Speaker 1: You're listening to the Mind over Murder podcast.
Speaker 2: My name is Bill Thomas. I'm a writer, consulting, producer,
and now podcaster. I am now trying to use my
experience as the brother of a murder victim to help
other victims of violent crime. I'm working on a book
on the unsolved Colonial Parkway murders and I'm the co
administrator of the Colonial Parkway Murders Facebook group together with
Kristin Dilly.
Speaker 1: My name is Kristin Dilly.
Speaker 3: I'm a writer, a researcher, a teacher, and a victim's advocate,
as well as the social media manager and co administrator
for the Colonial Parkway Murders Facebook page with my partner
in crime, Bill Thomas.
Speaker 4: Welcome to Mind of a Murder. I'm Kristin Billy and
I'm Bill Thomas. We are joined today by author and
podcaster Gilbert King here to talk to us about the
book Bone Valley, a true story of injustice and redemption
in the heart of Florida, which is also a best
selling podcast. Gilbert, thank you, thank you so much for
joining us. We are so happy to have you here.
Speaker 5: Oh, I'm so happy to be with you guys. I'm
really going to enjoy this. I can tell.
Speaker 4: Gilbert to start off by telling us about your life
as an author and about the books that you've written,
all of which you're amazing.
Speaker 5: By the way, Oh, that's very lovely. Started writing about
twenty years ago and really focusing on this time period
called the pre civil rights era, which is like the
nineteen forties and the nineteen fifties. So it's that area
between the end of World War Two and the beginning
of the Civil rights movement, and it was an extraordinarily
violent time in American history. I went back and found
one of these cases about these four young men in Groveland,
Flarda who'd been accused of sexually assaulting a white woman,
which is about the most explosive thing you can do
in the Jim Crow South. And it led to the
sheriff coming in and saying, I know exactly who did it,
picking out four men, and he believed were troublemakers because
two of them continued to wear their military uniforms, which
is very provocative. And so he found four suspects and
tried to pin it on them, and then Thurgood Marshall
got involved, and once they were convicted, he got the
case overturned by the US Supreme Court, and then the
sheriff in this town said, oh, that's fine, we're gonna
have a new trial. I'll go up and pick up
the guys. Myself picked him up, and the next thing
you know, they're laying in a ditch, one of them
shot to death, one of them nearly dead. It was
just a really phenomenal like if you look at it
from just a crime narrative, it's just such a really
interesting case because you have a sheriff's taking a law
into his own hands and starts executing the defendants because
he didn't believe the courts were going to do it.
And so Thurgood Marshal comes in and takes this case.
And it's one of those cases that was just forgotten
in history. It happened in Florida, and nobody remembers it.
They remember like the Scottsboro Boys in Alabama from nineteen
thirty one, but that nobody got killed in that case.
It was not as explosive. And so when I found
this case, I thought, this really deserves a book. It's
got Thurgood Marshall. It's a great crime narrative. I love crime,
and so I wrote this book, and I'll just tell you, like,
when it came out, it got like very few reviews.
Nobody really cared about it. I got a letter from
the publisher saying, basically called a remainder letter. It's the
worce letter you could possibly get as an author. So
it means that we have sold so few of your
books that they're taking up space and we're going to
start pulping them. Oh no, you can buy them for
a dollar each and a source letter. It just means
your books going out of print. And then two days
later I won the Pulitzer Prize for the same.
Speaker 2: Book, for the same book, did they turn off the
pulping machine and say they did?
Speaker 5: I said, can I buy some copies? And they said,
we'll give you a box.
Speaker 2: But that's it, because now it's such for you buying
a thousands of books and a dollar.
Speaker 5: A pot exactly exactly. It's it's the equivalent of kind
of being struck by lightning. Because this was not on
my radar. After all the disappointments of not selling and
getting it pulped, I just had given up on that
and then this thing comes out of the blue and
it's just absolutely changed. My life, and the most important
way is that it allowed me to co continue telling
these kind of stories that I wanted to tell. I
think before there was like they're not selling. But now
that I've got the pull up Serprize, they can put
that on the cover and people will pay attention. And
I'm like, whatever it takes. But the only thing for
me that matter was like, I just want to keep
doing this. I'm was just starting to get good at it,
I thought, and that would be ashamed to just walk away.
Speaker 2: How is it that a pilot Prize winning book is
teetering on being pulped and turned into I've reads a
paper who submits books for pilozers. How does that process work?
I'll be honest, this is what I think happened. I
don't know all the facts, but what happened was my
editor left in the middle of the process. Oh that's
a problem, I.
Speaker 5: Thought, Are they're going to cancel this book like that?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 5: But she said, I really believe in this. I think
another editor should take it, and they gave it to
a very experienced editor. But she said, look, I didn't
I'm not really involved with this book is mostly done.
She passed it off to her young assistant, and it
was I think her first job and her first maybe
the first time she's talking to an author for all
I know. But she was so excited and so enthusiastic,
and she just treated it like this is her book,
which was and I you're the editor, let's do this,
and we put the book together. And I think there
was a time where they were putting books together from
Harper and I think she must have thrown my books
in for considerations because she was so proud of it. Yeah,
so that young assistant, her name is Maya z If. She
basically saved my publishing life. I'm pretty convinced of that.
So very cool.
Speaker 2: Does she know you feel this way?
Speaker 5: Oh, she knows. We have this a look that we
give each other whenever we see It's like she obvitously
got promoted and for her too. He's now a force
in publishing and we just got to know something happens
years ago, and that was really beautiful.
