Full Transcript for Chapter 4 | Dog with a Bone

majority of jurors. 00:07:51 Speaker 1: Voting in favor. 00:07:53 Speaker 2: This is different from a conviction, which requires a unanimous vote. But instead of going along with the Pam speaks her mind and says she doesn't believe Leo should be executed. She thinks the other jurors felt a little sorry for her, or maybe they admire this twenty two year old for sticking to her beliefs. For whatever reason, Pam says, they switched their. 00:08:17 Speaker 9: Votes, but they changed it for me so that way, you know, it wouldn't bother me. I guess maybe I thought it was nice all those jurors that did that. 00:08:26 Speaker 2: Instead of voting to send Leo to the electric chair, they vote for life in prison. Pam may be the single most important reason why Leo didn't die in the electric chair. 00:08:38 Speaker 9: I just hope he gets out if he's you know, I mean for sure, if he's not guilty, I mean they need to get him out of there. 00:08:45 Speaker 2: I mean thirty years. 00:08:47 Speaker 11: That's awful for a guy. 00:08:49 Speaker 12: Shoot. 00:08:56 Speaker 13: Hi, I'm Jason Flamm, CEO and founder of Lava for Good podcasts, Home to Bone Valley, Wrongful Conviction, The War on Drugs, and many other great podcasts. Today we're asking you, our listeners, to take part in a survey. Your feedback is going to help inform how we make podcasts in the future. Your complete and candid answers will help us continue to bring you more insightful and inspiring stories about important topics that impact us all. So please go to Lava for Good dot com slash survey and participate today. Thank you for your support. 00:09:30 Speaker 2: 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 failed War on drugs that has criminalized addiction, fueled over incarceration, and shattered communities. At eleven years old, Scott Strow drank his first beer. At fifteen, Scott went to a mental health facility because of suicidal thoughts, where he tried cocaine. Like many others who experience addiction, Scott was using drugs and alcohol to numb the pain he was trying to numb childhood trauma. In his early twenties, Scott was invited into a boxing gym by a friend. That's where he discovered the healing power of sport and community that helped propel him towards sobriety. In two thousand and six, Scott founded the Phoenix, a free, sober active community that uses the transformative power of sport to help people treat and heal from addiction and imagine new possibilities for their lives through fitness. The program restores compassion to a system that has long relied on locking people up to solve the addiction crisis. Scott Strode as one of many entrepreneurs partnering with Stand Together to drive solutions in education, health care, poverty, and criminal justice. To learn more about addiction and the War on Drugs, listen to The War on Drugs Poser podcast on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. 00:11:12 Speaker 8: Hitting Record, Testing Testing. All right, ready, Okay, I'm ready. 00:11:20 Speaker 2: After Kelsey and I read through Leo's transcript, we still don't have a clear picture of the state's theory. There seem to be so many gaps in their timeline from the night Michelle disappeared, So let's break it down. 00:11:32 Speaker 8: We'll start with the times both the state and the defense agree on. At nine five pm, Leo's at Buddy Anderson's house when he gets the call from Michelle. She says she's clocked off work and is about to drive over in the Mazda and pick him up. Leo tells her to meet him at Vince Rayner's house, should take her about fifteen minutes to get there from Sparky's gas station, where she's calling from. 00:11:56 Speaker 2: But about three hours later, Michelle still hasn't shown up Vince's, so Leo calls the Sheriff's department. The call went through at twelve forty three am. It's recorded and documented, and Leo can be heard talking with Vince while he's on hold. 00:12:12 Speaker 10: You're checking the fifty's in jail and not they're going to transform me back to the chefs upon the file and missing chest. 00:12:19 Speaker 2: Assistant State Attorney John Aguero uses this twelve forty three am call to establish Leo's state of mind that night. He suggests that you can hear the anger in Leo's voice that Leo was so furious at his wife he'd end up stabbing her twenty six times within the hour. Listen closely. 00:12:39 Speaker 10: I doubt whether says they should be just fucking arm and means he is. God help her, because I can't afford to fucking worry about this kind of little shit. You know, the rightest little problem is fucking cut me out. I don't know why, but they just thing I hate this failing, fucking hate it. She was on her way here. Why I'm tripping outlands? How I could have knew it. 00:13:04 Speaker 8: I've listened to this call so many times, and I've tried to hear it the way Aguero wanted the jury to hear it. But Leo's furious, but I just can't. To me, he just sounds scared or worried. 00:13:19 Speaker 2: After this call to the Sheriff's office, Aguero says that Leo leaves Vince's house and then somehow someway, he locates Michelle and the Mazda. 00:13:29 Speaker 8: Aguero doesn't offer any theory about how or where this reunion between Leo and Michelle occurred because he has no witnesses. But according to Aguero's timeline, this reunion had to have happened between about one am and one thirty because at around one thirty am, Leo's neighbor, Alice Scott, enters the picture. 00:13:50 Speaker 2: Since Alice is the only witness who claims to have seen anything related to the murder itself, Aguero's case hinges on her testimony of where and when Michelle was killed, So sometime around one thirty Am, Alice Scott is supposedly sitting at her bathroom window when she sees Leo and Michelle drive up in the orange Mazda and walk

