Bone Valley: The Leo Schofield Case

Michelle Schofield, 18, did not return from her restaurant job in Lakeland, Florida on 24 February 1987; her body, stabbed repeatedly, was found three days later in a drainage canal in the phosphate country known as Bone Valley. Her husband Leo was charged with first-degree murder and convicted in 1989 on an entirely circumstantial case — no physical evidence tied him to the killing, and the prosecution instead called a succession of witnesses to give testimony about the couple’s volatile marriage. He was sentenced to life, and has maintained his innocence throughout, refusing plea offers that would have shortened his time.

In 2004 fingerprints lifted from Michelle’s abandoned car, never matched at the time, were identified as those of Jeremy Scott — a convicted killer already serving life for a 1988 murder, who had lived a few miles from where her body was found. Scott first said he had broken into the car to steal stereo equipment, an account a postconviction judge accepted; in 2017 he confessed, verbally, in writing, and in a recorded statement to a private investigator, to killing Michelle himself. Circuit Judge Kevin Abdoney found Scott “not credible” and refused a new trial, and in 2020 Florida’s Second District Court of Appeal upheld that refusal, describing his testimony as “to put it mildly, bizarre”.

The case reached a national audience through Gilbert King’s 2022 podcast Bone Valley and an ABC 20/20 film, and was later re-examined by the former federal prosecutors behind The Prosecutors, who set out to test the innocence claim and came to the same conclusion. Criticism has centred on the original prosecutor, the late John Aguero, who interviewed Scott privately with no witness present and no recording, and then closed that line of inquiry. Leo Schofield was released on parole on 30 April 2024, after 36 years. He has not been exonerated: in law he remains a convicted murderer, and stays on parole for life unless the conviction is set aside.

The conversation below is from First Coast Connect, WJCT Public Media’s daily call-in programme in Jacksonville, presented by Anne Schindler and broadcast on 14 October 2026 — the first time Gilbert King, Leo Schofield and the two prosecutors who re-investigated his case had all been in a room together, and recorded hours before they appeared at a seminar at the State Attorney’s Office, part of its speaker series, co-sponsored by the Federalist Society and the Innocence Project of Florida.

About the speakers

Gilbert King is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author whose book Devil in the Grove led to the posthumous pardon and exoneration of the Groveland Four. He made the Bone Valley podcast, which brought national attention to Leo Schofield’s conviction.

Leo Schofield served 36 years in prison for the 1987 murder of his wife Michelle, maintaining his innocence throughout. He was released on parole in April 2024 and is still seeking exoneration.

Brett Talley and Alice LaCour are former federal prosecutors in Alabama and co-hosts of the true-crime podcast The Prosecutors, which is normally sceptical of innocence claims. They devoted a nine-part series to the Schofield case and concluded he is innocent.

The programme is well worth listening to in full.

This is an edited transcript of the programme; the full conversation is in the recording.

Meeting for the first time

Host: So all of you are in town today because you are doing a presentation at the state attorney’s office here. It’s part of their speaker series. It’s co-sponsored by the Federalist Society and the Innocence Project of Florida, which I think proves there’s room for strange bedfellows in the work that you all are doing. But this is the first time that you’ve been together. What is it like, finally meeting? You’re all familiar with Leo’s case. You’ve covered it. You’ve covered the podcast on your podcast, The Prosecutors. You’ve discussed Bone Valley. What is it like to kind of meet each other for the first time?

Alice LaCour: It’s incredibly powerful. For one, we’ve been able to dig into everything, both good and bad, of Leo’s case, and to be able to meet the man behind it who allowed us to do this. Because we recognise this isn’t just a story. This isn’t entertainment. This is his entire life. He allowed us to do that. But at the same time, we’ve never spoken to him about any of this. So he had no direction over this. You can imagine someone’s done this to your life, you may not like them very much. But it’s quite the opposite, because from the beginning he’s told us through Gilbert: dig as deep as you can, I have nothing to hide. And those are powerful words. So it’s a privilege for us to be here with both Leo and Gilbert.

