October 12, 2022 • 50 mins
Chapter 5 of 9
Gilbert and Kelsey do a deep dive investigation into Jeremy Scott. By speaking to people who were close to Jeremy at the time, a picture emerges of an impulsive and troubled teenager who was prone to violence. When investigators confront Jeremy about the newly identified fingerprints, he explains that he was in Michelle’s car to steal stereo equipment. The State believes Jeremy, and they close their investigation.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
I was blown away because I'm like, why would his
fingerprint be in the vehicle? Why would that not have
been something that had been investigated.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
When police Captain Cinda Williams ran the Prince that had
been found in Michelle Scofield's car seventeen years ago, she
wasn't expecting anything, but there was.
Speaker 1 (00:32):
A hit, so I ran a criminal history check on
Jeremy Scott.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
Now Cinda wasn't really supposed to have run these prints.
The Michelle Scofield case is under Polk County's jurisdiction, not
Henry County, where she works, but because of her friendship
with Chrissy, she decides to look into Jeremy Scott anyway.
Speaker 1 (00:55):
It felt like it was the right thing to do,
and he had an extensive criminal history. And when I
say extensive, imediate mostly violent.
Speaker 2 (01:10):
Crime charges of grand theft, burglary, multiple assaults, arson, and
two arrests for murder.
Speaker 3 (01:30):
Do you mo maness.
Speaker 4 (01:36):
Left to have my fears.
Speaker 3 (01:42):
Soruive sormness in this vasty him rage dansish to the
(02:11):
word sling stuff to the bone soundings.
Speaker 5 (02:20):
Stuff so.
Speaker 2 (02:43):
Bone Valley Chapter five, bam bam, Who is Jeremy Scott?
(03:08):
Who is this man whose fingerprints turned up in the
car Michelle Schofield was driving on the night she was murdered.
Kelsey and I wanted to find out everything we could
about him. We started filing record requests.
Speaker 6 (03:23):
We got police reports from both the Sheriff's office and
the Lakeland Police Department. They documented dozens of Jeremy's arrests
in Polk County, and we were also able to get
our hands on Jeremy's psychiatric reports. He was evaluated by
psychologists while awaiting trial on a homicide charge.
Speaker 2 (03:42):
This homicide charge, Jeremy would eventually be convicted for it.
We'll get back to that later. But after he was
found guilty, several of Jeremy's family members testified, pleading with
the judge and jury to spare Jeremy's life, to sentence
him to life in prison instead of giving him the
death penalty. Their testimony about Jeremy's childhood and upbringing paints
(04:07):
a Scott family portrait that can only be described as
chaotic and unstable. We started compiling this testimony and other
documents we've been able to dig up, and we were
able to make a rough timeline of Jeremy's early life.
Speaker 6 (04:25):
Jeremy was born in Michigan on April twenty ninth, nineteen
sixty nine. According to family testimony, his mother, Linda immediately
rejected him when she brought him home from the hospital.
Linda didn't want anything to do with him. She was
fifteen at the time in using drugs, so she left
him with her parents. So Jeremy's grandparents, Arlene and Stacy Scott,
(04:49):
they raise him, and Jeremy grows up calling them mom
and Dad, and they call him Bam Bam because he
liked to hit stuff. But early in works and Stacy
struggles with alcoholism, so Jeremy spends much of his early
years in the care of his aunt Debbie, who's just fourteen.
Speaker 2 (05:08):
Then one day, when Jeremy was two or three, he
was left without supervision and was hit by a neighbor's car.
His psych reports say that there was significant injury to
the right frontal area of his skull. It seems this
incident may have left Jeremy with lasting brain damage, and
soon after Jeremy's uncle Tom moved in. Tom pretty severely
(05:33):
abused Jeremy. He would beat him and call him names.
According to his aunt Debbie's testimony, when Jeremy starts school,
sounds like he doesn't do very well. He has to
repeat kindergarten and he's placed in special education classes.
Speaker 6 (05:48):
And then we get to the mid to late seventies
and the family starts to relocate down to Florida. They
were up in Michigan, and they start trickling down to
various parts of the state, settle in Perry in the
Florida Panhandle, and also in central Florida, Lakeland, Kissimi, Davenport,
and Mulberry.
Speaker 2 (06:09):
It's hard to piece together exactly where Jeremy was and
when and who cared for him. He was being passed
back and forth between different caregivers, different family members.
Speaker 6 (06:19):
But at some point he ends up back with his mother, Linda.
Jeremy's aunt, Debbie, says that Linda was beating him with
belts and with sticks, and the school he was attending
at that time took notice. They reported the abuse, and
it seems like at that point Jeremy was removed from
his mother's care and placed into foster care.
Speaker 2 (06:43):
After fourth grade, Jeremy stops regularly attending school, and by
eighth grade, he's apparently dropped out of school entirely Somewhere
in that time he starts getting in trouble with the
law too. The first arrest we have on recD is
August nineteen eighty It was for petty theft, burglary, criminal mischief,
(07:05):
dealing in stolen property, and unauthorized use of a motor vehicle,
all misdemeanor charges. But he was only eleven years old.
That's five charges. Around this same time, Jeremy's already living
on the streets and he asks his sixteen year old
aunt for money, food, and clothes, which she isn't always
(07:27):
able to provide.
Speaker 6 (07:29):
And then in January of nineteen eighty two, he's arrested
for grand theft and burglary and those are felony charges.
Jeremy was twelve, and this is when things become a
little more serious for him. There are some real repercussions.
He sent away to Okachobe, the juvenile detention facility in
South Florida, so he's in and out of Okachobe between
(07:52):
the ages of thirteen and fifteen.
Speaker 2 (07:56):
After one of Jeremy's stays at Okachobe, he lands in
a little in Polk County, just outside of Lakeland. It's
called Eagle Lake. From Jeremy's criminal records and police reports,
we learn about a murder that took place in this
area in nineteen eighty five, when Jeremy was just fifteen
years old. So we tried to track down some of
(08:18):
the other people whose names we found in the documents.
Speaker 4 (08:23):
Okay, I'm out here.
Speaker 2 (08:25):
I'm about to meet with Nancy, and I think her mother,
Wilma is here. I'm just gonna walk over there right now.
They're sitting on a picnic bench underneath a tree. Nancy
and her mom, Wilma, are still living in the area
where the crime took place. I called them after seeing
Nancy's name in a witness deposition. I was especially interested
(08:46):
in talking to them because they said they remember Jeremy. Hello,
you must be Wilma. We talked on the phone.
Speaker 4 (08:58):
Gilbert, Hi, Nancy, how are you.
Speaker 2 (09:00):
Nancy says she first met Jeremy while he was working
the rides at the Florida Citrus Festival in nearby winter Haven.
Nancy was around thirteen years old and Jeremy was fifteen.
Speaker 7 (09:12):
We all went to the fair, and we'd go every
single night. What kind of fair was it? It was
just a carnival. You had the sea Dragon. You had
the Zipper, the one that spends around Himalaya.
Speaker 2 (09:26):
What was Jeremy Scott doing there?
Speaker 7 (09:27):
He was actually running the Sea Dragon.
Speaker 2 (09:30):
And he so he when you were at the fair,
liked he would be the guy that would put you
on the rides. That was his job.
Speaker 7 (09:35):
No, he actually was the one that turned it on.
It was the mechanical part.
Speaker 2 (09:40):
So he was basically a carney.
Speaker 4 (09:41):
A carney.
Speaker 2 (09:43):
Nancy and her friends would see him every night over
the ten days the festival was in town.
Speaker 7 (09:47):
So when me and the girls got on him, we
got an extra ride, like, hey, I got that extra ride.
Speaker 2 (09:55):
And when the festival eventually packs up, Jeremy sticks around
the area.
Speaker 7 (10:00):
I think he just came into town and decided to
stay for a little bit. He was quiet, I mean,
like shy, very shy compared to like the average kids.
And I mean until you got to know you, you know,
I do know he was like maybe slow. I don't
know how to better explain him. He just was different,
(10:24):
you know. I don't know if it's a disability or what.
Speaker 2 (10:27):
Because back then, Nancy grew up with the sense that
she should protect kids like Jeremy, so she would make
sure to include him when she and her friends would
play sports and hang around the park. Jeremy would stay
over at their house some nights too, he'd crash on
the couch.
Speaker 7 (10:43):
He was polite because it was like he had respect,
I guess his best way to say it, because I
never saw temper out of him or anything.
Speaker 2 (10:54):
But then Jeremy stops coming over to Nancy and Wilma's
house as often, and Nancy she starts seeing Jeremy with
one of her neighbors, an ex con by the name
of Smoky Johnson. Smokey picks up Jeremy while he's hitchhiking
one day. Smokey is forty six and Jeremy is just fifteen.
Speaker 7 (11:13):
Honestly, I mean, it's really weird that somebody that much
older would be hanging out with me, you know.
Speaker 2 (11:22):
That spring On April eleventh, nineteen eighty five, Smoky's seventy
five year old mother, Juel Johnson, was found dead in
a locked trailer behind her house.
Speaker 7 (11:35):
Well, she lived right around the corner from where we.
Speaker 2 (11:37):
Lived, right and jul Johnson was just like a sweet
elderly woman.
Speaker 8 (11:42):
I mean, yes, saying that she was a very sweet lady.
Speaker 7 (11:46):
Now that's what I told different people that I knew
quite well, yeah, that.
Speaker 2 (11:52):
That she's a very sweet lady. Juel Johnson suffered blunt
force trauma to the head and she was in the torso,
presumably with the twenty two caliber rifle found at the scene.
