tested,
but it's been too long. The samples have degraded, so
they couldn't draw any conclusive information from them. But there
are also hairs that were found at the crime scene.
Maybe one of them belongs to the murderer. She tries
to get those tested too, but the state attorney don Aguero,
(48:52):
when we were in this process, he had the hair destroyed,
so it was in the process. In the process, the
hair of samples that we wanted to tests were destroyed.
This is heartbreaking and infuriating to Chrissy. Why would they
destroy evidence. The state attorney says it's just a routine disposal,
(49:13):
But to Chrissy, it feels like the state is intentionally
putting up roadblocks to stop Leo from getting a new trial.
She doesn't give up. There's one more piece of physical
evidence that she can't stop thinking about. Always always. The
fingerprints was a big question in my mind because there's
(49:37):
fingerprints in the car. Those fingerprints were never identified. Investigators
just knew they didn't belong to anyone whose prints should
have been in the car. They didn't match Leo or Michelle.
The Prince. Also didn't belong to Leo's father. In fact,
no one else's fingerprints were found in the Mazda. Just
(49:59):
this rangers. Whose fingerprints are they? I don't know, nobody, No,
nobody can answer, Well, they have to be somebody's fingerprints.
So is it the tow truck driver or is it
a mechanic or is it a random person? Or It
was always bothered me. Obviously somebody was in the car,
(50:20):
somebody knew something. Who was it? What do they know?
So Chrissy keeps working at it, intent on trying to
figure out this piece of the mystery. At the same time, Cinda,
Chrissy's cop friend's working hard in her new job as
an investigator for the State Attorney's office in Palm Beach County.
(50:41):
Sinda had come from a small sheriff's office in a
rural county to Palm Beach County, which is a larger,
more metropolitan area, and there she meets a young prosecutor.
His name is Scott Cupp. He might recognize that name.
He's now Judge Scott Cupp, who first tipped me to
Leo Schofield's case by handing me a business card. Can
(51:04):
you talk about what Scott was like as a young prosecutor?
What you know, what kind of person he was at
that time in his life. Yeah, let's see, he was aggressive.
I think aggressive is a word that I don't really
see him as that aggressive today, but back then he
was a prosecutor. Yes, he was a prosecutor. And I well,
(51:28):
I can give you an example. I remember the first
time that he came down to my office and they
had these big glass windows that looked out over the courthouse.
And he looked at me and he said, I want
you to look outside. And I didn't know it, you know,
(51:49):
was wrong with him, but I'm like okay. So I
looked outside and he says to me, do you see
any orange groves? And I'm like no, and he's like, well,
do you see any horse and buggies out there? And
I'm like no, and he goes, well, welcome to the
big city. So I'm like thinking to myself, what a
(52:11):
jerk that. Ultimately, you know, I worked with him on many,
many cases and we eventually started seeing each other and
then eventually we married. Not too long after that, Cinda
and Scott Cupp moved back to Hendry County. Sinda takes
a job as captain with the Sheriff's office. Cup takes
(52:34):
off his prosecutor's hat and sets up his defense practice
in the tiny city of LaBelle, Florida. Chrissy is also
still in Hendry County doing social work. One day, she
goes to visit one of her clients who is being
held in the county jail. One day, I was going
into the jail and there was an attorney next to me.
We're both going through the door at the same time.
We have to buzz you in, and when we got
(52:57):
to the desk, we both say we were there for
the same person. So we kind of looked at each
other and he's like, oh, that's my client. He introduced himself,
who was Scott Cupp. We met, you know, seemed to
me bright, pretty intelligent. Had no idea that Chrissy Carter
(53:20):
was Chrissie Schofield at that time. She didn't she didn't
lead with that. Cup was the defense attorney. Chrissy was
the social worker working with the same client. They talk
a bit about their client and then both of them
leave the jail and go home for the day. Apparently
he told his wife that he met the social worker
(53:42):
for the same you know, client, and told her my name,
and she, from what he's told me, cried and he's like,
what what just happened? He said, that's my friend, Chrissie.
So that's how we all reconnected. They become friendly, Chrissy, Cinda,
(54:02):
and Sinda's husband, Scott Cup, And it's not long before
Chrissy starts sharing again about Leo, and that's how Scott
Cupp finds out that Chrissy is married to a man
convicted of murdering his wife. And I just like kind
of threw my hands up and get oh my god.
I had no idea she was a whack job, and
(54:23):
so she was trying to get you involved in this case, right,
which I did several times said no, no, no, no,
no no. I just thought this was the typical guy
getting over on somebody who they met through the prison system,
convincing them for whatever reason, to marry them so they
can tool them, whether it's for money, or maybe get
(54:47):
them some representation to see if they can file something
on some quote unquote technicality. And I want to know
part of that. But Chrissy is relentless. She's begging Cinda
to tell Scott to just look at Leo's trial transcript.
I didn't push it and say, oh, well, she's my friend.
(55:07):
I said, you know, you talk to her, maybe you
can give her some advice and steer her in a
direction that you know she needs to go legally. And then,
and I'm not proud of this, but kind of coldly,
I said, Okay, here's the deal. I'll do it. But
(55:27):
she's going to pay me, and she's my client. I'm
not representing her husband. Okay, I'm not going into the
prison to talk to this guy. I don't know what
the hell's going on, but just to make this go away,
I will review the transcript and I will explain to
her why her quote unquote husband is in prison for murder.
(55:50):
And I thought that would be the end of it.
I just wanted this to stop and just leave me
alone about this, and quite frankly, if said, and I
don't want her coming over here anymore. Okay, So Chrissy
shows up at Scott Cup's office in LaBelle one day
with six binders and two thousand plus pages of trial transcripts.
(56:11):
She leaves them on his desk, and later that afternoon
he stays true to his word and starts reading and
reading into the night. The former prosecutor is transfixed. And
I got to the end of the States case and
(56:34):
closed that binder and just sat there, and I think
I maybe even out out said, holy shit, this guy
didn't do it. He couldn't have done it. All the
overwhelming evidence of Leo's guilt that he expected to find
in the transcript, it just isn't there. And as an
(56:55):
experienced prosecutor, he knows it when he sees it. Cupp
hadn't even read as far as the defense's case, and
it was already obvious to him that Leo Schofield was
wrongly convicted. He finishes the transcript and he's even more
convinced that Leo is an innocent man. And now the
(57:15):
aggressive prosecutor turned defense attorney is invested. He starts poking
around to see if there's any physical evidence recovered from
the original investigation of Michelle's murder. He's not interested in
any of that bad character evidence or premonition stuff. He
wants actual forensic evidence, of course, with DNA evidence destroyed.
(57:38):
He learns what Chrissy has been stuck on for the
past decade. There was a few prints that were found
inside the vehicle that went unidentified at the time. He
doesn't understand why detectives didn't do more with the prince.