inside their trailer. 00:14:14 Speaker 8: Alice Scott's statements are not consistent. Her story about what she saw that night changes each time she tells it, but in the version she gives at trial, she says, when Leo and Michelle get home, they start fighting, and this apparently goes on for about twenty minutes, then all goes quiet. Alice says she sees Leo walk out of the trailer, get in the Mazda, and drive off. She says he's gone for another twenty minutes. 00:14:42 Speaker 2: After he returns, Alice says Leo spent five or ten minutes in the trailer before bringing out the heavy object. He puts the heavy object, what's assumed to be Michelle's body, in the back of the Mazda and drives off. It's around two twenty am when Alice says she sees Leo carrying the object out, but. 00:15:05 Speaker 8: Two twenty is another important time. That's when David saw Michelle's dad told police that Leo showed up at his house, woke him up and told him his daughter was missing. 00:15:16 Speaker 2: So the Times don't line up. The statements of Alice Scott and David Salm put Leo in two places at once at two twenty. 00:15:24 Speaker 8: Am, and then Leo's mom testifies she had driven Leo to David's house. So Aguero basically says that Leo gets in touch with his parents and they immediately agreed to become accessories to a murder, and then right away they come up with this master plan. They're going to get rid of Michelle's body and craft a false. 00:15:46 Speaker 2: Alibi, so to recap. According to Aguero, Leo and Michelle start fighting at one point thirty and it goes on for about twenty minutes. He says, Leo kills his wife in a fit of raid and drives away to call his parents for help. Then Leo goes back to the trailer, puts the body in the Mazda, and drives off. He meets up with his parents, switches vehicles, and shows up at Michelle's dad's house with his. 00:16:14 Speaker 8: Mom, and Aguero said, this all happened within one hour. That just doesn't make sense to me. 00:16:24 Speaker 2: Then around three am, Leo and his mom drive up to two patrol cars parked at a gas station on Comby road. Both Leo and the state agree on this. It's documented in the police reports, but according to Aguero, they're not actually out looking for Michelle. He says the Schofields are just driving around in the middle of the night to fake an alibi. When Leo and his mom saw the police officers, Aguero says they were really on their way to meet up with Leo Senior at the Canal to help get rid of Michelle's body. 00:16:59 Speaker 8: Aguero brings the Laffoons to the stand to support this version of events. Remember, Randy and Mary Laffoon are the couple that live down the street from Leo and Michelle. At first, they say they didn't see or hear anything on the night Michelle was murdered. But then fifteen months later, Aguero talks to them at the suggestion of Alice Scott, and suddenly they say they remember seeing the Mazda or Leo Senior's pickup truck near where Michelle's body was found. 00:17:29 Speaker 2: How is it that, fifteen months after the murder, they now remember all these details that they didn't remember until Laguero spoke to them. The Laffoons also changed their story depending on who they're talking to, and they can't remember specific details or dates. 00:17:47 Speaker 8: And then there's the issue of the crime scene or the supposed crime scene Leo and Michelle's trailer, the place where Leo supposedly stabbed Michelle twenty six times, or the medical examiner says she would have lost five pints of blood. 00:18:05 Speaker 2: Alice Scott, Leo's neighbor, says she sees Leo bring a carpet cleaner inside his trailer the next morning, and she sees him cleaning the carpet through his open front door. If this is true, Leo must have done a remarkable job scrubbing the scene because not a single trace of Michelle's blood is found in the trailer. No blood on the walls or ceiling, no blood on the carpet or seeped into the floorboards. Not one speck of blood was found in the kitchen or the bathroom either. One of the crime scene technicians testified that the carpet did not look clean, and that he found no evidence that it was recently cleaned. If it had been, there should have been some kind of detergent on the carpet, but there wasn't. 00:18:53 Speaker 8: To address this, Aguero pivots, he suggests that Leo could have steamed all the blood out of the carpet using water alone. I'm pretty sure this is impossible. Plus, wouldn't there be blood in the carpet cleaner. The state never mentions any effort to locate the cleaner and test for blood. And I find it hard to believe that any crime scene technician walked into that trailer and concluded that a brutal stabbing took place there. Nine or ten investigators went in to search the trailer, but the only thing they took out was a three by four inch piece of carpet. It had a small stain on it. They tested it and said that they couldn't even determine what kind of stain it was. Could have been blood, or it could have been vodka or rust. They were in there for four or five hours and that's all they found. 00:19:48 Speaker 2: And when asked why they didn't remove more of the carpeting in the trailer to see if any blood had soaked into the padding beneath it, the crime scene technician testified they didn't do that because it would have ruined the flow. Think about that. The state claims that Michelle was stabbed twenty six times in there. They can't find any blood, and they're worried about damaging the floor in a single wide trailer. When I look at the reports and the photos, I'm convinced that detectives and crime scene technicians knew what their own eyes were telling them. The trailer was not the crime scene. 00:20:26 Speaker 8: And then there's the Mazda. It's found broken down on I four, more than six miles away from where Michelle's body is discovered. 00:20:36 Speaker 2: Aguero offers no explanation for that. Who was driving and where were they going? 00:20:43 Speaker

