Gilbert King: Bone Valley

We might have our first Pulitzer Prize winner on our show. Author Gilbert King digs into cases of wrongful conviction. Today, we’re talking about his outstanding podcast, Bone Valley Season 2. Gilbert explores the 1987 murder of Michelle Schofield in Florida. It’s a story of justice, forgiveness, and the possibility of redemption. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This story contains adult content and language. Listener discretion is advised.

Speaker 2 (00:13):
He sees his father coming out of the woods with
his hands over his face, and he knows something happened.
His father just grabs him and says, she's gone. She's gone.

Speaker 1 (00:27):
I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a nonfiction author and journalism professor
in Austin, Texas. I'm also the co host of the
podcast Buried Bones on Exactly Right, and throughout my career,
research for my many audio and book projects has taken
me around the world. On Wicked Words, I sit down
with the people I've met along the way, amazing writers, journalists, filmmakers,

(00:50):
and podcasters who have investigated and reported on notorious true
crime cases. This is about the choices writers make, both
good and bad, and it's a deep dive into the
unpublished details behind their stories. We might have our first
Pulitzer Prize winner on our show Today, author Gilbert King

(01:11):
digs into cases of wrongful conviction, and today we're talking
about his outstanding podcast, Bone Valley season two. Gilbert explores
the nineteen eighty seven murder of Michelle Schofield in Florida.
It's a story of justice forgiveness and the possibility of redemption.
So this story is Lakeland, Florida, nineteen eighty seven. Can

(01:36):
you tell me what nineteen eighty seven is like? I
was thirteen, So what was it nineteen eighty seven like
in Florida or in the nation.

Speaker 2 (01:43):
I was a little bit older than that, but I
went to college down there. So I used to drive
through Lakeland, and I remember Lakeland is just this kind
of hard rock capital of Florida. They used to have
Lakely Civic Center had this heavy metal fetish. I guess
you'd say they had. Everybody would show up, you know,
my crew, you name it. They were there and it
was like the place. And so you know, just driving

(02:05):
past your radio ads, you know, these are the days
before cell phones and concerts were really huge. A lot
of metal bands were big, and they were all playing
in Lakeland. Lakeland is kind of like the poor stepchild
between Tampa and Orlando. It's a smaller little town and
it's right off eye for the car door between Orlando
and Tampa, and so it's a little bit more rural too.

(02:26):
I mean, back then, a lot of orange growths, a
lot of phosphate business, agriculture, whereas you know, Tampa and
Orlando were a little more thriving in terms of urban centers,
so that was pretty much it. Lakeland was just I've
got every part of America really, you know, it was
just had everything you could imagine, but it was more
of a rural community and you know, the nineteen eighties,

(02:48):
there's no cell phones. It's just a little bit of
a different vibe. And I really love the heavy metal
aspect because Leo Schofield, who's at the center of it,
is this Boston kid who moves down to Florida with
the parents, doesn't really want to leave New England, but
there he is. He's got the thick Boston accent and
he's a heavy metal dude, long hair. He's aspiring musician.
He plays lead guitar. He's in a band.

Speaker 1 (03:10):
Called Rhino Okay, so, and he is not an outcast
in this town which we hear from sometimes it sounds
like he fits right into this place.

Speaker 2 (03:18):
Well in some ways he does, because he's got this
music connection and he's a very good guitarist, so bands
wanted him and he plays the part really well. You know,
he's thin guy, long black hair, twenty years old. He's
just good at what he does. But on the other hand,
he comes down here from Boston and he's like, I
don't get the cowboy hats. I don't get these gator shirts,
you know, like I don't have a pickup truck. I'm

(03:39):
not that kind of guy. Like I'm a motorcycle riding
you know. Jean's vest heavy metal dude. So he really
had to look for his tribe, so to speak. And
he does find it in these bandmates. That becomes his thing.
But you know, he doesn't feel comfortable there. He drops
out of high school, starts doing odd jobs. He's all
about doing the music. He sees that as his.

Speaker 1 (03:58):
Career, okay, and he ends up meeting a young woman
is Michelle from Lakeland, Florida.

Speaker 2 (04:04):
Also yes, she got born and raised in Lakeland. She
grew up there, you know. And Leo first meets her.
I think she's sixteen years old. He's going there to
give this friend to his Manny guitar lessons. And Mannie
is kind of like Michelle's boyfriend, except Manny's got his
eyes on a lot of other girls. He's not really
paying attention. It was kind of like this good looking

(04:26):
serfer dude, and you know, Michelle is just one of
his many girls, I guess you would say. But Leo
just is struck by her immediately when he meets her.
But Manny gets himself into some trouble and goes off
to a juvenile facility for some kind of I don't
really know what it was. It involved a gun, nobody
was killed or anything like that, but he's looking at
a long, lengthy sentence. And when he finally goes away

(04:47):
to this juvenile detention center in Florida, Michelle is kind
of lonely and she meets Leo, and you know, they
start hanging out as friends and coming to concerts and
stuff like that. But as time goes by, see they're
spending a lot of time together. They're clearly interested in
each other. And so with Manny gone, Leo decides, Okay,
I guess we can do this, and you know, right

(05:08):
away they're practically living together.

Speaker 1 (05:10):
Wow, and so young too. What do we know about
Michelle personality wise? What kind of family she came from,
any of that stuff?

Speaker 2 (05:18):
Yeah, she comes with a broke from a broken family.
Her mom and dad divorced. Mom moves back to Texas,
gets in a really bad car accident and has some
kind of brain damage. So it's Michelle and her two
older brother, a younger brother and an older brother, and
they're living in Lakeland. But you know, the dad is
works in the phosphate minds. He runs a dragline. He's

(05:39):
got really long hours. So they're kind of got a
lot of freedom, and Leo's not used to that kind
of freedom. Leo's parents are very involved, but Michelle can
pretty much come and go as she pleases. They looked
at their father, David, as a sort of like a
roommate rather than a father. You know, he was pretty
lax about that. But the kids weren't in trouble or anything.
They were, you know, good kids. But they're really on

(06:01):
their own. Michelle was working in fast food or she
was selling Amway products, you know, even at fifteen, sixteen
years old, so she's off pretty much on her own.
And when she meets Leo, they you know, they're they're
dating right away, and they decide they just want to
get their own place because they both have jobs. And
so they get a trailer in a low income area

(06:22):
of Lakeland and move in together and start living their
life that way.

Speaker 1 (06:27):
And tell me again, as far as aspirations. Do either
of these kids have aspirations? I know that it sounds
Leo really wants to stay in music, right, Yeah.

Speaker 2 (06:34):
Leo's definitely like he's got heavy metal on his mind.
He's in this band, right, I know they're practicing all
the time. Michelle not so much. She's still trying to
figure things out. You know, at this point, she just
turned seventeen, and you know, she does like metal music
and she does like to sing, but she's really figuring
herself out. But you know, the relationship with Leo and
she sort of falls into the homemaker role at early.

(06:56):
It's at seventeen. I mean, she's just she's got that down,
works a job. She gets this new job at Tom's restaurant.
She's a waitress there, and and everything's going, you know,
well with her, except you know Leo. And Leo's kind
of a volatile guy, and that's sort of a key
to the whole story. He's got a temper. You know,
he talked to his bandmates and like at one point

(07:17):
there was one girl that he was dating and in
the middle of a concert he saw her flash another
guy lift her top up and let that sets Leo off,
you know, he runs off the stage, throws his guitar
into a bonfire, storms into the woods. He's a very
temperamental guy. And you know, they talk him back out,
come back to the concert. Come on, Leo, it's okay.
They pull the guitar out of the bonfires, still got

(07:39):
burn marks on it. He still plays it, you know.
And so that pretty much describes Leo, who's like I
think he's like nineteen or twenty at the time when
this happened.

Speaker 1 (07:47):
Wow, okay, I was going to ask what the general
impressions are a family and friends of their relationship. Is
he volatile with her very much?

