Come see Gilbert King tell the story Polk County's powerful don't want you to hear

I'm offering two free (good) tickets to see the Pulitzer-winning journalist who has convinced everybody -- except the people for whom justice is just a job -- that Leo Schofield should be exonerated.

Update: Wow, my two tickets have already been claimed. That did not take long. LOL. Please go to Lakeland Now to buy tickets. It’ll be worth it.

I don’t know a single person in Polk County who is not a personally-compromised prosecutor, judge, or reporter who even pretends to think Leo Schofield — not Jeremy Scott — killed his wife Michelle Schofield in north Lakeland in 1987.

Gilbert King — dogged journalist, talented storyteller, Pulitzer Prize winner for Devil in the Grove, honorary Florida man, and all around great guy — is the main reason for that. And he is coming to the Polk Theatre on Saturday, Dec. 21 to talk about his groundbreaking Leo Schofield podcast Bone Valley — and more.

It’s the dynamic public chat that current and former state attorneys Brian Haas and Jerry Hill — or really anybody else in power or status positions in Polk County — don’t want you to take part in. So just attending is a small act of rebellion. You can rest assured they won’t be there to confront their failures and immorality.

And kudos to Lakeland Now, the non-profit local news organization, for inviting Gilbert. This is by far the most provocative “candid conversation” Lakeland Now has ever held because the Schofield case lays bare the same Polk leadership class pathologies and cowardices that led to the Taylor Cadle and Deborah Dorbert atrocities — not to mention the shamelessness of the East Polk high school construction process. It’s an important civic event. We need institutions of justice and power to take their jobs seriously.

Alas, I have an out-of-town family commitment that night. But I have purchased two good orchestra seats and will give them to the first reader who claims them. Send me an email. And if you want to know the core of the story, you can find it in the article linked below. The opening few paragraphs boil it down to its most elemental.

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Abandoned, abused, and brain-damaged as a child, Jeremy Scott became a confessed serial killer in late 1980s Polk and Osceola counties. For a few years, he was arguably the most dangerously prolific criminal in the history of Lakeland and Polk County.

He was convicted of one murder, tried and acquitted for another, and connected to two others, for which he later confessed in detail. He was a serial, life-destroying rapist of underage girls, and a chronic violent abuser of women and gay men he picked up around Lake Morton and later robbed. (Today, Lake Morton is my neighborhood. I moved here in 1999.)

Here’s the best evidence that Jeremy Scott specifically murdered 18-year Michelle Schofield of Lakeland in 1987 by stabbing her in a fit of rage more than 20 times after she gave him a ride on a rainy night near Combee Road and Highway 33:

• Scott’s palm print was found in the car Michelle Schofield was driving on the night she disappeared, when it was located far from her body. It is the only physical evidence tying anyone to Michelle Schofield’s murder.

• Scott took his 1987-89 girlfriend, whom he routinely abused (to the point of leaving her jaw permanently disfigured), to a well-known Highway 33 phosphate “lover’s lane.” Scott wanted have sex outside near an old phosphate pond, the girlfriend said. Michelle Schofield’s body was found in that same pond.

• Scott confessed to killing Michelle Schofield — on a phone calls, in written statements, under oath in official hearings, in ever growing detail over more than decade. Scott says he confessed, face-to-face, to prosecutor John Aguero, who handled Michelle Schofield’s murder. This happened during an untaped, closed door meeting Aguero acknowledged summoning Scott to. If Scott’s account is true, Aguero later perjured himself under oath. Scott has never recanted his Michelle Schofield confession, despite grossly inaccurate contemporary news reporting from one hearing. King’s podcast corrects that reporting error with full actual audio and context. Here’s a sample from one of Jeremy Scott’s many confessions:

“She gave me a ride and all that. That’s why it hurts me more. … Girls like that, they don’t pick up people. I dream, I wake up, I turn over, I see a dead body sleeping next to me. I sleep with dead bodies every night when I go to bed. That’s my punishment.”

Nightmares are Jeremy Scott’s only punishment for Michelle.

That’s because Polk County and the State of Florida have chosen — repeatedly — to punish Leo Schofield, Michelle’s husband, rather than correct their obvious mistake. That horror compounds within every second that we don’t end it.

“That man ain’t do nothin,” Jeremy Scott says of Leo Schofield. “He’s innocent.”

Leo Schofield has been in prison for his wife’s murder for more than 30 years. No jury of Leo Schofield’s peers has ever heard any of the evidence against Jeremy Scott. That’s because the Polk County State Attorney’s Office and the state of Florida refuse to allow any jury to hear it.

And there has been no popular outcry to force them. There should be; and it should come from Polk County itself. We did this.

Our only excuse as a community is that we didn’t know about Jeremy Scott. Our police and prosecutors and judges have denied us the chance to know. They have denied us the chance to correct the unforgivable mistake we made in 1989.

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