8: Aguero never presents a theory to answer any of those questions. Maybe he could have crafted a more coherent story if he wasn't tied to the testimony of Alice Scott, Aguero's star witness, the neighborhood busybody. And let's be straight, Alice Scott is not a credible witness. Her story changed multiple times throughout the investigation and even during the trial. 00:21:08 Speaker 2: And I've always wondered about this. If Alice was the type of neighbor to call the cops on kids riding bikes on her lawn, why wouldn't she call the police the night she heard her neighbor screaming bloody murder? At two am, And how is it that none of Leo's other neighbors reported hearing anything like that when they were questioned by police. 00:21:29 Speaker 8: And then Alice's husband, Ricky Scott, would tell a newspaper reporter twenty years after Michelle's death that even he didn't believe Alice's story, he says he knew how she twisted the truth. Ricky said, quote, she took a little something and exaggerated like she always did. And Alice's sister in law, Linda Sells, would tell the same reporter that Alice will say anything to be the center of attention. 00:21:57 Speaker 2: On top of that, when Alice herself was confronted by the reporter on the inconsistencies in her story, like that she couldn't see what she said she saw from her bathroom window, she changed her story yet again. Twenty years after Michelle's death, Alice said that her vantage point from the bathroom window wasn't good enough, so she'd walked onto her porch to observe the commotion. This is not what she said a trial. 00:22:27 Speaker 8: She also told the reporter quote, if Aguero had done what he was supposed to and executed Leo Schofield, we wouldn't have to be dealing with this mess now. 00:22:42 Speaker 2: For prosecutor John Aguero, defending the state's timeline wasn't going to be easy, and he knew it, but destroying Leo's alibi defense by challenging Leo's Senior's credibility would be much easier. Leo's father and the alleged vision from God that led him to Michelle's body three days after she was killed, had become the elephant in the courtroom. Aguero argued that Leo Senior knew exactly where the body was, and since he couldn't call God as a witness, he just let Leo Senior's premonition hang in the courthouse air for the jury to ponder. John Aguero was stuck on Leo Senior's premonition. 00:23:24 Speaker 14: John was very a very straightforward man. 00:23:28 Speaker 2: Officer Richard Kachadourian of the Lakeland Police Department was on duty when Leo and his father first went down to the station to report Michelle missing. He also heard first hand of Leo Senior's premonition when he called to offer his condolences to the family. Katchadorian remembers that even after the trial ended, John Aguero was still focused heavily on Leo Senior. 00:23:51 Speaker 14: Every time I went to State Attorney's office, would mee end of the hall a little bit, and John would be at the desk and his classes on, and I stick my head in and John, how you do anything new? And we chitchat for a minute, and he told me, said, mister Schofield, dodge the bullet on this one, because he felt mister Schofield was involved in this, at least in the disposal of the body. He told me a number of times, Richard, when I get the time, I'm going to go back into an historical case and put him in jail. 00:24:23 Speaker 2: The narrative about Leo Senior and his strange vision rippled through the press and the community. It's often the first thing people mention when we asked them about the Schofield case. 00:24:35 Speaker 15: The whole thing has struck me really about this case was the father. 00:24:41 Speaker 2: This is Joe Zarbo. He was working at the Polk County Sheriff's office in nineteen eighty seven. 00:24:47 Speaker 15: Obviously he's involved in it. Somehow. 00:24:50 Speaker 2: Joe was at the crime scene that day Michelle's body was found. Not long after Michelle's murder, he left his job as a deputy and became a private investigator. In nineteen ninety two, while Leo was trying to get his case looked at again, Joe's Arbo was brought in to re examine Leo's case, and one of his first steps was to interview Leo in prison. 00:25:12 Speaker 15: I know that one time during the interview, I believe he was he started to cry a little bit and he asked me, he said, do you believe me? And I told him, I said, it doesn't make any difference whether I believe or not. I don't know if he did it or not. Leo, I said, I can't prove it. I'm not here trying to get Leo off. I'm just looking at the whole thing all over again, you know, as a fresh set of eyes. 00:25:35 Speaker 2: But Joe's Arbo also couldn't shake Leo Senior's premonition from. 00:25:40 Speaker 15: What he said, God told me where she was. I mean, it was just weird. 00:25:45 Speaker 2: Especially weird was where he found the body. 00:25:49 Speaker 15: It was well off the road a little bit, you know, at that time. I can remember there was a lot of heavy brush, you know, between the roadway and where she was found. It's not something that you're to be walking down the street and look over and see a body laying there. Okay, have you gone out there crime scene or where it was? 00:26:10 Speaker 2: And these are definitely not the same fuck pos, But I mean, yeah, we'd been there. 00:26:15 Speaker 5: If you were to count those poles off, just I counted. 00:26:19 Speaker 2: It was one of the first places Kelsey and I went to in Lakeland. We brought along the police reports with all the distances measured out. It was one of those sweltering afternoons in Polk County when you get out of the air conditioned car and you're blasted by the heat and humidity of the Florida summer. Kelsey and I are walking along State Road thirty three trying to locate the exact spot where Leo's senior found Michelle's body. 00:26:48 Speaker 4: Did you see any water? 00:26:51 Speaker 3: Yeah? 00:26:51 Speaker 10: There it is. 00:26:52 Speaker 1:

