‘Bone Valley’ convicted murderer is out of prison but doesn’t feel free

Up before daylight, he’d barely slept, par for his course since prison, where he says he never managed more than four hours a night. Leo Schofield is pumped, pre-caffeine, he’s feeling triumphant.

He’s gone from an anonymous prisoner desperate for anyone to listen to him, to today’s chance to address a crop of mostly third-year law students at the University of Florida.

He’d gotten the blessing from his parole officer to leave his halfway house in Tampa for the day trip to Gainesville. He’d also seen and loved the poster promoting the event:

Bone Valley: The wrongful conviction of Leo Schofield

It included photos of the guest of honor plus the other panelists: former Circuit Judge Scott Cupp, who resigned from the bench to devote himself to Schofield’s defense, and Gilbert King, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author whose “Bone Valley” podcast altered the trajectory of the case.

King is Schofield’s ride for the two-hour drive up Interstate 75. The law school professor who organized the event greets them — and apologizes for the question mark.

What question mark? Schofield hadn’t noticed, but the promotional poster has been updated. Now it reads:

Bone Valley: The wrongful conviction of Leo Schofield?

Schofield hates it. To him, there should be no question. But he gets it. Legally, he is a jury-convicted, appeals denied, paroled, first-degree murderer, and no state institution can host an event that says otherwise.

He feels like he’s in no-man’s-land.

***

Having served 36 years for the stabbing murder of his teenage wife, having at long last gotten the world’s attention to his case for innocence, Schofield was paroled last year. It marked a monumental step toward living with the family he built from inside prison: the wife he met there, the newborn they adopted who’s all grown up and their three grandsons.

Schofield walked out of prison and joined his family, a free man, happily ever after. …

He found work as a mechanic in an auto shop in East Tampa, welding and fixing flats, and preaching that save for the horror of Michelle’s murder, he wouldn’t change the course of his life.

He has come to believe that God meant for him to suffer this journey — so he could help others by sharing, long and loud, what he went through, and so he could save himself by forgiving his wife’s killer.

That is the message he shares as guest pastor at Sunday morning churches, the message he tells reporters, true crime aficionados — anyone who wants to pray at the altar of his innocence. Many who hear him come away using the same word, they are struck by his “grace.”

The gentle, measured exterior contains a simmering frustration and anger that at times overwhelms him. What’s weird is that as much as he resented Polk County prosecutors and courts all his days across all his decades in prison, now that he’s free, he resents them more.

That’s because of how he was released — on parole for life, just another murderer who did his time.

Polk prosecutors had repeatedly fought his parole, calling him a remorseless, cold-blooded killer who should not be released. After the podcast brought uncomfortable attention, Polk officials told the parole board to ignore “the show” surrounding his case and treat him like any other inmate.

State Attorney Brian Haas declined to be interviewed but said in a statement: “It would have been a lot easier to go along with the conspiracy theorists in the media and let this case go, but that’s not how my role as state attorney works. Justice required that I handle the case as I did.

“The Commission on Offender Review has a different role in our system. I respect their work. The decisions they make regarding eligibility for parole are not related to guilt or innocence of the prisoner, but instead a variety of other factors. By 2023 and 2024, it was clear that Schofield was on the path to parole …”

Schofield says releasing him suited those who sent away the wrong man. The unpleasant questions stop, no one’s reputation is tarnished. Everyone wins — everyone except him.

To them he’s a nobody, he says, less than a nobody, really, just some lowlife who came here from up north, took up with a local girl and killed her in a rage. Never mind that a man who left his fingerprints in Michelle’s car has confessed to killing her. Schofield is supposed to be grateful that he’s out and just go away.

***

Out of the dry pages of trial transcripts and court opinions, the voice from the podcast stands before the students.

Two years ago, King had told Schofield about appearing before another group of students here, and the two of them imagined a world in which he would be free, literally free, to come himself.

“I shared with Gilbert when we were getting out of the car, before we get out, I said, ‘I just want you to take this moment in with me because I didn’t know it would ever happen.’ And here we are.’’

Most of the students this fall morning are in the law school’s Wrongful Convictions Clinic, an elective in which they work with the Jacksonville-based state attorney to screen petitions of convicts who say they are innocent. The students investigate the claims and point the state attorney to those bearing closer review.

Since beginning that collaboration in 2020, clinic students have worked on 130 cases, two of which resulted in exonerations.

Schofield tells the students freedom is great, sure, but it’s not over for him because Michelle still doesn’t have justice, nor does he.

He shares one of his go-to quotes, this one from state Sen. Jonathan Martin: “He said, ‘We don’t put innocent people in prison. … And if we don’t put ’em in prison, then we have no business putting ’em on parole, either.’”

