April 16, 2025
Jeremy | Chapter 3 - Never Turned Her Back on Me
As Gilbert’s relationship with Jeremy deepens, it’s tested by Jeremy’s darkest instincts. After a long silence, Jeremy reveals he’s been thrown into solitary confinement because he stabbed another inmate—possibly in self-defense. Possibly not.
Gilbert is forced to reckon with the contradictions: the man trying to right past wrongs, and the man still capable of harm. In letters and phone calls, in moments of rage and vulnerability, Jeremy opens a window into who he is now… and what still haunts him.
Even in solitary confinement, Jeremy begins to connect: with Gilbert, through books the author sends him, and eventually, with himself.
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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00:00:13
Speaker 1: The more I talk to Justin, the more it was clear he wanted to talk to his dad.
00:00:18
Speaker 2: I just feel like at this point in time, since he's already opening up and so I feel like we're both writing talk to each other the way.
00:00:26
Speaker 3: Well, I would honestly say it's true. I mean, he does talk a lot about his family.
00:00:30
Speaker 4: You know.
00:00:31
Speaker 1: I explained to Justin that Jeremy was on lockdown.
00:00:35
Speaker 3: We've been corresponding with him. I'll just tell you right now, he's in sort of in like solitary confinement right now.
00:00:40
Speaker 1: And Jeremy's life was still marked by chaos and violence even in prison. At the time. I was the only one writing and talking to him.
00:00:50
Speaker 5: He does feel kind of lonely. It's been only recently.
00:00:55
Speaker 1: He was no longer getting any letters from anyone in his family. He would say to me, you're the only person I talked to, the only person. Jeremy said that to me multiple times.
00:01:09
Speaker 2: When he said that no one wrote, I was like, damn, because I ain't gonna lie. I got a letter from him before. I don't remember what it says.
00:01:15
Speaker 6: I don't have it.
00:01:17
Speaker 2: Well, I never put that effort in.
00:01:20
Speaker 1: I found myself in an unusual position, the bridge between a multiple murderer and the thirty five year old son he'd never met. I never thought I'd end up here, So I want to tell you the story of how I did.
00:01:45
Speaker 4: My man man left to have my face s steps, sir. In this vally Sation rage.
00:02:21
Speaker 7: Des fish to the world, things, stuff, soldings.
00:02:32
Speaker 4: Stuff.
00:02:46
Speaker 1: Bone Valley Season two, Jeremy chapter three never turned her back on me. Well before Justin reached out to me. I got a mid night email from Jeremy. Mister King, I have no hard feelings towards you or to society. I'll make this short. This will be my last time writing to you. The monster in me is coming alive one last time. Hope everything works out for you. Goodbye. After I got that cryptic message, I didn't hear from him again for a while.
00:03:24
Speaker 5: I had no idea where he was.
00:03:27
Speaker 1: Finally I learned he'd been transferred to a different prison, and that's when we found out that he'd gotten into some kind of trouble.
00:03:35
Speaker 8: This is an inspector paget regarding a an aggravated battery that occurred.
00:03:43
Speaker 1: I was able to get the report on the incident from the Florida Department of Corrections in a recording of the interview.
00:03:48
Speaker 5: With the victim, and who is this inmate?
00:03:52
Speaker 4: Okay, so you woke up to him stabbing you?
00:03:55
Speaker 8: Where was he stabbing you at?
00:03:57
Speaker 5: Okay?
00:03:59
Speaker 4: So he started multiple times? Okay.
00:04:02
Speaker 1: The critical incident summary from the corrections officer on duty that night is also heavily redacted. It says, after reviewing camera footage, inmate Scott could be seen entering the bathroom and retrieving the weapon and approaching inmate Blank's bunk as he slept, and proceeded to carry out the assault by stabbing inmate Blank numerous times. Inmate Blank was stabbed by inmate Jeremy Scott with an improvised ice pick style weapon. The inmate that he stabbed survived and was transported to a hospital, and Jeremy was put in immediate confinement. It was months later, after I found out Jeremy had been transferred to a different prison, that I got this letter. Dear mister King, I hope you are doing well. As for myself, I'm still alive.
00:05:01
Speaker 5: And he's got the exclamation point there.
00:05:04
Speaker 8: He says, I had some trouble. It's all fucked up. I don't have shit not even deodorant. I get one free letter once a month. Please get back to me as soon as you can. Thanks, Jeremy L.
00:05:16
Speaker 3: Scott.
00:05:20
Speaker 1: Jeremy was in solitary confinement at Florida State Prison, and at first he could only receive letters, but after a few months he was allowed two free telephone.
00:05:31
Speaker 5: Calls a week, one for five minutes and one for thirty Hello.
00:05:36
Speaker 6: This is a prepaid call from an inmate at a Florida Department of Corrections institutions.
00:05:45
Speaker 1: Jeremy was living alone in a cell sharing a floor with other inmates who were also in disciplinary confinement. They call it close management or CM. An officer brings the phone to him in his cell he can hear me. At first, we just talked about how he was holding up in solitary.
00:06:03
Speaker 6: OK.
00:06:04
Speaker 1: Yeah, good, I just didn't He started calling me almost every week.
00:06:08
Speaker 6: Yeah. I also wanted to let you know. I looked into the tablet too, and.
00:06:12
Speaker 1: After a while I asked him to tell me about the stabbing incident.
00:06:16
Speaker 6: He wrote me a note and said that they might lock you up for a while.
00:06:21
Speaker 9: Well, I told you that because that stabbing I did already hit on me and I found out about.
00:06:26
Speaker 1: It He said he'd gotten into trouble with some inmates, found out someone had put a hit on him and that he was in immediate danger.
00:06:34
Speaker 6: How'd you find out that he was coming after you?
00:06:38
Speaker 9: Work is round, you know, and all they got to do is said cold.
00:06:43
Speaker 1: Inmates at different prisons send coded messages to each other.
00:06:49
Speaker 2: In prison.
00:06:50
Speaker 1: Jeremy claims that another inmate in his dorm with a contraband phone had seen a code numbers or an emoji or something with Jeremy's picture, and Jeremy said he'd been in prison long enough to know what that meant.
00:07:04
Speaker 5: He was a marked man.
00:07:06
Speaker 9: They knew while I was coming. They knew, well, well, I looked like everything.
00:07:10
Speaker 1: Jeremy said, he knew the guy that was supposed to.
00:07:13
Speaker 9: Come after him, and I know who his dud was, right, And when I heard what you're going to do?
00:07:20
Speaker 2: Right, I just smacked him.
00:07:27
Speaker 1: He said he was just laying there with one eye open until the guy.
00:07:30
Speaker 9: Fell asleep, because I know he'd wait for me to go to sleep, right, I'll hy away, so I know it was something going to happen. It was going down, you.
00:07:40
Speaker 2: Know, by me being in prison all these years, I ain't stupid.
