October 12, 2022 • 50 mins
Chapter 5 of 9
Gilbert and Kelsey do a deep dive investigation into Jeremy Scott. By speaking to people who were close to Jeremy at the time, a picture emerges of an impulsive and troubled teenager who was prone to violence. When investigators confront Jeremy about the newly identified fingerprints, he explains that he was in Michelle’s car to steal stereo equipment. The State believes Jeremy, and they close their investigation.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
I was blown away because I'm like, why would his
fingerprint be in the vehicle? Why would that not have
been something that had been investigated. When Police Captain Sinda
Williams ran the Prince that had been found in Michelle
Scofield's car seventeen years ago, she wasn't expecting anything, but
(00:31):
there was a hit, So I ran a criminal history
check on Jeremy Scott. Now, Sinda wasn't really supposed to
have run these prints. The Michelle Scofield case is under
Polk County's jurisdiction, not Hendry County, where she works, but
because of her friendship with Chrissy, she decides to look
into Jeremy Scott anyway. I felt like it was the
(00:55):
right thing to do, and he had um an extensive
criminal history. And when I say extensive, I mean mostly
violent crime charges of grand theft, burglary, multiple assaults, arson,
(01:20):
and two arrests for murder. Do you my man left
to my fields step sor in this vast reach that'spra
(02:11):
to the worm to st Bone Valley? Chapter five? Bam, bam?
(03:05):
Who is Jeremy Scott? Who is this man whose fingerprints
turned up in the car Michelle Scofield was driving on
the night she was murdered. Kelsey and I wanted to
find out everything we could about him. We started filing
record requests. We got police reports from both the Sheriff's
(03:25):
office and the Lakeland Police Department. They documented dozens of
Jeremy's arrests in Polk County, and we were also able
to get our hands on Jeremy's psychiatric reports. He was
evaluated by psychologists while awaiting trial on a homicide charge.
This homicide charge, Jeremy would eventually be convicted for it.
(03:46):
We'll get back to that later. But after he was
found guilty, several of Jeremy's family members testified, pleading with
the judge and jury to spare Jeremy's life, to sentence
him to life in prison instead of giving him the
death penalty. Their testimony about Jeremy's childhood and upbringing paints
(04:07):
a Scott family portrait that can only be described as
chaotic and unstable. We started compiling this testimony and other
documents we'd been able to dig up, and we were
able to make a rough timeline of Jeremy's early life.
Jeremy was born in Michigan on April twenty ninth, nineteen
(04:29):
sixty nine. According to family testimony, his mother Linda immediately
rejected him when she brought him home from the hospital.
Linda didn't want anything to do with him. She was
fifteen at the time and using drugs, so she left
him with her parents. So Jeremy's grandparents, Arline and Stacy Scott.
(04:49):
They raise him, and Jeremy grows up calling them mom
and Dad, and they call him Bam Bam because he
liked to hit stuff. But early in works and Stacy
struggles with alcoholism, so Jeremy spends much of his early
years in the care of his aunt Debbie, who's just fourteen.
Then one day, when Jeremy was two or three, he
(05:12):
was left without supervision and was hit by a neighbor's car.
His psych reports say that there was significant injury to
the right frontal area of his skull. It seems this
incident may have left Jeremy with lasting brain damage, and
soon after Jeremy's uncle Tom moved in. Tom pretty severely
(05:33):
abused Jeremy. He would beat him and call him names.
According to his aunt Debby's testimony, when Jeremy starts school,
sounds like he doesn't do very well. He has to
repeat kindergarten and he's placed in special education classes. And
then we get to the mid to late seventies and
the family starts to relocate down to Florida. They were
(05:55):
up in Michigan, and they start trickling down to various
parts of the state. They settle in Perry in the
Florida Panhandle, and also in central Florida, Lakeland, Kissimmee, Davenport,
and Mulberry. It's hard to piece together exactly where Jeremy
was and when and who cared for him. He was
being passed back and forth between different caregivers, different family members,
(06:19):
but at some point he ends up back with his mother, Linda.
Jeremy's aunt, Debbie, says that Linda was beating him with
belts and with sticks, and the school he was attending
at that time took notice. They reported the abuse, and
it seems like at that point Jeremy was removed from
his mother's care and placed into foster care. After fourth grade,
(06:44):
Jeremy stops regularly attending school, and by eighth grade he's
apparently dropped out of school entirely. Somewhere in that time,
he starts getting in trouble with the law too. The
first arrest we have on record is August nineteen eighty
It was for petty theft, burglary, criminal mischief, dealing in
(07:06):
stolen property, and unauthorized use of a motor vehicle, all
misdemeanor charges. But he was only eleven years old. That's
five charges. Around this same time, Jeremy's already living on
the streets and he asks his sixteen year old aunt
for money, food, and clothes, which she isn't always able
(07:27):
to provide. And then in January of nineteen eighty two,
he's arrested for grand theft and burglary, and those are
felony charges. Jeremy was twelve, and this is when things
become a little more serious for him. There are some
real repercussions. He's sent away to Okachobee, the juvenile detention
(07:48):
facility in South Florida, so he's in and out of
Okachobee between the ages of thirteen and fifteen. After one
of Jeremy's stays at Okachobee, he lands in a little
town in Polk County, just outside of Lakeland. It's called
Eagle Lake. From Jeremy's criminal records and police reports, we
(08:09):
learned about a murder that took place in this area
in nineteen eighty five, when Jeremy was just fifteen years old,
so we tried to track down some of the other
people whose names we found in the documents. Okay, I'm
out here. I'm about to meet with Nancy, and I
think her mother, Wilma is here. I'm just gonna walk
(08:30):
over there right now on a picnic bench underneath the tree.
Nancy and her mom, Wilma, are still living in the
area where the crime took place. I called them after
seeing Nancy's name in a witness deposition. I was especially
interested in talking to them because they said they remember Jeremy. Hello,
(08:53):
you must be Wilma. We talked on the phone. Kilburn, Hi, Nancy,
how are you. Nancy says she first met Jeremy while
he was working the rides at the Florida Citrus Festival
in nearby winter Haven. Nancy was around thirteen years old
and Jeremy was fifteen. We all went to the fair,
(09:14):
and we'd go every single night. What kind of fair
was it? It was just a carnival. You had the
sea dragon, you had the zipper, the one that spins
around Himalaya. What was Jeremy Scott doing there? He was
actually running the Sea Dragon and he so he when
you were at the fair, like he would he would
be the guy that would put you on the rides.
That was his job. No, he actually was the one
(09:36):
that turned it on. It was in the mechanical part.
So he was basically a carney Carney. Nancy and her
friends would see him every night over the ten days
the festival was in town. So when me and the
girls got on and we got an extra ride, like, hey,
I got that extra ride. And when the festival eventually
packs up, Jeremy sticks around the area. I think he
(10:01):
just came into town and decided to stay for a
little bit. He was quiet, Yeah, I mean like shy,
very shy compared to like the average kids. And I
mean until he got to know you, you know, I
do know he was like maybe slow. I don't know
how to better explain him. He just was different, you know,
(10:25):
I don't know if it's a disability or what. Because
back then, Nancy grew up with the sense that she
should protect kids like Jeremy, so she would make sure
to include him when she and her friends would play
sports and hang around the park. Jeremy would stay over
at their house some nights too. He'd crash on the couch.
He was polite because it's like he had respect, I
(10:47):
guess his best way to say it, because I never
saw temper out of him or anything. But then Jeremy
stops coming over to Nancy and Wilma's houses often, and
Nancy she starts seeing Jeremy with one of her neighbors,
an ex con by the name of Smokey Johnson. Smokey
picks up Jeremy while he's hitchhiking one day. Smokey is
(11:10):
forty six and Jeremy is just fifteen. Honestly, but I mean,
it's really weird that somebody that much older would be
hanging out with you. You know that spring On April eleventh,
nineteen eighty five, Smokey seventy five year old mother Jul
Johnson was found dead in a locked trailer behind her house. Now,
(11:35):
she lived right around the corner from More. We lived
right and Jul Johnson was just like a sweet elderly woman.
I mean, everybody yes saying that she was a very
sweet lady. Now that's different people that I'm knew quite
whale yeah that she is a very sweet lady. Jul
(11:56):
Johnson suffered blunt force trauma to the head and she
was shot in the torso, presumably with the twenty two
caliber rifle found at the scene. Detective Richard Putnell, the
same detective that would work Michelle's Scofield's murder two years later,
conducts the investigation. Detective Putnell talks to Jule Johnson's son, Smokey,
(12:19):
who says that about fifty dollars in rolled coins was
taken from the house, as well as some large knives.
As far as we can tell, there are no eye
witnesses to the killing and no one claims to have
heard any gunshots. But then detective Putnell interviews two teenage
girls in the neighborhood and the investigation takes a new direction.
