State board denies parole for Schofield, convicted in 1987 Lakeland murder

Leo Schofield Jr., championed as a man wrongly convicted of murder in a popular podcast, will not be leaving prison yet.

Schofield, who has served nearly 35 years after being convicted of killing his wife in Lakeland in 1987, had a fourth chance at parole Wednesday when the Florida Commission on Offender Review met in Tallahassee. In a compromise vote, the three-person panel decided on a one-year extension of release date.

That means Schofield, 56, could leave prison in June of 2024, though he will face another review next March. Schofield’s presumptive parole release date was set about a decade ago at June of this year.

Schofield received a life sentence after a Polk County jury found him guilty of murder in 1989. Florida abolished parole in the 1980s, but inmates convicted of murder before 1994 are eligible for release after serving at least 25 years.

Previously: Leo Schofield, subject of podcast on 1987 Lakeland murder conviction, faces parole hearing

Schofield’s plight has become an international cause through the podcast “Bone Valley,” which began releases last fall. The 12-part audio series, narrated by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Gilbert King, has drawn more than 7 million listeners, according to the production company.

The case for Schofield’s innocence hinges on the disputed confession of Jeremy Scott, a man serving a life sentence for a separate murder.

King attended Wednesday’s hearing in Tallahassee, as did a crew from the ABC program “20/20,” which aired an episode on Schofield last fall. King said the New York Times also sent a reporter to cover the hearing.

Schofield, now incarcerated at Hardee Correctional Institution near Wauchula, has insisted on his innocence since his conviction. In the podcast, he says that he declined a plea agreement offer that would have resulted in a relatively short sentence.

The commission’s hearings are not judicial proceedings and do not seek to establish whether a candidate was fairly convicted. Instead, the panel determines whether the convicted person should be released. The parole candidates do not appear at the hearings.

One commissioner favored release

The commission considering Schofield’s potential release Wednesday included David Wyant, the retired deputy chief of the Bartow Police Department, along with two former prosecutors, Chair Melinda Coonrod and Vice Chair Richard Davison. The commissioners noted that an investigator, after conducting an interview with Schofield in prison, had recommended an extension.

Davison recommended a delay of 24 months for Schofield, and Wyant followed with a suggest of an 18-month extension. Coonrod favored Schofield’s immediate parole.

Outnumbered, Coonrod asked if the others would consider a 12-month extension. Wyant agreed, providing the two-vote margin needed for the commission to act.

The commission recommended having Schofield transferred to Everglades Correctional Institution in Miami, which has a program for inmates preparing to be released from life sentences.

Schofield has exhausted all his legal options to challenge his conviction, and the decision of the parole commission cannot be appealed.

The agenda for the hearing indicated that the commission received statements from a range of relatives and supporters of Schofield. The advocates included Seth Miller, a lawyer with the Florida Innocence Project, and Crissie Schofield, a social worker who married Schofield after meeting him while working in prison. The list featured two ministers and an inmate advocate, Laurie Allen.

Also: Mother and 3 kids shot to death in Lake Wales, suspect killed in shootout with police

Wednesday’s hearing allotted 10 minutes for statements from those supporting and opposing Schofield’s parole. Scott Cupp, a retired Circuit Judge who has become an advocate for Schofield, spoke for supporters.

Cupp shared a letter that Schofield wrote to the commission. In the statement, Schofield emphasized that he cannot express remorse for a crime that he insists he did not commit.

“Please understand that I am not stating this fact in arrogance,” said the letter, which Schofield had read for a bonus episode of “Bone Valley” released last month. “The only reason I am emphatically stating my position here is because I cannot make a statement of remorse for this crime, as the state has highlighted in my last appearance before you in (2020).”

Cupp read a letter from Jessie Saum, Michelle’s younger brother. Saum, who was 16 when his sister died, wrote that he originally believed the prosecution’s narrative but had since lost confidence in the conviction, citing what he called “inconsistencies and discrepancies” in the case.

