September 21, 2022 • 61 mins
Chapter 2 of 9
Leo’s friends and family search desperately for Michelle around Lakeland, Florida. Three days later, her body is found in a phosphate mining pit with 26 stab wounds. Leo is arrested, charged with first degree murder, and faces the electric chair.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
It's eighteen eighty one. Captain J. Francis le Baron of
the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers is surveying Central Florida.
As he travels up the Peace River in Polk County,
he finds something fossils, tons of them along the sandy
banks of the Peace River, giant shark, teethed whale skulls,
(00:23):
and prehistoric mastadon bones. Captain le Baron collects nine barrels
worth of fossils and has them shipped off to a
professor at the Smithsonian Institution. A few years later, Captain
le Baron returns to the region. As he's digging through
the sandbars of the Peace River amongst the bones from
(00:45):
millions of years ago, he makes another discovery. All the bones,
all the decomposition had left Central Florida rich in phosphate,
a mineral left over from the creatures that lived and
died in an around the ancient sea that once covered Florida,
and phosphate, it turns out, is a valuable ingredient for
(01:07):
making fertilizer. They called it white gold. There's interest in
the fossils, but palaeontologists don't get the chance to dig
because the mining companies get there first. Soon, Polk County
became the self proclaimed phosphate capital of the world, and
the area was producing three quarters of the nation's supply.
(01:32):
By the late nineteenth century. Railroad tracks had sprung out
in every direction across the region, which helped move all
that phosphate. There was a lot of work and not
enough workers to get the job done, so phosphate companies
paid a fee to the state of Florida in exchange
for prisoners to fill the labor shortage. Black men arrested
(01:55):
for petty crimes were forced to dig ditches and push wheelbacks.
Was full of white rock while underguard. It had become
a new form of slavery.
Speaker 2 (02:14):
This song that called Shove it Over, and it's a
line in rhythm, pretty generally distributed all over Florida. It
was sung to me by Charlie Jones on railroad construction
camp near Lakeland, Florida.
Speaker 1 (02:28):
This is Zora Neil Hurston, the novelist who became a
central figure in the African American cultural revival of the
nineteen twenties and thirties known as the Harlem Renaissance.
Speaker 2 (02:40):
When I get in a land noise, I'm going to
spread the news about the Florida Boy.
Speaker 1 (02:49):
Hurston grew up in central Florida, and in nineteen twenty
seven she moved to Polk County to collect and record
stories and work songs from Black Southerners, songs that were
down from generations. Some of the workers who taught Hurston
these songs were setting down railroad tracks and working in
the mines to move phosphate. Hurston described these men who
(03:12):
worked long, hard hours in Polk County in her memoir
dust tracks on a road they go down in the
phosphate mines, Hurston wrote, and bring up the wet dust
of the bones of prehistoric monsters to make rich land
in far places so that people can eat. But all
of it is not dust. Huge ribs twenty feet from
(03:35):
belly to backbone, some old time sea monster caught in
the shallows, shark teeth as wide as the hand of
a working man. It was these fossils tossed to the
side by mining operations that gave this region its new
name Bone Valley. As the decades passed, phosphate mining evolved.
(03:59):
Instead of convict with shovels, they started using dragline machines
like the one operated by Michelle Schofield's father, David's Palm.
These giant machines excavate the top soil and produce towering
two hundred foot mountains of white sand called gypsum stacks
that loom over the Polk County horizon. By the nineteen eighties,
(04:22):
some of the mines in northern Polk County shut down
after depleting the soil of its phosphate, and mining operations
moved further south, but you can still see the scars
the industry left behind. The mined out areas were left
to be reclaimed by nature. Dense vegetation grew around these
(04:44):
deep mining pits that filled with water, which is why
you see these long, narrow bodies of water in the region,
like the ones in North Lakeland where Leo, his dad
and friends continue their search from Michelle Schofield.
Speaker 3 (05:08):
Do you my maness, I have to have my feet
saw rule deps sarrangleists in this vallyity.
Speaker 4 (05:31):
I see relation about a breach das rash to the world.
Who's holding the stars to the warm solding.
Speaker 1 (05:57):
Store Bone Valley Chapter two comby Critters. It's been almost
(06:32):
forty eight hours since Michelle went missing. There was no
sign of her until one of Leo's friends saw the
orange Mazda just off the eastbound side of I four,
a major highway that runs through Polk County and connects
Tampa and Orlando.
Speaker 5 (06:48):
Now a new wave of panic washes.
Speaker 1 (06:50):
Over Leo as he and his father's speed to where
the Mazda was seen. A few of Leo's friends and
Michelle's dad followed them there.
Speaker 6 (07:00):
We get to the car, We find the car. Obviously
we didn't touch the car. I didn't want anybody to
touch the car. And we looked at it. We had flashlights,
and you know, obviously it was mine.
Speaker 1 (07:09):
But there's no sign of Michelle. It's nearly midnight. Leo
knows he needs to call the sheriff to get someone
out here and quick. The car is right by the
Polk City exit ramp on a rural stretch of the interstate.
Speaker 6 (07:24):
I didn't even know where I was at. I mean,
I wasn't lost, but I've never been in this area.
So I went up on the embankment. I climbed the embankment,
got up on the road, and you couldn't see a
store from the highway, but I went up anyway to
look and when I get up to that overpass and
walked just a few feet up behind a tree line.
There was a store up there, and there was a
pay phone, so I went over there and I made
(07:46):
a call to the Sheriff's department, and I told them
that I told him who I was, told him where
I was, and that we had found the car on
the side of the road. They asked me if I
was going to take it home. I said, you're apparently
not understanding who I am. My wife is still missing.
I found her car, I did not find her. I
(08:10):
need some help. I'm expecting we'll be right there, mister Scofield,
you know what I mean. And Batman shows up and
everything gets fixed and stuff, and it didn't work that way.
Speaker 1 (08:23):
Finally deputies arrive and the crime scene unit is called in.
They start inspecting the car. Some stereo equipment in the
Mazda is missing. Leo doesn't want to waste any more time.
He wants to start searching the area for Michelle.
Speaker 6 (08:43):
I told the detective Russell, I'm going to be out
here in the ditches and in the medium and of
vye for looking for anything.
Speaker 1 (08:52):
But the deputy tells Leo to wait because they're going
to fly a helicopter over the area at sunrise. So
Leo and the rest of the search party a few
hours sleep before.
Speaker 5 (09:01):
Meeting up again.
Speaker 6 (09:03):
I literally am there at daybreak, and so the plan
was to search I four.
Speaker 1 (09:09):
They search both sides of the highway, including the Median. Leo,
his dad, his friends, and Michelle's family cover the six
plus miles of I four until they reached the exit
for State Road thirty three. There's no sign of Michelle.
Speaker 7 (09:28):
Nobody that we knew from nobody.
Speaker 1 (09:32):
This is Michelle McCluskey. She's Michelle Schofield's best friend. It's
mid morning now. When they come on to State Road
thirty three, which connects I four, the highway where the
car was found to Cumby Road, which was Michelle's last
known location, they decide to split up. Leo's father will
(09:52):
start searching one end of State Road thirty three. Leo
and Michelle McCluskey will start at the other end of
State Road thirty three, and they play to meet Leo
Senior somewhere in the middle. So Leo and Michelle McCluskey
jump into her boyfriend's pickup truck.
Speaker 7 (10:07):
I was just terrified and just really focused on really
trying to find her.
Speaker 1 (10:14):
It's slow searching. They walk a stretch of the road,
get back in the truck, pull up a bit, get
out and search again.
Speaker 6 (10:23):
One Michelle McCluskey and I were looking in one particular area.
There was a sheriff's car that went by real fast,
headed down thirty three toward where my father was looking,
and the second car went by. I said, I'm following this.
Something's going on.
Speaker 1 (10:39):
Leo jumps in the pickup with Michelle McCluskey in the
passenger seat and tries to catch the sheriff's car ahead.
Speaker 5 (10:46):
In the distance, he.
Speaker 1 (10:47):
Sees an eighteen wheeled truck jackknife in the middle of
the road. Some cars are parked on the shoulder.
Speaker 6 (10:53):
I almost turned off because it was so congested. I
thought it was a car accident. Yeah, I thought this
was going to be one of things where it turns
out to be nothing, and I wish that it would
have been.
Speaker 1 (11:06):
Leo keeps driving toward the congestion. A helicopter's on the
ground at the scene.
Speaker 7 (11:12):
Somebody's missing, and you come up on a scene like that,
and the helicopters sat down and the ambulances there. You
just know, all of a sudden, nobody has to tell
you what it is, you know.
Speaker 6 (11:25):
I saw my father's truck down there on the side
of the road and all these other vehicles, and then
he was coming out of the woods and he had
his hands in his cover and his face, and I
knew they had found her. And I didn't even stop
the truck. I mean I slowed down and up, and
I jumped out and went running, and everything was blending
(11:47):
together and going super fast.
Speaker 1 (11:50):
Leo jumps out of the pickup and runs along the
side of the road. Yellow crime scene tape has already
been tied between a pine tree and a sign that.
Speaker 5 (11:58):
Reads no dump of rubbish.
Speaker 1 (12:02):
The tape cordons off a short sandy road that cuts
through the tree line. Beyond it, Leo sees men in
suits standing in front of palmetto.
Speaker 5 (12:12):
Bushes, looking down into a drainage canal.
Speaker 1 (12:16):
Leo now knows Michelle is back there, and he's trying
to push past the deputies to get to her. His
dad grabs him and keeps him from reaching the canal,
to keep him from seeing Michelle's body.
Speaker 6 (12:33):
And he kept saying she's gone, And I was trying
to hold on to some kind of my mind was
doing it, fabricating some kind of possibility that you're not right,
She's not dead. It could not possibly end like this.
I mean, it's just unreal. And it was like my
(12:56):
whole world was just fragmenting, and I wanted so bad
to just run back there and just grab her, and
if I could just hold her, I'd hold her and
she'd still be alive. And I, you just I can't.
It can't end like this. It just it can't end.
We look too hard, I've been up too long. I'm
(13:21):
gonna save her. I mean, it just just I just
lost it. I ended up punching the ground. I was
pulling grass out. I hit the tree, and I kept saying,
she's not dead, She's not dead. And then all these
people are coming around, and because I'm flipping out, I
(13:42):
end up in between these cars.
Speaker 1 (13:45):
The cops come around one side of the car towards Leo.
His dad comes from the other side.
Speaker 6 (13:51):
And I'm telling him, don't touch me, don't come near me.
I want her out now. I just want to. I
ended up just falling down and sitting against the front
tire of a car. I came in glue.
Speaker 1 (14:14):
Michelle's body is floating face down in a drainage canal
off State Road thirty three near an.
Speaker 5 (14:20):
Old phosphate mine.
Speaker 1 (14:23):
There's a large piece of plywood partially covering her body,
resting on her back and legs. She's still wearing the
red pants she wore to work that day and a
sleeveless white top. Her autopsy would later reveal that she'd
been stabbed twenty six times, and scrapes on her back
(14:43):
were consistent with her body being dragged after she was killed.
Officer Richard Kachadorian, who talked to Leo and his father
the morning after Michelle's disappeared, hears about it.
Speaker 5 (15:01):
On the news.
Speaker 8 (15:03):
I remember coming to work one night and there it
was on television, and she was found not far from
where I'm sitting right now.
Speaker 1 (15:10):
He feels bad for the Schofields and picks up the
phone to offer his condolences. Leo Senior answers, and.
Speaker 8 (15:18):
It was definitely a very peculiar conversation. He talked about
a premonition that he had.