(12:43):
Thirteen year old Luanda Green and fifteen year old Anne
Aldridge tell detective Putnell that they know Jeremy and they
remember seeing him on his bike just hours after Jule's murder.
They say Jeremy had on all new clothes when they
saw him, gray jacket, gray shirt, gray pants instead of
his usual jeans and T shirt. He also had a
(13:06):
bunch of coins on him. He told them that his
grandfather just died and left him fifty dollars. He showed
the coins and said, this is all I have left.
He had a red bag with him and said there's
a big knife in there. Not long after Jul Johnson
is killed, Jeremy stops by Nancy's place. He just swung
(13:30):
by the house to tell us why. Like, the conversation
was really really short, not like where he was before that,
you know, he laughed or whatever. It was just different.
He just said that we wouldn't get to see him
no more. He would staying away because he was in trouble.
After I interviewed Nancy and Wilma at the ballpark, they
(13:52):
tell me to follow their car and they'll point out
Jul Johnson's house. And this is really earl back here,
a lot less houses, just little farmhouses. Cattle. Yeah, there
it is. I can see the little shed in the
back under tree. That's where I think they found the
(14:17):
body of Joe Johnson. Investigators weren't able to lift any
prints from the rifle found at the crime scene. Whoever
shot Jul Johnson must have wiped down the weapon afterwards,
but they were able to lift fingerprints from a coin
wrapper and jewels, broken eyeglasses. The Polk County Sheriff's office
(14:42):
compares the prince to Jeremy's. It's a match. Jeremy Scott,
now sixteen, becomes the leads suspect in the murder of
Jewel Johnson. Three weeks after the killing, Jeremy's arrested and
charged with first degree murder. At his arrangement, the judge,
(15:04):
who spent years presiding over juvenile cases, recognizes Jeremy's name.
He tells reporters he wasn't surprised. He says, quote, this
was one of those situations in which there was nothing
the system could do. Jeremy was in jail, and he
(15:29):
was a young man, very immature, very i'm gonna say,
mentally disturbed in the sense that he had a number
of mental illnesses. He was a severely abused child. You know,
he was cutting himself quite a bit in the jail.
This is Austin Meslanic, who was an attorney with the
Public Defender's Office. Meslantic was assigned to represent Jeremy in
(15:54):
the murder of Jule Johnson. I mean the state was
seeking the death penal because this was before the United
States Freme Court had ruled that juveniles were not eligible
for the death penalty, and you know, in Pope County
at that time, the state went for the death penalty
on just about every case. He was young, he was difficult,
(16:18):
sometimes he was cooperative, sometimes he wasn't. This is Tony Maloney.
She's the investigator from the Public Defender's Office. She was
assigned to Leo Schofield's case in nineteen eighty eight, before
Leo dropped them and hired Jack Edmond instead. But before
all that, back in nineteen eighty five, she was assigned
(16:39):
to Jeremy Scott's defense in the Jule Johnson murder. It
was hard for him to stay on task for any
period of time, and then even when he did, it
was sort of like, you know, as he really connecting
the dots here, not out of touch with reality, but
an inability to calmly control on. At trial, the state
(17:04):
presents a pretty simple case. They say that while Smokey
Johnson is at work, Jewel catches Jeremy trying to steal
her rolls of coins. She tells Jeremy she's calling the sheriff,
so he hits her over the head and shoots her
with a rifle. But the public defenders did witness interviews
and brought in a mental health expert to defend Jeremy
(17:25):
at trial, and you put on a pretty aggressive defense.
Gess what he did. Jeremy takes the stand at trial
and says that it was Smokey Johnson who killed his
own mother. Jeremy says he was a witness to the killing.
He said it happened after Smokey and Jewel argued about
smoking weed. Several jurors said that they didn't think Jeremy
(17:49):
killed Juel Johnson because he didn't seem intelligent enough to
remove his fingerprints from the murder weapon. Smokey, on the
other hand, had done some time for selling, and he
apparently didn't come across too well at trial. That's how
in September nineteen eighty five, Jeremy Scott is acquitted of
(18:10):
Jule Johnson's murder. The state never prosecute Smoky because of
the strength of his alibi. Multiple co workers testify that
he was at work at the time his mother was murdered.
Jule Johnson's murder is still considered unsolved to this day,
but the state of Florida didn't seem too happy about
(18:30):
Jeremy's acquittal, so they weren't so quick to release him.
While Jeremy was in the jail awaiting trial, he lit
his mattress on fire. So after he's acquitted in the
Jule Johnson murder, he's held in the Polk County jail
for the arson charge that happened months before. To me
and Kelsey, though it seems like Jeremy literally got away
(18:53):
with murder, I think that's sort of a bitch ruin
a bunch of people's lives. This is Lee Underwood. We
reached out to him because he was a close friend
of Michelle Schofield's back in the day. She was a
very very very special friend of mine, like a sister.
(19:19):
It was Michelle who gave him his nickname, Lee the Flee,
and she named me that basically because I was always
playing to a lead the police and then am stuck
with Today. We tracked Lee the Flee down in Wisconsin,
and as we were talking, the interview took an unexpected turn.
(19:42):
Did you didn't know Jeremy Scott, did you? I was
in chill with them back at eighty Sorry. We checked
this and Lee is a little off on the year.
Based on arrest records, the cops finally caught up with
Lee in nineteen eighty five. They locked him up in
the Polk County ja on charges of well fleeing police,
(20:03):
and Lee tells us one of his cellmates then was
Jeremy Scott. Lee was there when Jeremy set his mattress
on fire, and he remembers when Jeremy was acquitted of
killing Jule Johnson. I don't know how he got off
of it. He had brack to everybody in the sell
about doing it. This guy was crazy. He'd like make
(20:27):
a shake like a jail knive out of a razor
right around the jail, cutting people just at random. This
kid was crazy, and he had a look in his
eye just like like he wasn't right. Jeremy is convicted
(20:52):
on the arson charge and shipped off to state prison.
By the time he's released, it's December nineteen eighty six.
Leo and Michelle Scofield have been married for about four months.
They're living in the little trailer near Cumby Settlement. They're
going to church. Leo's playing music and Michelle has yet
(21:15):
to start her job at Tom's restaurant. Jeremy Scott is
back on the streets, and this time he's in Lakeland. Hi.
I'm Jason Flom, CEO and founder of Lava for Good podcasts,
(21:38):
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Stand Together is a philanthropic community that partners with America's
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country's biggest problems, including the broken criminal justice system. Weldon
(22:25):
Angelos is one of those changemakers. At the age of
twenty three, Weldon was arrested for a first time offense
of selling weed to a confidential informant. At the time,
he was a budding musician spending time with artists like
Tupac Snoop Dog, Pink, and Nas. His entire life was
ahead of him when he was sentenced to a mandatory
(22:46):
fifty five years in federal prison without the possibility of
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to him getting officially pardoned. Upon his release, he founded
the Weldon Project, a nonprofit working to create better outcomes
for those still in prison that funds social change and
(23:08):
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Let's see, this is just kind of describing Lakeland, how
it all came to be. We're at Heide's emen's house,
looking through boxes. Heidi, her sister Wendy, and their parents
(23:52):
were living in Lakeland when Jeremy Scott entered their lives.
Heidi's parents were professors. Her dad taught Greek and mom
taught English, and for a while in the nineteen eighties,
they took in local teenagers they called throwaway kids who
had been kicked out or we're living on the streets.
The Zeeman's offered them a place to stay. My dad
(24:14):
was you know, he was a writer. He just wrote, wrote,
so when when he passed away, there were boxes and
boxes of writing. So as I was pulling everything out,
I was trying to decide, you know, what was what.
And I came across this and I was like, oh,
my gosh, like this is the story of all the kids.
So it was pretty neat. And then I found Mom's
(24:36):
notebook and I was like, oh, this is really cool
that they both wrote the kids stories. The Zeemans first
started taking in kids living on the street when Heidi's
sister Wendy started dating a boy named Mike Jason. Yeah.
I've been on the streets when I was fourteen because
my brother and I got didn't get along, so you know,
I just felt like I was the black sheep of
(24:57):
the family, so I left. I was scared I was
gonna die. Honestly, living on the streets, didn't know where
you're gonna eat. You wore the same clothes all the time,
and it was a struggle Heidi and Wendy's parents let
Mike live with them, and then they start letting some
of Mike's friends who also had nowhere else to go
(25:20):
into their house. And then before you knew it, it
was Mike. You know. There were so many kids and
they they would sleep wherever they could fit at the
Zeeman's house, in the garage, on couches or on the
living room floor. When they ran out of floor space
and couch space, someone might sleep on the recliner. And
(25:40):
then I kind of became part of the family. Rob
Morales was one of the teens staying at the Zeeman house.
Rob also went by Spot because you had this one
patch of white on a head full of black hair.
