April 9, 2025
Chapter 1 | You Told Me No
After Bone Valley Season 1, something unexpected happened: people began to respond to Jeremy Scott—not for who he was, but for what he did—finally telling the truth. Among those drawn in is someone who has every reason not to be: Jeremy’s son, Justin. Now 35, Justin has never met his father, never wanted to. But something’s shifted. He wants answers.
Through a conversation years in the making, Justin’s mother Jami opens up about the relationship she once had with Jeremy—a relationship she’s never fully shared with anyone. Now, through Gilbert, mother and son begin to uncover a truth that’s been buried for decades.
For photos and images from each episode, visit:
https://lavaforgood.com/bone-valley/
New episodes of Bone Valley Season 2 will be available every Wednesday wherever you get your podcasts or subscribe to Lava for Good + on Apple Podcasts to binge the whole season, ad-free now.
Bone Valley is a production of Lava for Good Podcasts in association with Signal Co. No1.
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00:00:09
Speaker 1: Something unexpected happened after I told you the story of a man convicted of murdering his own wife.
00:00:17
Speaker 2: I am one hundred percent innocent.
00:00:19
Speaker 3: That means someone else killed in my wife.
00:00:23
Speaker 1: If you haven't heard Season one of Bone Valley, you might want to go back and listen. It's the story of Leo Schofield, who spent thirty six years in prison for a crime he swears he did not commit.
00:00:35
Speaker 2: I just want justice for my dead wife. That's what I want.
00:00:39
Speaker 1: After investigating his case for years, I'm convinced he's telling the truth because I also met the one man who says he knows for sure that Leo is innocent.
00:00:51
Speaker 4: I'm saying he didn't do it, that's what I mean. And he didn't do it.
00:00:56
Speaker 1: Jeremy Scott told me in terrifying detail how he was the one who killed Michelle Schofield.
00:01:04
Speaker 4: So she gave me a ride, and that's one of them. I guess I lost it Dan and she went to screaming and panicing and stuff.
00:01:14
Speaker 1: When I first learned about Jeremy Scott, I didn't want to know any more than I had. Here was a man with a history of extraordinary violence. He was impulsive, and volatile, attacking random citizens and teenage girls on the outside, and cellmates, guards and nurses while locked behind bars. I'll admit at first I saw Jeremy as sort of a monster. It was Leo, of all people who changed my mind. Leo, whose wife was murdered by this man, was able to see something in Jeremy that I couldn't.
00:02:01
Speaker 3: And I was looking for this creature that you know, I couldn't. I could hate that, I could I could detest that, could be repulsed by and vindicated in all of it. And then you see him and what is he? He's a broken individual, broken vessel, someone who's never known what it is to be loved. My prayer is that somehow he comes to know love that gives him some kind of peace.
00:02:27
Speaker 1: Jeremy was trying to tell me and anyone who would listen the truth that he was the guilty one, not Leo.
00:02:36
Speaker 4: I've been trying to help him and doing everything I could.
00:02:44
Speaker 1: In season one of Bone Valley, I told you the story of a man fighting to prove his innocence. This season the story of a man trying to prove his own guilt and the unlikely collection of people who heard Jeremy confess of nowhere step forward to help him make things right.
00:03:05
Speaker 2: So I spoke to Jeremy yesterday.
00:03:08
Speaker 5: You know when I try to encourage him to stay out of trouble, and I would.
00:03:11
Speaker 2: Tell him because I did love him. I did love Jeremy.
00:03:15
Speaker 1: It wasn't until you knew him a little bit, right, I just knew him as a kid.
00:03:19
Speaker 6: Yeah, Gilbert King Home, I'm the son of Jeremy and Scott.
00:03:29
Speaker 1: Jeremy Scott confessed and the state of Florida doesn't believe him. These are the stories of the people who do.
00:03:37
Speaker 2: When y'all wanted to talk to me, before I tried, I couldn't do it. I never talked to anybody about any of this. I couldn't see here. A year ago, I couldn't do it. I could do it today.
00:03:55
Speaker 7: Everything in life takes effect, you know, Like I don't want to hide nothing. Everything I say I want everybody to hear, Like like, at the end of the day, I'm literally a son of a killer.
00:04:23
Speaker 8: Do you, my maness, love to have my feet sorru steps sorn in this vastity? Uh see relation.
00:04:52
Speaker 9: Outreach dezhday stuff.
00:05:11
Speaker 1: So Boom Valley Season two Jeremy Chapter one, you told me No. One morning in the fall of twenty twenty two, I woke up to a flood of text messages, a mist call, and a voicemail that came in at one am.
00:05:46
Speaker 6: Hi, Gilbert King. This is Justin Allen. I was born on March nineteen eighty nine. I'm the son of Jamie Allens. Her name is to be Chaney Allen and the son of Jeremylyn Scott.
00:06:08
Speaker 1: Jeremy's son wanted to talk to me.
00:06:12
Speaker 6: Maybe he just called me that please.
00:06:16
Speaker 1: I texted him back right away and we started chatting. His messages felt urgent. He just finished listening to his father confessed to murder. Justin wrote, sorry for getting excited and talking so much. I've never had a chance to talk about my dad. And I'm thirty four.
00:06:37
Speaker 7: Hello, Hey, Justin, Hey, it's Gilbert.
00:06:40
Speaker 6: How are you.
00:06:42
Speaker 7: I'm pretty good.
00:06:43
Speaker 2: How you doing. I'm doing good.
00:06:44
Speaker 1: I'm so sorry I missed you last night.
00:06:46
Speaker 3: I know it was it was late.
00:06:47
Speaker 8: I was listening the.
00:06:48
Speaker 7: Whole time I woke up. I was a little crazy.
00:06:52
Speaker 1: Yeah, I could imagine it. I mean one of the first of a long list of things Justin wants to talk about is actually not his dad, it's Leo. Justin has listened to our podcast, done all these sleepless calculations, and he's come to this.
00:07:06
Speaker 2: Conclusion with the Oh Leo situation.
00:07:10
Speaker 7: If you really stop and think about it, I pretty much owe him my life.
00:07:14
Speaker 1: If Jeremy had gone to jail instead of Leo, Justin would have never been conceived.
00:07:19
Speaker 7: Something about it. The murder was in nineteen eighty seven, right, right, Okay, Leo ended up taking the hit from my dad. But within that time, my dad was free, you know, and he was still with my mom and they had me. So if the cops and everything would have done their job properly, my dad would have been in jail. I would have never existed.
00:07:39
Speaker 1: While we're on the phone, I realized Justin is with his own son.
00:07:43
Speaker 7: I'm sorry, I'm holding I'm holding my boy right now, and it's pacing back and forth and not a lot on my mind. Yeah, yeah, here, hold on, here's some grims. He wants the color now.
00:07:56
Speaker 2: His birthday was yesterday, oh sweet, two years old.
