Transcript
00:00:03
Speaker 1: I'm Kathleen goldhar This is crime story every week, a new crime with the storyteller who knows it best. There was a moment I don't distinctly remember it, but there was a chill that kind of ran down my body when he said, that's my punishment. This girl was nice to me and I killed her. If you love true crime, there's a good chance you know the podcast Bone Valley. To make the series, host Gilbert King and his producer Kelsey Decker spent more than five years investigating a murder. The result is the kind of story that reporters dream about, where Doggett investigative work actually makes a difference, where lives are changed and truths are told. This story begins in nineteen eighty five when Leo Schofield and Michelle sam first met. They were just kids, a couple of high school dropouts who fell in love in Lakeland, Florida. Michelle was a local to Bone Valley, a region of central Florida named after its fossil rich soil. Leo was a transplant for Massachusetts who didn't really fit in. He loved rip jeans and rock and roll, while the locals wore mostly cowboy hats and gaiteror printed shirts. But Leo was charming and he had a way with the girls. Not long after meeting Michelle, Leo proposed, and like many young romances, things were a little rocky, and at times Michelle felt that Leo was a little bit possessive. But Bone Valley is not a podcast about a troubled marriage. It's about a murder. On a rainy, humid night in February nineteen eighty seven, Michelle locked out of her waitressing job and never came home. She was discovered three days later, stabbed to death. There was no physical evidence linking Leo to the crime. In fact, there were fingerprints at the scene that matched someone else, and yet Leo was convicted of Michelle's murder. He was just twenty two, and he's been in prison ever since. Gilbert King learned of Leo's story when a Florida judge named Scott Kopp handed him a business card. On the back, the judge had written, Leo Schofield not just wrongly convicted, but he's an innocent man. I think he was just driving. It really hit me in the heart a little bit to see how I would respond to that, because I remember I went out to dinner with some public defenders that night and we're having a conversation. I said, oh, I gotta just show you something. I was doing this talk earlier today at this judge's convention, and I said, one of the judges handed me this card, what do you make of it? And we passed it around the room to the public defenders, and I know all of them were like, wait, a judge wrote this. He's a sitting judge. And I said yeah. And then the last guy that touched it was from Paul County and he said, I know this case. You should call him. And that sort of tipped me off that he was aware that there was something wrong with this conviction. And so when I got back to New York, I think a day or two later, I finally picked up the phone and reached out to Judge Cup. And what did Judge Cup tell you? So in nineteen eighty seven, Leo Schofield's eighteen year old wife disappeared. A frantic search for days, and finally on the third day they find her body in a phosphate canal and she's been stabbed twenty six times and there wasn't really much evidence pointing to Leo. Leo was out there searching at a pretty strong alibi. He was with people all night. But it took months and months and months and well over a year they couldn't solve this case. And then a new prosecutor comes in and decides that there may be enough evidence to build a case that Leo could have been responsible for this, and so Leo unfortunately gets a very ineffective defense attorney who really blows the case, doesn't do any preparation, can't get the names right. He's just not prepared for this, and so Leo's convicted. And the way the judicial system works is that's not an uncommon thing. We see a lot of rawful convictions out there, and we know about this because DNA comes into play. Later on, they go, oh, we got the wrong guy. So it wasn't really that difficult a case. At that point. It's just another conviction of somebody who's claiming they were innocent. Where the case really gets interesting is seventeen years into Leo's sentence, they find these fingerprints that were in the car that were never identified. And now, because they have better technology and an aphis system that can run the Prince do they run it through, and it matches this known killer who lives on the same street where mis was last seen. And this is a man who's killed multiple people and he's currently in prison himself. And so that's when the case to me became something really interesting. It stood out to me than a normal, I hate to even say a normal wrongful conviction. This had some other element to it that was unsolved, and I remember thinking to myself, wait a minute, why is Leo Schofield still in prison? And that's basically what the story is about, trying to answer that question, why is Leo Schofield still in prison? You eventually moved to Florida to be closer to this story, which is an incredible commitment. But from your past work, I mean, we know that you throw yourself into stories like this before, but can we talk a little bit about the way you do take on a story. I have a lot of connections in Florida that I've built up over the years from my books and a lot of goodwill. I think. I do