00:07:45
Speaker 5: This is Jeremy's side of the story. Anyway.
00:07:49
Speaker 1: There's video of Jeremy getting up from his bunk and going into the bathroom. He grabbed the weapon, went over to the bunk where his would be attacker had fallen asleep. He started stabbing him. The feeling I got from Jeremy about this is that he wasn't proud of what he did, and he wasn't ashamed of it. He was telling me I had to do this to survive in here, and he said, I stabbed him, but I.
00:08:20
Speaker 5: Didn't kill him.
00:08:22
Speaker 9: I could ask acutey, I could have could have put.
00:08:24
Speaker 2: It right in his heart.
00:08:41
Speaker 1: When I got that note from Jeremy that the monster was coming alive one more time, it was terrifying. And then to learn that he actually waited in the dark in his prison dorm for someone to fall asleep so he could stab him, it made me a little sick.
00:08:55
Speaker 5: Just what am I doing?
00:08:56
Speaker 1: Why do I stay in touch with him? Up to this point, most of my communication with Jeremy had been pragmatic. I wrote to him with questions and sent him a few stamps. He wrote me back with information that helped confirm he was the man who murdered Leo Schofield's wife. Now I was talking to him every week, sometimes twice, and about all kinds of things. It used to be that the only phone calls I got from prison were from Leo. Leo was the person at the center of this story. Leo was the guy I kept in touch with. Now I started to worry what would Leo think of my recent telephone calls with the man who confessed to murdering Michelle. The first time I talked to Leo about the fact that I was continuing a dialogue with Jeremy Scott. It wasn't really sure how Leo would feel, but Leo told me Gilbert, I'm proud of you.
00:10:25
Speaker 10: We're out the truth, you know, and he's the one that supplied the truth, you know. But I would really like him to know and feel that myself and those who represent me are, you know, concerned for his well being as well.
00:10:46
Speaker 1: Jeremy continued to help me corroborate that his account of what he'd done to Michelle was the truth, that Leo was innocent, and one of my letters to them, I wrote, You've been so helpful to me and my investigation, and I think you could help me understand a few more things that I'm still not very clear on. In our calls, he would answer most of my questions.
00:11:06
Speaker 6: You know what I want to ask you something. Jamie said that you used to hang out behind the mall, the Lakeland Mall.
00:11:13
Speaker 2: Yeah, let's we created what was that there?
00:11:17
Speaker 6: Like benches or something like where'd you hang out in our cars?
00:11:22
Speaker 10: You know?
00:11:24
Speaker 5: Yeah?
00:11:26
Speaker 10: You know.
00:11:27
Speaker 1: Florida prosecutor once advised me that if I want this reporting a one day exonerate Leo, I need to prove that.
00:11:33
Speaker 5: Jeremy Scott is credible. So that's one reason I.
00:11:37
Speaker 1: Wanted to keep my conversations with Jeremy going about Michelle and about another murder.
00:11:42
Speaker 5: He told me he committed.
00:11:44
Speaker 2: You know, we did get here of this music, you know, and we got beer or something, you know.
00:11:49
Speaker 6: And that is that the Jeremy, Is that the same place that you hit the gun?
00:11:53
Speaker 1: Yeah, And Jeremy was giving me good information. I was able to source it and corroborate it with gards I had.
00:12:01
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's why I hate that gun. Eh.
00:12:03
Speaker 9: Yeah, she would. She wouldn't looking for it, couldn't find it. When I saw her looking as sore she lives, I went and got it, moved it. Yeah, I knew somebody somebody had saw him.
00:12:12
Speaker 11: And put it there.
00:12:15
Speaker 1: In one of his letters to me, it's clear Jeremy was still thinking about Michelle. He wrote, they know Leo didn't do it. Hell, he been locked up for thirty five years. The state don't want people to really know. During the course of my conversations with Jeremy, Leo was finally able to get out of prison. He wasn't exonerated. He was still a convicted felon in the eyes of the state, but he was paroled and he was now in a half way house in Tampa. So I told Jeremy about it and told him Leo believes that a big part of why he's out is because of you and your willingness to be honest about what you'd done. Jeremy didn't say much, but I could tell he felt like he'd done something good. It was a strange place for me to be in between these two guys, both of them caring.
00:13:14
Speaker 5: About each other in a way.
00:13:17
Speaker 1: It's what gave me permission to continue the conversations, even when they weren't explicitly about the cases I was investigating.
00:13:30
Speaker 6: Hello, Hello, Hey, oh, Jeremy, you're there.
00:13:34
Speaker 1: He always seemed to call when I was at the office, so I'd see it pop up on my phone saying Rayford, Hey, good to hear from you. I always picked it up if I saw it, I just say, all right, half hour time for Jeremy.
00:13:46
Speaker 6: You don't have any glasses right now?
00:13:48
Speaker 9: No, I'll borrow my knick door neighbors glasses.
00:13:51
Speaker 6: Okay, Now we got to get you some new glasses. If Gus hurt my eyes, oh yeah, that's not good. You gotta get the right ones.
00:13:59
Speaker 1: From the very start, I was excited to get his calls.
00:14:02
Speaker 6: All right, can you hear me?
00:14:04
Speaker 5: Like, wow, all right, this is going to be interesting.
00:14:07
Speaker 6: What's the name of that author again? Just just spell it out again?
00:14:11
Speaker 2: All right?
00:14:13
Speaker 1: Well, he talked a lot about how in solitary reading is the only thing I can do. If I don't have any books, all I can do is sit.
00:14:20
Speaker 5: Here and think.
00:14:22
Speaker 1: And I know those were really dark moments for him.
00:14:25
Speaker 2: So he would tell me what he likes to read, all right, Mark, his last name is g R.
00:14:32
Speaker 10: E A E Y.
00:14:35
Speaker 1: So I started sending him paperbacks.
00:14:37
Speaker 6: Okay, great, okay, good, And he.
00:14:40
Speaker 1: Likes James Patterson and Stephen King. He likes some Western writers. I send him Game of Thrones.
00:14:48
Speaker 9: It don't make no sense how they kill all them kids of like that I know.
00:14:52
Speaker 7: And now the only one that left is is.
00:14:55
Speaker 9: The two girls and yeah, one little boy. Yeah, and they cripple in the cripple Key, which he's gonna become some mills.
00:15:03
Speaker 6: Yeah, he becomes a really big part of it.
00:15:05
Speaker 1: Later, I was mostly sending things that my kids had read, because Jeremy had only gone through the fourth grade in school. I didn't want to just keep sending him the same authors, so I sent him The Hunger Games to mix things up for him.
00:15:18
Speaker 9: Remember that serious you sent me? Yeah, that was pretty That was a pretty good series too, told me they got it on a TV too.
00:15:27
Speaker 6: Oh really, I didn't even know that. I'll check it out.
