Leo Schofield, subject of podcast on 1987 Lakeland murder conviction, faces parole hearing
On one level, little has changed since Leo Schofield Jr. last appeared before the Florida Commission on Offender Review in 2020.
Schofield, convicted in 1989 for the stabbing death of his young wife, Michelle, two years earlier, continues to declare his innocence. As a result, he says that he is unable to express remorse as the three-person commission considers his bid for parole in a hearing scheduled for Wednesday in Tallahassee.
The State Attorney’s Office for the 10th Judicial Circuit, which handled the prosecution 34 years ago, maintains an unequivocal assertion of Schofield’s guilt.
What has changed, aside from the passage of three more years for Schofield in confinement, is that his quest for release has become an international cause. Schofield, 56, is the subject of “Bone Valley,” a 12-part podcast promoting his innocence that has drawn an audience of more than 7 million, according to the production company.
The ABC program “20/20” also devoted an episode to Schofield last fall.
Supporters, most of them having learned of Schofield’s plight from the “Bone Valley” podcast, have sent letters to the Commission on Offender Review pleading for his release from prison. Nearly 31,000 people have signed a petition on Change.org seeking to have Schofield’s case transferred to a conviction integrity unit for an independent review.
But Schofield’s immediate fate will be determined by just three people, the members of the Commission on Offender Review. Schofield is one of 52 inmates scheduled for hearings Wednesday at the Betty Easley Conference Center in Tallahassee.
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Schofield faces what is officially known as an effective interview, but he won’t actually be in Tallahassee. Candidates for parole or other forms of release do not attend the hearings.
The commission can opt to grant parole, decline parole or extend the subject’s presumptive parole release date. Schofield’s date, set about a decade ago, is in June. If the commission declines parole, his release date goes into suspended status.
Scott Cupp, a retired judge now advocating for Schofield’s innocence, is expected to speak on behalf of Schofield, who is now incarcerated at Hardee Correctional Institution near Wauchula. Gilbert King, the creator of the “Bone Valley” podcast, plans to attend and has been in regular contact with Schofield.
“He's cautiously optimistic,” King said Monday by phone from Tallahassee. “But he's also really anxious about this. This is his whole life at stake. If he's not successful in this attempt, it's going to be years. There's no more legal avenues, so he's just going to have to wait for another parole hearing.”
Under the hearing rules, each side is allotted 10 minutes to state its case. For Schofield’s previous hearings, the State Attorney’s Office for the 10th Judicial Circuit has sent a representative to argue against Schofield’s release.
Jacob Orr, a spokesperson, said Thursday that he “anticipated” that the State Attorney’s Office will have someone present for the hearing. He declined to comment further, referring to his previous statements.
One of the commissioners, David Wyant, is a retired detective with the Bartow Police Department. The other two – Chair Melinda Coonrod and Vice Chair Richard Davison – are both former prosecutors.
Schofield received a life sentence after being convicted by a Polk County jury in 1989 and has so far served nearly 35 years. Florida abolished parole in the 1980s, but inmates convicted of murder before 1994 are eligible for release.
Schofield, then a Lakeland resident and aspiring rock musician, was 21 when he reported the disappearance of his 18-year-old wife, Michelle Saum Schofield, in February 1987, triggering a search by law enforcement. After three days, Schofield’s father found Michelle’s body submerged beneath a piece of plywood in a phosphate pit along State Road 33, not far from Interstate 4.
She had been stabbed 26 times in the neck, chest and back.
In what proved to be a crucial element of the investigation by the Polk County Sheriff’s Office, the elder Schofield claimed that an “inner force” had led him to the spot. Leo Schofield and his father had both joined in the search for Michelle, whose abandoned car had been found earlier along I-4.
Schofield’s conviction in 1989 hinged largely on the testimony of a woman who lived across the street in the mobile-home community where Leo and Michelle resided. The neighbor testified that she had seen the couple arguing just before Michelle’s reported disappearance and told investigators that she had seen Schofield carrying something heavy from the home that night.
Podcast generates support
King is the author of “Devil in the Grove,” a Pulitzer Prize-winning book that explored the 1949 case of the “Groveland Four,” a group of Black men accused of raping a white woman and the actions of Lake County’s notorious Sheriff Willis McCall. He first learned of the Schofield case from another man who is now one of Schofield’s leading advocates.
Cupp, then a Circuit Court judge, approached King after the author spoke at a judicial conference in Naples in 2018. The judge implored King to read the transcript of Schofield’s trial.
After doing so, King became convinced that Schofield had been wrongly convicted. He spent four years investigating Schofield’s case, with help from a researcher turned producer, Kelsey Decker, before launching the podcast in September.