Why not expand out? Let's brainstorm, who's got connects to
(57:59):
that area? You know? Who are our guys that we
know could be, as they say on TV, good for this?
Why didn't they do that? Why wasn't that done? Scott
Cupp calls up to Tallahassee to the Florida Department of
Law Enforcement to see if they still have a copy
of the fingerprints on file. They do, and they send
(58:22):
him a copy on an index card. Then Cup has
to decide what to do next. At that point, I
really didn't know. I'd like to ruminate on things and
try to figure out what's the best way to go forward. Well,
he doesn't really get the time to think about it.
Because he gives Chrissy the card, and Chrissy kind of
(58:43):
goes behind Scott's back and meets up with Cinda, who's
now a police captain in Henry County. I remember Chrissy
wanting to talk to me and coming to me and
telling me that she had a fingerprint and that nobody
(59:05):
ran it, and I'm like, please, please, please figure out
a way. Chrissy's pretty tenacious, you know. Chrissy's like a
dog of the bone. She has a cause and she
falls through. So she handed it to me and she goes,
here it is. I kind of laughed at her and
I said, what are you doing with this? And she said,
(59:29):
could you just see if this print comes back to anybody?
And I thought to myself, well, apparently it doesn't, because
nobody's pursued this. I didn't know how she was going
to do it. I was just begging her, on her,
begging her, and she said, I'll look into it. I said, oh, right,
give it to me. I did that probably because at
(59:54):
that point I thought, if Chrissy doesn't leave me alone,
this is gonna finally make her shut up. And so
I took the fingerprint and I handed it to one
of my crime scene detectives, and I said to him,
is there any way that you can find out by
running this through the database if this comes back to anyone?
(01:00:15):
And he said sure, And if you want me to
be perfectly honest, I thought it was going to come
back as nothing. Not that I wanted it to, but
I thought that it would be something that was already
done and this was just another dead end avenue. And
(01:00:36):
again I thought that she was grasping at straws. But
he came back to me three days later and he said,
there's a hit. And I'm like, really, all right, who
does it come back to? And he said, a guy
(01:00:58):
named Jeremy Scott, Jerry Scott. Who the fuck's Jeremy Scott?
Holy shit. Bone Valley is a production of Lava for
(01:01:18):
Good podcast in association with Signal Company Number One. Our
executive producers are Jason Flam and Kevin Wurdis. Karak Kornheber
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 Kelsey Decker. Our theme song,
(01:01:43):
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 Hearty Correctional Institution. Bone Valley is
written and produced by me Gilbert King. You can follow
the show on Instagram, a, Facebook, and Twitter at Lava
for Good. To see photos and documents from our investigation
(01:02:06):
and exclusive behind the scenes content, visit Lava Forgood dot
com slash Bone Valley
Hearns, go next door. Yeah, that's the right place. It's
a private road. Keep out. Kelsey and I are in
a rural area on the outskirts of Lakeland, Florida, looking
for a woman named pam Reynolds. Here I get the
(00:36):
ledger delivered back here. All we have is her address
from nineteen eighty nine, when she was the youngest juror
on the Leo Scopfield trial. I'm not going to open
any gates, though, whoa you know? With hearing your dogs there,
let's give it a try. I'm not hearing anything, okay.
(01:11):
Is this a kind of situation where we want to
leave a note or oh hello? Yeah? Oh hi, um sir.
My name is Gilbert King, and I'm a writer and
I'm I'm looking to see a Pamela Reynolds. Does she
live in this neighborhood? Or who are you now? My
name is Gilbert King, and I'm a writer and I'm
(01:31):
researching a case from the nineteen eighties and there's a
woman named Pamela Reynolds who was who served on a trial.
And I don't know where she lives, but we've we've
tracked it down to back here. But we couldn't figure
out where she might be here. Oh, she's not here. Um,
she was involved in a very big trial back in
nineteen eighty nine. She was, Yeah, she sat on a jury.
(01:53):
She was on the jury. By the end of Leo's trial,
there were only ten jurors that deliberated and eventually convicted him.
Many of these ten jurors were already retired or nearing
retirement ages during the trial in nineteen eighty nine, so
when we tried to track them down thirty years later,
(02:14):
we weren't surprised to find that many had passed away.
But Pam Reynolds was just twenty two years old when
she was called to serve on Leo's trial. We wanted
to find her to ask her what went on in
that jury room, what made those ten jurors vote to
convict Leo. Yeah. We find out that the man we
(02:39):
are talking to is Pam's dad, Kelsey, and I leave
a card with him, but we don't get a call.
So we go back to Pam's house a few more times.
One time her mom is there and she tells us
Pam had a hard time with the trial, has nightmares
about it. We aren't sure we'll hear from her. But
(03:00):
then one day we get a call and Kelsey goes
to meet pam Okay, testing testing, testing. I just made
it to the Lakeland Square mall here to meet Pamela Reynolds.
She lives one of the jurors that leaves trial, and
(03:21):
I'm really hoping I can you find the quiet space
in the mall? Okay, Hi are you, Pamela? I'm good?
How are you so cute? How young are you? Oh?
Thank you? I'm twenty for you? Really? Yeah, well, you
know you were very young at the trial, oh child? Yeah,
(03:42):
that was the way back when I'm the one that
I didn't believe in the capital punishment part where you know,
you sent him up and let him burn them whatever.
I just didn't believe in that. And if you think
about it, I kind of saved the guy's life. If
he's gonna get all? Is he getting out or what
(04:09):
do you? My man? To my feels sorrows steps arenless
in this vasty I see olation. I reach desperation to
(04:49):
the world. Who's holding the star to the word bone
(05:22):
Valley Chapter four, Dog with a Bone. When Pam is
twenty two, she's by far the youngest juror on the case,
and she takes her role seriously. Back then, I was
more quiet and I took notes. I remember taking notes.
(05:44):
She listened to all of the testimony. She watched John
Aguero's aggressive theatrics, Jack Edmonds folksy style, She heard about
Leo Senior's premonition, Alice Scott's eyewitness testimony, Leo's temper and
volatile relationship with Michelle, And after two weeks of testimony,
this is what she thought of Leo. I don't know.
(06:05):
To me, he just didn't I didn't feel like he
did it or whatever. When Kelsey sent me this interview
to listen to, I was not expecting to hear that
Pam didn't think Leo did it, but she still voted
to convict him. I try to imagine Pam going back
into the jury room after the trial to deliberate on
(06:26):
Leo's case. I can see her sitting at a table
surrounded by people she probably considered to be the adults
in the room. It was scary because I was the
only young one on the jury too. Pam was told
during the juror questioning process that a guilty verdict must
be unanimous. She knew that even her single vote to
(06:48):
a quit Leo would have been enough to deadlock the
jury and trigger a mistrial. When the jury was deliberating,
Pam went along with the majority to convict Leo. Then
since to Judge Davis read their verdict in court, and
she watches Leo tell the jury that they've made a
big mistake, that he's an innocent man. Pam and the
(07:09):
other jurors go back to deliberate again, this time to
recommend either life in prison for Leo Schofield or the
death penalty. When forced to consider voting to put Leo
to death, Pam finds herself outnumbered again, but this time
she can't bring herself to go along with the majority.