“I assumed we would find all this evidence Gilbert had left out”

Host: And Brett, the podcast that you and Alice do, The Prosecutors, really does take this cold-blooded, analytical take on cases. You are not afraid of debunking the common sentiment around a case. You’ve covered the Serial podcast, the Adnan Syed case — you think he’s guilty, and you came to that conclusion after reviewing all of the evidence. You really do do a deep dive into the evidence. So you approached this maybe even with some skepticism, because of the Bone Valley podcast and the movement it has inspired, that Leo is wrongfully convicted, that this was an aberrant miscarriage of justice. I think maybe you in particular were like, is that really the case?

Brett Talley: That was definitely how I approached it. And the reason we covered the case is we had so many of our listeners — we were in the middle of covering Serial, in the middle of covering Adnan Syed’s case — and we had people reach out and say, hey, I listened to this great podcast called Bone Valley, but I’m really skeptical of innocence movements. I’m really skeptical of the media effort to prove someone is not guilty of a crime. Will you take a look at it? And we thought, why not?

And I will say, my bias going in was, I assumed we would look at the facts, we would look at the transcript, we would look at the police reports, and we would find all this evidence that Gilbert had left out. And we probably would conclude at the end of the day that Leo was actually guilty of the crime. But as we’re reading the transcripts, as we’re looking at the evidence, as we’re seeing the holes in the prosecution’s case, learning about evidence that was developed years after the conviction, it became evident to me that this wasn’t even a particularly close case. This was one of the clearest cases of innocence I’ve ever seen, and I think that exists out there in the world.

And it was one of the reasons that this case, for two people who typically are on the side of “no, they actually did it”, has become a real passion project for us. Because I truly believe if you’re going to stand up and say we need to question these innocence claims, when you find one that’s true, you need to be championing for justice in that case. And that’s what needs to happen here.

Host: Well, I want to take a listen to a segment of the podcast. This was a nine-part deep dive — 10 if you count the subsequent interview you did with Gilbert King on your programme. I want to take a listen to one of the final segments where you’re talking about your conclusion, Brett, let’s take a listen.

Brett Talley (podcast clip): We think Leo is innocent. I think he should be exonerated. I think Jeremy Scott’s guilty. That’s what I think happened. I don’t know that for sure. I can’t prove that. And we’ll never know, because we don’t have a time machine. And I would say we’d know if Jeremy Scott told us, but he’s told us several different stories. So it’s hard to even know when he tells us.

Welcoming the scrutiny

Host: We’ll talk about Jeremy Scott more in a minute, and Gilbert, I’m probably going to lean on you for that a little bit. But in terms of when The Prosecutors podcast decided to take up examining your work — I would imagine that is a bit daunting, to have somebody delve into your research, review it, determine whether your conclusions were accurate. But it is not your first rodeo. You did Devil in the Grove, which led to the posthumous exoneration of four young black men who’d been wrongfully accused of sexually assaulting a white woman, a couple of them at least executed by law enforcement. So you’re used to people looking at your work. Is that right?

Gilbert King: Yeah, I would say that. In fact, I welcomed it a bit, because I was a fan of the show and I listened to how thorough they were. And I really love getting the prosecution perspective — how do they look at a case? How do they look at it differently than the defence? And so I really welcomed them to look at it and dig into it as hard as they do with the other cases. I just felt that confident in this.

And it’s not really a secret, but I kind of pick low-hanging fruit for my cases. These are, like Brett just said, very obvious to me after you start looking into it, that there’s only one way to look at this case. And so I felt very confident that anybody who looks into this with the same kind of passion and the same kind of depth is going to come to the same conclusion.

The case in brief

Host: Because there are cases you’re sort of alluding to that could go either way. There’s evidence on both sides. It’s not 100% clear. And you could look and make the case like, well, this person maybe shouldn’t have been sentenced, but you can see why a jury made that decision. But you really came down on the side that this was a blatantly wrongful conviction. Can you just familiarise us as best you can with an incredibly complicated case?