***

He isn’t just Sen. Jonathan Martin. He is Sen. Jonathan Martin, chairperson of the Criminal Justice Committee. He is Sen. Jonathan Martin, reliable ally of the governor. And Sen. Jonathan Martin, crusader for Leo Schofield’s innocence.

The senator is trying to navigate a compromise in a world with no middle ground. For Schofield to rid himself of the mantle of wife murderer, as he calls it, would mean Polk had it wrong all along — in a county where two law enforcement figures loom large.

Jerry Hill beat an opponent when he was elected state attorney in 1984, and nobody challenged him in the next seven elections. He retired in 2016 and handed the office to his chosen successor, Brian Haas, who has won three terms without opposition.

Grady Judd joined the Sheriff’s Office out of Lakeland High in 1972 and was elected sheriff in 2004. No other Polk sheriff had been elected more than four times; he’s won six elections. He has made a national name for himself with colorful, folksy news conferences. “The Best Grady Judd Quotes’’ T-shirt, available online, includes the one that went viral when he answered why his deputies repeatedly shot a suspected cop killer – “Why 68 times? Because we ran out of bullets.”

But when it comes to Schofield, the sheriff has been restrained. He declined to be interviewed for this story. “He’s not interested in discussing the Leo Schofield case,” a spokesperson said.

“My position remains the same as always,” Hill said in an email response. “He was tried, convicted, and lost his appeals. His claim of new evidence was litigated twice and appealed twice. He is a convicted murderer. That will not change.”

Haas, in his statement, said: “Those who depend on the media and ‘true crime’ podcasts for their information on the Schofield case are often duped into believing Schofield is innocent. However, those who consider all of the facts of the case, as we are required to do by the rules of evidence, conclude that Schofield is guilty.

“When I was elected many years ago, I had a fresh, in-depth review of the Schofield case conducted by prosecutors and investigators in my office, independent of John Aguero (who prosecuted Schofield) or the previous administration. Their conclusions were consistent with the multiple appellate judges and trial court judges who have upheld the Schofield conviction many times over the years, based upon a complete and accurate examination of the facts.”

The state senator says Polk prosecutors in the 10th circuit should have given Schofield a new trial 20 years ago, after the fingerprints in Michelle’s car were matched to a multiple murderer. “Outside the 10th, everybody, Republican and Democrat, old and young, law enforcement, they all say, this is weird, why are they digging their heels in,” Martin said. “It’s like with little kids, you want to say, what are you hiding from me?”

He says the public needs to have faith that in those rare times the system fails, it can and will correct itself. “It should be done with what the constitution provides, with prosecutors doing the right thing. Give him a new trial.”

***

At his law school appearance, Schofield does the Gator chomp and shares that once upon a time, he was a Gator, too.

It was back in the 1990s, after a Polk judge denied him a state-funded lawyer for more appeals. With no money to hire someone, he figured the only way to get in the game was to learn to do it for himself. He signed up for a legal assistant/paralegal distance learning course through UF; two years later, he had his certificate.

“I believe in our judicial system,” he tells the students, “I always have, and I believed it was right, it was gonna right itself. For a long time, and being naive, I went probably years before I figured out, ‘Something’s really wrong here. They’re not looking for the truth, they’re just looking to keep this hammer on me.’ …

“Three years in, I’m still waiting. Any day they’re gonna come and say, ‘Listen, we made a big mistake, you need to pack your stuff and get out of here’ and all that.’

“And this guy come to me, he’d been in for like 40 years at the time, and he said, ‘Jit,’ because I was a young guy then, they called young guys jits. He said, ‘Jit, you need to get your head on this side of the fence, because if you don’t, somebody’s gonna cut your head off for you.’ And that night, under my blanket, I cried and cried. I knew, nobody’s coming, this is not a mistake.

“And the next morning I get up, I was a different man. And the fight really began then for me to figure out what’s going on.”

***

Yes, prison was hell, but he made a life there.

“You are utterly on your own. It doesn’t matter who you have on the outside, how much they love you. You are on your own. You will live and die by what you do and say. It’s a world inside a world, and it’s a really messed up world.”

He got beat up a few times but wouldn’t back down from a fight. “It’s hard to put fear in a guy who doesn’t care about getting hurt.”

After one fight, he asked another inmate to train him in martial arts. He said it changed everything, even how he walked.

In his 20 years at Hardee Correctional, he made the best of it. He kept busy. His prison band, The Watchers, played chapel services. He attended seminary, taught himself to draw.

“You have a sense of normalcy, a pattern of living. …You gotta remember, new people are coming in all the time. You become like a piece of furniture. You’re old news, you’re not the new guy anymore. There’s a bus coming in every week bringing new guys.