I remember one part where they wanted to send him
(07:33):
up to be, you know, on that electric here, but
I didn't want it to so they changed that for
me because of me. I thought that was interesting. All
that was needed to sentence a defendant to death in
Florida at the time was a simple majority of jurors
voting in favor. This is different from a conviction, which
(07:55):
requires a unanimous vote. But instead of going along with
the jardi, Pam speaks her mind and says she doesn't
believe Leo should be executed. She thinks the other jurors
felt a little sorry for her, or maybe they admire
this twenty two year old for sticking to her beliefs.
For whatever reason, Pam says, they switched their votes, but
(08:18):
they changed it for me so that way, you know,
it wouldn't bother me. I guess maybe I thought it
was nice all those jurors that did that. Instead of
voting to send Leo to the electric chair, they vote
for life in prison. Pam maybe the single most important
reason why Leo didn't die in the electric chair. I
just hope he gets out if he's you know, I mean,
(08:42):
if for sure, if he's not guilty, I mean they
need to get him out there. I mean thirty years
that's awful for a guy. Shoot. Hi, I'm Jason Flom,
CEO and founder of Lava for Good podcasts, Home to
Bone Valley, Wrongful Conviction, The War on Drugs, and many
(09:03):
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(09:26):
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 biggest problems,
including the failed War on drugs that has criminalized addiction,
fueled over incarceration, and shattered communities. At eleven years old,
(09:51):
Scott Strode drank his first beer. At fifteen, Scott went
to a mental health facility because of suicidal thoughts, where
he tried cocaine. Like many others who experience addiction, Scott
was using drugs and alcohol to numb the pain he
was trying to numb childhood trauma. In his early twenties,
Scott was invited into a boxing gym by a friend.
(10:14):
That's where he discovered the healing power of sport and
community that helped propel him towards sobriety. In two thousand
and six, Scott founded The Phoenix, a free, sober active
community that uses the transformative power of sport to help
people treat and heal from addiction and imagine new possibilities
for their lives through fitness. The program restores compassion to
(10:38):
a system that has long relied on locking people up
to solve the addiction crisis. Scott Strode as one of
many entrepreneurs partnering with Stand Together to drive solutions in education, healthcare, poverty,
and criminal justice. To learn more about addiction and the
War on Drugs, listened to the War on Drugs podcast
(11:00):
on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hitting Record,
Testing Testing. All right, ready, Okay, I'm ready. After Kelsey
(11:20):
and I read through Leo's transcript, we still don't have
a clear picture of the stage theory. There seem to
be so many gaps in their timeline from the night
Michelle disappeared, So let's break it down. We'll start with
the times both the state and the defense agree on.
At ninety five PM, Leo's at Buddy Anderson's house when
he gets the call from Michelle. She says she's clocked
(11:43):
off work and is about to drive over in the
Mazda and pick him up. Leo tells her to meet
him at Vince Rayner's house should take her about fifteen
minutes to get there from Sparky's gas station where she's
calling from, But about three hours later, Michelle still hasn't
shown up Vinces, so Leo calls the Sheriff's department. The
(12:04):
call went through at twelve forty three am. It's recorded
and documented, and Leo can be heard talking with Vince
while he's on hold for chucking Fish's in jails and
not they're got chance coming back to the chefs upon
file missing Twisting. Assistant State Attorney John Aguero uses this
twelve forty three am call to establish Leo's state of
(12:25):
mind that night. He suggests that you can hear the
anger in Leo's voice that Leo was so furious at
his wife he'd end up stabbing her twenty six times
within the hour. Listen closely. I doubt very they should
be just fucking arm from when she is, God help
her to. I can't afford a fucking worry about this
(12:45):
kind of most shit, you know. That's why it's a
little problem. Fucking tut me out. I don't know why,
but they just think I hate their failing fucking hate it.
She was on her way here an. I've listened to
this call so many times, and I've tried to hear
(13:08):
it the way Aguero wanted the jury to hear it.
But Leo's furious, but I just can't. To me, he
just founds scared or worried. After this call to the
Sheriff's office, Aguero says that Leo leaves Vince's house and
then somehow someway, he locates Michelle and the Mazda. Aguero
(13:30):
doesn't offer any theory about how we're where this reunion
between Leo and Michelle occurred because he has no witnesses.
But according to Aguero's timeline, this reunion had to have
happened between about one am and one thirty because at
around one thirty am, Leo's neighbor, Alice Scott, enters the picture.
(13:50):
Since Alice is the only witness who claims to have
seen anything related to the murder itself, Aguero's case hinges
on her testimony of where and when Michelle was killed.
So sometime around one thirty am, Alice Scott is supposedly
sitting at her bathroom window when she sees Leo and
Michelle drive up in the Orange Mazda and walk inside
(14:12):
their trailer. Alice Scott's statements are not consistent. Her story
about what she saw that night changes each time she
tells it, but in the version she gives a trial,
she says, when Leo and Michelle get home, they start fighting,
and this apparently goes on for about twenty minutes, then
all goes quiet. Alice says she sees Leo walk out
(14:36):
of the trailer, get in the Mazda, and drive off.
She says he's gone for another twenty minutes. After he returns,
Alice says Leo spent five or ten minutes in the
trailer before bringing out the heavy object. He puts the
heavy object, what's assumed to be Michelle's body, in the
back of the Mazda and drives off. It's around two
(14:59):
twenty am when Alice says she sees Leo carrying the
object out, but two twenty is another important time. That's
when David Salm, Michelle's dad, told police that Leo showed
up at his house, woke him up, and told him
his daughter was missing. So the times don't line up.
The statements of Alice Scott and David Psalm put Leo
(15:21):
in two places at once. At two twenty am, and
then Leo's mom testifies she had driven Leo to David's house.
So Aguero basically says that Leo gets in touch with
his parents and they immediately agree to become accessories to
a murder, and then right away they come up with
this master plan. They're going to get rid of Michelle's
(15:45):
body and craft a false alibi so to recap. According
to Aguero, Leo and Michelle start fighting at one thirty
and it goes on for about twenty minutes. He says,
Leo kills his wife in a fit of raid and
drives away to call his parents for help. Then Leo
goes back to the trailer, puts the body in the Mazda,
(16:07):
and drives off. He meets up with his parents, switches vehicles,
and shows up at Michelle's dad's house with his mom,
and Aguero said, this all happened within one hour. That
just doesn't make sense to me. Then around three AM,
Leo and his mom drive up to two patrol cars
(16:28):
parked at a gas station on Cumbey Road. Both Leo
and the state agree on this. It's documented in the
police reports, but according to Aguero, they're not actually outlooking
for Michelle. He says the Schofields are just driving around
in the middle of the night to fake an alibi.