Gilbert King: Yeah, I’ll just give you the basics. So in 1987, Leo’s 18-year-old wife Michelle was murdered. She went missing for a couple of days and found dead. And there’s a long investigation, a year and a half, and police just had no leads, no physical evidence. It wasn’t going anywhere. And then a prosecutor by the name of John Aguero came in and kind of tidied it up. And I think if you look at the evidence, he started changing the timeline to fit the evidence, and doing some things that I don’t think most prosecutors would really approve of — pretty unethical things. And that’s how the case came together.

And so Leo is sentenced to prison, sentenced to life for this murder, and always maintaining his innocence. Even when he’s offered deals, he just maintains his innocence, doesn’t accept the deals. And then 17 years after he’s incarcerated, some mysterious fingerprints are finally identified in the car that Michelle was driving that night. And they point to a known murderer who’s in prison for another thing. And so that goes through an evidentiary hearing. He initially denies having any involvement. And then several years later he comes through and says, I’m coming clean, I actually did this. And he brings up details that only a killer would know. And so that man was Jeremy Scott, and he became a big part of the investigation. Not only is Leo innocent, but we think we know who did it. And so that’s really the crux of the case.

“Michelle was worthy”

Host: And Leo, all of this storytelling is around your experience, 36 years that you served in prison, the entire time you were there insisting upon your innocence. And your motivation throughout all of this has not just been your exoneration or your freedom, which you now have because you got parole finally, but justice for your wife Michelle.

Leo Schofield: Right. And that’s the most important part for me, because Michelle can’t speak for herself. And she was worthy to help us know what actually happened to her. And so taking deals, or doing something that would make things lighter for me, was just not an option. First and foremost, because I’m innocent. And second, because Michelle was worthy of having her story told and knowing what actually happened to her. So it was really difficult.

And I just want to say this, if I can — when I’m in this position here, like right here, and this is, I got goosebumps meeting Brett and Alice for the first time, but I sometimes feel like a slide under a microscope, you know, and people digging deep and looking. I was thinking about what the privilege is for me to have Brett and Alice joining onto this story, because I was told by Gilbert that they were going to do a dive on it anyway, even before Gilbert had asked.

But I was thinking, good. And this is the telltale sign — if you are going to ask Brett and Alice to dig into your case, you better be truly innocent. Because they’re going to know when they get to the other end of it. Brett says he doesn’t know one way. We don’t have a time machine. That’s right. But he went where the evidence led. And someone who’s truly innocent doesn’t mind someone digging into it.

But I can tell you that I’m wore out. You know, it’s time for exoneration. This has gone on way too long. And I am wore out. I’m wore out. We know what happened to Michelle. I am satisfied that Jeremy Lynn Scott had murdered her. And I need to get this in my rear-view mirror.

“Dogpile on their relationship”

Host: Alice, I want to ask you about your decision to take on this case, and then to form a relationship with these other two folks, Gilbert and Leo, because your dive is a very analytical approach. You don’t give anyone favours in terms of your assessment of the evidence. And part of your conclusion is that there’s blame to go around. I want to talk about what the prosecutor did, what the judge perhaps could have done better. But I also want to talk about Leo, because he had a history with Michelle of domestic violence. That’s an element of the case that proved fairly consequential for Leo, because there were so many people at the start of his trial testifying about that. And a lot of people, I think you included, think that that really may have set up the case in a way that wasn’t favourable to him. So talk about looking at that evidence, looking beyond that evidence, how evidence like that makes it into a case, and how it can prejudice a jury or even a prosecutor.

