Sept. 3, 2025
Kevin is Next - Part I
Leo Schofield walked out of prison wearing a shirt that read “Kevin is next.” For Leo, that wasn’t a slogan—it was a promise to the man who had shared his cell for decades, a friend he believed to be innocent. This episode traces Leo’s bond with Kevin Herrick and the years they spent fighting side by side, even as the courts shut them out. Now, with Leo free, Kevin’s case draws new attention from Georgetown’s Making an Exoneree program, where law student Nick White and Dr. Amanda Lewis begin peeling back the layers of a case that has never added up.
Bone Valley is a production of Lava for Good™ Podcasts in association with Signal Co. No1.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
00:00:02
Speaker 1: So check this out. Uh, that is the house, right, so they run out here?
00:00:08
Speaker 2: Tell me who was in there?
00:00:09
Speaker 3: Which one?
00:00:10
Speaker 1: So, David Nick.
00:00:12
Speaker 3: White and Amanda Lewis don't look like academics. If you saw them on the street with their tattoos and their restless energy, we probably guess indie music bandmates before anything to do with the law. In fact, they're a young married couple working with Georgetown University's Prison and Justice Initiative, Amanda as doctor Amanda Lewis, a lecturer and research associate, Nick in his third year of law school.
00:00:40
Speaker 4: And then.
00:00:42
Speaker 1: Look at this little dog not bothering us.
00:00:44
Speaker 3: And they both have a weakness for dogs.
00:00:49
Speaker 5: Hello little dog?
00:00:51
Speaker 2: Hello? Hello? Who is this? Oh? Hello? Okay, yeah, I'm not going to this one him.
00:01:02
Speaker 3: This afternoon, I'm here with them in Largo, Florida, as they're doing some boots on the ground investigating on a case from nineteen eighty nine. We're walking around the neighborhood where this crime took place thirty six years ago on Florida's Gulf Coast. It's hot as hell out here, and we run into a man walking two little lap dogs. He lives down the block and he's curious about the microphone I'm holding.
00:01:27
Speaker 2: Are you investigating case from nineteen eighty nine?
00:01:31
Speaker 6: You?
00:01:32
Speaker 7: Yeah, did you?
00:01:33
Speaker 2: Or I'm assuming you would have been way younger.
00:01:37
Speaker 3: Nick and Amanda waste no time talking to the neighbor, trying to find out more information.
00:01:43
Speaker 1: What house was it?
00:01:45
Speaker 2: It's an Airbnb.
00:01:46
Speaker 3: Now turns out the case that they're investigating isn't just any case, or even just any wrongful conviction. What somebody passed away there or something murdered.
00:01:59
Speaker 2: No, it was a it was a sexual assault case and then it was interrupted. Someone was kind of slash staff. Everybody was, you know, okay, But they convicted the neighbor, who we believed had absolutely nothing to do with it, and he's been in prison for thirty six years.
00:02:17
Speaker 8: Yeah.
00:02:19
Speaker 3: The man in prison is Kevin Herrick. You might remember that name, and if you do, you might know why I'm here. Kevin is Leo Schofield's best friend. They were cellmates for more than two decades at Hardy Correctional Institutions.
00:02:37
Speaker 1: Hopefully, so that's what we're doing now.
00:02:39
Speaker 3: We're that's why we're here.
00:02:40
Speaker 4: We can't find.
00:02:57
Speaker 3: The first time I'd heard about Kevin's case, Leo was still in prison. He mentioned it to Kelsey while she was interviewing him.
00:03:06
Speaker 5: Kevin Herrick, who is my best friend? Who you know of? Kevin is another one doesn't belong in prison? Yes, yes, yes, exactly what's working on.
00:03:19
Speaker 3: At the time, we just knew he was the other guitarist who made music with Leo.
00:03:23
Speaker 5: He's an incredible guy and we've been best friends for almost the whole time we've been in prison. You know, I don't think Kevin's innocent. I know he's innocent, like I know I'm innocent.
00:03:39
Speaker 3: Leo and Kevin met when they were both in their twenties, soon after they were both convicted of serious crimes in the late nineteen eighties. In prison, they both came to believe in the other's innocence as fiercely as his own, and their bond was forged in the long years of unjust incarceration. But they also discovered they shared a love of rock and roll and a drive to better themselves through education. Not long after they met, back in the early nineteen nineties, they put in a request to share a cell together, and they studied each other's cases too, talking evidence and strategy late into the night.
00:04:19
Speaker 5: Yeah, listen, you'll drive yourself crazy. His is more insane than mine. I'm not kidding. His case is insane.
00:04:29
Speaker 3: They drafted pro sae motions for themselves at a time when neither had a lawyer, but the courts gave them nothing, and the decades passed spent shoulder to shoulder in the darkest places, fighting battles on paper that never seemed to reach the light of day. As they fought side by side to prove their innocence, they developed a pact.
00:04:52
Speaker 5: We always knew one of us has to get out so the other can get out. So, you know, because if I make it out, I'm not going to stay out knocking on doors until Sonny pays attention to Kevin.
00:05:03
Speaker 2: You know.
00:05:03
Speaker 5: That's just the way that it's got to be. And I know he would do the same for me, because it's right.
00:05:10
Speaker 3: Four years after Leo told Kelsey about his pact with Kevin, he learned that freedom might finally be within reach. But as his release drew closer, a haunting question followed him. What if he walked out first, leaving Kevin behind. When Leo was released on parole in April twenty twenty four, he made his promise to Kevin unmistakable. He walked out wearing a shirt that read Kevin is Next. I was there, and in his first hours of freedom, he didn't dwell on his own story. Instead, he turned to the fight still ahead for Kevin.
00:05:50
Speaker 5: And you know that's the reason why I have the Kevin is Next. You know, I'm no different than he is. I'm no better than he is, you know, because his story is the and he counts, he counts.
00:06:05
Speaker 3: About six months after Leo's release, I met him once again in Florida, this time in a hotel room overlooking the water. We talked about everything he'd been doing since getting out. He told me about preaching in local churches and public speaking, but he always brought it back to Kevin and the fight to prove his best friend's innocence.