I flip on the couch because I didn't have any
place to go. Well, that's where I met Jeremy. It's
(26:04):
the summer of nineteen eighty eight, the summer that Leo
Schofield is arrested and charged with the murder of his wife, Michelle.
Jeremy Scott, homeless, finds his way into the Zeeman House
in Lakeland. He's nineteen years old now, but he's already
had a couple of stints in state prison. Spot describes
(26:24):
Jeremy as impulsive and violent. Usually every time you know,
we met up, we were either getting into a fight
with someone else or you know, he was always the
first to come to gun. He made me nervous. This
is Tracy Slaughter. That's summer nineteen eighty eight. She's sixteen,
(26:48):
she's dating Spot, and she and Wendy Zeeman are almost inseparable.
That was the Death Leopard summer. And you walk around
with your gray boom BOXX and you keep flipping it
back and forth. Wendy and I would walk and we
would walk, and we would walk. You would walk everywhere,
and you had to have your your buga shell necklace on,
and you had to have your your black leather like
(27:11):
a stretchy leer targ type pants that had looked like
they were satiny looking, you know, and then some type
of bright tangerine top or something like that. That was
that summer. And I associate all of that with with this.
(27:32):
This is a summer Tracy would never forget. As Tracy's
hanging out at the Zeeman house, she sees Jeremy coming
and going with his friend Cheryl. Cheryl is about ten
years older than Tracy, and she has a car. One night,
Cheryl takes Tracy and Wendy Zeeman out for a ride.
(27:53):
So we went and she bought a bottle of Seagrum seven.
Don't drink it to this day. Then Cheryl says, we
need to go pick up Jeremy, and that's what they do.
I knew that I didn't want him to be there,
that's all. That was just my feeling, because then Cheryl
also let him drive, and we thought that was odd
(28:15):
because she relinquished her vehicle over it to him. And
I remember when we stopped the convenient storage by the
second bottle of Seagram seven. Yeah, Jeremy drops off Wendy
and Cheryl at the Zieman house. He drives off with
Tracy for coffee to sober her up before taking her home,
and then it all just went to help him there.
(28:38):
Tracy tells me that instead of taking her home, Jeremy
drives her to a wooded area off a two lane road.
It's dark, there aren't any street lights, and very little traffic.
She doesn't go into detail, but she makes it clear
that Jeremy sexually assaulted her that night. She says she
(28:59):
can remember laying in the sand on the side of
the road and hearing a car drive by without stopping.
I was sixteen years old, and then that was my
welcome into the world. Around the same time, Heide Zeeman
(29:22):
starts noticing that her sister, Wendy is not really acting
like herself. It was obvious there was something wrong. One day,
Jeremy's in the house and the Zeeman's here Wendy scream.
He walked in on her one day in the shower,
and she ripped the shower curtain off and started screaming,
(29:43):
and so, you know, we kind of knew that was
such a violent reaction that she had to him. You know,
you could tell something had happened. Wendy tells her mom
that not long before the shower incident, Jeremy had raped her.
Jeremy didn't want to be thrown out of the house,
so we tried to keep Wendy quiet. From my understanding,
(30:05):
he told her that if she if she told anybody,
or if she did anything, he would kill her. And
so I think she was just terrified fourteen year old girl.
The Zeemans do kick Jeremy out of the house, and
now they're left to figure out what to do next.
They're devastated about what Jeremy did to Wendy, But the
(30:26):
Zeemans as a family basically decide that they were not
going to report Jeremy's sexual assault. They just didn't want
to expose their fourteen year old daughter to an investigation
in a trial. And Wendy Zeman wouldn't seem to recover
from the trauma that happened so early in her life.
(30:46):
What did she do afterwards? She never did anything after that.
She never went back to school, she was never a
room holden job. She got to the point where she
didn't want to leave the house. I mean, she was
just so paranoid about everything and everybody, and it just
got worse through the years. And then there's Tracy. If
(31:09):
I say that something I did today was because of him,
I'm allowing him to control my life, and I'm allowing
him to attack me and be ugly to me every
single time that I allow him to take part of
my life. I'm not giving him He's gotten all for me,
He's ever getting from me. After Jeremy sexually assaulted her,
(31:35):
she stopped talking to her best friend Wendy and stopped
going to the Zeman's house. She just wanted to move on.
Tracy still lives in Polk County. She's got her own
children now, and I got the impression that she's happily
married and doing well. Her friend, Wendy Zeeman wasn't so lucky.
Her mental and physical health continued to decline, and she
(31:57):
died of heart failure in twenty fifteen at the age
of forty one. Tracy had no idea that Wendy had
her own traumatic experience with Jeremy Scott. We were the
ones to break the news to her more than three
decades later. I felt bad after you told me that
Wendy had passed and stuff like that. I was like,
(32:18):
maybe I should have continued being her friend. I didn't
know that he affected her, and she didn't know he
affected me, so you know what I mean. So I
kind of felt I still kind of feel like shit,
but there's not nice to do about it. It is
what it is at this point. So the Zeemans had
(32:39):
their hearts in the right place. According to their youngest daughter, Heidi,
her parents did make a difference in the lives of
some of the kids, like Spot, who had a successful
military career and returned to Lakeland to thank mister and
Missus Zeeman for all their help. But some of the
throwaway kids that went through the Zemon house weren't as
lucky as spot. Many of the boys ended up dead
(33:01):
or in prison, and the Zeman's older daughter, Wendy, paid
the price for her parents good intentions. Mister Zeeman died
a year after his daughter Wendy. His younger daughter, Heidi,
went through his possessions and she came across all of
his papers and writing, as well as the journal he
(33:22):
was keeping back in the nineteen eighties. So he starts
off with the kids who had passed away. Yeah, so
he starts off with Harry, which she was so attached
to Harry. So Aaron Louis, mister and Missus Zeman tried
(33:46):
to keep track of them all to record some details
about each life. To them, they weren't throwaways, they were
children who had fallen through the cracks. And then this
is the part, like I said, that talks about Jeremy.
When he talks about Jeremy, he even says, I'm not
going to give him his own story because I'm not
(34:06):
going to give him the satisfaction of giving him his
own story because of what he did In his journal,
mister Zeman acknowledges Jeremy's troubled life, but he also goes
on to say that Jeremy, upset about being kicked out
of the house, cut the brakes on Missus Zeeman's car,
But mister Zeman writes that murder attempt was not successful.
(34:36):
After Jeremy Scott left so much destruction in his wake,
he took off with another boy who was living at
the Zeman's. His name is Larry Brian Hall, but he
goes by Brian for a little while. Brian moves into
a small place with Wendy's ex boyfriend Mike. Jeremy and
him were why he's going off in the evening at
(34:57):
nighttime when Brian stayed at my place. Mike seems concerned
because he knew Brian could easily get caught up with
the wrong people like Jeremy. He was trying to figure
out how to survive, and he followed people. I just
think he didn't know any better. He would just do
whatever somebody said to do. You know. That was one
of the things Brian told me. He said he is
(35:19):
scared of him. Brian eventually moves out of Mike's apartment
and goes off with Jeremy. But Jeremy and Brian have
nowhere to live. They're staying wherever they can, sometimes in
abandoned buildings. They start breaking into houses together. Spots still
in the area too, and he hears that Jeremy and
Brian are hanging out in downtown Lakeland at night around
(35:42):
Lake Morton. Okay, well Late Morton needs to be a
Oh I gotta put this a gay pickup zone. Oh okay,
so that was I hate to get Grafford. It's okay,
it's okay. So at that time, what would happened was
(36:02):
anybody that was looking to get money, you would hang
out at the lake at night, and then somebody would
drive around the lake and if they flashed their lights,
that meant that they were looking. And then you would
flash your lights, which meant that yes, you were available.
So they would do whatever they wanted, you know, and
(36:23):
then they'd pay you forty or fifty bucks. And then
if you stayed out there long enough, you know, you
can get you know, three or four people at night.
So he was kind of a hustler. Yeah. According to Spot,
Jeremy was targeting gay men. Usually he'd robbed them and
these men were not likely to contact law enforcement, not
(36:46):
if they had to explain to police why they were
cruising around Lake Morton. This is what Jeremy and Brian
were up to on Halloween night nineteen eighty eight. It's
about three am and they're hanging out by the lake.
Jeremy's been drinking and they call a middle aged gay
man named Donald moorehead. Jeremy's been with him before, and
(37:09):
Donald drives over to pick the two teenagers up in
his Chevy Baretta. He brings Brian and Jeremy back to
his trailer in Lakeland. They're drinking and smoking, and Donald
ends up falling asleep naked in a rocking chair. But
the robbery, everything just happened been such a even as
(37:34):
all these years do I'm comfortable to talk about. Here's
Brian Hall. He's serving a life sentence at Hearty Correctional Institution.