When Leo and his mom saw the police officers, Aguero
(16:51):
says they were really on their way to meet up
with Leo Senior at the Canal to help get rid
of Michelle's body. Aguero brings the Lafoons to the stand
to support this version of events. Remember Randy and Mary
Laffoon are the couple that lived down the street from
Leo and Michelle. At first, they say they didn't see
or hear anything on the night Michelle was murdered. But
(17:14):
then fifteen months later, Aguero talks to them at the
suggestion of Alice Scott, and suddenly they say they remember
seeing the Mazda or Leo Senior's pickup truck near where
Michelle's body was found. How is it that, fifteen months
after the murder, they now remember all these details that
they didn't remember until Aguero spoke to them. The Lafoons
(17:40):
also changed their story depending on who they're talking to,
and they can't remember specific details or dates. And then
there's the issue of the crime scene or the supposed
crime scene. Leo and Michelle's trailer, the place where Leo
supposedly stabbed Michelle twenty six times. The medical examiner says
(18:01):
she would have lost five pints of blood. Alice Scott,
Leo's neighbor, says she sees Leo bring a carpet cleaner
inside his trailer the next morning, and she sees him
cleaning the carpet through his open front door. If this
is true, Leo must have done a remarkable job scrubbing
the scene because not a single trace of Michelle's blood
(18:24):
is found in the trailer. No blood on the walls
or ceiling, no blood on the carpet or seeped into
the floorboards. Not one speck of blood was found in
the kitchen or the bathroom either. One of the crime
scene technicians testified that the carpet did not look clean,
and that he found no evidence that it was recently cleaned.
(18:46):
If it had been, there should have been some kind
of detergent on the carpet, but there wasn't. To address this,
Aquero pivots, he suggests that Leo could have steamed all
the blood out of the carpet using water alone. I'm
pretty sure this is impossible. Plus wouldn't there be blood
(19:07):
in the carpet cleaner. The state never mentions any effort
to locate the cleaner and test for blood. And I
find it hard to believe that any crime scene technician
walked into that trailer and concluded that a brutal stabbing
took place there. Nine or ten investigators went in to
search the trailer, but the only thing they took out
(19:28):
was a three by four inch piece of carpet. It
had a small stain on it. They tested it and
said that they couldn't even determine what kind of stain
it was. Could have been blood, or it could have
been vodka or rust. They were in there for four
or five hours and that's all they found. And when
asked why they didn't remove more of the carpeting in
(19:51):
the trailer to see if any blood had soaked into
the padding beneath it, the crime scene technician testified they
didn't do that because it would have ruined the flow.
Think about that. The state claims that Michelle was stabbed
twenty six times in there, they can't find any blood,
and they're worried about damaging the floor in a single
(20:11):
wide trailer. When I look at the reports and the photos.
I'm convinced that detectives and crime scene technicians knew what
their own eyes were telling them. The trailer was not
the crime scene. And then there's the Mazda. It's found
broken down on I four, more than six miles away
(20:33):
from where Michelle's body is discovered. Aguero offers no explanation
for that. Who was driving and where were they going?
Aguero never presents a theory to answer any of those questions.
Maybe he could have crafted a more coherent story if
he wasn't tied to the testimony of Alice Scott, o'guero's
(20:54):
star witness, the neighborhood busybody. And let's be straight, Alice
Scott is not a credible witness. Her story changed multiple
times throughout the investigation and even during the trial. And
I've always wondered about this. If Alice was the type
of neighbor to call the cops on kids riding bikes
(21:15):
on her lawn, why wouldn't she call the police the
night she heard her neighbor screaming bloody murder at two am?
And how is it that none of Leo's other neighbors
reported hearing anything like that when they were questioned by police,
and then Alice's husband, Rickie Scott, would tell a newspaper
reporter twenty years after Michelle's death that even he didn't
(21:38):
believe Alice's story, he says he knew how she twisted
the truth. Ricky said, quote, she took a little something
and exaggerated like she always did. And Alice's sister in law,
Linda Sells, would tell the same reporter that Alice will
say anything to be the center of attention. On top
(21:58):
of that, when Alice herself was confronted by the reporter
on the inconsistencies in her story, like that she couldn't
see what she said she saw from her bathroom window,
she changed her story yet again. Twenty years after Michelle's death,
Alice said that her vantage point from the bathroom window
wasn't good enough, so she'd walked onto her porch to
(22:21):
observe the commotion. This is not what she said at trial.
She also told the reporter quote, if Aguero had done
what he was supposed to and executed Leo Scofield, we
wouldn't have to be dealing with this mess now. For
(22:42):
Prosecutor John Aguero, defending the state's timeline, wasn't going to
be easy, and he knew it, but destroying Leo's alibi
defense by challenging Leo Senior's credibility would be much easier.
Leo's father and the alleged vision from God that led
him to Michelle's body three days after she was killed,
(23:03):
had become the elephant in the courtroom. Aguero argued that
Leo Senior knew exactly where the body was, and since
he couldn't call God as a witness, he just let
Leo Senior's premonition hang in the courthouse, heir for the
jury to ponder. John Aguero was stuck on Leo Senior's premonition.
(23:24):
John was very a very straightforward man. Officer Richard Kachadourian
of the Lakeland Police Department was on duty when Leo
and his father first went down to the station to
report Michelle missing. He also heard firsthand of Leo Senior's
premonition when he called to offer his condolences to the family.
Kachadourian remembers that even after the trial ended, John Aguero
(23:47):
was still focused heavily on Leo Senior. Every time I
went to State Attorney's office, I would meand of the
hall a little bit, and John would be at the
desk of his classes on and I stick my head
in and John, how you do anything new? And we
chit chat for a minute, and he told me said,
mister Scoffield dodged the bullet on this one because he
(24:08):
felt mister Scoffield was involved in this, at least in
the disposal of the body. He told me a number
of times, Richard, when I get the time, I'm going
to go back into an historical case and put him
in jail. The narrative about Leo Senior and his strange
vision rippled through the press and the community. It's often
(24:30):
the first thing people mentioned when we asked them about
the Scofield case. The whole thing has struck me really
about this case was the father. This is Joe Zarbo.
He was working at the Polk County Sheriff's office in
nineteen eighty seven. Obviously he's involved in it. Somehow. Joe
was at the crime scene that day Michelle's body was found.
