Imagine being locked up in prison for more than 35 years for a crime you didn't commit.
That was the case for Polk County's Leo Schofield. He was accused and found guilty of killing his wife, Michelle. He was released on parole in 2023 — after another man confessed to the murder — and is now seeking exoneration.
Gilbert King shone a light on Schofield's case through a podcast that turned into the book "Bone Valley: A true story of injustice and redemption in the heart of Florida."
He's a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer whose work involves race and wrongful conviction, with many based in Florida. King grew up in New York, where he lives now.
On "Florida Matters Live & Local," King spoke about Schofield's case, why he keeps coming back to Florida and more.
Portions of this interview were edited for length and clarity.
Leo Schofield. Tell us about him. Who is he? Why did you decide to focus on this story?
It sort of came to me. I was out speaking about my book, "Devil in the Grove." I was at a Judicial Conference, and afterwards, I was signing books, and this judge came up to me and handed me his business card.
It said on the back of it: Leo Schofield. [It] had his prison number, and it said, 'not just wrongfully convicted. He's an innocent man.'
And I remember thinking like, judges aren't supposed to do that. They're supposed to be for the integrity. There's certain ethical Canons that they have to follow. They're not about to really talk about injustices within the state.
And I kind of showed that card around, and people were kind of aghast that a judge had wrote that. And so I followed up with him and started talking to him, and he told me, 'You really need to look into this case. There's an innocent man who's still in prison. I can tell you exactly how they put him there.' And that just got my curiosity.
I was reading that just a week or two back. Jeremy Scott died in prison. He wasn't that old. He was in his mid 50s, I think, of heart failure. What does that mean for Leo Schofield's bid for exoneration?
I talked to some lawyers about this, and it actually doesn't really have much of an effect. I mean, there's a law that says, you know, confessors, if they've passed on, you can go back to tape-recorded statements or affidavits, or any kind of testimony they've given.
So I don't think it'll really have that much of an effect, but it was kind of a profound moment — sort of came out of the blue just two weeks ago.
We learned that Jeremy Scott had passed away, and it's interesting to see Leo's response to that. One of the things he's always said was like, I had to learn to forgive him, because this bitterness and anger was going to destroy me, and it was destroying him in prison. And he's a very spiritual guy, and he had to really just pray and realize the only way for him to survive was to just let go of this hatred and bitterness at the man who's not only killed his wife, but caused him to be in prison for so long, and he was able to do it, and he's since then, he's so shown a lot of empathy for Jeremy.
It's probably the only person in the whole story who has real empathy for Jeremy is Leo, which I think is pretty extraordinary. And he took the news of Jeremy's passing pretty hard, but only as a human being. He says 'I don't have the ability to forgive for Michelle, his wife's family or others, but I had to do it to save my own life.'
I guess it sort of gives a lot more weight to that conversation that you were witness to between those two men, because it sounds like it was really important for them to have that conversation, at least for Leo to say, I forgive you, and for Jeremy as well, to kind of hear that from him.
Yeah, it really meant a lot to both people. Even Leo said afterwards, like, 'I always wanted to forgive him, but like, today was the test when I actually, when he called and I had to do it.'
What's really strange is that after the news of Jeremy's death, kind of, oddly enough, Jeremy's family is sort of reconnected with Jeremy over the last few months. They were very moved by the story, too.
And they actually asked Leo if he would deliver the eulogy for Jeremy Scott, which we did last week. And just to see this happen, being in this private memorial service where family members and me and Leo, and just to hear Leo's words, he gave a great gift to that family and acknowledged that without Jeremy's confession, he doesn't think he'd ever be out of prison.
I got to ask too, though, about the other family in the mix here, Michelle's family, what do they say about all this?
Well, it's interesting enough. Michelle's brother, Jesse, was really 14 at the time. He didn't really know too much about it, but over the years, he started doing his own investigation and started looking into it, and he ended up supporting the parole for Leo, and actually writing a letter to the parole commission saying he didn't have confidence in the conviction of Leo Schofield. So he's really come around.
And it's really just interesting to see all these people from Leo's past sort of reconnect with him in this way. And he's getting a great deal of support from Michelle's brother.
But there are others in the family who aren't happy with the turn of events?
There's another brother who's out on the West Coast, and he actually testified against Leo's parole at the time. So yeah, they're a little bit split on on that.
Bone Valley is a great name for a book. Why that title?
I never heard of it, and I spent a lot of time in Central Florida, and I talked to people in that area who they say they've never heard of it, but basically it goes back to the Peace River.
And when they were over 100 years ago, they were dredging it, looking for ways to make a canal across the state. And by just digging in a little bit, they started finding all these shark teeth and skulls and just so many Megalodons. And odd, you know, creatures from a million years ago in Florida was underwater.
And so, because they found so much of this, they began to call it Bone Valley. It's mostly known for the ... mineral in there, potassium? No, it's what am I thinking of? I'm not. You, but, yeah, but it's a fertilizer center.
And basically, I think three-fourths of the world's fertilizer was coming from Polk County at the time, and the phosphate mines, that's the word I was listening for. But right in those phosphate mines, in the sand, they were finding all these mammals. So it became known as Bone Valley.
This is your third book set in Florida. What is it about Florida that keeps you coming back here?
I go out and do talks, and ... people always tip me off to these stories, and they're really good stories. And they're stories I'd never heard before, so I don't know.
I think this area of Central Florida is just being so rich in these kind of stories that really are not well known to the public. In particular, this case was not really well-known. I think a lot of it had to do with local media coverage. Didn't really make it seem that interesting. It seemed kind of an open-and-shut case.
But when you dig into it and look into it, you start seeing all sorts of signs of prosecutorial misconduct and all sorts of different things that make it interesting for me as a writer to really delve into it.
So I don't ever want to leave Florida. I feel like there's just so many people here that help me, and the Sunshine laws make it really accessible to me. So I really don't want to leave Florida for any of my stories.
You've written a lot about kind of injustices and the justice system in general, both in Florida and just kind of generally. What did you learn from telling this story?
A lot of the cases are different. I think when I look back at the Lake County stuff, most of the point was it was law enforcement that was the problem. You had a really powerful sheriff who was convinced that he was going to railroad these innocent men in this particular case.
In Leo's case, it's more of the prosecutor's office in this case. I thought the police handled this entire case pretty ethically. I think there's a few areas of incompetence, but you could probably find that all the time. But I thought the Polk County Sheriff's Office did a really good job with it.