He's thin, sunken eyes, and graying hair. He tells us
what happened in the trailer with Jeremy. He waited till
(37:57):
Donald was asleep, and I was looking for money and
things in the house or a trailer, and then the
last thing I was expecting was that he was going
to kill him. Brian didn't go into great detail, but
(38:18):
according to the testimony he gave in court, here's what happened.
Jeremy woke Brian up early in the morning on November first.
He was searching Donald's trailer for cash. Jeremy tells Brian
that they'll need to kill Donald so he doesn't turn
them in. And then Jeremy picks up a glass bottle
(38:40):
of grape juice and repeatedly hits Donald over the head
with it. Donald slumps out of the rocking chair, but
is making some gurgling noises, so Jeremy strangles him with
a telephone cord. Jeremy then wipes down the grape juice
bottle and places it back in the fridge. Brian Hall
(39:05):
is the only person we know of who actually saw
Jeremy Scott kill someone, and he did in such a
way that this seemed like like you had swat a fly.
Just didn't seem to have any concern or conscience on it.
(39:29):
What were you thinking while you were sitting there and
watching this happen. It was just talking out of body experience,
just in fear of seeing something that you didn't think
someone was capable of doing. It was just a side
of him that I didn't see. Sometimes you find out
(39:56):
more and more as time goes on about people that
you never knew. You never knew him like you thought
you knew him. After killing Donald, Brian and Jeremy steal
his Chevy. They take off to a town called Davenport,
about thirty miles east in Polk County. Jeremy's mother and
stepfather lived there, and his brother lived close by. But
(40:19):
when a police helicopter starts circling over the neighborhood, Jeremy
runs off into the woods. Deputies are in pursuit now,
and Jeremy surrenders. He leads them to his mom's trailer,
where Brian is sleeping. The two teenagers are arrested and
taken into custody in early November of nineteen eighty eight.
(40:42):
By this time, Leo Schofield is sitting in the Pulk
County jail awaiting trial. The same prosecutor in Leo's case
is assigned to prosecute Jeremy Scott and Brian Hall the
man with the electric chair tie clip. Assistant State Attorney
John Aguero. Aguero offers Brian a deal. He says he'll
(41:03):
take the death penalty off the table if Brian testifies
to what he saw Jeremy do. Brian takes the deal,
he sentenced to life in prison and testifies against Jeremy.
The jury recommends life in prison for Jeremy, but Aguero
convinces the judge to override the jury's recommendation. The judge agrees,
(41:27):
and Jeremy Scott is sentenced to death. A reporter for
the Tampa Tribune is sitting in the courtroom watching Jeremy
as the sentence is read. She writes that she sees Jeremy,
who is handcuffed with his legs shackled, glanced back at
his crying grandmother. As Jeremy is led away, he too
(41:49):
begins to cry. Smokey Johnson was also in the courtroom
during sentencing. Smokey is convinced Jeremy got away with killing
his mother, Julee Johnson and four years prior, so he
shows up at Jeremy's hearing for satisfaction, he says. Smokey
tells the reporter what goes around comes around. A few
(42:13):
years later, the Florida Supreme Court overturns Jeremy's death sentence,
citing factors such as is borderline intelligence, emotional instability, and
a childhood rife with abuse. So, at twenty three years old,
Jeremy comes off death row and begins serving a life
sentence for the murder of Donald Moorehead without any possibility
(42:35):
for parole. Jeremy Scott is now locked up for good.
(42:58):
So I picked up the telephone own and I contacted
Polk County Sheriff's office. It's two thousand and four. Jeremy
and Leo have both been serving more than fifteen years
in prison. When Sinda Williams finds out the fingerprints in
Michelle Schofield's car match Jeremy Scott. Sinda sees Jeremy's rap
(43:19):
sheet theft, assault, arson, vagrancy, burglary. The list goes on
topped off by two first degree murders, acquitted of one,
convicted of the other. And so I spoke to a
sergeant and I told him, listen, this is something that
(43:40):
has come to light here. I understand it is not
our jurisdiction or our investigation, but I need to give
you this information because I feel it's important. This prant
was run. It came back to an individual named Jeremy Scott,
I think you guys need to probably look at this.
I don't know if you've ever looked at it before,
but here's the information. Then she calls Leo's wife, Chrissie.
(44:05):
I couldn't believe it. I was expecting a tow truck
driver and instead they match a killer. Realistically, what would
the case look like had this state known it at
the time, Scott cupp here's the news from his wife
Cinda that night, and he's thinking from a legal perspective
(44:27):
that Leo would never be in prison if these prints
in Michelle Scofield's Mazda had been properly investigated back in
nineteen eighty seven. This prosecutor, this police agency, they knew
all too well about who Jeremy Scott was, and if
part of their initial investigation was the identity of those
(44:49):
prints to Jeremy Scott, that's where the investigation would have gone.
I mean, Aguero was a good prosecutor. I mean he
he convicted Leo with nothing matching what he could have
done with Jeremy Scott. After getting a match on the fingerprints,
(45:10):
there's a celebratory dinner. That's what Chrissy's up to when
she gets a call from Leo. She doesn't want to
tell him anything on the phone, though she's going to
visit him in the morning. She wants to tell him
in person, so instead she hands the phone over to
Scott Cupp. Cupp had been trying to stay out of
Leo's case. He'd only agreed to represent Chrissy, but now
(45:33):
he sees that there's evidence someone else may have killed Michelle.
Until this moment, Leo and Cupp had never spoken before,
and now Cup can't hide his excitement. He says to me,
I'm going to get you out there in ninety days, buddy.
My wife was giddy. He was giddy, and this is
(45:53):
this is mom's feeling. I'm aggravated the ship. I'm like,
you gotta fucking be kime me. You know, he sounds
half lit. I'm in a prison and my emotions are
now exploding. The next morning, Chrissy comes to the prison
and meets with Leo in the visitation room. So he
(46:15):
sit down. I say, we'll have a match on the
fingerprints and give him a name. And at the time,
I didn't realize how difficult that was going to be
for him. It was very painful. His first reaction was
to put his head down and cry, I've had this
(46:38):
mantle of a murderer on my shoulders for all these years,
you know, and it come out and and say, we
got the guy. He's we got him. He's frantically length
we know who it is. We he's a murder and
all this other stuff, and I'm saying, that's the guy
who murdered my life, you know what I mean. So
there was so much. It just it was an explosion
of stuff and I got I was, I was, you know,
(47:01):
I was really mad. And it took me some days
to uh, to get control of that. When Sindon notifies
(47:23):
the Polk County Sheriff's Office about the prince, a new
investigation into Jeremy Scott is opened. Two cold case detectives
from the Polk County Sheriff's Office are sent to interview
Jeremy in prison. They tell him that his prints were
found inside the car of Michelle Scofield, who was murdered
eighteen years ago. They asked Jeremy what he knows. Jeremy
(47:48):
says he doesn't know anything about a murder, but if
his fingerprints are in the car, maybe he'd broken into it.
He tells them he must have stolen a half dozen
car stereos while he was living on the streets, but
he's clearly shaken. Soon after the detectives leave, Jeremy calls
the only person he's in contact with outside of prison,
(48:09):
his grandmother Erline, and this call is recorded by the
Florida Department of Corrections. Grandma, listen, I want you to listen.
All right, all right, I'm listening. Have anybody come fart
to you? What murder? Murder? Who got murdered? Some girl
(48:30):
back in eighty seven at Samon we lived on Comby Road. Yeah,
they said they found the girl's body in the lake.
Hello one right, Well, just tell him you don't know nothing,
and you ain't seen nothing, heard nothing, and just leave
you alone. They're coming back, Grandma. Wow, just tell him
(48:52):
you don't know nothing. But they told him back, Grandma.
They ain't got no proof. Soon they got a pawprint
that could have been anybody too. I mean, dam comps.
All they do is framed people. Oh lord, they stoopid.
I hate god deem cops, son of a bitches. I
(49:14):
hate them. The girl they're coming. Bone Valley is a
production of Lava for Good Podcasts in association with Signal
(49:35):
Company Number One. Our executive producers are Jason Flam and
Kevin Wurdis. Karak Kornhaber is our senior producer. Brit Spangler
is our sound designer. Roxandra Guidi is our editor. Fact
checking by Maximo Anderson. Our producer and researcher is Kelsey Decker.
(49:56):
Our theme song, The One Who's Holding the Stars, is
performed by Leebob and the Truth. It was written by
Leo Schofield and Kevin Herrick in Florida's Hearty Correctional Institution.
Bone Valley is written and produced by me Gilbert King.
