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Leo Schofield from ‘Bone Valley’ podcast denied parole again

Prosecutors have maintained that they got the right man despite fingerprint evidence and a confession from another man.
 
Leo Schofield is seen in 2007. Schofield was convicted of killing his 18-year-old bride in 1987.
Leo Schofield is seen in 2007. Schofield was convicted of killing his 18-year-old bride in 1987. [ Times (2007) ]
Published May 3, 2023|Updated May 3, 2023

TALLAHASSEE — Leo Schofield, convicted of killing his 18-year-old bride in 1987, was denied parole Wednesday — his fourth unsuccessful effort to win release even though another man has confessed to the crime.

The parole board voted to transfer Schofield to a prison near Miami that hosts a lifer’s program, designed to prepare prisoners under life sentences for reentry into society. In another year, after completing the program, Schofield can go back to the parole board to try again.

The board is supposed to decide only if an inmate is suited to be released back into society, not whether he is guilty or innocent. But Schofield attorney Scott Cupp beseeched the board not to ignore “the elephant in the room.” Schofield is innocent and has spent 35 years in prison, he said, and should not be held another day.

“What I’m asking you to do is search your heart,” he told the three commissioners. “I think you all know what’s gone on here. Several of you, I know, believe he is, in fact, innocent.”

Polk Chief Assistant State Attorney Jacob Orr countered that Schofield’s case has been the “most reviewed case in the history of Polk County,” and every review found “overwhelming evidence” that Schofield is guilty.

“Treat this inmate the same as any other,” Orr said. “Ignore all the show that’s going on along with” the case.

The commissioners voted to send Schofield, 57, to the Corrections Transition Program (the lifer’s program) at Everglades Correctional Institution, the parole board’s go-to program before inmates serving life sentences are granted parole. The commission reset Schofield’s presumptive parole date to June 2024. By then, he would have completed the program and could again request parole.

“Although we are marginally disappointed that it was not immediate parole, Leo is happy with this,” Cupp said in an interview with the Tampa Bay Times. “Yes, he’s getting transferred to another prison, but we’re very confident that given the nature of this program and what we know about it, he’ll be able to sail through it and definitely be headed toward freedom by about this time next year.”

Crissie Carter Schofield, a social worker who married Schofield in 1995, said she informed her husband of the parole board’s decision. “His reaction was, you know, acceptance, we’ll make the most of it, we’ll be OK,” she told the Times. “You know, the other parole hearings, we walked away extremely defeated. This time we walked away and at least there was some movement, so that’s a good thing.”

She doesn’t think her husband needs a program to transition to the outside world because he has a strong network of family and others to help him. “We really don’t have any choice, we have to be OK. We have no choice,” she said.

“You have these lows, these letdowns, you have to feel it, cry it out, and then you put your shoulders back, lift your head up high and be OK. And that’s where I am, and that’s where Leo is. That’s the way we get through it.”

The Schofield case

Michelle Saum Schofield, 18, was supposed to pick up her husband from a friend’s house after a waitressing shift on Feb. 24, 1987. But she was late and hadn’t called, which Polk prosecutors said infuriated her husband of six months. At their trailer, the 21-year-old husband unleashed his rage, stabbing Michelle 26 times, then loaded her body in the back of their Mazda station wagon and had her dumped in a remote canal, prosecutors said.

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Leo Schofield was 20 and Michelle Saum was 17 when they married in Lakeland. Michelle would be murdered six months later. [ Courtesy of Schofield family ]

Though Michelle lost half the blood in her body, crime scene technicians could not find any blood in the trailer. Technicians did, however, find two large stains of blood in the dirt near the canal — blood that matched to Michelle — where another man would confess that he had murdered her.

That other man, Jeremy Scott, would have made an ideal suspect back when Polk sheriff’s detectives zeroed in on Schofield. Scott lived just 1.7 miles from the remote area where Michelle’s body was dumped, had taken his girlfriend to that same area to have sex and had a rap sheet dating to when he was 11 years old. He has been linked to four murders in Central Florida, all while he was a teenager.

No forensic evidence linked Schofield to the crime. Investigators lifted only two fingerprints from the Mazda, neither matching Schofield or Michelle, and the prints remained unidentified at Schofield’s trial.

It wasn’t until 15 years later, with computerized fingerprint technology, that the prints were matched to Scott, a link first reported by the St. Petersburg Times in 2007. Scott told investigators that his fingerprints must have ended up in the Mazda because he was a car stereo thief and had stumbled upon the abandoned vehicle and took the opportunity to steal the stereo.

Years later, Scott would confess to Schofield’s lawyers that he murdered Michelle. He also confessed to Pulitzer Prize-winning author Gilbert King, whose Bone Valley podcast made the case that Schofield is innocent. The podcast brought worldwide attention to Polk County. The Times wrote about the case last month.

None of the new evidence moved Polk prosecutors from their confidence that the evidence supported Schofield’s conviction.

They say Scott has been all over the map on whether he murdered Michelle and his versions of how he killed her evolved in each telling to fit details as he learned them. As Orr has put it, “When he switches to confessing, he is terrible at it.”

The parole hearing

At Wednesday’s hearing, state Sen. Jonathan Martin, chairperson of the Criminal Justice Committee, told the parole board (the Florida Commission on Offender Review) that Schofield should be released.

“Everything that I’ve seen about this case turns my stomach,” said Martin, a former prosecutor.

“I don’t know why Leo Schofield wasn’t released years ago. … You have the chance to restore credibility to the system that thousands of people know injustice is continuing every single second that Leo Schofield remains behind bars.”

Schofield was denied parole in 2012, 2015 and 2020. Each time, Polk prosecutors called him an unrepentant, cold-blooded murderer not fit to return to society.

Schofield knew that the parole board wants inmates to express remorse for their crimes, but he refused to apologize for something he said he did not do. He said it would dishonor his dead wife’s memory to take the easy way out of prison and let her true killer go unpunished.

Inmates don’t attend their parole hearings, but at Wednesday’s hearing, Cupp read a letter in which Schofield addressed his nonapology head on.

“I do know that you rightly look for remorse in the potential parolee,’’ he wrote. “I may not be able to share remorse for a crime I did not commit, but I can wholeheartedly promise you that if you will take a chance on me and grant me parole, your grace will never come back to you in embarrassment or regret.”

Facing the death penalty if he went to trial back in 1989, Schofield turned down the state’s offer to plead guilty to second-degree murder, which would have gotten him out of prison decades ago.

Having now served 35 years, he is in line to serve at least one year more.