Speaker 2 (07:56):
Yeah? Yeah, they're They're known to fight, and Leo's got
a temper. And you know, roommates who'd come into the
trailer and all say the same thing, like they'd hear
the door shut, they'd hear crashing, slamming, throwing things around,
and you know they nobody ever saw That's the thing
like that, nobody really ever saw Leo hit her or
anything like that, but they assumed it was happening, something
was going on, and like he had a really bad temper,

(08:18):
and most of his temper was based around the fact
that Michelle didn't have a driver's license. She had a
learning permit, so she wasn't supposed to be driving the car,
but Leo had to get a car, and so she
would often take the car and go out and disappear,
and Leo had no way of knowing where she was,
and it would scare him because one time she got

(08:38):
and pulled over by police and they kind of let
her go with a warning. But you know, she would
just take the car all the time and go off
with friends, and Leo saw that as a problem because
she didn't have insurance and she wasn't really licensed, and
so Leo just said, just check in with me, let
me know where you are, And that was one of
the things that they thought about the most.

Speaker 1 (08:57):
Has anybody interpreted that in intead of him being kind
of just concerned about her getting picked up of the
police or wrecking the car or doing any number of
things that someone might has that been interpreted ever as
him being increasingly controlling over a young woman that he married.

Speaker 2 (09:13):
Also, Yeah, and he admits it too. You know, he
just said, I was immature, I didn't really know, I
was not ready for a relationship. What ended up happening
was because they were fighting they decided to go to
a church. They had a fellow painter that Leo was
doing odd jobs with, and he said, you ought to
come and check out this Baptist church, and so Leo
did and they went together and they liked it. But

(09:34):
one of the things the church said is you're living
together in sin, you got to get married. And they
have really only known each other for a few months,
and they kind of felt some pressure from the church
to sort of, you know, solidify their relationship by marrying.
And Leo was like, you know, I love her. I
was nineteen twenty. Do I want to spend the rest
of my life? Leo said, you know, frankly, I do.

(09:56):
I really this is a good different girl from me.
I really liked her because I wasn't sure a Shell
was ready for marriage though, and we talked about it
and she said she's ready. And so they decided to
get married very quickly, put together within a matter of
I think two weeks, borrowed some clothes from like other
parishioners who had recently got married, and they put together

(10:16):
this wedding really quick, and the next thing you know,
they're newlyweds and living in this trailer together comeby section
of Lakeland.

Speaker 1 (10:22):
So how long are they married before what happens happens?

Speaker 2 (10:27):
Right, So they get married in August of eighty six.
They're living in this trailer. Six months later is when
Leo goes into band practice. One night, he worked all
day with the drummer's father. He did, like laid down
lines for a cable company, and they had band practice
this night, February twenty fourth, nineteen eighty seven. You know,

(10:47):
they don't have a phone in the trailer, so all
their calls are sort of calling at Vince's house, and
whenever they call, they had to call from a payphone
at a gas station. But on this particular night, Leo's
waiting at band practice. Arrangements like, after you finish your
shift to Tom's restaurant, come by the band practice, hang
out with us, then we'll go out and grab something
to eat. That was the plan. But Michelle's shift ended

(11:09):
at eight pm and Leo doesn't hear, so he's kind
of already getting worried. Look, she knows to call here,
she knew the number. Where is she? Nobody really knew.
But at nine forty five pm, finally Michelle calls, and
she calls on the payphone. She says, look, I finished
my shift at eight, I went home, I did the laundry,
I fed the dogs, and now I'm ready to come over.

(11:31):
And Leo's like, great, thank you for calling. This is
like you know, He's saying to her, like, this is great.
Now we don't have to have a fight because you
called me and everything worked out. I know where you
are and she should be there within about ten or
fifteen minutes, and she said she'd be right over. The
phone call ends with both of them saying I love you.
Ten fifteen minutes pass no sign of Michelle. An hour passes,

(11:52):
no sign of Michelle, and now Leo is starting to
panic because this is not like her usually when something
like this happens. She said I'll be right over or
she's calming, but she hasn't shown. And now it's like
eleven PM, eleven thirty, and Leo's getting really worried. He
calls his father and said, Dad, you got to come
get me. I don't know where Michelle is. She said
she'd be right over. I don't know if her car
broke down, if she got an accident. He starts making

(12:15):
some phone calls. There's three hours that pass, and Leo
is just hanging out with his friends and there's no
sign of Michelle.

Speaker 1 (12:22):
Tell me where she made that phone call from again,
I'm sorry.

Speaker 2 (12:25):
She made it from a gas station called Sparky's, which
was right across the street from Tom's restaurant where she
was working, and that was sort of the closest one
to their house, so they used to use that one
the most.

Speaker 1 (12:35):
So she never ended up going back to the trailer.
She was supposed to go straight from the restaurant. Is
that right?

Speaker 2 (12:41):
She was supposed to come straight from the restaurant. But
she did say, like, I had to do someth like
just some laundry at my dad's house earlier that day,
and I went back and folded it. And then they
had two little puppies, and so she went back and
walked them and fed them and did some stuff. And
she stayed till like nine forty five, that's when she
got back to the gas station. It was a little
late for Leo's taste, but he knew he was supposed
to be. He knew he was going to be practicing

(13:02):
to at least ten anyway.

Speaker 1 (13:04):
So just for a practical question for later on, are
there people who see her making this phone call from
Sparky's to him at whatever time that was.

Speaker 2 (13:15):
No because Sparky's is closed at this hour. She had
gone in there earlier after a shift change. She got
three dollars worth of gas and she bought a coke.
And so she told Leo on the phone. She made
thirteen dollars in tips because she called at the friend's house,
and there are a lot of witnesses there who like
kind of heard the conversation. There was like no doubt

(13:35):
that that had happened. Even the state later on said,
you know, we agree that that happened, you know, and
they could mark time at nine forty five, and so yeah,
there was no real dispute about that call.

Speaker 1 (13:46):
Okay, So she vanishes, but she has the car, the
family car, right.

Speaker 2 (13:51):
Right, And that's the thing. So Leo just like, I'm
going to just trace the steps, and so they try.
He tries with his father around eleven thirty. They drive
out closer to midnight. Actually they're driving around trying to
retrace the steps, driving by friend's house and seeing if
they could see any sign of a car. They drive
past Leo's trailer. They don't see it. There there's no
sign of them. This is worrying. So they go back

(14:13):
to Vince's thinking, all, right, now, the time before cellphone,
she couldn't check in with Vince, right, So they go
back to Vince's house and say, well, that's where she
was likely headed. We should go back there. And they
get there and there's still no sign of her, and
Leo is getting really worried. At this point, his father
waits out in the truck in the driveway. Leo goes
inside and decides he's got to start making some calls.

(14:34):
At twelve forty three am, he calls the Sheriff's office,
Oh County Sheriff's office, and he reports her missing. And
it's kind of frustrating because at this point she's eighteen
years old now, so it's not like it's a child
that's missing. They take the information, but there's not much
they can do it. They check in the jail to
see if maybe she got arrested for driving, you know,

(14:55):
without a license. She wasn't there. There's no sign of
any accidents are in the neighbors, so there's nothing going
on like that. Leo made some phone calls to the
hospitals just to see if there had been any kind
of accident and no sign of her, and the sheriff's
office just takes all the information but basically says, there's
not much we can do. We'll put out a bolo,
you know, be on the lookout for but you know,

(15:16):
there's not much we can do. But if we do
see her, the books we can do is really tell
her we're looking for. So that's not enough for Leo.
The Leo wants action. He's really worried. After he hangs
up the phone, he goes out with his father and
they start looking around again.

Speaker 1 (15:30):
How many people are in Lakeland? Tell me how big
of a place this is? Again?

Speaker 2 (15:34):
Well, I mean the population today I think is over
one hundred thousand. Yeah, but you know, a little bit
smaller back then. There is a city of Lakeland, and
that's sort of where they are. But Lakeland is a
polk county is right in the middle of Florida, and
it's huge. It's bigger than the state of Rhode Island.
And most of it is just rural, you know, farmland
and stuff like that. But they're in the city of Lakeland.