00:15:30
Speaker 1: Books have a way of building empathy. They let you step into someone else's life for a little while, and I wanted Jeremy to experience that too, to escape the reality of being locked in a prison cell, even for a moment. I could see how reading relaxed him, how it opened him up. Our conversations became more honest, and as I got to know this side of Jeremy. I started to see him differently. The more we talked, the more I understood he didn't want to be the violent person he'd been in the past. He wanted to be better. Maybe just by talking with him, I could help him do that.
00:16:10
Speaker 9: Books pretty good. I still want to read the rest of them, Will the Will the Time series, But man's a lot. That's a lot of books there. They got eighteen books in that series.
00:16:23
Speaker 10: Really, I think I only read five of them so far. I think, yeah, but.
00:16:28
Speaker 2: One, two, three, four, and five.
00:16:32
Speaker 6: Okay, so you're going in order then, okay.
00:16:35
Speaker 7: Yeah.
00:16:41
Speaker 9: Ever since I came back over here, like everything's been going wrong for me.
00:16:46
Speaker 2: I can't gas for no reason. They spraying that pepper spray.
00:16:51
Speaker 10: They ain't doing nothing.
00:16:53
Speaker 1: Sometimes Jeremy was in a really, really dark place, and when I pick up the phone, I recognize that today would.
00:17:00
Speaker 5: Just be a listening day.
00:17:02
Speaker 2: Now my ship has stolen and and and it gotta be something. That's something going on, some kind of something's going on here. I don't want to stand this year.
00:17:14
Speaker 8: I gotta go to medical.
00:17:15
Speaker 9: I gotta get I gotta get a chest run on me because I got.
00:17:18
Speaker 2: I got a not in my stomach.
00:17:21
Speaker 1: He was having some real health problems, losing a lot of weight.
00:17:25
Speaker 9: And I asked the male nurse about it. Right, he say, he's said it could be it could be a hernia, right, or it could be a tumor.
00:17:38
Speaker 6: Is rais on your stomach because it's really low or higher.
00:17:44
Speaker 9: It's it's like that, not it's like it's right. It's like maybe two inches above my navel.
00:17:52
Speaker 2: Okay, it's right there, right in the middle of my cut, okay.
00:17:56
Speaker 6: And it hurts when I touch it, oh ship, all right?
00:18:00
Speaker 2: And when when I lay down.
00:18:01
Speaker 9: I can see I can see my ribs cages.
00:18:04
Speaker 12: Oh man, Jeremy, are they like you see a doctor? Are they gonna get you to see a doctor?
00:18:11
Speaker 9: They're gonna I don't like to do it now because you know they they they they charge you five dollars every time you go up there to see a doctor. And you know they're gonna charge a five dollars. His nurse and she's gonna write it on this. She put a report into the doctor. Then you gotta wait a couple of weeks, maybe a month, you know, see your name pops up, you know, hey.
00:18:34
Speaker 6: They can have nobody, you know, yeah, yeah, oh man, all right, that's horrible.
00:18:53
Speaker 1: At the time I was getting all these phone calls from Jeremy, I found out that for the first time he'd found someone on the inside that he could trust.
00:19:02
Speaker 6: Hey, sorry, okay, cool, I'm so glad you called me, Zach. How you doing that?
00:19:06
Speaker 5: I'm yeah, Actually, this is Oscar Smith.
00:19:10
Speaker 1: Turns out Oscar went to theological school with Leo while they were both at Hardy CI.
00:19:15
Speaker 11: On the front Road. He actually sat next to me right in front of the class the first It's.
00:19:20
Speaker 1: A class that you can get a degree from within the prison. From what I understand, Oscar and Leo graduated at the top of their class.
00:19:28
Speaker 11: Eventually, of course, became almost inseparable wherever you see.
00:19:32
Speaker 1: After Leo got released, some of the graduates were spread throughout the prison system to serve as pastors for other inmates. Oscar was transferred up to Florida State Prison where Jeremy was.
00:19:44
Speaker 11: Somebody asked who we were, so I was explaining to them who we were, as film ministers, and.
00:19:50
Speaker 1: He mentions that he came from Hardy CI.
00:19:54
Speaker 11: And then I heard a voice and he said, you guys are from Hardy and I kind of looked over then I said yeah, and he asked me, he said, do you know Leo Schofield And I said, yes, me and they were pretty close, and he goes, I'm Jeremy Scott Oscar.
00:20:11
Speaker 1: Knows exactly who this is. He's very familiar with Leo's case.
00:20:16
Speaker 11: And I'm like, I'm looking at him in the wing that he's in. It's all open sale. It's just like open bars, so I actually can see him.
00:20:26
Speaker 10: Face to face.
00:20:27
Speaker 11: The really the only thing that stands between me and him is just some steel bars. At the time, I was like, CROs my heart, just thank I paused for a minute and I said, actually, I know quite a bit about you, sir, and I said I've talked to Leo.
00:20:42
Speaker 10: I said, I know who you are.
00:20:45
Speaker 11: He was like okay. And the next thing he told me, he said, listen, Leo's innocent. He goes, I killed his wife and now nobody wants to listen.
00:20:57
Speaker 9: He said you Jeremy's cut said, asked me right, and shug Miami. He was one of the ones that worked with Leo over there.
00:21:07
Speaker 1: Jeremy was impressed that somebody close to Leo was still willing to talk to him and be kind to him.
00:21:13
Speaker 6: Yeah, there was a lot of guys praying for you, including you know, Leo obviously.
00:21:18
Speaker 1: Yeah, I remember thinking like this is a relief in a way that now there's someone on the inside who can keep an eye on Jeremy.
00:21:26
Speaker 6: How did he look to you when you first saw him.
00:21:28
Speaker 11: He's he's thinned, you know. I mean anytime Uran confinement or something like that, there's a tendency of losing weight just because the trays that come back there aren't always the best trays. You know, the breads, you know, laying in beans and so it's all mushy and stoppy, and so you know, it's just yeah, so you have a tendency to eat less. So I mean he was thin, looked frail. You know, he seemed to be in decent spirits. You know, it wasn't like he was really distraught or anything else like that.
00:22:03
Speaker 1: But I mean Oscar told me that once a week he goes up on that wing and talks to Jeremy.
00:22:08
Speaker 11: I walked up there two weeks ago and he had a gash on his head. He was literally bleeding from his head and I'm looking at Jeremy and he was frazzed. Well, it kind of had tears in his eyes. He had a split basically on his forehead, but a little bit more towards the top of his head. And so I knew there was something going on. You know, they can't reach one another or they can't do whatever. So I don't know if it was self inflicted, because he was angry at something, and I have no idea.
00:22:40
Speaker 1: Oscar was worried about Jeremy's mental health.
00:22:43
Speaker 6: Oscar told me, you busted your head open. What happened?
00:22:46
Speaker 12: Oh?
00:22:47
Speaker 2: They lost my property. They threw all my stuff away.
00:22:52
Speaker 11: They did.
00:22:53
Speaker 9: Yeah, they threw all my stuff away.