You can follow the show on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter
at Lava for Good. To see photos and documents from
(50:19):
our investigation and exclusive behind the scenes content, visit Lava
Forgod dot com slash Bone Valley
I was blown away because I'm like, why would his
fingerprint be in the vehicle? Why would that not have
been something that had been investigated. When Police Captain Sinda
Williams ran the Prince that had been found in Michelle
Scofield's car seventeen years ago, she wasn't expecting anything, but
(00:31):
there was a hit, So I ran a criminal history
check on Jeremy Scott. Now, Sinda wasn't really supposed to
have run these prints. The Michelle Scofield case is under
Polk County's jurisdiction, not Hendry County, where she works, but
because of her friendship with Chrissy, she decides to look
into Jeremy Scott anyway. I felt like it was the
(00:55):
right thing to do, and he had um an extensive
criminal history. And when I say extensive, I mean mostly
violent crime charges of grand theft, burglary, multiple assaults, arson,
(01:20):
and two arrests for murder. Do you my man left
to my fields step sor in this vast reach that'spra
(02:11):
to the worm to st Bone Valley? Chapter five? Bam, bam?
(03:05):
Who is Jeremy Scott? Who is this man whose fingerprints
turned up in the car Michelle Scofield was driving on
the night she was murdered. Kelsey and I wanted to
find out everything we could about him. We started filing
record requests. We got police reports from both the Sheriff's
(03:25):
office and the Lakeland Police Department. They documented dozens of
Jeremy's arrests in Polk County, and we were also able
to get our hands on Jeremy's psychiatric reports. He was
evaluated by psychologists while awaiting trial on a homicide charge.
This homicide charge, Jeremy would eventually be convicted for it.
(03:46):
We'll get back to that later. But after he was
found guilty, several of Jeremy's family members testified, pleading with
the judge and jury to spare Jeremy's life, to sentence
him to life in prison instead of giving him the
death penalty. Their testimony about Jeremy's childhood and upbringing paints
(04:07):
a Scott family portrait that can only be described as
chaotic and unstable. We started compiling this testimony and other
documents we'd been able to dig up, and we were
able to make a rough timeline of Jeremy's early life.
Jeremy was born in Michigan on April twenty ninth, nineteen
(04:29):
sixty nine. According to family testimony, his mother Linda immediately
rejected him when she brought him home from the hospital.
Linda didn't want anything to do with him. She was
fifteen at the time and using drugs, so she left
him with her parents. So Jeremy's grandparents, Arline and Stacy Scott.
(04:49):
They raise him, and Jeremy grows up calling them mom
and Dad, and they call him Bam Bam because he
liked to hit stuff. But early in works and Stacy
struggles with alcoholism, so Jeremy spends much of his early
years in the care of his aunt Debbie, who's just fourteen.
Then one day, when Jeremy was two or three, he
(05:12):
was left without supervision and was hit by a neighbor's car.
His psych reports say that there was significant injury to
the right frontal area of his skull. It seems this
incident may have left Jeremy with lasting brain damage, and
soon after Jeremy's uncle Tom moved in. Tom pretty severely
(05:33):
abused Jeremy. He would beat him and call him names.
According to his aunt Debby's testimony, when Jeremy starts school,
sounds like he doesn't do very well. He has to
repeat kindergarten and he's placed in special education classes. And
then we get to the mid to late seventies and
the family starts to relocate down to Florida. They were
(05:55):
up in Michigan, and they start trickling down to various
parts of the state. They settle in Perry in the
Florida Panhandle, and also in central Florida, Lakeland, Kissimmee, Davenport,
and Mulberry. It's hard to piece together exactly where Jeremy
was and when and who cared for him. He was
being passed back and forth between different caregivers, different family members,
(06:19):
but at some point he ends up back with his mother, Linda.
Jeremy's aunt, Debbie, says that Linda was beating him with
belts and with sticks, and the school he was attending
at that time took notice. They reported the abuse, and
it seems like at that point Jeremy was removed from
his mother's care and placed into foster care. After fourth grade,
(06:44):
Jeremy stops regularly attending school, and by eighth grade he's
apparently dropped out of school entirely. Somewhere in that time,
he starts getting in trouble with the law too. The
first arrest we have on record is August nineteen eighty
It was for petty theft, burglary, criminal mischief, dealing in
(07:06):
stolen property, and unauthorized use of a motor vehicle, all
misdemeanor charges. But he was only eleven years old. That's
five charges. Around this same time, Jeremy's already living on
the streets and he asks his sixteen year old aunt
for money, food, and clothes, which she isn't always able
(07:27):
to provide. And then in January of nineteen eighty two,
he's arrested for grand theft and burglary, and those are
felony charges. Jeremy was twelve, and this is when things
become a little more serious for him. There are some
real repercussions. He's sent away to Okachobee, the juvenile detention
(07:48):
facility in South Florida, so he's in and out of
Okachobee between the ages of thirteen and fifteen. After one
of Jeremy's stays at Okachobee, he lands in a little
town in Polk County, just outside of Lakeland. It's called
Eagle Lake. From Jeremy's criminal records and police reports, we
(08:09):
learned about a murder that took place in this area
in nineteen eighty five, when Jeremy was just fifteen years old,
so we tried to track down some of the other
people whose names we found in the documents. Okay, I'm
out here. I'm about to meet with Nancy, and I
think her mother, Wilma is here. I'm just gonna walk
(08:30):
over there right now on a picnic bench underneath the tree.
Nancy and her mom, Wilma, are still living in the
area where the crime took place. I called them after
seeing Nancy's name in a witness deposition. I was especially
interested in talking to them because they said they remember Jeremy. Hello,
(08:53):
you must be Wilma. We talked on the phone. Kilburn, Hi, Nancy,
how are you. Nancy says she first met Jeremy while
he was working the rides at the Florida Citrus Festival
in nearby winter Haven. Nancy was around thirteen years old
and Jeremy was fifteen. We all went to the fair,
(09:14):
and we'd go every single night. What kind of fair
was it? It was just a carnival. You had the
sea dragon, you had the zipper, the one that spins
around Himalaya. What was Jeremy Scott doing there? He was
actually running the Sea Dragon and he so he when
you were at the fair, like he would he would
be the guy that would put you on the rides.
That was his job. No, he actually was the one
(09:36):
that turned it on. It was in the mechanical part.
So he was basically a carney Carney. Nancy and her
friends would see him every night over the ten days
the festival was in town. So when me and the
girls got on and we got an extra ride, like, hey,
I got that extra ride. And when the festival eventually
packs up, Jeremy sticks around the area. I think he
(10:01):
just came into town and decided to stay for a
little bit. He was quiet, Yeah, I mean like shy,
very shy compared to like the average kids. And I
mean until he got to know you, you know, I
do know he was like maybe slow. I don't know
how to better explain him. He just was different, you know,
(10:25):
I don't know if it's a disability or what. Because
back then, Nancy grew up with the sense that she
should protect kids like Jeremy, so she would make sure
to include him when she and her friends would play
sports and hang around the park. Jeremy would stay over
at their house some nights too. He'd crash on the couch.
He was polite because it's like he had respect, I
(10:47):
guess his best way to say it, because I never
saw temper out of him or anything. But then Jeremy
stops coming over to Nancy and Wilma's houses often, and
Nancy she starts seeing Jeremy with one of her neighbors,
an ex con by the name of Smokey Johnson. Smokey
picks up Jeremy while he's hitchhiking one day. Smokey is
(11:10):
forty six and Jeremy is just fifteen. Honestly, but I mean,
it's really weird that somebody that much older would be
hanging out with you. You know that spring On April eleventh,
nineteen eighty five, Smokey seventy five year old mother Jul
Johnson was found dead in a locked trailer behind her house. Now,
(11:35):
she lived right around the corner from More. We lived
right and Jul Johnson was just like a sweet elderly woman.
I mean, everybody yes saying that she was a very
sweet lady. Now that's different people that I'm knew quite
whale yeah that she is a very sweet lady. Jul
(11:56):
Johnson suffered blunt force trauma to the head and she
was shot in the torso, presumably with the twenty two
caliber rifle found at the scene. Detective Richard Putnell, the
same detective that would work Michelle's Scofield's murder two years later,
conducts the investigation. Detective Putnell talks to Jule Johnson's son, Smokey,
(12:19):
who says that about fifty dollars in rolled coins was
taken from the house, as well as some large knives.
As far as we can tell, there are no eye
witnesses to the killing and no one claims to have
heard any gunshots. But then detective Putnell interviews two teenage
girls in the neighborhood and the investigation takes a new direction.
(12:43):
Thirteen year old Luanda Green and fifteen year old Anne
Aldridge tell detective Putnell that they know Jeremy and they
remember seeing him on his bike just hours after Jule's murder.
They say Jeremy had on all new clothes when they
saw him, gray jacket, gray shirt, gray pants instead of
his usual jeans and T shirt. He also had a
(13:06):
bunch of coins on him. He told them that his
grandfather just died and left him fifty dollars. He showed
the coins and said, this is all I have left.
