April 9, 2025 • 36 mins
After Bone Valley Season 1, something unexpected happened: people began to respond to Jeremy Scott—not for who he was, but for what he did—finally telling the truth. Among those drawn in is someone who has every reason not to be: Jeremy’s son, Justin. Now 35, Justin has never met his father, never wanted to. But something’s shifted. He wants answers.
Through a conversation years in the making, Justin’s mother Jami opens up about the relationship she once had with Jeremy—a relationship she’s never fully shared with anyone. Now, through Gilbert, mother and son begin to uncover a truth that’s been buried for decades.
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New episodes of Bone Valley Season 2 will be available every Wednesday wherever you get your podcasts or subscribe to Lava for Good + on Apple Podcasts to binge the whole season, ad-free now.
Bone Valley is a production of Lava for Good Podcasts in association with Signal Co. No1.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:09):
Something unexpected happened after I told you the story of
a man convicted of murdering his own wife.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
I am one hundred percent innocent.
Speaker 3 (00:19):
That means someone else killed in my wife.
Speaker 1 (00:23):
If you haven't heard Season one of Bone Valley, you
might want to go back and listen. It's the story
of Leo Schofield, who spent thirty six years in prison
for a crime he swears he did not commit.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
I just want justice for my dead wife. That's what
I want.
Speaker 1 (00:39):
After investigating his case for years, I'm convinced he's telling
the truth because I also met the one man who
says he knows for sure that Leo is innocent.
Speaker 4 (00:51):
I'm saying he didn't do it, that's what I mean.
And he didn't do it.
Speaker 1 (00:56):
Jeremy Scott told me in terrifying detail how he was
the one who killed Michelle Schofield.
Speaker 4 (01:04):
So she gave me a ride, and that's one of them.
I guess I lost it Dan and she went to
screaming and panicing and stuff.
Speaker 1 (01:14):
When I first learned about Jeremy Scott, I didn't want
to know any more than I had. Here was a
man with a history of extraordinary violence. He was impulsive,
and volatile, attacking random citizens and teenage girls on the outside,
and cellmates, guards and nurses while locked behind bars. I'll
(01:37):
admit at first I saw Jeremy as sort of a monster.
It was Leo, of all people who changed my mind. Leo,
whose wife was murdered by this man, was able to
see something in Jeremy that I couldn't.
Speaker 3 (02:01):
And I was looking for this creature that you know,
I couldn't. I could hate that, I could I could
detest that, could be repulsed by and vindicated in all
of it. And then you see him and what is he?
He's a broken individual, broken vessel, someone who's never known
what it is to be loved. My prayer is that
(02:22):
somehow he comes to know love that gives him some
kind of peace.
Speaker 1 (02:27):
Jeremy was trying to tell me and anyone who would
listen the truth that he was the guilty one, not Leo.
Speaker 4 (02:36):
I've been trying to help him and doing everything I could.
Speaker 1 (02:44):
In season one of Bone Valley, I told you the
story of a man fighting to prove his innocence. This
season the story of a man trying to prove his
own guilt and the unlikely collection of people who heard
Jeremy confess of nowhere step forward to help him make
things right.
Speaker 2 (03:05):
So I spoke to Jeremy yesterday.
Speaker 5 (03:08):
You know when I try to encourage him to stay
out of trouble, and I would.
Speaker 2 (03:11):
Tell him because I did love him. I did love Jeremy.
Speaker 1 (03:15):
It wasn't until you knew him a little bit, right,
I just knew him as a kid.
Speaker 6 (03:19):
Yeah, Gilbert King Home, I'm the son of Jeremy and Scott.
Speaker 1 (03:29):
Jeremy Scott confessed and the state of Florida doesn't believe him.
These are the stories of the people who do.
Speaker 2 (03:37):
When y'all wanted to talk to me, before I tried,
I couldn't do it. I never talked to anybody about
any of this. I couldn't see here. A year ago,
I couldn't do it. I could do it today.
Speaker 7 (03:55):
Everything in life takes effect, you know, Like I don't
want to hide nothing. Everything I say I want everybody
to hear, Like like, at the end of the day,
I'm literally a son of a killer.
Speaker 8 (04:23):
Do you, my maness, love to have my feet sorru
steps sorn in this vastity? Uh see relation.
Speaker 9 (04:52):
Outreach dezhday stuff.
Speaker 1 (05:11):
So Boom Valley Season two Jeremy Chapter one, you told
(05:32):
me No. One morning in the fall of twenty twenty two,
I woke up to a flood of text messages, a
mist call, and a voicemail that came in at one am.
Speaker 6 (05:46):
Hi, Gilbert King. This is Justin Allen. I was born
on March nineteen eighty nine. I'm the son of Jamie Allens.
Her name is to be Chaney Allen and the son
of Jeremylyn Scott.
Speaker 1 (06:08):
Jeremy's son wanted to talk to me.
Speaker 6 (06:12):
Maybe he just called me that please.
Speaker 1 (06:16):
I texted him back right away and we started chatting.
His messages felt urgent. He just finished listening to his
father confessed to murder. Justin wrote, sorry for getting excited
and talking so much. I've never had a chance to
talk about my dad. And I'm thirty four.
Speaker 7 (06:37):
Hello, Hey, Justin, Hey, it's Gilbert.
Speaker 6 (06:40):
How are you.
Speaker 7 (06:42):
I'm pretty good.
Speaker 2 (06:43):
How you doing. I'm doing good.
Speaker 1 (06:44):
I'm so sorry I missed you last night.
Speaker 3 (06:46):
I know it was it was late.
Speaker 8 (06:47):
I was listening the.
Speaker 7 (06:48):
Whole time I woke up. I was a little crazy.
Speaker 1 (06:52):
Yeah, I could imagine it. I mean one of the
first of a long list of things Justin wants to
talk about is actually not his dad, it's Leo. Justin
has listened to our podcast, done all these sleepless calculations,
and he's come to this.
Speaker 2 (07:06):
Conclusion with the Oh Leo situation.
Speaker 7 (07:10):
If you really stop and think about it, I pretty
much owe him my life.
Speaker 1 (07:14):
If Jeremy had gone to jail instead of Leo, Justin
would have never been conceived.
Speaker 7 (07:19):
Something about it. The murder was in nineteen eighty seven, right, right, Okay,
Leo ended up taking the hit from my dad. But
within that time, my dad was free, you know, and
he was still with my mom and they had me.
So if the cops and everything would have done their
job properly, my dad would have been in jail. I
would have never existed.
Speaker 1 (07:39):
While we're on the phone, I realized Justin is with
his own son.
Speaker 7 (07:43):
I'm sorry, I'm holding I'm holding my boy right now,
and it's pacing back and forth and not a lot
on my mind. Yeah, yeah, here, hold on, here's some grims.
He wants the color now.
Speaker 2 (07:56):
His birthday was yesterday, oh sweet, two years old.
Speaker 1 (07:59):
Yeah, he just He tells me he's raising his son
with his girlfriend Ariel, who also has three young daughters
from a prior relationship.
Speaker 7 (08:07):
That's how I look at it. They're my girls because
I take care of him with my girl.
Speaker 1 (08:11):
This is why his voicemail came in so late at night.
He's incredibly busy. He works the night shift as a
supermarket manager and during the day he's taking care of
the kids while Ariels at work.