a lot of public speaking at judicial conferences, public defender conferences, and I'm very much there's probably not a lawyer in Florida who hasn't seen me speak, to be honest with you, So I'm really rooted in there, and it's been a really valuable way to work because there there are times that, like I'll be reading, in one specific case, an opinion from the Florida Supreme Court that they don't quite understand, and I look at who wrote it. I said, Oh, I got that guy on speed dial. I know him. You know, I've had drinks with him. After a conference. I'll just call Hi up and ask him what he was thinking and get him on the phone and work through it. And that seems to happen to me all the time. So I just knew that if it's in Florida, I can find things out, I can get records. I know how to do this, and it's just a very comfortable like battleground, I guess, so to say. And I love to just sort of dive into these projects. My books take about five years to do. I didn't think a podcast was going to take me that long. I was completely wrong, because it's coming up on five years on that as well. But I just think the level of investigation that I want to do and to bring to this is just so important and I feel like, the readers have always responded to the level of detail and the thoroughists in the books that I've written, and I wanted to do that kind of narrative for a podcast. And along with you is Kelsey And can you tell me who was she? How did you guys connect? Kelsey? Interestingly enough, was attending Barnard College here in New York and she worked at the Columbia University's Butler Library, which has a lot of oral history that she was working as an archivist in there, sort of part time in college, and so I would go to that library all the time to do research on my book. And you know, once I met her, I was like, way, do you ever want to do any freelance work? Like what are you doing? Because I need research done And she was open to that, and she started helping me with my book. And then we got this lead on this Leo Schofield case and I remember said to like, you know, this case seems really interesting, but I have this book that I'm working on. And I remember she was the one that said, well, if there's an this and man in prison, that should be the priority. And so she was the one that sort of persuaded me to look in to this a little more, and so finally it came time to go down and start researching and meet Leo Schofield and I said, do you want to do this? Do you want to be in on this? And she said, yeah, I do, and that was it, and so we ended up working on this for the next four plus years of our lives. And one of the things that I loved you so much of this podcast always to me felt like just these enduring friendships and these relationships that you develop, and one of them really is with Kelsey. And so there's you, older, more experienced journalist, her young. But I felt like she took on a real leadership. I don't know if that's the right word, but you guys became very equal partners, and she brought in a strength and a humanity that was a lovely counter to you and your factual journalist stick put one foot in front of the other, keep asking the questions. And I saw that develop over the podcast, and I was just so taken. And I think the moment that Kelsey arrived in my ears as that very important storyteller was after you guys see Michelle's autopsy pictures, you get back in the car and this happens. I mean I was thinking about her and like the pain she must have felt and how scared she must have been in those last moments. You know, there's also the proximity and age I was thinking about, you know, also like myself and all of my friends who are young women and could potentially be in a situation like that. Can you tell me what Kelsey means to you and what she brought to the story. Yeah, I mean I've often said this. I believe that she's the conscience of this story and that particular scene. I was not in favor of that scene. My first instincts were like, this is too manipulative. It's not something journalistically that I would really approve of. I wasn't comfortable with it at all. But we played it a couple times with the producers and they thought it was really effective in a way that I couldn't really see because I didn't have a lot of audio experience. And I remember just pulling Kelsey aside and I said, look, how do you feel about this? And she goes, it's real And that's what happened. And we kept the mic running all the time because we didn't know what we were doing, so we just said record everything, and so we had all these moments like that that were just a little bit more emotional than what I was used to doing. And I was worried that I was going to feel like we were manipulating a listener, but they kind of convinced me that instead of just writing about what we just saw these horrific autopsy pictures that kind of spoke to it all right there, and the fact that she was closer in age to Michelle the victim really resonated to me, and I just felt like everything she says and does in the story is always honest and real, and so she was really the conscience of this story. And I really there's a lot of times where I just followed her lead and followed her instincts. I try to give her as much credit as possible, but I don't think anybody will ever really know the true