It isn't hard to find, Okay, so that's got to be that's got to be the body of water. I've heard it described as a fishing pit, spate mining pit, whatever it is. 00:27:04 Speaker 2: That's definitely the water. And it's exactly one hundred and fifteen feet from State. 00:27:08 Speaker 1: Road thirty three, So I guess in there is where Michelle's body would have been found back in nineteen eighty seven. It's a horrible place to end up. 00:27:27 Speaker 2: We've talked to a lot of people about this place and it comes up constantly. In the trial testimony, the prosecutor, John Aguero goes to great lengths to paint a picture of how remote the location is. But if you look at the aerial photos taken on the day Michelle was found, it's not as off the beaten path as the state makes it seem. In the photos, you see a long, narrow body of water that runs parallel to State Road thirty three. It can't be seen from the road because of the tree line and the thick palmetto bush is guarding it. There's a dirt path as wide as a driveway that cuts from the road and leads right to the edge of the canal. The dirt road opens into a clearing behind the tree. 00:28:09 Speaker 8: Line, right by the place you pull off. There's a sign there that says no dumping of rubbish. You can see it in the photos. I mean they tied the crime scene tape to that sign. 00:28:23 Speaker 2: There's garbage everywhere, empty beer bottles, cigarette butts, old tires, plastic tarps, and in the photos shown at trial, there are tire tracks and footprints in the soil right next to Michelle's bloodstains. When Jack Edmund asked one of the crime scene technicians why no one bothered to analyze the tire tracks or footprints, he was told there were just too many. It would have taken too long. Even Aguero has to pivot in his closing argument from the description of this place as remote and hard to find. He admits that, yes, the location where Michelle's body was found is both a lover's lie for teenagers as well as a fishing spot. 00:29:03 Speaker 8: There's just multiple stories told about this one little location, and I think there's some validity on both sides. But it's definitely like a place that people would go, like, people would go back there and fish there was like, yeah, there was trash back there. 00:29:22 Speaker 2: If you believe the defense, it makes perfect sense that Leo Senior would look there. When Leo, his dad, and Michelle's friends and family went searching for her, they were methodical, working backwards from where the MASDA was found on I four, heading towards Sparky's gas station. They were all searching in ditches off the side of the road. It seems like any member of the search party could have found her, but all that was lost on the jury. The second Leo Senior told his own story about his vision from God. I looked into this phenomenon people saying that God led them to finding a dead body. It turns out this kind of thing isn't uncommon. There are plenty of reports from homicide

cases where witnesses claim that a higher power led them to the discovery of important evidence or even a body. I think these visions are similar to the stories you hear from people who just miss a flight that crashes, killing everyone on board. How can you not attribute some kind of divine intervention to such a traumatic event. Still, telling people that God led him to that spot does sound weird. There's no denying that. And so the suspicion around Leo Senior's vision or premonition was its own gift from God to the prosecutor. It made up the bulk of Aguero's closing argument, and all the innuendo around Leo's father was a devastating blow to Leo's case. And there was one other thing Joe's Arbo was left wondering about. 00:30:56 Speaker 15: There was something that keeps popping into my head that Leo's father made a move on Michelle. Did you ever hear anything like that? 00:31:07 Speaker 2: No, we didn't, But there is something disturbing in Leo Senior's past. In April nineteen eighty seven, a couple months after Michelle was murdered, Leo Senior was arrested and charged with sexually abusing a minor in Rhode Island. And this behavior it wasn't a one time thing. This is a pattern with Leo's father. He's serving a prison sentence in Idaho for a similar charge. I think this is one of the reasons Aguero was so fixated on Leo Senior. John Aguero began his career prosecuting child abuse cases, and he'd seen a lot of them. He knew the type. Perhaps, in Aguero's mind, Leo Senior was such a bad guy, he just had to have been involved in Michelle's murder too. It even came up a trial during a bench conference because of Leo Senior's arrest in nineteen eighty seven. Aguero was aware of the charges, but he was reminded by the judge that he was prohibited from bringing it up before the jury. Leo Senior's history of sexual abuse while devastating is not evidence that he committed murder or helped dispose of the body, and it certainly is an evidence that Leo had anything to do with Michelle's death. It's nineteen ninety three. Leo's now been in prison for four years. He's trying to make the most of his time there, so he gets his ged and he's thinking about enrolling in paralegal courses through the University of Florida. He's also started working as a teaching aid for a life skills class where inmates learn communication skills, resume writing, and how to balance a checkbook. Really, Leo is running the class while the teacher supervises. One day, Leo learns that his supervising teacher has moved on and the prison is bringing in someone new to run the program. Leo shows up to work. He has a little office in the prison and he gets a call from the guy who runs the education program. 00:33:32 Speaker 16: He called on the intercoms in my computer. He says, Schofield, please start at my office. 00:33:39 Speaker 2: He's about to be introduced to the new life skills teacher. Leo says that most of the teachers hired by the prison system are retirees, so he was expecting a seventy five year old lady. When he makes it to the education program office, the guy who runs the program points Leo to the new teacher, so. 00:33:57 Speaker 11: The head of education assigned him to be my aide. 00:34:01 Speaker 2: This is Chrissy Carter. She's a social worker and the new life Skills teacher. 00:34:06 Speaker 16: And I saw Chrissy for the first time, and because she was thirty one years old, and she was absolutely stunning. 