00:06:27
Speaker 5: I will never ever be happy with him in there. I can't be happy out here. I am very happy for my family myself. I'm not saying I want to go back and live in prison. I couldn't do it now. I couldn't go back. And once you got me here and I started, you know, assimilating back into free society, there's no way I can go back to that lifestyle. But it was very difficult to leave it, and sometimes I regret leaving him there. You know, I didn't just leave him in Vietnam. I left him in the heated battlefield, you know. And it's not just he's at bay somewhere. You know, he's in the field, and it's a never ending war. At the forefront of my mind, not the back of my mind, the forefront of my mind. Mostly every waking moment, I'm trying to figure out, how are we going to get him proven innocent. The deal is one of us has to get out to get the other out. In ninety two when we met, I was playing in the rock band back then that's inside the prison, and he had an interest in playing guitar, so he spent a lot of time watching us in the band. And I remember him, you know, picking up the guitar one day and just holding it, and I said, you want to learn how to play that thing? And he kind of acted like, you know, because I know it's going to take some time. But I told him, I said, it's not as hard as your think to put something in it. And so I remember putting his fingers on the fretboard of the guitar to form a decord and when the first clause you should learn. And then he'd have his finger on the wrong place, not here, fool, and I'd move it and put it there until he could get it right.
00:08:21
Speaker 3: They started playing together in a prison band called the Watchers. Lee and Kevin began writing songs side by side, songs you might even recognize, like this one, can.
00:08:46
Speaker 7: Well you here my madness.
00:08:52
Speaker 3: Laughs, sorrows damn So.
00:09:03
Speaker 6: This vally.
00:09:28
Speaker 3: Bone Valley Kevin is next Part one. I'll be honest. When Leo first told me years ago that his best friend in prison was innocent, I was doubtful. Two men in the same cell, both serving life for crimes they swore they didn't commit. It sounded like the old jailhouse cliche. I carried that skepticism until le said something that made me stop and reconsider. In all his decades inside, he could count on one hand the number of men who ever claimed they were truly innocent. If there's one thing I learned about Leo is that when he told me something was true, it was worth looking into. So I emailed Kevin my number and asked him to call me and Enry at a Florida department of correction constitutions.
00:10:27
Speaker 4: To accept this call, press zero to refuse this call. This call is from a.
00:10:33
Speaker 9: Correction facility and is subject to monitoring and recording.
00:10:37
Speaker 4: Thank you for.
00:10:38
Speaker 9: Using Global Telling.
00:10:40
Speaker 3: Hell, hey, Kevin, good good. I'm sorry I missed you. I was setting up and you called and I was like, oh boy, hope he called back. As I talked to Kevin on the phone, he talks to me about Leo and their friendship.
00:10:54
Speaker 4: You know, Gilbert, I've known Leo for thirty five years or thirty since ninety two, wherever that is, thirty three years. When somebody tells you that they're innocent and you're innocent, and it is with Leo, it just automatically connected. And you meet a guy who is actually innocent, like Leo, and then you do anything to try to help him, because you know. The thing that binds Leo and I together as the most I think, is that we know exactly what it feels like to be each other. I don't know what it's like to lose my wife, but I know what it's like to sit there, hopeless in a self with life sentence for something he didn't do.
00:11:40
Speaker 3: But eventually I ask him about the details of his case, and he gets right into it. He takes me back to the late nineteen eighties, when he was twenty two. Kevin was living with a girlfriend in Chicago, but the relationship was falling apart, so Kevin returned to Florida, where he grew up and checked into a hotel.
00:12:02
Speaker 4: You know, money really tight. Figured I needed to find some friends and you know, get back on my seat, he had established. So I was slipping through a phone book.
00:12:12
Speaker 3: It's nineteen eighty nine. No Facebook, no Google, no cell phone. Kevin can't afford to keep staying in a hotel, so he looks for someone familiar to reach out to. Slipping through the phone book, he spots a name he recognizes, Pory, the mother of a childhood friend. Pat. Kevin had grown up just down the street from the Pory family. As a kid, Kevin used to have sleepovers with Pat and his brothers.
00:12:40
Speaker 4: You know, all the kids would come over to Pat's house and play one way we're younger.
00:12:46
Speaker 3: So he calls the house and Pat.
00:12:48
Speaker 4: Answers he happened to be there, picked up the phone. He said, Hey, now how's it gone? I said, know, he just came back from Chicago, staying up here.
00:12:55
Speaker 3: Kevin tells him he's back in town, and Pat says, I'll be there in ten minutes to pick you up. Kevin had grown up with Pat, but hadn't seen him in years, and the man who pulled up wasn't the one he remembered from child at.
00:13:08
Speaker 4: The best description I can give you of Pat is he was a male stripper, great shape, very ripped up, six pack, dark black hair, chiseled jaw. You'd throw on a bandana around his head or something or a headband, and he was the spinning image of Rambow, except extremely shorter and small. When I first seen him, I was like, holy cow man, look at you. Deeper voice than I remember, but the same Pat. You know, Saint Pat I met as a kid.
00:13:41
Speaker 3: The two friends grab lunch and catch up on lost time.
00:13:45
Speaker 4: And he says, why are you staying in a hotel? He says, why don't you come see mom? And I got a room you can stay there.
00:13:52
Speaker 3: Pat brings Kevin back to the same triplex where he had sleepovers as a kid, a one floor you shaped building with three connected apartments. Hat and his mom, Missus Pory, still lived in the biggest of the three, apartments at the bottom of the U. Two young couples lived in the other units. Missus Pory was the landlord. She owned the whole building.
00:14:15
Speaker 4: Yeah, Risa at that time, little older probably I would guess in her sixties. She was very short, maybe five ones. She was typical Italian mother who you know. She used to beat me and my brother with spatula when we'd be over there playing hyper woman, you know, I mean she when she'd scream at you, you knew she was I'll get you, you know. But a beautiful heart, just a great mom, a neighborhood mom.
00:14:43
Speaker 3: But she'd aged quite a bit since Kevin had last seen her.
00:14:46
Speaker 4: At that when we came there, she was on oxygen. She had a severe emphasema. She had like two hundred feet of hose and surprisingly she could get everywhere. He would go everywhere and do everything, you know, And you know how Italians are you walking the door and the first thing, have you eaten and sit out? You're gonna get something to eat. So that's kind of how she was, especially with me. So she was very open and very welcoming for me to come stay there and get on here.
00:15:19
Speaker 3: And Pat and missus Pory invite Kevin to stay in their extra bedroom.
00:15:25
Speaker 4: I was in the back bedroom. Pat said, Harry, stay here.