In the podcast, King said that the retired State Attorney for the 10^th Judicial Circuit, Jerry Hill, had been given a letter from Saum recommending Schofield’s release at a 2020 parole but had declined to share it with the commission.

Florida Sen. Jonathan Martin, R-Fort Myers, also spoke in support of Schofield.

“Everything that I’ve seen about this case turns my stomach,” said Martin, a former Assistant State Attorney in Southwest Florida. “I don’t know why Leo Schofield wasn’t released years ago.”

Martin said the handling of Schofield’s case had created doubts about the fairness of Florida’s criminal-justice system.

“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,” Martin said.

Prosecutor: 'Overwhelming evidence'

Cupp acknowledged that the parole commission is not supposed to consider a subject’s potential innocence, but he said that Schofield’s innocence has “been the elephant in the room for way too long.”

Cupp repeated the word “innocent” three times after reading Schofield’s letter, which ended with that word. He said that Schofield has spent 35 years grieving both for Michelle and for his own lost freedom.

The State Attorney’s Office for the 10^th Judicial Circuit had opposed his parole at three previous hearings. Jacob Orr, Chief Assistant State Attorney, led the argument against Schofield’s release on Wednesday. Orr said he has been told that Schofield’s case is the most reviewed in the history of Polk County.

“Every time we go to court, we relitigate and we review the case based on actual transcripts and actual available evidence,” Orr said. “And every one of those reviews resulted in the same outcome, that there's overwhelming evidence in support of the guilty verdict that was handed down many years ago.”

Orr said the commission should treat Schofield the same as it would any other in his situation. He urged the panel to “ignore all the show that’s going along with” Schofield’s case.

Michelle Schofield’s older brother, Ricky Saum, spoke by phone in opposition to parole for Leo Schofield. He contradicted details Schofield gave in his testimony about what happened the night he reported Michelle missing.

More: Florida Southern College will hold 139th commencement event Saturday in Lakeland

“I just want say that a lot of people have, let’s just say, distorted the truth of this case,” Saum said. “I was there. I wasn’t a kid. I was the older brother and was not too young to understand.”

Saum added: “I believe in God, and I believe in the courts, and the courts got it right. At the end of the day, you know, if Leo has to sit in prison for 45 years or 50 years because he tortured my sister; mentally tortured her — at the end of the day he should stay in jail for the rest of his life, period.”

Orr did recognize that Schofield had been “a good inmate” with a nearly spotless record of behavior in prison.

The three commissioners each gave brief explanations before making their recommendations. All said they had reviewed the case carefully. Wyant, in suggesting an 18-month extension, observed that Schofield had “a clean record” in prison.

Coonrod said she thought the State Attorney’s Office had “done their job” in prosecuting Schofield. She noted that the original trial result had been upheld many times.

“We have to respect what has been done in the court system,” she said.

She also offered a defense of Hill as “an honorable man.” The podcast cast the retired prosecutor in a negative light, presenting a recording of Hill speaking at Schofield’s parole hearing in 2020. Hill wrongly stated that Schofield had told authorities that an inner force guided him to the location of Michelle’s body during the search.

It was actually Schofield’s father who made that statement.

Schofield could have been released next month if another commission had agreed with Coonrod’s recommendation of granting him parole. A spokesperson for the Florida Commission on Offender Review said that Schofield would be placed in the Corrections Transitions Program at Everglades CI one year prior to his release date.

“Because Leo is innocent, we were asking the parole commissioners to immediately release him from prison,” Cupp said after the decision in a statement released by Lava for Good, the company behind the podcast. “Their decision to send him to the Everglades Re-entry Center was not the ideal outcome, but it's finally progress. And we are not done fighting for Leo’s freedom.”

King said: "Leo's case is a tragic example of a broken criminal legal system, and we will continue to fight for justice. Our hope was that the parole board would recognize the injustice that has been done to Leo as well as Michelle. We will not let this story and their voices fall silent."

King said that he expects to release a new "Bone Valley" episode as early as Friday.

Podcast suggests other killer

Schofield, an aspiring rock musician living in Lakeland, was 21 when he reported the disappearance of his 18-year-old wife, Michelle Saum Schofield, in February 1987. He and his father joined law enforcement in searching for her after her abandoned car was found along Interstate 4.