00:22:55
Speaker 6: I got nothing.
00:22:56
Speaker 11: The books you should me?
00:22:58
Speaker 9: Yeah, before both.
00:22:59
Speaker 2: I ain't got to redo they are they were in my property name, I ain't got nothing. I'm talking about everything I owned with my lagger's gone.
00:23:11
Speaker 11: God?
00:23:12
Speaker 2: Hey can you.
00:23:15
Speaker 6: Yeah? You want more? Poor boot of the gray man?
00:23:17
Speaker 9: Hey, I ain't never.
00:23:18
Speaker 2: I ain't never got to redo other ones.
00:23:21
Speaker 6: I'll just send you to do. I'll just send you the same ones. If you didn't get him, I'll just send the same ones to you.
00:23:26
Speaker 2: All right.
00:23:28
Speaker 6: Did you ever see a doctor about your stomach?
00:23:31
Speaker 4: No?
00:23:32
Speaker 2: I still ain't seen him.
00:23:35
Speaker 1: I was still pressing Jeremy for answers, but I could feel myself getting pulled into his life in ways I never expected, helping him navigate his health issues, trying to reconnect him with family he hasn't heard from in years.
00:23:49
Speaker 6: I'll tell you this. I I talked to Joshua. Do you remember him?
00:23:54
Speaker 11: Who?
00:23:55
Speaker 6: Joshua? He's Jason's brother, Oh, my cousin. Yeah.
00:24:00
Speaker 5: And then there were.
00:24:01
Speaker 1: Moments when I heard something else in him, a flash of who he might have been, a childhood memory that.
00:24:08
Speaker 5: Makes him laugh.
00:24:09
Speaker 9: And the only other person he might be still around is John Scott. Johnny Scott as my oldest cousin.
00:24:18
Speaker 6: Yeah. I don't know him at all. I'll look into him.
00:24:21
Speaker 9: One got me into crime?
00:24:23
Speaker 6: Oh really?
00:24:26
Speaker 2: First I ever did a crime was with him? What kind of crime we We saw a truck? Oh okay, Yeah, he's not a criminal. That was something we did when we were we were thirteen years old.
00:24:41
Speaker 11: That ain't that.
00:24:42
Speaker 2: I think I might have been nine or ten.
00:24:44
Speaker 6: Yeah, no, I think you haven't arrested ten, So you started pretty well.
00:24:50
Speaker 1: One day I got this letter from Jeremy. It says, mister King, I almost forgot to ask you. You have asked me about my family. I just I don't understand why they stopped writing me. My aunt Debbie, of all people, I tried writing her but heard nothing. Maybe you can find out. I really would like to know I missed them. Thank you, mister King. He's lost his whole family. He hasn't had contact with them for over a decade, and I said, well, listen, I'm trying to talk to them too. I'll try to find out. I had no luck with Jeremy's aunt Debbie, so I reached out to some family members who were close to her. I finally got in touch with her son, Joshua, Jeremy's cousin. I set up a time to meet with him, and at the last minute he said he had COVID. He was very apologetic, he said, I'm so sorry, it's just not a good time. So I kept texting him and he ended up telling me some bad news news I knew Jeremy was going to take hard.
00:26:00
Speaker 12: Well, yeah, I've been I've been in touch with with josh We've just had a hard time connecting.
00:26:05
Speaker 6: I think he got COVID or something like that.
00:26:07
Speaker 2: So do you know if anybody else died in my family? I don't.
00:26:11
Speaker 12: Yeah, yeah, I do, Jeremy, and I'm sorry to tell you this, but Josh said that Debbie died a couple of years.
00:26:17
Speaker 9: Ago, that mama, yeah, oh my god.
00:26:23
Speaker 4: Yeah.
00:26:23
Speaker 12: He said it was like Christmas Eve and twenty twenty one, and he said, he said, I don't even know if Jeremy knows yet.
00:26:32
Speaker 10: I didn't.
00:26:36
Speaker 2: No, you know, me and her a close.
00:26:44
Speaker 11: Yeah, I know.
00:26:46
Speaker 12: I was hoping to talk to her, and I just I'm sorry that I'm the one that have to tell you that, but I just found out, and I was trying to think about who I could maybe.
00:26:56
Speaker 6: Have you talk to about that, But you are from her. Yeah, she died a couple of.
00:27:02
Speaker 2: Years turned her back on me there because it was for a Grandma came to seeing me. Yeah, you know, he always killed me out.
00:27:13
Speaker 6: Yeah, you know she, I know she was important and she I know she raised you.
00:27:31
Speaker 1: Before I met Jeremy's son, Justin, I didn't think anyone else from Jeremy's family was ever going to write him, much less call or visit. I had tried to be a bridge between Jeremy and his family, but I'd failed.
00:27:54
Speaker 11: Talking about his aunt Debbie and speaking to him about that. He was worried about his own death. He doesn't want to be buried in a prison cemetery.
00:28:08
Speaker 1: The Florida State Prison Cemetery at Rayford doesn't get many visitors. The gravestones are simple gray concrete slabs in the ground, each anchored by silver metal plates produced by inmates in the prison's license tag plant. They're embossed with the inmates name, prison number, and date of death. That's it. You don't see any flowers laid on top. It's the final resting place for inmates who died in custody and are unclaimed by family members. Some of the men buried here were strapped to old Sparky Florida's electric chair or a gurney where they were executed by lethal injection. Jeremy knows he's never getting out of prison, but the idea of being buried on prison grounds seems to bother him more than anything He's aid.
00:28:59
Speaker 11: But Oscar, I don't want to be buried here, he goes not' I don't know how you know to go about that. And I asked him, I says, well, if you have any family, I said, the best bet would be for you to try to contact them somehow, some way, because if nobody is willing to take responsibility for the body, then they have no other recourse but to, you know, bury you in a prison cemetery because you're a ward of state.
00:29:27
Speaker 1: There would have to be someone out there who cares enough to claim Jeremy's body. When Jeremy's son, Justin asked me to help him talk to his dad, I was wary, but also intrigued. I knew if I told Jeremy there was a family member who wanted to talk to him, he would be uplifted, and the idea that it was his son, I could only imagine the excitement he'd feel. So I told Jeremy that his son wanted to write to him. Jeremy told me he would write to Justin, and while I waited for them to find their first words for each other, I headed back to Florida. I wanted to make one final attempt to put my hands on evidence that could prove without a doubt that Jeremy Scott was telling the truth about what he'd done.
00:30:20
Speaker 2: And we had two dogs from the time he did lead him to the abandoned house, but they lost him there.
00:30:29
Speaker 1: Okay, so the dog thought that whoever did this went to the abandoned house.
00:30:35
Speaker 5: Yes sure, okay, Yes sure, that's next time.