Speaker 1 (15:55):
Okay, Now, will you tell me what is possible of
these things in nineteen eighty seven, because I'm just not sure.
That's way too modern of a time for me. Does
Sparkys or anybody near Sparkys like Tom's, do they have
any kind of exterior security cameras or anything.

Speaker 2 (16:11):
No, there's no cameras back then at all. There's just
really nothing back then. No cell phones, no mounted cameras,
you know, on the street lights or outside stores, so
there's nothing to check on that. I think it's a
lot of why a lot of my friends who are
mystery writers set their stuff in the eighties, because you
don't have the chips that tell you where you were doing.

(16:31):
It was an easier time to have a crime because
they're just tougher to document. And so you know, I
ended up talking to the sheriff of Paulk County, Grady Judd,
who you'd probably seen. He goes viral a lot. He's
like a tough talk in Lauren Ordered, Florida sheriff, and
we interviewed him and I said, look, I need you
to put your historians hat on, because you were in
the sheriff department in the eighties yourself as a young deputy.

(16:54):
And he said, you know, it was just impossible to
solve crimes unless somebody spoke up. Back then, you just
didn't have cameras, you didn't have cell phone data, you
didn't have any of that stuff. Unless somebody saw something,
you know, a lot of cases would go unsolved. And
at this particular time in Lakeland, they had a white
supremacist sheriff who was forced out of office by the governor,
and a lot of detectives and deputies kind of quit.

(17:16):
This was right at the time of you know, Michelle disappearing,
right and so it was they were in a lot
of turmoil there.

Speaker 1 (17:22):
They did.

Speaker 2 (17:23):
They didn't have a lot of manpower, and so they're
kind of short shifted, and so that was played into
it too. They just they were getting a lot of
unsolved murders right around the time because they just couldn't
keep up with them.

Speaker 1 (17:33):
I had just talked to a detective in a different city.
I'm in Texas, and he said, you know, when somebody
goes missing, you really should tell the police immediately. Everyone
thinks you have to wait twenty four hours or forty
eight hours, but especially if it's somebody at risk and
outside the norm, you really should talk to them sooner.
What about Michelle when do they start thinking this is

(17:54):
this is more than just a wife who wandered off somewhere.

Speaker 2 (17:59):
I would say immediately. I mean when she doesn't show up,
Leo has like a couple of calls to the sheriff's office.
He's checking in and they're like, mister Schofield, we told
you there's nothing we can do unless we run into her,
you know. But he's really frustrated. He wants a search,
and they're saying, we don't do searches, like we're not
there yet, and so it's basically putting together friends and
family retracing the roads like the you know, Leo's out

(18:22):
all night that night with his father and his mother,
driving around. They show up at like Michelle's father's house
at two twenty in the morning, knocking on the door.
You know, we can't find Michelle. We can't find Michelle.
Mielle's father comes out to the search. He's driving around town.
He sees two deputies cars parked at a gas station.
He runs over there and says, I'm looking for my wife.

(18:43):
You know, did you see have you heard anything? And
they're like, we don't have any report of any missing person.
He's getting really frustrated, like called this in a couple
of times. Nobody's doing anything, and you know, they're basically saying,
there's nothing we can do, and so it's really frustrating.
It's a search by friends and family. So the next
morning they kind of put together search to they're all
out looking. They put together flyers, they're distributing them all

(19:04):
over town. They're doing like everything you could imagine that
can be done. And Leo's like not sleeping. He's frantic,
you know, he's looking everywhere, calling friends, trying to see
where Michelle could be.

Speaker 1 (19:16):
What do the people at Tom's, at that restaurant she
worked out? What did they say her night was like?
They said it was basically like any other night. She
was originally going to work till five. They extended her
shift to eight because it was kind of busy. You know,
they all saw her leave, They.

Speaker 2 (19:31):
Saw her go across the street to Sparky's, and even
the clerk at Sparkys was in her. She remembered that
she remembered Michelle coming in after work and buying the
coke and the gas when they asked her later, So
there's no doubt about that. And then she she only
lived a couple miles away, so she went back to
the house, fed the dogs and all that. So the
people at Tom's didn't really have anything to add, nothing suspicious.

Speaker 1 (19:54):
Did anybody look at Leo sooner rather than later? Maybe
her family, even though I know they were not as
involved as Leo's family.

Speaker 2 (20:02):
Is, surprisingly not right away, because Leo was the one
who was like sort of the impetus behind the searching.
He was the one pushing everybody and so, and you know,
he was constantly calling the police, like constantly checking in
with them. His behavior didn't really rattle anyone. In fact,
they kind of said to him HERU like, calm down,
She's gonna be all right. She runs off sometimes she's

(20:23):
done this before, you know that. But Leo was really
particularly worried about this time for some reason, because she
called and said she'd be right over. This didn't seem
like one of those things where she was off with friends.
And to be frank, they could not find any reports
or any evidence that she was out of friend nobody.
None of her friends had seen her, and that's what

(20:43):
they thought was really strange, Like she disappeared, but there
was no accounts of like, yeah, I'm having a fight
with Leo. I just had to get away, like she's
nowhere to be seen, like no one could find her,
and that all her friends are now searching.

Speaker 1 (20:57):
How many days does this go on before something changes?

Speaker 2 (21:01):
It extends into a second day, So she goes missing,
twenty four hours goes by, nothing goes into the second day.
One of Leo's former bandmates, it was a guy named
Chris Peck and he worked in Orlando and he was
driving home from work and he saw what he thought
was Michelle's Mazda station Wagon broken down on the side

(21:22):
of the road, or at least park there, and he
was tempted to stop and write a haha note because
Leo's car would constantly break down and he wanted to
just leave a note on the lunshield like ha ha,
you broke down again, something like that, And so he
was thinking about that, but it was on the other
side of the highway and he was trying to get home.
But he gets down to Lakeland and coincidentally pulls into

(21:44):
that same Sparky's and sees a flyer with Michelle's picture
on it saying missing, Help find me. And at that
point he's like, oh no, and so His first thought
is he sees the detective's number for the Polk County
Sheriff's office, and he calls there and tells them that
he just saw the car that Michelle was driving. But

(22:04):
they're like, not really searching. It doesn't really register, and
so the next thing he does is called Leo and
tries to get a message to him, you know, like
I just saw your car on the side of I four,
And he gets it over to Leo's parents and finally
they get back to him later that night and he
tells him I saw the Masta on the side of
I four at this exit. And so Leo, his father,

(22:26):
a couple of friends they rush out to the scene
and there's the Mazda. It's broken down about seven miles
outside of Lakeland on the way towards Orlando, and it's
just sitting there and they look at it. They already
know like, don't touch it. They're smart enough about that.
So there's a gas station up on a hill right
near the exit. Leo walks up the hill and calls

(22:47):
the Polk County Sheriff's office and says, you know, I
found the car. My wife is not here. She's nowhere
to be found. You've got to send somebody out here.
And you know, the cops are like, well, are you
going to drive the car home then? And he's like,
you don't understand she's missing. We just found her car.
It takes a while for it to sink in and finally,
you know, detectives finally show up and they think what

(23:07):
they see what might be blood in the back seat,
like in the back hatchback, and so they're still careful
not to touch anything, but they point that out, you know,
to the detectives. At this point, now it's going to
be a full blown search. The police are going to
get involved, but they sort of say, you know, wait
till morning. Okay, it's past midnight. Now we're going to

(23:28):
do a helicopter search of the area in the morning.
Go home and rest and come back at the break
of dawn and then start searching. And so that's exactly
what happens. The helicopter goes out in the morning, starts
searching the area. Leo, his father, the friends, they all
kind of split up. But now because they know where
the car was, it's very easy to trace that back.
They're going to trace it back to Tom's restaurant. The