impact she had, not just on the reporting. She was equal to me every single step of the way. Yeah, I'm so glad you kept that in as a listener. It was insanely impactful and it just brought Michelle back to us as opposed to it being about Leo and the injustice of Leo, which was equally as important, obviously, but it just reminded us that this somebody died, somebody was violently killed, and Kelsey does that she represented us, I think in a way that's a really beautiful way of putting it. I can tell you, Like, just you know, Michelle's brother was very moved by how we were treating everything, and we were, you know, and then same with Leo. Leo was really really moved by Kelsey's reactions to these things. It's also really hurtful to him because it brought back a lot of pain about loss and the tragedy of it, and hearing Kelsey's reaction. I can't imagine what it's like for Leo to hear some of this stuff because it's so intensely personal. You know, we were asking a lot of him. We'd go into the prison and interview him for three hours and we'd leave and he'd tell us he's a wreck for days, like just revisiting all this stuff, and it just really brought home the point and see and the importance of treating this in a way that is respectful to everybody. And I think journalists like I mean, I can feel the same. You do it for enough years and it starts to just become your job as a story, like you're just looking for the next thing to defend your thesis as opposed to you. And so sometimes more than sometimes you need the people like Kelsey to bring you back to it being about real people. You know. Yeah, I absolutely agree, And I'm so glad that I didn't, like, just put my foot down and say no, this isn't traditional journalism or whatever, and I just trusted and you know, it's like you're all working with our team. Was like these young women who just had such much better instincts than I did for this stuff. I think that happens in life all the time, doesn't it. Yeah, it does. One of the other moments in the podcast that is just so powerful is when you finally meet Jeremy Scott, the man whose fingerprints were found in Michelle's car, who you believe is the real murderer. I've done jailhouse interviews, and no matter how many times you go into a prison, they're always just a little bit nerve wracking. So can you talk to me a little bit about that visit with Jeremy. Yeah. I think one of the things That's really important is we had prepared for this interview for a long time. We went through every single possible situation, you know, if he's combative, if he starts to deny things, we had a strategy we were Just as I was writing to him, he said, I want to tell my story, but I don't know how. I just want to tell my version of it. And so we use that to sort of say, all right, we're here for you. We want to listen to you, we want to hear your story, and we're not going to interrogate you. We're not going to try and trick you. We want this to be about how you feel about this. And so we went through all these scenarios and things we knew we had to cover, knowing that we might only get like less than an hour in there with him. But you know, once we got inside there, something really interesting happened. I would start Jeremy talking and sort of make him feel comfortable, and I think that was really working. You could tell he just felt really relaxed. And then Kelsey would just ask him a lot of questions that sounds like what a therapist might ask, how did that make you feel? Jeremy? And he was really responding to her. You know, he didn't always make eye contact with her, but sometimes he did and he would get emotional. But you know, we were obviously leading to Michelle, and I think there was a moment where I was expecting him to sort of take accountability for it, but I never expected him to get so emotional about it. That really blew me away just listening to him talk about this remorse that he felt. And there was a moment I don't distinctly remember it, but I think there was a chill that kind of ran down my body when he said, and sit gets me so scared. I sneak with it every night. He was acknowledging that I'm tortured by this. This girl was nice to me, and I kills her. That's my punishment. I have to see her face every night when I go to sleep. That part just got me, and I just figured we may not connect on anything else, but that moment is going to really connect because I could feel it just listening to it. And I mean he confessed to you, Ye, so fecus. As far as Michelle, she is at her own time, wrong place, and everything happens when you're youngly not thinking I read a lot of these kind of interviews, interrogations, however you want to phrase it, and you can see what's common when you're talking to somebody who's done something really horrific, is they kind of lead you up there with all these details. They can describe the details, but the actual act itself sometimes becomes a blur, and they don't really love to dive into that, and they'll often cut the story short. And so Jeremy his way of doing it was like, well, then I lost it. It would have been very easy if he was lying to just say I got a stabed there a bunch of times. I can't remember how many times. I just kept plunging, And you know, he could have done that and just paid lip service to it. But he didn't want to talk about