Speaker 1 (15:28):
What Leo Senior told him was so odd. Katadorian decided
to write an official report about the call. His report reads,
mister Schofield advised writer that he received a premonition the
night prior to the discovery of his daughter in law,
possibly from the Lord, advising him where Michelle could be found.
Speaker 9 (15:49):
He told me on the phone at night that he
discovered the body, and the body was in the water, and.
Speaker 8 (15:53):
That she was looking at him, and that she was
smiling at him.
Speaker 1 (15:57):
Michelle was smiling, Leo Senior said, as of saying thank
you for finding me. This is especially odd because Michelle
was floating face down and had plywood on top of her.
Speaker 9 (16:11):
It was strange, and that's how I thought of it.
It became extremely strange, and I got I mean, it
frightened me to a certain degree. And if you know
that landscape, you.
Speaker 8 (16:22):
Just don't happen upon. You just don't drive down.
Speaker 9 (16:25):
That road and happen upon anything that's really dense vegetation,
snake infested water.
Speaker 8 (16:31):
I mean, do you either have to.
Speaker 9 (16:32):
Know something's there, or somebody directed you there, or you
knew something was in that area. You know, in hindsight, Gilbert,
what I feel he was.
Speaker 8 (16:44):
Doing was confessing that was definitely one of the oddest
phone calls in my life.
Speaker 10 (16:59):
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Speaker 1 (17:33):
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Speaker 5 (17:45):
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Speaker 1 (17:47):
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(18:32):
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Speaker 11 (19:04):
There is a piece of wood board that was covering
the body. I do have that, so I bring that out.
Speaker 6 (19:11):
Just been reading about it for months.
Speaker 5 (19:13):
It's just so funny that it's here.
Speaker 1 (19:15):
Kelsey and I are talking to Shane Kent, who runs
the evidence room in the basement of the Polk County Courthouse.
Shane's in his early forties with tattoos, engaged piercings. He's
gonna show us all the physical evidence from Michelle Schofield's murder.
Speaker 11 (19:32):
How's gonna go down is I'm gonna try to keep
control out of all the evidence. Sure, I'm gonna be
the only one handling it. If I'll drop off piece,
let you look at it, examine it, if you want
to take pictures of it. The only thing that I
do not recommend any any pictures being taken is of
the victim is any kind of nude, because some of
the wounds are in her chest and her bare chest
(19:53):
is exposed.
Speaker 6 (19:54):
So okay, understand, okay, all right, if you want to, guys,
have a seat, I'll start bringing Okay, thanks.
Speaker 1 (20:03):
Every time someone asked to see the evidence from a homicide,
the state Attorney's office is notified and they can send
someone down to observe. So we have an armed officer
with us, and she's going to be watching as we
look through all the evidence. Alright, Kelsey and I sit
(20:25):
side by side at the table and Shane starts bringing
out the evidence. The plywood that was covering Michelle's body
in the canal where she was found was found on
top of the body. In that little maps of lakeland
mounted on foam boards. Michelle's time card from Tom's restaurant.
Speaker 6 (20:45):
See there's a downy bottle that they found.
Speaker 1 (20:47):
The blood smeared downy fabric soft in her bottle that
was found in the back of the Mazda.
Speaker 12 (20:53):
The downy bottle very much looked like a downy bottle
from the eighties. You know, it wasn't like the one
you'd be able to buy at the store today. You know,
for me, this all happened before I was born, So
seeing some of that stuff, I was able to like
better place in time, like, oh my gosh, okay, this
happened and it was nineteen eighty seven.
Speaker 1 (21:17):
Then Shane brings out Michelle's clothes. Each piece is contained
in a clear plastic bag.
Speaker 12 (21:24):
Her jacket, her top, her bra and underwear, and the
red pants that she and more to work. That was
all there as well, no sense And this is the
gray jacket, the jacket and the top. They'd been slashed
(21:44):
and there was a lot of dried blood on those items.
Speaker 5 (21:51):
I look at Kelsey. We both know what's next.
Speaker 1 (21:56):
Shane starts with photos of Michelle as she was found
floating faced down in the canal under the plywood. A
few more like that without the plywood. Then he brings
out the photographs from the autopsy. There are pictures of
her face, her head tilted to one side. She looks
(22:16):
like she could be sleeping, except she isn't, and the
wounds are horrific. We've been studying this case for months now,
but in documents the crime can feel abstract, with Michelle
described only as the victim. By this time, we'd met Leo,
(22:37):
some of Michelle's friends and family, and now she's no
longer some stranger or the victim on an autopsy table,
and your heart just breaks trying to imagine the pain
and devastation they felt when Michelle was killed. That's all
I can think about seeing these photos.
Speaker 6 (23:09):
That's everything.
Speaker 1 (23:10):
Yeah, that's a pleasant.
Speaker 13 (23:15):
Yeah.
Speaker 6 (23:16):
Not a lot of cases are, no, I know. But
I'm gonna need to decompress her.
Speaker 1 (23:22):
Yeah, sure, yeah, Kelsey and I aren't saying much. On
the way back to the parking garage, the summer heat
is stifling, and it's the end of the work day,
so there are people all around us.
Speaker 5 (23:42):
We get to our car where we debrief.
Speaker 12 (23:46):
I mean, I was thinking about her and like the
pain she must have felt, and how scared she must
have been in those last moments. I think you know,
there's also the proximity and age I was thinking about,
(24:13):
you know, also like myself and and all of my
friends who are young women and could potentially be in
a situation like that.
Speaker 5 (24:37):
Certa I can take your time.
Speaker 1 (25:12):
Grief and heartbreak overwhelm everyone close to Michelle in the
days and nights after her body is discovered. When it
comes time to arrange her funeral, Leo is in no
shape to help.
Speaker 6 (25:26):
My dad took over everything. I could not make a
solid decision for me for anything. I couldn't decide what
close further where. I couldn't decide what color of the
casket should be, what kind of casket should be on
those things were so fond to me. How do you
decide what kind of casket you put your dead wife in?
Speaker 1 (25:41):
But there's one detail Leo does care about. Michelle's dad
wants a closed casket.
Speaker 6 (25:46):
Wake, and I just could not leave her without seeing
her again. I just could not do it.
Speaker 1 (25:54):
So Leo makes an arrangement with the funeral home. They'll
hold the wake with a closed casket, But an hour
or so before they'll let Leo c Michelle one last time,
the funeral director tells him that to view Michelle. They'll
need a high necked shirt to cover her wounds.
Speaker 6 (26:11):
And I was flabbergasted. Was like, what wounds? When Michelle
was murdered? I was originally on the impression all the
way up until the wake that she was drown and
that's when my father said they were stab wounds.
Speaker 1 (26:33):
With Leo in his debilitated state, no one had wanted
to tell him exactly what happened to Michelle.
Speaker 6 (26:40):
Obviously I knew somebody had killed her. Why or how
was beyond my ability to think. Stabbing her is beyond that,
you know, it's just beyond that. And for me, that
was the whole thing. Cast again, relive in it all
(27:03):
over again, a different scenario, somehow worse than the drowning.
Speaker 1 (27:11):
At the wake, Leo was given the private moment he
wanted to see Michelle one last time.
Speaker 6 (27:19):
And walked into the viewing area. I have never seen
a dead body. I've never been to a wake, I've
never had any experience like that, so I really wasn't
prepared for any of that. And she was laying in
the gasket, and I told myself that I wanted to
(27:39):
see it because I wanted to kiss her one more time.
She was so cold. I couldn't do it. Immediately. I
felt her hand. She was ice cold, and she didn't
even look like her. I mean, Michelle without life was
not Michelle. I did manage to him. It took a while.
(28:04):
I managed to kiss her. It didn't help me. I
kept thinking, I gotta just figure out a way. I
gotta go back. All I gotta do is get back
to this minute, the one I was looking for, instead
of going this way. If I just go that way,
I could have ran into the car, you know, but
(28:26):
just any just that minute, if I could just get
back to there, I could I could make it all
go away. And you can't go back. There's no way
to go back. My life has been chasing that going
back ever since.
Speaker 1 (28:49):
After the wake, there's Michelle's funeral. The church is filled
with young people and they've come to remember Michelle.
Speaker 7 (28:57):
We met in fourth grade, and I don't know, we
just we hit it off like right away, you know,
as little kids.
Speaker 1 (29:05):
This is Michelle McCluskey. She was Michelle Schofield's best friend.
As kids, they did gymnastics in the front yard, listen
to music, and then as they grew into teenagers, they
would go the roller skating rink almost every night. They
also played a lot of sports with boys in the neighborhood.
Speaker 7 (29:22):
She seemed to be kind of good at almost everything.
I remember always thinking how strong she was. She could
do things physically that a lot of girls our age
couldn't do. She was kind of rough and tumble, you know.
She had an older brother and a younger brother. She
wrestled with them and stuff like that. But she was,
(29:43):
you know, she wasn't like a tough girl or anything
like that. She was very sweet and feminine and like
always liked to do her nails and have her hair
done and that kind of stuff too. When we were younger,
they lived in a small mobile home. It was a
single wide mobile home and it was so small, but
Ricky had a full drum set in a living room.
Speaker 1 (30:06):
Ricky is Michelle's older brother. The whole family loved music, playing, singing,
you name it. Ricky and his father, David, both learned
the drums. Michelle's grandfather played the banjo.
Speaker 7 (30:18):
Of course. Then we started listening to rock and roll,
and if you met her, you would never guess that
she liked heavy metal locks, you know what I mean.
Speaker 1 (30:27):
Kelsey and I reached out to Jesse Saum, Michelle's younger brother.
Speaker 5 (30:31):
Today.
Speaker 1 (30:32):
He's an artist and we met him at his studio
in Port Canaveral. It has big garage doors that open
onto the marina. Dozens of his metal sculptures hang from
the walls and ceiling. He keeps a picture of Michelle
at one of his workstations.
Speaker 13 (30:48):
She was she was trying to do more musical stuff too.
You know, she was really good at singing and stuff
like that, and I think she was just trying to
find her voice, you know, and was kind of surprising
it because everybody has to work and hear the bill,
you know what I mean. But I think that that
was really her kind of creative the thing that she
how she could express herself.
Speaker 1 (31:07):
Jesse and Michelle went to a lot of heavy metal
shows together when they were growing up. He's only sixteen
when Michelle moves in with Leo. He comes home one
afternoon when he hears that Michelle's body has been found.
Speaker 13 (31:20):
I think I had come home, uh, And I think
my grandmother actually told me, because I don't think my
dad was there. I was hoping not to witness his
state of being at that moment, because you know, he just,
you know, crumpled.
Speaker 1 (31:44):
We asked Jesse if he thinks his dad, David Soalm,
would talk to us, but Jesse tells us that his
dad doesn't even like to talk to him about Michelle.
It's still too painful. As a matter of courtesy, I
mailed David a letter telling him what I'm doing and
offering him the opportunity to speak with me or to
ask any questions.
Speaker 5 (32:06):
But I don't hear back from him.
Speaker 1 (32:12):
In the days following Michelle's funeral, Leo is having a
hard time processing these new details of his wife's death.
Now he's forced to think about the violence Michelle experienced
in her last moments.
Speaker 6 (32:26):
I know Michelle, and there's no way that anybody who
knew her was capable of doing this to her. It's
not possible. And so I'm looking for some monstrous thing
that you can't describe in a human form, you know,
it's just a monster.
Speaker 1 (32:54):
Leo and Michelle's friends are also trying to make sense
of Michelle's murder, and they're trying to figure out who
might be responsible.
Speaker 14 (33:01):
It's a time, you know, we were the suspect of
a lot of different people. You know, you sit around
in your mind, you try to who could have done
something you know as terrible as that.