Speaker 2: Wow, that's a great story. And I love the we're
just about to push these books off the loading dock
and into the big shredding machine and you win appeal
to her. It's amazing.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it is sometimes I feel like you can't really
get give any lessons about that because it's learned, like
how do you get struck by lightning? But I do
remind people like I had no control of how it
was received. The only thing I control were the words
were on the page, and I felt I did my job.
Maybe my kids will read this one day and just go, oh,
dad wrote a goo book. Maybe that's all that I'm
going to get from this. There's no guarantees of sales
or any The same book that was considered a disaster
and a bomb was the same book that won the
Pulitzer Prize. So I don't try to explain these things anymore.
Just I just tell people, look, you have some control,
but it's all in the writing that you do, and
you never know. There's no guarantee anything's going to happen.
Speaker 4: I'm going to predict that Bone Valley is going to
do extraordinarily well because it is based on a podcast
that is extraordinarily popular. I want to go ahead and
have you start by talking to us about Leo Schofield,
who is the basis for the Bone Valley podcast.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and I'll give you an idea the kind of
origin story because it's really interesting, and we do start
the book out that way. And I was going around
doing talks at the judicial conferences in Florida, and I
showed up at this one down in Naples and it
was all judges, all circuit judges, and at the end
of it, this judge approaches me and he hands me
this business card and it's got Leo Schofield's name on
it and it says, not just wrongfully convicted, he's an
innocent man. And I remember thinking, I wasn't sure. I'm
not a lawyer. I wasn't sure, but I said, are
judges really supposed to be saying like, basically, somebody got framed,
it doesn't belong in prison. I didn't think so. And
I showed it to some public defenders when I met
with the following night, and they were like a judge rotive,
like why would he do that? That violates his ethics,
cannons and all that stuff. And they passed it around
the table and it got to a guy, another lawyer
in Polk County, and he looked at the card and
he goes, I know this case. You should get in
touch with that guy. So that kind of tipped me
that there was something there beyond just maybe I had
a crazy judge who knows. But then this public defenders
said I know this case and it's worth looking into,
and so that's when I started looking into it. I
talked to Judge Cup. He promised me this guy was innocent,
and he said, you ought to meet him. And I'd
never been inside a prison before, so that was really
my first trip into a prison. It was really striking
to see the way he walked, in the way he
carried himself. He basically said, I wish I could remember
the exact words it's in the book, but he says,
I don't need you to validate my truth. I'm an
innocent man. Whether you believe it or not doesn't change
the fact that I'm an innocent man. And there was
just something really powerful about that. And he wasn't trying
to convince me of anything. But I started reading the
trial transcript and doing all these research, and I said,
there's something complicated here. I don't really think this is right,
but I really wanted to take my time, and ultimately
Leo has just become this really remarkable person in my
life because he said, there's full transparency here. I'll answer everything.
Some of the questions you might ask, I won't know
because I wasn't there, but I'll tell you everything. And
his story has never changed over thirty six years, seven years.
He's always stuck to the same story. And then just
declared his innocence. And sometimes when you talk to people
like that, you can just look in their eyes and
when they tell you look into everything. I'm not afraid
of anything. And the more you find, the more innocent.
I'm going to be calm in your eyes. And he
challenged me with that, and that's exactly what happened.
Speaker 2: You said in the first episode of the Bone Valley Podcast,
Season one, Episode one, you said there were thousands of
pages in these transcripts. First of all, how do you
access them? Does someone printed out for you and you've
got thousands of pages? Or are you looking at a
computer until your eyes fall out of your head? How's
it all work?
Speaker 5: Yeah? In the first instance, I believe I got a
link to the Polk County Clerk and they're putting a
lot of these cases online and so I was able
to link to that and it's all reading online. But
I got I always say, like halfway through it, I
just said I don't think this guy's guilty. I don't
think he did it. I could see how the prosecutor
was cutting corners and describing things that were not in
the transcripts. He was really manipulating the evidence and the testimony.
And I got to say he was a very good
and powerful prosecutor. I really admire how good he was.
He almost felt like saying, this guy's so good he
could put innocent men in prison for life. That's how
good he is.
Speaker 2: And apparently he has and he.
Speaker 5: Was yeah, and he was all I have to say. Also,
in Leo's defense, Leo ended up with this I call
him a kind of like a better call Saul kind
of lawyer. He's popular, everybody loved it. Didn't do any research.
He just said I got the personality, I'll charm everybody.
He just got steamrolled in court by a really good prosecutor,
and that those days might have worked well in the
sixties and seventies, but in the eighties they just weren't
holding up. He was getting a little old, and he
wasn't as.
Speaker 4: Sharp in the recounting of all the factors that went
into sending Leo to prison for a crime he did
not commit. Would you say that it was the lawyer
that was a nail in the coffin, or like, what
was it? Ultimately that sort of was the tipping point.
Speaker 5: There was a few factors. One of them, the most
important factor was the beginning. The state. John Aguerre of
the prosecutor opened up with something like twenty one straight
witnesses that just spoke about Leo's character and his temper.
None of them had anything to do with seeing anything
in the crime, but it was character evidence, and honestly,
every lawyer I've talked to said that never should have happened.
The defense attorney did not object to that. And there's
a certain amount of overkill where you can poison the
jury and prejudice them by just doing day after day
of just people saying he's a bad person, and he
fights with his wife, he breaks things, he gets really angry,
he throws his guitar into a bonfire, and by the
time the case gets to the evidence, people have already
made up their mind. And that's when I had people
I consult with. I said, read the transcript and tell
me what you think, and they all said, this trial
was over before the third day. The people had already
made up their mind. So I think that was probably
the contributing thing. There's a couple other moments in the
case that are just weird and innuendo ish, and they
got played by the prosecute. I'll give you the perfect example.