“I had some great, wonderful, joyful times in prison. … What makes a huge difference is if you have some talent. Guys respect talent if you can do something they can’t do. For me, it was the music. I could play a rock ‘n’ roll show.”

Playing in a legit band, that’s his dream now that he’s out — the same dream, really, that he had when he went in at 21. It’s just, now he’s coming up on 60.

***

Jami Allen was a high school junior, had just gotten her driver’s license, when she fell for a boy who got into a fight at a dance hall in Lakeland.

It was spring 1987, just before his 18th birthday. She liked that he got by on his wits, and he treated her right, at first. She didn’t know he was a brain-damaged sociopath, abandoned as a child, abused by his mother and uncle, walking-talking violence waiting to go off.

In the 18 months they were together, she said, Jeremy Scott never had a home or a job. What did he do for money? “Burglaries, robberies, beating people up … selling stolen goods.”

He liked to go up a dirt track off State Road 33, leading back toward a canal. He took her there twice in the middle of the night, it was spooky dark, and both times they had violent sex. He choked her to unconsciousness.

He told her about the cab driver he killed and got away with it. He told her about the old woman he killed when he was 15 and how the jury let him off.

Allen’s jaw remains disfigured from the time he took a baseball bat to her face. “I went to Disney World with my mother and two sisters, and he told me I couldn’t go, and I went anyways.”

During a robbery a few months later, he killed someone else, a 37-year-old he beat with a grape juice bottle and strangled with a telephone cord. Pregnant with Scott’s child, Allen started her new life, and he went to prison for the rest of his.

More than 15 years later, a cold case detective from the Polk Sheriff’s Office called with questions about that old boyfriend. She agreed to accompany Detective Louis Giampavolo on a driving tour of Scott’s haunts.

She directed him to that favorite spot of his outside Lakeland. It was adjacent to the canal where Michelle Schofield’s body had been recovered, stabbed 26 times.

Also, Michelle’s car was abandoned about 7 miles away and wiped clean of fingerprints — except for two that now had been matched to Scott.

***

Those fingerprints took Giampavolo to the Florida Panhandle, to Washington Correctional Institution, where he asked Scott: How did his prints get inside this murdered woman’s Mazda?

Scott said he didn’t know anything about that and asked to speak to Polk prosecutor John Aguero. Then Scott asked if the stereo was missing from that Mazda, because he used to steal stereos from abandoned cars. Maybe that’s how his prints ended up there.

Giampavolo arranged to have Scott brought to Polk County to meet with Aguero, who had secured convictions of Scott and Schofield for separate murders.

Aguero met alone with Scott. No lawyer was there to represent him, and Aguero made no audio or video recording. There was no court reporter.

Later, they would offer different accounts of what happened in that office. Aguero, who died in 2017, would say he gave Scott immunity. He said Scott “fully understood” that he would not be prosecuted no matter what he admitted to and repeated his story: I only stole the stereo.

Scott would say that Aguero knew he was lying but promised that if Scott stuck to the stereo story, he’d get the parole board to let him out of prison early.

Polk prosecutors — who vouched for Scott as just a stereo thief in the Schofield case after twice taking him to trial for murders — say he’s lying about Aguero because he was doing life without parole and knew Aguero had no authority to get him out.

When the defense had the chance to question Aguero, he testified that Giampavolo was there when he met with Scott.

But in the report Giampavolo filed at the time, he wrote: “ASA Aguero advised that he had Scott brought to his office while I was on vacation.”

***

The formal talk over in Gainesville, they’ve pushed tables together for box lunches and conversation. Schofield is asked if the program at Everglades Correctional that he went through during his last year in prison was helpful. It prepares inmates for reentering society.

It was a godsend, he says, even if he had a big issue from the get-go.

“What they want right from the beginning is accountability for your crimes, and they basically want a confession. And I get it. … My issue is, I’m not guilty, I’m innocent, and I can’t say it.”

His inmate orientation officer wasn’t having it, saying that wouldn’t work with the guys. Turns out, the other inmates forced him to see that even if he is innocent, he’s still responsible for his prison time because his mistreatment of Michelle and others made him an easy target.

“It’s easy to say John Aguero was corrupt, it’s easy to say the system failed me. It’s a lot more difficult to see where I was there that allowed them … to have the cannon fodder” to build the case.

“It was a wrenching place for me at that time, because until then, I mean, I’d been in the fight for so long. … I’m constantly building my case to prove that I’m innocent, and I don’t ever get to really look at my responsibility in it.”