00:15:33
Speaker 3: It's July nineteen eighty nine. Kevin had been at the Pories for a few weeks, and he'd wanted to show his gratitude to missus Pory for allowing him to live with them.
00:15:44
Speaker 4: I didn't want to just freeload off from Teresa, so I'd go day labor, get a little bit of money, buy some cigarettes and food and whatnot, and give her twenty bucks. So it want an a moach. Didn't want to be a moch or anything.
00:15:58
Speaker 3: He'd also do chores on the house for missus Pory, like mowing the lawn.
00:16:04
Speaker 4: Through cutting the grass. I came across on the other side and I meet Scott Barfield.
00:16:09
Speaker 3: Scott Barfield is running one of the other units of the triplex. He's around the same age as Kevin.
00:16:16
Speaker 5: Pat and I.
00:16:17
Speaker 4: We would be more cut off sleeve T shirt guys. Scott's more of a dress shirt guy. We probably looked a little more rugged than he would.
00:16:27
Speaker 3: As Kevin mows the lawn, he sees Scott working in his yard.
00:16:32
Speaker 4: He's out there working on a little pond that he has out behind his sliding glass doors a little ditch, not ditch, but a holy doug and he's got a turtle pond. You go figure. But so we started talking and you know, one thing leads to another. He says, you smoke pot.
00:16:51
Speaker 3: Yeah, sure, the hangout smoke some pot. Scott tells Kevin that he lives with his girlfriend and their two and a half month old son. And not long after, Kevin's standing in the courtyard with Teresa Pori when he meets Scott's girlfriend, Cheryl.
00:17:09
Speaker 4: Teresa and I are standing there for whatever reason. I'm sure I'm smoking it because that's what I've go outside for. And how comes Cheryl Blondell comes out of the apartment where Scott lives. So I realized, this is, you know, his girlfriend or wife or whatever. She's got her little little baby in her arms, you know, and which is automatic magnet for for Teresa. She sees a baby, oh you know, runs over and so I meet her. She was going to check her mail, and I was like, you know, she's got the little little baby bundled up, got the little hat on him or whatever. And I said, no, I'll go out there and get check your mail for you know problem, so that's what I did. We talked a few minutes, and then we went about our business.
00:17:57
Speaker 3: While Kevin is living with the Pories, often goes out partying at the strip club where Pat's girlfriend works. Other nights were quieter and they cross paths with the neighbors. It's the late nineteen eighties, watching a movie Mint, driving to the video store, renting a cassette, and hoping your VCR didn't eat the tape. One night, Pat and Kevin brought a video rental home but couldn't get it to play. Kevin knocked on Scott and Cheryl's door to ask for a VCR cleaner. Instead, Cheryl invited them in to watch the movie at her place.
00:18:35
Speaker 4: She tells us that Scott's at a bachelor party, is going to be gone all night long, and she's home by herself.
00:18:43
Speaker 3: Glad to have company, Cheryl puts the baby to bed, makes popcorn. They smoke a little weed and watch Cocoon, a movie about elderly people who discover the Fountain of youth. It's set in the same Gulf Coast area of Florida where Kevin is living with the Poories. After the movie, Pat and Kevin head back to their apartment and go to sleep. The next night, Patt invites Kevin to go out to the strip club for once. Kevin says, no.
00:19:13
Speaker 4: It's kind of ironic that the one night in my life that I didn't want to go party, if I would have went out and partied, I don't see this ever happening to.
00:19:45
Speaker 9: Hey, y'all, it's Maggie. I'm here to tell you about a new show I've been working on for the past two years. It's called Graves County and it's an investigative series about the murder of a young mom in Kentucky and just how far are legal system will go in order to find someone to blame. Here is the trailer for Graves County.
00:20:09
Speaker 4: All I know is what I've been told, and that's a half truth, is a whole lie.
00:20:15
Speaker 9: For almost a decade, the murder of an eighteen year old girl from a small town in Graves County, Kentucky, went unsolved until a local homemaker, a journalist, and a handful of girls came forward with a story.
00:20:30
Speaker 2: I'm telling you, we know, we know.
00:20:34
Speaker 9: A story that law enforcement used to convict six people, and that got the citizen investigator on national TV.
00:20:42
Speaker 1: Through sheer, persistence and nerve, this Kentucky housewife helped give justice to Jessica Current.
00:20:49
Speaker 9: My name is Maggie Freeling. I'm a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist producer, and I wouldn't be here if the truth were that easy to find.
00:21:00
Speaker 7: And I did not kill her or raid or burn or any of that other stuff that y'all said it.
00:21:04
Speaker 9: They literally made me say that I took a match and struck and threw it on her.
00:21:08
Speaker 8: They made me say that I'm pore guests on.
00:21:10
Speaker 9: Her From LoVa for Good. This is Graves County, a show about just how far our legal system will go in order to find someone to blame MARKA.
00:21:23
Speaker 3: Y'all betta work the hell up.
00:21:25
Speaker 5: Bad things happens to good people in small towns.
00:21:32
Speaker 9: Listen to Graves County in the Bone Valley Feed starting September seventeenth on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts, and to binge the entire season ad free. Subscribe to LoVa for Good plus on Apple Podcasts.
00:22:04
Speaker 3: On the evening of July fourteenth, Kevin decides not to go out partying with Pat. He talked to his girlfriend earlier that day and promised her things would be different. He was going to sober up and get his act together. So, while Pat, dressed up looking like Rambo as usual, heads to the strip club, Kevin drops by.
00:22:24
Speaker 4: His neighbor's place, so knock down the door. Cheryl answers, you know, how's it going Scott home? She says, no, Scott's not here? Is okay? Well, she said, come on to be home anytime, you know, come on in. She invited an inn and we sit down and let's see. They have a chess board set up. We ended up playing a couple of games of chess.
00:22:44
Speaker 3: When Scott gets home, he's got a couple of friends.
00:22:47
Speaker 4: With him, so Scott says, you know, hey, let's let's smoke, pulls out a bag of pot, rolls up a couple of joints. We all smoke it.
00:22:55
Speaker 3: After a while, Sheryl and Scott say they're heading out to a drive in movie with their baby. Everyone leaves and Kevin goes back to his apartment. Pat's still out of the strip club, but Teresa Pori is there hooked up to her oxygen tank. Kevin makes some hamburger helper and offers missus Pori, a great Italian cook, a plate hamburger helper.