00:30:45
Speaker 1: Bone Valley is a production of LoVa for Good Podcasts in association with Signal Company Number One. Our executive producers are Jason Flom, Jeff Kepler, and Kevin Wordis. Karen Krnhaber is our senior producer. Jackie Pauley and Hannah Biel are our producers. Britz Spangler is our sound designer.
00:31:06
Speaker 5: Marianne McCune is our editor.
00:31:08
Speaker 1: Fact checking by Dania Suleman. 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: The more I talk to Justin, the more it was clear he wanted to talk to his dad.
00:00:18
Speaker 2: I just feel like at this point in time, since he's already opening up and so I feel like we're both writing talk to each other the way.
00:00:26
Speaker 3: Well, I would honestly say it's true. I mean, he does talk a lot about his family.
00:00:30
Speaker 4: You know.
00:00:31
Speaker 1: I explained to Justin that Jeremy was on lockdown.
00:00:35
Speaker 3: We've been corresponding with him. I'll just tell you right now, he's in sort of in like solitary confinement right now.
00:00:40
Speaker 1: And Jeremy's life was still marked by chaos and violence even in prison. At the time. I was the only one writing and talking to him.
00:00:50
Speaker 5: He does feel kind of lonely. It's been only recently.
00:00:55
Speaker 1: He was no longer getting any letters from anyone in his family. He would say to me, you're the only person I talked to, the only person. Jeremy said that to me multiple times.
00:01:09
Speaker 2: When he said that no one wrote, I was like, damn, because I ain't gonna lie. I got a letter from him before. I don't remember what it says.
00:01:15
Speaker 6: I don't have it.
00:01:17
Speaker 2: Well, I never put that effort in.
00:01:20
Speaker 1: I found myself in an unusual position, the bridge between a multiple murderer and the thirty five year old son he'd never met. I never thought I'd end up here, So I want to tell you the story of how I did.
00:01:45
Speaker 4: My man man left to have my face s steps, sir. In this vally Sation rage.
00:02:21
Speaker 7: Des fish to the world, things, stuff, soldings.
00:02:32
Speaker 4: Stuff.
00:02:46
Speaker 1: Bone Valley Season two, Jeremy chapter three never turned her back on me. Well before Justin reached out to me. I got a mid night email from Jeremy. Mister King, I have no hard feelings towards you or to society. I'll make this short. This will be my last time writing to you. The monster in me is coming alive one last time. Hope everything works out for you. Goodbye. After I got that cryptic message, I didn't hear from him again for a while.
00:03:24
Speaker 5: I had no idea where he was.
00:03:27
Speaker 1: Finally I learned he'd been transferred to a different prison, and that's when we found out that he'd gotten into some kind of trouble.
00:03:35
Speaker 8: This is an inspector paget regarding a an aggravated battery that occurred.
00:03:43
Speaker 1: I was able to get the report on the incident from the Florida Department of Corrections in a recording of the interview.
00:03:48
Speaker 5: With the victim, and who is this inmate?
00:03:52
Speaker 4: Okay, so you woke up to him stabbing you?
00:03:55
Speaker 8: Where was he stabbing you at?
00:03:57
Speaker 5: Okay?
00:03:59
Speaker 4: So he started multiple times? Okay.
00:04:02
Speaker 1: The critical incident summary from the corrections officer on duty that night is also heavily redacted. It says, after reviewing camera footage, inmate Scott could be seen entering the bathroom and retrieving the weapon and approaching inmate Blank's bunk as he slept, and proceeded to carry out the assault by stabbing inmate Blank numerous times. Inmate Blank was stabbed by inmate Jeremy Scott with an improvised ice pick style weapon. The inmate that he stabbed survived and was transported to a hospital, and Jeremy was put in immediate confinement. It was months later, after I found out Jeremy had been transferred to a different prison, that I got this letter. Dear mister King, I hope you are doing well. As for myself, I'm still alive.
00:05:01
Speaker 5: And he's got the exclamation point there.
00:05:04
Speaker 8: He says, I had some trouble. It's all fucked up. I don't have shit not even deodorant. I get one free letter once a month. Please get back to me as soon as you can. Thanks, Jeremy L.
00:05:16
Speaker 3: Scott.
00:05:20
Speaker 1: Jeremy was in solitary confinement at Florida State Prison, and at first he could only receive letters, but after a few months he was allowed two free telephone.
00:05:31
Speaker 5: Calls a week, one for five minutes and one for thirty Hello.
00:05:36
Speaker 6: This is a prepaid call from an inmate at a Florida Department of Corrections institutions.
00:05:45
Speaker 1: Jeremy was living alone in a cell sharing a floor with other inmates who were also in disciplinary confinement. They call it close management or CM. An officer brings the phone to him in his cell he can hear me. At first, we just talked about how he was holding up in solitary.
00:06:03
Speaker 6: OK.
00:06:04
Speaker 1: Yeah, good, I just didn't He started calling me almost every week.
00:06:08
Speaker 6: Yeah. I also wanted to let you know. I looked into the tablet too, and.
00:06:12
Speaker 1: After a while I asked him to tell me about the stabbing incident.
00:06:16
Speaker 6: He wrote me a note and said that they might lock you up for a while.
00:06:21
Speaker 9: Well, I told you that because that stabbing I did already hit on me and I found out about.
00:06:26
Speaker 1: It He said he'd gotten into trouble with some inmates, found out someone had put a hit on him and that he was in immediate danger.
00:06:34
Speaker 6: How'd you find out that he was coming after you?
00:06:38
Speaker 9: Work is round, you know, and all they got to do is said cold.
00:06:43
Speaker 1: Inmates at different prisons send coded messages to each other.
00:06:49
Speaker 2: In prison.
00:06:50
Speaker 1: Jeremy claims that another inmate in his dorm with a contraband phone had seen a code numbers or an emoji or something with Jeremy's picture, and Jeremy said he'd been in prison long enough to know what that meant.
00:07:04
Speaker 5: He was a marked man.
00:07:06
Speaker 9: They knew while I was coming. They knew, well, well, I looked like everything.
00:07:10
Speaker 1: Jeremy said, he knew the guy that was supposed to.
00:07:13
Speaker 9: Come after him, and I know who his dud was, right, And when I heard what you're going to do?
00:07:20
Speaker 2: Right, I just smacked him.
00:07:27
Speaker 1: He said he was just laying there with one eye open until the guy.
00:07:30
Speaker 9: Fell asleep, because I know he'd wait for me to go to sleep, right, I'll hy away, so I know it was something going to happen. It was going down, you.
00:07:40
Speaker 2: Know, by me being in prison all these years, I ain't stupid.
00:07:45
Speaker 5: This is Jeremy's side of the story. Anyway.
00:07:49
Speaker 1: There's video of Jeremy getting up from his bunk and going into the bathroom. He grabbed the weapon, went over to the bunk where his would be attacker had fallen asleep. He started stabbing him. The feeling I got from Jeremy about this is that he wasn't proud of what he did, and he wasn't ashamed of it. He was telling me I had to do this to survive in here, and he said, I stabbed him, but I.