So they find Michelle's body on day three of the search,
and the reason they find it is because on day two,
the night of day two, they find her car abandoned
on the side of the road. So now they have
a place to search. They can trace where the car
was back to the restaurant where she disappeared, and so
that was where they started searching, and they broke up
the search party and Leo's father found the body. Anybody
who was doing this search would have looked in this place,
but it happened to be Leo's father. And after he
found the body, he said something that the prosecution used
against him with great fast. He said, yeah, I found
God must have led me to her. And it got
turned into this premonition and spun into the story like
he'd wake woke up in the middle of the night
and said I know where the body is and led
police there. That's not what he's that's not what happened.
He just once he found the body. I can't imagine
the trauma of finding your daughter in law floating face down.
And I think he tried to put some kind of
it must have been my destiny to find the body.
God led me there, And that just got turned into
something that people just think he had prior knowledge. He
knew where the body was and so that that hurt
him a lot too. And there was a few other
things here and there, but it was a perfect storm
of things against Leo.
Speaker 4: It really did sound exactly like that, like here is
everything that could possibly go wrong in a trial, and
it went in that way. And again, for the benefit
of our listeners, when we say Leo did not murder
his first wife, Michelle, he really truly did not murder
his first wife Michelle, and that is as a result
of the fact that someone else did and someone else
confessed to it. Can you tell us a little bit
about who actually did murder Michelle Skofia else?
Speaker 5: Yeah, And this is a crazy story and I really
got it. I was able to write about this in
the book and just expand on it because it was
so interesting to me. But after several years in prison,
Leo's just trying to educate himself. He finished his high school,
he got college degrees. It got so to the point
where he was actually a teacher's aid and he was
helping the teachers and in walks this six foot tall
blonde woman who's just a couple of years older than him,
and Leo becomes the teacher's aid and it's like a
Hollywood scriptum and they fall in love. And people that
just have a hard time believing that they've been married
for thirty years. This is not sometimes you think about
Ted Bundy, he's got groupies. It wasn't that kind of situation.
And once you get to know Leo, if you could
imagine that why people would find him interesting. He's claiming
his innocence, but because he meets the social workers, she
has to transfer, otherwise she could be jeopardizing her job,
so that they didn't really get together until after she transferred.
Leo said, look, I'm not going to lie to you.
I've been through so much. I lost my last wife
and I got accused of her murder, and I'm not
going to try and convince you anything. But if you
want to look at into it yourself and ask me
any questions, I'll happily answer, and so she takes them
up on that, and she starts going to the clerk's
office and researching it, and she finds this document that
there's these unidentified fingerprints found in Michelle's car. They didn't
match Leo, they didn't match Michelle. They just unidentified because
there wasn't an Athos system that you could run it through,
so they just sat there. And so she ends up
asking a friend to hers who works for the sheriff's office,
to run the Prince just to see and it's her
friend Cinda and her friend Senda's. Look, this has probably
been looked into, this is going nowhere, but just to
shut you up, I'm going to run these prints, runs
the Prince and talk about it in the books. She's
just staring at her computer screen when the prints come
up and she does holy shit. It finds out, Yo,
it's a hit, the worst hit you can imagine. It's
a man who's killed several people, who lives in that
same area, and he's in prison for another murder. And
so now it's not the tow truck driver, it's not
like a detective from the crime scene, it's not some
innocent byes it's a person who's killed people in basically
the same spot where Michelle was found. And that's where
the story gets really dicey, because first thing they do
is send some investigators and then they he talks to
John Aguero Intoguero's office. Now this is also to remind you,
John Aguero has put this man in prison and got
the death penalty against Jeremy, so he knows exactly who
he is. Yeah, and now he's coming back into the office,
no tape recorders, no witnesses, and the next thing you know,
Jeremy saying, I just stole stereos from her car. I
used to travel the highway and steal stereos and that
became the story to explain why the fingerprints were in there.
Speaker 2: So it sounds like he's being coached or guided, or
being even told what to say, which would steer the
potential involvement in her murder away from him.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and that's exactly what he says happened. And we
interviewed him a couple times. I've talked to him many
times about it. And as Leo says, you don't go
into a meeting with a guy like Jeremy Scott and
not have witnesses and not have a tape recorder unless
you don't want a record of what your conversation is
going to be exactly. And Leo's been around the block
knows this, and that's exactly what happened. Jeremy has been
very honest with me over the years. He said that
John Aguero promised to help him with his parole. He says,
you have a state attorney, assistant state attorney who is
on your side. This is your chance at freedom. Just
stick to the story. And Jeremy said, so I sticked
to this.
Speaker 2: He didn't the prosecutor didn't want to hear about Jeremy
admitting that he had actually killed Michelle No.
Speaker 5: And later on Jeremy told me that he confessed to
John Aguero and said, I'm the one that did that.
And Aguero took out these aerial photos from the canal
where you can't see a body, and he said, point
to the place where the body was found, and Jeremy did,
and he said, I knew exactly where it was because
I'm the one who put it in. But Aguero didn't
want to hear it, and so they in the evident
Jerry hearing Jeremy stood up on the stand and said,
I just stole the stereo, and the state just said, Yep,
that's all he is. That's his mo. He's a stereo thief. Meanwhile,
they prosecuted him twice for murder. Once he got acquitted.
The other time he's convicted and sentence to death, so
they knew exactly who he was. He's not just a
stereo thief. That was just disingenuous in the extreme.
Speaker 2: It sounds like prosecutor Guero just wanted to preserve his
win convicting Leo wrongfully and wasn't even willing to look
at the real story.
Speaker 5: No, and I think that was part of the problem.
Here's the guy who's convicted both Jeremy Scott and Leo Schofield.
This is this could open up a big can of worms.