“Bone Valley” examines the Schofield case in deep detail. Though King takes a journalistic approach in reporting details such as Schofield’s history of anger issues, he clearly advocates for the claim that Schofield did not kill Michelle. In multiple recorded interviews with Schofield, mostly conducted by phone, King unveils a growing friendship and connection with his subject.
The podcast focuses on what King presents as weaknesses in the prosecution’s case, including the lack of physical evidence and the unreliability of the main witness, the neighbor described as a “busybody.” King reports that a relative of the key witness said she had gotten the day wrong.
King says investigators found no blood or residue from cleaning products at Schofield’s home, though the neighbor said she had seen him cleaning the home after carrying out the heavy object – which Schofield said was probably an amplifier.
Witnesses at the trial portrayed Schofield as an abusive spouse, according to previous Ledger reporting. And witnesses testified to seeing two men standing near where Michelle’s body was later found in the early morning after her reported disappearance.
King also makes the case that Schofield had incompetent representation in his trial.
Above all, “Bone Valley” argues that another man, Jeremy Scott, actually killed Michelle Schofield. When the Polk County Sheriff’s Office examined Michelle’s abandoned orange Mazda, it found a fingerprint on an interior window that didn’t match either Schofield or the victim.
Using improved technology, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement in 2004 matched the print with Scott, who was serving a life sentence for another murder.
Scott had admitted to a practice of stealing stereo equipment from abandoned vehicles, and prosecutors argued that he had left the print in Michelle’s car after finding it along the road and breaking into it.
Schofield filed an appeal in 2009, seeking a new trial based on the fingerprint evidence, but was denied. He filed again in 2017, after his lawyers talked to Scott, who confessed both verbally and in writing to killing Michelle. A former cellmate also claimed Scott had confessed to him.
During a subsequent evidentiary hearing in Bartow, Scott said he had seen Michelle Schofield at a convenience store and asked her for a ride. Inside the car, he dropped a hunting knife while reaching for a cigarette, he said, and Michelle responded by hitting him, after which he “lost it” and stabbed her.
But Scott appeared to recant under a cross-examination from Assistant State Attorney Victoria Avalon. When Avalon showed an autopsy photo of Michelle Schofield’s stab wounds, Scott said, “I didn’t do that.”
In the podcast, King suggests that Scott was reacting to the degraded state of Michelle’s body after days in the canal and emphasized the word “that,” meaning only that he hadn’t left her in such a condition. King said that Scott later in the hearing repeated his claim of having killed Michelle.
Prosecutors said that Scott told Schofield’s lawyers that he would confess if they paid him $1,000 and later claimed to be responsible for every murder committed in Polk County in 1987 and 1988.
Circuit Judge Kevin Abdoney ruled in 2018 after the evidentiary hearing that Scott was “not credible” and “could not recount facts accurately.”
In the podcast, King says that Scott had entered the court in an addled condition because he was being denied psychiatric medication.
Legal challenges fail
Florida’s Second District Court of Appeal in 2020 rejected Schofield’s bid for a new trial, writing that Scott’s testimony at the hearing had been “to put it mildly, bizarre.” Writing for the three-court panel, Judge Samul Salario Jr. noted that Schofield’s lawyer had to have Scott declared an adverse witness and that he said an oath he swore in court did not mean much to him.
“Bone Valley” includes subsequent interviews with Scott. Initially evasive, he eventually repeats his claim that he killed Michelle and offers additional details. King also elicits a confession from Scott for a murder of a taxi driver in Osceola County that officially remains unsolved.
The podcast includes interviews with Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd and retired Ledger reporter Suzie Schottelkotte, who covered Schofield’s trial and the related hearings. King and Decker also speak at length with Crissie Schofield, a social worker who married Leo in 1995 after meeting him while teaching in prison.
The podcast includes interviews with Jesse Saum, Michelle’s brother. Saum says that he no longer has confidence in Schofield’s conviction and would like to see him released.
“Bone Valley” has posted three bonus episodes beyond the original nine segments. In an episode released April 19, King talks to the director of a post-incarceration halfway house in Tampa that has offered Schofield a space, should he be granted parole.
The segment includes excerpts from letters that listeners have sent to the parole commission urging Schofield’s dismissal from prison. Some of the writers offer to provide support to Schofield if he is released.
Though Schofield is not allowed to attend Wednesday’s hearing, the recent episode of “Bone Valley” presents a recording of him reading a letter addressed to the commission. He acknowledges that parole hearings are not intended to determine innocence but reiterates his claim of innocence.
“Please understand that I am not stating this fact in arrogance,” Schofield says. “The only reason I am emphatically stating my position here is because I cannot make a statement of remorse for this crime, as the state has highlighted in my last appearance before you in (2020).”