00:08:20
Speaker 5: Didn't kill him.
00:08:22
Speaker 9: I could ask acutey, I could have could have put.
00:08:24
Speaker 2: It right in his heart.
00:08:41
Speaker 1: When I got that note from Jeremy that the monster was coming alive one more time, it was terrifying. And then to learn that he actually waited in the dark in his prison dorm for someone to fall asleep so he could stab him, it made me a little sick.
00:08:55
Speaker 5: Just what am I doing?
00:08:56
Speaker 1: Why do I stay in touch with him? Up to this point, most of my communication with Jeremy had been pragmatic. I wrote to him with questions and sent him a few stamps. He wrote me back with information that helped confirm he was the man who murdered Leo Schofield's wife. Now I was talking to him every week, sometimes twice, and about all kinds of things. It used to be that the only phone calls I got from prison were from Leo. Leo was the person at the center of this story. Leo was the guy I kept in touch with. Now I started to worry what would Leo think of my recent telephone calls with the man who confessed to murdering Michelle. The first time I talked to Leo about the fact that I was continuing a dialogue with Jeremy Scott. It wasn't really sure how Leo would feel, but Leo told me Gilbert, I'm proud of you.
00:10:25
Speaker 10: We're out the truth, you know, and he's the one that supplied the truth, you know. But I would really like him to know and feel that myself and those who represent me are, you know, concerned for his well being as well.
00:10:46
Speaker 1: Jeremy continued to help me corroborate that his account of what he'd done to Michelle was the truth, that Leo was innocent, and one of my letters to them, I wrote, You've been so helpful to me and my investigation, and I think you could help me understand a few more things that I'm still not very clear on. In our calls, he would answer most of my questions.
00:11:06
Speaker 6: You know what I want to ask you something. Jamie said that you used to hang out behind the mall, the Lakeland Mall.
00:11:13
Speaker 2: Yeah, let's we created what was that there?
00:11:17
Speaker 6: Like benches or something like where'd you hang out in our cars?
00:11:22
Speaker 10: You know?
00:11:24
Speaker 5: Yeah?
00:11:26
Speaker 10: You know.
00:11:27
Speaker 1: Florida prosecutor once advised me that if I want this reporting a one day exonerate Leo, I need to prove that.
00:11:33
Speaker 5: Jeremy Scott is credible. So that's one reason I.
00:11:37
Speaker 1: Wanted to keep my conversations with Jeremy going about Michelle and about another murder.
00:11:42
Speaker 5: He told me he committed.
00:11:44
Speaker 2: You know, we did get here of this music, you know, and we got beer or something, you know.
00:11:49
Speaker 6: And that is that the Jeremy, Is that the same place that you hit the gun?
00:11:53
Speaker 1: Yeah, And Jeremy was giving me good information. I was able to source it and corroborate it with gards I had.
00:12:01
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's why I hate that gun. Eh.
00:12:03
Speaker 9: Yeah, she would. She wouldn't looking for it, couldn't find it. When I saw her looking as sore she lives, I went and got it, moved it. Yeah, I knew somebody somebody had saw him.
00:12:12
Speaker 11: And put it there.
00:12:15
Speaker 1: In one of his letters to me, it's clear Jeremy was still thinking about Michelle. He wrote, they know Leo didn't do it. Hell, he been locked up for thirty five years. The state don't want people to really know. During the course of my conversations with Jeremy, Leo was finally able to get out of prison. He wasn't exonerated. He was still a convicted felon in the eyes of the state, but he was paroled and he was now in a half way house in Tampa. So I told Jeremy about it and told him Leo believes that a big part of why he's out is because of you and your willingness to be honest about what you'd done. Jeremy didn't say much, but I could tell he felt like he'd done something good. It was a strange place for me to be in between these two guys, both of them caring.
00:13:14
Speaker 5: About each other in a way.
00:13:17
Speaker 1: It's what gave me permission to continue the conversations, even when they weren't explicitly about the cases I was investigating.
00:13:30
Speaker 6: Hello, Hello, Hey, oh, Jeremy, you're there.
00:13:34
Speaker 1: He always seemed to call when I was at the office, so I'd see it pop up on my phone saying Rayford, Hey, good to hear from you. I always picked it up if I saw it, I just say, all right, half hour time for Jeremy.
00:13:46
Speaker 6: You don't have any glasses right now?
00:13:48
Speaker 9: No, I'll borrow my knick door neighbors glasses.
00:13:51
Speaker 6: Okay, Now we got to get you some new glasses. If Gus hurt my eyes, oh yeah, that's not good. You gotta get the right ones.
00:13:59
Speaker 1: From the very start, I was excited to get his calls.
00:14:02
Speaker 6: All right, can you hear me?
00:14:04
Speaker 5: Like, wow, all right, this is going to be interesting.
00:14:07
Speaker 6: What's the name of that author again? Just just spell it out again?
00:14:11
Speaker 2: All right?
00:14:13
Speaker 1: Well, he talked a lot about how in solitary reading is the only thing I can do. If I don't have any books, all I can do is sit.
00:14:20
Speaker 5: Here and think.
00:14:22
Speaker 1: And I know those were really dark moments for him.
00:14:25
Speaker 2: So he would tell me what he likes to read, all right, Mark, his last name is g R.
00:14:32
Speaker 10: E A E Y.
00:14:35
Speaker 1: So I started sending him paperbacks.
00:14:37
Speaker 6: Okay, great, okay, good, And he.
00:14:40
Speaker 1: Likes James Patterson and Stephen King. He likes some Western writers. I send him Game of Thrones.
00:14:48
Speaker 9: It don't make no sense how they kill all them kids of like that I know.
00:14:52
Speaker 7: And now the only one that left is is.
00:14:55
Speaker 9: The two girls and yeah, one little boy. Yeah, and they cripple in the cripple Key, which he's gonna become some mills.
00:15:03
Speaker 6: Yeah, he becomes a really big part of it.
00:15:05
Speaker 1: Later, I was mostly sending things that my kids had read, because Jeremy had only gone through the fourth grade in school. I didn't want to just keep sending him the same authors, so I sent him The Hunger Games to mix things up for him.
00:15:18
Speaker 9: Remember that serious you sent me? Yeah, that was pretty That was a pretty good series too, told me they got it on a TV too.
00:15:27
Speaker 6: Oh really, I didn't even know that. I'll check it out.
00:15:30
Speaker 1: Books have a way of building empathy. They let you step into someone else's life for a little while, and I wanted Jeremy to experience that too, to escape the reality of being locked in a prison cell, even for a moment. I could see how reading relaxed him, how it opened him up. Our conversations became more honest, and as I got to know this side of Jeremy. I started to see him differently. The more we talked, the more I understood he didn't want to be the violent person he'd been in the past. He wanted to be better. Maybe just by talking with him, I could help him do that.