00:34:13 Speaker 2: She's tall, blonde, and she's no old lady. 00:34:17 Speaker 11: The next time I saw him actually came into a class. There was another teacher there giving a test. Leo was there helping that teacher organize the test. So he and I sat at the front and started talking, and I liked him, and we had stuff to talk about that was interesting, and the two hours just kind of flew by. He's pretty funny, very sincere. He seemed different, you know, And one of the things I'd never do is ask at eBay why they're in or what's going on with that. But somehow the topic of his case came up. 00:34:54 Speaker 2: Leo tells her he's been convicted of killing his wife, Michelle, but that he's an innocent man. 00:35:00 Speaker 16: In the chain gang inmates will play games with girls and they'll say they're getting out in such and such a time, and then in that time comes up, they're. 00:35:06 Speaker 11: Not getting out. 00:35:07 Speaker 16: They'll make up some story. And I was not going to do that with her. I'd already lost my life and wasn't in a mood for a game, and I was very broken, and so I just laid it all on the line for you know, everything that was happening, and I told her this is the hill that I have to climb. 00:35:25 Speaker 11: I was like, Okay, what is this all about. 00:35:29 Speaker 2: Chrissy wants to believe him, and she likes him. She watches him teach the class, and they continue to get to know each other. At the same time, Leo was also getting ready to go back to court. Those first few years in prison, he'd had plenty of time to think about his case and what went wrong. He began spending time in the prison library learning about possible next steps in the legal system for someone who claims to be wrongfully convicted. He started researching the appeals process, and he came to the realization that his defense attorney, Jack Edmund, made a number of crucial mistakes at trial. So Leo starts to write up his own legal brief. It claims that Jack Edmund had provided ineffective assistance of counsel during the trial. Basically, he didn't do his job properly and as a result, Leo's conviction should be thrown out. The court grants Leo adhering to argue his case. He tells Chrissy and she decides to attend. Leo is given a court appointed lawyer to help prepare the argument. Together, they point to twelve mistakes that Jack Edmund made in Leo's defense. Here are the three most crucial mistakes. First, Edmund didn't meet with Leo until the night before his trial began, know the witnesses the

evidence Leo's timeline, and Leo didn't learn about the evidence the state had against him until the trial began. He had no idea what was coming. Second, Edmond failed to object to the twenty one witnesses the prosecution called to testify about Leo's character. These witnesses, again twenty one in total, gave testimony that had nothing to do with evidence that could prove whether or not Leo committed the murder. Instead, they testified that Leo was someone who had a temper it should never have been allowed to open the state's case. Courts have decided this kind of testimony is deeply prejudicial to juries. There is one exception to this rule. Judges may allow testimony of prior bad acts when they occur between a defendant and the victim. So testimony about Leo hitting Michelle or dragging her by the hair that could have been admissible, But the prosecutor, John Aguero, was supposed to file something called a notice of intent so the judge could review the testimony and decide whether or not it should be allowed. In Leo's case, John Aguero never did that. He introduced the testimony anyway, and Jack Edmond failed to object, and finally Edmond failed by not calling Michelle's aunt Kathy to the stand. There were a number of important witnesses Edmund should have called but didn't, Leo and Michelle's landlord, who could have refuted the carpet cleaner testimony, and hospital and sheriff dispatchers who could have corroborated Leo's efforts to find his wife. But none of these witnesses were as important to Leo's case as Michelle's aunt Cathy. She'd been on the receiving end of a call Leo made to Michelle's grandmother. This call was crucial, not because of what was said, but because of when it took place too. That's the time Leo told Detective Weeks he made the call, and that's the time Aunt Cathy said she spoke to Leo. Detective Weeks confirmed this and it's documented in his report. This is critical because two am is also the time Alice Scott told police she heard screaming from Leo and Michelle's trailer, but Leo did not have a telephone in his trailer, so he couldn't have made the call from there. Leo claims he was at his parents' house all the way across town when he made that call. This phone call could have been a major piece of evidence corroborating Leo's alibi. All these points against Edmund are presented at the hearing. Jack Edmund even testifies and he admits that he didn't understand all the rules of evidence, so he falls on his sword and admits to the court that he failed to effectively represent Leo Schofield at trial. 00:39:59 Speaker 12: But none of it matters. 00:40:01 Speaker 2: Leo's motion is denied, and I believe. 00:40:07 Speaker 16: Awe that I'm convicted because they didn't like who I was. I don't believe anybody on that jury really believes I'm the harder. He didn't show any evidence of that. They believe that I was such a bad guy it didn't matter. 00:40:23 Speaker 2: After the hearing, Leo is handcuffed and transported back