I don't know why the State Attorney's office didn't send
a different prosecutor in there and have him handle it,
because there's a ethical conflict between you having convicted both
men and that never happened. Some years go by and
the Jeremy doesn't get any help with his parole. Guero
doesn't even show up, and then he dies. Jeremy Scott
said he wrote a letter, talked to Leo's lawyers and said,
all right, and you're ready for the real story. I'm
the guy that did it. And he started mentioning details
and they get to another evidentiary hearing and it's just
so depressing to see. But they just destroyed his credibility.
We lie the first, can't be trusted, and then the
judge decides that he's not worthy to be and they
just dismiss him out right. This was a very easy
and convenient thing to do by law, but it was
definitely not getting us closer to the truth.
Speaker 4: The sheer injustice that's demonstrated by this case and this
total lack of accountability from the justice system in Florida
is it was maddening to read, and I'm sure it
was even worse to live. How did you deal with
the anger and the frustration that must have resulted from
working on this case and being told over and over again,
no Leo's to Keller, even though Jeremy confessed.
Speaker 5: And that was the thing. I felt like Jeremy Scott
had a lot of the answers to this case. He's
the I believe he's the last person to see Michelle alive.
So I had listened to all his tapes of recordings
when he talked to detectives and when he denied it initially,
And he cannot tell a straight story about the lie
because he's got he's got a little bit of brain damage.
He's got like a seventy nine IQ. When he starts
making up stories, he may makes so many mistakes and
gets things wrong. It was just very obvious reading that
and listening to him that he was not telling the truth.
And so once I ended up interviewing him in prison, yeah,
I didn't really know what to expect from him. I
didn't know if he was going to be hostile. He
didn't want to talk to anybody anymore, and a lot
of times he was off his meds and unpredictable. But
we went in and I just could not believe how
candid he was. We didn't talk to him like interrogations,
like prosecutors and lawyers have talked to him. We almost
used a therapeutic approach. Does it make you feel better
to talk about these things? And just put him relaxed.
And you know, he said, I have trouble sleeping. And
one of the things that he said was just so
mind blowing. We asked him, do you think about Michelle
a lot? And he said all the time. I go
to bed at night and I see the faces and
it's a nightmare and I can't get out of it.
He said, that's my punishment. And I think he was
just reliving his past and the people that he killed,
and it was haunting him. In the end, he said,
if I can do one good thing, like maybe help
Leo or help the families of the people I kill,
I'm going to do it that way. I'll just tell
the truth so they know what happened. In the process
of investigating Michelle's case, he admitted to an other murder
that he got away with, and I'm absolutely convinced it
was because I have evidence and everything and I can't
get I'm not trying to get somebody out of prison now,
I'm trying to actually get someone charged with a murder.
I couldn't get any cooperation anywhere. It was just it's
mind blowing. It just shows you how hard this stuff is.
There is no doubt in anybody's mind who looks into
this that Jeremy Scott is Michelle's killer. He just brought
up so many details, all the remorse that the state
wants Leo to show, and he can't because he claims innocence.
Jeremy's showing that remorse. He's haunted by his actions, and
so that was what really made it really interesting to me.
Speaker 2: With the original prosecutor gone now having died, there's no
chance of them taking a fresh look at these cases.
And I know that Leo is out of jail now,
but he's not been exonerated. And at the same time,
you've got Jeremy Scott confessing to Michelle's murder. Is there
no one willing to take this up on the prosecutor.
Speaker 5: Side, Not in this particular circuit. I think John Aguero
entered a lot of young prosecutors. He was having some
personal issues and they demoted him a little bit, but
he still trained. And this prosecutor took it over, was
like his star pupil el Jeremy.
Speaker 2: He's a mentor and.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and she was really she still is. She's a
very bright attorney. And this is really hard. So I
hoping Leo got some dummy prosecutor, but it just never happened.
There was always really bright people. They knew what they
were doing. In a way. It makes it a little
bit more disturbing because I believe that I don't think
you can look at this rationally and think that Leo
was guilty of this crime. But they've taken this position
and they're really like doubled down on it, and it's
really difficult to go up against.
Speaker 2: We've seen this in the Colonial Parkway murders, and I've
said this many times on Mind of a Murder and
other podcasts and media appearances. We find that institutional interests
supersede the pursuit of justice. It's all about protecting the
reputation of in our example, the FBI and the Virginia
State Police in this amazing story in Bone Valley. It's
protecting the prosecutors and former prosecutors who handled in I
think mishandled these cases.
Speaker 5: You're absolutely right. It's just this concept of finality, like
we don't ever want to disturb a jury that has
heard this case. We don't want to second guess them.
That's all fine and good. I think sometimes in this
case where you have somebody who's forensically connected to the
crime scene, who's extraordinarily violent and is saying he did
it to me, that would have been reasonable doubt if
that would have show up in LEO. But this a
jury has never heard this evidence, and it's really come
down to one judge who makes that decision. They're the gatekeeper,
and they say he's not credible. This does not belong
in front of a jury. And so he's never been
tested and questioned in a criminal court. He's been questioned
in evident share hearings, and he confessed over forty times.
The last time they spoke with him and wow, last
words were I killed her, And he was getting upset.
This man didn't do it.
Speaker 2: I did it.
Speaker 5: I'll take a polygraph test. He was really adamant about it.
Speaker 2: But and Jeremy Scott is he in prison currently and
he will he ever get out of prison.
Speaker 5: No, he'll never get out because he's I believe he's
killed four people. He's been convicted on the last one.
I think he got away with three murders. And even
in prison, as I was talking to him, I'll just
tell you this strange story. It's in the book. He
wrote me this cryptic note, mister King. This is after
a couple of years, mister King, this is the last
note I'll be writing to you, And he said, the
monster in me is coming out again. Good luck with
your story, Jeremy. And I'm like, the hell does that mean?