(23:50):
last place she was seeing seven miles away, so that's
what they do. They sort of split up along I
four early in the morning, and they're working both sides,
looking in ditches, looking in the meat, in no sign
of anything. They finally get back to the road where
Tom's is and they're there and they split up again,
and this is the point where Leo is searching with
his Michelle's best friend. Her name is Michelle McCluskey, and

(24:14):
they see a cop car speedby with the lights on,
siren blaring, so Leo thinks, okay, that's it, and then
they see a second one and then Leo's like, all right,
we got to go follow that car, and so they
jump in the car Leo's with Michelle's best friend, and
they're speeding toward it, and they see a truck kind
of jackknifed on the road and Leo's like, oh, they're

(24:34):
speeding to an accident. They get a little bit closer
and he sees his father's car on the side of
the road in the same spot. Leo jumps out of
the truck, still moving, and he sees his father coming
out of the woods with his hands over his face,
and he knows at this point something happened and he
rushes over to his father. His father just grabs him

(24:54):
and says she's gone, she's gone, and Leo's kind of
freaks out. He's like, they tell her she's a water
and Leo's like, get her out, get her out? How
do you know she? Like, he's just freaking out. The detectives,
the police kind of hold him back. They won't let
him go over there, and so he's kind of freaking out.
There's a very famous picture of Leo, like he tears
his shirt off and he's just pacing up and down

(25:16):
the street, and that's kind of like the image we
use on the Bone Valley themes. Like Leo is just
totally distraught. He knows his wife is back there, they
won't let him go see, and he's just unprepared for this.

Speaker 1 (25:27):
How did his father find her? How did that even happen?
If they're kind of in a wooded area, that becomes
a big part of the case.

Speaker 2 (25:33):
You know, they find Michelle, and then after Michelle has found,
Leo's father found her, and so what does he start saying?
He said, God let me to the body. It was God,
help me find her. They kind of spun it into
like Leo's father woke up in the middle of the night,
had a premonition at the body, and went right to
the site, and that's how it got spun locally. But
you know what happened was it was a logical, methodical

(25:56):
search backwards from the car towards Sparky gas station. And
this was on the way. And if you look at
the aerial shots that the helicopter did, like, if you're
going that way, that's a place you're going to go into.
It has a driveway into it, there's lots of beer
bottles and garbage. It's a place where kids hung out.
And so Leo's father is working backwards from ifour This

(26:17):
is the first cut that leads back to this dark area,
and he starts looking around back there and he sees
a jacket right near the water, there's an old phosphate pit.
He sees a jacket laying there kind of looks like
could be Michelle's jacket, and so he walks to the
jacket and that's when he sees Michelle floating face down
in the water, and she's got like a piece of

(26:39):
plywood over most of her body and she's just laying there,
and that's when he freaks out. He runs out into
the truck he fled, you know, waves down a truck
and says, y's your radio. Call the police, and he says,
my daughter in law is back there.

Speaker 1 (26:53):
So was the theory until we see this plywood and
find out a little bit more about this. Was the
theory that she wrecked her car, then went back to
Sparkeys to get help, and then something happened to her
in between the car, the seven miles of the car,
and then Sparky's is that what it would be?

Speaker 2 (27:10):
You know, they never really get to that theory because
they can't explain why the car is like seven miles away.
They don't have any explanation for that broken down on
the side of the road. They really start looking about
canvassing the neighborhood. And as they start canvassing the neighborhood
of the trailer where Leo and Michelle lived, some of
the neighbors are saying that, oh, they used to fight
over there all the time, and so now they're like,

(27:30):
h well, it's the husband. And then there's a witness
across the street from the Schofields trailer. Her name is
Alice Scott. And Alice Scott is kind of the busybody neighbor.
In fact, the prosecution calls her that, and she basically
says that she saw Leo carrying something out heavy into
the back of the Mazda the night she disappeared, and

(27:52):
so this becomes the biggest break for the police. They're thinking,
if that's true, the trailer must be the crime scene.
So because Alice says she saw Leo come out of
there after a fight, carrying something heavy and putting in
the back of the car and driving away, they start
using that as the theory of how the crime took place.
All based on Alice Scott's testimony and statements.

Speaker 1 (28:14):
Tell me a little bit more about what investigators see
when they go back there and they see her floating
with you said a piece of plywood above her, and
you said, is this a pond or what kind of
body of water is this?

Speaker 2 (28:25):
It's an abandoned phosphate pit. So there used to be
a phosphate mine that was there, and they filled it
with water and it just left it. It's basically reclaimed
land at this point, but it's filled with water. It
more or less looks like a lake. But it runs
parallel to this road, so it seems more like a canal,
but the way they call it back then was called
a drainage pit. And so they find Michelle fully clothed

(28:49):
everything but her shoes, and she's laying in this water.
And when they pull the ply would offer and bring
her out of the water, they quickly find out that
she's been stabbed numerous times. Later on the corner would
say twenty six times. She'd been stabbed in the front
and back and parts of her neck. So it was
a brutal, brutal killing. And so they examined the crime

(29:11):
scene basically that area, and they find like a large
clump of blood and it matches Michelle's blood. So it's
right in the sand, in the dirt, right in that
area of cut right back in that woods back there
near the near the water, and so you know, they
find that there, and they find the body, but they
don't really put it together, like they look at it

(29:34):
sort of, well, if Leo was seen carrying something heavy,
she must have been killed back there, and this was
probably the dumping site, and that's kind of what they
settled on. They settle on the trailer as being the
crime scene. The big problem with this is they cannot
find one drop or speck of blood in the trailer
for someone who have stabbed someone twenty six times inside

(29:56):
that trailer then carry her out. Is pretty clear that
there's going to be some form of blood, like it's
just impossible to clean up that kind of mess. But
they don't find any blood, and so that's kind of
a problem for the state. And the other problem is
that Alice Scott is kind of a suspect witness's you know,
she's been institutionalized in mental institutes for delusions. Her husband

(30:18):
is saying begging the police not to talk to her
because she tends to get overly involved in these kind
of things and they doesn't want her to do it.
He doesn't want her doing this, but she doesn't. She
starts talking to police and her descriptions become more clear
and more violent, and she's the only witness who had
heard anything that night. It takes about sixteen months for

(30:39):
the state to arrest Leo Schofield because they're just they're
not really confident they have a strong case here. There's
no physical evidence connecting Leo. There's a lot of alibi
witness because he's with friends most of the time, so
they're trying to narrow down that period from when it
would have happened, and Alice Scott says, I looked at
a clock. I saw this. It was between two thirty
and three am. Well, Leo's accounted for, he's with police

(31:02):
and he's with Michelle's father at that hour, So like
kind of worried about this. But they have a really
good prosecutor named John Aguero, who's an expert at putting
together circumstantial cases, and when he starts to talk to
Alice Scott himself, he finds that the timeline is starting
to come together under his questioning.

Speaker 1 (31:27):
In my other show Buried Bones with Paul Paul Hols,
I learned something this was several years ago. When they
find a victim and it's a woman and she is
fully clothed, I assume, as I think a lot of
people do, that there was no sexual assault, until Paul says,
sometimes the offender redresses them. So did they find any

(31:47):
signs of sexual assault or anything like that on Michelle.

Speaker 2 (31:51):
No, they said that she was not sexually assaulted. There
was no evidence of that. That's really interesting. I'd never
heard that before.

Speaker 1 (31:58):
Yeah, I hadn't either.

Speaker 2 (31:59):
Yeah, particular case, there was nothing like that, which led
them more towards Leo, because like, why would Leo have
sexually assault you know, it's not that kind of This
was a rage crime. That's what they're arguing. Shoot, Leo
was so mad that Michelle was late that for some
reason he decided to stab her twenty six times. That's
that's pretty much how the case came together. Miraculously, Alice

(32:19):
Scott led them to two more neighbors who after a
year and a half, suddenly remembered that they saw Leo's
father's car or the Mazda at that pit area that night,
even though they talked to police twice and that never
came up. There was a lot of things that never
came up in the initial statements that fifteen months later,
they came up in John Aguero's office when he was

(32:39):
questioning him. That was a key to the case.