Alice LaCour: Yeah. So what you’re talking about is basically the presentation of the trial record versus the entire record. When you’re a prosecutor, you have to decide how to tell the story. And this prosecutor started off in a way that was effective. We know it’s effective because the jury ultimately convicted. They didn’t really start on the evidence. And I’ll tell you why. There really is no physical evidence tying Leo to Michelle’s murder. Now, this fingerprint evidence is incredible. It came after the trial. So he should have tested that fingerprint at the time.

But what he did was he put on dozens of people who were willing to get on the stand and essentially dogpile on their relationship, on Leo and Michelle’s relationship, everyone pointing fingers at what a bad guy Leo was. This is classic. If you are an attorney, you know that this is classic 404(b) evidence, is what we call it. That means you can’t convict someone just because they are a bad guy, just because you can find 20 people who point a finger and say that’s a bad guy. That’s not our justice system. That’s mob mentality. Rather, we tell every single person: you’re going to be convicted based on the evidence of this case before us.

So from the very start, the prosecution did something that I’m not in favour of, but is a tactic. And it ultimately worked, unfortunately, to a wrongful conviction. And look, we don’t actually know if everything would have stood up to proper cross-examination. I have a lot of bones to pick with the defence attorney at this time. When you are a defence attorney given many types of cases like this, I get it. It’s exhausting. You may not be fully prepared for every case. But now, many decades later, and having met Leo and having seen the history of his entire life’s work to be the proof, I do question those dozens of witnesses who the prosecution put on pointing fingers at what a bad guy Leo was.

And ultimately, that shouldn’t matter. He could be the worst guy in the world. If the evidence doesn’t point to him being the killer, he should not be convicted. But I think because that’s what the jury heard, not once, not twice, dozens of times — by the time they were hearing from other witnesses, they had their mind made up. We see this from jurors, because we poll jurors afterwards. Sometimes they’ll think, well, if it’s such a bad guy, if they didn’t do it here, at least we’re getting a bad guy off the streets. That is the antithesis of justice and what a prosecutor should protect against. I think that’s what happened in this case. And we should all be guarded against that as consumers — even if you’re not a lawyer — a consumer of justice news, of judicial news, when you watch cases like that and all you hear is, well, we have all these neighbours and friends who can say what a bad guy this is. People just really follow the bandwagon. Once you hear one thing, people start thinking, “well, you know, one time someone raised a voice, maybe they do have a temper”. And we need to use our analytical thinking that I think was lacking in his trial presentation.

The prosecutor and Jeremy Scott

Host: Brett, in terms of the prosecutor in this case — Gilbert mentioned how the timeline changed. The timeline is an essential element of this case, and it is complicated, and we are not going to get deep into it. But it did change over time in terms of how the prosecutor presented it. It changed in a way that better accommodated his theory of the case. But there were other elements that came in that were very questionable, in terms of how he handled the discovery that the fingerprints were of a serial killer, essentially — a man who is linked to multiple crimes, sexual batteries, and was there in the car the night of the murder. The prosecutor in this case met privately with Jeremy Scott and asked him if he did it, and there were no witnesses. He said he was told by Jeremy Scott that he wasn’t there, and dismissed that as a potential alternate theory of the crime. Tell us about why that might be inappropriate.

Brett Talley: Well, I know there are prosecutors listening to this right now, and as you say that, they’re shocked. They can’t believe he would do that. That is so inappropriate. We try to never meet with any witnesses without a law enforcement officer in the room, without someone to record what’s being said.

The thing is, whether you think the prosecutor in this case was corrupt or not, once he did that, how can you trust anything that comes afterwards? Because he has a vested interest in his conviction that he’s been defending for 20 years, that now is subject to all this criticism, that now has a fingerprint which seemed to undermine his conviction. He has his own preconceived biases, his own tunnel vision facing the facts, and what he needs is some way to explain this — both for himself, probably, and for whoever’s going to come next.

