‘Devil in the Grove’ author says he solved ’87 murder case
It was a relief when Daniel Otte walked out the Osceola County Jail in October 1987, dressed in a button-down shirt and tie and standing next to his girlfriend as he spoke to loved ones who gathered to await his release.
Otte had spent the previous six months behind bars, accused of killing cab driver Joseph Lavair, 25, in Intercession City on a late April night and robbing him of $180. Following a mistrial, he was later found not guilty after a state’s witness took the stand and accused a detective of threatening to take away her children if she didn’t pin the murder on Otte.
“Shephard in his own mind knew I didn’t do it. He tried to frame me,” he said outside the jail, referring to Osceola County Sheriff ’s Office Sgt. Buddy Shephard, who was accused by at least two other women questioned in the case of threatening them.
No new suspects were investigated after Otte’s acquittal as detectives were confident he had killed Lavair. But a recent episode of “Bone Valley,” a podcast series released by author Gilbert King investigating the murder of Michelle Schofield in Polk County, indicates the cab driver’s death is the work of someone cops never considered — Jeremy Scott, who is currently serving a life sentence in Florida for an unrelated killing.
In a recorded interview King shared with the Orlando Sentinel, which worked with the author over the past year to reexamine the case and his findings, Scott confessed to Lavair’s killing in October 2021, recounting details that aligned with other records and interviews in the case.
Otte, who since left Florida, said he avoided traveling into Osceola for years after he was acquitted, in fear of harassment by people in the community who insisted he was a killer.
“Why wasn’t the investigation done better before this all come out 30 years later?” Otte asked in an interview with the Sentinel. “I went through hell thinking I was gonna fry for something I didn’t do, and maybe if they did the investigation better and not jumped the gun, they would have caught [Scott] a
hell of a lot sooner.”
King, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his 2012 book “Devil In The Grove” about the since-discredited rape prosecution of four young Black men now known as the Groveland Four, said he presented “a pretty solid case” against Scott to the Sheriff ’s Office and the State Attorney’s Office in 2021. It’s not clear whether the case is being re-investigated.
The State Attorney’s Office confirmed the meeting with King but wouldn’t say if any action was being taken. The Sheriff ’s Office didn’t respond to an email seeking comment by press time.
“To me, it merited some kind of investigation, but we tried to follow up and they never returned any of our calls or emails,” King said. “So it was just my assumption that the case was not being investigated and that I had kind of been blown off.
The Florida Department of Law Enforcement, which reportedly was unable to prove the allegations against Shephard and cleared him, said it couldn’t find records about that probe. His personnel file obtained by the Sentinel showed no indication the claims reviewed internally by the Sheriff ’s Office.
Repeated attempts to reach Shephard, who resigned from the Sheriff ’s Office in 1991 after being demoted for insubordination, were unsuccessful.
The killing of Joseph Lavair
On the night of April 10, 1987, Lavair was working a shift for the Yellow Cab Company, one of three drivers working that night. At around 10:30 p.m., a dispatcher received a phone call from a man whose voice he later described to investigators as sounding “a little country ... from around here in this area.”
About seven minutes later, Lavair arrived at a K-Mart on Vine Street in Kissimmee, from there driving to an unknown address in Intercession City. A second dispatcher who took over the shift radioed Lavair to alert him a customer was complaining he was taking too long to pick her up. The dispatcher told detectives Lavair said he was having trouble finding the client’s home.
As time passed, Lavair stopped responding. His car was later found abandoned on Osceola Avenue in Intercession City — after it had sideswiped a parked car and crashed into a utility pole, knocking out power in the surrounding neighborhood. Three witnesses near the scene of the crash said they saw a man hop out of the taxi, yelling, “The car is gonna blow,” just before disappearing into the brush.
Lavair’s body was found along Old Tampa Highway, a couple of miles from where the car crashed. An autopsy found he was shot in the face, chest and abdomen, before being dumped out. A black baseball hat bearing the Confederate flag and a cowboy skull design was also found in the taxi. Witnesses said it belonged to Otte, which he denied.
Debra Murphy, a 21-yearold mother who lived in Intercession City and went to school with Otte, told Shephard she saw Otte hours after cops arrived at the scene, and he confessed to having killed Lavair before he “swung me around, [gave] me a hug, [gave] me a kiss,” and told her not to tell anybody.
Tammy Clark, a witness to the crash who also spoke to detectives, described a suspect similar in appearance to Otte. The following day, while speaking to Shephard, she pointed to Otte as Lavair’s killer.