He had a red bag with him and said there's
a big knife in there. Not long after Jul Johnson
is killed, Jeremy stops by Nancy's place. He just swung
(13:30):
by the house to tell us why. Like, the conversation
was really really short, not like where he was before that,
you know, he laughed or whatever. It was just different.
He just said that we wouldn't get to see him
no more. He would staying away because he was in trouble.
After I interviewed Nancy and Wilma at the ballpark, they
(13:52):
tell me to follow their car and they'll point out
Jul Johnson's house. And this is really earl back here,
a lot less houses, just little farmhouses. Cattle. Yeah, there
it is. I can see the little shed in the
back under tree. That's where I think they found the
(14:17):
body of Joe Johnson. Investigators weren't able to lift any
prints from the rifle found at the crime scene. Whoever
shot Jul Johnson must have wiped down the weapon afterwards,
but they were able to lift fingerprints from a coin
wrapper and jewels, broken eyeglasses. The Polk County Sheriff's office
(14:42):
compares the prince to Jeremy's. It's a match. Jeremy Scott,
now sixteen, becomes the leads suspect in the murder of
Jewel Johnson. Three weeks after the killing, Jeremy's arrested and
charged with first degree murder. At his arrangement, the judge,
(15:04):
who spent years presiding over juvenile cases, recognizes Jeremy's name.
He tells reporters he wasn't surprised. He says, quote, this
was one of those situations in which there was nothing
the system could do. Jeremy was in jail, and he
(15:29):
was a young man, very immature, very i'm gonna say,
mentally disturbed in the sense that he had a number
of mental illnesses. He was a severely abused child. You know,
he was cutting himself quite a bit in the jail.
This is Austin Meslanic, who was an attorney with the
Public Defender's Office. Meslantic was assigned to represent Jeremy in
(15:54):
the murder of Jule Johnson. I mean the state was
seeking the death penal because this was before the United
States Freme Court had ruled that juveniles were not eligible
for the death penalty, and you know, in Pope County
at that time, the state went for the death penalty
on just about every case. He was young, he was difficult,
(16:18):
sometimes he was cooperative, sometimes he wasn't. This is Tony Maloney.
She's the investigator from the Public Defender's Office. She was
assigned to Leo Schofield's case in nineteen eighty eight, before
Leo dropped them and hired Jack Edmond instead. But before
all that, back in nineteen eighty five, she was assigned
(16:39):
to Jeremy Scott's defense in the Jule Johnson murder. It
was hard for him to stay on task for any
period of time, and then even when he did, it
was sort of like, you know, as he really connecting
the dots here, not out of touch with reality, but
an inability to calmly control on. At trial, the state
(17:04):
presents a pretty simple case. They say that while Smokey
Johnson is at work, Jewel catches Jeremy trying to steal
her rolls of coins. She tells Jeremy she's calling the sheriff,
so he hits her over the head and shoots her
with a rifle. But the public defenders did witness interviews
and brought in a mental health expert to defend Jeremy
(17:25):
at trial, and you put on a pretty aggressive defense.
Gess what he did. Jeremy takes the stand at trial
and says that it was Smokey Johnson who killed his
own mother. Jeremy says he was a witness to the killing.
He said it happened after Smokey and Jewel argued about
smoking weed. Several jurors said that they didn't think Jeremy
(17:49):
killed Juel Johnson because he didn't seem intelligent enough to
remove his fingerprints from the murder weapon. Smokey, on the
other hand, had done some time for selling, and he
apparently didn't come across too well at trial. That's how
in September nineteen eighty five, Jeremy Scott is acquitted of
(18:10):
Jule Johnson's murder. The state never prosecute Smoky because of
the strength of his alibi. Multiple co workers testify that
he was at work at the time his mother was murdered.
Jule Johnson's murder is still considered unsolved to this day,
but the state of Florida didn't seem too happy about
(18:30):
Jeremy's acquittal, so they weren't so quick to release him.
While Jeremy was in the jail awaiting trial, he lit
his mattress on fire. So after he's acquitted in the
Jule Johnson murder, he's held in the Polk County jail
for the arson charge that happened months before. To me
and Kelsey, though it seems like Jeremy literally got away
(18:53):
with murder, I think that's sort of a bitch ruin
a bunch of people's lives. This is Lee Underwood. We
reached out to him because he was a close friend
of Michelle Schofield's back in the day. She was a
very very very special friend of mine, like a sister.
(19:19):
It was Michelle who gave him his nickname, Lee the Flee,
and she named me that basically because I was always
playing to a lead the police and then am stuck
with Today. We tracked Lee the Flee down in Wisconsin,
and as we were talking, the interview took an unexpected turn.
(19:42):
Did you didn't know Jeremy Scott, did you? I was
in chill with them back at eighty Sorry. We checked
this and Lee is a little off on the year.
Based on arrest records, the cops finally caught up with
Lee in nineteen eighty five. They locked him up in
the Polk County ja on charges of well fleeing police,
(20:03):
and Lee tells us one of his cellmates then was
Jeremy Scott. Lee was there when Jeremy set his mattress
on fire, and he remembers when Jeremy was acquitted of
killing Jule Johnson. I don't know how he got off
of it. He had brack to everybody in the sell
about doing it. This guy was crazy. He'd like make
(20:27):
a shake like a jail knive out of a razor
right around the jail, cutting people just at random. This
kid was crazy, and he had a look in his
eye just like like he wasn't right. Jeremy is convicted
(20:52):
on the arson charge and shipped off to state prison.
By the time he's released, it's December nineteen eighty six.
Leo and Michelle Scofield have been married for about four months.
They're living in the little trailer near Cumby Settlement. They're
going to church. Leo's playing music and Michelle has yet
(21:15):
to start her job at Tom's restaurant. Jeremy Scott is
back on the streets, and this time he's in Lakeland. Hi.
I'm Jason Flom, CEO and founder of Lava for Good podcasts,
(21:38):
home to Bone Valley, Wrongful Conviction, The War on Drugs,
and many other great podcasts. Today we're asking you, our listeners,
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(22:00):
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for your support. Bone Valley is sponsored by Stand Together.
Stand Together is a philanthropic community that partners with America's
boldest change makers to tackle the root causes of our
country's biggest problems, including the broken criminal justice system. Weldon
(22:25):
Angelos is one of those changemakers. At the age of
twenty three, Weldon was arrested for a first time offense
of selling weed to a confidential informant. At the time,
he was a budding musician spending time with artists like
Tupac Snoop Dog, Pink, and Nas. His entire life was
ahead of him when he was sentenced to a mandatory
(22:46):
fifty five years in federal prison without the possibility of
early release. After serving thirteen years, a bipartisan effort led
to him getting officially pardoned. Upon his release, he founded
the Weldon Project, a nonprofit working to create better outcomes
for those still in prison that funds social change and
(23:08):
provides financial aid for all those who were still serving
time for cannabis related offenses. Weldon Angelos is one of
the many entrepreneurs partnering with Stand Together to drive solutions
in education, healthcare, poverty, and criminal justice. To learn more
about the War on Drugs, listen to the War on
(23:29):
Drugs podcast on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
Let's see, this is just kind of describing Lakeland, how
it all came to be. We're at Heide's emen's house,
looking through boxes. Heidi, her sister Wendy, and their parents
(23:52):
were living in Lakeland when Jeremy Scott entered their lives.
Heidi's parents were professors. Her dad taught Greek and mom
taught English, and for a while in the nineteen eighties,
they took in local teenagers they called throwaway kids who
had been kicked out or we're living on the streets.
The Zeeman's offered them a place to stay. My dad
(24:14):
was you know, he was a writer. He just wrote, wrote,
so when when he passed away, there were boxes and
boxes of writing. So as I was pulling everything out,
I was trying to decide, you know, what was what.
And I came across this and I was like, oh,
my gosh, like this is the story of all the kids.
So it was pretty neat. And then I found Mom's
(24:36):
notebook and I was like, oh, this is really cool
that they both wrote the kids stories. The Zeemans first
started taking in kids living on the street when Heidi's
sister Wendy started dating a boy named Mike Jason. Yeah.
I've been on the streets when I was fourteen because
my brother and I got didn't get along, so you know,
I just felt like I was the black sheep of
(24:57):
the family, so I left. I was scared I was
gonna die. Honestly, living on the streets, didn't know where
you're gonna eat. You wore the same clothes all the time,
and it was a struggle Heidi and Wendy's parents let
Mike live with them, and then they start letting some
of Mike's friends who also had nowhere else to go
(25:20):
into their house. And then before you knew it, it
was Mike. You know. There were so many kids and
they they would sleep wherever they could fit at the
Zeeman's house, in the garage, on couches or on the
living room floor. When they ran out of floor space
and couch space, someone might sleep on the recliner. And
(25:40):
then I kind of became part of the family. Rob
Morales was one of the teens staying at the Zeeman house.