He’s in that room with Jeremy Scott. We don’t know what he said. We don’t know exactly how he presented it. We don’t know if he said, now, could it have just been that you stole the stereo, right? Could that be where the fingerprints came from? Leading questions are problematic for a reason, especially with someone like Jeremy Scott, especially with someone who’s trying to get out of it. And because he inappropriately and unethically did that interview without any witnesses in the room, now we can’t know. We don’t know how much he corrupted that, and that led to the fiasco that happened afterwards with Jeremy Scott, where it took Jeremy Scott a while, in my opinion, to finally come clean with what actually happened.

So to me, when Bone Valley was presenting Aguero and presenting some of the issues he may have had, I was skeptical, because just as a prosecutor I would like to think most prosecutors wouldn’t do that. Then I heard how he handled that, and I thought: it’s all true.

Immunity, and the fingerprints

Host: The conversation also included a promise of immunity, is that right? Tell us about how immunity offers are made, and having done so in this context, how that would fit into the prosecutor’s role, as it should be.

Brett Talley: Offering immunity to someone for a murder in a case like this — just unbelievable. And to do it the way he did it, just in this sort of private meeting. He acknowledges that. He said that the reason he did that is because he just wanted the truth. If Leo was innocent, he just wanted him out. He wasn’t looking to prosecute the case again. And I just found all of that to be so unbelievable, and it makes you question everything else that he did in the case and how he handled the case.

I just want to mention the fingerprints briefly. That was inexcusable, for law enforcement to not test unknown fingerprints in a vehicle against known offenders in the area. They didn’t have to run a nationwide search. He lived a couple of miles from where her body was found. They tried him for a murder that he absolutely committed, he somehow got off. He’s living in the community. It would have taken minimal investigative effort to test those fingerprints. And if they had done that, we wouldn’t be here today.

Defending a conviction

Host: In terms of the state attorney’s role in this case, it seems paramount — his credibility, how he conducted himself, how he managed this case. And yet he’s been dead for a number of years. That office has continued to defend Leo’s conviction, to fight his parole in very strenuous ways. And it is the job, it’s kind of the law of the state attorney, to defend a conviction. It’s the way the system operates. And so I’m curious, for you two prosecutors, as you speak today at this event, which is going to be attended by a number of people in the legal community, including prosecutors: is that a flaw in the system, that when you have a conviction it becomes the role of the state to essentially double down on defending that conviction, when there could be really serious flaws, as there are in this case?

Brett Talley: So I don’t think it’s a flaw. But I think it reinforces the responsibility of a prosecutor’s office to honestly look at the evidence and follow the evidence where it goes. I completely understand that you want to defend these convictions. And it should be rare that you wouldn’t. It should be incredibly rare that you wouldn’t. It should be when you have something like the fingerprints of a serial killer in the car and a confession with information only the killer could know. That is the circumstance when you need to take a serious look.

But I want to say something else, because I think it’s important from where we are now. There’s the lessons we can learn, but there’s also where we are. It is true that finality is important. And it is true that prosecutors’ offices should defend convictions. But that’s why, in our system, we include things like executive clemency. It’s why we have a safety valve outside of the prosecutor’s office and the judicial system, for when you have extraordinary cases where the political system can right wrongs. That’s where we are now. Whatever’s happened in the past, there are lessons to be learned from it. And we should learn those lessons. But that’s only half of this. The other half is making this right. And that’s one of the reasons we wanted to be here today.

Where the exoneration effort stands

Host: So if you can, Leo, Gilbert, catch us up on where we are with that particular effort, because we mentioned Leo’s paroled. Florida doesn’t even have parole any more. So he’s one of the rare cases where somebody who is wrongfully convicted, whose appeals have been rejected by the courts, had an opportunity to become free — or free in a sense, because you are still on parole, right?

Leo Schofield: Still under conviction.

Host: For life, unless you are exonerated. So where do your efforts to achieve an exoneration from this governor’s office stand? Have you been making those appeals? Have you gotten any reception on that? And what does the timeline of this current administration, how does that play in? We know that the governor is just a few months from leaving office.