Detective Richard Putnall, the same detective that would work Michelle
Schofield's murder two years later, conducts the investigation. Detective Putnall
(12:17):
talks to Jule Johnson's son, Smoky, who says that about
fifty dollars in rolled coins was taken from the house,
as well as some large knives. As far as we
can tell, there are no eyewitnesses to the killing, and
no one claims to have heard any gunshots. But then
detective Putnall interviews two teenage girls in the neighborhood and
(12:40):
the investigation takes a new direction. Thirteen year old Lwanda
Green and fifteen year old Anne Aldridge tell Detective Putnall
that they know Jeremy and they remember seeing him on
his bike just hours after Jewel's murder. They say Jeremy
had on all new clothes when they saw him, gray jacket,
(13:01):
gray shirt, gray pants instead of his usual jeans and
t shirt. He also had a bunch of coins on him.
He told them that his grandfather just died and left
him fifty dollars. He showed the coins and said, this
is all I have left. He had a red bag
with him and said there's a big knife in there.
(13:24):
Not long after Juel Johnson is killed, Jeremy stops by
Nancy's place.
Speaker 7 (13:29):
He just swung by the house to tell us why. Like,
the conversation was really really short, not like where he
was before that, you know, he laughed or whatever. It
was just different. He just said that we wouldn't get
to see him no more. He was staying away because
he was in trouble.
Speaker 2 (13:49):
After I interviewed Nancy and Wilma at the ballpark, they
tell me to follow their car and they'll point out
Juel Johnson's house. And this is really roll back.
Speaker 9 (14:00):
Here a lot less houses, just a little farmhouse.
Speaker 4 (14:03):
And it's cattle. Yeah, there it is.
Speaker 2 (14:10):
I can see the little shed in the back under tree.
That's where I think they found the body of jul Johnson.
Investigators weren't able to lift any prince from the rifle
found at the crime scene. Whoever shot Juel Johnson must
have wiped down the weapon afterwards, but they were able
(14:34):
to lift fingerprints from a coin wrapper and Jewel's broken eyeglasses.
The Polk County Sheriff's Office compares the prince to Jeremy's.
It's a match. Jeremy Scott, now sixteen, becomes the lead
suspect in the murder of Jewel Johnson. Three weeks after
(14:56):
the killing, Jeremy's arrested and charged with first degree murder.
At his arraignement, the judge, who spent years presiding over
juvenile cases recognizes Jeremy's name. He tells reporters he wasn't surprised.
He says, quote, this was one of those situations in
(15:17):
which there was nothing the system could do.
Speaker 4 (15:26):
Jeremy was in jail, and he was a young man,
very immature, very mentally I'm gonna say mentally disturbed in
the sense that he had a number of mental illnesses.
He was a severely abused child. You know, he was
cutting himself quite a bit in the jail.
Speaker 2 (15:46):
This is Austin meslank who was an attorney with the
Public Defender's Office. Meslanic was assigned to represent Jeremy in
the murder of Jule Johnson.
Speaker 4 (15:56):
I mean the state was seeking the death penal to you,
because this was before the United States Supreme Court had
ruled the juveniles were not eligible for the death penalty,
and you know, in Polk County at that time, the
state went for the death penalty just about every case.
Speaker 10 (16:15):
He was young, he was difficult, sometimes he was cooperative,
sometimes he wasn't.
Speaker 2 (16:22):
This is Tony Maloney. She's the investigator from the Public
Defender's Office. She was assigned to Leo Schofield's case in
nineteen eighty eight, before Leo dropped them and hired Jack
Edmund instead. But before all that, back in nineteen eighty five,
she was assigned to Jeremy Scott's defense in the Jule
Johnson murder.
Speaker 10 (16:43):
It was hard for him to stay on tasks for
any period of time, and then even when he did,
it was sort of like, you know, is he really
connecting the dots here? Not out of touch with reality,
but an inability to calmly control.
Speaker 2 (17:02):
At trial, the state presents a pretty simple case. They
say that while Smokey Johnson is at work, Jewel catches
Jeremy trying to steal her rolls of coins. She tells Jeremy,
she's calling the sheriff, so he hits her over the
head and shoots her with a rifle. But the public
defenders did witness interviews and brought in a mental health
(17:24):
expert to defend Jeremy at trial, and you put on.
Speaker 4 (17:27):
A pretty aggressive defense, Yes, we did.
Speaker 2 (17:32):
Jeremy takes the stand at trial and says that it
was Smoky Johnson who killed his own mother. Jeremy says
he was a witness to the killing. He said it
happened after Smoky and Jewel argued about smoking weed. Several
jurors said that they didn't think Jeremy killed Juel Johnson
because he didn't seem intelligent enough to remove his fingerprints
(17:54):
from the murder weapon. Smokey, on the other hand, had
done some time for selling, and he apparently didn't come
across too well at trial. That's how in September nineteen
eighty five, Jeremy Scott is acquitted of Juel Johnson's murder.
The state never prosecuted Smoky because of the strength of
(18:15):
his alibi. Multiple co workers testify that he was at
work at the time his mother was murdered. Juel Johnson's
murder is still considered unsolved to this day, but the
state of Florida didn't seem too happy about Jeremy's acquittal,
so they weren't so quick to release him. While Jeremy
was in the jail awaiting trial, he lit his mattress
(18:38):
on fire. So after he's acquitted in the Jewel Johnson murder,
he's held in the Polk County jail for the arson
charge that happened months before. To me and Kelsey, though
it seems like Jeremy literally got away with murder, I think.
Speaker 8 (18:58):
That's sort of a bitch, arrowing a bunch of people's lives.
Speaker 2 (19:03):
This is Lee Underwood. We reached out to him because
he was a close friend to Michelle Schofield's back in
the day.
Speaker 8 (19:10):
She was a very very very special friend of mine,
like a sister.
Speaker 2 (19:19):
It was Michelle who gave him his nickname, Lee the Flea,
and she named.
Speaker 11 (19:24):
Me that.
Speaker 8 (19:27):
Basically as I was always playing to lead the polis
and that name is stuck would mad till today.
Speaker 2 (19:36):
We tracked Leave the Flee down in Wisconsin, and as
we were talking, the interview took an unexpected turn.
Speaker 8 (19:42):
You didn't know Jeremy Scott, did you. I was in
jail with them back in eighty Sorry.
Speaker 2 (19:49):
We checked this and Lee is a little off on
the year based on arrest records. The cops finally caught
up with Lee in nineteen eighty five. They locked him
up in the Polk County JA on charges of well
fleeing police, and Lee tells us one of his cellmates
then was Jeremy Scott. Lee was there when Jeremy set
(20:09):
his mattress on fire, and he remembers when Jeremy was
acquitted of killing jul Johnson.
Speaker 8 (20:15):
I don't know how he got off of it. He
get bragged to everybody in the cell about doing it.
This guy was crazy. He'd like make a shank like
a jail knife out of a razor right around the jail,
(20:36):
cutting people just at random. This kid was crazy and
he had a look in his eye just like like
he wasn't right.
Speaker 2 (20:50):
Jeremy is convicted on the arson charge and shipped off
to state prison. By the time he's released, it's December
nineteen eighty. Leo and Michelle Schofield have been married for
about four months. They're living in the little trailer near
Comby Settlement. They're going to church. Leo's playing music and
(21:14):
Michelle has yet to start her job at Tom's restaurant.
Jeremy Scott is back on the streets, and this time
he's in Lakeland.
Speaker 8 (21:34):
Hi.
Speaker 12 (21:34):
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(21:57):
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Speaker 9 (22:10):
Bone Valley is sponsored by Stand Together. Stand Together is
a philanthropic community that partners with America's boldest change makers
to tackle the root causes of our country's biggest problems,
including the broken criminal justice system. Weldon Angelos is one
of those change makers. At the age of twenty three,
(22:30):
Weldon was arrested for a first time offense of selling
weed to a confidential informant. At the time, he was
a budding musician spending time with artists like Tupac, Snoop Dogg, Pink,
and Gnase. His entire life was ahead of him when
he was sentenced to a mandatory fifty five years in
federal prison without the possibility of early release. After serving
(22:53):
thirteen years, a bipartisan effort led to him getting officially pardoned.
Upon his release, he founded the Weldon Project, a nonprofit
working to create better outcomes for those still in prison
that funds social change and provides financial aid for all
those who were still serving time for cannabis related offenses.
(23:15):
Weldon Angelos is one of the many entrepreneurs partnering with
Stand Together to drive solutions in education, health care, poverty,
and criminal justice. To learn more about the War on Drugs,
listen to the War on Drugs podcast on Apple Podcasts
or wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 13 (23:37):
Let's see, this is just kind of describing Lakeland, how
it all came to be.
Speaker 2 (23:46):
We're at Heide's Eeman's house looking through boxes. Heidi, her
sister Wendy, and their parents were living in Lakeland when
Jeremy Scott entered their lives. Heidie's parents were professors, her
dad taught Greek, and her Mom taught English, and for
a while in the nineteen eighties they took in local
teenagers they called throwaway kids who'd been kicked out or
(24:09):
were living on the streets. The Zeemans offered them a
place to stay.
Speaker 13 (24:14):
My dad was he was a writer. He just wrote,
so when he passed away, there were just boxes and
boxes of writing. So as I was pulling everything out,
I was trying to decide, you know, what was what.
And I came across this and I was like, oh,
my gosh, like this is the story of all the kids.
So it was pretty neat. And then I found Mom's
(24:36):
notebook and I was like, oh, this is really cool
that they both wrote the kids' stories.
Speaker 2 (24:43):
The Zeemans first started taking in kids living on the
street when Heidi's sister Wendy started dating a boy named
Mike Jason.
Speaker 14 (24:50):
Yeah, I've been on the streets when I was fourteen
because my brother and I got didn't get along, so
you know, I just felt like I was the black
sheep of the family, so I left. I was scared
I was going to die. Honestly, living on the streets,
didn't know where you're going to eat. You wore the
same clothes all the time, and uh, it was struggle.
Speaker 2 (25:12):
Heidi and Wendy's parents let Mike live with them, and
then they start letting some of Mike's friends who also
had nowhere else to go into their house.
Speaker 13 (25:22):
And then before you knew it, it was like, you know,
there were so many kids and they just they would.