Speaker 1 (33:13):
This is Dave again, the bass player in Leo's band,
and his wife Liz.
Speaker 6 (33:18):
There was a couple of people that we wondered about.
Speaker 15 (33:22):
My first reaction when we got the phone call that
night at the same time that this happened, and just
before there was like five girls in the area that
had been killed. One of them was even right down
here off Comby Road, dumped on the railroad track.
Speaker 1 (33:38):
Comby Road is the street where a lot of teenagers
hang out in Lakeland. A lot of crime happens here,
a lot of theft fights, sometimes murders. It also happens
to be where Tom's Restaurant is, where Michelle was working
the night she went missing.
Speaker 16 (33:53):
So my first reaction was, oh, my god, it's got
to be that same guy. He's come over here. So
I just that was my first reaction. It was that
serial killer that had been running around I four corridor.
Speaker 1 (34:06):
But their minds always returned to those closest to Michelle,
and word was getting around about how Leo's dad claimed
a premonition had led him to Michelle's body.
Speaker 14 (34:20):
The Sheriff's department was looking at that and thinking, yeah,
that don't sound right, you know, And to be honest
with you, there were times when we kind of suspected
he may have because there again, at a time like that,
it's such a terrible thing, you know, you try to
figure out who in the world would have done something
like that, you know, That's what.
Speaker 1 (34:40):
The Polk County Sheriff's Office would have to figure out.
Two experienced detectives were assigned to the Michelle Schofield case,
Detective Weeks and Detective Putnam. I could try to describe them,
but it might be better coming from the longtime reporter
for the Lakeland Ledger, Susie SHOTTLECOTTI.
Speaker 17 (35:01):
I was covering cops then, so I do remember having
a lot of murders going on at that point and
a lot of things that went unsolved.
Speaker 1 (35:09):
Susie has been reporting on the courts in Polk County
for over thirty five years, and she's married to a
retired detective with the Sheriff's office. She knows just about
everyone in Polk County. First I asked her about Detective
Robert Weeks.
Speaker 17 (35:23):
Oh, yeah, Weebel webel. Yes, it's little short guy. He's
kind of built like a wee boy, you know, Weebel's wobble.
Speaker 1 (35:34):
Then I asked Susie about Weeks's partner, Detective Putnall.
Speaker 17 (35:38):
Of God, Richard Putnall doctor deaf. Oh god, he has
the personality of a dial tone. I mean they called
him doctor Deaf because he was always at a crime scene.
Speaker 2 (35:47):
But he was.
Speaker 17 (35:48):
He was the typical chain smoking, rumpled suit, tall, lanky detective.
I mean, he was just what you would imagine an
old krusty. He smelled like smoke all the time.
Speaker 6 (36:02):
Detective.
Speaker 2 (36:03):
You know.
Speaker 1 (36:04):
Kelsey and I tried reaching out to these detectives without luck.
We sent email, left phone messages, and knocked on doors.
It was almost like word had gotten out about what
we were doing. Very few people from the Sheriff's office,
active or retired, wanted to talk to us. But there
was one guy. His name is Grady Judd. He's the
(36:29):
actual sheriff now, and it's fair to say that he's
the face and the voice of Polk County.
Speaker 18 (36:35):
This is a wonderful, safe community. I love the people here,
and in turn, the community here overwhelmingly cares for each
other and looks out for each other. It's a good place.
Speaker 1 (36:47):
Sheriff Grady Judd is a white man in his mid sixties.
He wears glasses and a green uniform with his sheriff
star pinned to his chest. He's known for his campy,
tough on crime press conferences, which often involved props and
pictures and often go viral on social media. In two
thousand and six, his deputies chased someone suspected of killing
(37:08):
a police officer into the woods and shot him dead.
After the autopsy, Judd was asked why deputies fired sixty
eight bullets into the suspect. That's all the bullets we had,
and we would have shot him more.
Speaker 18 (37:21):
He said, we don't choose to shoot people. They choose
for us to shoot them. And if you choose for
us to shoot at you, we're gonna shoot at you
a lot. That's a guarantee.
Speaker 1 (37:36):
When we met him, some Lakeland rappers had just released
a new song, duck in Grady Judd, and they made
a music video that pokes fun at evading cops in
Polk County.
Speaker 5 (37:46):
The sheriff loved it.
Speaker 18 (37:47):
Really we got a boom. And by the way, we're
going to do an encore together. It's already schedule. I
told him. I said, they said, can we do an encore?
And I said yes, I love it because the first
one I didn't have anything to do with it. They
(38:07):
pulled my clips off the YouTube and this one I'm
going to have a cameo appearance and they said, can
we can we shoot part of it with your swat
vehicle and I said, well, sure you can.
Speaker 1 (38:23):
Jud is so popular in Polk County. He recently won
his fifth consecutive term as sheriff, running unopposed. He tells
us he grew up in the Cumby area, that same
part of Lakeland where Michelle worked and where bodies were
turning up.
Speaker 18 (38:38):
They used to call me a Comby critter. When I
was a kid. I'd run around talking about being the sheriff,
and they'd say, they're not going to elect some kid
from Comby Road to be the sheriff. I said, yeah,
they are. They're going to let me. They ain't going
to elect the Comby critter. Well they did here I
am Grady.
Speaker 1 (38:55):
Judd was just eighteen when he joined the Sheriff's office,
but since he was too young to legally purchase ammunition
for his service weapon, his father had to buy it
for him. Jud quickly rose up the ranks, and just
a few years before Michelle Schofield's murder, he was supervising
forty four employees, all older than him. And jud is
(39:15):
the first to admit that it's a pretty bad sign
when a kid in his twenties is running the criminal
investigations unit.
Speaker 18 (39:22):
You know, I like to think that I'm sharper than
the average bear, but that's just a personal opinion of me.
But the reality is, we should have had people with
institutional wisdom running a criminal investigations division back in the day,
and we didn't. So we had a young, upstart college
kid who read a lot and was intuitive when the
(39:46):
real mature leaders weren't there.
Speaker 1 (39:50):
In Polk County in the nineteen eighties, violent crime was
rising dramatically, and Grady Judd was alarmed and frustrated by
the growing number of unsolved homicides. Back then, they didn't
really have the resources to keep up.
Speaker 18 (40:04):
We didn't have DNA, we didn't have cell phone tracking,
we didn't have stores and intersections with cameras.
Speaker 1 (40:15):
On top of that, Grady Judd says they didn't have
many experienced homicide detectives back then, and there were too
many murders for them to handle. They'd start working one murder,
but then another murder would come along and they'd have
to stop what they were doing to move on to
the next one. The year Michelle was killed, the Sheriff's
office handled twenty seven homicides, its second worst year for
(40:36):
murders in a decade. There were nine recent murder cases
that had gone cold, and now detectives from the Polk
County Sheriff's Office had another killing on their hands with
very little evidence to go on, making matters worse. A
month before Michelle's murder, Polk County Sheriff Dan Daniels, a
self avowed white supremacist, was forced out of office by
(40:59):
the governor on the same day Michelle's body was found.
There was an overhaul of the department and massive reorganization underway.
Many officers in the Polk County Sheriff's Office resigned.
Speaker 18 (41:13):
I didn't because my goal was to make this organization better,
not run from a challenge. But it was tumultuous during
those days.
Speaker 1 (41:25):
With the Sheriff's department in turmoil, Detectives weeks and putnall
do what they can with the resources available to them.
The first thing they do is canvas Leo and Michelle's neighborhood,
knocking on doors, and they begin to hear stories from
neighbors of arguments and loud noises coming from the young
couple's trailer, but nobody had seen or heard anything unusual
(41:47):
on the night Michelle disappeared until Detective Weeks shows up
at the trailer of Ricky and Alice Scott, who live
across the street from Leo and Michelle. Ricky didn't see anything,
but he says he's concerned about his wife getting involved
in the investigation. Alice, who's in her mid thirties, stays
(42:11):
up late and she's the neighborhood busybody. She's been known
to call the cops on kids for riding bikes on
her lawn, and she tells Detective Weeks that yes, she
did see.
Speaker 5 (42:22):
Something suspicious on the night Michelle disappeared.
Speaker 1 (42:25):
She says she heard a noise and looked out her
bathroom window. The Schofields pulled up to their trailer in
the Mazda. She watched as Leo and Michelle went inside.
Then Alice says she hears a scream. She says she
stays at the window waiting until Leo emerges from the trailer.
(42:49):
He's carrying something large and heavy that he places in
the back of the Mazda. He closes the hatch, starts
the car, and away With that single statement, Alice Scott
puts the investigations focused squarely on Leo.
Speaker 18 (43:11):
Eyewitness testimony is not your best evidence because people in
a traumatic event, perception can be skewed. They mean well,
some don't mean well. Some there's an ulterior motive. But
for the most part, your eyewitnesses mean well, but they're
(43:33):
scared to death and their perceptions may not be exactly
as it occurred. But if somebody didn't talk, it was
hard to solve a murder.
Speaker 1 (43:45):
Back then, as detectives weeks in Putnall interview Leo and
Michelle's friends and former roommates, they learned that the young
couple had a volatile relationship. There were stories about loud
arguments in the trailer, Leo screaming at Michelle, some noises
that sounded like slaps, red marks on Michelle's face, stories
(44:09):
of Leo dragging Michelle by the hair. As the days
turned to weeks after Michelle's murder, Leo can feel people looking.
Speaker 5 (44:18):
At him differently.
Speaker 1 (44:20):
Word is getting out now that there's a witness pointing
to Leo as the main suspect. At one point, Leo
calls Michelle's dad, David Salm.
Speaker 6 (44:31):
He said that he was informed by doctor Weeks to
not have any contact with me until this was over,
that they believed that I did it. And I said
to him, you don't believe that, David, And he said
I don't know. And I was silent for a few seconds,
(44:53):
and I said, okay, all right, and that it was
the last time I suppo to him. I understand his pain,
but when he said that, it really really hurt, because
you should know me better than that. But he needed
something to hang that had on, you know, something to
(45:15):
makes sense, like we all did. But when he said that,
I really really started feeling the way coming down.
Speaker 1 (45:24):
And it's not just Michelle's dad who turns his back
on Leo. Michelle's friends are talking to detectives too.
Speaker 7 (45:32):
Michelle was a very very beautiful girl, and she always
dated very nice looking boy And when I met him,
he just didn't seem like the kind of person that
I would think she would be interested in. He was
kind of small bill, kind of grungy, and he just
didn't seem that attractive to me. It just it just
(45:55):
rubbed me weird. I just didn't understand what she was
so interested about, you know, I don't know.
Speaker 1 (46:02):
Michelle McCluskey was the maid of honor at Leo and
Michelle's wedding, but she still had her doubts.
Speaker 7 (46:09):
I remember not not being sure that it was a
good thing for her and being concerned, you know, but
she just she always convinced me it was okay. If
they were not getting along or she was unhappy or
anything like that, she didn't tell me.
Speaker 1 (46:29):
But after Michelle went missing, Michelle McCluskey remembers one moment
in particular, after her first night of searching for her
best friend, when questions about Leo's started.
Speaker 5 (46:38):
To creep in.
Speaker 7 (46:40):
We spent that whole day looking for her and stuff.
And it was sometime laid into the night, and we
went back to their house and I fell asleep on
the couch and then I heard a noise or something.
I woke up and he was standing in the living
room with the front door open, just kind of looking outside.
And that was the first time that I thought what if,
(47:07):
Like what if he did something to her, and it
made me kind of scared that I was there along
with him.