Gilbert King: Yeah, I’ll just update. I think there’s been a lot of interest in this case. I think sometimes the perception is, well, he’s out on parole, that case is over with. But as you can see, Leo does not want to stop with that. He wants to keep going and just wants final justice. He needs to be exonerated.

And so we’ve had a lot of support. Some of the people supporting Leo — a state senator, Jonathan Martin, who’s the head of the criminal justice committee, he ended up testifying at Leo’s parole hearing, saying this man shouldn’t spend one more day in prison, and came to Leo’s side to testify before the parole commission. And so he’s gotten a lot of bipartisan support around the state. I think there’s a great deal of interest in getting justice in this case and finally correcting this injustice.

Very similar to the Groveland Four when that first happened. Governor DeSantis looked at it. On the campaign trail he made a promise that this was going to be one of the first things he looked into if he was elected. And I think it was on day two in the office he pardoned them and reopened the case, which led to the exoneration. So I have a lot of confidence that people in Florida really do care about this justice, on both sides of the political spectrum. And I think there’s a lot of interest in Leo. We’ve had meetings, and I’m very optimistic that something’s going to be done.

“A paradigm shift”

Host: Go ahead, Leo.

Leo Schofield: Yeah, I’d just like to comment on all that, because what we’re talking about really is a paradigm shift in our social way of looking at things. Brett was talking about, we want to be able to have prosecutors who will defend a conviction. This is not just about me any more for me. I definitely want to be exonerated. I need to be exonerated. I should be exonerated. But it doesn’t stop there with me any more, because the paradigm has to be that when I think of Brett, Alice, Judge Cupp, Melissa Nelson, others who have taken an interest in this case and have brought their integrity from that side of the fence to this case — that’s what I want to defend. I want to uphold that. I want to show that as an example of what’s right with our system.

I want to make it clear that I am not an advocate for criminals. I am not trying to get criminals out of prison. I am not in an adversarial position against the DOC or any of that. That was my life, and there’s a lot of good that has come out of that. But this is an important enough thing in my life that it needs to change. We can’t accept innocent people being put in prison for crimes they did not commit. I think the only way that that’s going to stop, or at least lessen a lot, is when we can come together from these different perspectives, and when we have people such as these who are here in this room with us to bring that integrity to the system.

We need the system. We need our judiciary. It’s the best in the world. It really is. It works when you work it the right way. Then we can have confidence in what happens when people commit crimes, they should pay for them. I want to know that when this happens, it’s the right thing to have happen. Because before it, I never even thought about the court system. I never thought about being on trial for something.

The judge said something in my case once that I’ll never forget. He told this to the jury. He said it’s not the responsibility of the court to teach you what your rights are. As a citizen of this country it is your responsibility to attend any public library and learn what they are. While I was sitting there, that just hit me, because I’m sitting there with this Colonel Sanders-looking lawyer eating Life Savers, and I don’t know what’s happened. I don’t even understand the language of what’s happened. They’re using words that are not even English. I have no idea that it’s happening. I didn’t know about the 404 evidence that Alice was talking about. I sat there while this atrocity of a case took place and I lost my life over it.

Had I known anything like what I know today — and by far I’m not a lawyer, but I learned what my rights are and I learned how the system works a little bit. We should have an interest in it as a people, because innocent people are getting thrown in prison at too large of a number to be acceptable.

Justice for Michelle

Leo Schofield: I’m not here for money. I’m not looking for fame. I would love to put this whole thing behind me and get on with the rest of my life, but I’m not going to be able to go away leaving it like this. I just cannot. I welcome the opportunity to speak with anybody, and I put myself under that microscope that I mentioned earlier. Look as hard as you need to look. And that’s not easy. It really is not easy. It’s a hard way to live life, but that’s the effort that I have to make to get justice for Michelle, and to change the paradigm within our communities.

How the case found Gilbert King

Host: I want to ask you, Gilbert — he mentioned his attorney who’s here, and only because this case is so unusual. I just want you to remind us how you first learned about it, because it shows how awareness in the criminal justice system, there are people who really are concerned about justice even when they’re seeing something contrary to that happening right in front of them.