Otte said he didn’t have a relationship with Murphy and only remembered her and Clark as they took the same bus in middle school. Attempts to contact Murphy and Clark were unsuccessful.
Neighbor Scott Pitts, who witnessed the crash, described the suspect as a man who was 5-foot-10 at most, with a slim build and weighing between 150 to 190 pounds. Otte at the time
stood over 6 feet tall and weighed 225 pounds.
Investigators told reporters they talked to “three-fourths of the residents in Intercession City,” which also included Charles Shephard, Buddy’s brother. In a statement written 11 days after the murder, he said he’d seen a pick-up truck “following the cab at a short distance” close to midnight.
On April 17, Otte was arrested, and a photo of him handcuffed while shirtless and on his belly as detectives stood over him was published in the Sentinel. He said he was unaware a murder was being investigated.
“I’ll be honest, I was out trying to buy weed, so when they pulled me over, I thought that’s what they were stopping me for,” Otte said in a recent interview. “I nearly swallowed my tongue when they said it was for first-degree murder.”
He told detectives that on that night, he was out in what’s now Championsgate, about 10 miles from the scene, partying and drinking with friends until 12:30 a.m. Those who were with him corroborated this, though many also said the group briefly split up before the night was over.
Otte said he was with one friend all night, Charles Groffen, who initially spoke with detectives before abruptly ending the interview.
“He was with me that night, every minute of the night,” Otte said. “Me and Chucky know without a doubt that I didn’t do it, so I’m good with that.”
But investigators didn’t believe him, and he was locked up in the Osceola County Jail. Meanwhile, his family got to work finding a lawyer, eventually hiring famed defense attorney Jack Edmund with money raised by his father.
“He had a junkyard worth probably $80,000, and he crushed every car in that junkyard to get the money up to get this lawyer,” Otte said. “My daddy don’t cry, he’s just a tough man. I’ve never seen my daddy cry so much than when they had me in there for murder.”
‘... And the one on your hip’
Expansive public requests to multiple public agencies by the Sentinel returned an incomplete record of the case against Otte — with documents in both the investigative file and court record apparently having gone missing over the decades.
But the records that do still exist, along with news clippings and interviews, suggest the case against Otte rested mostly on witness testimony.
Hairs and saliva on a cigarette butt found in Lavair’s car weren’t tested against samples taken from Otte and Lavair, according to lab reports. Latent fingerprints also were “not identified” with those taken after his arrest.
And months before the trial, Dennis Whitt, Otte’s cousin, in April 1987 told reporters he had been offered $1,000 to wear a bug to record Otte’s confession. When Whitt refused, the Sentinel reported, the offer went up to $10,000, a claim the Sheriff ’s Office at the time would neither confirm nor deny.
Then there were the young women who claimed they saw Otte that night. At trial, Clark reiterated what she told Shephard and other investigators, as did
Murphy, who again testified Otte confessed to the murder.
But Lisa Locke, Otte’s girlfriend and later his wife who was with him for part of that night, told the jury Shephard threatened to take her child if she didn’t accuse Otte of killing Lavair. The alleged threats weren’t recorded in the transcript of her interview with Shephard, a contentious conversation the day of Otte’s arrest.
“He called me a liar,” she said, according to news reports. “He threatened to have my baby taken away. I asked him not to bring my baby into this.”
Tanya Johnston also testified at first trial, though at 15, she was not named in news reports. She still remembers the day Shephard spoke to her outside her home in Intercession City as she held her first-born child while pregnant with her second.
“I will never forget this, for the rest of my life,” Johnston told the Sentinel. “Shephard said, ‘If you don’t come down to the station and give your statement saying that you’ve seen Dan Otte run from the scene, you will lose that child in your stomach and the one on your hip.’ ”
Later, at the Sheriff’s Office, her father wasn’t allowed in the interview room with her.
“It felt 24 hours long, it was very traumatic and scary,” Johnston recalled. “Here I am telling the truth, and I’m thinking, ‘Will he really take away my kids?’ ”
Records of that conversation were not included in the investigative file. Her transcribed testimony was also not included in court records.
The conflicting testimony led to a mistrial. Then came a collect call to Edmund’s office from Murphy. She wanted to recant her testimony.
In a deposition, Murphy said Shephard and another investigator had threatened to take away her kids and warned she “would go to prison” with Otte. They also offered to help her with a child custody battle in exchange for her cooperation and said she wouldn’t have to take the witness stand, she said.