Speaker 2 (25:29):
Sleep wherever they could fit at the Zeeman's house, in
the garage, on couches or on the living room floor.
When they ran out of floor space and couch space,
someone might sleep on the recliner.
Speaker 5 (25:40):
And then I kind of became part of the family.
Speaker 2 (25:43):
Rob Morales was one of the teens staying at the
Zeeman house. Rob also went by spot because you had
this one patch of white on a head full of
black hair.
Speaker 5 (25:53):
I flipped on the couch because I didn't have any
pits to go. Well, that's where I met Jeremy.
Speaker 2 (26:04):
It's the summer of nineteen eighty eight, the summer that
Leo Schofield is arrested in charged with the murder of
his wife Michelle. Jeremy Scott, homeless, finds his way into
the Zeman House in Lakeland. He's nineteen years old now,
but he's already had a couple of stints in state prison.
Spot describes Jeremy as impulsive and violent.
Speaker 5 (26:28):
Usually every time you know, we met up, we're either
getting into a fight with someone else, or you know,
he was always the first to come to gun.
Speaker 15 (26:40):
He made me nervous.
Speaker 2 (26:42):
This is Tracy Slaughter that summer nineteen eighty eight. She's sixteen,
she's dating Spot, and she and Wendy Zeeman are almost inseparable.
Speaker 15 (26:54):
That was the Death Leopard summer. And you walk around
with your gray boombox and you keep slipping it back
and forth. Wendy and I would walk and we would walk,
and we would walk. We would walk everywhere. And you
had to have your your Bouga Shelle necklace on, and
you had to have your your black leather like a
stretchy leer targ type pants that had looked like they
(27:15):
were satiny looking, you know, and then some type of
bright tangerine top or something like that. That was that summer,
and I associate all of that with this.
Speaker 2 (27:32):
This is a summer Tracy would never forget. As Tracy's
hanging out at the Zeeman house, she sees Jeremy coming
and going with his friend Cheryl. Cheryl is about ten
years older than Tracy, and she has a car. One night,
Cheryl takes Tracy and Wendy Zeman out for a ride, So.
Speaker 15 (27:54):
We went and she bought a bottle of Segrum seven
don't drink it.
Speaker 16 (27:58):
To this day.
Speaker 2 (28:00):
Then Cheryl says, we need to go pick up Jeremy,
and that's what they do.
Speaker 15 (28:05):
I knew that I didn't want him to be there,
that's all. That was just my feeling, because then Cheryl
also let him drive, and we thought that was odd
because she relinquished her vehicle over to him. And I
remember when we stopt the be convenience storage by the
second model of Seagram seven.
Speaker 2 (28:23):
Yeah, Jeremy drops off Wendy and Cheryl at the Zeman house.
He drives off with Tracy for coffee to sober her
up before taking.
Speaker 14 (28:33):
Her home, and then it all just went to help
him there.
Speaker 2 (28:38):
Tracy tells me that instead of taking her home, Jeremy
drives her to a wooded area off a two lane road.
It's dark, there aren't any street lights, and very little traffic.
She doesn't go into detail, but she makes it clear
that Jeremy sexually assaulted her that night. She says she
(28:59):
can remember laying in the sand on the side of
the road and hearing a car drive by without stopping.
Speaker 15 (29:07):
I was sixteen years old, and then that was my
welcome into the world.
Speaker 2 (29:20):
Around the same time, Heidie Zeman starts noticing that her
sister Wendy is not really acting like herself.
Speaker 13 (29:27):
It was obvious there was something wrong.
Speaker 2 (29:30):
One day, Jeremy's in the house and the Zeman's here
Wendy scream.
Speaker 13 (29:35):
He walked in on her one day in the shower
and she ripped the shower curtain off and started screaming,
and so, you know, we kind of knew that was
such a violent reaction that she had to him. You know,
you could tell something had happened.
Speaker 2 (29:52):
Wendy tells her mom that not long before the shower incident,
Jeremy had raped her. Jeremy didn't want to be thrown
out of the house, so we tried to keep Wendy quiet.
Speaker 13 (30:04):
From my understanding, he told her that if she if
she told anybody, or if she did anything, he would
kill her. And so I think she was just terrified
fourteen year old girl.
Speaker 2 (30:15):
The Zeemans do kick Jeremy out of the house, and
now they're left to figure out what to do next.
They're devastated about what Jeremy did to Wendy, but the
Zeemans as a family, basically decide that they were not
going to report Jeremy's sexual assault. They just didn't want
to expose their fourteen year old daughter to an investigation
(30:37):
in a trial. And Wendy Zeman wouldn't seem to recover
from the trauma that happened so early in her life.
Speaker 4 (30:46):
What did she do afterwards?
Speaker 13 (30:47):
She never did anything after that. She never went back
to school, she was never ablem beholding job. She got
to the point where she didn't want to leave the house.
I mean, she was just so paranoid about everything and everybody,
and it just got worse through the years.
Speaker 2 (31:06):
And then there's Tracy.
Speaker 15 (31:08):
If I say that something I did today was because
of him, I'm allowing him to control my life, and
I'm allowing him to attack me and be ugly to me.
Every single time that I allow him to take part
of my life, I'm not giving him. He's gotten all
for me, he's ever getting from me.
Speaker 2 (31:33):
After Jeremy sexually assaulted her, she stopped talking to her
best friend Wendy and stopped going to the Zeeman's house.
She just wanted to move on. Tracy still lives in
Polk County. She's got her own children now, and I
got the impression that she's happily married and doing well.
Her friend, Wendy Zemon wasn't so lucky. Her mental and
(31:55):
physical health continued to decline, and she died of heart
failure in twenty fifteen at the age of forty one.
Tracy had no idea that Wendy had her own traumatic
experience with Jeremy Scott. We were the ones to break
the news to her more than three decades later.
Speaker 15 (32:14):
I felt bad after you told me that Wendy had
passed and stuff like that. I was like, maybe I
should have continued being her friend. I didn't know that
he affected her, and she didn't know he affected me,
so you know what I mean. So I kind of
felt I still kind of feel like shit, but there's
none I can do about it. It is what it
(32:35):
is at this point.
Speaker 2 (32:36):
So the Ziemans had their hearts in the right place.
According to their youngest daughter, Heidi, her parents did make
a difference in the lives of some of the kids,
like Spott, who had a successful military career, and returned
to Lakeland to thank mister and missus Zemon for all
their help. But some of the throwaway kids that went
through the Zeeman house weren't as lucky as spot. Many
(32:59):
of the ended up dead or in prison, and the
Zeeman's older daughter, Wendy, paid the price for her parents'
good intentions. Mister Zeeman died a year after his daughter Wendy.
His younger daughter, Heidi, went through his possessions and she
came across all of his papers and writing, as well
(33:21):
as the journal he was keeping back in the nineteen eighties.
Speaker 13 (33:25):
So he starts off with the kids who passed away. Yeah,
so he starts off with Harry, which she was so
attached to Harry.
Speaker 16 (33:41):
So Aaron Louis.
Speaker 2 (33:44):
Mister and Missus Zemon tried to keep track of them
all to record some details about each life. To them,
they weren't throwaways, they were children who had fallen through
the cracks.
Speaker 13 (33:57):
And then this is the part, like I said, that
talks about Jeremy. When he talks about Jeremy, he even says,
I'm not going to give him his own story because
I'm not going to give him the satisfaction of giving
him his own story because of what he did.
Speaker 2 (34:12):
In his journal, mister Zieman acknowledges Jeremy's troubled life, but
he also goes on to say that Jeremy, upset about
being kicked out of the house, cut the brakes on
Missus Zeeman's car, But mister Zeeman writes that murder attempt
was not successful. After Jeremy Scott left so much destruction
(34:39):
in his wake, he took off with another boy who
was living at the Ziemans. His name is Larry Bryan Hall,
but he goes by Brian for a little while. Brian
moves into a small place with Wendy's ex boyfriend Mike.
Speaker 14 (34:54):
Jeremy and him were what he's going off in the
evening at nighttime when Brian stayed at my place.
Speaker 2 (35:01):
Mike seems concerned because he knew Brian could easily get
caught up with the wrong people like Jeremy.
Speaker 14 (35:08):
He was trying to figure out how to survive, and
he followed people. I just think he didn't know any better.
He would just do whatever somebody said to do.
Speaker 1 (35:17):
You know.
Speaker 14 (35:17):
That was one of the things Brian told me. He
said he was scared of him.
Speaker 2 (35:20):
Brian eventually moves out of Mike's apartment and goes off
with Jeremy. But Jeremy and Brian have nowhere to live.
They're staying wherever they can, sometimes in abandoned buildings. They
start breaking into houses together. Spots still in the area too,
and he hears the Jeremy and Brian are hanging out
in downtown Lakeland at night around Lake Morton.
Speaker 5 (35:43):
Okay, well, Late Morton used to be a oh I
gotta put this a gay pickup zone.
Speaker 17 (35:52):
Oh, okay, so that was I hate to get graphic.
Speaker 2 (35:56):
It's okay, it's okay.
Speaker 5 (35:59):
So at that time, what happened was anybody that was
looking to get money, you would hang out at the
lake at night, and then somebody would drive around the
lake and if they flashed their lights, that meant that
they were looking. And then you would flash your lights,
which meant that, yes, you were available, so they would
(36:21):
do whatever they wanted, you know, and then they'd pay
you forty or fifty bucks. And then if you stayed
out there long enough, you know, you can get you know,
three or four people at night.
Speaker 9 (36:33):
So he was kind of a hustler.
Speaker 2 (36:35):
Yes, according to Spot, Jeremy was targeting gay men, usually
he'd rob them, and these men were not likely to
contact law enforcement, not if they had to explain to
police why they were cruising around Lake Morton. This is
what Jeremy and Brian were up to on Halloween night
(36:55):
nineteen eighty eight. It's about three am and they're hanging
out by the lake. Jeremy's been drinking and they call
a middle aged gay man named Donald Morehead. Jeremy's been
with him before, and Donald drives over to pick the
two teenagers up in his Chevy Bretta. He brings Brian
(37:15):
and Jeremy back to his trailer in Lakeland. They're drinking
and smoking, and Donald ends up falling asleep naked in
a rocking chair.