Speaker 7 (08:22):
My boy two years old, and I'll talk about him
walking and trying to talk now and everything else. He
likes supermonsters. You know, I'm trying to teach him right.
And this is all thanks to Leo taking the fucking
hit for my dad.
Speaker 1 (08:36):
Justin tells me he feels immense guilt about Leo Schofield.
Speaker 10 (08:40):
If I'm able to help Leo, it'll make me feel
uncomfortable about myself because I feel guilty even being alive.
I'm not gonna lie like because think about it, the
dude lost his wife and had to go to jail
for thirty five years just to have the killer that
killed your wife son live.
Speaker 1 (08:58):
In the podcast, he heard his dad trying to tell
the truth about Michelle's murder to help absolve Leo. It
was the first time he ever heard his.
Speaker 7 (09:08):
Dad speak dude. When I heard my dad's voice. That
shit hit me because no one ever talks about my dad.
Speaker 1 (09:15):
Yeah, Justin told me growing up, his mom never spoke
about his dad at all. Nothing bad, nothing good, just nothing.
But when he was around other family members, he'd catch
bits and pieces.
Speaker 7 (09:31):
You know, I didn't know my dad was, you know,
from a young age. I listened. I'm not stupid, like
I knew he killed from a very young age. It's
just whenever I hear stories about him, is always something different.
I don't know what's true or falls.
Speaker 1 (09:44):
Yeah, as we talk, I get the sense that overnight,
Justin has embarked on a delicate and complicated mission to
find out everything he can about his dad, however difficult,
and to see if any of what he learns can
bolster his dad's confession and help Leo. A big part
of that mission is getting his mom, Jamie, to talk
(10:05):
to me. Among the texts he sent me were screenshots
of a Facebook conversation he had with her. He tells
her he just finished listening to the podcast, and he
floods the chat box between them with questions about Jeremy's murders,
whether or not Jeremy really loved her, if he tried
to kill her. She answers his questions, and she tells
(10:27):
him that his dad only saw him once.
Speaker 7 (10:30):
We didn't want to attest. The first time he ever
cried in front of her was seeing me. He's never
once held me.
Speaker 1 (10:40):
I already knew something about Justin's mom, Jamie Nellams. She
was Jeremy's girlfriend around the time of Michelle Schofield's murder.
While I was investigating Jeremy's crimes. I saw her name
in police reports, so Kelsey and I tried to talk
to her years ago. She even agreed to meet us
for lunch at a nearby restaurant County. She texted me
(11:02):
that she was on her way. We waited and waited,
but Jamie never showed up and I never heard from
her again. But now, after hearing his dad talk for
the very first time, Justin was asking Jamie to talk
to me. In the messages to his mom, he talked
about hearing Jeremy's voice. He wrote, he sounded alone and afraid,
(11:25):
always on guard. Trust issues. Weirded me out. How alike
we are. He wanted to know if she heard the
podcast too. She says, I haven't. I'm sorry, hon, I
can't bring myself to hear his voice again. He says,
I understand fully, and when he tells her, I'm trying
to contact Gilbert King now and see what happens. She
(11:47):
says he tried to contact me a while back. I
wouldn't talk to him. I just couldn't do it. Later on,
she says, my psych doctor thinks I should tell my
story to Gilbert King if it would be therapeutic. Justin
urges me to contact her again. He says, she wants
to talk.
Speaker 2 (12:07):
Now.
Speaker 7 (12:14):
How are you feeling about this.
Speaker 2 (12:17):
Microphone and all that? It's it's it's okay.
Speaker 6 (12:20):
I'm a little.
Speaker 2 (12:21):
More okay with it now than I was. It's just,
you know, when all this first starting, and then I
spent so many years trying not to think about it
and not to talk about it.
Speaker 1 (12:36):
Kelsey and I rent a hotel room for an interview
with Jamie.
Speaker 2 (12:39):
It was it was really rough there for a while
because I went through years of nightmares and the paranoia.
Speaker 1 (12:48):
Kelsey has arranged the room simply, three chairs, a table
in the middle, and two microphones set up.
Speaker 2 (12:55):
Yeah, I'm gonna say, if you don't mind.
Speaker 1 (12:57):
I sit down across from Jamie. She's dressed in jeans,
and a blouse, her short brown hair showing just a
hint of gray. She's visibly nervous as we settle around
the table doing this. I wanted to start slowly, assuming
she might have a hard time opening up. But as
she spoke, I realized that this was going to be
(13:18):
different from the Jamie I had come to know through
depositions and courtroom transcripts.
Speaker 2 (13:23):
Justin finally reached a point where he wanted to start
asking questions.
Speaker 1 (13:26):
In those formal settings, she was responding to lawyers focused
solely on the facts. Here, it became clear she was
responding to Justin. She was determined to give him the
answers he'd always wanted about his father's life and her own.
Speaker 2 (13:43):
If me dealing with my crap can help him, it's
worth it. It's worth it. I can deal with this
to help him. If it's just for me, I wouldn't
be doing this. I wouldn't be saying I'm just being real.
(14:04):
If it was just to do your book or just
to do a podcast or whatever, I wouldn't be sitting here.
I'm doing this for Justin. I really am.
Speaker 10 (14:34):
Where were you born?
Speaker 2 (14:35):
You know, what did your parents do for a living?
Speaker 8 (14:37):
Just give us an idea of your growing up and
what you were doing.
Speaker 2 (14:40):
Okay, I can remember weekends at my grandmother's house. She
had thirteen kids, and there'd be like thirty of us,
all as cousins. We'd go over on Friday, we'd stay
there to Sunday. The parents would all be in the
house playing canasta all weekend. They'd had their weekend marathon.
(15:02):
The kids were outside playing.
Speaker 11 (15:04):
We used to play in the orange grow and Jamie,
all of us be cousins.
Speaker 5 (15:08):
We would go over there and we would play like
freeze tag or you know, hide and seek, and you
know things like that in the orange growth.
Speaker 1 (15:16):
Jennifer Stone lived just two doors down from Jamie's grandma.
Speaker 5 (15:20):
We knew all the neighbors. All the neighbors knew all
the kids and who they belonged to. So if you
did something you weren't supposed to, your parents were going
to hear about it.
Speaker 1 (15:28):
When Jamie was seven, her mom married a strict and
controlling ex navy guy. By the time she turns seventeen,
they're divorced and her mom gets a job as head
nurse at a local hospital.
Speaker 2 (15:40):
She worked to all of our chiefs, so we were
pretty much on our own.
Speaker 1 (15:44):
Jamie found herself experiencing a new sense of freedom, one
she'd never known before. With her stepfather out of the picture,
she could finally breathe, and in that space there's a
quiet resistance to the controls she'd grown up under.
Speaker 2 (15:58):
Well, we found that club secret picture, a rave club
with no alcohol. It was a safe place for teenagers.
They didn't let people over eighteen in and it was
a dance club. It had the flashing lights and the
neon lights, and we would wear the white shirts or
(16:19):
with the black lights, you know, it would kind of glow.
Speaker 1 (16:23):
One night in April nineteen eighty seven, Jamie sitting in
the chair right off the dance floor. She's got thick
brown hair and glasses like a wallflower, hiding off to
the side with her friend Maria when they see this
teenage boy enter the club. He's tall and thin, and
he moves with confidence and a quiet presence. It's hard
to ignore. His name is Jeremy Scott.