(24:54):
Not long after Michelle's murder, he left his job as
a deputy and became a private investigator. In nineteen ninety two,
while Leo was trying to get his case looked at again.
Joe's Arbo was brought in to re examine Leo's case,
and one of his first steps was to interview Leo
in prison. I know that one time during the interview,
I believe he was he started to cry a little
(25:16):
bit and he asked me to do you believe me?
And I told him, I said, it doesn't make any
difference whether I believe here. I don't know if he
did it or not. Leo. I can't prove it. I'm
not here trying to get Leo off. I'm just looking
at the whole thing all over again, you know, as
a fresh set of eyes. But Joe's Arbo also couldn't
(25:37):
shake Leo's senior's premonition from what he said, God told
me where she was. I mean, it was just weird.
Especially weird was where he found the body. It was
well off the road a little bit, you know, at
that time. I can remember there was a lot of
heavy brush between the roadway and where she was found.
(25:58):
It's not something that you're to be walking down the
street and look over and see a body laying there. Okay,
have you gone out through the crime scene or where
it was? And these are definitely not the same, but
I mean, yeah, we'd been there if you were to
count those poles off just It was one of the
(26:20):
first places Kelsey and I went to in Lakeland. We
brought along the police reports with all the distances measured out.
It was one of those sweltering afternoons in Polk County
when you get out of the air conditioned car and
you're blasted by the heat and humidity of the Florida summer.
Kelsey and I are walking along State Road thirty three
trying to locate the exact spot where Leo Senior found
(26:42):
Michelle's body. You see any water, Yeah, there it is.
It isn't hard to find, Okay, So that's got to
be That's got to be the body of water. I've
heard it described as a fishing pit, spate mining pit,
whatever it is. That's definitely the water. And it's exactly
(27:05):
one hundred and fifteen feet from State Road thirty three.
So I guess in there is where Michelle's body would
have been found about in nineteen eighty seven. It's the
horrible place to end up. We've talked to a lot
(27:28):
of people about this place and it comes up constantly
in the trial testimony, the prosecutor, John Aguero, goes to
great lengths to paint a picture of how remote the
location is. But if you look at the aerial photos
taken on the day Michelle was found, it's not as
off the beaten path as the state makes it seem.
In the photos you see a long, narrow body of
(27:50):
water that runs parallel to State Road thirty three. It
can't be seen from the road because of the tree
line and the thick palmetto bush is guarding it. But
there's a dirt paths Why does the driveway that cuts
from the road and leads right to the edge of
the canal. The dirt road opens into a clearing behind
the tree line right by the place you pull off.
(28:13):
There's a sign there that says no dumping of rubbish.
You can see it in the photos. I mean they
tied the crime scene tape to that sign. There's garbage everywhere,
empty beer bottles, cigarette butts, old tires, plastic tarps, and
in the photos shown at trial, there are tire tracks
and footprints in the soil right next to Michelle's bloodstains.
(28:37):
When Jack Edmond asked one of the crime scene technicians
why no one bothered to analyze the tire tracks or footprints.
He was told there were just too many. It would
have taken too long. Even Aguero has to pivot in
his closing argument from the description of this place as
remote and hard to find. He admits that, yes, the
location where Michelle's body was found is both a lover's
(29:00):
for teenagers as well as a fishing spot. There's just
multiple stories told about this one little location, and I
think there's some validity on both sides. But it's definitely
like a place that people would go like, people would
go back there and fish there was like, yeah, there
was trash back there. If you believe the defense, it
(29:23):
makes perfect sense that Leo Senior would look there. When Leo,
his dad, and Michelle's friends and family went searching for her,
they were methodical, working backwards from where the Mazda was
found on I four, heading towards Sparky's gas station. They
were all searching in ditches off the side of the road.
It seems like any member of the search party could
(29:45):
have found her, but all that was lost on the jury.
The second Leo Senior told his own story about his
vision from God. I looked into this phenomenon, people saying
that God led them to finding a dead body. It
turns out this kind of thing isn't uncommon. There are
plenty of reports from homicide cases where witnesses claim that
(30:06):
a higher power led them to the discovery of important
evidence or even a body. I think these visions are
similar to the stories you hear from people who just
miss a flight that crashes, killing everyone on board. How
can you not attribute some kind of divine intervention to
such a traumatic event. Still, telling people that God led
(30:27):
him to that spot does sound weird. There's no denying that.
And so the suspicion around Leo's senior's vision or premonition
was its own gift from God to the prosecutor. It
made up the bulk of Aguero's closing argument, and all
the innuendo around Leo's father was a devastating blow to
(30:49):
Leo's case. And there was one other thing Joe's Arbo
was left wondering about. There was something that keeps popping
into my head that Leo's father made a move on Michelle.
Did you ever hear anything like that? No, we didn't,
But there is something disturbing in Leo Senior's past. In
(31:13):
April nineteen eighty seven, a couple months after Michelle was murdered,
Leo Senior was arrested and charged with sexually abusing a
minor in Rhode Island. And this behavior it wasn't a
one time thing. This is a pattern with Leo's father.
He's serving a prison sentence in Idaho for a similar charge.
(31:34):
I think this is one of the reasons Aguero was
so fixated on Leo Senior. John Aguero began his career
prosecuting child abuse cases, and he'd seen a lot of them.
He knew the type. Perhaps, in Aguero's mind, Leo Senior
was such a bad guy, he just had to have
been involved in Michelle's murder too. It even came up
(31:58):
a trial during a bench conference because of Leo Senior's
arrest in nineteen eighty seven. Aguero was aware of the charges,
but he was reminded by the judge that he was
prohibited from bringing it up before the jury. Leo Senior's
history of sexual abuse, while devastating, is not evidence that
he committed murder or helped dispose of the body, and
(32:22):
it certainly is an evidence that Leo had anything to
do with Michelle's death. It's nineteen ninety three. Leo has
(32:49):
now been in prison for four years. He's trying to
make the most of his time there so he gets
his ged and he's thinking about enrolling in paralegal courses
through the University of Florida. He's also started working as
a teaching aid for a life skills class where inmates
learn communication skills, resume writing, and how to balance a checkbook. Really,
(33:11):
Leo is running the class while the teacher supervises. One day,
Leo learns that his supervising teacher has moved on and
the prison is bringing in someone new to run the program.
Leo shows up to work. He has a little office
in the prison and he gets a call from the
guy who runs the education program. He called from the
(33:33):
intercomics in my computer, He says, God, please stop at
my office. He's about to be introduced to the new
life skills teacher. Leo says that most of the teachers
hired by the prison system are retirees, so he was
expecting a seventy five year old lady. When he makes
it to the education program office, the guy who runs
(33:54):
the program points Leo to the new teacher, so the
head of education assigned him to be my aide. This
is Chrissy Carter. She's a social worker and the New
Life Skills teacher. And I saw Chrissie for the first
time and cous she was thirty one years old, and
she was absolutely stunning. She's tall, blond, and she's no
(34:15):
old lady. The next time I saw him actually came
into a class. There was another teacher there giving a test.