Speaker 11 (37:25):
But the robbery, everything just happened, been such a even
after all these years, still uncomfortable to you and talk about.
Speaker 2 (37:38):
Here's Brian Hall. He's serving a life sentence at Hardy
Correctional Institution. He's thin, sunken eyes, and graying hair. He
tells us what happened in the trailer with Jeremy.
Speaker 11 (37:55):
Waited until Donald was asleep and was looking for money
and things in the house or the trailer, and then
the last thing I was expecting was that he was
gonna kill him.
Speaker 2 (38:16):
Brian didn't go into great detail, but according to the
testimony he gave in court, here's what happened. Jeremy woke
Brian up early in the morning on November first. He
was searching Donald's trailer for cash. Jeremy tells Brian that
they'll need to kill Donald so he doesn't turn them in.
(38:37):
And then Jeremy picks up a glass bottle of grape
juice and repeatedly hits Donald over the head with it.
Donald slumps out of the rocking chair, but is making
some gurgling noises, so Jeremy strangles him with a telephone cord.
(38:57):
Jeremy then wipes down the grape juice bottle and places
it back in the fridge. Brian Hall is the only
person we know of who actually saw Jeremy Scott kill someone.
Speaker 11 (39:14):
And he did it in such a way that this
seemed like you had swat a fly. Just just didn't
seem to have any concern or conscience on it.
Speaker 2 (39:29):
What were you thinking while you were sitting there and
watching this happen.
Speaker 5 (39:33):
It was.
Speaker 11 (39:37):
Just like an out of body experience. I was just
in fear of seeing something that you didn't think someone
was capable of doing It was just a side of
him that I didn't see. Sometimes you find out more
and more as time goes on about people that you
(39:58):
never knew. You never knew him like you thought you
knew him.
Speaker 2 (40:03):
After killing Donald, Brian and Jeremy steal his Chevy. They
take off to a town called Davenport, about thirty miles
east in Polk County. Jeremy's mother and stepfather live there,
and his brother lived close by. But when a police
helicopter starts circling over the neighborhood, Jeremy runs off into
(40:24):
the woods. Deputies are in pursuit now, and Jeremy surrenders.
He leads them to his mom's trailer, where Brian is sleeping.
The two teenagers are arrested and taken into custody in
early November of nineteen eighty eight. By this time, Leo
Schofield is sitting in the Polk County jail awaiting trial.
(40:48):
The same prosecutor in Leo's case is assigned to prosecute
Jeremy Scott and Brian Hall. The man with the electric
chair tie clip. Assistant State Attorney John Aguero. Aguero offers
Brian a deal. He says he'll take the death penalty
off the table if Brian testifies to what he saw
Jeremy do. Brian takes the deal. He's sentenced to life
(41:13):
in prison and testifies against Jeremy. The jury recommends life
in prison for Jeremy, but Aguero convinces the judge to
override the jury's recommendation. The judge agrees, and Jeremy Scott
is sentenced to death. A reporter for the Tampa Tribune
(41:33):
is sitting in the courtroom watching Jeremy as the sentence
is read. She writes that she sees Jeremy, who is
handcuffed with his legs shackled, glance back at his crying grandmother.
As Jeremy is led away, he too begins to cry.
Smokey Johnson was also in the courtroom during sentencing. Smokey
(41:56):
is convinced Jeremy got away with killing his mother, Juel
Johnson and four years prior, so he shows up at
Jeremy's hearing for satisfaction, he says. Smokey tells the reporter
what goes around comes around. A few years later, the
Florida Supreme Court overturns Jeremy's death sentence, citing factors such
(42:19):
as his borderline intelligence, emotional instability, and a childhood rife
with abuse. So, at twenty three years old, Jeremy comes
off death row and begins serving a life sentence for
the murder of Donald Morehead without any possibility for parole.
Jeremy Scott is now locked up for good.
Speaker 1 (42:58):
So I picked up the telephone and I contacted Polk
County Sheriff's office.
Speaker 2 (43:03):
It's two thousand and four. Jeremy and Leo have both
been serving more than fifteen years in prison. When Cinda
Williams finds out the fingerprints in Michelle Schofield's car match
Jeremy Scott sind de seize Jeremy's rap sheet, theft, assault, arson, vagrancy, burglary.
(43:25):
The list goes on topped off by two first degree murders,
acquitted of one, convicted of the other.
Speaker 1 (43:34):
And so I spoke to a sergeant and I told him, listen,
this is something that has come to light here. I
understand it is not you know, our jurisdiction or our investigation,
but I need to give you this information because I
feel it's important. This print was run. It came back
to an individual named Jeremy Scott. I think you guys
(43:55):
need to probably look at this. I don't know if
you've ever looked at it before. Here's the information.
Speaker 2 (44:02):
Then she calls Leo's wife, Chrissy.
Speaker 16 (44:05):
I couldn't believe it. I was expecting a tow truck
driver and instead they match a killer.
Speaker 17 (44:15):
Realistically, what would the case look like had this state
known it at the time.
Speaker 2 (44:21):
Scott Kupp hears the news from his wife Cinda that night,
and he's thinking from a legal perspective that Leo would
never be in prison if these prints in Michelle Schofield's
Mazda had been properly investigated back in nineteen eighty seven.
Speaker 17 (44:36):
This prosecutor, this police agency, they knew all too well
about who Jeremy Scott was, and if part of their
initial investigation was the identity of those prints to Jeremy Scott,
that's where the investigation would have gone. I mean, Aguerra
(44:58):
was a good prosecutor. I mean he convicted Leo with nothing.
Imagine what he could have done with Jeremy Scott.
Speaker 2 (45:07):
After getting a match on the fingerprints. There's a celebratory dinner.
That's what Chrissy's up to. When she gets a call
from Leo, she doesn't want to tell him anything on
the phone, though she's going to visit him in the morning.
She wants to tell him in person, so instead she
hands the phone over to Scott Cup. Cup had been
trying to stay out of Leo's case. He'd only agreed
(45:30):
to represent Chrissy, but now he sees that there's evidence
someone else may have killed Michelle. Until this moment, Leo
and Cupp had never spoken before, and now Cup can't
hide his excitement.
Speaker 18 (45:45):
He says to me, I'm going to get you out
of there in ninety days, buddy, my wife was giddy.
He was giddy, and this is my mom's feeling.
Speaker 17 (45:56):
I magravated the shit.
Speaker 18 (45:57):
I'm like, you gotta fucking be kidding me, you know,
he sounds half lit. I'm in a prison and my
emotions are now exploding.
Speaker 2 (46:09):
The next morning, Chrissy comes to the prison and meets
with Leo in the visitation room.
Speaker 16 (46:14):
So I sit down and I say, we have a
match on the fingerprints and give him a name. And
at the time, I didn't realize how difficult that was
going to be for him. It was very painful. His
first reaction was to put his head down and cry.
Speaker 18 (46:37):
I've had this mantle of a murderer on my shoulders
for all these years, you know, And to come out
and say, we got the guy's we got him. He's
forensically linked, we know who it is.
Speaker 16 (46:48):
He's a murderer, and.
Speaker 18 (46:49):
All this other stuff, and I'm saying, that's the guy
who murdered my life, you know what I mean.
Speaker 17 (46:54):
So there was so much.
Speaker 18 (46:56):
It's just it was an explosion of stuff and I
got I was, I was, I was really mad, and
it took me some days too long.
Speaker 17 (47:08):
To get control of.
Speaker 2 (47:22):
When Sindon notifies the Polk County Sheriff's Office about the Prince,
a new investigation into Jeremy Scott is opened. Two cold
case detectives from the Polk County Sheriff's Office are sent
to interview Jeremy in prison. They tell him that his
prints were found inside the car of Michelle Schofield, who
(47:42):
was murdered eighteen years ago. They asked Jeremy what he knows.
Jeremy says he doesn't know anything about a murder, but
if his fingerprints are in the car, maybe he'd broken
into it. He tells them he must have stolen a
half dozen car stereos while he was living on the streets,
but he's clearly shaken. Soon after the detectives leave, Jeremy
(48:05):
calls the only person he's in contact with outside of prison,
his grandmother, Arlene, and this call is recorded by the
Florida Department of Corrections.
Speaker 18 (48:17):
Grandma, I want you to listen carefully.
Speaker 19 (48:20):
All right, all right, I'm listening.
Speaker 5 (48:22):
Has anybody come tward to you?
Speaker 19 (48:24):
What murder? Murder?
Speaker 5 (48:27):
Murder?
Speaker 19 (48:28):
Who got murdered some girl back in eighty seven, eighty seven.
Speaker 18 (48:33):
When we lived on Combe Road.
Speaker 5 (48:35):
Yeah, they said they found the girl's body in the lake.
Speaker 19 (48:40):
Lor right, Well just tell them you don't know nothing,
and I ain't seen nothing, heard nothing, and just leave
you alone for they coming back. Grandma, Well just tell
him you don't know nothing. But they call him back, Grandma.
They ain't got no proof, so they got all that
(49:00):
could have been anybody too, right, What I mean, m
damn cops. All they do is frame vapl Oh Lord,
they're prom stupid. I hate god damn cops. Son of
a pictures. I hate them, girl, they come to get me.
Speaker 2 (49:31):
Bone Valley is a production of Lava for Good Podcasts
in association with Signal Company Number One. Our executive producers
are Jason Flam and Kevin Wordiskaen Krnhaber is our senior producer.
Brit Spangler is our sound designer. Roxandra Greedy is our editor.