Speaker 2 (16:46):
None of us had ever seen him before, and he's
heading toward them. Well, when I first met him, the
first thing I thought was his eyes. He had the
most purecing eye. They would just like look into you,
and I remember sitting in the chairs and he was
(17:09):
wearing all black, so you couldn't really see him, but
you could see his eyes and he was just staring
at me. And I can remember being nervous, you know,
because I'd never had a boyfriend before and never really talked.
I was so shy, so shy mad. And I remember
him kicking my chair and saying, you want to dance?
(17:34):
And we danced and that that was it.
Speaker 1 (17:45):
At the end of the night, Jeremy walked her to
her car.
Speaker 2 (17:49):
I had a big seventy three Cutlas Supreme.
Speaker 1 (17:53):
Jamie's friend Maria, leaned on one side of the car with.
Speaker 2 (17:56):
Her boyfriend and they were hugging and kissing and stuff.
Speaker 1 (17:59):
Well, Jeremy and Jamie settled by the driver's.
Speaker 2 (18:02):
Side and we just kind of stood there awkwardly for
a few minutes, and he asked if next Friday i'd
meet him at the mall. Well, I was kind of
iffy because the ones that went to the mall were
the type of kids that didn't go to secrets, you know.
These were the smokers and the drinkers, and that's where
(18:23):
the cops would always show up, was at the mall.
But I said, yeah, I'd meet him at the mall,
and I did.
Speaker 1 (18:37):
From what I've learned about Jeremy, secret seems like the
last place he'd want to be. Tight supervision, no alcohol,
and parents hovering just outside. So a few nights later,
Jamie meets up with Jeremy at one of his usual
spots behind the Lakeland Mall.
Speaker 2 (18:54):
Now, when I met him at the mall, I asked
him where he was staying at, and he said he
was staying downtown. He did ask me for a ride home,
and I had dropped him off at this house. And
I remember looking at this house and thinking it looked abandoned,
like nobody lived there, like it was falling apart. But
(19:15):
there was lights on upstairs, there was people staying there.
It was all kids like him. They were hijacking electricity
off the apartment complex behind it with cords, so that's
how they had lights on. So, come to find out,
(19:35):
that's where he stayed out a lot, and that's where
he would take me a lot of times, was to
abandon houses. And that's where you know, he'd be like,
you're staying with me tonight, and we'd go downtown and
find an abandoned building and we'd climb in and go
to sleep, And here I got a nice townhouse and
bed waiting for me at home, and I'm in love,
(19:57):
you know, And honestly, if I want to be honest,
it was kind of exciting.
Speaker 1 (20:03):
Jeremy's hanging out with people like this guy named Rambo Stocky,
twenty something who wears Camo, rides a motorcycle, and who
spent some time in the Polk County jail and burglary charges.
Speaker 11 (20:14):
They were not my people.
Speaker 1 (20:16):
Jamie's childhood friend, Jennifer was less than impressed with Jamie's
new boyfriend.
Speaker 5 (20:21):
I wasn't comfortable with the people that he was with,
and I never understood what she saw in him, to
be honest with you, they were, you know, the headbanging
rock and roller, you know, the drugging type was what
we referred to him as they were just looking at them. Okay,
(20:43):
so very judgmental, but being an adult now, I would
say a bunch of loadlifes. But she was my friend,
you know, we were young but dumb kids.
Speaker 1 (20:54):
She was in love Jamie spending more and more time
trying to understand Jeremy's secret off the grid world. She
wants to know more about him and the people who
matter in his life.
Speaker 2 (21:06):
He talked a lot about his grandmother. He talked a
lot about his grandfather and how they used to call
him Jeremiah, and that Jeremiah was a bullfrog. That was
his grandfather's favorite song, and they called him Bam Bam,
and they thought it was so cute because he'd beat
everything up with sticks and stuff and thought it was funny.
Speaker 1 (21:27):
As we talk with Jamie, since she was allowing herself
to remember not just the painful truth Justin would have
to confront about his father, but perhaps for the first
time in decades, she was willing to think about why
she'd once been drawn to Jeremy Scott.
Speaker 2 (21:42):
Jeremy had that good side, and he had that funny side,
and he could be sweet and caring, and you know,
he had that good in him.
Speaker 7 (21:54):
I saw it.
Speaker 1 (21:56):
But Jamie also found herself doing things for Jeremy, things
she never would have imagined doing before she met him.
At first, it wasn't anything too bad, just sort of weird.
Speaker 2 (22:07):
I had money, you know, all I had to do
was ask. But he would take me and we'd go
donate plasma and we'd do that three times a week.
Speaker 1 (22:17):
It's not unlike giving blood to the Red Cross. They
go into a harsh, fluorescent lit room where people wait
in long lines, trading the plasma and their blood for cash.
Speaker 2 (22:28):
And I know the first time he took me, it
was like one hundred dollars for being a first time donor,
they pay you a large amount. But then after that,
I think it was like twenty five first time, fifteen
the second time, and ten the third time, so it
was like fifty bucks something like that, and then as
soon as we get done, I'd give him the money.
Speaker 1 (22:54):
It's like they live in separate worlds. Well, Jamie rollerskates
with friends. Jeremy's getting drunk in the park. Well she's
in school. He's breaking into houses and pawning whatever he can.
Speaker 2 (23:06):
And we hadn't been together a while, and we weren't
together all the time. I mean, this is a thing
you've got to understand. I would see him for two
or three days, and then I wouldn't see him for
three or four months. And then i'd see him for
two or three days, and then I wouldn't see him
for six weeks. He didn't have a house phone, he
didn't have a house, so he'd either call me from
a payphone, or I wentn't hear from him, And when
(23:30):
he would show up, he'd call from a paythone, Hey,
meet me down the road. Then when I would see him,
it was constant. He was right there in my face, constant,
and I couldn't go anywhere do anything without him right there.
Speaker 1 (23:57):
One day, Jeremy tells Jamie he wants to take a
trip a few hours north. Jeremy gets behind the wheel,
even though he doesn't have a license.
Speaker 2 (24:06):
He was wanting me to meet his mom. I hadn't
met his mom yet.
Speaker 1 (24:11):
After hours of driving, they finally make it to Perry, Florida.
Jeremy pulls into a gas station where his mother, Linda
is working.
Speaker 2 (24:20):
It was the only gas station in the hotel. And
I can remember us pulling up to the hess station
and her coming out, and her exact words were, what
the eff are you doing here? And I just kind
of sat there and shock, you know, I'm like, I'm like, oh,
(24:40):
this is his mom. And he turned around and he
got back in the car and we drove down the
road and he pulled off the side of the road
and I looked at him and I said, are you okay?
And I guess I shouldn't have said that. And as
soon as I said, are U okay, he punched me
(25:01):
as hard as he could and he kicked me out
of the car. And I remember him kicking me out
of the car. I mean looking down this road and
there's nothing but palmmeadow trees and big old pine trees
and nothing. There's no building, you know, And I started crying,
and I'm thinking, he's going to leave me here. I
(25:22):
don't know anybody. I'm not going to talk to that lady.