Rob also went by Spot because you had this one
patch of white on a head full of black hair.
I flip on the couch because I didn't have any
place to go. Well, that's where I met Jeremy. It's
(26:04):
the summer of nineteen eighty eight, the summer that Leo
Schofield is arrested and charged with the murder of his wife, Michelle.
Jeremy Scott, homeless, finds his way into the Zeeman House
in Lakeland. He's nineteen years old now, but he's already
had a couple of stints in state prison. Spot describes
(26:24):
Jeremy as impulsive and violent. Usually every time you know,
we met up, we were either getting into a fight
with someone else or you know, he was always the
first to come to gun. He made me nervous. This
is Tracy Slaughter. That's summer nineteen eighty eight. She's sixteen,
(26:48):
she's dating Spot, and she and Wendy Zeeman are almost inseparable.
That was the Death Leopard summer. And you walk around
with your gray boom BOXX and you keep flipping it
back and forth. Wendy and I would walk and we
would walk, and we would walk. You would walk everywhere,
and you had to have your your buga shell necklace on,
and you had to have your your black leather like
(27:11):
a stretchy leer targ type pants that had looked like
they were satiny looking, you know, and then some type
of bright tangerine top or something like that. That was
that summer. And I associate all of that with with this.
(27:32):
This is a summer Tracy would never forget. As Tracy's
hanging out at the Zeeman house, she sees Jeremy coming
and going with his friend Cheryl. Cheryl is about ten
years older than Tracy, and she has a car. One night,
Cheryl takes Tracy and Wendy Zeeman out for a ride.
(27:53):
So we went and she bought a bottle of Seagrum seven.
Don't drink it to this day. Then Cheryl says, we
need to go pick up Jeremy, and that's what they do.
I knew that I didn't want him to be there,
that's all. That was just my feeling, because then Cheryl
also let him drive, and we thought that was odd
(28:15):
because she relinquished her vehicle over it to him. And
I remember when we stopped the convenient storage by the
second bottle of Seagram seven. Yeah, Jeremy drops off Wendy
and Cheryl at the Zieman house. He drives off with
Tracy for coffee to sober her up before taking her home,
and then it all just went to help him there.
(28:38):
Tracy tells me that instead of taking her home, Jeremy
drives her to a wooded area off a two lane road.
It's dark, there aren't any street lights, and very little traffic.
She doesn't go into detail, but she makes it clear
that Jeremy sexually assaulted her that night. She says she
(28:59):
can remember laying in the sand on the side of
the road and hearing a car drive by without stopping.
I was sixteen years old, and then that was my
welcome into the world. Around the same time, Heide Zeeman
(29:22):
starts noticing that her sister, Wendy is not really acting
like herself. It was obvious there was something wrong. One day,
Jeremy's in the house and the Zeeman's here Wendy scream.
He walked in on her one day in the shower,
and she ripped the shower curtain off and started screaming,
(29:43):
and so, you know, we kind of knew that was
such a violent reaction that she had to him. You know,
you could tell something had happened. Wendy tells her mom
that not long before the shower incident, Jeremy had raped her.
Jeremy didn't want to be thrown out of the house,
so we tried to keep Wendy quiet. From my understanding,
(30:05):
he told her that if she if she told anybody,
or if she did anything, he would kill her. And
so I think she was just terrified fourteen year old girl.
The Zeemans do kick Jeremy out of the house, and
now they're left to figure out what to do next.
They're devastated about what Jeremy did to Wendy, But the
(30:26):
Zeemans as a family basically decide that they were not
going to report Jeremy's sexual assault. They just didn't want
to expose their fourteen year old daughter to an investigation
in a trial. And Wendy Zeman wouldn't seem to recover
from the trauma that happened so early in her life.
(30:46):
What did she do afterwards? She never did anything after that.
She never went back to school, she was never a
room holden job. She got to the point where she
didn't want to leave the house. I mean, she was
just so paranoid about everything and everybody, and it just
got worse through the years. And then there's Tracy. If
(31:09):
I say that something I did today was because of him,
I'm allowing him to control my life, and I'm allowing
him to attack me and be ugly to me every
single time that I allow him to take part of
my life. I'm not giving him He's gotten all for me,
He's ever getting from me. After Jeremy sexually assaulted her,
(31:35):
she stopped talking to her best friend Wendy and stopped
going to the Zeman's house. She just wanted to move on.
Tracy still lives in Polk County. She's got her own
children now, and I got the impression that she's happily
married and doing well. Her friend, Wendy Zeeman wasn't so lucky.
Her mental and physical health continued to decline, and she
(31:57):
died of heart failure in twenty fifteen at the age
of forty one. Tracy had no idea that Wendy had
her own traumatic experience with Jeremy Scott. We were the
ones to break the news to her more than three
decades later. I felt bad after you told me that
Wendy had passed and stuff like that. I was like,
(32:18):
maybe I should have continued being her friend. I didn't
know that he affected her, and she didn't know he
affected me, so you know what I mean. So I
kind of felt I still kind of feel like shit,
but there's not nice to do about it. It is
what it is at this point. So the Zeemans had
(32:39):
their hearts in the right place. According to their youngest daughter, Heidi,
her parents did make a difference in the lives of
some of the kids, like Spot, who had a successful
military career and returned to Lakeland to thank mister and
Missus Zeeman for all their help. But some of the
throwaway kids that went through the Zemon house weren't as
lucky as spot. Many of the boys ended up dead
(33:01):
or in prison, and the Zeman's older daughter, Wendy, paid
the price for her parents good intentions. Mister Zeeman died
a year after his daughter Wendy. His younger daughter, Heidi,
went through his possessions and she came across all of
his papers and writing, as well as the journal he
(33:22):
was keeping back in the nineteen eighties. So he starts
off with the kids who had passed away. Yeah, so
he starts off with Harry, which she was so attached
to Harry. So Aaron Louis, mister and Missus Zeman tried
(33:46):
to keep track of them all to record some details
about each life. To them, they weren't throwaways, they were
children who had fallen through the cracks. And then this
is the part, like I said, that talks about Jeremy.
When he talks about Jeremy, he even says, I'm not
going to give him his own story because I'm not
(34:06):
going to give him the satisfaction of giving him his
own story because of what he did In his journal,
mister Zeman acknowledges Jeremy's troubled life, but he also goes
on to say that Jeremy, upset about being kicked out
of the house, cut the brakes on Missus Zeeman's car,
But mister Zeman writes that murder attempt was not successful.
(34:36):
After Jeremy Scott left so much destruction in his wake,
he took off with another boy who was living at
the Zeman's. His name is Larry Brian Hall, but he
goes by Brian for a little while. Brian moves into
a small place with Wendy's ex boyfriend Mike. Jeremy and
him were why he's going off in the evening at
(34:57):
nighttime when Brian stayed at my place. Mike seems concerned
because he knew Brian could easily get caught up with
the wrong people like Jeremy. He was trying to figure
out how to survive, and he followed people. I just
think he didn't know any better. He would just do
whatever somebody said to do. You know. That was one
of the things Brian told me. He said he is
(35:19):
scared of him. Brian eventually moves out of Mike's apartment
and goes off with Jeremy. But Jeremy and Brian have
nowhere to live. They're staying wherever they can, sometimes in
abandoned buildings. They start breaking into houses together. Spots still
in the area too, and he hears that Jeremy and
Brian are hanging out in downtown Lakeland at night around
(35:42):
Lake Morton. Okay, well Late Morton needs to be a
Oh I gotta put this a gay pickup zone. Oh okay,
so that was I hate to get Grafford. It's okay,
it's okay. So at that time, what would happened was
(36:02):
anybody that was looking to get money, you would hang
out at the lake at night, and then somebody would
drive around the lake and if they flashed their lights,
that meant that they were looking. And then you would
flash your lights, which meant that yes, you were available.
So they would do whatever they wanted, you know, and
(36:23):
then they'd pay you forty or fifty bucks. And then
if you stayed out there long enough, you know, you
can get you know, three or four people at night.
So he was kind of a hustler. Yeah. According to Spot,
Jeremy was targeting gay men. Usually he'd robbed them and
these men were not likely to contact law enforcement, not
(36:46):
if they had to explain to police why they were
cruising around Lake Morton. This is what Jeremy and Brian
were up to on Halloween night nineteen eighty eight. It's
about three am and they're hanging out by the lake.
Jeremy's been drinking and they call a middle aged gay
man named Donald moorehead. Jeremy's been with him before, and
(37:09):
Donald drives over to pick the two teenagers up in
his Chevy Baretta. He brings Brian and Jeremy back to
his trailer in Lakeland. They're drinking and smoking, and Donald
ends up falling asleep naked in a rocking chair. But
the robbery, everything just happened been such a even as
(37:34):
all these years do I'm comfortable to talk about. Here's
Brian Hall. He's serving a life sentence at Hearty Correctional Institution.