00:23:18
Speaker 4: And what she's like this is not goved.
00:23:22
Speaker 3: Kevin watches some television, but he's gonna call it a night. It's about eleven PM.
00:23:28
Speaker 4: Teresa was sitting in the kitchen. Went told her to say, I'm gonna go. I'm gonna crash. I wouldn't say burnt out from smoking with Scott and Cheryl, but you know, it's a few hours later, kind of mellowed out, relaxed. I went in, laid down, grabbed my book The Rest of Our Lives, and read for about twenty minutes, and I went to sleep.
00:23:52
Speaker 3: What happens next would change Kevin's life forever. He told this part of the story to Georgetown's Nick White, who did Kevin in prison.
00:24:02
Speaker 8: Next thing I know, Teresa wakes me up.
00:24:04
Speaker 7: She's screaming in the room, screaming, and I don't know how to describe her other than it's just this little Italian woman who is going with Zark that the girl next door is being raped.
00:24:19
Speaker 8: She's shaking me. I wake up. I look at her, I hear what she's saying. I jump up. I call on my shorts and I run to the front of the door.
00:24:28
Speaker 7: When I come out Teresa's door, Cheryl's standing to my right holding her baby, and she's screaming over and over. And when I say screaming, she is screaming. She's not just saying don't leave me, don't leave me, but she is screaming, don't leave me, don't leave me, don't leave me, don't leave me.
00:24:47
Speaker 3: Kevin says that at this point it's just him, missus Pori, and Cheryl with the baby standing outside in the middle of the night.
00:24:55
Speaker 7: It's got to be within a minute. It can't be more than a minute, two minutes if that, Scott's coming down the walkway towards me.
00:25:03
Speaker 3: Scott, his neighbor, who usually looks put together, is running up the sidewalk towards the triplex. He's frantic yelling a series of numbers and letters a license plate he's just seen.
00:25:17
Speaker 7: He's scraming it over and over and over, and he's adding right down, he might.
00:25:22
Speaker 3: Kevin says, that's when the neighbor in the third unit, David, comes outside.
00:25:27
Speaker 8: Tell David get a piece of paper.
00:25:30
Speaker 7: He runs back in his door, grabs scraps piece of paper, comes out, writes down license plate number.
00:25:36
Speaker 3: David says he'll call the police. Kevin turns to Scott. He's out of breath, his shirt unbuttoned.
00:25:44
Speaker 7: I'm looking at him. I can see his chest. He's got two puncture marks and he's bleeding. He's breathing hards. Chest is in and out.
00:25:53
Speaker 3: Scott tells Kevin what happened. That he'd walked into his apartment and interrupted a man's sexually assaulting sh Arrol in their bedroom. The man slashed Scott twice with a knife for a scalpel, ran out the door, and Scott chased him down the street, but the assailant escaped over a backyard fence to a parking lot. That's where Scott said he thought he saw the assailant getting into a car, so Scott memorized the plate then ran back home.
00:26:20
Speaker 7: He says, man, I chased the guy to a car. The guy got away in the car. This is a license plate number, I said David Scott that he's getting it to the police.
00:26:29
Speaker 8: I said, okay, okay, and I'm looking at it. He's looking.
00:26:31
Speaker 3: Kevin says he told Scott the police were on their way and that he should probably deal with the weed in his apartment.
00:26:38
Speaker 7: You got your stuff sitting in the livery room. You need to go put away your pot. He's got a bong, he's got all kinds of crap. And I said, the cops are come. They're going to come. You don't need to get, you know, busted for possession of weed.
00:26:51
Speaker 8: So he says, yeah, yeah, yeah. He goes in there. She stays out there.
00:26:55
Speaker 7: She didn't necessarily go, and she probably went in and out a couple times before, but she stayed there with me and Teresa David standing there.
00:27:04
Speaker 3: The neighbors stand out front, shaken, unsettled, trying to make sense of what just happened. Then police cars and an ambulance pull up. Kevin says he waved them in, directed them where to go, and then stayed outside with the other neighbors. As officers began their investigation.
00:27:24
Speaker 7: Officer Crosby comes over, ask me who I am, what's my birthday, social Security number? And what do I know about what happened? Those are the four things this man asked me. He didn't ask me.
00:27:36
Speaker 3: He tells police he doesn't know what happened. That missus Pory woke him up and he ran outside to find ryl screaming and Scott rushing up the sidewalk with blood on his chest. Scott is taken to the hospital by ambulance. Kevin goes back inside to sit with missus Pory, who is upset by everything that's happened that night. A few hours later, there's a knock on the door.
00:28:07
Speaker 7: I don't take nothing up and I opened the door. There's the cops. I actually say, Kevin, can we talk to you. Let's say absolutely a step, go to step out there, grab me, throw me on the ground, handcuff may picked me up, and a cop says, we found your fingerprints on that door, pointing to Scott and Cheryl's door.
00:28:23
Speaker 8: You're the one who did this.
00:28:38
Speaker 9: Least because the.
00:28:44
Speaker 3: Sun is beginning to set over the Gulf and we're walking on the sidewalk outside the triplex. Three decades ago, in this very apartment, Kevin was reading a book called The Rest of Our Lives, A quiet night turning ages until it ended in chaos, police bursting in handcuffs, County jail next door. Something had happened in Scott and Cheryl's apartment, something that would change Kevin's life forever. He was convicted of aggravated battery, burglary and sexual battery. Sentenced to life in prison without parole, where he remains today.
00:29:28
Speaker 2: All lif y'all want to say, Yeah, I don't know Kevin's on the phone.
00:29:33
Speaker 1: Also, you're you're now here with Gilbert and a microphone is shoved up to the speakerphone.
00:29:38
Speaker 3: Hi, Kevin, what's that be over?
00:29:40
Speaker 8: How are you?
00:29:41
Speaker 7: Man?
00:29:41
Speaker 3: I'm doing good man.
00:29:42
Speaker 4: Unfortunately, I'm thinking they just called count time they did. I can't believe I've been waiting.
00:29:47
Speaker 3: An hour and a half to get on the phone.
00:29:49
Speaker 2: Man.
00:29:51
Speaker 5: Man, it's great talking to you guys.
00:29:54
Speaker 7: Obviously a big weekend.
00:29:57
Speaker 4: I'm definitely gonna have to go with Doug if you.
