Podcast-turned-book Bone Valley delves into the true story of a wrongful murder conviction

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Investigations of possible wrongful convictions have been podcast fodder since Serial struck gold with its first season about Adnan Syed and put podcasts on the cultural map. So when Bone Valley was first released, I didn’t immediately jump to listen. But after seeing it make several “Best Podcasts of 2022″ lists, I paid attention, then binged the first season in a day.

Part of what makes Bone Valley exceptional is the details of the story. Leo Schofield was convicted of murdering his wife Michelle in 1987, but when his current wife, Crissie, ran a mystery fingerprint, she discovered someone she believed could be the true perpetrator: a man who was already in prison for another murder, who then confessed to killing Michelle too. Though released from prison in 2023, Schofield is on parole to this day, and has not been exonerated.

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Host Gilbert King had never made a podcast before, but he had won a Pulitzer for his non-fiction book Devil in the Grove.

Now, King is out with a book version of Bone Valley. It digs deeper into Schofield’s trial and offers plenty of behind-the-scenes anecdotes about how King and research-assistant-turned-producer Kelsey Decker became podcasters as they traipsed through the countryside and county courthouses of Florida.

The Globe and Mail spoke with King by videoconference from Brooklyn, N.Y.

When did you know that the story of Leo Schofield’s wrongful conviction for the murder of his wife, Michelle, would be part of your life and your work for years to come?

When I first started the project, I just thought, “Okay, well, I like history. I like writing about cold cases or civil-rights stories from the pre-civil-rights movement, forties and fifties.” I had no real interest in doing anything modern. But then once I got into it, I realized how long it was going to take.

And in fact, today I’m still like, I can’t believe I’m still in this Bone Valley universe, so to speak, doing outside cases. So I guess the answer is: Never.

I asked because you almost seem reticent, especially in the book. You got kind of sucked into it.

Yeah, I definitely did. And then it was one of those things where I had to switch formats [from a book to a podcast] because we’re thinking, like, boy, all these voices, all the people are alive. And I think you need to hear the voices. I had just listened at the time to Serial and I think In the Dark, the Curtis Flowers season, and I think those are those ones that just gave me so much hope for the way that storytelling in an audio format can be.

What difference did it make for Leo that you got involved and you made this podcast?

I can tell you because he answers this all the time and he says, “Without that podcast, I’d still be in prison today.” The attention that it had brought to his case, it sort of got them to look at this case a little bit differently, and look at his parole differently. And so in the last parole hearing, they stopped calling him a manipulative, unrepentant murderer, they stopped showing the autopsy pictures, which they’d done over and over, and basically their message was just treat him like any inmate or defendant.

Why take a project that was originally a podcast and make it into a book now?

I think part of the reason is that there’s so much that we left out, that we just couldn’t explore. We couldn’t really get into the trial much because we didn’t have audio from that. And I didn’t feel comfortable just reading cross-examinations and recreating them.

I also really wanted to put a little bit more attention on how much Kelsey and I had worked on this and the process behind it, because I think it really is interesting.

The behind-the-scenes stuff is so fun to read after listening to it.

I didn’t know what I was doing and I didn’t know how to speak and we had nobody there supervising us. It was really Kelsey’s decision: We’re just going to keep the microphone on all the time.

I was kind of surprised when the producers got all our tape back and they were finding all these moments that they were including in the podcast.

I’ll give you an example: When we went into the evidence room and we got to see Michelle’s pictures – autopsy, the evidence – I was a little bit worried about it because Kelsey had never really done anything like this. It definitely hit her on the way out and we were out in the car about to do a debriefing, and she just lost it. She just started crying and it was real. And I at first did not want to put that in the podcast because I thought it might maybe be manipulating the audience by having this emotion from the journalists, you know? And then the producers were like, no, this actually says a lot more than any words you could have said there.

Kelsey and I had a discussion and with her it was always about, if it’s real, it can stay.

Do fans of the podcast feel like they know you better than maybe fans of your written work, because you’re kind of a character [in the podcast]?

Completely. It’s mind-blowing to me. I was just at CrimeCon in Denver, so there’s like, I don’t know, 7,000 true-crime fans all there and I don’t know how you recognize me, it’s a podcast, how would you? But I guess they’re so into the podcast that they look up the hosts and know the faces.

Do you have faith that Leo Schofield will be exonerated one day?

I do because I think the story has reached the right people and there is some kind of movement. I try to argue this is not a political issue. It’s not left versus right, it’s wrong versus right. I think everybody can agree that we don’t want to put innocent people in prison.

I want to point out one big difference between Canada generally and Florida, which is sunshine laws. Can you tell me just a little bit about how that kind of access helped you tell Leo’s and then Jeremy’s story?

That’s one of the reasons I stay in Florida because not even every state is like that. A lot of times I’m the first person to open these envelopes. I remember when I was working on Devil in the Grove – this is actually at the Library of Congress, but still – I literally opened up these envelopes that were sealed decades and decades ago and bullets fell out. And one of the archivists came over to me like, “Where did you get those bullets?” I’m like, “I didn’t bring them in here!” And then I got into a great conversation and I said, “What’s the best thing you’ve ever uncovered when somebody comes in?” And they said, “We had some of Abe Lincoln’s hair. We found a locket in a book.” So you never know what you’re gonna get.

I know this is a complicated question, but do you think what led to Leo’s conviction could still be happening today?

Absolutely.

This interview has been edited and condensed.