Gilbert King: Yeah, back in the summer of 2018 I was doing a legal conference, and I was invited to speak about Devil in the Grove for all the circuit judges in Florida, a couple of hundred of them. At the end of my talk I was signing books in the back, and this man came up to me and just handed me this card. It was his business card, and it said Leo Schofield, his prison number, and said: not just wrongfully convicted, he’s an innocent man.

I remember getting the card and not really fully understanding the implications of a sitting judge criticising the criminal justice system in the state he worked. I showed it to some public defenders that night and they were all like, is this guy retired? Did he do that? They’re not supposed to do this. There are sorts of ethical canons about criticising. But that’s what he was saying. He was saying: we failed.

I ended up reaching out to him and he started walking me through this case. It was interesting, because a few months earlier Leo had lost in court. The fingerprints had been identified, Jeremy Scott confessed. This came before an evidentiary hearing, and a judge ruled that Jeremy was not credible because first he said he was a car stereo thief and now he’s saying he’s a murderer. You can’t believe anything he says, and threw it out. He was out of legal options.

I think Judge Cupp, who was once Leo’s defence attorney years before that, before he became a judge, it was not sitting well with him. I think he just really felt like something needs to be done. There’s no more legal options. Maybe this writer can look into it. I think that was his hope. It’s kind of a long shot, because I get a lot of these kinds of requests all the time. But as I was looking through the case, I was like, something’s wrong with this. I kept working with him and he kept explaining things, giving me more documents. I came to the realisation of: this man is definitely innocent. That’s when I started investigating.

The defence attorney

Host: Alice, Leo referred to this Colonel Sanders-looking, Life Savers-eating attorney. He had an attorney that I think has been faulted for not delving deeply enough. He made some good arguments in a superficial way, but didn’t really get into the evidence in a way that would have helped break down the prosecutor’s case. There’s also this question of a private attorney in a case like this versus a public defender. That’s something you all talked about on your podcast. There’s this instinctive sense like, well, public defenders are overworked, they’re underpaid, I’m going to get myself a high-profile criminal defence attorney. It doesn’t always work out for the best.

Alice LaCour: That’s right. In this case there was a public defender, who Leo then hired a private attorney to replace. Anyone understanding economics may think, of course, if you’re going to pay a lot of money for something, that’s probably going to be better. In general, I think that’s right. In a case like this — and I say this because the attorney he got was very well known, very well respected in the community, very charismatic, good with juries. We said this before on the podcast, and I’ll say it again: he was probably the exact kind of attorney you want if you were dead guilty, because he was going to woo the jury. He was going to poke holes. He was going to do a song and dance. The facts didn’t really matter for a case like that, because you don’t want to dig into the facts. You want to just do enough song and dance for the jury to think, I don’t know, I kind of like this guy. What’s reasonable doubt?

But when you have a case like Leo’s — and most criminal defence attorneys, the people they are hired to defend really did do it. And so there is a laziness that I think came with this, when he probably got the file and thought, well, young guy, he sees the evidence that the prosecution’s going to put up. Probably did it, because most times when a woman is murdered it often is someone close to her. It’s often the boyfriend or the husband. That is just statistics.

The problem though is that all he had to do was look right under the surface to begin to tear apart that timeline. Question the key witnesses in this case. If he just dug in a little bit, he could have seen that the state’s key witness, a neighbour who had terrible testimony for Leo — she says she heard Michelle’s final words, but if you just dig a little bit you realise that her entire testimony falls apart, and then she had hands in other witnesses’ testimony that then ultimately supported this completely faulty timeline. If he had looked a little bit and asked those questions at trial, I truly think the prosecution’s timeline could have been deconstructed. But he did what a lot of defence attorneys did, which is just to do that song and dance, and didn’t bring the facts in this case. He didn’t even need to do much investigation. He could have torn it down.