Speaker 1 (47:14):
Soon, Michelle McCluskey would learn that Leo's neighbor, Alice Scott,
told detective she heard Michelle's scream then saw Leo carrying
something heavy to the Mazda. If that was true, it
would mean that Michelle McCluskey was sleeping at the crime
scene where her best friend had been violently murdered the
(47:34):
night before by the man she was now.
Speaker 7 (47:37):
Alone with being in the house the next day and
there's no blood, nothing's broken, no holes in the wall, no,
you know, there's no sign that anything like that happened
in their house. So I just thought, well, that just
doesn't make sense. I had decided there was no way
(47:58):
he could have done it because blood would have been
all over the house and it wasn't.
Speaker 1 (48:04):
But what Michelle McCluskey didn't know was that busybody. Neighbor
Alice Scott told police that she saw something else. The
day after Michelle Schofield went missing, Leo bringing a carpet
cleaner into the trailer. Detectives Weeks and Putnall continue to
(48:40):
question Leo, and he can feel the pressure mounting and
because he feels that he has nothing to hide, he
never even thinks to bring a lawyer along.
Speaker 6 (48:50):
The fact that you're questioning me about the murder of
my own life was extremely uncomfortable. I've told this story
of zillion times. It doesn't change. I don't have any
answers to what actually took place because I wasn't there
to be in that position. It's beyond trying to prove
(49:13):
your innocence. It's beyond that there's a sludge that covers
you when you're being questioned for such a thing. We're
not talking about robin a store, or a cocaine charge
or something, and we're not even talking about a murder,
which is bad enough. This is the murder of my wife,
whom I love, and now I'm forced to prove that
(49:33):
to someone I've never met before and obviously doesn't have
any idea who I am.
Speaker 1 (49:41):
Leo asked to take a lie detector test. He wants
to prove his innocence, and Detective Weeks obliges. Weeks brings
in a guy from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.
The examiner focuses on three questions, did you stab Michelle
Leo answers no, Oh, did you stab Michelle with a knife?
Speaker 12 (50:04):
No?
Speaker 1 (50:06):
Did your mother lie about your activities that night?
Speaker 2 (50:09):
No?
Speaker 1 (50:11):
The polygraph examiner tells Leo he flunked, tells him, I
think you killed your wife. Armed with the lie detective results,
Weeks and Putnall continue to interview people close to the couple.
Speaker 6 (50:25):
Weeks and his team are going around spreading all kinds
of stuff. My friends are looking at me strange. I
can feel it, you can feel the difference. And on
top of everything, I lost Michelle.
Speaker 1 (50:37):
Months pass with Leo as the main suspect, yet no
evidence is turning up that connects him to Michelle's murder.
The clothes he was wearing that night had no blood
on them. Detectives don't have a murder weapon. They have
an alleged failed polygraph. But polygraph tests don't actually detect lies.
They really only measure anxiety. The US Supreme Court ruled
(51:01):
that polygraph tests are not reliable and their results are
not admissible evidence.
Speaker 5 (51:06):
In Florida.
Speaker 1 (51:08):
The detectives have statements about Leo's temper and his relationship
with Michelle, and a statement from Alice Scott, who claims
to have seen something the night Michelle disappeared. Still, the
State Attorney's office is looking over all the evidence and
they don't think detectives have enough to arrest Leo. Yet
there's other evidence, like the fingerprints found in Michelle's Mazda.
(51:31):
There were just two sets of prints that were lifted
from inside the car, and when they didn't match Leo
or Michelle or Leo Senior, the Sheriff's office stops looking
for possible matches. But what's strange is that Leo and
Michelle's prints aren't even in the car, which they should
have been because.
Speaker 5 (51:48):
It's their car.
Speaker 1 (51:50):
When I first saw that in the Florida Department of
Law Enforcements report, I wondered if someone wiped down the fingerprints.
Crime scene technicians also exact and Leo and Michelle's trailer.
If Alice Scott's eyewitness statement is true that she heard
Michelle's scream then saw Leo carrying something heavy like a
body and place it in the Mazda, that makes the
(52:12):
trailer the scene of the crime. The medical examiner concludes
that Michelle lost approximately five pints of blood, but they
don't find anything you'd expect to find in the trailer
after someone has been stabbed twenty six times. Inside, there
is no blood, just like Michelle McCluskey noticed, and no
(52:34):
signs that the carpet had been cleaned, which there should
have been if Leo used the carpet cleaner. Alice Scott
claims she saw him bringing into the trailer the day
after Michelle disappeared. Instead, most of Michelle Schofield's blood was
found in the dirt near the canal where.
Speaker 5 (52:52):
Her body was discovered.
Speaker 1 (52:55):
Nearly half of female homicide victims are killed by their partners,
and the majority of those homicides are carried out by
a male partner, so it makes sense that detectives would
be suspicious of Leo, but there's no physical evidence connecting
Leo to the crime, so the case stalls for months
with no arrest. By the end of nineteen eighty seven,
(53:20):
with no new developments, the murder of Michelle Scofield is
going cold. The Polk County Sheriff's Office now has ten
unsolved murders on the books, but there's a new homicide prosecutor,
Assistant State Attorney John Aguero. His job is to get
the evidence from the detectives and convict someone for the
(53:40):
murder of Michelle Schofield. He's young, smart, and very aggressive.
Aguero takes a look at the Michelle Scofield case file
and he thinks he sees something. He reads Officer Kachadorian's
report about his conversation with Leo Senior, and Aguero thinks
there's something weird going on with the father. A vision
(54:02):
from God led him to Michelle's body in a phosphate
drainage canal that can't even be seen from the road.
Aguero is certain that Leo's father is somehow involved. His
so called vision from God that called him to Michelle's
body is just too suspicious to ignore, so Assistant State
Attorney John Aguero sends detectives weeks in putnall back out
(54:26):
for a few more rounds of questioning with Leo, and
there's a new focus.
Speaker 6 (54:31):
No, it's not about me anymore. They're both good cops,
and we're going to talk about my dad.
Speaker 5 (54:36):
But the detectives don't get what they want.
Speaker 1 (54:39):
Leo says he doesn't know anything about Michelle's murder, and
if Leo thought his dad had something to do with it,
he'd give up any information he had. Not long after this,
Leo is a passenger and a serious car crash where
he breaks his neck. He's hospitalized then released, but has
to wear a metal neck brace for a while. He
(55:01):
decides he's done with Florida. By this point, Leo's parents
have moved back to Massachusetts. Leo tell's detective Weeks he's
moving back up north, gives him contact information in Massachusetts,
and asks the detective to let him know if they
learn anything new about Michelle's murder. It's now May of
(55:22):
nineteen eighty eight. Michelle has been dead for more than
fifteen months. John Aguero, the prosecutor, is frustrated by the
investigation's lack of progress, so he decides he wants to
talk to the neighbor Alice Scott himself. Alice points Aguero
to Randy and Mary Laffoon, a neighborhood couple that delivers
(55:44):
newspapers around Lakeland. Detective Weeks interviewed them both a year before,
but they said they didn't notice anything unusual on the
night Michelle disappeared. But now under Aguero's questioning, the couple
tells the prosecutor they remember seeing an orange Mazda and
a pickup truck just like the one Leo's senior drives
(56:05):
they were parked right where Michelle's body was found, and now,
fifteen months later, they say they saw those vehicles in
the early morning hours of February twenty fifth, nineteen eighty seven,
the night Michelle disappeared. Aguero might not have the evidence
to charge Leo's senior yet, but with the statements from
(56:26):
Alice Scott and the Laffoons, he thinks he has enough
to charge Leo. So in June of nineteen eighty eight,
Leo is indicted for first degree murder, a charge punishable
by death in Florida. Aguero notifies police in Massachusetts and
he gets on a plane with Detective Weeks to take
Leo into custody. Leo knows they're coming, but before he surrenders,
(56:52):
he goes up to the roof of an apartment building
he and his dad are painting, and he takes what
could be his last look over the neighborhood he grew
up in. He's just a few stories up and his
father joins him.
Speaker 6 (57:05):
And of course, I've never been arrested for anything, so
I'm pretty scared. I'm in a panic, and Dad's not
saying anything. I actually went out on the roof and
I went out and I stood on the edge of
the thing, and I'm not gonna lie. I honestly stood
there thinking and I should just drop off of it
and be done. You know, I'm not gonna let these
(57:28):
people take me through hell. You know you're not listening
to the truth, don't care about the truth. And my
dad said something really crazy. He said, if you did it, jump.
Speaker 1 (57:46):
Leo's wife has been murdered, his friends have mostly abandoned him,
and now his own family is cracking under the pressure.
Speaker 6 (57:55):
If all you can think is that I did it,
then obviously you're not caring who killed Michelle. I did
not kill Michelle, And at some point I just decided
I'm going to stand for my wife.
Speaker 1 (58:12):
Leo goes to the office of a local lawyer who
has arranged for the arrest and they wait. Then Leo
notices movement outside the window. He turns to the lawyer.
Speaker 6 (58:25):
I said that they're outside your window. And the swat
team was outside the window with their rifles, so I
know they had surrounded the building. And no siner did
I say that they came in the office. They kicked
them the door, and this came right off in there.
And weeks was there. Aguero was there, and they picked
(58:47):
me up, handcuffed me. I told Weeks, you're making a mistake.
I kept saying that you're making a mistake. He didn't
respond to that at all.
Speaker 1 (59:05):
Leo has brought before a Massachusetts judge who tells him
he can fight extradition to Florida if he wants, but
Leo waves that right. He says he'll go willingly and
gets in a car with the prosecutor.
Speaker 5 (59:17):
John Aguero now told of gar.
Speaker 6 (59:20):
When we were driving to Logan Airport in Massachusetts, he
asked me, how do you like the car? We're in
a red Cadillac, and he said, how do you like
the car? I said, and I like it. It's nice.
I'm gonna make you drive me back in it. You're
driving me to Massachusetts in a red Cadillac.
Speaker 1 (59:45):
Leo is escorted onto the plane for the flight back
to Florida by Detective Weeks and John Aguero. Leo is
just twenty two years old, and tonight he's going to
be sleeping in the Polk County jail.
Speaker 6 (59:58):
I remember asking we because he sat by me on
the plane and I asked him to not stop looking,
to continue looking, and he said why would I do that?
And I said, because I'm not guilty of killing Michelle.
And he said, well, if I believe that, you wouldn't
(01:00:21):
be here.
Speaker 1 (01:00:24):
That's when Leo turns to the other man sitting by him,
Prosecutor John Aguero. Leo catches a glimpse of something shiny
on Aguero's tie. It's a tie clasp with some kind
of design. Leo leans in to get a closer look.
It's old, sparky Florida's Electric Chair. Bone Valley is a
(01:00:53):
production of Lava for Good Podcasts in association with Signal
Company Number One. Our executive ducers are Jason Flam and
Kevin Wordiska Kornhaber is our senior producer. Brit Spangler is
our sound designer. Roxandra Guidy is our editor. Fact checking
by Maximo Anderson. Our producer and researcher is Kelsey Decker.
(01:01:18):
Our theme song, The One Who's Holding the Stars, is
performed by Lee Bob and the Truth. It was written
by Leo Schofield and Kevin Herrick in Florida's Hearty Correctional Institution.
Bone Valley is written and produced by me Gilbert King.
You can follow the show on Instagram. Facebook, and Twitter
at Lava for Good to see photos and documents from
(01:01:41):
our investigation and exclusive behind the scenes content. Visit Lava
Forgood dot com, slash Bone Valley
It's eighteen eighty one. Captain J. Francis le Baron of
the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers is surveying Central Florida.