it, and that was telling in itself, like I'll tell you all this, I'm not proud of this. It's one of the worst moments of my life. But I'm not gonna do that because that's really getting into his psyche and that's a lot of damage, I can tell you. Afterwards, he wrote me and he asked me to see some transcripts from that interview, and I sent him some transcripts, and he said, I don't ever want to read that again. It's awful. It could just sort of tell how he felt about it. One of the remarkable things about the work that you did in this podcast was you sort of are open to everybody's story and humanity. So there's this man who's in front of you telling you that he did this terrible thing to this woman, has done a bunch of other terrible things. But I still felt like you decided that his history of trauma, his background, his heart upbringing was worthy of explaining. One it better helps us understand who he became, but it also sort of forces you to get out of this punishment and tough on crime mentality to understand that most people get to a place like that because of their background. Is that part of what you go in there looking to do? Like, how much of that is important to you as a storyteller, that you give everybody that kind of fair shake, that sense that we have to understand everybody's story. Yeah, I think it's I think it is important. I would say we didn't really go in there planning on this, because, to be honest with you, Jeremy Scott and his actions, they're pretty horrific, and there's a long pattern of violence. You can hear it throughout the show, from his girlfriend, friends, from the people he was around, from people he interacted with who had extraordinarily violent interactions with him. I knew that was going to be something that I didn't think we could try and persuade audiences to feel empathy about this. We couldn't do that. We weren't even gonna try that. I think the reason it works really well in this case is is that we really followed Leo's lead on this, and Leo at one point realizes that he was always looking for this monster, the person who must have done this to his wife had to be some monster. And then he learns who Jeremy Scott is and he's like, this is no monster. This is kind of a damaged individual that he just can't feel this hatred that he was feeling all those years when he didn't know who did it. And I think, you know, with Leo, he really respected the fact that Jeremy confessed because he didn't have to do that, and for Leo, it felt like this was Jeremy's redemption, trying to come clean. He didn't know Leo he wasn't really invested in this. Jeremy was doing a lot of this for himself and his own psyche. And Leo couldn't survive in prison for all these years unless he took on that bitterness and that anger, and it's really important for him religiously to find forgiveness in his heart for Jeremy. That's the only way he said. He was very clear about it, which I thought was fascinating. He said, I'm in no position to forgive Jeremy Scott. That's I would never be so presumptive to do that because Michelle's own family, they have a right to have feelings about this. I'm not doing it for any other reason than to save myself and to save myself from being destroyed in this prison. I need help with this, and the way I get there is by forgiving Jeremy and moving on from that and not having hatred in my heart, not only for Jeremy but for the state that put him in prison. And so we really followed Leo's lead, and the way Leo talked about Jeremy was really important to us. And that's I think why it really works so well is it's not coming from from us. You know the reporters, it's coming from Leo, the man who has every right to hate Jeremy Scott, but he won't do it. And that's that's really who Leo is. I mean, Leo is remarkable. This is a man who was under educated, who had poverty in his background, has been in prison since twenty two years old. Where does that come from? He is an astounding human. Yeah, you know, it also made us think, like when he described his story, a lot of this we didn't really put in the podcast, but he had mentors at prison, and they were older men who just said, you have to make the better of yourself at every opportunity. You have to go back and get your ged. You got to get your high school degree, then you got to go to college. And you know, he did all that. He got multiple degrees from college, and then he becomes a leader in the church God behind bars. And to just tell you how remarkable is because I just talked to him and he's at this re entry program and it's you would think, like, everything's great, there's no violence in this prison. His life is really pretty relaxed compared to where he used to be. But he's extraordinarily lonely because he was removed from a prison where all his friends were from the last twenty years and he's prohibited from contacting them. He can't even write to them, so they're just all of a sudden, he's plucked out of their lives. And a lot of those men were counting on him to get through prison, and he's always been that leader in the prison who's able to mentor young kids coming in, but also his friends and his bandmates, and it was really painful for Leo. And I remember there was a moment where he was being ready for transferred to be transferred, which was all about his growth and his next