00:07:59
Speaker 1: Yeah, he just He tells me he's raising his son with his girlfriend Ariel, who also has three young daughters from a prior relationship.
00:08:07
Speaker 7: That's how I look at it. They're my girls because I take care of him with my girl.
00:08:11
Speaker 1: This is why his voicemail came in so late at night. He's incredibly busy. He works the night shift as a supermarket manager and during the day he's taking care of the kids while Ariels at work.
00:08:22
Speaker 7: My boy two years old, and I'll talk about him walking and trying to talk now and everything else. He likes supermonsters. You know, I'm trying to teach him right. And this is all thanks to Leo taking the fucking hit for my dad.
00:08:36
Speaker 1: Justin tells me he feels immense guilt about Leo Schofield.
00:08:40
Speaker 10: If I'm able to help Leo, it'll make me feel uncomfortable about myself because I feel guilty even being alive. I'm not gonna lie like because think about it, the dude lost his wife and had to go to jail for thirty five years just to have the killer that killed your wife son live.
00:08:58
Speaker 1: In the podcast, he heard his dad trying to tell the truth about Michelle's murder to help absolve Leo. It was the first time he ever heard his.
00:09:08
Speaker 7: Dad speak dude. When I heard my dad's voice. That shit hit me because no one ever talks about my dad.
00:09:15
Speaker 1: Yeah, Justin told me growing up, his mom never spoke about his dad at all. Nothing bad, nothing good, just nothing. But when he was around other family members, he'd catch bits and pieces.
00:09:31
Speaker 7: You know, I didn't know my dad was, you know, from a young age. I listened. I'm not stupid, like I knew he killed from a very young age. It's just whenever I hear stories about him, is always something different. I don't know what's true or falls.
00:09:44
Speaker 1: Yeah, as we talk, I get the sense that overnight, Justin has embarked on a delicate and complicated mission to find out everything he can about his dad, however difficult, and to see if any of what he learns can bolster his dad's confession and help Leo. A big part of that mission is getting his mom, Jamie, to talk to me. Among the texts he sent me were screenshots of a Facebook conversation he had with her. He tells her he just finished listening to the podcast, and he floods the chat box between them with questions about Jeremy's murders, whether or not Jeremy really loved her, if he tried to kill her. She answers his questions, and she tells him that his dad only saw him once.
00:10:30
Speaker 7: We didn't want to attest. The first time he ever cried in front of her was seeing me. He's never once held me.
00:10:40
Speaker 1: I already knew something about Justin's mom, Jamie Nellams. She was Jeremy's girlfriend around the time of Michelle Schofield's murder. While I was investigating Jeremy's crimes. I saw her name in police reports, so Kelsey and I tried to talk to her years ago. She even agreed to meet us for lunch at a nearby restaurant County. She texted me that she was on her way. We waited and waited, but Jamie never showed up and I never heard from her again. But now, after hearing his dad talk for the very first time, Justin was asking Jamie to talk to me. In the messages to his mom, he talked about hearing Jeremy's voice. He wrote, he sounded alone and afraid, always on guard. Trust issues. Weirded me out. How alike we are. He wanted to know if she heard the podcast too. She says, I haven't. I'm sorry, hon, I can't bring myself to hear his voice again. He says, I understand fully, and when he tells her, I'm trying to contact Gilbert King now and see what happens. She says he tried to contact me a while back. I wouldn't talk to him. I just couldn't do it. Later on, she says, my psych doctor thinks I should tell my story to Gilbert King if it would be therapeutic. Justin urges me to contact her again. He says, she wants to talk.
00:12:07
Speaker 2: Now.
00:12:14
Speaker 7: How are you feeling about this.
00:12:17
Speaker 2: Microphone and all that? It's it's it's okay.
00:12:20
Speaker 6: I'm a little.
00:12:21
Speaker 2: More okay with it now than I was. It's just, you know, when all this first starting, and then I spent so many years trying not to think about it and not to talk about it.
00:12:36
Speaker 1: Kelsey and I rent a hotel room for an interview with Jamie.
00:12:39
Speaker 2: It was it was really rough there for a while because I went through years of nightmares and the paranoia.
00:12:48
Speaker 1: Kelsey has arranged the room simply, three chairs, a table in the middle, and two microphones set up.
00:12:55
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm gonna say, if you don't mind.
00:12:57
Speaker 1: I sit down across from Jamie. She's dressed in jeans, and a blouse, her short brown hair showing just a hint of gray. She's visibly nervous as we settle around the table doing this. I wanted to start slowly, assuming she might have a hard time opening up. But as she spoke, I realized that this was going to be different from the Jamie I had come to know through depositions and courtroom transcripts.
00:13:23
Speaker 2: Justin finally reached a point where he wanted to start asking questions.
00:13:26
Speaker 1: In those formal settings, she was responding to lawyers focused solely on the facts. Here, it became clear she was responding to Justin. She was determined to give him the answers he'd always wanted about his father's life and her own.
00:13:43
Speaker 2: If me dealing with my crap can help him, it's worth it. It's worth it. I can deal with this to help him. If it's just for me, I wouldn't be doing this. I wouldn't be saying I'm just being real. If it was just to do your book or just to do a podcast or whatever, I wouldn't be sitting here. I'm doing this for Justin. I really am.
00:14:34
Speaker 10: Where were you born?
00:14:35
Speaker 2: You know, what did your parents do for a living?
00:14:37
Speaker 8: Just give us an idea of your growing up and what you were doing.
00:14:40
Speaker 2: Okay, I can remember weekends at my grandmother's house. She had thirteen kids, and there'd be like thirty of us, all as cousins. We'd go over on Friday, we'd stay there to Sunday. The parents would all be in the house playing canasta all weekend. They'd had their weekend marathon. The kids were outside playing.
00:15:04
Speaker 11: We used to play in the orange grow and Jamie, all of us be cousins.
00:15:08
Speaker 5: We would go over there and we would play like freeze tag or you know, hide and seek, and you know things like that in the orange growth.
00:15:16
Speaker 1: Jennifer Stone lived just two doors down from Jamie's grandma.
00:15:20
Speaker 5: We knew all the neighbors. All the neighbors knew all the kids and who they belonged to. So if you did something you weren't supposed to, your parents were going to hear about it.
00:15:28
Speaker 1: When Jamie was seven, her mom married a strict and controlling ex navy guy. By the time she turns seventeen, they're divorced and her mom gets a job as head nurse at a local hospital.
00:15:40
Speaker 2: She worked to all of our chiefs, so we were pretty much on our own.
00:15:44
Speaker 1: Jamie found herself experiencing a new sense of freedom, one she'd never known before. With her stepfather out of the picture, she could finally breathe, and in that space there's a quiet resistance to the controls she'd grown up under.
00:15:58
Speaker 2: Well, we found that club secret picture, a rave club with no alcohol. It was a safe place for teenagers. They didn't let people over eighteen in and it was a dance club. It had the flashing lights and the neon lights, and we would wear the white shirts or with the black lights, you know, it would kind of glow.