As he travels up the Peace River in Polk County,
he finds something fossils, tons of them along the sandy
banks of the Peace River, giant shark, teethed whale skulls,
(00:23):
and prehistoric mastadon bones. Captain le Baron collects nine barrels
worth of fossils and has them shipped off to a
professor at the Smithsonian Institution. A few years later, Captain
le Baron returns to the region. As he's digging through
the sandbars of the Peace River amongst the bones from
(00:45):
millions of years ago, he makes another discovery. All the bones,
all the decomposition had left Central Florida rich in phosphate,
a mineral left over from the creatures that lived and
died in an around the ancient sea that once covered Florida,
and phosphate, it turns out, is a valuable ingredient for
(01:07):
making fertilizer. They called it white gold. There's interest in
the fossils, but palaeontologists don't get the chance to dig
because the mining companies get there first. Soon, Polk County
became the self proclaimed phosphate capital of the world, and
the area was producing three quarters of the nation's supply.
(01:32):
By the late nineteenth century. Railroad tracks had sprung out
in every direction across the region, which helped move all
that phosphate. There was a lot of work and not
enough workers to get the job done, so phosphate companies
paid a fee to the state of Florida in exchange
for prisoners to fill the labor shortage. Black men arrested
(01:55):
for petty crimes were forced to dig ditches and push wheelbacks.
Was full of white rock while underguard. It had become
a new form of slavery.
Speaker 2 (02:14):
This song that called Shove it Over, and it's a
line in rhythm, pretty generally distributed all over Florida. It
was sung to me by Charlie Jones on railroad construction
camp near Lakeland, Florida.
Speaker 1 (02:28):
This is Zora Neil Hurston, the novelist who became a
central figure in the African American cultural revival of the
nineteen twenties and thirties known as the Harlem Renaissance.
Speaker 2 (02:40):
When I get in a land noise, I'm going to
spread the news about the Florida Boy.
Speaker 1 (02:49):
Hurston grew up in central Florida, and in nineteen twenty
seven she moved to Polk County to collect and record
stories and work songs from Black Southerners, songs that were
down from generations. Some of the workers who taught Hurston
these songs were setting down railroad tracks and working in
the mines to move phosphate. Hurston described these men who
(03:12):
worked long, hard hours in Polk County in her memoir
dust tracks on a road they go down in the
phosphate mines, Hurston wrote, and bring up the wet dust
of the bones of prehistoric monsters to make rich land
in far places so that people can eat. But all
of it is not dust. Huge ribs twenty feet from
(03:35):
belly to backbone, some old time sea monster caught in
the shallows, shark teeth as wide as the hand of
a working man. It was these fossils tossed to the
side by mining operations that gave this region its new
name Bone Valley. As the decades passed, phosphate mining evolved.
(03:59):
Instead of convict with shovels, they started using dragline machines
like the one operated by Michelle Schofield's father, David's Palm.
These giant machines excavate the top soil and produce towering
two hundred foot mountains of white sand called gypsum stacks
that loom over the Polk County horizon. By the nineteen eighties,
(04:22):
some of the mines in northern Polk County shut down
after depleting the soil of its phosphate, and mining operations
moved further south, but you can still see the scars
the industry left behind. The mined out areas were left
to be reclaimed by nature. Dense vegetation grew around these
(04:44):
deep mining pits that filled with water, which is why
you see these long, narrow bodies of water in the region,
like the ones in North Lakeland where Leo, his dad
and friends continue their search from Michelle Schofield.
Speaker 3 (05:08):
Do you my maness, I have to have my feet
saw rule deps sarrangleists in this vallyity.
Speaker 4 (05:31):
I see relation about a breach das rash to the world.
Who's holding the stars to the warm solding.
Speaker 1 (05:57):
Store Bone Valley Chapter two comby Critters. It's been almost
(06:32):
forty eight hours since Michelle went missing. There was no
sign of her until one of Leo's friends saw the
orange Mazda just off the eastbound side of I four,
a major highway that runs through Polk County and connects
Tampa and Orlando.
Speaker 5 (06:48):
Now a new wave of panic washes.
Speaker 1 (06:50):
Over Leo as he and his father's speed to where
the Mazda was seen. A few of Leo's friends and
Michelle's dad followed them there.
Speaker 6 (07:00):
We get to the car, We find the car. Obviously
we didn't touch the car. I didn't want anybody to
touch the car. And we looked at it. We had flashlights,
and you know, obviously it was mine.
Speaker 1 (07:09):
But there's no sign of Michelle. It's nearly midnight. Leo
knows he needs to call the sheriff to get someone
out here and quick. The car is right by the
Polk City exit ramp on a rural stretch of the interstate.
Speaker 6 (07:24):
I didn't even know where I was at. I mean,
I wasn't lost, but I've never been in this area.
So I went up on the embankment. I climbed the embankment,
got up on the road, and you couldn't see a
store from the highway, but I went up anyway to
look and when I get up to that overpass and
walked just a few feet up behind a tree line.
There was a store up there, and there was a
pay phone, so I went over there and I made
(07:46):
a call to the Sheriff's department, and I told them
that I told him who I was, told him where
I was, and that we had found the car on
the side of the road. They asked me if I
was going to take it home. I said, you're apparently
not understanding who I am. My wife is still missing.
I found her car, I did not find her. I
(08:10):
need some help. I'm expecting we'll be right there, mister Scofield,
you know what I mean. And Batman shows up and
everything gets fixed and stuff, and it didn't work that way.
Speaker 1 (08:23):
Finally deputies arrive and the crime scene unit is called in.
They start inspecting the car. Some stereo equipment in the
Mazda is missing. Leo doesn't want to waste any more time.
He wants to start searching the area for Michelle.
Speaker 6 (08:43):
I told the detective Russell, I'm going to be out
here in the ditches and in the medium and of
vye for looking for anything.
Speaker 1 (08:52):
But the deputy tells Leo to wait because they're going
to fly a helicopter over the area at sunrise. So
Leo and the rest of the search party a few
hours sleep before.
Speaker 5 (09:01):
Meeting up again.
Speaker 6 (09:03):
I literally am there at daybreak, and so the plan
was to search I four.
Speaker 1 (09:09):
They search both sides of the highway, including the Median. Leo,
his dad, his friends, and Michelle's family cover the six
plus miles of I four until they reached the exit
for State Road thirty three. There's no sign of Michelle.
Speaker 7 (09:28):
Nobody that we knew from nobody.
Speaker 1 (09:32):
This is Michelle McCluskey. She's Michelle Schofield's best friend. It's
mid morning now. When they come on to State Road
thirty three, which connects I four, the highway where the
car was found to Cumby Road, which was Michelle's last
known location, they decide to split up. Leo's father will
(09:52):
start searching one end of State Road thirty three. Leo
and Michelle McCluskey will start at the other end of
State Road thirty three, and they play to meet Leo
Senior somewhere in the middle. So Leo and Michelle McCluskey
jump into her boyfriend's pickup truck.
Speaker 7 (10:07):
I was just terrified and just really focused on really
trying to find her.
Speaker 1 (10:14):
It's slow searching. They walk a stretch of the road,
get back in the truck, pull up a bit, get
out and search again.
Speaker 6 (10:23):
One Michelle McCluskey and I were looking in one particular area.
There was a sheriff's car that went by real fast,
headed down thirty three toward where my father was looking,
and the second car went by. I said, I'm following this.
Something's going on.
Speaker 1 (10:39):
Leo jumps in the pickup with Michelle McCluskey in the
passenger seat and tries to catch the sheriff's car ahead.
Speaker 5 (10:46):
In the distance, he.
Speaker 1 (10:47):
Sees an eighteen wheeled truck jackknife in the middle of
the road. Some cars are parked on the shoulder.
Speaker 6 (10:53):
I almost turned off because it was so congested. I
thought it was a car accident. Yeah, I thought this
was going to be one of things where it turns
out to be nothing, and I wish that it would
have been.
Speaker 1 (11:06):
Leo keeps driving toward the congestion. A helicopter's on the
ground at the scene.
Speaker 7 (11:12):
Somebody's missing, and you come up on a scene like that,
and the helicopters sat down and the ambulances there. You
just know, all of a sudden, nobody has to tell
you what it is, you know.
Speaker 6 (11:25):
I saw my father's truck down there on the side
of the road and all these other vehicles, and then
he was coming out of the woods and he had
his hands in his cover and his face, and I
knew they had found her. And I didn't even stop
the truck. I mean I slowed down and up, and
I jumped out and went running, and everything was blending
(11:47):
together and going super fast.
Speaker 1 (11:50):
Leo jumps out of the pickup and runs along the
side of the road. Yellow crime scene tape has already
been tied between a pine tree and a sign that.
Speaker 5 (11:58):
Reads no dump of rubbish.
Speaker 1 (12:02):
The tape cordons off a short sandy road that cuts
through the tree line. Beyond it, Leo sees men in
suits standing in front of palmetto.
Speaker 5 (12:12):
Bushes, looking down into a drainage canal.
Speaker 1 (12:16):
Leo now knows Michelle is back there, and he's trying
to push past the deputies to get to her. His
dad grabs him and keeps him from reaching the canal,
to keep him from seeing Michelle's body.
Speaker 6 (12:33):
And he kept saying she's gone, And I was trying
to hold on to some kind of my mind was
doing it, fabricating some kind of possibility that you're not right,
She's not dead. It could not possibly end like this.
I mean, it's just unreal. And it was like my
(12:56):
whole world was just fragmenting, and I wanted so bad
to just run back there and just grab her, and
if I could just hold her, I'd hold her and
she'd still be alive. And I, you just I can't.
It can't end like this. It just it can't end.
We look too hard, I've been up too long. I'm
(13:21):
gonna save her. I mean, it just just I just
lost it. I ended up punching the ground. I was
pulling grass out. I hit the tree, and I kept saying,
she's not dead, She's not dead. And then all these
people are coming around, and because I'm flipping out, I
(13:42):
end up in between these cars.
Speaker 1 (13:45):
The cops come around one side of the car towards Leo.
His dad comes from the other side.
Speaker 6 (13:51):
And I'm telling him, don't touch me, don't come near me.
I want her out now. I just want to. I
ended up just falling down and sitting against the front
tire of a car. I came in glue.
Speaker 1 (14:14):
Michelle's body is floating face down in a drainage canal
off State Road thirty three near an.
Speaker 5 (14:20):
Old phosphate mine.
Speaker 1 (14:23):
There's a large piece of plywood partially covering her body,
resting on her back and legs. She's still wearing the
red pants she wore to work that day and a
sleeveless white top. Her autopsy would later reveal that she'd
been stabbed twenty six times, and scrapes on her back
(14:43):
were consistent with her body being dragged after she was killed.
Officer Richard Kachadorian, who talked to Leo and his father
the morning after Michelle's disappeared, hears about it.
Speaker 5 (15:01):
On the news.
Speaker 8 (15:03):
I remember coming to work one night and there it
was on television, and she was found not far from
where I'm sitting right now.
Speaker 1 (15:10):
He feels bad for the Schofields and picks up the
phone to offer his condolences. Leo Senior answers, and.
Speaker 8 (15:18):
It was definitely a very peculiar conversation. He talked about
a premonition that he had.
Speaker 1 (15:28):
What Leo Senior told him was so odd. Katadorian decided
to write an official report about the call. His report reads,
mister Schofield advised writer that he received a premonition the
night prior to the discovery of his daughter in law,
possibly from the Lord, advising him where Michelle could be found.
Speaker 9 (15:49):
He told me on the phone at night that he
discovered the body, and the body was in the water, and.
Speaker 8 (15:53):
That she was looking at him, and that she was
smiling at him.
Speaker 1 (15:57):
Michelle was smiling, Leo Senior said, as of saying thank
you for finding me. This is especially odd because Michelle
was floating face down and had plywood on top of her.