to prison, and Chrissy approaches Leo's attorney, Bob Doyle. She asks if she can speak to him privately. 00:40:33 Speaker 11: So we went to a little coffee shop and I was telling him, you know, here for Leo and interested in his case and looking at it, and you know, I told him that I was, you know, I. 00:40:45 Speaker 4: Like this guy. 00:40:47 Speaker 2: Chrissy tells this to Leo's lawyer, Bob Doyle because she's hoping he'll lead her in the right direction, even if that means she should run away from Leo as fast as she can. But instead, Doyle tells her. 00:40:59 Speaker 11: This, don't believe them, because you want to look at the case. 00:41:09 Speaker 2: Chrissy leaves the coffee shop, goes back to the Polk County Courthouse and walks into the clerk's office. She asks to see the files on Leo's case. 00:41:18 Speaker 11: I just started looking and asking and looking and asking some more. 00:41:23 Speaker 2: As Chrissy starts digging and asking questions, she starts seeing all the discrepancies. She was especially hung up on the state's timeline. How is it possible for Leo to be accounted for by friends, family, and deputies on the night Michelle had gone missing and still slip away to murder his wife, dispose of the body, and clean up a crime scene. 00:41:46 Speaker 11: Well, when you start looking at the case and you start putting the pieces together, nothing is adding up. 00:41:52 Speaker 2: She reads the trial transcripts, then she begins digging into the sheriff's reports and the files from the state attorney's office. Obviously, she has questions about Leo and Michelle's relationship, so she'd visit the prison to ask Leo about the case and about Michelle. 00:42:09 Speaker 11: No question was off limits, nothing was too difficult for him to share. Well, it might have been difficult, but he was willing. 00:42:17 Speaker 2: After talking to Leo, she'd go back to the clerk's office to do more research. Then back she'd go to run more questions by Leo. 00:42:25 Speaker 11: And his answer would always confirm that that was impossible for those things that have happened, or clarify that maybe I didn't understand right. 00:42:35 Speaker 2: She kept doing this for months, going back and forth between the court files and visiting Leo at the prison. After a while, Chrissy became certain that Leo couldn't have done this. But not only that, she realizes she's developing feelings for Leo. 00:42:51 Speaker 11: We got along really well, you know, it seemed like we were kind of liking each other a little bit. But he's in prison, you know, so the relationship ship, the dating thing was like a little awkward. In addition to the obvious, you know, physical restrictions and living your life in a fish pool. Every kiss, every hug, everything we say, everything has been under someone's watch. There's no hiding when you're in a relationship with someone in prison. We decided about four years into the relationship that we were going to do this forever, prison or no

prison. We were doing it. So we had to do an application to get married in prison. I had to write a letter about why I wanted to marry him, you know, dear sir, I want to marr him because I love him, you know, sincerely. So we picked a date and my friend and I went shopping and I picked out a dress and went to the prison chaplain and walked in my dress that we'd picked out and we got married. 00:44:00 Speaker 7: There you go. 00:44:08 Speaker 2: Obviously, Chrissy did not choose a simple life. She's struggling to explain this choice. But at the same time, she didn't want to hide who she was, and so she called her friends to tell them about this man that she had married. One of them was her work friend, Cinda Williams. 00:44:28 Speaker 7: Actually, I handled all of the crimes against children cases that came to our Sheriff's office, and that's how I met Chrissy. 00:44:37 Speaker 2: Cinda was an investigator in Henry County when she first met Chrissy. Chrissy was the social worker Cinda worked with on child abuse cases. Then their career paths diverged. Sinda went to work for the State Attorney's office in Palm Beach County, almost two hours east of Henry, but they kept in touch and then one day Cinda gets this call from Chrissy. 00:45:01 Speaker 7: And she said, listen, I need to talk to you. And I'm like, sure, what, And I figured it was about a case and she said I've met somebody and I'm like, well, that's great, Chrissy, who is it? And she goes, well, his name is Leo, and I said okay, and she said, and he's incarcerated at the Henry County Correctional Facility. 00:45:25 Speaker 2: And I'm like. 00:45:27 Speaker 15: What. 00:45:28 Speaker 7: And then I said, well, why is he you know, why is he in prison? And she said, well, he's accused of murdering his wife. And I was like stunned, and I said, you know, what are you doing? That's you know, kind of nuts. I said, you know, you have so much going for you. You're smart, you're you're you know, going forward in your career. Why would you do something like that? And she said, well, because I believe he's innocent. And I thought to myself, a lot of people say these things all the time, and so I was just kind of thrown by it. Because she believed so strongly that he was innocent. I think that she wanted me, as her friend, to validate. 00:46:11 Speaker 2: That, but Cinda wasn't going to be able to do that. 00:46:16 Speaker 7: I told her, point blank, Chrissy, I cannot help you with this. It puts me in a terrible position. 00:46:23 Speaker 2: Remember, Senda's a cop. She has to think about her career. She can't be helping out a friend whose partner is in prison. 00:46:31 Speaker 7: Quite frankly didn't know what to say, and there wasn't anything that I could do because Leo had been he had had a trial, and he had been convicted, and he had been sentenced to prison, and there was no way that I could have gotten involved in that. 00:46:47 Speaker 11: At that point, when she knew I was involved with someone

in prison, she cut ties with me. For her, that was a big no no. She wanted her reputation and her experience and to not have any cloud around her, and she told me at the time that's why she was doing It was very, very painful. 00:47:12 Speaker 7: I was worried about her across the board. 00:47:15 Speaker 6: Did it seem out of character for her? 00:47:19 Speaker 7: Yes, even though I think Christy is very caring and very accepting of things, I kind of thought that that she was being sucked in. 00:47:33 Speaker 11: That's how I felt. 00:47:35 Speaker 2: Sinda tries to keep her distance, but Chrissie keeps giving her updates a new thing that she's learning about Leo's case, And. 00:47:43 Speaker 7: Every time I spoke to her, I always thought she's gonna tell me, Okay, I can't do this anymore, and you know this is not working out, and I'm just gonna, you know, forget about it. 00:47:55 Speaker 15: But she never did. 00:47:57 Speaker 2: By this point, Chrissy is completely obsessed with Leo's case. She does everything she can to investigate it on her own, and then she reads something in the reports. She sees that there's evidence that can be analyzed for possible DNA. 00:48:14 Speaker 11: Trying to get the DNA tested took three years, hearings and hearings and hearings. I think three thousand dollars that I had to pay for by myself. I'm a social worker, you know. My salary was social work salary. 