BONE VALLEY

A crime and justice writer tackles the story of an innocent Florida man serving time for his wife’s murder.

King’s lead comes from a Florida circuit judge: Leo Schofield has been in prison for more than 30 years despite being innocent. Judge Scott Cupp’s tip-off went against a duty to defend Florida’s justice system—proof of the lengths the state had gone and the distortions it would cling to in order to uphold Leo’s conviction. Though the case is unlike the historical, racially fueled abuses that King has built a career studying, the author is drawn quickly into the intricate web between Leo, a string of Florida state attorneys, and Jeremy Scott, who has confessed to the murder of Michelle Schofield, Leo’s 18-year-old wife. In a story crafted over six years—which also was the topic of his successful podcast with Kelsey Decker—King illuminates stark failures of justice that were “baked into the process from the start,” in particular under the targeted direction of Assistant State Attorney John Aguero. Wearing a tie clip in the shape of the electric chair, Aguero makes an easy villain, with aggressive and performative prosecutorial tactics that underscore, in the author’s telling, the gross mismanagement of the Florida detectives, law enforcement, and judiciary. But King finds his anchor much deeper inside the case, in the crescendos and decimations of Leo’s hope and resignation, as well as in the complicated past of Jeremy, with his own trauma, desperation, and agitation. With depth, humility, and an open, timid understanding of its inadequacy within the legal system, this orientation of King’s reporting grants human gravitas to the mind-blowing frustrations of procedural technicalities.

Both infuriating and hopeful, a story about the ultimate integrity of truth.