00:16:10
Speaker 9: Books pretty good. I still want to read the rest of them, Will the Will the Time series, But man's a lot. That's a lot of books there. They got eighteen books in that series.
00:16:23
Speaker 10: Really, I think I only read five of them so far. I think, yeah, but.
00:16:28
Speaker 2: One, two, three, four, and five.
00:16:32
Speaker 6: Okay, so you're going in order then, okay.
00:16:35
Speaker 7: Yeah.
00:16:41
Speaker 9: Ever since I came back over here, like everything's been going wrong for me.
00:16:46
Speaker 2: I can't gas for no reason. They spraying that pepper spray.
00:16:51
Speaker 10: They ain't doing nothing.
00:16:53
Speaker 1: Sometimes Jeremy was in a really, really dark place, and when I pick up the phone, I recognize that today would.
00:17:00
Speaker 5: Just be a listening day.
00:17:02
Speaker 2: Now my ship has stolen and and and it gotta be something. That's something going on, some kind of something's going on here. I don't want to stand this year.
00:17:14
Speaker 8: I gotta go to medical.
00:17:15
Speaker 9: I gotta get I gotta get a chest run on me because I got.
00:17:18
Speaker 2: I got a not in my stomach.
00:17:21
Speaker 1: He was having some real health problems, losing a lot of weight.
00:17:25
Speaker 9: And I asked the male nurse about it. Right, he say, he's said it could be it could be a hernia, right, or it could be a tumor.
00:17:38
Speaker 6: Is rais on your stomach because it's really low or higher.
00:17:44
Speaker 9: It's it's like that, not it's like it's right. It's like maybe two inches above my navel.
00:17:52
Speaker 2: Okay, it's right there, right in the middle of my cut, okay.
00:17:56
Speaker 6: And it hurts when I touch it, oh ship, all right?
00:18:00
Speaker 2: And when when I lay down.
00:18:01
Speaker 9: I can see I can see my ribs cages.
00:18:04
Speaker 12: Oh man, Jeremy, are they like you see a doctor? Are they gonna get you to see a doctor?
00:18:11
Speaker 9: They're gonna I don't like to do it now because you know they they they they charge you five dollars every time you go up there to see a doctor. And you know they're gonna charge a five dollars. His nurse and she's gonna write it on this. She put a report into the doctor. Then you gotta wait a couple of weeks, maybe a month, you know, see your name pops up, you know, hey.
00:18:34
Speaker 6: They can have nobody, you know, yeah, yeah, oh man, all right, that's horrible.
00:18:53
Speaker 1: At the time I was getting all these phone calls from Jeremy, I found out that for the first time he'd found someone on the inside that he could trust.
00:19:02
Speaker 6: Hey, sorry, okay, cool, I'm so glad you called me, Zach. How you doing that?
00:19:06
Speaker 5: I'm yeah, Actually, this is Oscar Smith.
00:19:10
Speaker 1: Turns out Oscar went to theological school with Leo while they were both at Hardy CI.
00:19:15
Speaker 11: On the front Road. He actually sat next to me right in front of the class the first It's.
00:19:20
Speaker 1: A class that you can get a degree from within the prison. From what I understand, Oscar and Leo graduated at the top of their class.
00:19:28
Speaker 11: Eventually, of course, became almost inseparable wherever you see.
00:19:32
Speaker 1: After Leo got released, some of the graduates were spread throughout the prison system to serve as pastors for other inmates. Oscar was transferred up to Florida State Prison where Jeremy was.
00:19:44
Speaker 11: Somebody asked who we were, so I was explaining to them who we were, as film ministers, and.
00:19:50
Speaker 1: He mentions that he came from Hardy CI.
00:19:54
Speaker 11: And then I heard a voice and he said, you guys are from Hardy and I kind of looked over then I said yeah, and he asked me, he said, do you know Leo Schofield And I said, yes, me and they were pretty close, and he goes, I'm Jeremy Scott Oscar.
00:20:11
Speaker 1: Knows exactly who this is. He's very familiar with Leo's case.
00:20:16
Speaker 11: And I'm like, I'm looking at him in the wing that he's in. It's all open sale. It's just like open bars, so I actually can see him.
00:20:26
Speaker 10: Face to face.
00:20:27
Speaker 11: The really the only thing that stands between me and him is just some steel bars. At the time, I was like, CROs my heart, just thank I paused for a minute and I said, actually, I know quite a bit about you, sir, and I said I've talked to Leo.
00:20:42
Speaker 10: I said, I know who you are.
00:20:45
Speaker 11: He was like okay. And the next thing he told me, he said, listen, Leo's innocent. He goes, I killed his wife and now nobody wants to listen.
00:20:57
Speaker 9: He said you Jeremy's cut said, asked me right, and shug Miami. He was one of the ones that worked with Leo over there.
00:21:07
Speaker 1: Jeremy was impressed that somebody close to Leo was still willing to talk to him and be kind to him.
00:21:13
Speaker 6: Yeah, there was a lot of guys praying for you, including you know, Leo obviously.
00:21:18
Speaker 1: Yeah, I remember thinking like this is a relief in a way that now there's someone on the inside who can keep an eye on Jeremy.
00:21:26
Speaker 6: How did he look to you when you first saw him.
00:21:28
Speaker 11: He's he's thinned, you know. I mean anytime Uran confinement or something like that, there's a tendency of losing weight just because the trays that come back there aren't always the best trays. You know, the breads, you know, laying in beans and so it's all mushy and stoppy, and so you know, it's just yeah, so you have a tendency to eat less. So I mean he was thin, looked frail. You know, he seemed to be in decent spirits. You know, it wasn't like he was really distraught or anything else like that.
00:22:03
Speaker 1: But I mean Oscar told me that once a week he goes up on that wing and talks to Jeremy.
00:22:08
Speaker 11: I walked up there two weeks ago and he had a gash on his head. He was literally bleeding from his head and I'm looking at Jeremy and he was frazzed. Well, it kind of had tears in his eyes. He had a split basically on his forehead, but a little bit more towards the top of his head. And so I knew there was something going on. You know, they can't reach one another or they can't do whatever. So I don't know if it was self inflicted, because he was angry at something, and I have no idea.
00:22:40
Speaker 1: Oscar was worried about Jeremy's mental health.
00:22:43
Speaker 6: Oscar told me, you busted your head open. What happened?
00:22:46
Speaker 12: Oh?
00:22:47
Speaker 2: They lost my property. They threw all my stuff away.
00:22:52
Speaker 11: They did.
00:22:53
Speaker 9: Yeah, they threw all my stuff away.
00:22:55
Speaker 6: I got nothing.
00:22:56
Speaker 11: The books you should me?
00:22:58
Speaker 9: Yeah, before both.
00:22:59
Speaker 2: I ain't got to redo they are they were in my property name, I ain't got nothing. I'm talking about everything I owned with my lagger's gone.