Speaker 9 (16:11):
It was strange, and that's how I thought of it.
It became extremely strange, and I got I mean, it
frightened me to a certain degree. And if you know
that landscape, you.
Speaker 8 (16:22):
Just don't happen upon. You just don't drive down.
Speaker 9 (16:25):
That road and happen upon anything that's really dense vegetation,
snake infested water.
Speaker 8 (16:31):
I mean, do you either have to.
Speaker 9 (16:32):
Know something's there, or somebody directed you there, or you
knew something was in that area. You know, in hindsight, Gilbert,
what I feel he was.
Speaker 8 (16:44):
Doing was confessing that was definitely one of the oddest
phone calls in my life.
Speaker 10 (16:59):
Him Flohm, CEO and founder of Lava for Good podcasts,
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(17:22):
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Speaker 6 (17:29):
Thank you for your support.
Speaker 1 (17:33):
Bone Valley is sponsored by Stand Together. Stand Together is
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Speaker 5 (17:45):
The broken criminal justice system.
Speaker 1 (17:47):
Christina Dent is one of many entrepreneurs partnering with Stand
Together to end the War on Drugs, the underlying cause
of many problems such as overincarceration and the criminalization of
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came into contact with the War on drugs when she
saw how it was ripping apart the family she worked with.
(18:10):
She witnessed how kids were affected and how mothers wanted
something better for their families, but didn't have the tools
to get there themselves. Christina Dent started a nonprofit called
End It for Good because she knew there was a
better solution to help these families. She's working to end
the War on Drugs in Mississippi and build consensus around
(18:32):
the state to help families struggling with substance abuse problems
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Stand Together has many more stories like this one, as
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(18:52):
To learn more about the War on drugs, listen to
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Speaker 11 (19:04):
There is a piece of wood board that was covering
the body. I do have that, so I bring that out.
Speaker 6 (19:11):
Just been reading about it for months.
Speaker 5 (19:13):
It's just so funny that it's here.
Speaker 1 (19:15):
Kelsey and I are talking to Shane Kent, who runs
the evidence room in the basement of the Polk County Courthouse.
Shane's in his early forties with tattoos, engaged piercings. He's
gonna show us all the physical evidence from Michelle Schofield's murder.
Speaker 11 (19:32):
How's gonna go down is I'm gonna try to keep
control out of all the evidence. Sure, I'm gonna be
the only one handling it. If I'll drop off piece,
let you look at it, examine it, if you want
to take pictures of it. The only thing that I
do not recommend any any pictures being taken is of
the victim is any kind of nude, because some of
the wounds are in her chest and her bare chest
(19:53):
is exposed.
Speaker 6 (19:54):
So okay, understand, okay, all right, if you want to, guys,
have a seat, I'll start bringing Okay, thanks.
Speaker 1 (20:03):
Every time someone asked to see the evidence from a homicide,
the state Attorney's office is notified and they can send
someone down to observe. So we have an armed officer
with us, and she's going to be watching as we
look through all the evidence. Alright, Kelsey and I sit
(20:25):
side by side at the table and Shane starts bringing
out the evidence. The plywood that was covering Michelle's body
in the canal where she was found was found on
top of the body. In that little maps of lakeland
mounted on foam boards. Michelle's time card from Tom's restaurant.
Speaker 6 (20:45):
See there's a downy bottle that they found.
Speaker 1 (20:47):
The blood smeared downy fabric soft in her bottle that
was found in the back of the Mazda.
Speaker 12 (20:53):
The downy bottle very much looked like a downy bottle
from the eighties. You know, it wasn't like the one
you'd be able to buy at the store today. You know,
for me, this all happened before I was born, So
seeing some of that stuff, I was able to like
better place in time, like, oh my gosh, okay, this
happened and it was nineteen eighty seven.
Speaker 1 (21:17):
Then Shane brings out Michelle's clothes. Each piece is contained
in a clear plastic bag.
Speaker 12 (21:24):
Her jacket, her top, her bra and underwear, and the
red pants that she and more to work. That was
all there as well, no sense And this is the
gray jacket, the jacket and the top. They'd been slashed
(21:44):
and there was a lot of dried blood on those items.
Speaker 5 (21:51):
I look at Kelsey. We both know what's next.
Speaker 1 (21:56):
Shane starts with photos of Michelle as she was found
floating faced down in the canal under the plywood. A
few more like that without the plywood. Then he brings
out the photographs from the autopsy. There are pictures of
her face, her head tilted to one side. She looks
(22:16):
like she could be sleeping, except she isn't, and the
wounds are horrific. We've been studying this case for months now,
but in documents the crime can feel abstract, with Michelle
described only as the victim. By this time, we'd met Leo,
(22:37):
some of Michelle's friends and family, and now she's no
longer some stranger or the victim on an autopsy table,
and your heart just breaks trying to imagine the pain
and devastation they felt when Michelle was killed. That's all
I can think about seeing these photos.
Speaker 6 (23:09):
That's everything.
Speaker 1 (23:10):
Yeah, that's a pleasant.
Speaker 13 (23:15):
Yeah.
Speaker 6 (23:16):
Not a lot of cases are, no, I know. But
I'm gonna need to decompress her.
Speaker 1 (23:22):
Yeah, sure, yeah, Kelsey and I aren't saying much. On
the way back to the parking garage, the summer heat
is stifling, and it's the end of the work day,
so there are people all around us.
Speaker 5 (23:42):
We get to our car where we debrief.
Speaker 12 (23:46):
I mean, I was thinking about her and like the
pain she must have felt, and how scared she must
have been in those last moments. I think you know,
there's also the proximity and age I was thinking about,
(24:13):
you know, also like myself and and all of my
friends who are young women and could potentially be in
a situation like that.
Speaker 5 (24:37):
Certa I can take your time.
Speaker 1 (25:12):
Grief and heartbreak overwhelm everyone close to Michelle in the
days and nights after her body is discovered. When it
comes time to arrange her funeral, Leo is in no
shape to help.
Speaker 6 (25:26):
My dad took over everything. I could not make a
solid decision for me for anything. I couldn't decide what
close further where. I couldn't decide what color of the
casket should be, what kind of casket should be on
those things were so fond to me. How do you
decide what kind of casket you put your dead wife in?
Speaker 1 (25:41):
But there's one detail Leo does care about. Michelle's dad
wants a closed casket.
Speaker 6 (25:46):
Wake, and I just could not leave her without seeing
her again. I just could not do it.
Speaker 1 (25:54):
So Leo makes an arrangement with the funeral home. They'll
hold the wake with a closed casket, But an hour
or so before they'll let Leo c Michelle one last time,
the funeral director tells him that to view Michelle. They'll
need a high necked shirt to cover her wounds.
Speaker 6 (26:11):
And I was flabbergasted. Was like, what wounds? When Michelle
was murdered? I was originally on the impression all the
way up until the wake that she was drown and
that's when my father said they were stab wounds.
Speaker 1 (26:33):
With Leo in his debilitated state, no one had wanted
to tell him exactly what happened to Michelle.
Speaker 6 (26:40):
Obviously I knew somebody had killed her. Why or how
was beyond my ability to think. Stabbing her is beyond that,
you know, it's just beyond that. And for me, that
was the whole thing. Cast again, relive in it all
(27:03):
over again, a different scenario, somehow worse than the drowning.
Speaker 1 (27:11):
At the wake, Leo was given the private moment he
wanted to see Michelle one last time.
Speaker 6 (27:19):
And walked into the viewing area. I have never seen
a dead body. I've never been to a wake, I've
never had any experience like that, so I really wasn't
prepared for any of that. And she was laying in
the gasket, and I told myself that I wanted to
(27:39):
see it because I wanted to kiss her one more time.
She was so cold. I couldn't do it. Immediately. I
felt her hand. She was ice cold, and she didn't
even look like her. I mean, Michelle without life was
not Michelle. I did manage to him. It took a while.
(28:04):
I managed to kiss her. It didn't help me. I
kept thinking, I gotta just figure out a way. I
gotta go back. All I gotta do is get back
to this minute, the one I was looking for, instead
of going this way. If I just go that way,
I could have ran into the car, you know, but
(28:26):
just any just that minute, if I could just get
back to there, I could I could make it all
go away. And you can't go back. There's no way
to go back. My life has been chasing that going
back ever since.
Speaker 1 (28:49):
After the wake, there's Michelle's funeral. The church is filled
with young people and they've come to remember Michelle.
Speaker 7 (28:57):
We met in fourth grade, and I don't know, we
just we hit it off like right away, you know,
as little kids.
Speaker 1 (29:05):
This is Michelle McCluskey. She was Michelle Schofield's best friend.
As kids, they did gymnastics in the front yard, listen
to music, and then as they grew into teenagers, they
would go the roller skating rink almost every night. They
also played a lot of sports with boys in the neighborhood.
Speaker 7 (29:22):
She seemed to be kind of good at almost everything.
I remember always thinking how strong she was. She could
do things physically that a lot of girls our age
couldn't do. She was kind of rough and tumble, you know.
She had an older brother and a younger brother. She
wrestled with them and stuff like that. But she was,
(29:43):
you know, she wasn't like a tough girl or anything
like that. She was very sweet and feminine and like
always liked to do her nails and have her hair
done and that kind of stuff too. When we were younger,
they lived in a small mobile home. It was a
single wide mobile home and it was so small, but
Ricky had a full drum set in a living room.
Speaker 1 (30:06):
Ricky is Michelle's older brother. The whole family loved music, playing, singing,
you name it. Ricky and his father, David, both learned
the drums. Michelle's grandfather played the banjo.
Speaker 7 (30:18):
Of course. Then we started listening to rock and roll,
and if you met her, you would never guess that
she liked heavy metal locks, you know what I mean.
Speaker 1 (30:27):
Kelsey and I reached out to Jesse Saum, Michelle's younger brother.
Speaker 5 (30:31):
Today.
Speaker 1 (30:32):
He's an artist and we met him at his studio
in Port Canaveral. It has big garage doors that open
onto the marina. Dozens of his metal sculptures hang from
the walls and ceiling. He keeps a picture of Michelle
at one of his workstations.
Speaker 13 (30:48):
She was she was trying to do more musical stuff too.
You know, she was really good at singing and stuff
like that, and I think she was just trying to
find her voice, you know, and was kind of surprising
it because everybody has to work and hear the bill,
you know what I mean. But I think that that
was really her kind of creative the thing that she
how she could express herself.
Speaker 1 (31:07):
Jesse and Michelle went to a lot of heavy metal
shows together when they were growing up. He's only sixteen
when Michelle moves in with Leo. He comes home one
afternoon when he hears that Michelle's body has been found.
Speaker 13 (31:20):
I think I had come home, uh, And I think
my grandmother actually told me, because I don't think my
dad was there. I was hoping not to witness his
state of being at that moment, because you know, he just,
you know, crumpled.
Speaker 1 (31:44):
We asked Jesse if he thinks his dad, David Soalm,
would talk to us, but Jesse tells us that his
dad doesn't even like to talk to him about Michelle.
It's still too painful. As a matter of courtesy, I
mailed David a letter telling him what I'm doing and
offering him the opportunity to speak with me or to
ask any questions.
Speaker 5 (32:06):
But I don't hear back from him.
Speaker 1 (32:12):
In the days following Michelle's funeral, Leo is having a
hard time processing these new details of his wife's death.
Now he's forced to think about the violence Michelle experienced
in her last moments.
Speaker 6 (32:26):
I know Michelle, and there's no way that anybody who
knew her was capable of doing this to her. It's
not possible. And so I'm looking for some monstrous thing
that you can't describe in a human form, you know,
it's just a monster.