stage in life, and he was like seriously contemplating not leaving because he felt like he couldn't leave these guys behind. And it took a little more effort than I could have possibly imagined to say, Leo, you have to do this, but he was like, I can't leave these guys. I don't know what's going to happen if I'm out of their lives, and that's the way he was thinking. So he's really an extraordinary person. I think it's like when you meet some people who are wrongfully convicted and it becomes obvious and you look at them and you talk to them and you go, I don't know if I could do that, I would be so angry and so bitter about losing so many years of my life. And we just cannot put ourselves in that headspace because it's so farign too us and so traumatic and I don't even know how to describe it. But when you meet people that come out of that who have been wrongfully convicted and they're still around and there's still a positive force, you're dealing with somebody special, and he really is. How did you handle it? Like? One of the things that I remember is I had listened to it. My husband listens to fewer podcasts than I do. I probably listened to more podcasts than most people, but I said, you have to listen to this. So he finally listened, and I think it was on episode five. He called me and said, you have to tell me that this ends up getting his conviction has to be changed, because I cannot handle listening to the rest if this ends up badly. And I was like, sorry, I can't. You were in this for five years. Were there times when you wanted to throw something at a wall or right up until the very end, I mean honestly, and I remember thinking like, look, we're not going to have the kind of feel good ending at the end of this story. We really are not, So where do we go with this ending? And I remember thinking to myself, I think the ending has to be we have to really just be truthful and it's going to infuriate people, and I said, that's okay, too. Infuriating people about something sometimes brings change and it brings people to the cause. And I think that's really by just saying, we're going to tell this story as honestly as we know it. But you know, we can't control people's reaction to this. I knew people were going to be really upset hearing this. And you know, your husband gets through five, it just starts getting worse from there and you just start seeing all the setbacks and they're just absolutely devastating. And we actually got to sit through a couple of them too, you know, his parole hearing and all. So one of his appeals that just got shot down, and it was like, how is it that everybody I show this to. I'm talking about lawyers around the country, every side of the political spectrum, judges, prosecutors, when they look at this, they go, oh, come on, this guy needs a new trial. But there's a little group in Polk County where they're like, no, no, no no, no, we got this right, No need to look at this any further. That was my question. I mean, what the hell? What why are they so immovable? I mean, what is that about. I talk to a lot of people about it, and there's a couple of things at play. I think the finality that the courts like to have, like you have to respect a jury's verdict, and the courts have spoken and he's gone through the appellate system, and I get that that's true, but it's not always correct. You know, we know this for a fact. We see exonerations all the time. Florida has a particularly notorious history of getting these cases wrong. And I'm talking about death penalty cases, where the appellate process is much more copper headsive. But when you talk about a regular first degree murder trial that doesn't have a capital sentence on it, you know, they don't get the same kind of scrutiny. And so you can only imagine how many really truly innocent people are out there. Now. I want to say that with this caveat, like the state usually gets these convictions right for the most part, a high percentage of crimes or you know, people taking pleas. These are still fairly rare, but they're not that rare in Florida. I just think the whole process. We really set out to look at the appellate process in this because you know, we do cover the trial, the original trial, but that to me doesn't even seem like the worst injustice. The worst injustice happens afterwards when we start to know who this person is, who's connected to the crime scene, and what he's saying and what he's trying to say, and nobody will listen to him, from prosecutors to judges to you know, appellate judges. It just became so frustrating to see, why is this not breaking through and they keep bringing up evidence it is false? How can judges the higher up keep letting this bullshit evidence be brought forward. It was just astounding to me, is like, is there nobody saying that's false? We know it's false, it's been proven to be false. There should be And that was the thing, like we felt like we had to really lay into a lot of these points, and you know, I never saw that the defense when I look at the defense documents, I never saw Leo's defense lying or misrepresenting evidence. Everything I saw about the lies and the misrepresentation was coming from the state. And also a lot of times they would just take these innocuous statements, like you know, Leo asked to see a lawyer early on in the in the like, yeah, so