00:23:11
Speaker 11: God?
00:23:12
Speaker 2: Hey can you.
00:23:15
Speaker 6: Yeah? You want more? Poor boot of the gray man?
00:23:17
Speaker 9: Hey, I ain't never.
00:23:18
Speaker 2: I ain't never got to redo other ones.
00:23:21
Speaker 6: I'll just send you to do. I'll just send you the same ones. If you didn't get him, I'll just send the same ones to you.
00:23:26
Speaker 2: All right.
00:23:28
Speaker 6: Did you ever see a doctor about your stomach?
00:23:31
Speaker 4: No?
00:23:32
Speaker 2: I still ain't seen him.
00:23:35
Speaker 1: I was still pressing Jeremy for answers, but I could feel myself getting pulled into his life in ways I never expected, helping him navigate his health issues, trying to reconnect him with family he hasn't heard from in years.
00:23:49
Speaker 6: I'll tell you this. I I talked to Joshua. Do you remember him?
00:23:54
Speaker 11: Who?
00:23:55
Speaker 6: Joshua? He's Jason's brother, Oh, my cousin. Yeah.
00:24:00
Speaker 5: And then there were.
00:24:01
Speaker 1: Moments when I heard something else in him, a flash of who he might have been, a childhood memory that.
00:24:08
Speaker 5: Makes him laugh.
00:24:09
Speaker 9: And the only other person he might be still around is John Scott. Johnny Scott as my oldest cousin.
00:24:18
Speaker 6: Yeah. I don't know him at all. I'll look into him.
00:24:21
Speaker 9: One got me into crime?
00:24:23
Speaker 6: Oh really?
00:24:26
Speaker 2: First I ever did a crime was with him? What kind of crime we We saw a truck? Oh okay, Yeah, he's not a criminal. That was something we did when we were we were thirteen years old.
00:24:41
Speaker 11: That ain't that.
00:24:42
Speaker 2: I think I might have been nine or ten.
00:24:44
Speaker 6: Yeah, no, I think you haven't arrested ten, So you started pretty well.
00:24:50
Speaker 1: One day I got this letter from Jeremy. It says, mister King, I almost forgot to ask you. You have asked me about my family. I just I don't understand why they stopped writing me. My aunt Debbie, of all people, I tried writing her but heard nothing. Maybe you can find out. I really would like to know I missed them. Thank you, mister King. He's lost his whole family. He hasn't had contact with them for over a decade, and I said, well, listen, I'm trying to talk to them too. I'll try to find out. I had no luck with Jeremy's aunt Debbie, so I reached out to some family members who were close to her. I finally got in touch with her son, Joshua, Jeremy's cousin. I set up a time to meet with him, and at the last minute he said he had COVID. He was very apologetic, he said, I'm so sorry, it's just not a good time. So I kept texting him and he ended up telling me some bad news news I knew Jeremy was going to take hard.
00:26:00
Speaker 12: Well, yeah, I've been I've been in touch with with josh We've just had a hard time connecting.
00:26:05
Speaker 6: I think he got COVID or something like that.
00:26:07
Speaker 2: So do you know if anybody else died in my family? I don't.
00:26:11
Speaker 12: Yeah, yeah, I do, Jeremy, and I'm sorry to tell you this, but Josh said that Debbie died a couple of years.
00:26:17
Speaker 9: Ago, that mama, yeah, oh my god.
00:26:23
Speaker 4: Yeah.
00:26:23
Speaker 12: He said it was like Christmas Eve and twenty twenty one, and he said, he said, I don't even know if Jeremy knows yet.
00:26:32
Speaker 10: I didn't.
00:26:36
Speaker 2: No, you know, me and her a close.
00:26:44
Speaker 11: Yeah, I know.
00:26:46
Speaker 12: I was hoping to talk to her, and I just I'm sorry that I'm the one that have to tell you that, but I just found out, and I was trying to think about who I could maybe.
00:26:56
Speaker 6: Have you talk to about that, But you are from her. Yeah, she died a couple of.
00:27:02
Speaker 2: Years turned her back on me there because it was for a Grandma came to seeing me. Yeah, you know, he always killed me out.
00:27:13
Speaker 6: Yeah, you know she, I know she was important and she I know she raised you.
00:27:31
Speaker 1: Before I met Jeremy's son, Justin, I didn't think anyone else from Jeremy's family was ever going to write him, much less call or visit. I had tried to be a bridge between Jeremy and his family, but I'd failed.
00:27:54
Speaker 11: Talking about his aunt Debbie and speaking to him about that. He was worried about his own death. He doesn't want to be buried in a prison cemetery.
00:28:08
Speaker 1: The Florida State Prison Cemetery at Rayford doesn't get many visitors. The gravestones are simple gray concrete slabs in the ground, each anchored by silver metal plates produced by inmates in the prison's license tag plant. They're embossed with the inmates name, prison number, and date of death. That's it. You don't see any flowers laid on top. It's the final resting place for inmates who died in custody and are unclaimed by family members. Some of the men buried here were strapped to old Sparky Florida's electric chair or a gurney where they were executed by lethal injection. Jeremy knows he's never getting out of prison, but the idea of being buried on prison grounds seems to bother him more than anything He's aid.
00:28:59
Speaker 11: But Oscar, I don't want to be buried here, he goes not' I don't know how you know to go about that. And I asked him, I says, well, if you have any family, I said, the best bet would be for you to try to contact them somehow, some way, because if nobody is willing to take responsibility for the body, then they have no other recourse but to, you know, bury you in a prison cemetery because you're a ward of state.
00:29:27
Speaker 1: There would have to be someone out there who cares enough to claim Jeremy's body. When Jeremy's son, Justin asked me to help him talk to his dad, I was wary, but also intrigued. I knew if I told Jeremy there was a family member who wanted to talk to him, he would be uplifted, and the idea that it was his son, I could only imagine the excitement he'd feel. So I told Jeremy that his son wanted to write to him. Jeremy told me he would write to Justin, and while I waited for them to find their first words for each other, I headed back to Florida. I wanted to make one final attempt to put my hands on evidence that could prove without a doubt that Jeremy Scott was telling the truth about what he'd done.
00:30:20
Speaker 2: And we had two dogs from the time he did lead him to the abandoned house, but they lost him there.
00:30:29
Speaker 1: Okay, so the dog thought that whoever did this went to the abandoned house.
00:30:35
Speaker 5: Yes sure, okay, Yes sure, that's next time.
00:30:45
Speaker 1: Bone Valley is a production of LoVa for Good Podcasts in association with Signal Company Number One. Our executive producers are Jason Flom, Jeff Kepler, and Kevin Wordis. Karen Krnhaber is our senior producer. Jackie Pauley and Hannah Biel are our producers. Britz Spangler is our sound designer.
00:31:06
Speaker 5: Marianne McCune is our editor.
00:31:08
Speaker 1: Fact checking by Dania Suleman. 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