Speaker 1 (32:54):
Leo and Michelle's friends are also trying to make sense
of Michelle's murder, and they're trying to figure out who
might be responsible.
Speaker 14 (33:01):
It's a time, you know, we were the suspect of
a lot of different people. You know, you sit around
in your mind, you try to who could have done
something you know as terrible as that.
Speaker 1 (33:13):
This is Dave again, the bass player in Leo's band,
and his wife Liz.
Speaker 6 (33:18):
There was a couple of people that we wondered about.
Speaker 15 (33:22):
My first reaction when we got the phone call that
night at the same time that this happened, and just
before there was like five girls in the area that
had been killed. One of them was even right down
here off Comby Road, dumped on the railroad track.
Speaker 1 (33:38):
Comby Road is the street where a lot of teenagers
hang out in Lakeland. A lot of crime happens here,
a lot of theft fights, sometimes murders. It also happens
to be where Tom's Restaurant is, where Michelle was working
the night she went missing.
Speaker 16 (33:53):
So my first reaction was, oh, my god, it's got
to be that same guy. He's come over here. So
I just that was my first reaction. It was that
serial killer that had been running around I four corridor.
Speaker 1 (34:06):
But their minds always returned to those closest to Michelle,
and word was getting around about how Leo's dad claimed
a premonition had led him to Michelle's body.
Speaker 14 (34:20):
The Sheriff's department was looking at that and thinking, yeah,
that don't sound right, you know, And to be honest
with you, there were times when we kind of suspected
he may have because there again, at a time like that,
it's such a terrible thing, you know, you try to
figure out who in the world would have done something
like that, you know, That's what.
Speaker 1 (34:40):
The Polk County Sheriff's Office would have to figure out.
Two experienced detectives were assigned to the Michelle Schofield case,
Detective Weeks and Detective Putnam. I could try to describe them,
but it might be better coming from the longtime reporter
for the Lakeland Ledger, Susie SHOTTLECOTTI.
Speaker 17 (35:01):
I was covering cops then, so I do remember having
a lot of murders going on at that point and
a lot of things that went unsolved.
Speaker 1 (35:09):
Susie has been reporting on the courts in Polk County
for over thirty five years, and she's married to a
retired detective with the Sheriff's office. She knows just about
everyone in Polk County. First I asked her about Detective
Robert Weeks.
Speaker 17 (35:23):
Oh, yeah, Weebel webel. Yes, it's little short guy. He's
kind of built like a wee boy, you know, Weebel's wobble.
Speaker 1 (35:34):
Then I asked Susie about Weeks's partner, Detective Putnall.
Speaker 17 (35:38):
Of God, Richard Putnall doctor deaf. Oh god, he has
the personality of a dial tone. I mean they called
him doctor Deaf because he was always at a crime scene.
Speaker 2 (35:47):
But he was.
Speaker 17 (35:48):
He was the typical chain smoking, rumpled suit, tall, lanky detective.
I mean, he was just what you would imagine an
old krusty. He smelled like smoke all the time.
Speaker 6 (36:02):
Detective.
Speaker 2 (36:03):
You know.
Speaker 1 (36:04):
Kelsey and I tried reaching out to these detectives without luck.
We sent email, left phone messages, and knocked on doors.
It was almost like word had gotten out about what
we were doing. Very few people from the Sheriff's office,
active or retired, wanted to talk to us. But there
was one guy. His name is Grady Judd. He's the
(36:29):
actual sheriff now, and it's fair to say that he's
the face and the voice of Polk County.
Speaker 18 (36:35):
This is a wonderful, safe community. I love the people here,
and in turn, the community here overwhelmingly cares for each
other and looks out for each other. It's a good place.
Speaker 1 (36:47):
Sheriff Grady Judd is a white man in his mid sixties.
He wears glasses and a green uniform with his sheriff
star pinned to his chest. He's known for his campy,
tough on crime press conferences, which often involved props and
pictures and often go viral on social media. In two
thousand and six, his deputies chased someone suspected of killing
(37:08):
a police officer into the woods and shot him dead.
After the autopsy, Judd was asked why deputies fired sixty
eight bullets into the suspect. That's all the bullets we had,
and we would have shot him more.
Speaker 18 (37:21):
He said, we don't choose to shoot people. They choose
for us to shoot them. And if you choose for
us to shoot at you, we're gonna shoot at you
a lot. That's a guarantee.
Speaker 1 (37:36):
When we met him, some Lakeland rappers had just released
a new song, duck in Grady Judd, and they made
a music video that pokes fun at evading cops in
Polk County.
Speaker 5 (37:46):
The sheriff loved it.
Speaker 18 (37:47):
Really we got a boom. And by the way, we're
going to do an encore together. It's already schedule. I
told him. I said, they said, can we do an encore?
And I said yes, I love it because the first
one I didn't have anything to do with it. They
(38:07):
pulled my clips off the YouTube and this one I'm
going to have a cameo appearance and they said, can
we can we shoot part of it with your swat
vehicle and I said, well, sure you can.
Speaker 1 (38:23):
Jud is so popular in Polk County. He recently won
his fifth consecutive term as sheriff, running unopposed. He tells
us he grew up in the Cumby area, that same
part of Lakeland where Michelle worked and where bodies were
turning up.
Speaker 18 (38:38):
They used to call me a Comby critter. When I
was a kid. I'd run around talking about being the sheriff,
and they'd say, they're not going to elect some kid
from Comby Road to be the sheriff. I said, yeah,
they are. They're going to let me. They ain't going
to elect the Comby critter. Well they did here I
am Grady.
Speaker 1 (38:55):
Judd was just eighteen when he joined the Sheriff's office,
but since he was too young to legally purchase ammunition
for his service weapon, his father had to buy it
for him. Jud quickly rose up the ranks, and just
a few years before Michelle Schofield's murder, he was supervising
forty four employees, all older than him. And jud is
(39:15):
the first to admit that it's a pretty bad sign
when a kid in his twenties is running the criminal
investigations unit.
Speaker 18 (39:22):
You know, I like to think that I'm sharper than
the average bear, but that's just a personal opinion of me.
But the reality is, we should have had people with
institutional wisdom running a criminal investigations division back in the day,
and we didn't. So we had a young, upstart college
kid who read a lot and was intuitive when the
(39:46):
real mature leaders weren't there.
Speaker 1 (39:50):
In Polk County in the nineteen eighties, violent crime was
rising dramatically, and Grady Judd was alarmed and frustrated by
the growing number of unsolved homicides. Back then, they didn't
really have the resources to keep up.
Speaker 18 (40:04):
We didn't have DNA, we didn't have cell phone tracking,
we didn't have stores and intersections with cameras.
Speaker 1 (40:15):
On top of that, Grady Judd says they didn't have
many experienced homicide detectives back then, and there were too
many murders for them to handle. They'd start working one murder,
but then another murder would come along and they'd have
to stop what they were doing to move on to
the next one. The year Michelle was killed, the Sheriff's
office handled twenty seven homicides, its second worst year for
(40:36):
murders in a decade. There were nine recent murder cases
that had gone cold, and now detectives from the Polk
County Sheriff's Office had another killing on their hands with
very little evidence to go on, making matters worse. A
month before Michelle's murder, Polk County Sheriff Dan Daniels, a
self avowed white supremacist, was forced out of office by
(40:59):
the governor on the same day Michelle's body was found.
There was an overhaul of the department and massive reorganization underway.
Many officers in the Polk County Sheriff's Office resigned.
Speaker 18 (41:13):
I didn't because my goal was to make this organization better,
not run from a challenge. But it was tumultuous during
those days.
Speaker 1 (41:25):
With the Sheriff's department in turmoil, Detectives weeks and putnall
do what they can with the resources available to them.
The first thing they do is canvas Leo and Michelle's neighborhood,
knocking on doors, and they begin to hear stories from
neighbors of arguments and loud noises coming from the young
couple's trailer, but nobody had seen or heard anything unusual
(41:47):
on the night Michelle disappeared until Detective Weeks shows up
at the trailer of Ricky and Alice Scott, who live
across the street from Leo and Michelle. Ricky didn't see anything,
but he says he's concerned about his wife getting involved
in the investigation. Alice, who's in her mid thirties, stays
(42:11):
up late and she's the neighborhood busybody. She's been known
to call the cops on kids for riding bikes on
her lawn, and she tells Detective Weeks that yes, she
did see.
Speaker 5 (42:22):
Something suspicious on the night Michelle disappeared.
Speaker 1 (42:25):
She says she heard a noise and looked out her
bathroom window. The Schofields pulled up to their trailer in
the Mazda. She watched as Leo and Michelle went inside.
Then Alice says she hears a scream. She says she
stays at the window waiting until Leo emerges from the trailer.
(42:49):
He's carrying something large and heavy that he places in
the back of the Mazda. He closes the hatch, starts
the car, and away With that single statement, Alice Scott
puts the investigations focused squarely on Leo.
Speaker 18 (43:11):
Eyewitness testimony is not your best evidence because people in
a traumatic event, perception can be skewed. They mean well,
some don't mean well. Some there's an ulterior motive. But
for the most part, your eyewitnesses mean well, but they're
(43:33):
scared to death and their perceptions may not be exactly
as it occurred. But if somebody didn't talk, it was
hard to solve a murder.
Speaker 1 (43:45):
Back then, as detectives weeks in Putnall interview Leo and
Michelle's friends and former roommates, they learned that the young
couple had a volatile relationship. There were stories about loud
arguments in the trailer, Leo screaming at Michelle, some noises
that sounded like slaps, red marks on Michelle's face, stories
(44:09):
of Leo dragging Michelle by the hair. As the days
turned to weeks after Michelle's murder, Leo can feel people looking.
Speaker 5 (44:18):
At him differently.
Speaker 1 (44:20):
Word is getting out now that there's a witness pointing
to Leo as the main suspect. At one point, Leo
calls Michelle's dad, David Salm.
Speaker 6 (44:31):
He said that he was informed by doctor Weeks to
not have any contact with me until this was over,
that they believed that I did it. And I said
to him, you don't believe that, David, And he said
I don't know. And I was silent for a few seconds,
(44:53):
and I said, okay, all right, and that it was
the last time I suppo to him. I understand his pain,
but when he said that, it really really hurt, because
you should know me better than that. But he needed
something to hang that had on, you know, something to
(45:15):
makes sense, like we all did. But when he said that,
I really really started feeling the way coming down.
Speaker 1 (45:24):
And it's not just Michelle's dad who turns his back
on Leo. Michelle's friends are talking to detectives too.
Speaker 7 (45:32):
Michelle was a very very beautiful girl, and she always
dated very nice looking boy And when I met him,
he just didn't seem like the kind of person that
I would think she would be interested in. He was
kind of small bill, kind of grungy, and he just
didn't seem that attractive to me. It just it just
(45:55):
rubbed me weird. I just didn't understand what she was
so interested about, you know, I don't know.
Speaker 1 (46:02):
Michelle McCluskey was the maid of honor at Leo and
Michelle's wedding, but she still had her doubts.
Speaker 7 (46:09):
I remember not not being sure that it was a
good thing for her and being concerned, you know, but
she just she always convinced me it was okay. If
they were not getting along or she was unhappy or
anything like that, she didn't tell me.
Speaker 1 (46:29):
But after Michelle went missing, Michelle McCluskey remembers one moment
in particular, after her first night of searching for her
best friend, when questions about Leo's started.
Speaker 5 (46:38):
To creep in.
Speaker 7 (46:40):
We spent that whole day looking for her and stuff.
And it was sometime laid into the night, and we
went back to their house and I fell asleep on
the couch and then I heard a noise or something.
I woke up and he was standing in the living
room with the front door open, just kind of looking outside.