I got this? And then I lost track of him
for a couple of.
Speaker 2: Months, and he's incarcerated or anything.
Speaker 5: No, And so I started doing record requests and I
found out that he had stabbed an inmate. Okay, so
he got put into solitary confinement and the inmates survived
the attack. And a couple of months later he called
me he was get a phone call. It got two
phone calls a week, and he had nobody to call.
So I was the person he would call. And I
said where were you? And he said, oh, I had
some trouble. He said, somebody put a hit on me.
I knew this guy was waiting for me, but I've
been in prison a long time. I know when that's happening.
And so I just one night, I waited until he
fell asleep. I went into the bathroom. It's all on
video too. He went into the bathroom, retrieved this makeshift
knife and went up to the guy that he thought
was going to kill him and started stabbing him. Didn't
kill him. And what's really interesting, he said to me,
because we've been talking a lot about remorse and reflection.
And he said, mister King, I could have killed him,
I could have put it in his heart, but I didn't.
So I was thinking baby steps, Jeremy, baby steps. I
don't know really what you say to that. But he's
never getting out of prison. I asked people, I ask
prosecutors this, if there's a man who's this extraordinarily violent,
who's never getting out of prison, what's the thing that
he can do to be most helpful to society. And
the answer is just confess to things you've done and
try to bring some relief. And also, there's a man
who's been wrongfully convicted because of his actions, and so
he's done everything right, and he's stuck by those stories,
and he's even frustrated that he can't be more of
a help I think he believes that polygraph tests have
no error rate. They're just completely legit. They can tell
if you are lying or not. That's his mind, and
he's when he says I'll take a polygraph on this,
he believes that's going to be the ultimate proof on this.
Speaker 2: You're listening to Mind over Murder. We'll be right back
after this word from our sponsors. We're back here at
mindover Murder.
Speaker 4: I loved the first season of Bone Valley, but I
have to say I think I almost liked the second
season a little bit more because you really took the
time to tell Jeremy Scott's story, and you certainly were
under no obligation to do that. Why did you feel
like it was important to tell Jeremy's story in addition
to Leo's story.
Speaker 5: And the answer to that is, I had no idea
that this would happen. I had no plan. But after
the first season of Bone Valley came out, I found
out Jeremy had a son who is now thirty five
years old, and he listened to the podcast. Was like
two months afterwards it had come out.
Speaker 2: Oh interesting.
Speaker 5: He just recalled me in a really frantic move. Is
that's the first time I've ever heard my father's voice.
I don't know anything about him, I just had.
Speaker 2: They never just met or spent any time together.
Speaker 5: Never he got her pregnant. He got his girlfriend pregnant
right at the time of the last murder. He committed
right and so he as a courtesy his girlfriend brought
this baby to death Row at Rayford and said I'll
let you see your son, but that's it.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 5: And that was the only time he'd ever seen when
he was like probably three months old, and so he'd
written letters. He tried to stay in touch with his son,
but nobody answered. And I think it was just because
he's a killer. Stay away from him, don't do it.
When Justin listened to the podcast, his takeaway was like,
he sounded like a broken person. He didn't sound like
a monster everybody was telling me about. He sounded like
someone who's trying to fix something that he did and
he believed in Leo, and he said, I think I
want to get in touch with my dad. And so
I said, that's really interesting. I think I can help
with that. Let's see how it goes. And in the
course of just interviewing Justin and learning about him, it's
just remarkable because for Jamie, who had a relationship with
Jeremy for about two years before he went off to prison,
and she knew what he was capable of, and she said,
have to admit he had a good side to him.
He could be charming and really sensitive at times, and
she said, Justin is the good side of Jeremy. He's
just turned into this beautiful young man, never been in
trouble with the law. He's really empathic, and the way
he's described, like all the people coming together to help Jeremy. Oh,
after this horrible story. Nobody wants to see him out
of prison, even his own son's and he doesn't belong
out of prison, but that doesn't mean he can't be
treated like a human being. And it just the story
became so human to me. I was worried in the
beginning that it might be too traumatic, like almost like
trauma porn to go into this. It was actually extraordinarily
healing for the people to talk about it, and I
learned a lot from this. It was a very difficult
season to produce because it was so emotional at times,
and trying to balance that line, are we just out
there creating sympathy for Jeremy? And I said, it's not us,
it's the people who want to come back into his
life that's worth knowing. And so it took me into
that direction, and ever since then, I've started to meet
more and more of Jeremery's family, and I thought they
might be mad at me because I was really honest
about what Jeremy had done. He said, no, you got
that right. But we feel really bad that we've lost
touch with him, and we're going to reconnect. And so
they have reconnected. And I don't know if it's a
beautiful story, but it's something that's extraordinarily human that you
don't get to dip into that often. And hear conversations
with Jeremy. He's broken, he's lost all his stuff in
his locker, he's got nothing. And once in a while
he'll say something, but mister King, like I rooined a
man's life. I didn't just take his wife. I put
him in prison for thirty six years and he has
I got to live with that. It's the wrong thing.
And I don't know what else I can do except
tell you what I did. And those candid moments like
I feel like he's not manipulating. He had nothing to
work with. He was just really concerned about, like staying
in touch with his family, and that was all he
could really expect. He's not getting out of prison. Nobody
wants to see him out, But does that mean he
can't be treated like a human being? And for Justin
to say, look, Jeremy's biggest fear is just dying and
being buried in a prison cemetery. Yeah, and just I said,
I'm not going to let that happen. He deserves to
be buried like a human being. I'll claim the body.