Fact checking by Maximo Anderson. Our producer and researcher is
(49:54):
Kelsey Decker. 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 Hardy
Correctional Institution. Bone Valley is written and produced by me
Gilbert King. You can follow the show on Instagram, Facebook,
(50:15):
and Twitter at Lava for Good. To see photos and
documents from our investigation and exclusive behind the scenes content,
visit Lava Forgood dot com slash Bone Valley
I was blown away because I'm like, why would his
fingerprint be in the vehicle? Why would that not have
been something that had been investigated.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
When police Captain Cinda Williams ran the Prince that had
been found in Michelle Scofield's car seventeen years ago, she
wasn't expecting anything, but there was.
Speaker 1 (00:32):
A hit, so I ran a criminal history check on
Jeremy Scott.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
Now Cinda wasn't really supposed to have run these prints.
The Michelle Scofield case is under Polk County's jurisdiction, not
Henry County, where she works, but because of her friendship
with Chrissy, she decides to look into Jeremy Scott anyway.
Speaker 1 (00:55):
It felt like it was the right thing to do,
and he had an extensive criminal history. And when I
say extensive, imediate mostly violent.
Speaker 2 (01:10):
Crime charges of grand theft, burglary, multiple assaults, arson, and
two arrests for murder.
Speaker 3 (01:30):
Do you mo maness.
Speaker 4 (01:36):
Left to have my fears.
Speaker 3 (01:42):
Soruive sormness in this vasty him rage dansish to the
(02:11):
word sling stuff to the bone soundings.
Speaker 5 (02:20):
Stuff so.
Speaker 2 (02:43):
Bone Valley Chapter five, bam bam, Who is Jeremy Scott?
(03:08):
Who is this man whose fingerprints turned up in the
car Michelle Schofield was driving on the night she was murdered.
Kelsey and I wanted to find out everything we could
about him. We started filing record requests.
Speaker 6 (03:23):
We got police reports from both the Sheriff's office and
the Lakeland Police Department. They documented dozens of Jeremy's arrests
in Polk County, and we were also able to get
our hands on Jeremy's psychiatric reports. He was evaluated by
psychologists while awaiting trial on a homicide charge.
Speaker 2 (03:42):
This homicide charge, Jeremy would eventually be convicted for it.
We'll get back to that later. But after he was
found guilty, several of Jeremy's family members testified, pleading with
the judge and jury to spare Jeremy's life, to sentence
him to life in prison instead of giving him the
death penalty. Their testimony about Jeremy's childhood and upbringing paints
(04:07):
a Scott family portrait that can only be described as
chaotic and unstable. We started compiling this testimony and other
documents we've been able to dig up, and we were
able to make a rough timeline of Jeremy's early life.
Speaker 6 (04:25):
Jeremy was born in Michigan on April twenty ninth, nineteen
sixty nine. According to family testimony, his mother, Linda immediately
rejected him when she brought him home from the hospital.
Linda didn't want anything to do with him. She was
fifteen at the time in using drugs, so she left
him with her parents. So Jeremy's grandparents, Arlene and Stacy Scott,
(04:49):
they raise him, and Jeremy grows up calling them mom
and Dad, and they call him Bam Bam because he
liked to hit stuff. But early in works and Stacy
struggles with alcoholism, so Jeremy spends much of his early
years in the care of his aunt Debbie, who's just fourteen.
Speaker 2 (05:08):
Then one day, when Jeremy was two or three, he
was left without supervision and was hit by a neighbor's car.
His psych reports say that there was significant injury to
the right frontal area of his skull. It seems this
incident may have left Jeremy with lasting brain damage, and
soon after Jeremy's uncle Tom moved in. Tom pretty severely
(05:33):
abused Jeremy. He would beat him and call him names.
According to his aunt Debbie's testimony, when Jeremy starts school,
sounds like he doesn't do very well. He has to
repeat kindergarten and he's placed in special education classes.
Speaker 6 (05:48):
And then we get to the mid to late seventies
and the family starts to relocate down to Florida. They
were up in Michigan, and they start trickling down to
various parts of the state, settle in Perry in the
Florida Panhandle, and also in central Florida, Lakeland, Kissimi, Davenport,
and Mulberry.
Speaker 2 (06:09):
It's hard to piece together exactly where Jeremy was and
when and who cared for him. He was being passed
back and forth between different caregivers, different family members.
Speaker 6 (06:19):
But at some point he ends up back with his mother, Linda.
Jeremy's aunt, Debbie, says that Linda was beating him with
belts and with sticks, and the school he was attending
at that time took notice. They reported the abuse, and
it seems like at that point Jeremy was removed from
his mother's care and placed into foster care.
Speaker 2 (06:43):
After fourth grade, Jeremy stops regularly attending school, and by
eighth grade, he's apparently dropped out of school entirely Somewhere
in that time he starts getting in trouble with the
law too. The first arrest we have on recD is
August nineteen eighty It was for petty theft, burglary, criminal mischief,
(07:05):
dealing in stolen property, and unauthorized use of a motor vehicle,
all misdemeanor charges. But he was only eleven years old.
That's five charges. Around this same time, Jeremy's already living
on the streets and he asks his sixteen year old
aunt for money, food, and clothes, which she isn't always
(07:27):
able to provide.
Speaker 6 (07:29):
And then in January of nineteen eighty two, he's arrested
for grand theft and burglary and those are felony charges.
Jeremy was twelve, and this is when things become a
little more serious for him. There are some real repercussions.
He sent away to Okachobe, the juvenile detention facility in
South Florida, so he's in and out of Okachobe between
(07:52):
the ages of thirteen and fifteen.
Speaker 2 (07:56):
After one of Jeremy's stays at Okachobe, he lands in
a little in Polk County, just outside of Lakeland. It's
called Eagle Lake. From Jeremy's criminal records and police reports,
we learn about a murder that took place in this
area in nineteen eighty five, when Jeremy was just fifteen
years old. So we tried to track down some of
(08:18):
the other people whose names we found in the documents.
Speaker 4 (08:23):
Okay, I'm out here.
Speaker 2 (08:25):
I'm about to meet with Nancy, and I think her mother,
Wilma is here. I'm just gonna walk over there right now.
They're sitting on a picnic bench underneath a tree. Nancy
and her mom, Wilma, are still living in the area
where the crime took place. I called them after seeing
Nancy's name in a witness deposition. I was especially interested
(08:46):
in talking to them because they said they remember Jeremy. Hello,
you must be Wilma. We talked on the phone.
Speaker 4 (08:58):
Gilbert, Hi, Nancy, how are you.
Speaker 2 (09:00):
Nancy says she first met Jeremy while he was working
the rides at the Florida Citrus Festival in nearby winter Haven.
Nancy was around thirteen years old and Jeremy was fifteen.
Speaker 7 (09:12):
We all went to the fair, and we'd go every
single night. What kind of fair was it? It was
just a carnival. You had the sea Dragon. You had
the Zipper, the one that spends around Himalaya.
Speaker 2 (09:26):
What was Jeremy Scott doing there?
Speaker 7 (09:27):
He was actually running the Sea Dragon.
Speaker 2 (09:30):
And he so he when you were at the fair,
liked he would be the guy that would put you
on the rides. That was his job.
Speaker 7 (09:35):
No, he actually was the one that turned it on.
It was the mechanical part.
Speaker 2 (09:40):
So he was basically a carney.
Speaker 4 (09:41):
A carney.
Speaker 2 (09:43):
Nancy and her friends would see him every night over
the ten days the festival was in town.
Speaker 7 (09:47):
So when me and the girls got on him, we
got an extra ride, like, hey, I got that extra ride.
Speaker 2 (09:55):
And when the festival eventually packs up, Jeremy sticks around
the area.
Speaker 7 (10:00):
I think he just came into town and decided to
stay for a little bit. He was quiet, I mean,
like shy, very shy compared to like the average kids.
And I mean until you got to know you, you know,
I do know he was like maybe slow. I don't
know how to better explain him. He just was different,
(10:24):
you know. I don't know if it's a disability or what.
Speaker 2 (10:27):
Because back then, Nancy grew up with the sense that
she should protect kids like Jeremy, so she would make
sure to include him when she and her friends would
play sports and hang around the park. Jeremy would stay
over at their house some nights too, he'd crash on
the couch.
Speaker 7 (10:43):
He was polite because it was like he had respect,
I guess his best way to say it, because I
never saw temper out of him or anything.
Speaker 2 (10:54):
But then Jeremy stops coming over to Nancy and Wilma's
house as often, and Nancy she starts seeing Jeremy with
one of her neighbors, an ex con by the name
of Smoky Johnson. Smokey picks up Jeremy while he's hitchhiking
one day. Smokey is forty six and Jeremy is just fifteen.
Speaker 7 (11:13):
Honestly, I mean, it's really weird that somebody that much
older would be hanging out with me, you know.
Speaker 2 (11:22):
That spring On April eleventh, nineteen eighty five, Smoky's seventy
five year old mother, Juel Johnson, was found dead in
a locked trailer behind her house.
Speaker 7 (11:35):
Well, she lived right around the corner from where we.
Speaker 2 (11:37):
Lived, right and jul Johnson was just like a sweet
elderly woman.
Speaker 8 (11:42):
I mean, yes, saying that she was a very sweet lady.
Speaker 7 (11:46):
Now that's what I told different people that I knew
quite well, yeah, that.
Speaker 2 (11:52):
That she's a very sweet lady. Juel Johnson suffered blunt
force trauma to the head and she was in the torso,
presumably with the twenty two caliber rifle found at the scene.
Detective Richard Putnall, the same detective that would work Michelle
Schofield's murder two years later, conducts the investigation. Detective Putnall
(12:17):
talks to Jule Johnson's son, Smoky, who says that about
fifty dollars in rolled coins was taken from the house,
as well as some large knives. As far as we
can tell, there are no eyewitnesses to the killing, and
no one claims to have heard any gunshots. But then
detective Putnall interviews two teenage girls in the neighborhood and
(12:40):
the investigation takes a new direction. Thirteen year old Lwanda
Green and fifteen year old Anne Aldridge tell Detective Putnall
that they know Jeremy and they remember seeing him on
his bike just hours after Jewel's murder. They say Jeremy
had on all new clothes when they saw him, gray jacket,
(13:01):
gray shirt, gray pants instead of his usual jeans and
t shirt. He also had a bunch of coins on him.