I'm not talking to her. She talks to her son
that way. What's she gonna say to me? Yeah? And
about ten minutes later, he came back. He came back,
and he picked me back up.
Speaker 1 (25:42):
They make the long, quiet drive back to Polk County.
From that moment on, her fear was mounting. And always there,
(26:15):
sitting in that hotel room with Jamie, listening to her
go back in time, I could see she was entering
some of the territories she tried to leave behind, things
that caused her a lot of pain and at times
probably caused justin some pain too.
Speaker 7 (26:31):
She tried it, but she struggled a lot, like she
was far from a perfect mom. But she loved us. Yeah,
like I give her that. She loved us for all
her heart and I knew that, but.
Speaker 1 (26:41):
It was a constant battle to keep Jeremy out of
her mind.
Speaker 2 (26:45):
I was burying them from me. Does that make sense?
So it wasn't that I was trying to protect Justin.
It wasn't that I was trying to keep them from Justin.
I didn't talk about to anybody.
Speaker 1 (26:58):
But now, with wanting to know everything, Jamie told me
it was time she said it all out loud. She
takes us back to nineteen eighty eight, she's dating Jeremy
and he disappears yet again.
Speaker 2 (27:16):
I still don't know what he went to prison for.
I remember asking him several times and he never answered me.
I know Jeremy used to like to wait outside the
Green Parrot and wait for the gay people to leave,
and he'd beat him up with baseball bats and stuff.
Speaker 1 (27:33):
He'd hang outside Lakeland's gay bars like the Green Parrot
and Fantasy two thousand.
Speaker 2 (27:38):
As a matter of fact, that's how he ended up
with stitches that one night. He ended up with stitches
in his knee in his head because he waited outside
Green Parrot and they knew he was there and jumped
him and he got some of his own medicine.
Speaker 1 (27:53):
The lesson doesn't take, and he's soon back at Lake
Morton after dark, prowling for his next targets.
Speaker 2 (28:00):
I mean, everybody knew what Lake Morton was, and that
was the gay hangout, and a lot of them got robbed,
a lot of them got beat up, a lot of
them got hurt, and it was just never reported. It
was never in the newspapers, but everybody knew about it.
Speaker 1 (28:20):
I know from going through court records that Robin gay
Men is not what Jeremy went to prison for this time. Instead,
it was for breaking into a home in Lakeland stealing
a few cameras of VCR and some other electronics. He
was caught, convicted, and sentenced to state prison, where he
spent over four months until his release in May of
(28:41):
nineteen eighty eight.
Speaker 2 (28:43):
When he got out from that was when he was
really different. And I don't know if something happened while
he was in prison or I don't know what it was,
but he was a total different person. And that's when
his eyes were empty and there was nothing, I mean,
(29:05):
he never smiled, there was nothing, There was nothing there,
and I can remember looking at him and just not
even really recognizing him, not even knowing who he was.
Speaker 1 (29:24):
Weeks after Jeremy got out of prison, Jamie remembers him
disappearing again. For a while, she didn't see or hear
from him. She had no idea where he was until
one hot summer morning, when Jamie, her sisters, and her
mom were getting ready to head to Disney World for
the day.
Speaker 2 (29:43):
He shows up that morning. I hadn't seen him in
like three weeks. My mom was nice enough to offer
to pay for him to go to Disney World with us,
and he said no. But then he told me I
couldn't go, and my mom put her foot down. Now
she's going. We've already bought tickets. It's a family day.
(30:04):
We're going. That was the first time I'd ever told
him no. I had never told him no before ever
for anything. Anything he ever asked me to do, I.
Speaker 1 (30:16):
Did it, except for this time. Jamie leaves with her
mom and her sisters. They spend the entire day at
the Magic Kingdom, and as they step into their ground
floor apartment that night, they see him. Jeremy. He's outside
knocking on the sliding glass door.
Speaker 2 (30:39):
He was in the backyard waiting, and I'm pretty sure
he sat there all day.
Speaker 1 (30:46):
Jamie steps out into the backyard. Jeremy gives a small wave,
motioning for her to follow. It's dark now. Jeremy leads
her to a spot behind the townhouses, out of sight.
Speaker 2 (31:01):
He bent over and he stood up and he turned
around and he said, you told me no. And that's
the last thing I remember. And that's when it really
got bad, because I think that's when it was ingrained
in me to never again tell him no. And I
(31:22):
never did.
Speaker 11 (31:35):
I remember. I remember something with her jaw.
Speaker 5 (31:39):
It was always kind of kind of about a whack,
not properly aligned, and I thought she was in a
car accident.
Speaker 11 (31:48):
It was my understanding of what happened. Is that really
what happened.
Speaker 7 (31:54):
I don't know.
Speaker 5 (31:55):
She had bruises, and you know, there was a couple
of times you could see where it looked like he
grabbed her, someone grabbed her. You know, she had bruises
on her arms and it looked like someone had punched
her in the face.
Speaker 11 (32:07):
But you know, it was I felt.
Speaker 5 (32:09):
I can't remember what her explanation was, but you know,
I felt like, you know, I wasn't paying attention, but
it was. She always explained it away. So what are
you going to say. I never saw him do anything.
She never told me he did anything.
Speaker 2 (32:28):
I think there was a part of me that thought
I could help him, that I could make it better,
make him feel loved, and he'd be okay, and maybe
he wouldn't do the things that he was doing, you
know what I'm saying. But I know that by the
end it was all fear, that there was no There
(32:49):
was no love there. It was all fear. Jeremy was
in jail when I found out I was pregnant.
Speaker 1 (33:02):
By the fall of nineteen eighty eight, Jamie's been seeing
Jeremy for about a year and a half, always on
his terms. She's eighteen now and she drops out of school.
Speaker 2 (33:14):
I was having to stay with my grandmother because my
mom found out I was pregnant and she kicked me out.
So I was living at my grandmother's house and Jeremy
showed up and I was showing I was scared to death,
and I can remember him calling me a couple weeks
later and telling me some fullless story about he was
(33:39):
dying of some disease and I needed to find somebody else,
and I can remember thinking about in my mind, he's
breaking up with me because I'm pregnant, and the sick
part of me was angry, how dare you break up
with me because I'm pregnant with your kid? And I
(34:00):
can remember I started crying and my aunt Mary walked in.
She's like, what's wrong with you? And I said, he
just broke up with me because I'm pregnant. And then
all of a sudden, I caught myself when I stopped,
and I smiled, and I said, he just broke up
with me because I'm pregnant.
Speaker 1 (34:18):
Jamie thought she was finally rid of Jeremy and all
the chaos, the violence and the abuse. But two weeks
later he's back, this time with blood on his pants
and a stolen car he wants Jamie to get in,
and by now Jamie knows the consequences of telling Jeremy no.
Speaker 2 (34:43):
Next time, I knew I wasn't coming back. I knew
if they didn't catch him, I was going to die.
Speaker 1 (34:58):
Own Valley is a production of LoVa for Good podcast
in association with Signal Company Number One. Our executive producers
are Jason Flomm, Jeff Kempler and Kevin Wordis. Karen Kornhaber
is our senior producer. Jackie Pauley and Hannah Biel are
our producers. Britz Spangler is our sound designer. Marianne McCune
(35:19):
is our editor. Fact checking by Dania Sulemant. Jeff Cliburn
is our head of marketing and operations. Our Social media
director is Ismati Guardrama, our Social Media manager is Sarah Gibbons,
and our art director is Andrew Nelson. Additional research and
production by Kelsey Decker. Additional sound recording by James Johnson.