And I just thought, this story is now really I'm
in it. I'm in, like in the middle of it.
I just think it's really worth telling. And I thank
you for saying that, because I think it's it really
is an extraordinary part of the story.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 4: I cried when Justin said that Bill knows I'm a softie.
Speaker 5: I really am.
Speaker 4: But the fact and the fact that he just said
it so quickly, I'll claim him. He's my dad. It
was like, oh my god. The way that you guys
layered in the audio where you alternated Justin's letters with Jeremy's.
There were real tears shed in this house when I
was listening to it, because it's so powerful. I cannot
tell you how much good it has done me as
a human being to hear that. It's very Really, you
guys have done something really special with that second season.
Speaker 5: Thanks for saying that, Chris. I'll tell you, like when
I first heard the cut of that medley where at
the end and then you all of a sudden you
hear Leo talking to Jeremy, you hear all these I
got ball. I couldn't believe what I was hearing. It
was so powerful to me, and like, I'm just my
team that I've been working with on all of this
from Lava for Good. Karen Krnhaber is the senior producer
and Britz Spangler does the sound, and just always felt
like we were on the right page with this. We
always felt it the same way. And I would hear
these cuts and these mixes of these layers and the
sound of like people just being human beings and the letters,
and I just it was almost too much for me,
Like I just I knew the story. Hearing it that
way was just so powerful. And it still gets me
in the heart when I think about it. And I'm
still in touch with Jeremy and I'm still in touch
with Leo, and nothing has really changed, and it's I
don't know where it's going, but hopefully it's going to
lead to justice.
Speaker 2: It's fascinating because I think that a lot of examples
when we talk about wrongfully convicted individuals. This story takes
a very interesting twist with the introduction of Jeremy Scott,
because Jeremy Scott is clearly guilty, he admits his own
in Michelle's murder and the murder of other individuals, and
yet there's something redemptive about your interaction with him. I
was thinking about the fact that there isn't much you
can offer a person who's in prison for the rest
of their life, but connecting him to his family, which
is obviously incredibly important to him, is something that you're
able to facilitate. Did you think to yourself, this is
something I can bring to the table as someone who
knows all the players.
Speaker 5: I'm a little bit reluctant to because I'm trying to
tell the story. And the next thing I know, I'm
in it on the bridge between the son and the father.
And we have one character who comes in, Mary, the
house cleaner, who's just a fan of the podcast and
she listens to it. She's like, this guy doesn't have
money for deoder, and I'm going to send him twenty bucks.
And the next thing I know, yeah, they're pent piles
again and it's just and she's extraordinary and she became
a mother figure for him. Are you brushing your teeth?
Are you going to need to see a doctor young man.
She just she's just so charismatic, and we gave her
a whole episode because she was just so wonderful. And
even today, she still visits Jeremy in prison, and she
still watches out for him and make sure he has
reading material. And I think when Justin just said this
is a story about just people trying to help each other,
I just that was the theme of this. I didn't
really think I would have that kind of a role,
but eventually I'm not ashamed of it. But there's times
where Jeremy and I would talk on the phone and
we just talk about books I sent him, and I
felt that was really making him compact, like he was
talking about the characters and like feeling for certain characters.
And I'd send him like The Hunger Games and Game.
Speaker 2: Of Throne and I'm too heavy just say these things.
Speaker 5: To me, like just about the books that he's reading.
And I was just like somebody Leo said, he goes,
this guy's pretty lucky. He's got this is in the book.
He goes, he's got like his own private like reading
group with a pole. Yeah that's true. Yeah, So I
don't make any like apologies. I feel like When I
first started looking into this, I had a lot of questions.
I wasn't sure. After seven years, I'm absolutely convinced of
what's happened, and I know it's there's no other way
to look at Every time I find something new, it
points to Jeremy. It doesn't point to Leo. Yeah, and
so I don't make any bones about it, like I'm
trying to help. I'm trying to get justice for this.
I'm not just like someone who's a storyteller a journalist.
I've become involved in the story the same way I
did with the Groveland Four when I wrote that book.
Next thing I know, they had me testifying in front
of the Parole Commission and testifying it. And I don't
mind because I feel like this is the truth and
I'm willing to put my reputation behind it in these cases.
Speaker 2: I wanted to ask you a question if I could sure.
Was the plan always to do a podcast which has
now turned into a podcast series and then a book,
because that wasn't how you wrote your other books, No,
not at all. So was this part of a master
plan or just the way it worked out?
Speaker 5: It was just really the way it worked out. I
think The reason is, like I'm used to dealing with
documents and dead people. I don't really have witnesses that
I could talk to in my stories. Everyone's gone, so
I'm reading documents. So this is interesting to me because
now I'm meeting people and they're all really young in
the nineteen eighties, they're all teenagers and so they're all around.
In fact, I'm older than these guys. It feels really weird.
But they were all willing to talk to me. And
so after we talked to Leo, we were only supposed
to get an hour going to the media rules. They
gave us like three and a half because they all
love Leo and they're like, how long you need, and
so we've talked to him for three over three hours.
He was telling stories about the worst moments in his life,
the search for Michelle and how he couldn't sleep and
how he's going out there and then ultimately when the
body was found, like just very human moments that he
was He was like, well, if she's not dead, you
found on the water, get her out. When they're trying
to tell her, like, look, she's dead, but he didn't
know that. He doesn't is mortifying and just have him
recount those stories and then like we'd say goodbye to
him and he would go into a cell and think
about the stuff that he doesn't talk about at all,
and I just felt like, this guy must be traumatized
by this. He knew it was important to tell the
story and he was willing to do it, and he said, Gilbert,
it's not easy. I really some of the stuff I
haven't ever talked about before, but I'll do it because
I know you're committed to this. And so I think
coming out of that, I was like, God, his voice
and the way he speaks is so powerful. Yeah, I
don't know if I could do justice like I think
people need to hear that. And then the transition, Like
once I started doing all that, I was like, Wow,
there's so much I'm leaving out of the podcast because
we don't have audio and can't cover the trial. I
can create those trial scenes and put the backstories and
the context in it. And that's when I really started
thinking about a book. It was after the podcast came out.