00:16:23
Speaker 1: One night in April nineteen eighty seven, Jamie sitting in the chair right off the dance floor. She's got thick brown hair and glasses like a wallflower, hiding off to the side with her friend Maria when they see this teenage boy enter the club. He's tall and thin, and he moves with confidence and a quiet presence. It's hard to ignore. His name is Jeremy Scott.
00:16:46
Speaker 2: None of us had ever seen him before, and he's heading toward them. Well, when I first met him, the first thing I thought was his eyes. He had the most purecing eye. They would just like look into you, and I remember sitting in the chairs and he was wearing all black, so you couldn't really see him, but you could see his eyes and he was just staring at me. And I can remember being nervous, you know, because I'd never had a boyfriend before and never really talked. I was so shy, so shy mad. And I remember him kicking my chair and saying, you want to dance? And we danced and that that was it.
00:17:45
Speaker 1: At the end of the night, Jeremy walked her to her car.
00:17:49
Speaker 2: I had a big seventy three Cutlas Supreme.
00:17:53
Speaker 1: Jamie's friend Maria, leaned on one side of the car with.
00:17:56
Speaker 2: Her boyfriend and they were hugging and kissing and stuff.
00:17:59
Speaker 1: Well, Jeremy and Jamie settled by the driver's.
00:18:02
Speaker 2: Side and we just kind of stood there awkwardly for a few minutes, and he asked if next Friday i'd meet him at the mall. Well, I was kind of iffy because the ones that went to the mall were the type of kids that didn't go to secrets, you know. These were the smokers and the drinkers, and that's where the cops would always show up, was at the mall. But I said, yeah, I'd meet him at the mall, and I did.
00:18:37
Speaker 1: From what I've learned about Jeremy, secret seems like the last place he'd want to be. Tight supervision, no alcohol, and parents hovering just outside. So a few nights later, Jamie meets up with Jeremy at one of his usual spots behind the Lakeland Mall.
00:18:54
Speaker 2: Now, when I met him at the mall, I asked him where he was staying at, and he said he was staying downtown. He did ask me for a ride home, and I had dropped him off at this house. And I remember looking at this house and thinking it looked abandoned, like nobody lived there, like it was falling apart. But there was lights on upstairs, there was people staying there. It was all kids like him. They were hijacking electricity off the apartment complex behind it with cords, so that's how they had lights on. So, come to find out, that's where he stayed out a lot, and that's where he would take me a lot of times, was to abandon houses. And that's where you know, he'd be like, you're staying with me tonight, and we'd go downtown and find an abandoned building and we'd climb in and go to sleep, And here I got a nice townhouse and bed waiting for me at home, and I'm in love, you know, And honestly, if I want to be honest, it was kind of exciting.
00:20:03
Speaker 1: Jeremy's hanging out with people like this guy named Rambo Stocky, twenty something who wears Camo, rides a motorcycle, and who spent some time in the Polk County jail and burglary charges.
00:20:14
Speaker 11: They were not my people.
00:20:16
Speaker 1: Jamie's childhood friend, Jennifer was less than impressed with Jamie's new boyfriend.
00:20:21
Speaker 5: I wasn't comfortable with the people that he was with, and I never understood what she saw in him, to be honest with you, they were, you know, the headbanging rock and roller, you know, the drugging type was what we referred to him as they were just looking at them. Okay, so very judgmental, but being an adult now, I would say a bunch of loadlifes. But she was my friend, you know, we were young but dumb kids.
00:20:54
Speaker 1: She was in love Jamie spending more and more time trying to understand Jeremy's secret off the grid world. She wants to know more about him and the people who matter in his life.
00:21:06
Speaker 2: He talked a lot about his grandmother. He talked a lot about his grandfather and how they used to call him Jeremiah, and that Jeremiah was a bullfrog. That was his grandfather's favorite song, and they called him Bam Bam, and they thought it was so cute because he'd beat everything up with sticks and stuff and thought it was funny.
00:21:27
Speaker 1: As we talk with Jamie, since she was allowing herself to remember not just the painful truth Justin would have to confront about his father, but perhaps for the first time in decades, she was willing to think about why she'd once been drawn to Jeremy Scott.
00:21:42
Speaker 2: Jeremy had that good side, and he had that funny side, and he could be sweet and caring, and you know, he had that good in him.
00:21:54
Speaker 7: I saw it.
00:21:56
Speaker 1: But Jamie also found herself doing things for Jeremy, things she never would have imagined doing before she met him. At first, it wasn't anything too bad, just sort of weird.
00:22:07
Speaker 2: I had money, you know, all I had to do was ask. But he would take me and we'd go donate plasma and we'd do that three times a week.
00:22:17
Speaker 1: It's not unlike giving blood to the Red Cross. They go into a harsh, fluorescent lit room where people wait in long lines, trading the plasma and their blood for cash.
00:22:28
Speaker 2: And I know the first time he took me, it was like one hundred dollars for being a first time donor, they pay you a large amount. But then after that, I think it was like twenty five first time, fifteen the second time, and ten the third time, so it was like fifty bucks something like that, and then as soon as we get done, I'd give him the money.
00:22:54
Speaker 1: It's like they live in separate worlds. Well, Jamie rollerskates with friends. Jeremy's getting drunk in the park. Well she's in school. He's breaking into houses and pawning whatever he can.
00:23:06
Speaker 2: And we hadn't been together a while, and we weren't together all the time. I mean, this is a thing you've got to understand. I would see him for two or three days, and then I wouldn't see him for three or four months. And then i'd see him for two or three days, and then I wouldn't see him for six weeks. He didn't have a house phone, he didn't have a house, so he'd either call me from a payphone, or I wentn't hear from him, And when he would show up, he'd call from a paythone, Hey, meet me down the road. Then when I would see him, it was constant. He was right there in my face, constant, and I couldn't go anywhere do anything without him right there.
00:23:57
Speaker 1: One day, Jeremy tells Jamie he wants to take a trip a few hours north. Jeremy gets behind the wheel, even though he doesn't have a license.
00:24:06
Speaker 2: He was wanting me to meet his mom. I hadn't met his mom yet.
00:24:11
Speaker 1: After hours of driving, they finally make it to Perry, Florida. Jeremy pulls into a gas station where his mother, Linda is working.
00:24:20
Speaker 2: It was the only gas station in the hotel. And I can remember us pulling up to the hess station and her coming out, and her exact words were, what the eff are you doing here? And I just kind of sat there and shock, you know, I'm like, I'm like, oh, this is his mom. And he turned around and he got back in the car and we drove down the road and he pulled off the side of the road and I looked at him and I said, are you okay? And I guess I shouldn't have said that. And as soon as I said, are U okay, he punched me as hard as he could and he kicked me out of the car. And I remember him kicking me out of the car. I mean looking down this road and there's nothing but palmmeadow trees and big old pine trees and nothing. There's no building, you know, And I started crying, and I'm thinking, he's going to leave me here. I don't know anybody. I'm not going to talk to that lady. I'm not talking to her. She talks to her son that way. What's she gonna say to me? Yeah? And about ten minutes later, he came back. He came back, and he picked me back up.