Speaker 1 (32:41):
You said, twenty seven stab wounds. Were there signs of
defensive wounds or were they located in one particular place.

Speaker 2 (32:48):
No, there was a couple of bruises on her, but
they didn't really notice any signs of defensive wounds or
anything like that. They did notice, and they preserved it
for a while, some fingernail scrapings that they believe, but
you know, they didn't just DNA backed. They preserved it,
but later the prosecutor destroyed it back in the nineties,
got rid of all of it. But so that's all
they really have is they have an eyewitness and a

(33:09):
very circumstantial case. There's nothing physical connecting Leo to the crime.
The one thing that kind of jumps out of the
state but doesn't seem to jump out to Leo's defense attorney,
is that they find fingerprints in the car that have
been unidentified. They don't belong to Leo, they don't belong
to Michelle, they don't belong to Leo's father. They just

(33:30):
become unidentified and they sit in the file for many,
many years as unidentified fingerprints. But because Leo's defense attorney
did no pre trial investigation and he did no depositions
of witnesses, he was known as a trial by ambush attorney.
Like he just didn't like to be prepared. He liked

(33:50):
to be spontaneous and I'll just take care of those
witnesses on the cross examination, and that's how I win
my cases. And he was very charming, southern, kind of
looked like Colonel Sanders, but he was really ill prepared
for this kind of case when it gets a little
more scientific.

Speaker 1 (34:04):
Hmm, Well, I'm going to channel poll Holes one more time.
Because the fingerprints inside the car, he would say, if
he were here, he would say, well, where are those fingerprints?
You know, if it's a random like a gas station
attendant who's doing something, and it makes sense maybe it's
on the inside of a window or something like that,
that's one thing. But if it's a place where a
stranger really probably shouldn't be, like the trunk of the

(34:27):
car or you know, some other area, that might make
a difference. Do we have any idea where those random
prints were?

Speaker 2 (34:33):
Yeah? Absolutely. And what's curious about it is that they
don't find any of Michelle or Leo's prints in the
car at all.

Speaker 1 (34:40):
Okay, so somebody wiped it down, right, Yeah.

Speaker 2 (34:42):
That's what they're thinking, right, somebody must have wiped it down.
But they find two fingerprints, ones on the inside driver's
door and inside the car, and the other one is
in the back, the back of the hatchback, and there's
a television rental receipt and the television rental receipt was
touched and fingerprints, but they didn't match anyone Leo or anyone.

(35:03):
So that's where they find these prints that are unidentified.
But also the stereo was tampered with, so the speakers
in the back were missing, as well as the equalizer
underneath the car stereo. The equalizer was taken out for
whatever reason, they tried getting the stereo up, couldn't get
it out, so they took the equalizer and the speakers
in the back. So that does kind of explain why

(35:24):
there might be, you know, fingerprints in the back of
the hatchback, unidentified fingerprints.

Speaker 1 (35:28):
So if we are not thinking Leo is a suspect
and we're thinking something else, would this be She breaks down,
someone comes up to her, wants to steal her stuff,
she puts up a fight, he stabs her and tosses
her in this phosphate pit. And that's kind of the
way this goes because now you have I didn't realize
there was stuff missing, So now there is a motive

(35:49):
for a stranger right.

Speaker 2 (35:51):
Right, And you know, nobody can explain why the car
is seven miles away like broken down, like it doesn't
really fit any theories of anything.

Speaker 1 (35:58):
You know, is it in the right direction though, Gilbert, like,
is it going where it's supposed to be going before
it breaks down toward the friend's house.

Speaker 2 (36:04):
No, it's going to totally opposite direction, and it's far
far away, like in an opposite direction, and like the
state isn't going to end up saying that Leo and
his father and his mother were in on this conspiracy.
One of them killed Michelle and they decided to all
act together and get rid of the body and get
rid of the car. And you know, that was what
the theory was, and so that really was about attacking

(36:25):
the alibi.

Speaker 1 (36:27):
Do we have any information about the blood that what
they thought was blood in the back seat? Did it
turn out to be blood and Michelle's blood? There was
Michelle's blood was found on the downy fabric soft in
her bottle, a little smear of it. It's just a
little bit, but enough to get a sample and to
show that it was Michelle's blood. There was also a
little bit of blood on the back rug in the hatchback,
but only a little bit, but they couldn't identify.

Speaker 2 (36:49):
It as Michelle's There wasn't enough of it there. But
they said it was definitely human blood and that's the
only blood that was found in the car in eighty seven.
Were they doing blood typing? Is that what it would
have been? It was blood typing, aba oh and that
kind of thing, and they could tell it wasn't Leo's.
They knew that it wasn't Leo's. It was definitely Michelle's
based on the blood typing.

Speaker 1 (37:08):
So Leo's suspicious. They look at the alibi and what
are they saying about his alibi? And I think all
these people are lying on his behalf or that he
slipped out and slipped back in and it was no
big deal.

Speaker 2 (37:19):
There's one period where Leo goes out with his father
for about an hour and he's driving around town. It's
like right after the right after the Leo calls the
sheriff reporting Michelle missing. They go back out and do
the same kind of thing, and then they go back
to Leo's parents trailer because Leo's father is not feeling well.
I mean, he's got a cast on his leg. He's
just not really up for this, and so he goes

(37:40):
to bed and the mom goes out with Leo, and
that's when they go over to Michelle's father's house. They
start tracing them as they're out to like three something
in the morning doing this. Finally they go back home,
drops off his mom, and Leo's like, I'm going to
my friend Buddy's house. I got to get his car.
We're going to go out searching him freaked out. So
the state's theory is that somehow, and they can't and
say how this happens, somehow Leo must have run into

(38:03):
Michelle while they're out searching, and then he says goodbye
to his father. He gets in the Mazda with Michelle
and they go back to the trailer, getting a huge fight.
Leo stabs are there, carries her out. That's the theory
they go on. You know, the timeline doesn't really work
because there's some other witnesses that show up in the
police reports verifying that Leo was calling there and exactly
the time he said he was, and he couldn't have

(38:25):
been doing it from the trailer. So there's a two
am call that Leo made to Michelle's grandmother that was
confirmed by both you know, the state acknowledged it. It's
in the police reports, but Leo's lawyer doesn't see it.
And so the state doesn't bring it up.

Speaker 1 (38:39):
So now we I think understand the way this trial
is going to go. He's getting real road in, right.
It seems pretty clear there are all these witnesses that
can give him an alibi. His dad luckily finds Michelle
to be able to recover her body and everything. But
now everything is turning on this guy's character. And he's
a young husband who's been her fighting, and you know,

(39:01):
all of this stuff. And of course, you know, you
can't ignore that he's from a very lower income area.
And you know, we're not talking about middle class, upper
class citizens in this in Lakeland. We're talking about very
low socioeconomic area where they're obviously not going to be
a priority. And it seems very clear that this kid
is violent and acts violence and he's the one who

(39:23):
did it. Open and shut.

Speaker 2 (39:24):
Yeah, pretty much. Horror thing is when you look into
this case, Lakeland, this area had an unbelievable public defender's office.
They were really good, really great trial and they had
extraordinary records of getting acquittals in death penalty cases like acquittals.
I mean, they were really good. And Leo starts out
with the public Defender's office but when they lock them
up and throw them in jail, he's talking to these

(39:44):
other inmates, and that's a public pretender. Your life's on
the line. You can't do that, you know. You got
to get somebody good, you know. And it's a death
penalty case. And because Leo had gotten in an accident
the summer before he broke his neck, he's a passenger
in a car, he had a fifty dollar settlement coming
his way. And so this hotshot lawyer named Jack Edmund said,

(40:05):
that's exactly my fee, and sign this paper and you know,
and that's what happens. So that's how Leo ends up,
not with the Public Defender's Office, which he says was
the biggest mistake of his life. He ended up with
a lawyer who was completely unprepared and just got steamrolled
by the prosecutor.