00:48:30 Speaker 2: She's finally able to get Michelle's fingernail scrapings tested, but it's been too long. The samples have degraded so they couldn't draw any conclusive information from them. But there are also hairs that were found at the crime scene. Maybe one of them belongs to the murderer. She tries to get those tested too, but the. 00:48:50 Speaker 11: State attorney, Johnny Guerrero, when we were in this process, he had the hair. 00:48:55 Speaker 15: Destroyed, so it was in the process. 00:48:57 Speaker 11: In the process, the hair of samples that we wanted to test were destroyed. 00:49:04 Speaker 2: This is heartbreaking and infuriating to Chrissy. Why would they destroy evidence? The state attorney says, it's just a routine disposal. But to Chrissy, it feels like the state is intentionally putting up roadblocks to stop Leo from getting a new trial. She doesn't give up. There's one more piece of physical evidence that she can't stop thinking about. 00:49:29 Speaker 11: Always always. The fingerprints was a big question in my mind, because there's fingerprints in the car. 00:49:41 Speaker 2: Those fingerprints were never identified. Investigators just knew they didn't belong to anyone whose prints should have been in the car. They didn't match Leo or Michelle. The Prince also didn't belong to Leo's father. In fact, no one else's fingerprints were found in the Mazda. 00:49:59 Speaker 11: This whose fingerprints are they? 00:50:04 Speaker 7: I don't know. Nobody know. 00:50:05 Speaker 11: Nobody can answer, Well, they have to be somebody's fingerprints. So is it the tow truck driver or is it a mechanic or is it a random person? Or It was always bothered me. Obviously somebody was in the car, somebody knew something. 00:50:22 Speaker 1: Who was it? 00:50:22 Speaker 4: What do they know? 00:50:26 Speaker 2: So Chrissy keeps working at it, intent on trying to figure out this piece of the mystery. At the same time, Cinda, Chrissy's cop friend, is working hard in her new job as an investigator for the State Attorney's office in Palm Beach County. Cinda had come from a small sheriff's office in a rural county to Palm Beach County, which is a larger, more metropolitan area, and there she meets a young prosecutor. His name is Scott Cup. You might recognize that name. He's now Judge Scott Cup, who first tipped me to Leo Schofield's case by handing me a business card. Can you talk about what Scott was like as a young prosecutor, you know, what kind of person he was at that time in his life. 00:51:12 Speaker 7: Yeah, well, let's see, he was aggressive. 00:51:18 Speaker 2: I think aggressive is a word that I don't really see him as that aggressive today, But back then he was a prosecutor. 00:51:25 Speaker 7: Yes, he was a prosecutor. And I, well, I can give you an example. I remember the first time that he came down to my office and they had these big glass windows that looked out over the courthouse, and he looked at me and he said, I want you to look outside. And I didn't know it, you know, was wrong with him, but I'm like, okay, So I looked outside and he says to me, do you see any orange Groves and I'm like no, and he's like, well, do you see any like horse and buggies out there? And I'm like no, and he goes, well, welcome to the big city. So I'm like thinking to myself, what a jerk that. Ultimately, you know, I worked with him on many many cases and we eventually started seeing each other and then eventually we married. 00:52:25 Speaker 2: Not too long after that, Cinda and Scott Cupp moved back to Hendry County. Sinda takes a job as captain with the Sheriff's office. Cup takes off his prosecutor's hat and sets up his defense practice in the tiny city of LaBelle, Florida. Chrissy is also still in Henry County doing social work. One day, she goes to visit one of her clients who's being held in the county jail. 00:52:49 Speaker 11: One day, I was going into the jail and there was an attorney next to me. We're both going through the door at the same time. They have to buzz you in, and when we got to the desk, we both said we were there for the same person. So we kind of looked at each other and he's like, oh, that's my client. He introduced himself. It was Scott Cup. 00:53:08 Speaker 12: We met, I, you know, seemed to me bright, pretty intelligent. I had no idea that Chrissy Carter was Chrissy Schofield at that time. She didn't she didn't lead with that. 00:53:26 Speaker 2: Cup was the defense attorney. Chrissy was the social worker working with the same client. They talk a bit about their

client and then both of them leave the jail and go home for the day. 00:53:37 Speaker 11: Apparently he told his wife that he met the social worker for the same client and told her my name, and she, from what he told me, cried and he's like, what what just happened? He said, that's my friend Chrissy. So that's how we all reconnected. 00:54:00 Speaker 2: Become friendly, Chrissy, Cinda, and Sinda's husband, Scott Cup. And it's not long before Chrissy starts sharing again about Leo, and that's how Scott Cupp finds out that Chrissy is married to a man convicted of murdering his wife. 00:54:16 Speaker 12: And I just like kind of threw my hands up and got oh my god. I had no idea she was. 00:54:22 Speaker 2: A whack job, and so she was trying to involved in this case. 00:54:26 Speaker 12: Right, which I didn't. I several times said no, no, no, no, no no. I just thought this was the typical guy getting over on somebody who they met through the prison system, convincing them for whatever reason, to marry them so they can tool them, whether it's for money, or maybe get them some representation to see if they can file something on some quote unquote technicality. 