00:25:42
Speaker 1: They make the long, quiet drive back to Polk County. From that moment on, her fear was mounting. And always there, sitting in that hotel room with Jamie, listening to her go back in time, I could see she was entering some of the territories she tried to leave behind, things that caused her a lot of pain and at times probably caused justin some pain too.
00:26:31
Speaker 7: She tried it, but she struggled a lot, like she was far from a perfect mom. But she loved us. Yeah, like I give her that. She loved us for all her heart and I knew that, but.
00:26:41
Speaker 1: It was a constant battle to keep Jeremy out of her mind.
00:26:45
Speaker 2: I was burying them from me. Does that make sense? So it wasn't that I was trying to protect Justin. It wasn't that I was trying to keep them from Justin. I didn't talk about to anybody.
00:26:58
Speaker 1: But now, with wanting to know everything, Jamie told me it was time she said it all out loud. She takes us back to nineteen eighty eight, she's dating Jeremy and he disappears yet again.
00:27:16
Speaker 2: I still don't know what he went to prison for. I remember asking him several times and he never answered me. I know Jeremy used to like to wait outside the Green Parrot and wait for the gay people to leave, and he'd beat him up with baseball bats and stuff.
00:27:33
Speaker 1: He'd hang outside Lakeland's gay bars like the Green Parrot and Fantasy two thousand.
00:27:38
Speaker 2: As a matter of fact, that's how he ended up with stitches that one night. He ended up with stitches in his knee in his head because he waited outside Green Parrot and they knew he was there and jumped him and he got some of his own medicine.
00:27:53
Speaker 1: The lesson doesn't take, and he's soon back at Lake Morton after dark, prowling for his next targets.
00:28:00
Speaker 2: I mean, everybody knew what Lake Morton was, and that was the gay hangout, and a lot of them got robbed, a lot of them got beat up, a lot of them got hurt, and it was just never reported. It was never in the newspapers, but everybody knew about it.
00:28:20
Speaker 1: I know from going through court records that Robin gay Men is not what Jeremy went to prison for this time. Instead, it was for breaking into a home in Lakeland stealing a few cameras of VCR and some other electronics. He was caught, convicted, and sentenced to state prison, where he spent over four months until his release in May of nineteen eighty eight.
00:28:43
Speaker 2: When he got out from that was when he was really different. And I don't know if something happened while he was in prison or I don't know what it was, but he was a total different person. And that's when his eyes were empty and there was nothing, I mean, he never smiled, there was nothing, There was nothing there, and I can remember looking at him and just not even really recognizing him, not even knowing who he was.
00:29:24
Speaker 1: Weeks after Jeremy got out of prison, Jamie remembers him disappearing again. For a while, she didn't see or hear from him. She had no idea where he was until one hot summer morning, when Jamie, her sisters, and her mom were getting ready to head to Disney World for the day.
00:29:43
Speaker 2: He shows up that morning. I hadn't seen him in like three weeks. My mom was nice enough to offer to pay for him to go to Disney World with us, and he said no. But then he told me I couldn't go, and my mom put her foot down. Now she's going. We've already bought tickets. It's a family day. We're going. That was the first time I'd ever told him no. I had never told him no before ever for anything. Anything he ever asked me to do, I.
00:30:16
Speaker 1: Did it, except for this time. Jamie leaves with her mom and her sisters. They spend the entire day at the Magic Kingdom, and as they step into their ground floor apartment that night, they see him. Jeremy. He's outside knocking on the sliding glass door.
00:30:39
Speaker 2: He was in the backyard waiting, and I'm pretty sure he sat there all day.
00:30:46
Speaker 1: Jamie steps out into the backyard. Jeremy gives a small wave, motioning for her to follow. It's dark now. Jeremy leads her to a spot behind the townhouses, out of sight.
00:31:01
Speaker 2: He bent over and he stood up and he turned around and he said, you told me no. And that's the last thing I remember. And that's when it really got bad, because I think that's when it was ingrained in me to never again tell him no. And I never did.
00:31:35
Speaker 11: I remember. I remember something with her jaw.
00:31:39
Speaker 5: It was always kind of kind of about a whack, not properly aligned, and I thought she was in a car accident.
00:31:48
Speaker 11: It was my understanding of what happened. Is that really what happened.
00:31:54
Speaker 7: I don't know.
00:31:55
Speaker 5: She had bruises, and you know, there was a couple of times you could see where it looked like he grabbed her, someone grabbed her. You know, she had bruises on her arms and it looked like someone had punched her in the face.
00:32:07
Speaker 11: But you know, it was I felt.
00:32:09
Speaker 5: I can't remember what her explanation was, but you know, I felt like, you know, I wasn't paying attention, but it was. She always explained it away. So what are you going to say. I never saw him do anything. She never told me he did anything.
00:32:28
Speaker 2: I think there was a part of me that thought I could help him, that I could make it better, make him feel loved, and he'd be okay, and maybe he wouldn't do the things that he was doing, you know what I'm saying. But I know that by the end it was all fear, that there was no There was no love there. It was all fear. Jeremy was in jail when I found out I was pregnant.
00:33:02
Speaker 1: By the fall of nineteen eighty eight, Jamie's been seeing Jeremy for about a year and a half, always on his terms. She's eighteen now and she drops out of school.
00:33:14
Speaker 2: I was having to stay with my grandmother because my mom found out I was pregnant and she kicked me out. So I was living at my grandmother's house and Jeremy showed up and I was showing I was scared to death, and I can remember him calling me a couple weeks later and telling me some fullless story about he was dying of some disease and I needed to find somebody else, and I can remember thinking about in my mind, he's breaking up with me because I'm pregnant, and the sick part of me was angry, how dare you break up with me because I'm pregnant with your kid? And I can remember I started crying and my aunt Mary walked in. She's like, what's wrong with you? And I said, he just broke up with me because I'm pregnant. And then all of a sudden, I caught myself when I stopped, and I smiled, and I said, he just broke up with me because I'm pregnant.
00:34:18
Speaker 1: Jamie thought she was finally rid of Jeremy and all the chaos, the violence and the abuse. But two weeks later he's back, this time with blood on his pants and a stolen car he wants Jamie to get in, and by now Jamie knows the consequences of telling Jeremy no.
00:34:43
Speaker 2: Next time, I knew I wasn't coming back. I knew if they didn't catch him, I was going to die.