(35:43):
Bone Valley is written and produced by Me Gilbert King.
Follow us on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and threads at Lava
for Good
Something unexpected happened after I told you the story of
a man convicted of murdering his own wife.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
I am one hundred percent innocent.
Speaker 3 (00:19):
That means someone else killed in my wife.
Speaker 1 (00:23):
If you haven't heard Season one of Bone Valley, you
might want to go back and listen. It's the story
of Leo Schofield, who spent thirty six years in prison
for a crime he swears he did not commit.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
I just want justice for my dead wife. That's what
I want.
Speaker 1 (00:39):
After investigating his case for years, I'm convinced he's telling
the truth because I also met the one man who
says he knows for sure that Leo is innocent.
Speaker 4 (00:51):
I'm saying he didn't do it, that's what I mean.
And he didn't do it.
Speaker 1 (00:56):
Jeremy Scott told me in terrifying detail how he was
the one who killed Michelle Schofield.
Speaker 4 (01:04):
So she gave me a ride, and that's one of them.
I guess I lost it Dan and she went to
screaming and panicing and stuff.
Speaker 1 (01:14):
When I first learned about Jeremy Scott, I didn't want
to know any more than I had. Here was a
man with a history of extraordinary violence. He was impulsive,
and volatile, attacking random citizens and teenage girls on the outside,
and cellmates, guards and nurses while locked behind bars. I'll
(01:37):
admit at first I saw Jeremy as sort of a monster.
It was Leo, of all people who changed my mind. Leo,
whose wife was murdered by this man, was able to
see something in Jeremy that I couldn't.
Speaker 3 (02:01):
And I was looking for this creature that you know,
I couldn't. I could hate that, I could I could
detest that, could be repulsed by and vindicated in all
of it. And then you see him and what is he?
He's a broken individual, broken vessel, someone who's never known
what it is to be loved. My prayer is that
(02:22):
somehow he comes to know love that gives him some
kind of peace.
Speaker 1 (02:27):
Jeremy was trying to tell me and anyone who would
listen the truth that he was the guilty one, not Leo.
Speaker 4 (02:36):
I've been trying to help him and doing everything I could.
Speaker 1 (02:44):
In season one of Bone Valley, I told you the
story of a man fighting to prove his innocence. This
season the story of a man trying to prove his
own guilt and the unlikely collection of people who heard
Jeremy confess of nowhere step forward to help him make
things right.
Speaker 2 (03:05):
So I spoke to Jeremy yesterday.
Speaker 5 (03:08):
You know when I try to encourage him to stay
out of trouble, and I would.
Speaker 2 (03:11):
Tell him because I did love him. I did love Jeremy.
Speaker 1 (03:15):
It wasn't until you knew him a little bit, right,
I just knew him as a kid.
Speaker 6 (03:19):
Yeah, Gilbert King Home, I'm the son of Jeremy and Scott.
Speaker 1 (03:29):
Jeremy Scott confessed and the state of Florida doesn't believe him.
These are the stories of the people who do.
Speaker 2 (03:37):
When y'all wanted to talk to me, before I tried,
I couldn't do it. I never talked to anybody about
any of this. I couldn't see here. A year ago,
I couldn't do it. I could do it today.
Speaker 7 (03:55):
Everything in life takes effect, you know, Like I don't
want to hide nothing. Everything I say I want everybody
to hear, Like like, at the end of the day,
I'm literally a son of a killer.
Speaker 8 (04:23):
Do you, my maness, love to have my feet sorru
steps sorn in this vastity? Uh see relation.
Speaker 9 (04:52):
Outreach dezhday stuff.
Speaker 1 (05:11):
So Boom Valley Season two Jeremy Chapter one, you told
(05:32):
me No. One morning in the fall of twenty twenty two,
I woke up to a flood of text messages, a
mist call, and a voicemail that came in at one am.
Speaker 6 (05:46):
Hi, Gilbert King. This is Justin Allen. I was born
on March nineteen eighty nine. I'm the son of Jamie Allens.
Her name is to be Chaney Allen and the son
of Jeremylyn Scott.
Speaker 1 (06:08):
Jeremy's son wanted to talk to me.
Speaker 6 (06:12):
Maybe he just called me that please.
Speaker 1 (06:16):
I texted him back right away and we started chatting.
His messages felt urgent. He just finished listening to his
father confessed to murder. Justin wrote, sorry for getting excited
and talking so much. I've never had a chance to
talk about my dad. And I'm thirty four.
Speaker 7 (06:37):
Hello, Hey, Justin, Hey, it's Gilbert.
Speaker 6 (06:40):
How are you.
Speaker 7 (06:42):
I'm pretty good.
Speaker 2 (06:43):
How you doing. I'm doing good.
Speaker 1 (06:44):
I'm so sorry I missed you last night.
Speaker 3 (06:46):
I know it was it was late.
Speaker 8 (06:47):
I was listening the.
Speaker 7 (06:48):
Whole time I woke up. I was a little crazy.
Speaker 1 (06:52):
Yeah, I could imagine it. I mean one of the
first of a long list of things Justin wants to
talk about is actually not his dad, it's Leo. Justin
has listened to our podcast, done all these sleepless calculations,
and he's come to this.
Speaker 2 (07:06):
Conclusion with the Oh Leo situation.
Speaker 7 (07:10):
If you really stop and think about it, I pretty
much owe him my life.
Speaker 1 (07:14):
If Jeremy had gone to jail instead of Leo, Justin
would have never been conceived.
Speaker 7 (07:19):
Something about it. The murder was in nineteen eighty seven, right, right, Okay,
Leo ended up taking the hit from my dad. But
within that time, my dad was free, you know, and
he was still with my mom and they had me.
So if the cops and everything would have done their
job properly, my dad would have been in jail. I
would have never existed.
Speaker 1 (07:39):
While we're on the phone, I realized Justin is with
his own son.
Speaker 7 (07:43):
I'm sorry, I'm holding I'm holding my boy right now,
and it's pacing back and forth and not a lot
on my mind. Yeah, yeah, here, hold on, here's some grims.
He wants the color now.
Speaker 2 (07:56):
His birthday was yesterday, oh sweet, two years old.
Speaker 1 (07:59):
Yeah, he just He tells me he's raising his son
with his girlfriend Ariel, who also has three young daughters
from a prior relationship.
Speaker 7 (08:07):
That's how I look at it. They're my girls because
I take care of him with my girl.
Speaker 1 (08:11):
This is why his voicemail came in so late at night.
He's incredibly busy. He works the night shift as a
supermarket manager and during the day he's taking care of
the kids while Ariels at work.
Speaker 7 (08:22):
My boy two years old, and I'll talk about him
walking and trying to talk now and everything else. He
likes supermonsters. You know, I'm trying to teach him right.
And this is all thanks to Leo taking the fucking
hit for my dad.
Speaker 1 (08:36):
Justin tells me he feels immense guilt about Leo Schofield.