Speaker 1 (40:21):
Is this a capital case in Florida? Must be in
eighty seven.

Speaker 2 (40:25):
Yes, this county went for the death penalty as much
as you could.

Speaker 1 (40:28):
So the trial goes on, it sounds like already you're
teasing that that Jack Edmunds, his defense attorney, is dropping
the ball, and ultimately I'm assuming we end up. Is
this a bench trial or is this a jury.

Speaker 2 (40:40):
It's a jury.

Speaker 1 (40:41):
No one tell me about the verdict.

Speaker 2 (40:42):
Yeah, I'll just tell you the biggest. Well, he made
a lot of mistakes, but the first mistake he did
was he allowed the state to open its case with
twenty one bad character witnesses in a row. And most
of them just got up there and said, he's volatile,
he fights all the time, he does this, he punches walls,
he's like screaming all the time. Just shit, that was
really prejudicial. There were some witnesses that came in and
talked about like his relationship with Michelle, that probably would

(41:04):
have been, you know, admissible, But because Jack Edmond didn't
object to anything, he didn't preserve the record so that
stuff could no longer be challenged. And I think, you know,
I've let some judges, some prosecutors read the trial transcript
and they all said the same thing, like this trial
was over before this defense even got their case off
the webings. This was just the way you start, Like,

(41:25):
you couldn't imagine that the judge didn't even step in
and say this has got to stop. It's twenty one
straight bad character witnesses, you know, and it's all this
four or four evidence, this stuff that's like should not
be admissible in this to this extent. But because he
didn't know, and you know, he said, I'm not really
much of an evidence guy. I just know how to
win trials. It wasn't really the guy you want for

(41:46):
the law, and so he let it all in without objection.
So that kind of started off in a really bad
way because the testimony made Leo look like, you know,
a violent monster. The worst part of it, I think
was that there was a next door neighbor to Alice
Scott who happened to be her sister in law. She
was much more credible. Her name was Linda Sells, and
basically what she ended up saying was like, yes, we

(42:07):
did see Leo carrying something heavy out and we joked
around about it, me and Alice because you know, we said, oh,
I wonder what's going on in there, and they made
jokes about it. But she said that was a week
or two before Michelle disappeared. That was not that same night,
because I didn't work that night and I wasn't coming
home from work as Alice described and having that conversation
with her in the driveway, and you know, it was

(42:28):
later shown that she did not work that night. She
was inside. So whatever Alice claimed she saw, she probably
did see. But it was like a week or two
before Michelle went missing. And you know, I asked Leo
about that. I said, you know, carrying something heavy? Was
it was alluded to being a body. In fact, she
does say at one point I saw him carrying the body,
and Leo said, look, you know I did carry something out.

(42:49):
I was not that night because Michelle had the car,
but I did put an amplifier back there. And it's like,
she goes, I had a blanket over it. He said,
you know, you knew what it was not. It was
not a body. It was a box, you know, like
that was what it was. And so Leo's like, you're
lying by saying it's a body. But prosecutor was able
to get away with that, and frankly, like the defense
really dropped the ball in this one, because if you

(43:10):
look at Linda sells his testimony, it's very clear like
Alice is saying, I'm not good with dates. She says
that a bunch of times, and Linda is like, I
am good with dates. We saw that a week or
two before. That was not the same night and so
that was like the state's whole case. That was their
main witness against Leo. That made the crime scene the trailer,

(43:31):
and it was a different night and there's no blood
in the trailer. Still, Leo ended up getting convicted.

Speaker 1 (43:36):
To simplify what they think the motive was, It's that
Leo is a young, angry, volatile, sometimes violent asshole who's
mad that his wife is not driving fast enough to
get to this party and maybe she's out doing something else.
Is that pretty much it? And he snaps and tracks
her down and does this.

Speaker 2 (43:55):
Yeah, pretty much. I think I look back at it,
like you look at his behavior and then you co
parent to you know, we know of some of these
cases that we see today where the spouse claims that
wife went missing, we don't know where she is. Leo's
behavior is consistent for the three days, like he's the
one out there saying, we got to look, we gotta
do this. He's calling the police, consert he's putting himself
in front of police. Think about this. Within fifteen minutes,

(44:18):
when the state says that Leo killed Michelle and carried
her out to the car, he shows up at Michelle's
father's house saying, I need your help to find Michelle,
Like fifteen minutes after he just butchered the daughter. Twenty
minutes after that, he's over in front of police, standing
in front of this saying I need help finding my wife.
You know, this is how much really cleaning could he
have done in that time, you know, like the one witnesses,

(44:39):
I'm pretty sure he's wearing the same exact thing for
those two days. He never changed, And so they took
the clothes in and examined him and didn't find a
speca blood there either. And this isn't someone who's got
like ninety pairs of shoes and jeans and stuff like that.
So and so there's just nothing physically connecting to him
to the case. But he gets convicted. Fortunately for Leo,
he the jury spared his life. And you know, I

(45:02):
ended up tracking down the juror because most of them
are like, you know, elderly Florida retired people. They're all dead.
But this this one woman was twenty two at the time,
and we tracked her down and she says, yeah, I
didn't I didn't think he was guilty, but I just
went along with the others. Oh my gosh, I know,
and then, like she said, the quiet part out loud, right,
But then when it came time to the death sentence,
she kind of held firm because they were ready to

(45:24):
send him to his death. Yeah, and she said, you know,
I think they just changed it because of me, because
they didn't want to upset me anymore, and so they
decided to give him life. So like that that juror
might have saved Leo's life too. You know, it's just
a strange thing that we were able to track her
down and talk to her.

Speaker 1 (45:40):
So tell me when things start to change, when people
other than you realize that this is not Leo, this
is actually somebody else.

Speaker 2 (45:49):
Well, this is the crazy part of the story. So Leo,
you know, settles off to prison. He's there a few years.
Some some like older veterans tell him, you, look, you
got to get your education. You got to be useful.
You have to prove to the state that you are
worthy to be released. That's what you need to be
working on. They just pounded his head. Follow the rules,
don't get involved with bad people, work on yourself, work

(46:11):
on your education. And that's what Leo does. He gets
his high school degree. Then he goes on gets college degrees,
multiple college degrees. But in the early days, he gets
assigned as a teacher's aid in the prison. And this
is in the early nineties, so he's like twenty five
years old, and this kind of six foot tall, blonde
social worker is who he's assigned to help. He's the

(46:32):
teacher's aid for her, and remarkably, they fall in love
in the prison and they get married and they're still
married today thirty years later. But Chrissy gets into conversations
with Leo, and Leo's like, look, I just want to
tell you I'm here. I was convicted of murdering my wife.
I want you to know that that's the hill I'm
going to die on it. I don't want to play

(46:53):
games with you. I am wrongfully convicted. And he's like,
I'm not going to try and talk you into anything.
If you want, go to your own research look into
my case. And she does. She's got a college degree,
and she starts looking into the case over many, many months,
and she becomes convinced that Leo's innocent. And the one
thing she settles on which obsesses her for years, is

(47:16):
that these unidentified fingerprints are in that car, and she
just wants to figure out who these prints belong to,
and so that becomes her mission. This goes on for
years and she's trying to get a hold of the Prince.
What can she do that Leo's no longer represented by
a lawyer. What can she do? She doesn't know. Flash
forward to two thousand and four. Michelle's been dead for

(47:37):
seventeen years now, Leo's still in prison. Chrissy finds a
friend who is a detective at a sheriff's department and
she's just begging her friend, Cinda, please just run these prints.
My husband is in prison. Chrissy is just relentless, like
a bulldog, and Sinda, just to get her to shut up,

(47:57):
basically says, fine, give me the Prince. So takes the
fingerprint cards. By this point they have the APHIS system
automatic fingerprint identification system. She runs the Prince through, thinking
this will be it. It's a tow truck driver, and
which the story is going to be over. Your husband's
a murderer, That's what she's thinking. They run the Prince through.
A couple of days later, they get a hit and

(48:17):
it's a young man who lived in Lakeland, very close
to where Leo and Michelle lived who's in prison for
a murder right now in the same area. And when
they look extensively into his criminal records, they find another
murder that he probably committed but he got acquitted of
the year before, and he's extraordinarily violent. He's in and

(48:38):
out of juvenile detention facilities, has an arrest record from
the age of ten up until he's finally incarcerated at
the age of nineteen for another murder. So now they're
looking at this guy's like, this isn't a tow truck driver,
This isn't a detective, It isn't any of those things.
It's not you know, some stereo fief for something that
stumbles it. It's an actual murderer. Can we start an investigation?