00:34:58
Speaker 1: Own Valley is a production of LoVa for Good podcast in association with Signal Company Number One. Our executive producers are Jason Flomm, Jeff Kempler and Kevin Wordis. Karen Kornhaber is our senior producer. Jackie Pauley and Hannah Biel are our producers. Britz Spangler is our sound designer. Marianne McCune is our editor. Fact checking by Dania Sulemant. Jeff Cliburn is our head of marketing and operations. Our Social media director is Ismati Guardrama, our Social Media manager is Sarah Gibbons, and our art director is Andrew Nelson. Additional research and production by Kelsey Decker. Additional sound recording by James Johnson. Bone Valley is written and produced by Me Gilbert King. Follow us on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and threads at Lava for Good
Speaker 1: Something unexpected happened after I told you the story of a man convicted of murdering his own wife.
00:00:17
Speaker 2: I am one hundred percent innocent.
00:00:19
Speaker 3: That means someone else killed in my wife.
00:00:23
Speaker 1: If you haven't heard Season one of Bone Valley, you might want to go back and listen. It's the story of Leo Schofield, who spent thirty six years in prison for a crime he swears he did not commit.
00:00:35
Speaker 2: I just want justice for my dead wife. That's what I want.
00:00:39
Speaker 1: After investigating his case for years, I'm convinced he's telling the truth because I also met the one man who says he knows for sure that Leo is innocent.
00:00:51
Speaker 4: I'm saying he didn't do it, that's what I mean. And he didn't do it.
00:00:56
Speaker 1: Jeremy Scott told me in terrifying detail how he was the one who killed Michelle Schofield.
00:01:04
Speaker 4: So she gave me a ride, and that's one of them. I guess I lost it Dan and she went to screaming and panicing and stuff.
00:01:14
Speaker 1: When I first learned about Jeremy Scott, I didn't want to know any more than I had. Here was a man with a history of extraordinary violence. He was impulsive, and volatile, attacking random citizens and teenage girls on the outside, and cellmates, guards and nurses while locked behind bars. I'll admit at first I saw Jeremy as sort of a monster. It was Leo, of all people who changed my mind. Leo, whose wife was murdered by this man, was able to see something in Jeremy that I couldn't.
00:02:01
Speaker 3: And I was looking for this creature that you know, I couldn't. I could hate that, I could I could detest that, could be repulsed by and vindicated in all of it. And then you see him and what is he? He's a broken individual, broken vessel, someone who's never known what it is to be loved. My prayer is that somehow he comes to know love that gives him some kind of peace.
00:02:27
Speaker 1: Jeremy was trying to tell me and anyone who would listen the truth that he was the guilty one, not Leo.
00:02:36
Speaker 4: I've been trying to help him and doing everything I could.
00:02:44
Speaker 1: In season one of Bone Valley, I told you the story of a man fighting to prove his innocence. This season the story of a man trying to prove his own guilt and the unlikely collection of people who heard Jeremy confess of nowhere step forward to help him make things right.
00:03:05
Speaker 2: So I spoke to Jeremy yesterday.
00:03:08
Speaker 5: You know when I try to encourage him to stay out of trouble, and I would.
00:03:11
Speaker 2: Tell him because I did love him. I did love Jeremy.
00:03:15
Speaker 1: It wasn't until you knew him a little bit, right, I just knew him as a kid.
00:03:19
Speaker 6: Yeah, Gilbert King Home, I'm the son of Jeremy and Scott.
00:03:29
Speaker 1: Jeremy Scott confessed and the state of Florida doesn't believe him. These are the stories of the people who do.
00:03:37
Speaker 2: When y'all wanted to talk to me, before I tried, I couldn't do it. I never talked to anybody about any of this. I couldn't see here. A year ago, I couldn't do it. I could do it today.
00:03:55
Speaker 7: Everything in life takes effect, you know, Like I don't want to hide nothing. Everything I say I want everybody to hear, Like like, at the end of the day, I'm literally a son of a killer.
00:04:23
Speaker 8: Do you, my maness, love to have my feet sorru steps sorn in this vastity? Uh see relation.
00:04:52
Speaker 9: Outreach dezhday stuff.
00:05:11
Speaker 1: So Boom Valley Season two Jeremy Chapter one, you told me No. One morning in the fall of twenty twenty two, I woke up to a flood of text messages, a mist call, and a voicemail that came in at one am.
00:05:46
Speaker 6: Hi, Gilbert King. This is Justin Allen. I was born on March nineteen eighty nine. I'm the son of Jamie Allens. Her name is to be Chaney Allen and the son of Jeremylyn Scott.
00:06:08
Speaker 1: Jeremy's son wanted to talk to me.
00:06:12
Speaker 6: Maybe he just called me that please.
00:06:16
Speaker 1: I texted him back right away and we started chatting. His messages felt urgent. He just finished listening to his father confessed to murder. Justin wrote, sorry for getting excited and talking so much. I've never had a chance to talk about my dad. And I'm thirty four.
00:06:37
Speaker 7: Hello, Hey, Justin, Hey, it's Gilbert.
00:06:40
Speaker 6: How are you.
00:06:42
Speaker 7: I'm pretty good.
00:06:43
Speaker 2: How you doing. I'm doing good.
00:06:44
Speaker 1: I'm so sorry I missed you last night.
00:06:46
Speaker 3: I know it was it was late.
00:06:47
Speaker 8: I was listening the.
00:06:48
Speaker 7: Whole time I woke up. I was a little crazy.
00:06:52
Speaker 1: Yeah, I could imagine it. I mean one of the first of a long list of things Justin wants to talk about is actually not his dad, it's Leo. Justin has listened to our podcast, done all these sleepless calculations, and he's come to this.
00:07:06
Speaker 2: Conclusion with the Oh Leo situation.
00:07:10
Speaker 7: If you really stop and think about it, I pretty much owe him my life.
00:07:14
Speaker 1: If Jeremy had gone to jail instead of Leo, Justin would have never been conceived.
00:07:19
Speaker 7: Something about it. The murder was in nineteen eighty seven, right, right, Okay, Leo ended up taking the hit from my dad. But within that time, my dad was free, you know, and he was still with my mom and they had me. So if the cops and everything would have done their job properly, my dad would have been in jail. I would have never existed.
00:07:39
Speaker 1: While we're on the phone, I realized Justin is with his own son.
00:07:43
Speaker 7: I'm sorry, I'm holding I'm holding my boy right now, and it's pacing back and forth and not a lot on my mind. Yeah, yeah, here, hold on, here's some grims. He wants the color now.
00:07:56
Speaker 2: His birthday was yesterday, oh sweet, two years old.
00:07:59
Speaker 1: Yeah, he just He tells me he's raising his son with his girlfriend Ariel, who also has three young daughters from a prior relationship.
00:08:07
Speaker 7: That's how I look at it. They're my girls because I take care of him with my girl.
00:08:11
Speaker 1: This is why his voicemail came in so late at night. He's incredibly busy. He works the night shift as a supermarket manager and during the day he's taking care of the kids while Ariels at work.