what everyone asked us. At one point he didn't even ask for a lawyer. He asked a friend, do you think I need a lawyer? They're questioning me every day. They use that against him. They said, well Leo couldn't, like he never helped with his wife's funeral, like to hold that against him, and like this is a twenty two year old basket case, and as he says in the podcast, like I was in no position to pick out the kind of wood for the coffin. I just couldn't handle that. This kid just like to put that response in ability on him and then to use it against him. I just found that it was really disingenuous, and there was a lot of that happening. It was always on behalf of the state, and so that part of it really told me that they I believe that they were trying to win this case. They weren't trying to seek justice. And what I also loved about the podcast is that, of course many of your episodes were done ahead of time and in the can but you were eventually going live and people were getting on board, and you talked about that people were getting angry. I mean, we weren't the only ones we saw it. There was articles being written. It became a very big thing. How much did the podcast popularity play into the fact that Leo finally got a break this year? I mean you mentioned that he was transferred to a lower security prison with the expect that maybe, and quite likely, he'll actually get paroled next year. Yeah. I think there was a lot of things happening which I thought were really interesting. You saw a lot of the public stuff, the social media response and that kind of stuff, and the articles that were being written. The New York Times wrote a couple pieces about the case, was covered by The Guardian. You know, it was all out there, but a lot of things were happening behind the scenes that were really interesting. People were contacting me, Prosecutors in the state of Florida were basically saying, what can I do to help? I looked into this case, they wanted to get involved. Ultimately, you had a state senator from Florida, very conservative state senator. He's newly elected. He gets put in charge of the Criminal Justice Committee, which oversees the parole Board and the prisons, and he looked at it and he was like, this guy doesn't need to be parolled. He needs to be exonerated. And he was furious about it. And I was getting a lot of those kind of letters and emails from law enforcement in the state, what can I do? And people were starting to write to the governor's office, and there was just this sort of movement that was happening outside of what we saw on social media, and I'm sure that had an impact on it. I think powerful people were reaching out not only to state representatives and the governor's office, but also to the Tenth Circuit where Leo's case originated. I'm positive that people were reaching out there and they were feeling some pressure because if you listened to the last episode, the state's position completely changed. They didn't really throw the autopsy pictures in front, and they didn't do what they usually do he showed no remorse. He refuses to say he did it? How can you let him out? They didn't go that route, so I have the feeling that they were getting a little bit of pushback from other places. I know some people who had written to them, but I don't know the details of that, but I suspected that locally people were saying things to them. Interesting. As you mentioned, this was your first audio project, your first podcast. How do you feel about telling stories through audio now? You know, honestly, I love it. I there was I was trying to think about a specifically our interview with Jeremy Scott, and what that would have looked like at the end of a book, had I written in a book, and how those quotes would have played out. And I think the power that you get in audio was that we could hear Jeremy's voice cracking, You could feel his remorse. You know. He has this line where Kelsey asked him like, do you think about Michelle really quietly? If you ever think about Michelle and his voice cracks. I do all the time. I pray for her every day when I lay down, I sleep with her. Can get out? Can get away? That's a nightmare. And you can feel it was real. And you know, we talked to Jeremy's brother, and Jeremy's brother sort of said that about Jeremy, like if he's saying that, he's not lying, he's feeling this. And his own brother spend time in prison, and he said, when you're in there by yourself in the cell, the weight of what you've done really begins to hit you. And he suspected that was really happening to Jeremy. And so I don't think I could have ever captured that the same way on the page. Just hearing that the voice and the intimacy, and like in a microphone or putting on headphones, it's really powerful. Even when I listen to it now, I think, wow, that's really amazing. Yeah, I mean truly, how did Bone Valley change your life? In a couple of ways? And I think almost all positive. The one I'll just talk about the one, and it's not really a negative. I just it's a thing that you really have to be aware of. Like, once you go down this path, you're in it and you're basically interviewing people constantly, You're asking for documents, asking for photos, and it takes an emotional toll on you because it just there's no way to sell I couldn't find a way to separate