He's thin, sunken eyes, and graying hair. He tells us
what happened in the trailer with Jeremy. He waited till
(37:57):
Donald was asleep, and I was looking for money and
things in the house or a trailer, and then the
last thing I was expecting was that he was going
to kill him. Brian didn't go into great detail, but
(38:18):
according to the testimony he gave in court, here's what happened.
Jeremy woke Brian up early in the morning on November first.
He was searching Donald's trailer for cash. Jeremy tells Brian
that they'll need to kill Donald so he doesn't turn
them in. And then Jeremy picks up a glass bottle
(38:40):
of grape juice and repeatedly hits Donald over the head
with it. Donald slumps out of the rocking chair, but
is making some gurgling noises, so Jeremy strangles him with
a telephone cord. Jeremy then wipes down the grape juice
bottle and places it back in the fridge. Brian Hall
(39:05):
is the only person we know of who actually saw
Jeremy Scott kill someone, and he did in such a
way that this seemed like like you had swat a fly.
Just didn't seem to have any concern or conscience on it.
(39:29):
What were you thinking while you were sitting there and
watching this happen. It was just talking out of body experience,
just in fear of seeing something that you didn't think
someone was capable of doing. It was just a side
of him that I didn't see. Sometimes you find out
(39:56):
more and more as time goes on about people that
you never knew. You never knew him like you thought
you knew him. After killing Donald, Brian and Jeremy steal
his Chevy. They take off to a town called Davenport,
about thirty miles east in Polk County. Jeremy's mother and
stepfather lived there, and his brother lived close by. But
(40:19):
when a police helicopter starts circling over the neighborhood, Jeremy
runs off into the woods. Deputies are in pursuit now,
and Jeremy surrenders. He leads them to his mom's trailer,
where Brian is sleeping. The two teenagers are arrested and
taken into custody in early November of nineteen eighty eight.
(40:42):
By this time, Leo Schofield is sitting in the Pulk
County jail awaiting trial. The same prosecutor in Leo's case
is assigned to prosecute Jeremy Scott and Brian Hall the
man with the electric chair tie clip. Assistant State Attorney
John Aguero. Aguero offers Brian a deal. He says he'll
(41:03):
take the death penalty off the table if Brian testifies
to what he saw Jeremy do. Brian takes the deal,
he sentenced to life in prison and testifies against Jeremy.
The jury recommends life in prison for Jeremy, but Aguero
convinces the judge to override the jury's recommendation. The judge agrees,
(41:27):
and Jeremy Scott is sentenced to death. A reporter for
the Tampa Tribune is sitting in the courtroom watching Jeremy
as the sentence is read. She writes that she sees Jeremy,
who is handcuffed with his legs shackled, glanced back at
his crying grandmother. As Jeremy is led away, he too
(41:49):
begins to cry. Smokey Johnson was also in the courtroom
during sentencing. Smokey is convinced Jeremy got away with killing
his mother, Julee Johnson and four years prior, so he
shows up at Jeremy's hearing for satisfaction, he says. Smokey
tells the reporter what goes around comes around. A few
(42:13):
years later, the Florida Supreme Court overturns Jeremy's death sentence,
citing factors such as is borderline intelligence, emotional instability, and
a childhood rife with abuse. So, at twenty three years old,
Jeremy comes off death row and begins serving a life
sentence for the murder of Donald Moorehead without any possibility
(42:35):
for parole. Jeremy Scott is now locked up for good.
(42:58):
So I picked up the telephone own and I contacted
Polk County Sheriff's office. It's two thousand and four. Jeremy
and Leo have both been serving more than fifteen years
in prison. When Sinda Williams finds out the fingerprints in
Michelle Schofield's car match Jeremy Scott. Sinda sees Jeremy's rap
(43:19):
sheet theft, assault, arson, vagrancy, burglary. The list goes on
topped off by two first degree murders, acquitted of one,
convicted of the other. And so I spoke to a
sergeant and I told him, listen, this is something that
(43:40):
has come to light here. I understand it is not
our jurisdiction or our investigation, but I need to give
you this information because I feel it's important. This prant
was run. It came back to an individual named Jeremy Scott,
I think you guys need to probably look at this.
I don't know if you've ever looked at it before,
but here's the information. Then she calls Leo's wife, Chrissie.
(44:05):
I couldn't believe it. I was expecting a tow truck
driver and instead they match a killer. Realistically, what would
the case look like had this state known it at
the time, Scott cupp here's the news from his wife
Cinda that night, and he's thinking from a legal perspective
(44:27):
that Leo would never be in prison if these prints
in Michelle Scofield's Mazda had been properly investigated back in
nineteen eighty seven. This prosecutor, this police agency, they knew
all too well about who Jeremy Scott was, and if
part of their initial investigation was the identity of those
(44:49):
prints to Jeremy Scott, that's where the investigation would have gone.
I mean, Aguero was a good prosecutor. I mean he
he convicted Leo with nothing matching what he could have
done with Jeremy Scott. After getting a match on the fingerprints,
(45:10):
there's a celebratory dinner. That's what Chrissy's up to when
she gets a call from Leo. She doesn't want to
tell him anything on the phone, though she's going to
visit him in the morning. She wants to tell him
in person, so instead she hands the phone over to
Scott Cupp. Cupp had been trying to stay out of
Leo's case. He'd only agreed to represent Chrissy, but now
(45:33):
he sees that there's evidence someone else may have killed Michelle.
Until this moment, Leo and Cupp had never spoken before,
and now Cup can't hide his excitement. He says to me,
I'm going to get you out there in ninety days, buddy.
My wife was giddy. He was giddy, and this is
(45:53):
this is mom's feeling. I'm aggravated the ship. I'm like,
you gotta fucking be kime me. You know, he sounds
half lit. I'm in a prison and my emotions are
now exploding. The next morning, Chrissy comes to the prison
and meets with Leo in the visitation room. So he
(46:15):
sit down. I say, we'll have a match on the
fingerprints and give him a name. And at the time,
I didn't realize how difficult that was going to be
for him. It was very painful. His first reaction was
to put his head down and cry, I've had this
(46:38):
mantle of a murderer on my shoulders for all these years,
you know, and it come out and and say, we
got the guy. He's we got him. He's frantically length
we know who it is. We he's a murder and
all this other stuff, and I'm saying, that's the guy
who murdered my life, you know what I mean. So
there was so much. It just it was an explosion
of stuff and I got I was, I was, you know,
(47:01):
I was really mad. And it took me some days
to uh, to get control of that. When Sindon notifies
(47:23):
the Polk County Sheriff's Office about the prince, a new
investigation into Jeremy Scott is opened. Two cold case detectives
from the Polk County Sheriff's Office are sent to interview
Jeremy in prison. They tell him that his prints were
found inside the car of Michelle Scofield, who was murdered
eighteen years ago. They asked Jeremy what he knows. Jeremy
(47:48):
says he doesn't know anything about a murder, but if
his fingerprints are in the car, maybe he'd broken into it.
He tells them he must have stolen a half dozen
car stereos while he was living on the streets, but
he's clearly shaken. Soon after the detectives leave, Jeremy calls
the only person he's in contact with outside of prison,
(48:09):
his grandmother Erline, and this call is recorded by the
Florida Department of Corrections. Grandma, listen, I want you to listen.
All right, all right, I'm listening. Have anybody come fart
to you? What murder? Murder? Who got murdered? Some girl
(48:30):
back in eighty seven at Samon we lived on Comby Road. Yeah,
they said they found the girl's body in the lake.
Hello one right, Well, just tell him you don't know nothing,
and you ain't seen nothing, heard nothing, and just leave
you alone. They're coming back, Grandma. Wow, just tell him
(48:52):
you don't know nothing. But they told him back, Grandma.
They ain't got no proof. Soon they got a pawprint
that could have been anybody too. I mean, dam comps.
All they do is framed people. Oh lord, they stoopid.
I hate god deem cops, son of a bitches. I
(49:14):
hate them. The girl they're coming. Bone Valley is a
production of Lava for Good Podcasts in association with Signal
(49:35):
Company Number One. Our executive producers are Jason Flam and
Kevin Wurdis. Karak Kornhaber is our senior producer. Brit Spangler
is our sound designer. Roxandra Guidi is our editor. Fact
checking by Maximo Anderson. Our producer and researcher is Kelsey Decker.
(49:56):
Our theme song, The One Who's Holding the Stars, is
performed by Leebob and the Truth. It was written by
Leo Schofield and Kevin Herrick in Florida's Hearty Correctional Institution.
Bone Valley is written and produced by me Gilbert King.
You can follow the show on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter
at Lava for Good. To see photos and documents from
(50:19):
our investigation and exclusive behind the scenes content, visit Lava
Forgod dot com slash Bone Valley
Host
Gilbert King
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