Leo was there helping that teacher organize the test. So
he and I sat at the front and started talking,
and I liked him, and we had stuff to talk
about that was interesting, and the two hours just kind
(34:37):
of flew by. He's pretty funny, very sincere. He seemed different,
you know. And one of the things I never do
was ask anybody why they're in or what's going on
with that. But somehow the topic of his case came up.
Leo tells her he's been convicted of killing his wife, Michelle,
but that he's an innocent man. In the chain gang
(35:01):
inmates will play games from girls and they'll say they're
getting out and such and such a time, and then
that time comes up, they're not getting out. They'll make
up some story, and I was not going to do
that with her. I'd already lost my life and wasn't
in a mood for a game, and I was very broken,
and so I just laid it all on the line
for you know, everything that was happening, and I told
(35:22):
her this is the hill that I have to climb.
I was like, Okay, what is this all about. Chrissy
wants to believe him, and she likes him. She watches
him teach the class and they continue to get to
know each other. At the same time, Leo is also
getting ready to go back to court. Those first few
(35:45):
years in prison, he'd had plenty of time to think
about his case and what went wrong. He began spending
time in the prison library learning about possible next steps
in the legal system for someone who claims to be
wrongfully convicted. He started researching the appeals process, and he
came to the realization that his defense attorney, Jack Edmond,
(36:07):
made a number of crucial mistakes at trial. So Leo
starts to write up his own legal brief. It claims
that Jack Edmond had provided ineffective assistance of counsel during
the trial. Basically, he didn't do his job properly, and
as a result, Leo's conviction should be thrown out. The
(36:29):
court grants Leo a hearing to argue his case. He
tells Chrissy and she decides to attend. Leo is given
a court appointed lawyer to help prepare the argument. Together,
they point to twelve mistakes that Jack Edmond made in
Leo's defense. Here are the three most crucial mistakes. First,
(36:55):
Edmond didn't meet with Leo until the night before his
trial began. The witnesses the evidence Leo's timeline, and Leo
didn't learn about the evidence the state had against him
until the trial began. He had no idea what was coming. Second,
Edmund failed to object to the twenty one witnesses the
(37:16):
prosecution called to testify about Leo's character. These witnesses, again
twenty one in total, gave testimony that had nothing to
do with evidence that could prove whether or not Leo
committed the murder. Instead, they testified that Leo was someone
who had a temper. It should never have been allowed
(37:36):
to open the state's case. Courts have decided this kind
of testimony is deeply prejudicial to juries. There is one
exception to this rule, judges may allow testimony of prior
bad acts when they occur between a defendant and the victim.
So testimony about Leo hitting Michelle or dragging her by
the hair that could have been admissible, but the cosecutor
(38:00):
John Aguero, was supposed to file something called a notice
of intent so the judge could review the testimony and
decide whether or not it should be allowed. In Leo's case,
John Aguero never did that. He introduced the testimony anyway,
and Jack Edmond failed to object, And finally Edmond failed
(38:23):
by not calling Michelle's aunt Cathy to the stand. There
were a number of important witnesses Edmund should have called
but didn't, Leo and Michelle's landlord who could have refuted
the carpetcleaner testimony, and hospital and sheriff dispatchers who could
have corroborated Leo's efforts to find his wife. But none
of these witnesses were as important to Leo's case as
(38:46):
Michelle's aunt Cathy. She'd been on the receiving end of
a call Leo made to Michelle's grandmother. This call was
crucial not because of what was said, but because of
when it took place. Too am. That's the time Leo
told Detective Weeks he made the call, and that's the
time Aunt Cathy said she spoke to Leo. Detective Weeks
(39:09):
confirmed this and it's documented in his report. This is
critical because two am is also the time Alice Scott
told police she heard screaming from Leo and Michelle's trailer,
but Leo did not have a telephone in his trailer,
so he couldn't have made the call from there. Leo
claims he was at his parents' house all the way
(39:32):
across town when he made that call. This phone call
could have been a major piece of evidence corroborating Leo's alibi.
All these points against Edmund are presented at the hearing.
Jack Edmund even testifies and he admits that he didn't
understand all the rules of evidence, so he falls on
(39:52):
his sword and admits to the court that he failed
to effectively represent Leo's scofield at trial, but none of
it matters. Leo's motion is denied, and I believe that
I'm convicted because they didn't like who I was. I
don't believe anybody on that jury really believes I'm the murderer.
(40:14):
He didn't show any evidence of that. They believe that
I was such a bad guy, it didn't matter. After
the hearing, Leo is handcuffed and transported back to prison,
and Chrissy approaches Leo's attorney, Bob Doyle. She asked if
she can speak to him privately. So we went to
a little coffee shop, and I was telling him, you know,
(40:37):
here for Leo and interested in his case and looking
at it, and you know, I told him that I was,
you know, I like this guy. Chrissie tells us to
Leo's lawyer, Bob Doyle because she's hoping he'll lead her
in the right direction, even if that means she should
run away from Leo as fast as she can. But instead,
(40:58):
Doyle tells her this, don't believe him, because you want
to look at the case. Chrissy leaves the coffee shop,
goes back to the Polk County Courthouse and walks into
the clerk's office. She asked to see the files on
Leo's case. I just started looking and asking and looking
(41:21):
and asking some more. As Chrissie starts digging and asking questions,
she starts seeing all the discrepancies. She was especially hung
up on the state's timeline. How was it possible for
Leo to be accounted for by friends, family, and deputies
on the night Michelle had gone missing and still slip
away to murder his wife, dispose of the body, and
(41:43):
clean up a crime scene. Well, when you start looking
at the case, you start putting the pieces together. Nothing
is adding up. She reads the trial transcripts, then she
begins digging into the sheriff's reports and the files from
the state attorney's office. Obviously, she asked questions about Leo
and Michelle's relationship. So she'd visit the prison to ask
(42:05):
Leo about the case and about Michelle. No question was
off limits, nothing was too difficult for him to share. Well,
it might have been difficult, but he was willing. After
talking to Leo, she'd go back to the clerk's office
to do more research. Then back she'd go to run
more questions by Leo, and his answer would always confirm
(42:29):
that that was impossible for those things to have happened,
or clarify that maybe I didn't understand right. She kept
doing this for months, going back and forth between the
court files and visiting Leo at the prison. After a while,
Chrissy became certain that Leo couldn't have done this, but
not only that, she realizes she's developing feelings for Leo.
(42:51):
We got along really well, you know, it seemed like
we were kind of liking each other a little bit.