(49:02):
And that's where you see the state really double down,
like you would think that new evidence of a known
killer whose fingerprints are found in his car the last
place Michelle's been. It takes six years to get Leo
into a hearing to look at this new evidence. It's
just like slow walking it. It just takes forever, and
you start to recognize that's what finality looks like. They

(49:24):
do not want to revisit this and possibly lose this conviction.
That's where the case really turns. The young man's name
is Jeremy Scott.

Speaker 1 (49:32):
Is he related to Alice Scott?

Speaker 2 (49:34):
No, And that's the first thing they look into and
they find no relation there. But it's pretty troubling that
they have this prince come back to him. So they
send a cold case detective up to the jail to
interview him, and basically he's in a defensive mode because
his original crime sent him to death row and he

(49:54):
got off because he was an abused child and had
all these mitigating factors. So they gave him life and
they tell him, your fingerprints were found in this murdered victim,
and they show him pictures and he claims to not
know anything about it, and he says, was the stereo
take it? And they're like, yes it was, and he says, yeah,
I used to steal stereos. And so when they finally
get into the hearing in twenty ten, John Aguero, the prosecutor,

(50:17):
is also the prosecutor who sent Jeremy Scott to death row.
So this same prosecutor prosecuted Leo and Jeremy. So now
you have these two guys that are both connected to
the death or to Michelle Scofield, which one of them
did this? Right, That's what this defense is trying to argue.
It's the guy that's really violent that did this. But
the state is saying, well, John Aguero talked to him

(50:39):
in his office, no witnesses, no police, no tape recorder,
and they come up with the story that he's a
stereo thief.

Speaker 1 (50:46):
He just found this car on the side of the
road and was like, I'm going to take this right now,
where's that nobody's here. Yeah, that's what I would have
said too, absolutely.

Speaker 2 (50:53):
Yeah, just Jeremy's bad luck that he happened to break
into a car of a girl who'd been murdered an
hour earlier. Right, But that's what they're going with. And
they go into this evidence you are hearing, and a
Polk County judge rules that, yes, that makes more sense
that he's a car stereo thief, forget his background. You know.
One of the things that comes up in this is
that they interview Jeremy's girlfriend, Jamie, and Jamie says, oh,

(51:16):
that place the cut where Michelle's body was found, that's
where he used to take me to have sex. That's
where we used to hang out, So what are the
odds that this guy's fingerprints is found in the same
place that Jeremy used to hang out take his girlfriends to.
There's this part of the story that just sort of
gets ignored and they just say no. I think they
called it extremely serendipitous that his fingerprints were found in

(51:38):
the car of a murdered victim. But he was a
stereo thief, so that's what they're going with.

Speaker 1 (51:42):
It sounds like they can't get over the fact that
they don't think she's been sexually assaulted. We know that
somebody can be sexually assaulted without seeing these outward damages
or penetration or anything like that. But for what they're saying,
it's well, I mean, what's his motive He got the stereo, right,
what would be the motive of dabbing this woman twenty
seven times? He didn't rape her? Is that the impression

(52:03):
you get or is it something different? Yeah?

Speaker 2 (52:05):
In fact, they use it in a real strange way.
They're like, you know, she's an attractive gal, like any
stranger would have raped her, but like if that's a husband,
he's not gonna you know, Like that's why it's just
a stabbing, and that's the argument they put forward. You know,
it doesn't really make a lot of sense, but that's
what they're still trying so hard to say. This is
not a stranger, this is not some psychotic this is

(52:26):
a passion killing. That's when you see stabbings a bunch
of times, like it's a husband and wife a fight.
Like that's what they go with. And you know, the defense,
to their credit, Jack Edmund blindly says, you know, like,
I think what we have out there is a ravenous
maniac who stabbed Michelle and enjoy a robbery. And but
you know, he didn't even look to see the fingerprints.
He could have argued that. Another strange thing is that

(52:47):
one of the investigators in the Michelle Schofield murder was
the lead investigator for the for the murder that Jeremy
got acquitted of, and he was absolutely convinced that they
had the right guy. But the Public Defender's office was
so good they got Jeremy off because basically they found
no fingerprints on the murder weapon, and the jury ended
up saying that kid didn't seem smart enough to wipe

(53:08):
fingerprints down, so I don't think he did it. And
so they acquitted him. But this particular detective like, why
didn't you look at those prints and say, who are
some known violent felons in the area. They could have
done a manual comparison, and that was never done, or
I'm going to say it was never done. The worst
side of it is that it was done and it
didn't like what they found. I didn't find any evidence

(53:29):
of that, but I'll tell you there was a pack
of Marlboro Reds sitting very close to the bloodstains that
was photographed by police but never processed, never fingerprinted. I
always found that very strange. It's the only object that's
photographed at the scene that was never tested. And you know,
if you look back at Jeremy's other cases, he smoked

(53:50):
Marlboro Reds and he left him at two other seats.
To me, it's just like I want to believe the
best that it was just incompetence, But sometimes I look
at this stuff and go, come on.

Speaker 1 (53:59):
Well things, I mean with Jeremy for people to say,
you know, maybe his book smarts are not as adept
and you don't need that to get away with a crime,
I mean, you don't. I think it's some of the
most intelligent killers I have ever written about were some
of the stupidest criminals, and then vice versa. So a
stereo thief has to be at least street smart to

(54:20):
be able to get away with that. You know, I
know he was in jail, but still and then you
know the other part. Paul and I talk about this
on the other show, about the idea of overkill, which
I think is way overblown. I think there is pure
rage anger, and it can be at a total stranger.
It does not have to be some intimate anything. Absolutely,
and Paul actually says it that I asked you about
the defense wounds, because he said, sometimes people stab that much.

(54:44):
You know, it doesn't matter if they're passionate or not.
It's the person keeps moving and you don't have a choice.
You're so scared that they're alive and they're gonna hurt you.
That's why they keep stabbing. It's not anger at that
specific woman. It can be anger at anybody, or it
could just be like he's scared he hasn't done the
job yet. So I think way too much. There's so
much assumption going on in this case of yours.

Speaker 2 (55:07):
Oh yeah, I agree with you. Completely about that. Like,
I just feel like to call this a passion killing,
it has to be someone. Now you don't know that,
Like there's no way to know that. There's plenty of
stabbing victims that are total strangers, but in this particular case,
you know, it's pretty shocking that it comes back to
Jeremy Scott, who is in and out of prison, in
jail all the time, but on this particular night where Michelle,
we know he's in Lakeland, he's living in Lakeland, not

(55:30):
too far. In fact, his trailer he's staying in, his
grandmother's trailer is located almost exactly between Tom's restaurant where
Michelle last worked and the place she was found. It's
right in the middle of that. And we're only talking
a few miles, so you know, there you have it,
and this is a place he's known to hang out at.

Speaker 1 (55:49):
And no alibia I assume for Jeremy Scott that night.

Speaker 2 (55:52):
No, I've looked at the thing. Like, Jeremy's not a
really good liar either, And so when he's trying to
put a story in place about they ask him how
to tell that's how you stole the stereo, and he
describes it and you just like, if you do this enough,
you start to see weird things. He says, something really curious.
He says, well, I drove past the car, and then
I went to this gas station and I saw this

(56:12):
trash can there, and I stopped at the trash can,
and then I met a U turn and I decided
to go back and steal the stereo. Why would you
mention that trash can Like this is just something that's really.