00:30:00
Speaker 8: Have one remaining.
00:30:04
Speaker 1: To bite.
00:30:10
Speaker 3: In our next bonus episode of Bone Valley, we'll uncover what happened that night and why Nick and Amanda now believe they found evidence that could finally prove Kevin Herrick is an innocent man.
Speaker 1: So check this out. Uh, that is the house, right, so they run out here?
00:00:08
Speaker 2: Tell me who was in there?
00:00:09
Speaker 3: Which one?
00:00:10
Speaker 1: So, David Nick.
00:00:12
Speaker 3: White and Amanda Lewis don't look like academics. If you saw them on the street with their tattoos and their restless energy, we probably guess indie music bandmates before anything to do with the law. In fact, they're a young married couple working with Georgetown University's Prison and Justice Initiative, Amanda as doctor Amanda Lewis, a lecturer and research associate, Nick in his third year of law school.
00:00:40
Speaker 4: And then.
00:00:42
Speaker 1: Look at this little dog not bothering us.
00:00:44
Speaker 3: And they both have a weakness for dogs.
00:00:49
Speaker 5: Hello little dog?
00:00:51
Speaker 2: Hello? Hello? Who is this? Oh? Hello? Okay, yeah, I'm not going to this one him.
00:01:02
Speaker 3: This afternoon, I'm here with them in Largo, Florida, as they're doing some boots on the ground investigating on a case from nineteen eighty nine. We're walking around the neighborhood where this crime took place thirty six years ago on Florida's Gulf Coast. It's hot as hell out here, and we run into a man walking two little lap dogs. He lives down the block and he's curious about the microphone I'm holding.
00:01:27
Speaker 2: Are you investigating case from nineteen eighty nine?
00:01:31
Speaker 6: You?
00:01:32
Speaker 7: Yeah, did you?
00:01:33
Speaker 2: Or I'm assuming you would have been way younger.
00:01:37
Speaker 3: Nick and Amanda waste no time talking to the neighbor, trying to find out more information.
00:01:43
Speaker 1: What house was it?
00:01:45
Speaker 2: It's an Airbnb.
00:01:46
Speaker 3: Now turns out the case that they're investigating isn't just any case, or even just any wrongful conviction. What somebody passed away there or something murdered.
00:01:59
Speaker 2: No, it was a it was a sexual assault case and then it was interrupted. Someone was kind of slash staff. Everybody was, you know, okay, But they convicted the neighbor, who we believed had absolutely nothing to do with it, and he's been in prison for thirty six years.
00:02:17
Speaker 8: Yeah.
00:02:19
Speaker 3: The man in prison is Kevin Herrick. You might remember that name, and if you do, you might know why I'm here. Kevin is Leo Schofield's best friend. They were cellmates for more than two decades at Hardy Correctional Institutions.
00:02:37
Speaker 1: Hopefully, so that's what we're doing now.
00:02:39
Speaker 3: We're that's why we're here.
00:02:40
Speaker 4: We can't find.
00:02:57
Speaker 3: The first time I'd heard about Kevin's case, Leo was still in prison. He mentioned it to Kelsey while she was interviewing him.
00:03:06
Speaker 5: Kevin Herrick, who is my best friend? Who you know of? Kevin is another one doesn't belong in prison? Yes, yes, yes, exactly what's working on.
00:03:19
Speaker 3: At the time, we just knew he was the other guitarist who made music with Leo.
00:03:23
Speaker 5: He's an incredible guy and we've been best friends for almost the whole time we've been in prison. You know, I don't think Kevin's innocent. I know he's innocent, like I know I'm innocent.
00:03:39
Speaker 3: Leo and Kevin met when they were both in their twenties, soon after they were both convicted of serious crimes in the late nineteen eighties. In prison, they both came to believe in the other's innocence as fiercely as his own, and their bond was forged in the long years of unjust incarceration. But they also discovered they shared a love of rock and roll and a drive to better themselves through education. Not long after they met, back in the early nineteen nineties, they put in a request to share a cell together, and they studied each other's cases too, talking evidence and strategy late into the night.
00:04:19
Speaker 5: Yeah, listen, you'll drive yourself crazy. His is more insane than mine. I'm not kidding. His case is insane.
00:04:29
Speaker 3: They drafted pro sae motions for themselves at a time when neither had a lawyer, but the courts gave them nothing, and the decades passed spent shoulder to shoulder in the darkest places, fighting battles on paper that never seemed to reach the light of day. As they fought side by side to prove their innocence, they developed a pact.
00:04:52
Speaker 5: We always knew one of us has to get out so the other can get out. So, you know, because if I make it out, I'm not going to stay out knocking on doors until Sonny pays attention to Kevin.
00:05:03
Speaker 2: You know.
00:05:03
Speaker 5: That's just the way that it's got to be. And I know he would do the same for me, because it's right.
00:05:10
Speaker 3: Four years after Leo told Kelsey about his pact with Kevin, he learned that freedom might finally be within reach. But as his release drew closer, a haunting question followed him. What if he walked out first, leaving Kevin behind. When Leo was released on parole in April twenty twenty four, he made his promise to Kevin unmistakable. He walked out wearing a shirt that read Kevin is Next. I was there, and in his first hours of freedom, he didn't dwell on his own story. Instead, he turned to the fight still ahead for Kevin.
00:05:50
Speaker 5: And you know that's the reason why I have the Kevin is Next. You know, I'm no different than he is. I'm no better than he is, you know, because his story is the and he counts, he counts.
00:06:05
Speaker 3: About six months after Leo's release, I met him once again in Florida, this time in a hotel room overlooking the water. We talked about everything he'd been doing since getting out. He told me about preaching in local churches and public speaking, but he always brought it back to Kevin and the fight to prove his best friend's innocence.