00:54:53 Speaker 2: And I want to know part of that. But Chrissy is relentless. She's begging Sinda to tell Scott to just look at Leo's trial transcript. 00:55:02 Speaker 7: I didn't push it and say, oh, well, she's my friend. I said, you know, you talk to her, maybe you can give her some advice and steer her in a direction that you know she needs to go legally. 00:55:20 Speaker 12: And then, and I'm not proud of this, but uh, kind of coldly, I said, Okay, here's the deal. I'll do it, but she's going to pay me, and she's my client. I'm not representing her husband. Okay, I'm not going into the prison to talk to this guy. I don't know what the hell's going on, but just to make this go away, I will review the transcript and I'll explain to her why her quote unquote husband is in prison for murder. And I thought that would be the end of it. I just wanted this to stop and just leave me alone about this, And quite frankly, I may have said, and I don't want her coming over here anymore. 00:56:02 Speaker 4: Okay. 00:56:03 Speaker 2: So Chrissy shows up at Scott Cup's office in LaBelle one day with six binders and two thousand plus pages of trial transcripts. She leaves them on his desk, and later that afternoon he stays true to his word and starts reading and reading into the night. The former prosecutor is transfixed. 00:56:26 Speaker 12: And I got to the end of the States case and closed up binder and just sat there, and I think I maybe even outset. Holy shit, this guy didn't do it. He couldn't have done it. 00:56:47 Speaker 2: All the overwhelming evidence of Leo's guilt that he expected to find in the transcript, it just isn't there. And as an experienced prosecutor, he knows it when he sees it. Cupp hadn't even read as far as the defense's case, and it was already obvious to him that Leo Schofield

was wrongly convicted. He finishes the transcript and he's even more convinced that Leo is an innocent man, and now the aggressive prosecutor turned defense attorney is invested. He starts poking around to see if there's any physical evidence recovered from the original investigation of Michelle's murder. He's not interested in any of that bad character evidence or premonition stuff. He wants actual forensic evidence, of course, with DNA evidence destroyed. He learns what Chrissy has been stuck on for the past decade. 00:57:42 Speaker 12: There was a few prints that were found inside the vehicle that went unidentified at the time. 00:57:49 Speaker 2: He doesn't understand why detectives didn't do more with the prince. 00:57:54 Speaker 12: Why not expand out? Let's brainstorm, who's got connects to that area? 00:58:00 Speaker 4: You know? 00:58:01 Speaker 12: Who are our guys that we know could be, as they say on TV, good for this? Why didn't they do that? Why wasn't that done? 00:58:12 Speaker 2: Scott Cupp calls up to Tallahassee to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement to see if they still have a copy of the fingerprints on file. They do, and they send him a copy on an index card. Then Cup has to decide what to do next. 00:58:29 Speaker 12: At that point, I really didn't know. I like to ruminate on things and try to figure out what's the best way to go forward. 00:58:38 Speaker 2: Well, he doesn't really get the time to think about it because he gives Chrissy the card and Chrissy kind of goes behind Scott's back and meets up with Cinda, who's now a police captain in Henry County. 00:58:50 Speaker 7: I remember Chrissy wanting to talk to me and coming to me and telling me that she had a fingerprint and that nobody ran it, and I'm. 00:59:06 Speaker 11: Like, please, please, please figure out a way. 00:59:10 Speaker 7: Chrissy's pretty tenacious, you know. Chrissie's like a dog with a bone. She has a cause and she follows through. So she handed it to me and she goes here it is. And I kind of laughed at her and I said, what are you doing with this? And she said, could you just see if this print comes back to anybody? And I thought to myself, well, apparently it doesn't, because nobody's pursued this. 00:59:41 Speaker 11: I didn't know how she was going to do it. I was just begging her, begging her, begging her, and she said, I'll look into it. 00:59:47 Speaker 7: I said, oh, right, give it to me. 00:59:49 Speaker 13: I did that. 00:59:51 Speaker 7: Probably because at that point I thought, if Chrissy doesn't leave me, alone. This is gonna finally make her shut up. And so I took the fingerprint and I handed it to one of my crime scene detectives and I said to him, is there any way that you can find out by running this through the database if this comes back to anyone? And he said sure, And if you want me to be perfectly honest, I thought it was going to come back as nothing. Not that I wanted it to, but I thought that it would be something that was already done and this was just another dead end avenue. And again I thought that she was grasping at straws. 01:00:39 Speaker 13: But he. 01:00:43 Speaker 7: Came back to me three days later and he said, there's a hit. And I'm like, really, all right, who does it come back to? And he said, a guy named Jeremy Scott, Jerry Scott. 01:01:00 Speaker 2: Who the fucks Jeremy Scott? 01:01:04 Speaker 7: Holy shit. 01:01:16 Speaker 2: Bone Valley is a production of Lava for Good Podcasts in association with Signal Company Number One. Our executive producers are Jason Flahm and Kevin Wordiskak. Kornhaber is our senior producer. Britz Spangler is our sound designer. Roxandra Guidy is our editor. Fact Checking by Maximo Anderson. Our producer and researcher is Kelsey Decker. Our theme song, The One Who's Holding the Stars, is performed by Lee Bob and The Truth. It was written by Leo Schofield and Kevin Herrick in Florida's Hardy Correctional Institution. Bone Valley is written and produced by me Gilbert King. You can follow the show on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter at Lava for Good. To see photos and documents from our investigation and exclusive behind the scenes content, visit Lava for Good dot com slash Bone Valley