Speaker 10 (08:40):
If I'm able to help Leo, it'll make me feel
uncomfortable about myself because I feel guilty even being alive.
I'm not gonna lie like because think about it, the
dude lost his wife and had to go to jail
for thirty five years just to have the killer that
killed your wife son live.
Speaker 1 (08:58):
In the podcast, he heard his dad trying to tell
the truth about Michelle's murder to help absolve Leo. It
was the first time he ever heard his.
Speaker 7 (09:08):
Dad speak dude. When I heard my dad's voice. That
shit hit me because no one ever talks about my dad.
Speaker 1 (09:15):
Yeah, Justin told me growing up, his mom never spoke
about his dad at all. Nothing bad, nothing good, just nothing.
But when he was around other family members, he'd catch
bits and pieces.
Speaker 7 (09:31):
You know, I didn't know my dad was, you know,
from a young age. I listened. I'm not stupid, like
I knew he killed from a very young age. It's
just whenever I hear stories about him, is always something different.
I don't know what's true or falls.
Speaker 1 (09:44):
Yeah, as we talk, I get the sense that overnight,
Justin has embarked on a delicate and complicated mission to
find out everything he can about his dad, however difficult,
and to see if any of what he learns can
bolster his dad's confession and help Leo. A big part
of that mission is getting his mom, Jamie, to talk
(10:05):
to me. Among the texts he sent me were screenshots
of a Facebook conversation he had with her. He tells
her he just finished listening to the podcast, and he
floods the chat box between them with questions about Jeremy's murders,
whether or not Jeremy really loved her, if he tried
to kill her. She answers his questions, and she tells
(10:27):
him that his dad only saw him once.
Speaker 7 (10:30):
We didn't want to attest. The first time he ever
cried in front of her was seeing me. He's never
once held me.
Speaker 1 (10:40):
I already knew something about Justin's mom, Jamie Nellams. She
was Jeremy's girlfriend around the time of Michelle Schofield's murder.
While I was investigating Jeremy's crimes. I saw her name
in police reports, so Kelsey and I tried to talk
to her years ago. She even agreed to meet us
for lunch at a nearby restaurant County. She texted me
(11:02):
that she was on her way. We waited and waited,
but Jamie never showed up and I never heard from
her again. But now, after hearing his dad talk for
the very first time, Justin was asking Jamie to talk
to me. In the messages to his mom, he talked
about hearing Jeremy's voice. He wrote, he sounded alone and afraid,
(11:25):
always on guard. Trust issues. Weirded me out. How alike
we are. He wanted to know if she heard the
podcast too. She says, I haven't. I'm sorry, hon, I
can't bring myself to hear his voice again. He says,
I understand fully, and when he tells her, I'm trying
to contact Gilbert King now and see what happens. She
(11:47):
says he tried to contact me a while back. I
wouldn't talk to him. I just couldn't do it. Later on,
she says, my psych doctor thinks I should tell my
story to Gilbert King if it would be therapeutic. Justin
urges me to contact her again. He says, she wants
to talk.
Speaker 2 (12:07):
Now.
Speaker 7 (12:14):
How are you feeling about this.
Speaker 2 (12:17):
Microphone and all that? It's it's it's okay.
Speaker 6 (12:20):
I'm a little.
Speaker 2 (12:21):
More okay with it now than I was. It's just,
you know, when all this first starting, and then I
spent so many years trying not to think about it
and not to talk about it.
Speaker 1 (12:36):
Kelsey and I rent a hotel room for an interview
with Jamie.
Speaker 2 (12:39):
It was it was really rough there for a while
because I went through years of nightmares and the paranoia.
Speaker 1 (12:48):
Kelsey has arranged the room simply, three chairs, a table
in the middle, and two microphones set up.
Speaker 2 (12:55):
Yeah, I'm gonna say, if you don't mind.
Speaker 1 (12:57):
I sit down across from Jamie. She's dressed in jeans,
and a blouse, her short brown hair showing just a
hint of gray. She's visibly nervous as we settle around
the table doing this. I wanted to start slowly, assuming
she might have a hard time opening up. But as
she spoke, I realized that this was going to be
(13:18):
different from the Jamie I had come to know through
depositions and courtroom transcripts.
Speaker 2 (13:23):
Justin finally reached a point where he wanted to start
asking questions.
Speaker 1 (13:26):
In those formal settings, she was responding to lawyers focused
solely on the facts. Here, it became clear she was
responding to Justin. She was determined to give him the
answers he'd always wanted about his father's life and her own.
Speaker 2 (13:43):
If me dealing with my crap can help him, it's
worth it. It's worth it. I can deal with this
to help him. If it's just for me, I wouldn't
be doing this. I wouldn't be saying I'm just being real.
(14:04):
If it was just to do your book or just
to do a podcast or whatever, I wouldn't be sitting here.
I'm doing this for Justin. I really am.
Speaker 10 (14:34):
Where were you born?
Speaker 2 (14:35):
You know, what did your parents do for a living?
Speaker 8 (14:37):
Just give us an idea of your growing up and
what you were doing.
Speaker 2 (14:40):
Okay, I can remember weekends at my grandmother's house. She
had thirteen kids, and there'd be like thirty of us,
all as cousins. We'd go over on Friday, we'd stay
there to Sunday. The parents would all be in the
house playing canasta all weekend. They'd had their weekend marathon.
(15:02):
The kids were outside playing.
Speaker 11 (15:04):
We used to play in the orange grow and Jamie,
all of us be cousins.
Speaker 5 (15:08):
We would go over there and we would play like
freeze tag or you know, hide and seek, and you
know things like that in the orange growth.
Speaker 1 (15:16):
Jennifer Stone lived just two doors down from Jamie's grandma.
Speaker 5 (15:20):
We knew all the neighbors. All the neighbors knew all
the kids and who they belonged to. So if you
did something you weren't supposed to, your parents were going
to hear about it.
Speaker 1 (15:28):
When Jamie was seven, her mom married a strict and
controlling ex navy guy. By the time she turns seventeen,
they're divorced and her mom gets a job as head
nurse at a local hospital.
Speaker 2 (15:40):
She worked to all of our chiefs, so we were
pretty much on our own.
Speaker 1 (15:44):
Jamie found herself experiencing a new sense of freedom, one
she'd never known before. With her stepfather out of the picture,
she could finally breathe, and in that space there's a
quiet resistance to the controls she'd grown up under.
Speaker 2 (15:58):
Well, we found that club secret picture, a rave club
with no alcohol. It was a safe place for teenagers.
They didn't let people over eighteen in and it was
a dance club. It had the flashing lights and the
neon lights, and we would wear the white shirts or
(16:19):
with the black lights, you know, it would kind of glow.
Speaker 1 (16:23):
One night in April nineteen eighty seven, Jamie sitting in
the chair right off the dance floor. She's got thick
brown hair and glasses like a wallflower, hiding off to
the side with her friend Maria when they see this
teenage boy enter the club. He's tall and thin, and
he moves with confidence and a quiet presence. It's hard
to ignore. His name is Jeremy Scott.
Speaker 2 (16:46):
None of us had ever seen him before, and he's
heading toward them. Well, when I first met him, the
first thing I thought was his eyes. He had the
most purecing eye. They would just like look into you,
and I remember sitting in the chairs and he was
(17:09):
wearing all black, so you couldn't really see him, but
you could see his eyes and he was just staring
at me. And I can remember being nervous, you know,
because I'd never had a boyfriend before and never really talked.