00:06:27
Speaker 5: I will never ever be happy with him in there. I can't be happy out here. I am very happy for my family myself. I'm not saying I want to go back and live in prison. I couldn't do it now. I couldn't go back. And once you got me here and I started, you know, assimilating back into free society, there's no way I can go back to that lifestyle. But it was very difficult to leave it, and sometimes I regret leaving him there. You know, I didn't just leave him in Vietnam. I left him in the heated battlefield, you know. And it's not just he's at bay somewhere. You know, he's in the field, and it's a never ending war. At the forefront of my mind, not the back of my mind, the forefront of my mind. Mostly every waking moment, I'm trying to figure out, how are we going to get him proven innocent. The deal is one of us has to get out to get the other out. In ninety two when we met, I was playing in the rock band back then that's inside the prison, and he had an interest in playing guitar, so he spent a lot of time watching us in the band. And I remember him, you know, picking up the guitar one day and just holding it, and I said, you want to learn how to play that thing? And he kind of acted like, you know, because I know it's going to take some time. But I told him, I said, it's not as hard as your think to put something in it. And so I remember putting his fingers on the fretboard of the guitar to form a decord and when the first clause you should learn. And then he'd have his finger on the wrong place, not here, fool, and I'd move it and put it there until he could get it right.
00:08:21
Speaker 3: They started playing together in a prison band called the Watchers. Lee and Kevin began writing songs side by side, songs you might even recognize, like this one, can.
00:08:46
Speaker 7: Well you here my madness.
00:08:52
Speaker 3: Laughs, sorrows damn So.
00:09:03
Speaker 6: This vally.
00:09:28
Speaker 3: Bone Valley Kevin is next Part one. I'll be honest. When Leo first told me years ago that his best friend in prison was innocent, I was doubtful. Two men in the same cell, both serving life for crimes they swore they didn't commit. It sounded like the old jailhouse cliche. I carried that skepticism until le said something that made me stop and reconsider. In all his decades inside, he could count on one hand the number of men who ever claimed they were truly innocent. If there's one thing I learned about Leo is that when he told me something was true, it was worth looking into. So I emailed Kevin my number and asked him to call me and Enry at a Florida department of correction constitutions.
00:10:27
Speaker 4: To accept this call, press zero to refuse this call. This call is from a.
00:10:33
Speaker 9: Correction facility and is subject to monitoring and recording.
00:10:37
Speaker 4: Thank you for.
00:10:38
Speaker 9: Using Global Telling.
00:10:40
Speaker 3: Hell, hey, Kevin, good good. I'm sorry I missed you. I was setting up and you called and I was like, oh boy, hope he called back. As I talked to Kevin on the phone, he talks to me about Leo and their friendship.
00:10:54
Speaker 4: You know, Gilbert, I've known Leo for thirty five years or thirty since ninety two, wherever that is, thirty three years. When somebody tells you that they're innocent and you're innocent, and it is with Leo, it just automatically connected. And you meet a guy who is actually innocent, like Leo, and then you do anything to try to help him, because you know. The thing that binds Leo and I together as the most I think, is that we know exactly what it feels like to be each other. I don't know what it's like to lose my wife, but I know what it's like to sit there, hopeless in a self with life sentence for something he didn't do.
00:11:40
Speaker 3: But eventually I ask him about the details of his case, and he gets right into it. He takes me back to the late nineteen eighties, when he was twenty two. Kevin was living with a girlfriend in Chicago, but the relationship was falling apart, so Kevin returned to Florida, where he grew up and checked into a hotel.
00:12:02
Speaker 4: You know, money really tight. Figured I needed to find some friends and you know, get back on my seat, he had established. So I was slipping through a phone book.
00:12:12
Speaker 3: It's nineteen eighty nine. No Facebook, no Google, no cell phone. Kevin can't afford to keep staying in a hotel, so he looks for someone familiar to reach out to. Slipping through the phone book, he spots a name he recognizes, Pory, the mother of a childhood friend. Pat. Kevin had grown up just down the street from the Pory family. As a kid, Kevin used to have sleepovers with Pat and his brothers.
00:12:40
Speaker 4: You know, all the kids would come over to Pat's house and play one way we're younger.
00:12:46
Speaker 3: So he calls the house and Pat.
00:12:48
Speaker 4: Answers he happened to be there, picked up the phone. He said, Hey, now how's it gone? I said, know, he just came back from Chicago, staying up here.
00:12:55
Speaker 3: Kevin tells him he's back in town, and Pat says, I'll be there in ten minutes to pick you up. Kevin had grown up with Pat, but hadn't seen him in years, and the man who pulled up wasn't the one he remembered from child at.
00:13:08
Speaker 4: The best description I can give you of Pat is he was a male stripper, great shape, very ripped up, six pack, dark black hair, chiseled jaw. You'd throw on a bandana around his head or something or a headband, and he was the spinning image of Rambow, except extremely shorter and small. When I first seen him, I was like, holy cow man, look at you. Deeper voice than I remember, but the same Pat. You know, Saint Pat I met as a kid.
00:13:41
Speaker 3: The two friends grab lunch and catch up on lost time.
00:13:45
Speaker 4: And he says, why are you staying in a hotel? He says, why don't you come see mom? And I got a room you can stay there.
00:13:52
Speaker 3: Pat brings Kevin back to the same triplex where he had sleepovers as a kid, a one floor you shaped building with three connected apartments. Hat and his mom, Missus Pory, still lived in the biggest of the three, apartments at the bottom of the U. Two young couples lived in the other units. Missus Pory was the landlord. She owned the whole building.
00:14:15
Speaker 4: Yeah, Risa at that time, little older probably I would guess in her sixties. She was very short, maybe five ones. She was typical Italian mother who you know. She used to beat me and my brother with spatula when we'd be over there playing hyper woman, you know, I mean she when she'd scream at you, you knew she was I'll get you, you know. But a beautiful heart, just a great mom, a neighborhood mom.
00:14:43
Speaker 3: But she'd aged quite a bit since Kevin had last seen her.
00:14:46
Speaker 4: At that when we came there, she was on oxygen. She had a severe emphasema. She had like two hundred feet of hose and surprisingly she could get everywhere. He would go everywhere and do everything, you know, And you know how Italians are you walking the door and the first thing, have you eaten and sit out? You're gonna get something to eat. So that's kind of how she was, especially with me. So she was very open and very welcoming for me to come stay there and get on here.
00:15:19
Speaker 3: And Pat and missus Pory invite Kevin to stay in their extra bedroom.
00:15:25
Speaker 4: I was in the back bedroom. Pat said, Harry, stay here.
00:15:33
Speaker 3: It's July nineteen eighty nine. Kevin had been at the Pories for a few weeks, and he'd wanted to show his gratitude to missus Pory for allowing him to live with them.
00:15:44
Speaker 4: I didn't want to just freeload off from Teresa, so I'd go day labor, get a little bit of money, buy some cigarettes and food and whatnot, and give her twenty bucks. So it want an a moach. Didn't want to be a moch or anything.