Speaker 1 (56:21):
Small, very detailed, So kind of give me the broad
strokes of how this goes. I know you got heavily
involved with this. You obviously feel like Leo is innocent
in Jeremy at a minimum needs to be better investigated.
But Leo's still in prison.

Speaker 2 (56:36):
Well several years after. Jeremy doesn't get any help with
his parole. That's what he always said, Like they promised
you're gonna help me with my parole, and nothing ever happened.
And that prosecutor died. Jhona Guerro died. He said, now
I'm telling the truth. He was mad, and he wrote
a letter to Leo's lawyer and confessed to killing Michelle.
So I'll tell you everything, how I did it and everything.
And he did that, and ultimately I interviewed him in prison,

(57:00):
and he told I was walking down Comby Road. I
saw a girl at a payphone at this gas station.
She recognized me, he said. I didn't know who she was,
but she must have seen me in town or something
like that. And it was kind of raining. She said,
why are you all wet? He says, I need a ride,
and he said where he was going, and he led

(57:20):
her to the cut and he led her back there
and she says, there's no houses back here, and that's
when a knife comes out of his jacket pocket and
she starts panicking and screaming and fighting him, and he
attacked her. And after he attacked her, he said, I
smoked some cigarettes trying to figure out what to do.
Then I just dragged her into the water, and I
took the car and was going back to my mom's house,

(57:41):
which is in that direction. Car broke down. Why did
it break down? He said, Michelle got so scared that
she drove the car out of trying to drive out
of the cut, and he slammed it into park and
something happened mechanically to the car that is consistent with
somebody doing that slamming a moving car into park him
for four years. Since then, he's never denied killing Michelle. Ever,

(58:05):
he goes into extreme detail. He also confessed to killing
somebody else that he'd gotten away with, and it absolutely matches.
He drew me a map of all his movements and
he just said, I want to help Leo. He doesn't
belong in prison. I'm the one who killed his wife.

Speaker 1 (58:19):
So now what I mean, do we have a new problem.
We must have a new prosecutor on Lakeland at this point.

Speaker 2 (58:24):
Nope, there is somebody new, but they've just doubled down.
This case is so obvious at this point it feels
even embarrassing talking about the trial because it has nothing
to do with the facts. Jeremy Scott is clearly the
killer in this case. In fact, Leo and Jeremy. Leo
finally got out last year on parole. He's still convicted
murder in the eyes of the state, but he's out

(58:45):
on parole at least. And he believes that Jeremy coming
clean is what did it. Because our podcast came out
and it was just, you know, obvious to everyone who
listened that Jeremy Scott is the real killer and it's
not a case of like some guy saying I'll take
the fall. He was there, he lived there, and he
talked about details that you know, nobody should have known,

(59:05):
and I looked into his case. I've been writing to him,
talking to him even to this day, and he's admitted
to all the murders he's committed, even though he only
got caught on one of them.

Speaker 1 (59:13):
Can the Innocence Project in New York get involved with
this or is there a project involved?

Speaker 2 (59:18):
The Innocence Project of Florida has had the case, but
basically they've just doubled down and said, you know what
a jury has spoken, the appellate courts has spoken. You know,
it's the same thing that every wrongful conviction has. Yes,
juries have ruled against you, and the pellate courts have
ruled against you. There's powerful people, I can tell you
in Leo's corner, including the chairman of the Criminal Justice Committee,

(59:38):
who actually testified at Leo's hearing saying this is an
abomination and makes him sick to his stomach that this
man is still in prison for this crime. He's got
some very powerful people out there, but there's an island
in this one circuit that just will not let go
of this and they're just they will not let the
conviction go.

Speaker 1 (59:56):
That's unbelievable because I mean that is you know, demanding
relief because of new evidence, not I mean, I know
it's things that Jack Edmund missed as his defense attorney.
But at the same time, this is no this is
somebody who's confessing that's unreal and there's no DNA right
because everything got thrown.

Speaker 2 (01:00:11):
Out, everything was destroyed, and you know, it's just it's
it's a really embarrassing I think to just look at
this case and look at the facts of it and
just see that the state is just still taking this position.
You know that they ended up saying that Jeremy Scott
because he once said that he didn't do it, and
now he says he does he did do it, that
you can't believe a word he says. So they have
to throw it all out with the bathwater. It's like,

(01:00:33):
how about doing an investigation?

Speaker 1 (01:00:35):
Yeah, did he talk to anybody else about this who's
not currently in prison or when he I mean, is
there anybody who corroborate what he's saying.

Speaker 2 (01:00:44):
There's one person that we believe, but you know, the
state just attacked him. He was like the jailhouse lawyer,
and after he found out that that his fingerprints were
found there, he worried that he's going to get sent
back to death row. He apparently confessed to this other
jailhouse lawyer. But you know, they just destroyed that guy's
credibility on the stand and made it seem like this
is just a bunch of crazy people talking. And you know, granted, Jeremy,

(01:01:06):
he's off his meds, he's upset in court, and you know,
they make him look kind of crazy that he's sitting
in a git in a psych cell, eating off his fingers,
and so they made him just seem like a not
credible witness, and so that's easy for them to dismiss him.
But I think it's one of the laziest things you
could do, because if you sit down with that guy,
you know, he tells you the things he did, and

(01:01:26):
he's you know, he's coming clean about his.

Speaker 1 (01:01:28):
Life, okay, And a couple of sentence says, what did
you learn from all of this?

Speaker 2 (01:01:33):
You know, I guess I learned that you don't really
guaranteed to get truth in a courtroom because how a
lot of stuff is just inadmissible and a verdicts don't
really have to do a truth. I find if you
look at our second season, it really gets to the
bottom of it. We you know, we go back into
this case, but we do it from a different side.
We do it from Jeremy's side, and it's all about
my conversations and my relationship with Jeremy and all the

(01:01:56):
remorse when Leo Schofield doesn't show remorse in a parole
hearing because he says, I have a claim of innocence
that I've never wavered from. I cannot apologize for killing
someone I did not kill. All the remorse is Jeremy's remorse.
He like cried in our interview. You know, He's like,
I think about Michelle all the time. I'm torment. This

(01:02:16):
is my punishment. I go to bed and see the
faces of the people I killed at night. That's my punishment.
I think anybody who listens to him will just side.
The state has this completely backward.

Speaker 1 (01:02:26):
And I think our listeners know how rare it is
to get some kind of a confession like that to
be able to play on a podcast and really build
the case that you've built. I know that Leo is out,
but this is hanging over him and will until he
dies unless you know, this gets expunged or somebody can
help in some way. And so you know, I'm pulling
for you because you did some hard work on this

(01:02:46):
and I know how personal you're taking this, So I
hope it works out for both of you really with this.

Speaker 2 (01:02:51):
Yeah, you know, I've been through this with my stories
in the past, and eventually, like it's undeniable, it just
needs to be handled by the right person to come along.
And there are some really good people and Leo's corner
that are not quitting on this, and Leo isn't either.
He just says, this is about justice for my dead wife.
I don't want her in all of eternity believing that
something like I did this. It's not the truth, and

(01:03:12):
he goes, I have to just get justice for my wife.

Speaker 1 (01:03:26):
If you love historical true crime stories, check out the
audio versions of my books The Ghost Club, All That
Is Wicked, and American Sherlock, and Don't Forget. There are
twelve seasons of my historical true crime podcast, Tenfold More
Wicked right here in this podcast feed, scroll back and
give them a listen if you haven't already. This has
been an exactly right production. Our senior producer is Alexis M. Morosi.

(01:03:50):
Our associate producer is Christina Chamberlain. This episode was mixed
by John Bradley. Curtis heath is our composer. Artwork by
Nick Toga. Executive produced by Georgia Hardstark, Karen Kilgarriff and
Danielle Kramer. Listen to Wicked Words on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Follow Wicked

(01:04:11):
Words on Instagram at tenfold more Wicked, and on Facebook
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