00:08:22
Speaker 7: My boy two years old, and I'll talk about him walking and trying to talk now and everything else. He likes supermonsters. You know, I'm trying to teach him right. And this is all thanks to Leo taking the fucking hit for my dad.
00:08:36
Speaker 1: Justin tells me he feels immense guilt about Leo Schofield.
00:08:40
Speaker 10: If I'm able to help Leo, it'll make me feel uncomfortable about myself because I feel guilty even being alive. I'm not gonna lie like because think about it, the dude lost his wife and had to go to jail for thirty five years just to have the killer that killed your wife son live.
00:08:58
Speaker 1: In the podcast, he heard his dad trying to tell the truth about Michelle's murder to help absolve Leo. It was the first time he ever heard his.
00:09:08
Speaker 7: Dad speak dude. When I heard my dad's voice. That shit hit me because no one ever talks about my dad.
00:09:15
Speaker 1: Yeah, Justin told me growing up, his mom never spoke about his dad at all. Nothing bad, nothing good, just nothing. But when he was around other family members, he'd catch bits and pieces.
00:09:31
Speaker 7: You know, I didn't know my dad was, you know, from a young age. I listened. I'm not stupid, like I knew he killed from a very young age. It's just whenever I hear stories about him, is always something different. I don't know what's true or falls.
00:09:44
Speaker 1: Yeah, as we talk, I get the sense that overnight, Justin has embarked on a delicate and complicated mission to find out everything he can about his dad, however difficult, and to see if any of what he learns can bolster his dad's confession and help Leo. A big part of that mission is getting his mom, Jamie, to talk to me. Among the texts he sent me were screenshots of a Facebook conversation he had with her. He tells her he just finished listening to the podcast, and he floods the chat box between them with questions about Jeremy's murders, whether or not Jeremy really loved her, if he tried to kill her. She answers his questions, and she tells him that his dad only saw him once.
00:10:30
Speaker 7: We didn't want to attest. The first time he ever cried in front of her was seeing me. He's never once held me.
00:10:40
Speaker 1: I already knew something about Justin's mom, Jamie Nellams. She was Jeremy's girlfriend around the time of Michelle Schofield's murder. While I was investigating Jeremy's crimes. I saw her name in police reports, so Kelsey and I tried to talk to her years ago. She even agreed to meet us for lunch at a nearby restaurant County. She texted me that she was on her way. We waited and waited, but Jamie never showed up and I never heard from her again. But now, after hearing his dad talk for the very first time, Justin was asking Jamie to talk to me. In the messages to his mom, he talked about hearing Jeremy's voice. He wrote, he sounded alone and afraid, always on guard. Trust issues. Weirded me out. How alike we are. He wanted to know if she heard the podcast too. She says, I haven't. I'm sorry, hon, I can't bring myself to hear his voice again. He says, I understand fully, and when he tells her, I'm trying to contact Gilbert King now and see what happens. She says he tried to contact me a while back. I wouldn't talk to him. I just couldn't do it. Later on, she says, my psych doctor thinks I should tell my story to Gilbert King if it would be therapeutic. Justin urges me to contact her again. He says, she wants to talk.
00:12:07
Speaker 2: Now.
00:12:14
Speaker 7: How are you feeling about this.
00:12:17
Speaker 2: Microphone and all that? It's it's it's okay.
00:12:20
Speaker 6: I'm a little.
00:12:21
Speaker 2: More okay with it now than I was. It's just, you know, when all this first starting, and then I spent so many years trying not to think about it and not to talk about it.
00:12:36
Speaker 1: Kelsey and I rent a hotel room for an interview with Jamie.
00:12:39
Speaker 2: It was it was really rough there for a while because I went through years of nightmares and the paranoia.
00:12:48
Speaker 1: Kelsey has arranged the room simply, three chairs, a table in the middle, and two microphones set up.
00:12:55
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm gonna say, if you don't mind.
00:12:57
Speaker 1: I sit down across from Jamie. She's dressed in jeans, and a blouse, her short brown hair showing just a hint of gray. She's visibly nervous as we settle around the table doing this. I wanted to start slowly, assuming she might have a hard time opening up. But as she spoke, I realized that this was going to be different from the Jamie I had come to know through depositions and courtroom transcripts.
00:13:23
Speaker 2: Justin finally reached a point where he wanted to start asking questions.
00:13:26
Speaker 1: In those formal settings, she was responding to lawyers focused solely on the facts. Here, it became clear she was responding to Justin. She was determined to give him the answers he'd always wanted about his father's life and her own.
00:13:43
Speaker 2: If me dealing with my crap can help him, it's worth it. It's worth it. I can deal with this to help him. If it's just for me, I wouldn't be doing this. I wouldn't be saying I'm just being real. If it was just to do your book or just to do a podcast or whatever, I wouldn't be sitting here. I'm doing this for Justin. I really am.
00:14:34
Speaker 10: Where were you born?
00:14:35
Speaker 2: You know, what did your parents do for a living?
00:14:37
Speaker 8: Just give us an idea of your growing up and what you were doing.
00:14:40
Speaker 2: Okay, I can remember weekends at my grandmother's house. She had thirteen kids, and there'd be like thirty of us, all as cousins. We'd go over on Friday, we'd stay there to Sunday. The parents would all be in the house playing canasta all weekend. They'd had their weekend marathon. The kids were outside playing.
00:15:04
Speaker 11: We used to play in the orange grow and Jamie, all of us be cousins.
00:15:08
Speaker 5: We would go over there and we would play like freeze tag or you know, hide and seek, and you know things like that in the orange growth.
00:15:16
Speaker 1: Jennifer Stone lived just two doors down from Jamie's grandma.
00:15:20
Speaker 5: We knew all the neighbors. All the neighbors knew all the kids and who they belonged to. So if you did something you weren't supposed to, your parents were going to hear about it.
00:15:28
Speaker 1: When Jamie was seven, her mom married a strict and controlling ex navy guy. By the time she turns seventeen, they're divorced and her mom gets a job as head nurse at a local hospital.
00:15:40
Speaker 2: She worked to all of our chiefs, so we were pretty much on our own.
00:15:44
Speaker 1: Jamie found herself experiencing a new sense of freedom, one she'd never known before. With her stepfather out of the picture, she could finally breathe, and in that space there's a quiet resistance to the controls she'd grown up under.
00:15:58
Speaker 2: Well, we found that club secret picture, a rave club with no alcohol. It was a safe place for teenagers. They didn't let people over eighteen in and it was a dance club. It had the flashing lights and the neon lights, and we would wear the white shirts or with the black lights, you know, it would kind of glow.
00:16:23
Speaker 1: One night in April nineteen eighty seven, Jamie sitting in the chair right off the dance floor. She's got thick brown hair and glasses like a wallflower, hiding off to the side with her friend Maria when they see this teenage boy enter the club. He's tall and thin, and he moves with confidence and a quiet presence. It's hard to ignore. His name is Jeremy Scott.