00:15:58
Speaker 3: He'd also do chores on the house for missus Pory, like mowing the lawn.
00:16:04
Speaker 4: Through cutting the grass. I came across on the other side and I meet Scott Barfield.
00:16:09
Speaker 3: Scott Barfield is running one of the other units of the triplex. He's around the same age as Kevin.
00:16:16
Speaker 5: Pat and I.
00:16:17
Speaker 4: We would be more cut off sleeve T shirt guys. Scott's more of a dress shirt guy. We probably looked a little more rugged than he would.
00:16:27
Speaker 3: As Kevin mows the lawn, he sees Scott working in his yard.
00:16:32
Speaker 4: He's out there working on a little pond that he has out behind his sliding glass doors a little ditch, not ditch, but a holy doug and he's got a turtle pond. You go figure. But so we started talking and you know, one thing leads to another. He says, you smoke pot.
00:16:51
Speaker 3: Yeah, sure, the hangout smoke some pot. Scott tells Kevin that he lives with his girlfriend and their two and a half month old son. And not long after, Kevin's standing in the courtyard with Teresa Pori when he meets Scott's girlfriend, Cheryl.
00:17:09
Speaker 4: Teresa and I are standing there for whatever reason. I'm sure I'm smoking it because that's what I've go outside for. And how comes Cheryl Blondell comes out of the apartment where Scott lives. So I realized, this is, you know, his girlfriend or wife or whatever. She's got her little little baby in her arms, you know, and which is automatic magnet for for Teresa. She sees a baby, oh you know, runs over and so I meet her. She was going to check her mail, and I was like, you know, she's got the little little baby bundled up, got the little hat on him or whatever. And I said, no, I'll go out there and get check your mail for you know problem, so that's what I did. We talked a few minutes, and then we went about our business.
00:17:57
Speaker 3: While Kevin is living with the Pories, often goes out partying at the strip club where Pat's girlfriend works. Other nights were quieter and they cross paths with the neighbors. It's the late nineteen eighties, watching a movie Mint, driving to the video store, renting a cassette, and hoping your VCR didn't eat the tape. One night, Pat and Kevin brought a video rental home but couldn't get it to play. Kevin knocked on Scott and Cheryl's door to ask for a VCR cleaner. Instead, Cheryl invited them in to watch the movie at her place.
00:18:35
Speaker 4: She tells us that Scott's at a bachelor party, is going to be gone all night long, and she's home by herself.
00:18:43
Speaker 3: Glad to have company, Cheryl puts the baby to bed, makes popcorn. They smoke a little weed and watch Cocoon, a movie about elderly people who discover the Fountain of youth. It's set in the same Gulf Coast area of Florida where Kevin is living with the Poories. After the movie, Pat and Kevin head back to their apartment and go to sleep. The next night, Patt invites Kevin to go out to the strip club for once. Kevin says, no.
00:19:13
Speaker 4: It's kind of ironic that the one night in my life that I didn't want to go party, if I would have went out and partied, I don't see this ever happening to.
00:19:45
Speaker 9: Hey, y'all, it's Maggie. I'm here to tell you about a new show I've been working on for the past two years. It's called Graves County and it's an investigative series about the murder of a young mom in Kentucky and just how far are legal system will go in order to find someone to blame. Here is the trailer for Graves County.
00:20:09
Speaker 4: All I know is what I've been told, and that's a half truth, is a whole lie.
00:20:15
Speaker 9: For almost a decade, the murder of an eighteen year old girl from a small town in Graves County, Kentucky, went unsolved until a local homemaker, a journalist, and a handful of girls came forward with a story.
00:20:30
Speaker 2: I'm telling you, we know, we know.
00:20:34
Speaker 9: A story that law enforcement used to convict six people, and that got the citizen investigator on national TV.
00:20:42
Speaker 1: Through sheer, persistence and nerve, this Kentucky housewife helped give justice to Jessica Current.
00:20:49
Speaker 9: My name is Maggie Freeling. I'm a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist producer, and I wouldn't be here if the truth were that easy to find.
00:21:00
Speaker 7: And I did not kill her or raid or burn or any of that other stuff that y'all said it.
00:21:04
Speaker 9: They literally made me say that I took a match and struck and threw it on her.
00:21:08
Speaker 8: They made me say that I'm pore guests on.
00:21:10
Speaker 9: Her From LoVa for Good. This is Graves County, a show about just how far our legal system will go in order to find someone to blame MARKA.
00:21:23
Speaker 3: Y'all betta work the hell up.
00:21:25
Speaker 5: Bad things happens to good people in small towns.
00:21:32
Speaker 9: Listen to Graves County in the Bone Valley Feed starting September seventeenth on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts, and to binge the entire season ad free. Subscribe to LoVa for Good plus on Apple Podcasts.
00:22:04
Speaker 3: On the evening of July fourteenth, Kevin decides not to go out partying with Pat. He talked to his girlfriend earlier that day and promised her things would be different. He was going to sober up and get his act together. So, while Pat, dressed up looking like Rambo as usual, heads to the strip club, Kevin drops by.
00:22:24
Speaker 4: His neighbor's place, so knock down the door. Cheryl answers, you know, how's it going Scott home? She says, no, Scott's not here? Is okay? Well, she said, come on to be home anytime, you know, come on in. She invited an inn and we sit down and let's see. They have a chess board set up. We ended up playing a couple of games of chess.
00:22:44
Speaker 3: When Scott gets home, he's got a couple of friends.
00:22:47
Speaker 4: With him, so Scott says, you know, hey, let's let's smoke, pulls out a bag of pot, rolls up a couple of joints. We all smoke it.
00:22:55
Speaker 3: After a while, Sheryl and Scott say they're heading out to a drive in movie with their baby. Everyone leaves and Kevin goes back to his apartment. Pat's still out of the strip club, but Teresa Pori is there hooked up to her oxygen tank. Kevin makes some hamburger helper and offers missus Pori, a great Italian cook, a plate hamburger helper.
00:23:18
Speaker 4: And what she's like this is not goved.
00:23:22
Speaker 3: Kevin watches some television, but he's gonna call it a night. It's about eleven PM.