He told them that his grandfather just died and left
him fifty dollars. He showed the coins and said, this
is all I have left. He had a red bag
with him and said there's a big knife in there.
(13:24):
Not long after Juel Johnson is killed, Jeremy stops by
Nancy's place.
Speaker 7 (13:29):
He just swung by the house to tell us why. Like,
the conversation was really really short, not like where he
was before that, you know, he laughed or whatever. It
was just different. He just said that we wouldn't get
to see him no more. He was staying away because
he was in trouble.
Speaker 2 (13:49):
After I interviewed Nancy and Wilma at the ballpark, they
tell me to follow their car and they'll point out
Juel Johnson's house. And this is really roll back.
Speaker 9 (14:00):
Here a lot less houses, just a little farmhouse.
Speaker 4 (14:03):
And it's cattle. Yeah, there it is.
Speaker 2 (14:10):
I can see the little shed in the back under tree.
That's where I think they found the body of jul Johnson.
Investigators weren't able to lift any prince from the rifle
found at the crime scene. Whoever shot Juel Johnson must
have wiped down the weapon afterwards, but they were able
(14:34):
to lift fingerprints from a coin wrapper and Jewel's broken eyeglasses.
The Polk County Sheriff's Office compares the prince to Jeremy's.
It's a match. Jeremy Scott, now sixteen, becomes the lead
suspect in the murder of Jewel Johnson. Three weeks after
(14:56):
the killing, Jeremy's arrested and charged with first degree murder.
At his arraignement, the judge, who spent years presiding over
juvenile cases recognizes Jeremy's name. He tells reporters he wasn't surprised.
He says, quote, this was one of those situations in
(15:17):
which there was nothing the system could do.
Speaker 4 (15:26):
Jeremy was in jail, and he was a young man,
very immature, very mentally I'm gonna say mentally disturbed in
the sense that he had a number of mental illnesses.
He was a severely abused child. You know, he was
cutting himself quite a bit in the jail.
Speaker 2 (15:46):
This is Austin meslank who was an attorney with the
Public Defender's Office. Meslanic was assigned to represent Jeremy in
the murder of Jule Johnson.
Speaker 4 (15:56):
I mean the state was seeking the death penal to you,
because this was before the United States Supreme Court had
ruled the juveniles were not eligible for the death penalty,
and you know, in Polk County at that time, the
state went for the death penalty just about every case.
Speaker 10 (16:15):
He was young, he was difficult, sometimes he was cooperative,
sometimes he wasn't.
Speaker 2 (16:22):
This is Tony Maloney. She's the investigator from the Public
Defender's Office. She was assigned to Leo Schofield's case in
nineteen eighty eight, before Leo dropped them and hired Jack
Edmund instead. But before all that, back in nineteen eighty five,
she was assigned to Jeremy Scott's defense in the Jule
Johnson murder.
Speaker 10 (16:43):
It was hard for him to stay on tasks for
any period of time, and then even when he did,
it was sort of like, you know, is he really
connecting the dots here? Not out of touch with reality,
but an inability to calmly control.
Speaker 2 (17:02):
At trial, the state presents a pretty simple case. They
say that while Smokey Johnson is at work, Jewel catches
Jeremy trying to steal her rolls of coins. She tells Jeremy,
she's calling the sheriff, so he hits her over the
head and shoots her with a rifle. But the public
defenders did witness interviews and brought in a mental health
(17:24):
expert to defend Jeremy at trial, and you put on.
Speaker 4 (17:27):
A pretty aggressive defense, Yes, we did.
Speaker 2 (17:32):
Jeremy takes the stand at trial and says that it
was Smoky Johnson who killed his own mother. Jeremy says
he was a witness to the killing. He said it
happened after Smoky and Jewel argued about smoking weed. Several
jurors said that they didn't think Jeremy killed Juel Johnson
because he didn't seem intelligent enough to remove his fingerprints
(17:54):
from the murder weapon. Smokey, on the other hand, had
done some time for selling, and he apparently didn't come
across too well at trial. That's how in September nineteen
eighty five, Jeremy Scott is acquitted of Juel Johnson's murder.
The state never prosecuted Smoky because of the strength of
(18:15):
his alibi. Multiple co workers testify that he was at
work at the time his mother was murdered. Juel Johnson's
murder is still considered unsolved to this day, but the
state of Florida didn't seem too happy about Jeremy's acquittal,
so they weren't so quick to release him. While Jeremy
was in the jail awaiting trial, he lit his mattress
(18:38):
on fire. So after he's acquitted in the Jewel Johnson murder,
he's held in the Polk County jail for the arson
charge that happened months before. To me and Kelsey, though
it seems like Jeremy literally got away with murder, I think.
Speaker 8 (18:58):
That's sort of a bitch, arrowing a bunch of people's lives.
Speaker 2 (19:03):
This is Lee Underwood. We reached out to him because
he was a close friend to Michelle Schofield's back in
the day.
Speaker 8 (19:10):
She was a very very very special friend of mine,
like a sister.
Speaker 2 (19:19):
It was Michelle who gave him his nickname, Lee the Flea,
and she named.
Speaker 11 (19:24):
Me that.
Speaker 8 (19:27):
Basically as I was always playing to lead the polis
and that name is stuck would mad till today.
Speaker 2 (19:36):
We tracked Leave the Flee down in Wisconsin, and as
we were talking, the interview took an unexpected turn.
Speaker 8 (19:42):
You didn't know Jeremy Scott, did you. I was in
jail with them back in eighty Sorry.
Speaker 2 (19:49):
We checked this and Lee is a little off on
the year based on arrest records. The cops finally caught
up with Lee in nineteen eighty five. They locked him
up in the Polk County JA on charges of well
fleeing police, and Lee tells us one of his cellmates
then was Jeremy Scott. Lee was there when Jeremy set
(20:09):
his mattress on fire, and he remembers when Jeremy was
acquitted of killing jul Johnson.
Speaker 8 (20:15):
I don't know how he got off of it. He
get bragged to everybody in the cell about doing it.
This guy was crazy. He'd like make a shank like
a jail knife out of a razor right around the jail,
(20:36):
cutting people just at random. This kid was crazy and
he had a look in his eye just like like
he wasn't right.
Speaker 2 (20:50):
Jeremy is convicted on the arson charge and shipped off
to state prison. By the time he's released, it's December
nineteen eighty. Leo and Michelle Schofield have been married for
about four months. They're living in the little trailer near
Comby Settlement. They're going to church. Leo's playing music and
(21:14):
Michelle has yet to start her job at Tom's restaurant.
Jeremy Scott is back on the streets, and this time
he's in Lakeland.
Speaker 8 (21:34):
Hi.
Speaker 12 (21:34):
I'm Jason Flamm, CEO and founder of Lava for Good podcasts,
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(21:57):
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Speaker 9 (22:10):
Bone Valley is sponsored by Stand Together. Stand Together is
a philanthropic community that partners with America's boldest change makers
to tackle the root causes of our country's biggest problems,
including the broken criminal justice system. Weldon Angelos is one
of those change makers. At the age of twenty three,
(22:30):
Weldon was arrested for a first time offense of selling
weed to a confidential informant. At the time, he was
a budding musician spending time with artists like Tupac, Snoop Dogg, Pink,
and Gnase. His entire life was ahead of him when
he was sentenced to a mandatory fifty five years in
federal prison without the possibility of early release. After serving
(22:53):
thirteen years, a bipartisan effort led to him getting officially pardoned.
Upon his release, he founded the Weldon Project, a nonprofit
working to create better outcomes for those still in prison
that funds social change and provides financial aid for all
those who were still serving time for cannabis related offenses.
(23:15):
Weldon Angelos is one of the many entrepreneurs partnering with
Stand Together to drive solutions in education, health care, poverty,
and criminal justice. To learn more about the War on Drugs,
listen to the War on Drugs podcast on Apple Podcasts
or wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 13 (23:37):
Let's see, this is just kind of describing Lakeland, how
it all came to be.
Speaker 2 (23:46):
We're at Heide's Eeman's house looking through boxes. Heidi, her
sister Wendy, and their parents were living in Lakeland when
Jeremy Scott entered their lives. Heidie's parents were professors, her
dad taught Greek, and her Mom taught English, and for
a while in the nineteen eighties they took in local
teenagers they called throwaway kids who'd been kicked out or
(24:09):
were living on the streets. The Zeemans offered them a
place to stay.
Speaker 13 (24:14):
My dad was he was a writer. He just wrote,
so when he passed away, there were just boxes and
boxes of writing. So as I was pulling everything out,
I was trying to decide, you know, what was what.
And I came across this and I was like, oh,
my gosh, like this is the story of all the kids.
So it was pretty neat. And then I found Mom's
(24:36):
notebook and I was like, oh, this is really cool
that they both wrote the kids' stories.
Speaker 2 (24:43):
The Zeemans first started taking in kids living on the
street when Heidi's sister Wendy started dating a boy named
Mike Jason.
Speaker 14 (24:50):
Yeah, I've been on the streets when I was fourteen
because my brother and I got didn't get along, so
you know, I just felt like I was the black
sheep of the family, so I left. I was scared
I was going to die. Honestly, living on the streets,
didn't know where you're going to eat. You wore the
same clothes all the time, and uh, it was struggle.
Speaker 2 (25:12):
Heidi and Wendy's parents let Mike live with them, and
then they start letting some of Mike's friends who also
had nowhere else to go into their house.
Speaker 13 (25:22):
And then before you knew it, it was like, you know,
there were so many kids and they just they would.
Speaker 2 (25:29):
Sleep wherever they could fit at the Zeeman's house, in
the garage, on couches or on the living room floor.
When they ran out of floor space and couch space,
someone might sleep on the recliner.
Speaker 5 (25:40):
And then I kind of became part of the family.