myself from this story. And a lot of it has to do with, you know, I guess the way I look at storytelling, I don't have a traditional journalistic background. I don't have that kind of training. I came up really through narrative nonfiction books, and so I think there's a different way of telling those kind of stories in that long form. You know, several years spent investigating it, and sometimes you think, well, is he being objective? You know, he's so involved. Is this advocacy journalism? Now what are we doing here? And I'm honestly hadn't really experienced any other way of doing this in the in the work that I've done in the past. But I equate it with like Ida Tarbell when she's at the turn of the century, one of the great muck breaking journalists of all time, and she ends up exposing Standard Oil and John D. Rockefeller and all the business shenanigans basically and pressure and corruption and all of that. And she really exposed that in a real concise and thorough and comprehensive way. And you look at like what got her in it? Well, John d Rockefeller and Standard Oil ruined her father's business and drove him out of business. So of course she's biased. She sees what happened and she's learned this, and that's sort of how the way I look at it. I w Wells is another example, when she was investigating lynching, like, there's no two sides to that story. You have to be against lynching. And that's how I feel about rawful convictions. And I'm not going to compromise my career by like advocating for someone and not believing it. You know, I put so much time into this. If there was like one moment where I felt Leo was being dishonest with me or was trying to mislead me, I honestly would probably back away from it, Like I don't think I can go forward with it. So I knew that that wasn't going to happen. And after a while, we just there's so much that we learned, and everything pointed towards Jeremy and not Leo, and it was just so obvious that this was wrong. And so I felt like I was much more heavily involved in this than I might be with a book because people were living and living this life. Yeah, and you really did become invested. It was just so clear to us. And there's this exchange in the final episode of the podcast where you and Kelsey and Leo you're on the phone and you're talking about its parole hearing and that it's still you know, there's the fight isn't over. We're not going anywhere, and just want I just wanted you to know that, and you know, we think about you all the time. And at the very end of the call, you tell Leo that you love him. Guys are the masters. I love you, Gilbert, take care of Buddy, Love you too. Bye bye. I thought it was just such a striking moment, and I don't think I've ever heard anything like that before on a podcast. So have you ever told any of your subjects that you've loved them before? No? I never have. I mean that this is all new to me. I'm used to writing in third person, but I'm not ashamed of that at all. I feel like it was just an organic part of the story. And at the very end that clip you just played, it just felt like we didn't know where this thing was going to end. We didn't know. It just felt like this was sort of the end. And there I was sitting there with Kelsey and just listening to Leo talk about what this whole experience has meant to him, and it was just really hard not to get emotional about it. And you know, I'm not ashamed of it. It was real and it was you know, I think I cried a few times in the podcast actually, and I think listening to it now, you looked a little bit emotional. Does it still kind of hit you when you hear it? It really does? You know. I think part of the thing that gets me emotional was just hearing Leo talk about Kelsey and Kelsey's arc throughout the story. Kelsey, somehow she has a connection in my heart. And as much as it was emotional hearing Leo, it was really emotional hearing Kelsey talk about what this project has meant to her and the way she perceived these new students down at this re entry program and how they were gonna interact with Leo and how grateful they would be to meet Leo. I know it's a whole process and we're all gonna have to process this, and you especially, but I really like you know, woke up feeling really really good about this today and like I'm really excited for you, Like I feel like, I mean, I'm excited. And I also just felt like I really wanted to just give Kelsey the last word on this story, to let her talk to Leo, and I just felt there was something really beautiful and organic about it, and I was just happy to slip into the background. I think like nine months is, yeah, that time's gonna go by fast, and you're gonna hopefully, you know, be able to connect with a bunch of new people. And then nine months from now, Team Leo is gonna be like even bigger and more robust, and you know we're all gonna be there for you when you know, you get out for real. This is Crime Story from CBC Podcasts. I'm your host Kathleen Goltar. Crime Story is produced and written by me Alexis Green and Sarah Clayton. Sound designed by Graham MacDonald. Our senior producer is Jeff Turner. Additional audio from Lava for Good. Our executive producers are Cecil Fernandez and Chris Oak. Tanya Springer is the senior manager for CBC Podcasts and r F Narani is the executive director of CBC Podcasts.