I was so shy, so shy mad. And I remember
him kicking my chair and saying, you want to dance?
(17:34):
And we danced and that that was it.
Speaker 1 (17:45):
At the end of the night, Jeremy walked her to
her car.
Speaker 2 (17:49):
I had a big seventy three Cutlas Supreme.
Speaker 1 (17:53):
Jamie's friend Maria, leaned on one side of the car with.
Speaker 2 (17:56):
Her boyfriend and they were hugging and kissing and stuff.
Speaker 1 (17:59):
Well, Jeremy and Jamie settled by the driver's.
Speaker 2 (18:02):
Side and we just kind of stood there awkwardly for
a few minutes, and he asked if next Friday i'd
meet him at the mall. Well, I was kind of
iffy because the ones that went to the mall were
the type of kids that didn't go to secrets, you know.
These were the smokers and the drinkers, and that's where
(18:23):
the cops would always show up, was at the mall.
But I said, yeah, I'd meet him at the mall,
and I did.
Speaker 1 (18:37):
From what I've learned about Jeremy, secret seems like the
last place he'd want to be. Tight supervision, no alcohol,
and parents hovering just outside. So a few nights later,
Jamie meets up with Jeremy at one of his usual
spots behind the Lakeland Mall.
Speaker 2 (18:54):
Now, when I met him at the mall, I asked
him where he was staying at, and he said he
was staying downtown. He did ask me for a ride home,
and I had dropped him off at this house. And
I remember looking at this house and thinking it looked abandoned,
like nobody lived there, like it was falling apart. But
(19:15):
there was lights on upstairs, there was people staying there.
It was all kids like him. They were hijacking electricity
off the apartment complex behind it with cords, so that's
how they had lights on. So, come to find out,
(19:35):
that's where he stayed out a lot, and that's where
he would take me a lot of times, was to
abandon houses. And that's where you know, he'd be like,
you're staying with me tonight, and we'd go downtown and
find an abandoned building and we'd climb in and go
to sleep, And here I got a nice townhouse and
bed waiting for me at home, and I'm in love,
(19:57):
you know, And honestly, if I want to be honest,
it was kind of exciting.
Speaker 1 (20:03):
Jeremy's hanging out with people like this guy named Rambo Stocky,
twenty something who wears Camo, rides a motorcycle, and who
spent some time in the Polk County jail and burglary charges.
Speaker 11 (20:14):
They were not my people.
Speaker 1 (20:16):
Jamie's childhood friend, Jennifer was less than impressed with Jamie's
new boyfriend.
Speaker 5 (20:21):
I wasn't comfortable with the people that he was with,
and I never understood what she saw in him, to
be honest with you, they were, you know, the headbanging
rock and roller, you know, the drugging type was what
we referred to him as they were just looking at them. Okay,
(20:43):
so very judgmental, but being an adult now, I would
say a bunch of loadlifes. But she was my friend,
you know, we were young but dumb kids.
Speaker 1 (20:54):
She was in love Jamie spending more and more time
trying to understand Jeremy's secret off the grid world. She
wants to know more about him and the people who
matter in his life.
Speaker 2 (21:06):
He talked a lot about his grandmother. He talked a
lot about his grandfather and how they used to call
him Jeremiah, and that Jeremiah was a bullfrog. That was
his grandfather's favorite song, and they called him Bam Bam,
and they thought it was so cute because he'd beat
everything up with sticks and stuff and thought it was funny.
Speaker 1 (21:27):
As we talk with Jamie, since she was allowing herself
to remember not just the painful truth Justin would have
to confront about his father, but perhaps for the first
time in decades, she was willing to think about why
she'd once been drawn to Jeremy Scott.
Speaker 2 (21:42):
Jeremy had that good side, and he had that funny side,
and he could be sweet and caring, and you know,
he had that good in him.
Speaker 7 (21:54):
I saw it.
Speaker 1 (21:56):
But Jamie also found herself doing things for Jeremy, things
she never would have imagined doing before she met him.
At first, it wasn't anything too bad, just sort of weird.
Speaker 2 (22:07):
I had money, you know, all I had to do
was ask. But he would take me and we'd go
donate plasma and we'd do that three times a week.
Speaker 1 (22:17):
It's not unlike giving blood to the Red Cross. They
go into a harsh, fluorescent lit room where people wait
in long lines, trading the plasma and their blood for cash.
Speaker 2 (22:28):
And I know the first time he took me, it
was like one hundred dollars for being a first time donor,
they pay you a large amount. But then after that,
I think it was like twenty five first time, fifteen
the second time, and ten the third time, so it
was like fifty bucks something like that, and then as
soon as we get done, I'd give him the money.
Speaker 1 (22:54):
It's like they live in separate worlds. Well, Jamie rollerskates
with friends. Jeremy's getting drunk in the park. Well she's
in school. He's breaking into houses and pawning whatever he can.
Speaker 2 (23:06):
And we hadn't been together a while, and we weren't
together all the time. I mean, this is a thing
you've got to understand. I would see him for two
or three days, and then I wouldn't see him for
three or four months. And then i'd see him for
two or three days, and then I wouldn't see him
for six weeks. He didn't have a house phone, he
didn't have a house, so he'd either call me from
a payphone, or I wentn't hear from him, And when
(23:30):
he would show up, he'd call from a paythone, Hey,
meet me down the road. Then when I would see him,
it was constant. He was right there in my face, constant,
and I couldn't go anywhere do anything without him right there.
Speaker 1 (23:57):
One day, Jeremy tells Jamie he wants to take a
trip a few hours north. Jeremy gets behind the wheel,
even though he doesn't have a license.
Speaker 2 (24:06):
He was wanting me to meet his mom. I hadn't
met his mom yet.
Speaker 1 (24:11):
After hours of driving, they finally make it to Perry, Florida.
Jeremy pulls into a gas station where his mother, Linda
is working.
Speaker 2 (24:20):
It was the only gas station in the hotel. And
I can remember us pulling up to the hess station
and her coming out, and her exact words were, what
the eff are you doing here? And I just kind
of sat there and shock, you know, I'm like, I'm like, oh,
(24:40):
this is his mom. And he turned around and he
got back in the car and we drove down the
road and he pulled off the side of the road
and I looked at him and I said, are you okay?
And I guess I shouldn't have said that. And as
soon as I said, are U okay, he punched me
(25:01):
as hard as he could and he kicked me out
of the car. And I remember him kicking me out
of the car. I mean looking down this road and
there's nothing but palmmeadow trees and big old pine trees
and nothing. There's no building, you know, And I started crying,
and I'm thinking, he's going to leave me here. I
(25:22):
don't know anybody. I'm not going to talk to that lady.
I'm not talking to her. She talks to her son
that way. What's she gonna say to me? Yeah? And
about ten minutes later, he came back. He came back,
and he picked me back up.
Speaker 1 (25:42):
They make the long, quiet drive back to Polk County.
From that moment on, her fear was mounting. And always there,
(26:15):
sitting in that hotel room with Jamie, listening to her
go back in time, I could see she was entering
some of the territories she tried to leave behind, things
that caused her a lot of pain and at times
probably caused justin some pain too.