I think that the public defenders know this, and even though they’re free, public defenders — we’ve worked with them a lot. We are on the other side of the V with them all the time. Some of the best attorneys you will ever get, because of their experience. They know the types of tactics that prosecutors can use, and though they may have a big workload, they are doing that job because they are called to do that work. No one works that hard for that little pay other than wanting justice. And so I have immense respect for public defenders.

And in this particular case, I think it was a perfect storm. A prosecution that is held to a higher standard, and this prosecution did not do it. And then they were not matched with an equal on the other side who was able to tear down their lazy timeline and their lazy testimonies and their lazy witnesses. And they didn’t ask the questions that I think could have exposed it all.

This is a very long way of saying there are ways that we can improve. But I do want to bring that all back to: a lot of people who are involved in this case are now dead. They’re not going to change their ways. We can learn from them, but the wrong has continued to this day, and that part is unacceptable. I don’t care about the mistakes made in the past. There is a way to fix this today, whether that’s through executive clemency — and that may be the only way. But we can’t turn a blind eye, because if we do, we let that laziness and misconduct win. And that’s not why I went to law school. That’s not why I became a prosecutor. Brett and I drove 16 hours over the last 20 hours in order to be here, because we care about this case. This is not going to be a shocker to you: we don’t do this for any one of the other cases that we’ve covered, and we have over 400 episodes.

Conviction integrity units

Host: I remember reading a review of the original Bone Valley podcast saying it’s not just good, it’s infuriating. And there are so many details that come out in the investigation that really are maddening. Brett, I want to ask you, because this state attorney’s office where you’re doing your appearance today has something that’s known as a Conviction Integrity Review Unit, which basically is an opportunity for prosecutors to look back at cases that may have flaws, re-examine them, and consider whether the convictions should stand. And in a couple of cases they’ve found cases that didn’t stand up to scrutiny and those convictions were erased. But that’s not everywhere. Not all state attorney’s offices have those. What do you think about how those cases should be handled? Is that an appropriate place for the prosecutor to be the venue where those are examined? And why are some offices still resistant?

Brett Talley: So to answer the last question first, I think there’s always a concern that, because innocence cases often do have a lot of media behind them — and sometimes that media is not always as thorough as you see from someone like Gilbert — there is some concern in some offices we’re going to have pressure to nitpick everything the prosecutor did. Concern that good convictions will somehow be overturned. And I understand that. And I think you have to construct them in the right way.

But I think you absolutely have to have them. Because prosecutors are human and investigators are human, and people make mistakes. And it’s easy, when you’re looking at a tough case like this and you don’t have an obvious alternative suspect at the time, and you have the husband and you have a few witnesses who turn out to be incredibly unreliable but at the time are telling you something — it’s very easy to fall into this: okay, he did it, now we’ve got to prove he did it. Instead of: where does the evidence lead us? And I think that’s what you see happened here. And not having someone who can come behind and say, hey guys, looking at this from an independent perspective as a prosecutor, someone that has done this work, someone who understands how this work has to happen — I am seeing some flaws here. I think that’s one reason it is good to have it in a prosecutor’s office. Because I think it’s good to have independent eyes on something, who have the experience.

And just one thing I want to add. We’ve talked a lot about the flaws of the defence attorney. We’ve talked about the flaws of the prosecutor and the flaws of the judge. Corrupt prosecutors and bad defence attorneys and bad judges can end up convicting guilty people. They absolutely can do that. They can frame the guilty, right? That happens. One thing I want everyone out there to understand: if you just look at the evidence, you put all this aside, if you just look at the evidence, if you take some time and dive into the evidence itself and just follow where the evidence leads, it will not lead you to Leo. And that, I think, is so important. I don’t want to lose sight of the specifics of the case when we’re talking about these bigger-picture issues.

Host: Well, it is great to speak to all of you. It’s really fascinating to have you all here together, and I really appreciate you participating in our conversation today.