Speaker 2 (25:43):
Rob Morales was one of the teens staying at the
Zeeman house. Rob also went by spot because you had
this one patch of white on a head full of
black hair.
Speaker 5 (25:53):
I flipped on the couch because I didn't have any
pits to go. Well, that's where I met Jeremy.
Speaker 2 (26:04):
It's the summer of nineteen eighty eight, the summer that
Leo Schofield is arrested in charged with the murder of
his wife Michelle. Jeremy Scott, homeless, finds his way into
the Zeman House in Lakeland. He's nineteen years old now,
but he's already had a couple of stints in state prison.
Spot describes Jeremy as impulsive and violent.
Speaker 5 (26:28):
Usually every time you know, we met up, we're either
getting into a fight with someone else, or you know,
he was always the first to come to gun.
Speaker 15 (26:40):
He made me nervous.
Speaker 2 (26:42):
This is Tracy Slaughter that summer nineteen eighty eight. She's sixteen,
she's dating Spot, and she and Wendy Zeeman are almost inseparable.
Speaker 15 (26:54):
That was the Death Leopard summer. And you walk around
with your gray boombox and you keep slipping it back
and forth. Wendy and I would walk and we would walk,
and we would walk. We would walk everywhere. And you
had to have your your Bouga Shelle necklace on, and
you had to have your your black leather like a
stretchy leer targ type pants that had looked like they
(27:15):
were satiny looking, you know, and then some type of
bright tangerine top or something like that. That was that summer,
and I associate all of that with this.
Speaker 2 (27:32):
This is a summer Tracy would never forget. As Tracy's
hanging out at the Zeeman house, she sees Jeremy coming
and going with his friend Cheryl. Cheryl is about ten
years older than Tracy, and she has a car. One night,
Cheryl takes Tracy and Wendy Zeman out for a ride, So.
Speaker 15 (27:54):
We went and she bought a bottle of Segrum seven
don't drink it.
Speaker 16 (27:58):
To this day.
Speaker 2 (28:00):
Then Cheryl says, we need to go pick up Jeremy,
and that's what they do.
Speaker 15 (28:05):
I knew that I didn't want him to be there,
that's all. That was just my feeling, because then Cheryl
also let him drive, and we thought that was odd
because she relinquished her vehicle over to him. And I
remember when we stopt the be convenience storage by the
second model of Seagram seven.
Speaker 2 (28:23):
Yeah, Jeremy drops off Wendy and Cheryl at the Zeman house.
He drives off with Tracy for coffee to sober her
up before taking.
Speaker 14 (28:33):
Her home, and then it all just went to help
him there.
Speaker 2 (28:38):
Tracy tells me that instead of taking her home, Jeremy
drives her to a wooded area off a two lane road.
It's dark, there aren't any street lights, and very little traffic.
She doesn't go into detail, but she makes it clear
that Jeremy sexually assaulted her that night. She says she
(28:59):
can remember laying in the sand on the side of
the road and hearing a car drive by without stopping.
Speaker 15 (29:07):
I was sixteen years old, and then that was my
welcome into the world.
Speaker 2 (29:20):
Around the same time, Heidie Zeman starts noticing that her
sister Wendy is not really acting like herself.
Speaker 13 (29:27):
It was obvious there was something wrong.
Speaker 2 (29:30):
One day, Jeremy's in the house and the Zeman's here
Wendy scream.
Speaker 13 (29:35):
He walked in on her one day in the shower
and she ripped the shower curtain off and started screaming,
and so, you know, we kind of knew that was
such a violent reaction that she had to him. You know,
you could tell something had happened.
Speaker 2 (29:52):
Wendy tells her mom that not long before the shower incident,
Jeremy had raped her. Jeremy didn't want to be thrown
out of the house, so we tried to keep Wendy quiet.
Speaker 13 (30:04):
From my understanding, he told her that if she if
she told anybody, or if she did anything, he would
kill her. And so I think she was just terrified
fourteen year old girl.
Speaker 2 (30:15):
The Zeemans do kick Jeremy out of the house, and
now they're left to figure out what to do next.
They're devastated about what Jeremy did to Wendy, but the
Zeemans as a family, basically decide that they were not
going to report Jeremy's sexual assault. They just didn't want
to expose their fourteen year old daughter to an investigation
(30:37):
in a trial. And Wendy Zeman wouldn't seem to recover
from the trauma that happened so early in her life.
Speaker 4 (30:46):
What did she do afterwards?
Speaker 13 (30:47):
She never did anything after that. She never went back
to school, she was never ablem beholding job. She got
to the point where she didn't want to leave the house.
I mean, she was just so paranoid about everything and everybody,
and it just got worse through the years.
Speaker 2 (31:06):
And then there's Tracy.
Speaker 15 (31:08):
If I say that something I did today was because
of him, I'm allowing him to control my life, and
I'm allowing him to attack me and be ugly to me.
Every single time that I allow him to take part
of my life, I'm not giving him. He's gotten all
for me, he's ever getting from me.
Speaker 2 (31:33):
After Jeremy sexually assaulted her, she stopped talking to her
best friend Wendy and stopped going to the Zeeman's house.
She just wanted to move on. Tracy still lives in
Polk County. She's got her own children now, and I
got the impression that she's happily married and doing well.
Her friend, Wendy Zemon wasn't so lucky. Her mental and
(31:55):
physical health continued to decline, and she died of heart
failure in twenty fifteen at the age of forty one.
Tracy had no idea that Wendy had her own traumatic
experience with Jeremy Scott. We were the ones to break
the news to her more than three decades later.
Speaker 15 (32:14):
I felt bad after you told me that Wendy had
passed and stuff like that. I was like, maybe I
should have continued being her friend. I didn't know that
he affected her, and she didn't know he affected me,
so you know what I mean. So I kind of
felt I still kind of feel like shit, but there's
none I can do about it. It is what it
(32:35):
is at this point.
Speaker 2 (32:36):
So the Ziemans had their hearts in the right place.
According to their youngest daughter, Heidi, her parents did make
a difference in the lives of some of the kids,
like Spott, who had a successful military career, and returned
to Lakeland to thank mister and missus Zemon for all
their help. But some of the throwaway kids that went
through the Zeeman house weren't as lucky as spot. Many
(32:59):
of the ended up dead or in prison, and the
Zeeman's older daughter, Wendy, paid the price for her parents'
good intentions. Mister Zeeman died a year after his daughter Wendy.
His younger daughter, Heidi, went through his possessions and she
came across all of his papers and writing, as well
(33:21):
as the journal he was keeping back in the nineteen eighties.
Speaker 13 (33:25):
So he starts off with the kids who passed away. Yeah,
so he starts off with Harry, which she was so
attached to Harry.
Speaker 16 (33:41):
So Aaron Louis.
Speaker 2 (33:44):
Mister and Missus Zemon tried to keep track of them
all to record some details about each life. To them,
they weren't throwaways, they were children who had fallen through
the cracks.
Speaker 13 (33:57):
And then this is the part, like I said, that
talks about Jeremy. When he talks about Jeremy, he even says,
I'm not going to give him his own story because
I'm not going to give him the satisfaction of giving
him his own story because of what he did.
Speaker 2 (34:12):
In his journal, mister Zieman acknowledges Jeremy's troubled life, but
he also goes on to say that Jeremy, upset about
being kicked out of the house, cut the brakes on
Missus Zeeman's car, But mister Zeeman writes that murder attempt
was not successful. After Jeremy Scott left so much destruction
(34:39):
in his wake, he took off with another boy who
was living at the Ziemans. His name is Larry Bryan Hall,
but he goes by Brian for a little while. Brian
moves into a small place with Wendy's ex boyfriend Mike.
Speaker 14 (34:54):
Jeremy and him were what he's going off in the
evening at nighttime when Brian stayed at my place.
Speaker 2 (35:01):
Mike seems concerned because he knew Brian could easily get
caught up with the wrong people like Jeremy.
Speaker 14 (35:08):
He was trying to figure out how to survive, and
he followed people. I just think he didn't know any better.
He would just do whatever somebody said to do.
Speaker 1 (35:17):
You know.
Speaker 14 (35:17):
That was one of the things Brian told me. He
said he was scared of him.
Speaker 2 (35:20):
Brian eventually moves out of Mike's apartment and goes off
with Jeremy. But Jeremy and Brian have nowhere to live.
They're staying wherever they can, sometimes in abandoned buildings. They
start breaking into houses together. Spots still in the area too,
and he hears the Jeremy and Brian are hanging out
in downtown Lakeland at night around Lake Morton.
Speaker 5 (35:43):
Okay, well, Late Morton used to be a oh I
gotta put this a gay pickup zone.
Speaker 17 (35:52):
Oh, okay, so that was I hate to get graphic.
Speaker 2 (35:56):
It's okay, it's okay.
Speaker 5 (35:59):
So at that time, what happened was anybody that was
looking to get money, you would hang out at the
lake at night, and then somebody would drive around the
lake and if they flashed their lights, that meant that
they were looking. And then you would flash your lights,
which meant that, yes, you were available, so they would
(36:21):
do whatever they wanted, you know, and then they'd pay
you forty or fifty bucks. And then if you stayed
out there long enough, you know, you can get you know,
three or four people at night.
Speaker 9 (36:33):
So he was kind of a hustler.
Speaker 2 (36:35):
Yes, according to Spot, Jeremy was targeting gay men, usually
he'd rob them, and these men were not likely to
contact law enforcement, not if they had to explain to
police why they were cruising around Lake Morton. This is
what Jeremy and Brian were up to on Halloween night
(36:55):
nineteen eighty eight. It's about three am and they're hanging
out by the lake. Jeremy's been drinking and they call
a middle aged gay man named Donald Morehead. Jeremy's been
with him before, and Donald drives over to pick the
two teenagers up in his Chevy Bretta. He brings Brian
(37:15):
and Jeremy back to his trailer in Lakeland. They're drinking
and smoking, and Donald ends up falling asleep naked in
a rocking chair.