Speaker 7 (26:31):
She tried it, but she struggled a lot, like she
was far from a perfect mom. But she loved us. Yeah,
like I give her that. She loved us for all
her heart and I knew that, but.
Speaker 1 (26:41):
It was a constant battle to keep Jeremy out of
her mind.
Speaker 2 (26:45):
I was burying them from me. Does that make sense?
So it wasn't that I was trying to protect Justin.
It wasn't that I was trying to keep them from Justin.
I didn't talk about to anybody.
Speaker 1 (26:58):
But now, with wanting to know everything, Jamie told me
it was time she said it all out loud. She
takes us back to nineteen eighty eight, she's dating Jeremy
and he disappears yet again.
Speaker 2 (27:16):
I still don't know what he went to prison for.
I remember asking him several times and he never answered me.
I know Jeremy used to like to wait outside the
Green Parrot and wait for the gay people to leave,
and he'd beat him up with baseball bats and stuff.
Speaker 1 (27:33):
He'd hang outside Lakeland's gay bars like the Green Parrot
and Fantasy two thousand.
Speaker 2 (27:38):
As a matter of fact, that's how he ended up
with stitches that one night. He ended up with stitches
in his knee in his head because he waited outside
Green Parrot and they knew he was there and jumped
him and he got some of his own medicine.
Speaker 1 (27:53):
The lesson doesn't take, and he's soon back at Lake
Morton after dark, prowling for his next targets.
Speaker 2 (28:00):
I mean, everybody knew what Lake Morton was, and that
was the gay hangout, and a lot of them got robbed,
a lot of them got beat up, a lot of
them got hurt, and it was just never reported. It
was never in the newspapers, but everybody knew about it.
Speaker 1 (28:20):
I know from going through court records that Robin gay
Men is not what Jeremy went to prison for this time. Instead,
it was for breaking into a home in Lakeland stealing
a few cameras of VCR and some other electronics. He
was caught, convicted, and sentenced to state prison, where he
spent over four months until his release in May of
(28:41):
nineteen eighty eight.
Speaker 2 (28:43):
When he got out from that was when he was
really different. And I don't know if something happened while
he was in prison or I don't know what it was,
but he was a total different person. And that's when
his eyes were empty and there was nothing, I mean,
(29:05):
he never smiled, there was nothing, There was nothing there,
and I can remember looking at him and just not
even really recognizing him, not even knowing who he was.
Speaker 1 (29:24):
Weeks after Jeremy got out of prison, Jamie remembers him
disappearing again. For a while, she didn't see or hear
from him. She had no idea where he was until
one hot summer morning, when Jamie, her sisters, and her
mom were getting ready to head to Disney World for
the day.
Speaker 2 (29:43):
He shows up that morning. I hadn't seen him in
like three weeks. My mom was nice enough to offer
to pay for him to go to Disney World with us,
and he said no. But then he told me I
couldn't go, and my mom put her foot down. Now
she's going. We've already bought tickets. It's a family day.
(30:04):
We're going. That was the first time I'd ever told
him no. I had never told him no before ever
for anything. Anything he ever asked me to do, I.
Speaker 1 (30:16):
Did it, except for this time. Jamie leaves with her
mom and her sisters. They spend the entire day at
the Magic Kingdom, and as they step into their ground
floor apartment that night, they see him. Jeremy. He's outside
knocking on the sliding glass door.
Speaker 2 (30:39):
He was in the backyard waiting, and I'm pretty sure
he sat there all day.
Speaker 1 (30:46):
Jamie steps out into the backyard. Jeremy gives a small wave,
motioning for her to follow. It's dark now. Jeremy leads
her to a spot behind the townhouses, out of sight.
Speaker 2 (31:01):
He bent over and he stood up and he turned
around and he said, you told me no. And that's
the last thing I remember. And that's when it really
got bad, because I think that's when it was ingrained
in me to never again tell him no. And I
(31:22):
never did.
Speaker 11 (31:35):
I remember. I remember something with her jaw.
Speaker 5 (31:39):
It was always kind of kind of about a whack,
not properly aligned, and I thought she was in a
car accident.
Speaker 11 (31:48):
It was my understanding of what happened. Is that really
what happened.
Speaker 7 (31:54):
I don't know.
Speaker 5 (31:55):
She had bruises, and you know, there was a couple
of times you could see where it looked like he
grabbed her, someone grabbed her. You know, she had bruises
on her arms and it looked like someone had punched
her in the face.
Speaker 11 (32:07):
But you know, it was I felt.
Speaker 5 (32:09):
I can't remember what her explanation was, but you know,
I felt like, you know, I wasn't paying attention, but
it was. She always explained it away. So what are
you going to say. I never saw him do anything.
She never told me he did anything.
Speaker 2 (32:28):
I think there was a part of me that thought
I could help him, that I could make it better,
make him feel loved, and he'd be okay, and maybe
he wouldn't do the things that he was doing, you
know what I'm saying. But I know that by the
end it was all fear, that there was no There
(32:49):
was no love there. It was all fear. Jeremy was
in jail when I found out I was pregnant.
Speaker 1 (33:02):
By the fall of nineteen eighty eight, Jamie's been seeing
Jeremy for about a year and a half, always on
his terms. She's eighteen now and she drops out of school.
Speaker 2 (33:14):
I was having to stay with my grandmother because my
mom found out I was pregnant and she kicked me out.
So I was living at my grandmother's house and Jeremy
showed up and I was showing I was scared to death,
and I can remember him calling me a couple weeks
later and telling me some fullless story about he was
(33:39):
dying of some disease and I needed to find somebody else,
and I can remember thinking about in my mind, he's
breaking up with me because I'm pregnant, and the sick
part of me was angry, how dare you break up
with me because I'm pregnant with your kid? And I
(34:00):
can remember I started crying and my aunt Mary walked in.
She's like, what's wrong with you? And I said, he
just broke up with me because I'm pregnant. And then
all of a sudden, I caught myself when I stopped,
and I smiled, and I said, he just broke up
with me because I'm pregnant.
Speaker 1 (34:18):
Jamie thought she was finally rid of Jeremy and all
the chaos, the violence and the abuse. But two weeks
later he's back, this time with blood on his pants
and a stolen car he wants Jamie to get in,
and by now Jamie knows the consequences of telling Jeremy no.
Speaker 2 (34:43):
Next time, I knew I wasn't coming back. I knew
if they didn't catch him, I was going to die.
Speaker 1 (34:58):
Own Valley is a production of LoVa for Good podcast
in association with Signal Company Number One. Our executive producers
are Jason Flomm, Jeff Kempler and Kevin Wordis. Karen Kornhaber
is our senior producer. Jackie Pauley and Hannah Biel are
our producers. Britz Spangler is our sound designer. Marianne McCune
(35:19):
is our editor. Fact checking by Dania Sulemant. Jeff Cliburn
is our head of marketing and operations. Our Social media
director is Ismati Guardrama, our Social Media manager is Sarah Gibbons,
and our art director is Andrew Nelson. Additional research and
production by Kelsey Decker. Additional sound recording by James Johnson.
(35:43):
Bone Valley is written and produced by Me Gilbert King.
Follow us on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and threads at Lava
for Good
Host
Gilbert King
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