And that was the first time that I thought what if,
(47:07):
Like what if he did something to her, and it
made me kind of scared that I was there along
with him.
Speaker 1 (47:14):
Soon, Michelle McCluskey would learn that Leo's neighbor, Alice Scott,
told detective she heard Michelle's scream then saw Leo carrying
something heavy to the Mazda. If that was true, it
would mean that Michelle McCluskey was sleeping at the crime
scene where her best friend had been violently murdered the
(47:34):
night before by the man she was now.
Speaker 7 (47:37):
Alone with being in the house the next day and
there's no blood, nothing's broken, no holes in the wall, no,
you know, there's no sign that anything like that happened
in their house. So I just thought, well, that just
doesn't make sense. I had decided there was no way
(47:58):
he could have done it because blood would have been
all over the house and it wasn't.
Speaker 1 (48:04):
But what Michelle McCluskey didn't know was that busybody. Neighbor
Alice Scott told police that she saw something else. The
day after Michelle Schofield went missing, Leo bringing a carpet
cleaner into the trailer. Detectives Weeks and Putnall continue to
(48:40):
question Leo, and he can feel the pressure mounting and
because he feels that he has nothing to hide, he
never even thinks to bring a lawyer along.
Speaker 6 (48:50):
The fact that you're questioning me about the murder of
my own life was extremely uncomfortable. I've told this story
of zillion times. It doesn't change. I don't have any
answers to what actually took place because I wasn't there
to be in that position. It's beyond trying to prove
(49:13):
your innocence. It's beyond that there's a sludge that covers
you when you're being questioned for such a thing. We're
not talking about robin a store, or a cocaine charge
or something, and we're not even talking about a murder,
which is bad enough. This is the murder of my wife,
whom I love, and now I'm forced to prove that
(49:33):
to someone I've never met before and obviously doesn't have
any idea who I am.
Speaker 1 (49:41):
Leo asked to take a lie detector test. He wants
to prove his innocence, and Detective Weeks obliges. Weeks brings
in a guy from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.
The examiner focuses on three questions, did you stab Michelle
Leo answers no, Oh, did you stab Michelle with a knife?
Speaker 12 (50:04):
No?
Speaker 1 (50:06):
Did your mother lie about your activities that night?
Speaker 2 (50:09):
No?
Speaker 1 (50:11):
The polygraph examiner tells Leo he flunked, tells him, I
think you killed your wife. Armed with the lie detective results,
Weeks and Putnall continue to interview people close to the couple.
Speaker 6 (50:25):
Weeks and his team are going around spreading all kinds
of stuff. My friends are looking at me strange. I
can feel it, you can feel the difference. And on
top of everything, I lost Michelle.
Speaker 1 (50:37):
Months pass with Leo as the main suspect, yet no
evidence is turning up that connects him to Michelle's murder.
The clothes he was wearing that night had no blood
on them. Detectives don't have a murder weapon. They have
an alleged failed polygraph. But polygraph tests don't actually detect lies.
They really only measure anxiety. The US Supreme Court ruled
(51:01):
that polygraph tests are not reliable and their results are
not admissible evidence.
Speaker 5 (51:06):
In Florida.
Speaker 1 (51:08):
The detectives have statements about Leo's temper and his relationship
with Michelle, and a statement from Alice Scott, who claims
to have seen something the night Michelle disappeared. Still, the
State Attorney's office is looking over all the evidence and
they don't think detectives have enough to arrest Leo. Yet
there's other evidence, like the fingerprints found in Michelle's Mazda.
(51:31):
There were just two sets of prints that were lifted
from inside the car, and when they didn't match Leo
or Michelle or Leo Senior, the Sheriff's office stops looking
for possible matches. But what's strange is that Leo and
Michelle's prints aren't even in the car, which they should
have been because.
Speaker 5 (51:48):
It's their car.
Speaker 1 (51:50):
When I first saw that in the Florida Department of
Law Enforcements report, I wondered if someone wiped down the fingerprints.
Crime scene technicians also exact and Leo and Michelle's trailer.
If Alice Scott's eyewitness statement is true that she heard
Michelle's scream then saw Leo carrying something heavy like a
body and place it in the Mazda, that makes the
(52:12):
trailer the scene of the crime. The medical examiner concludes
that Michelle lost approximately five pints of blood, but they
don't find anything you'd expect to find in the trailer
after someone has been stabbed twenty six times. Inside, there
is no blood, just like Michelle McCluskey noticed, and no
(52:34):
signs that the carpet had been cleaned, which there should
have been if Leo used the carpet cleaner. Alice Scott
claims she saw him bringing into the trailer the day
after Michelle disappeared. Instead, most of Michelle Schofield's blood was
found in the dirt near the canal where.
Speaker 5 (52:52):
Her body was discovered.
Speaker 1 (52:55):
Nearly half of female homicide victims are killed by their partners,
and the majority of those homicides are carried out by
a male partner, so it makes sense that detectives would
be suspicious of Leo, but there's no physical evidence connecting
Leo to the crime, so the case stalls for months
with no arrest. By the end of nineteen eighty seven,
(53:20):
with no new developments, the murder of Michelle Scofield is
going cold. The Polk County Sheriff's Office now has ten
unsolved murders on the books, but there's a new homicide prosecutor,
Assistant State Attorney John Aguero. His job is to get
the evidence from the detectives and convict someone for the
(53:40):
murder of Michelle Schofield. He's young, smart, and very aggressive.
Aguero takes a look at the Michelle Scofield case file
and he thinks he sees something. He reads Officer Kachadorian's
report about his conversation with Leo Senior, and Aguero thinks
there's something weird going on with the father. A vision
(54:02):
from God led him to Michelle's body in a phosphate
drainage canal that can't even be seen from the road.
Aguero is certain that Leo's father is somehow involved. His
so called vision from God that called him to Michelle's
body is just too suspicious to ignore, so Assistant State
Attorney John Aguero sends detectives weeks in putnall back out
(54:26):
for a few more rounds of questioning with Leo, and
there's a new focus.
Speaker 6 (54:31):
No, it's not about me anymore. They're both good cops,
and we're going to talk about my dad.
Speaker 5 (54:36):
But the detectives don't get what they want.
Speaker 1 (54:39):
Leo says he doesn't know anything about Michelle's murder, and
if Leo thought his dad had something to do with it,
he'd give up any information he had. Not long after this,
Leo is a passenger and a serious car crash where
he breaks his neck. He's hospitalized then released, but has
to wear a metal neck brace for a while. He
(55:01):
decides he's done with Florida. By this point, Leo's parents
have moved back to Massachusetts. Leo tell's detective Weeks he's
moving back up north, gives him contact information in Massachusetts,
and asks the detective to let him know if they
learn anything new about Michelle's murder. It's now May of
(55:22):
nineteen eighty eight. Michelle has been dead for more than
fifteen months. John Aguero, the prosecutor, is frustrated by the
investigation's lack of progress, so he decides he wants to
talk to the neighbor Alice Scott himself. Alice points Aguero
to Randy and Mary Laffoon, a neighborhood couple that delivers
(55:44):
newspapers around Lakeland. Detective Weeks interviewed them both a year before,
but they said they didn't notice anything unusual on the
night Michelle disappeared. But now under Aguero's questioning, the couple
tells the prosecutor they remember seeing an orange Mazda and
a pickup truck just like the one Leo's senior drives
(56:05):
they were parked right where Michelle's body was found, and now,
fifteen months later, they say they saw those vehicles in
the early morning hours of February twenty fifth, nineteen eighty seven,
the night Michelle disappeared. Aguero might not have the evidence
to charge Leo's senior yet, but with the statements from
(56:26):
Alice Scott and the Laffoons, he thinks he has enough
to charge Leo. So in June of nineteen eighty eight,
Leo is indicted for first degree murder, a charge punishable
by death in Florida. Aguero notifies police in Massachusetts and
he gets on a plane with Detective Weeks to take
Leo into custody. Leo knows they're coming, but before he surrenders,
(56:52):
he goes up to the roof of an apartment building
he and his dad are painting, and he takes what
could be his last look over the neighborhood he grew
up in. He's just a few stories up and his
father joins him.
Speaker 6 (57:05):
And of course, I've never been arrested for anything, so
I'm pretty scared. I'm in a panic, and Dad's not
saying anything. I actually went out on the roof and
I went out and I stood on the edge of
the thing, and I'm not gonna lie. I honestly stood
there thinking and I should just drop off of it
and be done. You know, I'm not gonna let these
(57:28):
people take me through hell. You know you're not listening
to the truth, don't care about the truth. And my
dad said something really crazy. He said, if you did it, jump.
Speaker 1 (57:46):
Leo's wife has been murdered, his friends have mostly abandoned him,
and now his own family is cracking under the pressure.
Speaker 6 (57:55):
If all you can think is that I did it,
then obviously you're not caring who killed Michelle. I did
not kill Michelle, And at some point I just decided
I'm going to stand for my wife.
Speaker 1 (58:12):
Leo goes to the office of a local lawyer who
has arranged for the arrest and they wait. Then Leo
notices movement outside the window. He turns to the lawyer.
Speaker 6 (58:25):
I said that they're outside your window. And the swat
team was outside the window with their rifles, so I
know they had surrounded the building. And no siner did
I say that they came in the office. They kicked
them the door, and this came right off in there.
And weeks was there. Aguero was there, and they picked
(58:47):
me up, handcuffed me. I told Weeks, you're making a mistake.
I kept saying that you're making a mistake. He didn't
respond to that at all.
Speaker 1 (59:05):
Leo has brought before a Massachusetts judge who tells him
he can fight extradition to Florida if he wants, but
Leo waves that right. He says he'll go willingly and
gets in a car with the prosecutor.
Speaker 5 (59:17):
John Aguero now told of gar.
Speaker 6 (59:20):
When we were driving to Logan Airport in Massachusetts, he
asked me, how do you like the car? We're in
a red Cadillac, and he said, how do you like
the car? I said, and I like it. It's nice.
I'm gonna make you drive me back in it. You're
driving me to Massachusetts in a red Cadillac.
Speaker 1 (59:45):
Leo is escorted onto the plane for the flight back
to Florida by Detective Weeks and John Aguero. Leo is
just twenty two years old, and tonight he's going to
be sleeping in the Polk County jail.
Speaker 6 (59:58):
I remember asking we because he sat by me on
the plane and I asked him to not stop looking,
to continue looking, and he said why would I do that?
And I said, because I'm not guilty of killing Michelle.
And he said, well, if I believe that, you wouldn't
(01:00:21):
be here.
Speaker 1 (01:00:24):
That's when Leo turns to the other man sitting by him,
Prosecutor John Aguero. Leo catches a glimpse of something shiny
on Aguero's tie. It's a tie clasp with some kind
of design. Leo leans in to get a closer look.
It's old, sparky Florida's Electric Chair. Bone Valley is a
(01:00:53):
production of Lava for Good Podcasts in association with Signal
Company Number One. Our executive ducers are Jason Flam and
Kevin Wordiska Kornhaber is our senior producer. Brit Spangler is
our sound designer. Roxandra Guidy is our editor. Fact checking
by Maximo Anderson. Our producer and researcher is Kelsey Decker.
(01:01:18):
Our theme song, The One Who's Holding the Stars, is
performed by Lee Bob and the Truth. It was written
by Leo Schofield and Kevin Herrick in Florida's Hearty Correctional Institution.
Bone Valley is written and produced by me Gilbert King.
You can follow the show on Instagram. Facebook, and Twitter
at Lava for Good to see photos and documents from
(01:01:41):
our investigation and exclusive behind the scenes content. Visit Lava
Forgood dot com, slash Bone Valley
Host
Gilbert King
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