After three days, Schofield’s father found Michelle’s body submerged beneath a piece of plywood in a phosphate pit in a remote area along State Road 33. She had been stabbed 26 times in the neck, chest and back.

During Schofield’s trial in 1989, the prosecution presented no physical evidence tying him to Michelle’s murder. The prosecution presented testimony from a woman who lived across the street in the mobile-home community where Leo and Michelle resided.

The neighbor testified that she had seen the couple arguing just before Michelle’s reported disappearance and told investigators that she had seen Schofield carrying something heavy from the home that night. In the podcast, Schofield said she probably saw him carrying an amplifier.

In “Bone Valley,” King takes a journalistic approach in reporting details of the case but clearly advocates for the claim that Schofield is innocent. The podcast includes multiple recorded interviews with Schofield.

The podcast focuses on what King presents as weaknesses in the prosecution’s case. It presents the key witness as a “busybody” seeking attention and says a relative contradicted part of her testimony.

King reports that investigators found no blood or residue from cleaning products at Schofield’s home, though the neighbor said she had seen him cleaning the home.

Witnesses at the trial portrayed Schofield as an abusive spouse, according to previous Ledger reporting. And witnesses testified to seeing two men standing near where Michelle’s body was later found in the early morning after her reported disappearance.

Supporters, most of them having learned of Schofield’s plight from the “Bone Valley” podcast, have sent letters to the Commission on Offender Review pleading for his release from prison. More than 31,000 people have signed a petition on Change.org seeking to have Schofield’s case transferred to a conviction integrity unit for an independent review.

Former U.S. Rep. Adam Kinzinger has publicly expressed support for Schofield.

In the recent podcast episode, the director of a halfway house in Tampa for men leaving prison said he was ready to welcome Schofield if the commission granted him parole. King said Schofield has been “a model inmate” and serves a mentor to other incarcerated men.

The podcast asserts that Jeremy Scott, now serving a life sentence for another murder, actually killed Michelle. Scott’s fingerprint was found in Michelle’s abandoned orange Mazda, though it wasn’t linked to him until 2004. Scott had admitted to a practice of stealing stereo equipment from abandoned vehicles, and prosecutors cited that history in explaining the presence of his fingerprint.

Schofield filed an appeal in 2009, seeking a new trial based on the fingerprint evidence, but was denied. He filed again in 2017, after his lawyers talked to Scott, who confessed to killing Michelle both orally and in writing. A former cellmate also claimed Scott had confessed to him.

During a subsequent evidentiary hearing in Bartow, Scott said he had seen Michelle Schofield at a convenience store and asked her for a ride. Inside the car, he dropped a hunting knife while reaching for a cigarette, he said, and Michelle responded by hitting him, after which he “lost it” and stabbed her.

But Scott appeared to recant under a cross-examination from Assistant State Attorney Victoria Avalon. When Avalon showed an autopsy photo of Michelle Schofield’s stab wounds, Scott said, “I didn’t do that.”

In the podcast, King suggests that Scott was reacting to the degraded state of Michelle’s body after days in the canal and emphasized the word “that,” meaning only that he hadn’t left her in such a condition. King said that Scott later in the hearing repeated his claim of having killed Michelle.

Prosecutors said that Scott told Schofield’s lawyers he would confess in exchange for $1,000 and later claimed to be responsible for every murder committed in Polk County in 1987 and 1988.

Circuit Judge Kevin Abdoney ruled in 2018 after the evidentiary hearing that Scott was “not credible” and “could not recount facts accurately.”

Florida’s Second District Court of Appeals in 2020 rejected Schofield’s bid for a new trial, writing that Scott’s testimony at the hearing had been “to put it mildly, bizarre.”

Gary White can be reached at gary.white@theledger.com or 863-802-7518. Follow on Twitter @garywhite13.

This article originally appeared on The Ledger: Board denies parole for Schofield, convicted in 1987 Lakeland murder