I just said I didn't really I got into it,
but I didn't really cover a lot of it. There's
a lot more there, and I really wanted to just
go into that and go back to my writing, which
is and I never would have done that, but I
felt like there was still so much more to tell.
Speaker 4: And you'd mentioned when you were talking to Maggie Freeley
and that you wanted to be able to do parallel
narratives where you would start with Leo and then move
to Jeremy and Leo and Jeremy, and you did that
with the book, and it works really beautifully. So I
can definitely see how doing it as a podcast. But
then here's the book that accompanies it. I think they
both compliment each other really well. You have told Leo
and Jeremy stories, but you also had two bonus episodes
where you talked about leo cellmate and best friend, Kevin Herrick,
who it also looks is in prison for a crime
he didn't commit. And that's going to be a little
weird too, to meet two people in prison who were
wrongfully convicted. Is there an update on Kevin?
Speaker 2: I really want there to.
Speaker 5: Be an update on Kevin. That investigation is continuing. Interestingly enough,
when Leo first told us about his roommate, he said
he's also innocent. My actually, like, how is everybody in it?
I just I trusted Leo. But if you're telling me
your cell MAT's also innocent for twenty five years and
they're they're playing a rock band together. And I honestly,
whenever Leo tells me something, some of it's hard to
believe at times, but it always comes back to being
like honest. He's being honest with this. At one point
he said, Gilbert, I know Kevin is as innocent as
I am. He's an innocent man. And so I was
tied up with some other projects and trying to work
these things out, and I gave it to some a
couple of lawyers, and I said, can you just look
at this case and look at the and just do
me a favor and look at this and just tell me,
And they both got back to me. He said, this
guy's definitely innocent.
Speaker 2: Wow. Yeah, so Leo was right.
Speaker 5: He was right. And then Judge Cup, who's like the
most skeptical person in the world. He's retired now, but
I said, Judge Cup, got to look at this for
me because I think this guy might be innocent. And
he says the same reaction, Oh geez, here we go, right,
And then he comes back he goes this guy didn't
do it, and I'm like, oh no. So we started
looking into it and yeah, this guy's definitely innocent. He
got railroaded.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 5: And it's not that they've accidentally in the same cell together.
The way they came up, they both got paralegal degrees
and they became jailhouse lawyers and they were helping other
lawyers with their appeals and motions, and they meant that way,
and they started talking. And people aren't don't freely admit
that they're innocent. It's an awkward thing. Leo told me, like,
because I thought the myth was like, oh, everybody says
they're innocent. He said, Gilbert, I can count on one hand,
over four decades in prison, the people who told me
they were actually factually innocent. He goes, It's not a
common thing. A lot of people will say I didn't
do what the state did. This guy was claiming total innocence,
just like Leo. And so we looked into it and
there's no doubt that this guy's innocent. I have no
doubt out on this one either, and so we just
started to explore it. There's still investigation that's coming, it'll
be out like once we really put it together. We're
working with the making an ex honor reprogram at Georgetown.
Their students are doing the investigation, which is great, and
they found stuff. Some of the people that are guiding
that investigation have found some Brady material that was never
turned over. And oh, that makes sense because when you
figure out somebody's innocent and you you start to believe it,
you start to see things like that, Oh, they never
turned this over to the defense. In this case, it
happened to be a license plate that one of the
victims was screaming out and it just disappeared from the evidence,
except they found a report that was in the state
attorney's files and it had a report on that license plate.
Speaker 2: And that was never turned over to the defense, never.
Speaker 5: Turned over, and when the investigators, the students looked into it,
they found that it was a man who lived about
a mile away who'd been convicted for sexual assault, which
is what Kevin's case was about. And the defense never
got to explore this because they never got these records.
And he had an airtight alibi, and that's another thing.
Airtight alabust got destroyed in court for some reason. It
makes you wonder what was how was that dynamic in
there that this woman who said I was in the
house the whole time he was sleeping, that he would
have had to walk by me because I was up
the whole time. He never left, he was sleeping when
I woke him up. And yet they ended up convicting
him and he's got life in prison without parole. He's
been in prison just as long more than Leo now
thirty seven years. It's really emotional for Leo because there's
times where Leo's told us like he didn't want to
get out of prison and leave Kevin behind. It was
a really difficult struggle for him, and they had this pact,
whoever gets out first comes back and help the other guy,
and that's what the story's about. To be honest with you,
I think Kevin has a better legal possibility of getting
his honor head than Leo does because there's some new
evidence that was found.
Speaker 2: How is working on Bone Valley and Leo's case changed you,
and we should ask how has it changed your podcast partner, Kelsey,
who worked with you on Bone Valley.
Speaker 5: There's been a lot of changes that in this story,
and I think a lot of them are really person
and all I don't think I ever saw myself corresponding
with and talking to someone who's a mass murderer. Basically,
he's killed four people, in my opinion, and he's confessed
to four of them, and he's forensically tied to three
of them. It seems pretty obvious. And he'll talk about
them with me. He'll answer just about all the questions
I ask him. It's also triggering for him. I wouldn't
say Jeremy and I have become friends over this entire
story where it's just really difficult to describe the relationship.