Schofield says that he turned down an offer of a plea agreement because he was unwilling to claim guilt for a crime that he insists he didn’t commit. He promises that if released he will make the commissioners proud and offers to work with the prison system to support other inmates.
King said the letter was included as part of Schofield’s parole packet, which includes letters of support from friends, relatives and prison officials. He said Schofield has been “a model inmate” and serves as a mentor to other incarcerated men.
King said he had no sense of how the hearing might go.
“I'm kind of optimistic that something's going to happen in this hearing, but I have no idea,” King said. “It’s one of those situations where three people are voting, and it’s really hard to tell what's going to happen. So I think there's going to be some tension to this.”
Prosecution has opposed parole
When Schofield had his first parole hearing in 2012, the original prosecutor, Assistant State Attorney John Aguero, spoke in opposition to his release. (Aguero died in 2017.)
Another prosecutor from the State Attorney’s Office for the 10th Judicial Circuit, Victoria Avalon, attended Schofield’s 2015 hearing and urged the commission to deny his parole. Avalon spoke in graphic detail about Michelle’s stab wounds and said she feared for the safety of Crissie Schofield if Leo were released.
For Schofield’s 2020 hearing, retired State Attorney Jerry Hill delivered the argument against his parole. “Bone Valley” features a recording of Hill speaking at the hearing and making an incorrect statement.
“Leo said he was driven by an inner force to go back to the pit area again,” Hill said in describing where Michelle’s body was discovered. “Leo said he felt drawn to that area and said he felt Michelle was calling out to him.”
In fact, it was Schofield’s father who later told deputies that he had felt divine guidance steering him to the location during the search.
King also reports in the podcast that Hill failed to read a letter given to him by Saum, Michelle’s brother, expressing support for Schofield’s release. Schofield’s lawyer, Seth Miller, executive director of the Innocence Project of Florida, says that Hill showed the commissioners what he believes were autopsy photos, an act he called “inappropriate” and “incredibly incendiary.”
The Ledger made an interview request to Hill through the State Attorney’s Office and did not get a response.
Schofield’s presumptive parole release date was set about a decade ago for June 2023. In the latest “Bone Valley” episode, Miller says that in 2020 he asked to have the date moved up one year and to have Schofield transferred to Everglades Correctional Institution in Miami, which has a “lifers” program for inmates preparing to be released from life sentences.
Crissie Schofield said she spoke to one of the commissioners before the hearing and had the impression the panel would agree to the changes Miller sought. But after hearing from Hill, the commission voted not to change Schofield’s status.
In the recent segment, Saum says that Avalon recently called him and spoke for about an hour, going over details of the case.
“It just seems like to me that someone who’s so dead-set on the result of the original conviction that there’s no sense for me to even try to battle,” Saum said. “That’s just going to be a one-sided argument. So I just listened to what she said.”
Asked if he found Avalon’s argument persuasive, Saum replied, “Not really. It seemed to have a lot of holes in it.”
“Bone Valley” reports that Cupp, who retired as a judge this year, met with Florida Sen. Jonathan Martin, R-Fort Myers, to discuss Schofield’s case. According to Cupp, Martin said that Coonrod, the commission chair, had listened to the podcast and read the transcript of Schofield’s trial.
King notes that Wyant, one of other commissioners, developed a close professional relationship with Hill during his career as a detective in Bartow. All three members of the commission were appointed by former Gov. Rick Scott, a Republican.
The commission is expected to decide on Schofield’s parole during the hearing, and a decision does not require unanimity.
The Commission on Offender Review had received 14 letters expressing views on Schofield’s case as of Friday.
King and his assistant, Decker, will be recording the details of the hearing for another bonus episode, which could post as early as Friday. King said that “20/20” and the New York Times also planned to send reporters to the hearing.
In March, former Polk County School Board member Billy Townsend and former County Commissioner Randy Wilkinson addressed the County Commission, urging members to adopt a resolution supporting a new trial for Schofield. None of the commissioners made a motion to do so, and Commissioner George Lindsey declared the matter “far outside our lane of responsibility.”
Orr, the chief assistant state attorney, spoke about the case at the March meeting.
“It’s been reviewed by multiple prosecutors and multiple judges as you just heard, and it's even been heard by more, including the appellate courts,” Orr said. “And each of those reviews has been based on the 'actual' evidence and the 'actual' testimony in the case. And each of those reviews found there is no reason to disturb this verdict. Those reviews have not been based on summaries, mischaracterizations or opinions of internet bloggers or podcasters or other outside groups.”
Gary White can be reached at gary.white@theledger.com or 863-802-7518. Follow on Twitter @garywhite13.
This article originally appeared on The Ledger: Leo Schofield, convicted of 1987 Lakeland murder, has chance at parole