00:16:46
Speaker 2: None of us had ever seen him before, and he's heading toward them. Well, when I first met him, the first thing I thought was his eyes. He had the most purecing eye. They would just like look into you, and I remember sitting in the chairs and he was wearing all black, so you couldn't really see him, but you could see his eyes and he was just staring at me. And I can remember being nervous, you know, because I'd never had a boyfriend before and never really talked. I was so shy, so shy mad. And I remember him kicking my chair and saying, you want to dance? And we danced and that that was it.
00:17:45
Speaker 1: At the end of the night, Jeremy walked her to her car.
00:17:49
Speaker 2: I had a big seventy three Cutlas Supreme.
00:17:53
Speaker 1: Jamie's friend Maria, leaned on one side of the car with.
00:17:56
Speaker 2: Her boyfriend and they were hugging and kissing and stuff.
00:17:59
Speaker 1: Well, Jeremy and Jamie settled by the driver's.
00:18:02
Speaker 2: Side and we just kind of stood there awkwardly for a few minutes, and he asked if next Friday i'd meet him at the mall. Well, I was kind of iffy because the ones that went to the mall were the type of kids that didn't go to secrets, you know. These were the smokers and the drinkers, and that's where the cops would always show up, was at the mall. But I said, yeah, I'd meet him at the mall, and I did.
00:18:37
Speaker 1: From what I've learned about Jeremy, secret seems like the last place he'd want to be. Tight supervision, no alcohol, and parents hovering just outside. So a few nights later, Jamie meets up with Jeremy at one of his usual spots behind the Lakeland Mall.
00:18:54
Speaker 2: Now, when I met him at the mall, I asked him where he was staying at, and he said he was staying downtown. He did ask me for a ride home, and I had dropped him off at this house. And I remember looking at this house and thinking it looked abandoned, like nobody lived there, like it was falling apart. But there was lights on upstairs, there was people staying there. It was all kids like him. They were hijacking electricity off the apartment complex behind it with cords, so that's how they had lights on. So, come to find out, that's where he stayed out a lot, and that's where he would take me a lot of times, was to abandon houses. And that's where you know, he'd be like, you're staying with me tonight, and we'd go downtown and find an abandoned building and we'd climb in and go to sleep, And here I got a nice townhouse and bed waiting for me at home, and I'm in love, you know, And honestly, if I want to be honest, it was kind of exciting.
00:20:03
Speaker 1: Jeremy's hanging out with people like this guy named Rambo Stocky, twenty something who wears Camo, rides a motorcycle, and who spent some time in the Polk County jail and burglary charges.
00:20:14
Speaker 11: They were not my people.
00:20:16
Speaker 1: Jamie's childhood friend, Jennifer was less than impressed with Jamie's new boyfriend.
00:20:21
Speaker 5: I wasn't comfortable with the people that he was with, and I never understood what she saw in him, to be honest with you, they were, you know, the headbanging rock and roller, you know, the drugging type was what we referred to him as they were just looking at them. Okay, so very judgmental, but being an adult now, I would say a bunch of loadlifes. But she was my friend, you know, we were young but dumb kids.
00:20:54
Speaker 1: She was in love Jamie spending more and more time trying to understand Jeremy's secret off the grid world. She wants to know more about him and the people who matter in his life.
00:21:06
Speaker 2: He talked a lot about his grandmother. He talked a lot about his grandfather and how they used to call him Jeremiah, and that Jeremiah was a bullfrog. That was his grandfather's favorite song, and they called him Bam Bam, and they thought it was so cute because he'd beat everything up with sticks and stuff and thought it was funny.
00:21:27
Speaker 1: As we talk with Jamie, since she was allowing herself to remember not just the painful truth Justin would have to confront about his father, but perhaps for the first time in decades, she was willing to think about why she'd once been drawn to Jeremy Scott.
00:21:42
Speaker 2: Jeremy had that good side, and he had that funny side, and he could be sweet and caring, and you know, he had that good in him.
00:21:54
Speaker 7: I saw it.
00:21:56
Speaker 1: But Jamie also found herself doing things for Jeremy, things she never would have imagined doing before she met him. At first, it wasn't anything too bad, just sort of weird.
00:22:07
Speaker 2: I had money, you know, all I had to do was ask. But he would take me and we'd go donate plasma and we'd do that three times a week.
00:22:17
Speaker 1: It's not unlike giving blood to the Red Cross. They go into a harsh, fluorescent lit room where people wait in long lines, trading the plasma and their blood for cash.
00:22:28
Speaker 2: And I know the first time he took me, it was like one hundred dollars for being a first time donor, they pay you a large amount. But then after that, I think it was like twenty five first time, fifteen the second time, and ten the third time, so it was like fifty bucks something like that, and then as soon as we get done, I'd give him the money.
00:22:54
Speaker 1: It's like they live in separate worlds. Well, Jamie rollerskates with friends. Jeremy's getting drunk in the park. Well she's in school. He's breaking into houses and pawning whatever he can.
00:23:06
Speaker 2: And we hadn't been together a while, and we weren't together all the time. I mean, this is a thing you've got to understand. I would see him for two or three days, and then I wouldn't see him for three or four months. And then i'd see him for two or three days, and then I wouldn't see him for six weeks. He didn't have a house phone, he didn't have a house, so he'd either call me from a payphone, or I wentn't hear from him, And when he would show up, he'd call from a paythone, Hey, meet me down the road. Then when I would see him, it was constant. He was right there in my face, constant, and I couldn't go anywhere do anything without him right there.
00:23:57
Speaker 1: One day, Jeremy tells Jamie he wants to take a trip a few hours north. Jeremy gets behind the wheel, even though he doesn't have a license.
00:24:06
Speaker 2: He was wanting me to meet his mom. I hadn't met his mom yet.
00:24:11
Speaker 1: After hours of driving, they finally make it to Perry, Florida. Jeremy pulls into a gas station where his mother, Linda is working.
00:24:20
Speaker 2: It was the only gas station in the hotel. And I can remember us pulling up to the hess station and her coming out, and her exact words were, what the eff are you doing here? And I just kind of sat there and shock, you know, I'm like, I'm like, oh, this is his mom. And he turned around and he got back in the car and we drove down the road and he pulled off the side of the road and I looked at him and I said, are you okay? And I guess I shouldn't have said that. And as soon as I said, are U okay, he punched me as hard as he could and he kicked me out of the car. And I remember him kicking me out of the car. I mean looking down this road and there's nothing but palmmeadow trees and big old pine trees and nothing. There's no building, you know, And I started crying, and I'm thinking, he's going to leave me here. I don't know anybody. I'm not going to talk to that lady. I'm not talking to her. She talks to her son that way. What's she gonna say to me? Yeah? And about ten minutes later, he came back. He came back, and he picked me back up.
00:25:42
Speaker 1: They make the long, quiet drive back to Polk County. From that moment on, her fear was mounting. And always there, sitting in that hotel room with Jamie, listening to her go back in time, I could see she was entering some of the territories she tried to leave behind, things that caused her a lot of pain and at times probably caused justin some pain too.