Taking accountability didn’t happen overnight, he says, and it culminated with him breaking down when he finally came to understand that he had failed his wife, and it had cost him everything.

***

So why did the 10th Circuit stop fighting his parole?

Schofield said the “Bone Valley” podcast, downloaded more than 10 million times, changed everything. Before, his complaints were whimpers from inside prison that nobody heard; now, he had a bullhorn.

He says Polk prosecutors wanted him released to take the air out of his story and forestall any investigation that might cause people to look again at Aguero’s other convictions.

“Honestly if it’s not that, it’s worse, it’s they’re afraid of ruining their reputation. God forbid you ruin someone’s reputation rather than do what’s right.’’

Haas, in his statement, said his office changed its approach only after it became clear that the parole board was moving toward releasing Schofield. The decision is the province of the board, he said.

Now that he’s out, what does Schofield want? “I want the state to take ownership for what they’ve done, well, the part they played in it. They don’t have to say sorry. Back up and do what’s right. Follow your own principles of law.

“Do what’s right by me, justify this by exonerating me and announcing that Michelle was killed by Jeremy Scott. Now we can all rest.”

***

A student in Gainesville asks about Schofield’s next legal steps, which prompts him to relate a chance encounter with his nemesis, Jerry Hill.

It was Hill’s office that convicted him, Hill who called him an unrepentant, cold-blooded murderer who should never be let out. Though retired, Hill still represents Polk at parole hearings.

Schofield was in Tallahassee to support another inmate seeking parole. And here came Hill, shaking hands outside the hearing room. His heart about to pound out of his chest, Schofield extended his hand.

“I’m so glad I got to shake your hand before you figured out who I was,” he says he told Hill and identified himself. “He didn’t even bat an eye. He said, ‘How you doing, Leo?’ I’m like, ‘I am doing great, Mr. Hill.’ … He said, ‘You know what. I’ve listened to some of your stuff recently … and I gotta say, I think you’ve come at it really sincerely.’”

Hill found him again after the hearing. “He came up and tapped me on the shoulder and I stood up and he said, ‘Good luck to you son.’”

Schofield tells the students he stayed civil because opening doors of communication is paramount.

Cupp, his lawyer, says he could not have remained polite. It’s “absolutely despicable” that Hill would shake Schofield’s hand and act like all is well, Cupp says, when he “could make this go away with a phone call.”

Schofield insists civility not only matters, it’s how you stay true to yourself. Which leads him to talk about the choice he says he made about Scott.

He could have had Scott killed in prison, he says, as the room goes quiet, he was that high in the prisoner hierarchy.

“There’s no place you could hide him in Florida, no prison in the state where he’s out of my reach, and I could have made a phone call and say I want him ended today, and he’d be gone.

“And I’d be OK because he murdered my wife. Who’s gonna blame me? And I wouldn’t care if you did blame me. You’re not wearing the mantle, I am. …”

But he says he wasn’t a killer going into prison, and he wasn’t about to turn into one.

“I didn’t let the system beat me. I was in the system, but the system is not in me.”

***

His eyes flutter shut as the painkiller kicks in, and he dozes in his bed at Tampa General Hospital. It’s the end of January, 10 days since he was nearly killed running to Home Depot to pick up some screws.

Schofield had hopped on his Harley, the one he’d named Storm, his 24-year-old daughter, Ashley, on the seat behind. A sedan turned left in front of him (the driver was issued a warning for failure to yield, Schofield was found not to have contributed), and a witness estimated he was doing 45 mph when they hit.

He suffered a pelvic fracture, a lacerated bladder, fractures of two lumbar vertebrae and broken bones in his hands, wrists and feet. Ashley had broken bones in both hands and pelvic fractures. Neither wore a helmet, but they avoided serious head injuries.

Schofield is home in Riverview now, released early from the halfway house so his wife can help take care of him. His rehab has been delayed for months until he can bear weight.

He quotes Romans 8:28: “God will work out all things for the good for those who love Him and are called according to his purpose.”

“It doesn’t say He will make all things good. He’ll work things out for the good. Watch and see. He didn’t make this happen, it was an accident. But He can use it, He already used it.” The crash has brought him an outpouring of love and support. And who knows what’s to come?

“Think of the hope I’m going to be able to bring people when I’m able to get up and share my story and share how God brought me through this.”

His bones will heal, he says he will rock the guitar again.

ABOUT THE STORY

This story is based on dozens of interviews with Leo Schofield; a four-hour video of the Gainesville law school event in October; videos of Schofield guest pastoring at Tampa Bay area churches; two podcasts that examined the case (“Bone Valley” and “The Prosecutors”); interviews with others associated with the case; and court records, including transcripts of the trial, hearings and depositions.