But he's in prison, you know, so the relationship hip,
the dating thing was like a little awkward in addition
to the obvious, you know, physical restrictions and living your
life in a fishbowl. Every kiss, every hug, everything we say,
(43:13):
everything has been under someone's watch. There's no hiding when
you're in a relationship with someone in prison. We decided
about four years into the relationship that we were gonna
do this forever, prison or no prison. We were doing it.
So we had to do an application to get married
(43:33):
in prison. I had to write a letter about why
I wanted to marry him, you know, dear sir, I
want to marry him because I love him, you know, sincerely.
So we picked a date and my friend and I
went shopping and I picked out a dress and went
to the prison chaplain and walked in my dress that
(43:55):
we'd picked out, and we got married. So there you go. Obviously,
Chrissy did not choose a simple life. She's struggling to
explain this choice. But at the same time, she didn't
(44:17):
want to hide who she was, and so she called
her friends to tell them about this man that she
had married. One of them was her work friend, Cinda Williams. Actually,
I had on all of the crime skinst children cases
that came to our Sheriff's office, and that's how I
met Chrissy. Sinda was an investigator in Hendry County when
(44:39):
she first met Chrissie. Chrissy was the social worker Sinda
worked with on child abuse cases. Then their career path diverged.
Sinda went to work for the State Attorney's office in
Palm Beach County, almost two hours east of Hendry, but
they kept in touch and then one day Sinda gets
this call from Chrissy and she said, listen, I need
(45:03):
to talk to you. And I'm like, sure, what, And
I figured it was about a case and she said, um,
I've met somebody. And I'm like, well, that's great, Chrissy,
who is it? And she goes, well, his name is Leo.
And I said okay, and she said, and he's incarcerated
at the Henry County Correctional Facility and I'm like what.
(45:28):
And then I said, well, why is he you know,
why is he in prison? And she said, well, he's
accused of murdering his wife. And I was like stunned,
and I said, you know, what are you doing? That's
you know, kind of nuts. I said, you know, you
have so much going for you. You're smart, you're you're
(45:48):
you know, going forward in your career. Why would you
do something like that? And she said, well, because I
believe he's innocent. And I thought to myself, a lot
of people say these things all the time him and
so I was just kind of thrown by it. Because
she believed so strongly that he was innocent. I think
that she wanted me, as her friend, to validate that,
(46:13):
but Sinda wasn't going to be able to do that.
I told her, point blank, Chrissy, I cannot help you
with this. It puts me in a terrible position. Remember,
sindas a cop, she has to think about her career.
She can't be helping out a friend whose partner is
in prison. Quite frankly, didn't know what to say, and
there wasn't anything that I could do because Leo had
(46:36):
been he had had a trial, and he had been
convicted and he had been sentenced to prison, and there's
no way that I could have gotten involved in that.
At that point, when she knew I was involved with
someone in prison, she cut ties with me. For her,
that was a big no no. She wanted her reputation
(47:01):
and her experience and to not have any cloud around her,
and she told me at the time that's why she
was doing It was very, very painful. I was worried
about her across the board. Did it see amount of
character for her? Yes, even though I think Chrissie is
(47:24):
very caring and very accepting of things, I kind of
thought that that's that she was being sucked in. That's
how I felt. Sinda tries to keep her distance, but
Chrissie keeps giving her updates on new things she's learning
about Leo's case, and every time I spoke to her,
(47:44):
I always thought she's gonna tell me, Okay, I can't
do this anymore, and you know this is not working out,
and I'm just gonna, you know, forget about it. But
she never did. By this point, Chrissy is completely obsessed
with Leo's case. She does everything she can to investigate
it on her own and then she reads something in
(48:07):
the reports. She sees that there's evidence that can be
analyzed for possible DNA. Trying to get the DNA tested
took three years, hearings and hearings and hearings. I think
three thousand dollars that I had to pay for by myself.
I'm a social worker, you know, my salary was social
(48:28):
work salary. She's finally able to get Michelle's fingernail scrapings tested,
but it's been too long. The samples have degraded, so
they couldn't draw any conclusive information from them. But there
are also hairs that were found at the crime scene.
Maybe one of them belongs to the murderer. She tries
to get those tested too, but the state attorney don Aguero,
(48:52):
when we were in this process, he had the hair destroyed,
so it was in the process. In the process, the
hair of samples that we wanted to tests were destroyed.
This is heartbreaking and infuriating to Chrissy. Why would they
destroy evidence. The state attorney says it's just a routine disposal,
(49:13):
But to Chrissy, it feels like the state is intentionally
putting up roadblocks to stop Leo from getting a new trial.
She doesn't give up. There's one more piece of physical
evidence that she can't stop thinking about. Always always. The
fingerprints was a big question in my mind because there's
(49:37):
fingerprints in the car. Those fingerprints were never identified. Investigators
just knew they didn't belong to anyone whose prints should
have been in the car. They didn't match Leo or Michelle.
The Prince. Also didn't belong to Leo's father. In fact,
no one else's fingerprints were found in the Mazda. Just
(49:59):
this rangers. Whose fingerprints are they? I don't know, nobody, No,
nobody can answer, Well, they have to be somebody's fingerprints.
So is it the tow truck driver or is it
a mechanic or is it a random person? Or It
was always bothered me. Obviously somebody was in the car,
(50:20):
somebody knew something. Who was it? What do they know?
So Chrissy keeps working at it, intent on trying to
figure out this piece of the mystery. At the same time, Cinda,
Chrissy's cop friend's working hard in her new job as
an investigator for the State Attorney's office in Palm Beach County.
(50:41):
Sinda had come from a small sheriff's office in a
rural county to Palm Beach County, which is a larger,
more metropolitan area, and there she meets a young prosecutor.
His name is Scott Cupp. He might recognize that name.
He's now Judge Scott Cupp, who first tipped me to
Leo Schofield's case by handing me a business card. Can
(51:04):
you talk about what Scott was like as a young prosecutor?
What you know, what kind of person he was at
that time in his life. Yeah, let's see, he was aggressive.
I think aggressive is a word that I don't really
see him as that aggressive today, but back then he
was a prosecutor. Yes, he was a prosecutor. And I well,
(51:28):
I can give you an example. I remember the first
time that he came down to my office and they
had these big glass windows that looked out over the courthouse.
And he looked at me and he said, I want
you to look outside. And I didn't know it, you know,
(51:49):
was wrong with him, but I'm like okay. So I
looked outside and he says to me, do you see
any orange groves? And I'm like no, and he's like, well,
do you see any horse and buggies out there? And
I'm like no, and he goes, well, welcome to the
big city. So I'm like thinking to myself, what a
(52:11):
jerk that. Ultimately, you know, I worked with him on many,
many cases and we eventually started seeing each other and
then eventually we married. Not too long after that, Cinda
and Scott Cupp moved back to Hendry County. Sinda takes
a job as captain with the Sheriff's office. Cup takes
(52:34):
off his prosecutor's hat and sets up his defense practice
in the tiny city of LaBelle, Florida. Chrissy is also
still in Hendry County doing social work. One day, she
goes to visit one of her clients who is being
held in the county jail. One day, I was going
into the jail and there was an attorney next to me.