00:23:28
Speaker 4: Teresa was sitting in the kitchen. Went told her to say, I'm gonna go. I'm gonna crash. I wouldn't say burnt out from smoking with Scott and Cheryl, but you know, it's a few hours later, kind of mellowed out, relaxed. I went in, laid down, grabbed my book The Rest of Our Lives, and read for about twenty minutes, and I went to sleep.
00:23:52
Speaker 3: What happens next would change Kevin's life forever. He told this part of the story to Georgetown's Nick White, who did Kevin in prison.
00:24:02
Speaker 8: Next thing I know, Teresa wakes me up.
00:24:04
Speaker 7: She's screaming in the room, screaming, and I don't know how to describe her other than it's just this little Italian woman who is going with Zark that the girl next door is being raped.
00:24:19
Speaker 8: She's shaking me. I wake up. I look at her, I hear what she's saying. I jump up. I call on my shorts and I run to the front of the door.
00:24:28
Speaker 7: When I come out Teresa's door, Cheryl's standing to my right holding her baby, and she's screaming over and over. And when I say screaming, she is screaming. She's not just saying don't leave me, don't leave me, but she is screaming, don't leave me, don't leave me, don't leave me, don't leave me.
00:24:47
Speaker 3: Kevin says that at this point it's just him, missus Pori, and Cheryl with the baby standing outside in the middle of the night.
00:24:55
Speaker 7: It's got to be within a minute. It can't be more than a minute, two minutes if that, Scott's coming down the walkway towards me.
00:25:03
Speaker 3: Scott, his neighbor, who usually looks put together, is running up the sidewalk towards the triplex. He's frantic yelling a series of numbers and letters a license plate he's just seen.
00:25:17
Speaker 7: He's scraming it over and over and over, and he's adding right down, he might.
00:25:22
Speaker 3: Kevin says, that's when the neighbor in the third unit, David, comes outside.
00:25:27
Speaker 8: Tell David get a piece of paper.
00:25:30
Speaker 7: He runs back in his door, grabs scraps piece of paper, comes out, writes down license plate number.
00:25:36
Speaker 3: David says he'll call the police. Kevin turns to Scott. He's out of breath, his shirt unbuttoned.
00:25:44
Speaker 7: I'm looking at him. I can see his chest. He's got two puncture marks and he's bleeding. He's breathing hards. Chest is in and out.
00:25:53
Speaker 3: Scott tells Kevin what happened. That he'd walked into his apartment and interrupted a man's sexually assaulting sh Arrol in their bedroom. The man slashed Scott twice with a knife for a scalpel, ran out the door, and Scott chased him down the street, but the assailant escaped over a backyard fence to a parking lot. That's where Scott said he thought he saw the assailant getting into a car, so Scott memorized the plate then ran back home.
00:26:20
Speaker 7: He says, man, I chased the guy to a car. The guy got away in the car. This is a license plate number, I said David Scott that he's getting it to the police.
00:26:29
Speaker 8: I said, okay, okay, and I'm looking at it. He's looking.
00:26:31
Speaker 3: Kevin says he told Scott the police were on their way and that he should probably deal with the weed in his apartment.
00:26:38
Speaker 7: You got your stuff sitting in the livery room. You need to go put away your pot. He's got a bong, he's got all kinds of crap. And I said, the cops are come. They're going to come. You don't need to get, you know, busted for possession of weed.
00:26:51
Speaker 8: So he says, yeah, yeah, yeah. He goes in there. She stays out there.
00:26:55
Speaker 7: She didn't necessarily go, and she probably went in and out a couple times before, but she stayed there with me and Teresa David standing there.
00:27:04
Speaker 3: The neighbors stand out front, shaken, unsettled, trying to make sense of what just happened. Then police cars and an ambulance pull up. Kevin says he waved them in, directed them where to go, and then stayed outside with the other neighbors. As officers began their investigation.
00:27:24
Speaker 7: Officer Crosby comes over, ask me who I am, what's my birthday, social Security number? And what do I know about what happened? Those are the four things this man asked me. He didn't ask me.
00:27:36
Speaker 3: He tells police he doesn't know what happened. That missus Pory woke him up and he ran outside to find ryl screaming and Scott rushing up the sidewalk with blood on his chest. Scott is taken to the hospital by ambulance. Kevin goes back inside to sit with missus Pory, who is upset by everything that's happened that night. A few hours later, there's a knock on the door.
00:28:07
Speaker 7: I don't take nothing up and I opened the door. There's the cops. I actually say, Kevin, can we talk to you. Let's say absolutely a step, go to step out there, grab me, throw me on the ground, handcuff may picked me up, and a cop says, we found your fingerprints on that door, pointing to Scott and Cheryl's door.
00:28:23
Speaker 8: You're the one who did this.
00:28:38
Speaker 9: Least because the.
00:28:44
Speaker 3: Sun is beginning to set over the Gulf and we're walking on the sidewalk outside the triplex. Three decades ago, in this very apartment, Kevin was reading a book called The Rest of Our Lives, A quiet night turning ages until it ended in chaos, police bursting in handcuffs, County jail next door. Something had happened in Scott and Cheryl's apartment, something that would change Kevin's life forever. He was convicted of aggravated battery, burglary and sexual battery. Sentenced to life in prison without parole, where he remains today.
00:29:28
Speaker 2: All lif y'all want to say, Yeah, I don't know Kevin's on the phone.
00:29:33
Speaker 1: Also, you're you're now here with Gilbert and a microphone is shoved up to the speakerphone.
00:29:38
Speaker 3: Hi, Kevin, what's that be over?
00:29:40
Speaker 8: How are you?
00:29:41
Speaker 7: Man?
00:29:41
Speaker 3: I'm doing good man.
00:29:42
Speaker 4: Unfortunately, I'm thinking they just called count time they did. I can't believe I've been waiting.
00:29:47
Speaker 3: An hour and a half to get on the phone.
00:29:49
Speaker 2: Man.
00:29:51
Speaker 5: Man, it's great talking to you guys.
00:29:54
Speaker 7: Obviously a big weekend.
00:29:57
Speaker 4: I'm definitely gonna have to go with Doug if you.
00:30:00
Speaker 8: Have one remaining.
00:30:04
Speaker 1: To bite.
00:30:10
Speaker 3: In our next bonus episode of Bone Valley, we'll uncover what happened that night and why Nick and Amanda now believe they found evidence that could finally prove Kevin Herrick is an innocent man.