Speaker 11 (37:25):
But the robbery, everything just happened, been such a even
after all these years, still uncomfortable to you and talk about.
Speaker 2 (37:38):
Here's Brian Hall. He's serving a life sentence at Hardy
Correctional Institution. He's thin, sunken eyes, and graying hair. He
tells us what happened in the trailer with Jeremy.
Speaker 11 (37:55):
Waited until Donald was asleep and was looking for money
and things in the house or the trailer, and then
the last thing I was expecting was that he was
gonna kill him.
Speaker 2 (38:16):
Brian didn't go into great detail, but according to the
testimony he gave in court, here's what happened. Jeremy woke
Brian up early in the morning on November first. He
was searching Donald's trailer for cash. Jeremy tells Brian that
they'll need to kill Donald so he doesn't turn them in.
(38:37):
And then Jeremy picks up a glass bottle of grape
juice and repeatedly hits Donald over the head with it.
Donald slumps out of the rocking chair, but is making
some gurgling noises, so Jeremy strangles him with a telephone cord.
(38:57):
Jeremy then wipes down the grape juice bottle and places
it back in the fridge. Brian Hall is the only
person we know of who actually saw Jeremy Scott kill someone.
Speaker 11 (39:14):
And he did it in such a way that this
seemed like you had swat a fly. Just just didn't
seem to have any concern or conscience on it.
Speaker 2 (39:29):
What were you thinking while you were sitting there and
watching this happen.
Speaker 5 (39:33):
It was.
Speaker 11 (39:37):
Just like an out of body experience. I was just
in fear of seeing something that you didn't think someone
was capable of doing It was just a side of
him that I didn't see. Sometimes you find out more
and more as time goes on about people that you
(39:58):
never knew. You never knew him like you thought you
knew him.
Speaker 2 (40:03):
After killing Donald, Brian and Jeremy steal his Chevy. They
take off to a town called Davenport, about thirty miles
east in Polk County. Jeremy's mother and stepfather live there,
and his brother lived close by. But when a police
helicopter starts circling over the neighborhood, Jeremy runs off into
(40:24):
the woods. Deputies are in pursuit now, and Jeremy surrenders.
He leads them to his mom's trailer, where Brian is sleeping.
The two teenagers are arrested and taken into custody in
early November of nineteen eighty eight. By this time, Leo
Schofield is sitting in the Polk County jail awaiting trial.
(40:48):
The same prosecutor in Leo's case is assigned to prosecute
Jeremy Scott and Brian Hall. The man with the electric
chair tie clip. Assistant State Attorney John Aguero. Aguero offers
Brian a deal. He says he'll take the death penalty
off the table if Brian testifies to what he saw
Jeremy do. Brian takes the deal. He's sentenced to life
(41:13):
in prison and testifies against Jeremy. The jury recommends life
in prison for Jeremy, but Aguero convinces the judge to
override the jury's recommendation. The judge agrees, and Jeremy Scott
is sentenced to death. A reporter for the Tampa Tribune
(41:33):
is sitting in the courtroom watching Jeremy as the sentence
is read. She writes that she sees Jeremy, who is
handcuffed with his legs shackled, glance back at his crying grandmother.
As Jeremy is led away, he too begins to cry.
Smokey Johnson was also in the courtroom during sentencing. Smokey
(41:56):
is convinced Jeremy got away with killing his mother, Juel
Johnson and four years prior, so he shows up at
Jeremy's hearing for satisfaction, he says. Smokey tells the reporter
what goes around comes around. A few years later, the
Florida Supreme Court overturns Jeremy's death sentence, citing factors such
(42:19):
as his borderline intelligence, emotional instability, and a childhood rife
with abuse. So, at twenty three years old, Jeremy comes
off death row and begins serving a life sentence for
the murder of Donald Morehead without any possibility for parole.
Jeremy Scott is now locked up for good.
Speaker 1 (42:58):
So I picked up the telephone and I contacted Polk
County Sheriff's office.
Speaker 2 (43:03):
It's two thousand and four. Jeremy and Leo have both
been serving more than fifteen years in prison. When Cinda
Williams finds out the fingerprints in Michelle Schofield's car match
Jeremy Scott sind de seize Jeremy's rap sheet, theft, assault, arson, vagrancy, burglary.
(43:25):
The list goes on topped off by two first degree murders,
acquitted of one, convicted of the other.
Speaker 1 (43:34):
And so I spoke to a sergeant and I told him, listen,
this is something that has come to light here. I
understand it is not you know, our jurisdiction or our investigation,
but I need to give you this information because I
feel it's important. This print was run. It came back
to an individual named Jeremy Scott. I think you guys
(43:55):
need to probably look at this. I don't know if
you've ever looked at it before. Here's the information.
Speaker 2 (44:02):
Then she calls Leo's wife, Chrissy.
Speaker 16 (44:05):
I couldn't believe it. I was expecting a tow truck
driver and instead they match a killer.
Speaker 17 (44:15):
Realistically, what would the case look like had this state
known it at the time.
Speaker 2 (44:21):
Scott Kupp hears the news from his wife Cinda that night,
and he's thinking from a legal perspective that Leo would
never be in prison if these prints in Michelle Schofield's
Mazda had been properly investigated back in nineteen eighty seven.
Speaker 17 (44:36):
This prosecutor, this police agency, they knew all too well
about who Jeremy Scott was, and if part of their
initial investigation was the identity of those prints to Jeremy Scott,
that's where the investigation would have gone. I mean, Aguerra
(44:58):
was a good prosecutor. I mean he convicted Leo with nothing.
Imagine what he could have done with Jeremy Scott.
Speaker 2 (45:07):
After getting a match on the fingerprints. There's a celebratory dinner.
That's what Chrissy's up to. When she gets a call
from Leo, she doesn't want to tell him anything on
the phone, though she's going to visit him in the morning.
She wants to tell him in person, so instead she
hands the phone over to Scott Cup. Cup had been
trying to stay out of Leo's case. He'd only agreed
(45:30):
to represent Chrissy, but now he sees that there's evidence
someone else may have killed Michelle. Until this moment, Leo
and Cupp had never spoken before, and now Cup can't
hide his excitement.
Speaker 18 (45:45):
He says to me, I'm going to get you out
of there in ninety days, buddy, my wife was giddy.
He was giddy, and this is my mom's feeling.
Speaker 17 (45:56):
I magravated the shit.
Speaker 18 (45:57):
I'm like, you gotta fucking be kidding me, you know,
he sounds half lit. I'm in a prison and my
emotions are now exploding.
Speaker 2 (46:09):
The next morning, Chrissy comes to the prison and meets
with Leo in the visitation room.
Speaker 16 (46:14):
So I sit down and I say, we have a
match on the fingerprints and give him a name. And
at the time, I didn't realize how difficult that was
going to be for him. It was very painful. His
first reaction was to put his head down and cry.
Speaker 18 (46:37):
I've had this mantle of a murderer on my shoulders
for all these years, you know, And to come out
and say, we got the guy's we got him. He's
forensically linked, we know who it is.
Speaker 16 (46:48):
He's a murderer, and.
Speaker 18 (46:49):
All this other stuff, and I'm saying, that's the guy
who murdered my life, you know what I mean.
Speaker 17 (46:54):
So there was so much.
Speaker 18 (46:56):
It's just it was an explosion of stuff and I
got I was, I was, I was really mad, and
it took me some days too long.
Speaker 17 (47:08):
To get control of.
Speaker 2 (47:22):
When Sindon notifies the Polk County Sheriff's Office about the Prince,
a new investigation into Jeremy Scott is opened. Two cold
case detectives from the Polk County Sheriff's Office are sent
to interview Jeremy in prison. They tell him that his
prints were found inside the car of Michelle Schofield, who
(47:42):
was murdered eighteen years ago. They asked Jeremy what he knows.
Jeremy says he doesn't know anything about a murder, but
if his fingerprints are in the car, maybe he'd broken
into it. He tells them he must have stolen a
half dozen car stereos while he was living on the streets,
but he's clearly shaken. Soon after the detectives leave, Jeremy
(48:05):
calls the only person he's in contact with outside of prison,
his grandmother, Arlene, and this call is recorded by the
Florida Department of Corrections.
Speaker 18 (48:17):
Grandma, I want you to listen carefully.
Speaker 19 (48:20):
All right, all right, I'm listening.
Speaker 5 (48:22):
Has anybody come tward to you?
Speaker 19 (48:24):
What murder? Murder?
Speaker 5 (48:27):
Murder?
Speaker 19 (48:28):
Who got murdered some girl back in eighty seven, eighty seven.
Speaker 18 (48:33):
When we lived on Combe Road.
Speaker 5 (48:35):
Yeah, they said they found the girl's body in the lake.
Speaker 19 (48:40):
Lor right, Well just tell them you don't know nothing,
and I ain't seen nothing, heard nothing, and just leave
you alone for they coming back. Grandma, Well just tell
him you don't know nothing. But they call him back, Grandma.
They ain't got no proof, so they got all that
(49:00):
could have been anybody too, right, What I mean, m
damn cops. All they do is frame vapl Oh Lord,
they're prom stupid. I hate god damn cops. Son of
a pictures. I hate them, girl, they come to get me.
Speaker 2 (49:31):
Bone Valley is a production of Lava for Good Podcasts
in association with Signal Company Number One. Our executive producers
are Jason Flam and Kevin Wordiskaen Krnhaber is our senior producer.
Brit Spangler is our sound designer. Roxandra Greedy is our editor.
Fact checking by Maximo Anderson. Our producer and researcher is
(49:54):
Kelsey Decker. 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 Hardy
Correctional Institution. Bone Valley is written and produced by me
Gilbert King. You can follow the show on Instagram, Facebook,
(50:15):
and Twitter at Lava for Good. To see photos and
documents from our investigation and exclusive behind the scenes content,
visit Lava Forgood dot com slash Bone Valley
Host
Gilbert King
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