00:26:31
Speaker 7: She tried it, but she struggled a lot, like she was far from a perfect mom. But she loved us. Yeah, like I give her that. She loved us for all her heart and I knew that, but.
00:26:41
Speaker 1: It was a constant battle to keep Jeremy out of her mind.
00:26:45
Speaker 2: I was burying them from me. Does that make sense? So it wasn't that I was trying to protect Justin. It wasn't that I was trying to keep them from Justin. I didn't talk about to anybody.
00:26:58
Speaker 1: But now, with wanting to know everything, Jamie told me it was time she said it all out loud. She takes us back to nineteen eighty eight, she's dating Jeremy and he disappears yet again.
00:27:16
Speaker 2: I still don't know what he went to prison for. I remember asking him several times and he never answered me. I know Jeremy used to like to wait outside the Green Parrot and wait for the gay people to leave, and he'd beat him up with baseball bats and stuff.
00:27:33
Speaker 1: He'd hang outside Lakeland's gay bars like the Green Parrot and Fantasy two thousand.
00:27:38
Speaker 2: As a matter of fact, that's how he ended up with stitches that one night. He ended up with stitches in his knee in his head because he waited outside Green Parrot and they knew he was there and jumped him and he got some of his own medicine.
00:27:53
Speaker 1: The lesson doesn't take, and he's soon back at Lake Morton after dark, prowling for his next targets.
00:28:00
Speaker 2: I mean, everybody knew what Lake Morton was, and that was the gay hangout, and a lot of them got robbed, a lot of them got beat up, a lot of them got hurt, and it was just never reported. It was never in the newspapers, but everybody knew about it.
00:28:20
Speaker 1: I know from going through court records that Robin gay Men is not what Jeremy went to prison for this time. Instead, it was for breaking into a home in Lakeland stealing a few cameras of VCR and some other electronics. He was caught, convicted, and sentenced to state prison, where he spent over four months until his release in May of nineteen eighty eight.
00:28:43
Speaker 2: When he got out from that was when he was really different. And I don't know if something happened while he was in prison or I don't know what it was, but he was a total different person. And that's when his eyes were empty and there was nothing, I mean, he never smiled, there was nothing, There was nothing there, and I can remember looking at him and just not even really recognizing him, not even knowing who he was.
00:29:24
Speaker 1: Weeks after Jeremy got out of prison, Jamie remembers him disappearing again. For a while, she didn't see or hear from him. She had no idea where he was until one hot summer morning, when Jamie, her sisters, and her mom were getting ready to head to Disney World for the day.
00:29:43
Speaker 2: He shows up that morning. I hadn't seen him in like three weeks. My mom was nice enough to offer to pay for him to go to Disney World with us, and he said no. But then he told me I couldn't go, and my mom put her foot down. Now she's going. We've already bought tickets. It's a family day. We're going. That was the first time I'd ever told him no. I had never told him no before ever for anything. Anything he ever asked me to do, I.
00:30:16
Speaker 1: Did it, except for this time. Jamie leaves with her mom and her sisters. They spend the entire day at the Magic Kingdom, and as they step into their ground floor apartment that night, they see him. Jeremy. He's outside knocking on the sliding glass door.
00:30:39
Speaker 2: He was in the backyard waiting, and I'm pretty sure he sat there all day.
00:30:46
Speaker 1: Jamie steps out into the backyard. Jeremy gives a small wave, motioning for her to follow. It's dark now. Jeremy leads her to a spot behind the townhouses, out of sight.
00:31:01
Speaker 2: He bent over and he stood up and he turned around and he said, you told me no. And that's the last thing I remember. And that's when it really got bad, because I think that's when it was ingrained in me to never again tell him no. And I never did.
00:31:35
Speaker 11: I remember. I remember something with her jaw.
00:31:39
Speaker 5: It was always kind of kind of about a whack, not properly aligned, and I thought she was in a car accident.
00:31:48
Speaker 11: It was my understanding of what happened. Is that really what happened.
00:31:54
Speaker 7: I don't know.
00:31:55
Speaker 5: She had bruises, and you know, there was a couple of times you could see where it looked like he grabbed her, someone grabbed her. You know, she had bruises on her arms and it looked like someone had punched her in the face.
00:32:07
Speaker 11: But you know, it was I felt.
00:32:09
Speaker 5: I can't remember what her explanation was, but you know, I felt like, you know, I wasn't paying attention, but it was. She always explained it away. So what are you going to say. I never saw him do anything. She never told me he did anything.
00:32:28
Speaker 2: I think there was a part of me that thought I could help him, that I could make it better, make him feel loved, and he'd be okay, and maybe he wouldn't do the things that he was doing, you know what I'm saying. But I know that by the end it was all fear, that there was no There was no love there. It was all fear. Jeremy was in jail when I found out I was pregnant.
00:33:02
Speaker 1: By the fall of nineteen eighty eight, Jamie's been seeing Jeremy for about a year and a half, always on his terms. She's eighteen now and she drops out of school.
00:33:14
Speaker 2: I was having to stay with my grandmother because my mom found out I was pregnant and she kicked me out. So I was living at my grandmother's house and Jeremy showed up and I was showing I was scared to death, and I can remember him calling me a couple weeks later and telling me some fullless story about he was dying of some disease and I needed to find somebody else, and I can remember thinking about in my mind, he's breaking up with me because I'm pregnant, and the sick part of me was angry, how dare you break up with me because I'm pregnant with your kid? And I can remember I started crying and my aunt Mary walked in. She's like, what's wrong with you? And I said, he just broke up with me because I'm pregnant. And then all of a sudden, I caught myself when I stopped, and I smiled, and I said, he just broke up with me because I'm pregnant.
00:34:18
Speaker 1: Jamie thought she was finally rid of Jeremy and all the chaos, the violence and the abuse. But two weeks later he's back, this time with blood on his pants and a stolen car he wants Jamie to get in, and by now Jamie knows the consequences of telling Jeremy no.
00:34:43
Speaker 2: Next time, I knew I wasn't coming back. I knew if they didn't catch him, I was going to die.
00:34:58
Speaker 1: Own Valley is a production of LoVa for Good podcast in association with Signal Company Number One. Our executive producers are Jason Flomm, Jeff Kempler and Kevin Wordis. Karen Kornhaber is our senior producer. Jackie Pauley and Hannah Biel are our producers. Britz Spangler is our sound designer. Marianne McCune is our editor. Fact checking by Dania Sulemant. Jeff Cliburn is our head of marketing and operations. Our Social media director is Ismati Guardrama, our Social Media manager is Sarah Gibbons, and our art director is Andrew Nelson. Additional research and production by Kelsey Decker. Additional sound recording by James Johnson. Bone Valley is written and produced by Me Gilbert King. Follow us on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and threads at Lava for Good