We're both going through the door at the same time.
We have to buzz you in, and when we got
(52:57):
to the desk, we both say we were there for
the same person. So we kind of looked at each
other and he's like, oh, that's my client. He introduced himself,
who was Scott Cupp. We met, you know, seemed to
me bright, pretty intelligent. Had no idea that Chrissy Carter
(53:20):
was Chrissie Schofield at that time. She didn't she didn't
lead with that. Cup was the defense attorney. Chrissy was
the social worker working with the same client. They talk
a bit about their client and then both of them
leave the jail and go home for the day. Apparently
he told his wife that he met the social worker
(53:42):
for the same you know, client, and told her my name,
and she, from what he's told me, cried and he's like,
what what just happened? He said, that's my friend, Chrissie.
So that's how we all reconnected. They become friendly, Chrissy, Cinda,
(54:02):
and Sinda's husband, Scott Cup, And it's not long before
Chrissy starts sharing again about Leo, and that's how Scott
Cupp finds out that Chrissy is married to a man
convicted of murdering his wife. And I just like kind
of threw my hands up and get oh my god.
I had no idea she was a whack job, and
(54:23):
so she was trying to get you involved in this case, right,
which I did several times said no, no, no, no,
no no. I just thought this was the typical guy
getting over on somebody who they met through the prison system,
convincing them for whatever reason, to marry them so they
can tool them, whether it's for money, or maybe get
(54:47):
them some representation to see if they can file something
on some quote unquote technicality. And I want to know
part of that. But Chrissy is relentless. She's begging Cinda
to tell Scott to just look at Leo's trial transcript.
I didn't push it and say, oh, well, she's my friend.
(55:07):
I said, you know, you talk to her, maybe you
can give her some advice and steer her in a
direction that you know she needs to go legally. And then,
and I'm not proud of this, but kind of coldly,
I said, Okay, here's the deal. I'll do it. But
(55:27):
she's going to pay me, and she's my client. I'm
not representing her husband. Okay, I'm not going into the
prison to talk to this guy. I don't know what
the hell's going on, but just to make this go away,
I will review the transcript and I will explain to
her why her quote unquote husband is in prison for murder.
(55:50):
And I thought that would be the end of it.
I just wanted this to stop and just leave me
alone about this, and quite frankly, if said, and I
don't want her coming over here anymore. Okay, So Chrissy
shows up at Scott Cup's office in LaBelle one day
with six binders and two thousand plus pages of trial transcripts.
(56:11):
She leaves them on his desk, and later that afternoon
he stays true to his word and starts reading and
reading into the night. The former prosecutor is transfixed. And
I got to the end of the States case and
(56:34):
closed that binder and just sat there, and I think
I maybe even out out said, holy shit, this guy
didn't do it. He couldn't have done it. All the
overwhelming evidence of Leo's guilt that he expected to find
in the transcript, it just isn't there. And as an
(56:55):
experienced prosecutor, he knows it when he sees it. Cupp
hadn't even read as far as the defense's case, and
it was already obvious to him that Leo Schofield was
wrongly convicted. He finishes the transcript and he's even more
convinced that Leo is an innocent man. And now the
(57:15):
aggressive prosecutor turned defense attorney is invested. He starts poking
around to see if there's any physical evidence recovered from
the original investigation of Michelle's murder. He's not interested in
any of that bad character evidence or premonition stuff. He
wants actual forensic evidence, of course, with DNA evidence destroyed.
(57:38):
He learns what Chrissy has been stuck on for the
past decade. There was a few prints that were found
inside the vehicle that went unidentified at the time. He
doesn't understand why detectives didn't do more with the prince.
Why not expand out? Let's brainstorm, who's got connects to
(57:59):
that area? You know? Who are our guys that we
know could be, as they say on TV, good for this?
Why didn't they do that? Why wasn't that done? Scott
Cupp calls up to Tallahassee to the Florida Department of
Law Enforcement to see if they still have a copy
of the fingerprints on file. They do, and they send
(58:22):
him a copy on an index card. Then Cup has
to decide what to do next. At that point, I
really didn't know. I'd like to ruminate on things and
try to figure out what's the best way to go forward. Well,
he doesn't really get the time to think about it.
Because he gives Chrissy the card, and Chrissy kind of
(58:43):
goes behind Scott's back and meets up with Cinda, who's
now a police captain in Henry County. I remember Chrissy
wanting to talk to me and coming to me and
telling me that she had a fingerprint and that nobody
(59:05):
ran it, and I'm like, please, please, please figure out
a way. Chrissy's pretty tenacious, you know. Chrissy's like a
dog of the bone. She has a cause and she
falls through. So she handed it to me and she goes,
here it is. I kind of laughed at her and
I said, what are you doing with this? And she said,
(59:29):
could you just see if this print comes back to anybody?
And I thought to myself, well, apparently it doesn't, because
nobody's pursued this. I didn't know how she was going
to do it. I was just begging her, on her,
begging her, and she said, I'll look into it. I said, oh, right,
give it to me. I did that probably because at
(59:54):
that point I thought, if Chrissy doesn't leave me alone,
this is gonna finally make her shut up. And so
I took the fingerprint and I handed it to one
of my crime scene detectives, and I said to him,
is there any way that you can find out by
running this through the database if this comes back to anyone?
(01:00:15):
And he said sure, And if you want me to
be perfectly honest, I thought it was going to come
back as nothing. Not that I wanted it to, but
I thought that it would be something that was already
done and this was just another dead end avenue. And
(01:00:36):
again I thought that she was grasping at straws. But
he came back to me three days later and he said,
there's a hit. And I'm like, really, all right, who
does it come back to? And he said, a guy
(01:00:58):
named Jeremy Scott, Jerry Scott. Who the fuck's Jeremy Scott?
Holy shit. Bone Valley is a production of Lava for
(01:01:18):
Good podcast in association with Signal Company Number One. Our
executive producers are Jason Flam and Kevin Wurdis. Karak Kornheber
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 Kelsey Decker. Our theme song,
(01:01:43):
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 Hearty Correctional Institution. Bone Valley is
written and produced by me Gilbert King. You can follow
the show on Instagram, a, Facebook, and Twitter at Lava
for Good. To see photos and documents from our investigation
(01:02:06):
and exclusive behind the scenes content, visit Lava Forgood dot
com slash Bone Valley
Host
Gilbert King
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