There were times where I was the only person he
knew and the only person who talked to him, and
he would write me these really long letters and just
at one point I just said, look, I know you
can't get to a phone, but I just need to
know your story. You have to write this down. He
wrote a six page letter, he drew a map of
everything matches the police evidence. There's no doubt he was there.
And ultimately I ended up talking to the lead detective
on that case who admitted that Jeremy should have been
a subject. And I call it the Bone Valley universe.
But it spreads out and like now, it's like we're
going into Jeremy's side, now we're going into Leo Selmy,
who's also innocent, and it's just spread out into these
different directions. I've met like detectives, cold case detectives and say,
I got a case for you. Nobody's written about this one.
I was involved in this, and I get all these
stories come to me, so I feel like I'm completely
involved in it. As far as Kelsey goes, it was
the same thing with her. This was the first case
that she really worked on. It was like our first
job out of college. She's just so talented and so dogged.
She could remember all the facts of the cases. And
there's times where it's a lot, yeah, a couple thousand
pages of transcripts, all these reports and appeals and motions,
and I could always count on her to say that
happened three weeks after that, that was that's wrong.
Speaker 2: He's got that young, sharp, uncluttered mind.
Speaker 5: Yes, And you see her like she has this scene
where she actually confronts the retired state attorney who's he's
been in office for thirty two years, and she starts
correcting him and asking him questions. And it started out
as a friendly interview, and the next thing, this young
woman is just grilling him and he's just doing like
that whole like little lady thing, like the why don't
you take him home and live with you if you
think he's not guilty? That kind of stuff. And I
write about that in the book because I was like,
I've been on the other side of that, like being
corrected by her, and I know she's right because at
one point the state attorney goes, did you read the
trans and she goes, I read it all, and I
just y, she did read it all, and don't try
to slip something by me. It's a really powerful interview.
I think it was the first one she really did
like that at it, but she just took a deep
breath and held her ground and really one of the
great moments in the book too. I really like that.
Speaker 4: The book is Bone Valley, a true story of injustice
and redemption in the heart of Florida. The podcast is
also Bone Valley. Where can everybody find the book and
the podcast?
Speaker 5: Now you can just it's stuck coming out until October eighth,
but if you go on anywhere Amazon or any local bookstore,
independent bookstores, it'll be everywhere. I'm going out on a
tour and taking Leo with me too for a lot
of the place. Oh yeahs, I'll just tell you he's
the star of this. I can recount the story and
put things in perspective, but then we'll have these conversations
and let the audiences ask questions. And he's Leo that
he's this graceful person who doesn't hold on to anger
and tries to be very rational and yeah, very forgiving.
He's just a remarkable person. And I think a lot
of that just sounds hard and sad to say, but
prison made him the man he is. I don't know
if he'd be the same man if he wasn't convicted
of this. I think he's an extraordinarily special person, and
he will say things to me like, aside from losing
my wife and getting convicting for that, I wouldn't trade anything,
because I don't think I would ever meet the people
I met a judge who's willing to quit his job
to come back to be his defense attorney. I wouldn't
have ever met you. And we're a big family now
and we all believe in this justice from Michelle. And
it's when he says that I'm like, yeah, I guess
I'm on that team with you. I just could I
not be. And it's just this remarkable bond that's from
all sides, even Jeremy's family, Michelle's family is very lovely
for the most part. I don't think so two of
the brothers agree on it on Leo's innocent, but the
one who does, who's in Lakeland, is he wrote a
letter of support for Leo's parole and he believes it
and he looked into it himself, and he's asked me
some questions along the way and satisfied with them. I
wouldn't trade this either. It's been seven more than seven
years of my life. Never would I have expected that
I'd be involved to this extent, but it's been a
life changing experience and it's brought me closer to the
how injustice can affect and ripple out in so many
different directions, and really just a human story.
Speaker 2: As you said earlier, Kristin, we're going to do our
best to get it out and see you and Leo
when you're on your book tour, because this sounds like
a fascinating conversation.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it is, and he surprises me. We did the
audiobook together. At the very end, as a bonus, Leo
interviews me. He interviews me and yeah, all I remember
is like people in New York were watching it, were
all crying. And he does that to you. We both
experienced it. Just some really personal questions that he asked
and I had to remind him. Like at one point
he said to me when I was working on this,
he said, Gilbert, if I had just gone left when
I went right, maybe I would have found her. And
I said, Leo, I hate to tell you this, but
Michelle was dead already, and he goes, I know it.
I just don't acknowledge it. But I know that those
turns wouldn't have made any difference. She was already gone.
But that was just like one of those kind of
conversations that I'll never forget with Leo and just say,
you couldn't have done anything, but it was too late,
really horrible.
Speaker 4: The book is fantastic, the podcast is fantastic, and we
can't thank you enough for spending time with us today.
Speaker 5: This has been wonderful. It was such a pleasure talking
to you. You guys are great to you, and I'm
now fans of your podcast. I'm going to go back
and listen because this is the kind of thing you
guys are doing.
Speaker 4: Thank you so much that is going to do it
for this episode of mind Ever Murder. Thank you so
much for listening. We'll see you next time.
Speaker 1: Mind Over Murder is a production of Absolute Zero and
Another Dog Productions.
Speaker 2: Our executive producers are Bill Thomas and Kristin Dilley.
Speaker 1: Our logo art is by Pamela Arnois.
Speaker 2: Our theme music is by Kevin McLoud.
Speaker 1: Mind Over Murder is distributed in partnership with Coral Space Media.
Speaker 2: You can follow us on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram.
Speaker 1: You can also follow our page on the Colonial Parkway
Murders on Facebook.
Speaker 2: And finally, you can follow Bill Thomas on Twitter at
Bill Thomas five six.
Speaker 1: Thank you for listening to mind Over Murder.