“Buddy Shephard himself put his arms around me, gave me a hug, told me that I didn’t have to worry about it anymore, that this was all over,” Murphy said. “I might have to make one more taped statement saying the same thing that I have said and they would just leave me alone.”
At the second trial, a tearful Murphy confessed on the stand she had lied about seeing Otte the night of the murder.
“I know as well as Dan knows that I never seen him that night,” she said.
Shephard denied the claims, telling Edmund that Murphy and the others misconstrued “legal warnings.”
“I told her that if she lied to me, she could be charged with perjury and accessory after the fact to a first-degree murder,” Shephard told Edmund, adding the warning was his “moral obligation.”
Otte was acquitted. As the verdict was being read, he let out a loud sigh and his mother, who had suffered two strokes since his arrest, shouted from the gallery.
An FDLE probe cleared Shephard of wrongdoing as investigators “could not determine if Murphy was lying” and had “no proof the detective had
threatened her,” the Sentinel reported. Records of that probe do not exist, an FDLE spokesperson said.
A killer beneath a blanket
Lavair’s killing went cold for the three decades that followed, until King sat down with Scott, who’s serving a life sentence at Florida State Prison in Raiford, to discuss the February 1987 murder of Michelle Schofield, the crux of his podcast “Bone Valley.”
In the interview, Scott confessed to Lavair’s murder, offering unprompted details that match much of what’s known about that night.
Scott said he got the gun, which he said was a .357 Magnum revolver, after breaking into a cop’s home weeks after killing Schofield. He soon found himself in Kissimmee and called a cab to take him to Intercession City, where his grandfather lived when Scott was a child. Lavair was the driver who picked him up.
The plan was to rob him for “extra money,” Scott said, but the gun had a hair trigger.
“Hell, I didn’t know the bullets were working in it, really, because I ain’t even had a chance to fire the gun,” he told King. “But when I pulled the gun out, and them hair triggers, well, you just barely touch it [and] it goes off.
After shooting Lavair three times, Scott said he left the body on the side of the road, made a U-turn and sped down Old Tampa Highway, turning sharply over the train tracks and onto Osceola Avenue, where he lost control of the car and crashed.
As he stumbled out the car and saw witnesses, Scott said he shouted, “Y’all, run! It’s gonna blow!”
“I was still a little bit drunk, but [lucid] enough to make it to an old house and crawl into the window,” he continued. “And when I woke up, I see a bunch of stuff going on and I just crawled back underneath a blanket and slept and hopefully I wake up and everything be gone. And they was gone.”
Scott said he got a ride into Polk County the next day, making money by pawning stolen items. The existing investigative file makes no mention of Scott as a possible suspect.
“I don’t understand how
I got lucky because they accused somebody else of it,” Scott told King.
Records show Scott’s conversation with King wasn’t the first time he was documented as having confessed to killing Lavair: He spontaneously mentioned that murder multiple times when investigators asked him about Schofield and the 1988 killing of Donald Morehead, for which he was convicted.
Jamie Nelams, Scott’s ex-girlfriend who described him as violent and abusive, told lawyers representing the man convicted of killing Schofield she remembered Scott bragging about getting away with killing Lavair.
Nelams also remembered Scott had bleached his hair around the time of the murder. One witness who saw Lavair’s car crash in Intercession City said he saw a man with blond hair near the scene.
Scott’s brother, Royal Dean Scott, also remembers his blond hair, telling King “he looked so stupid” with it. He recalled Jeremy Scott telling him about killing Lavair and that he “disappeared after that for a while.”
“I don’t see why he would make something like that up,” Royal Dean Scott said. “What I learned behind these bars, every person has a conscience no matter how mean they are or how bad they are. My brother does. If he said it, I’d have to back him up.”
‘Bone Valley’
King’s discovery of Jeremy Scott’s connection to Lavair’s murder came as he researched the trial of Leo Schofield, convicted of killing his wife Michelle in Polk County and leaving her body by a canal six weeks before Lavair was killed.
The investigation of the murder developed into “Bone Valley,” which seeks to exonerate Schofield, who for decades maintained his innocence as he serves a life sentence. He was most recently denied a new trial in 2016.
Like Otte, the case against Leo Schofield relied mostly on witness testimony. Prosecutors say he stabbed his wife, who he’d allegedly abused previously, 26 times in a fit of rage. Leo Schofield said he was with his parents that night, though their credibility on the witness stand was questioned and he was later found guilty.
Later tests of fingerprints found in Michelle Schofield’s car matched with Scott. The canal where her body was found was also near Scott’s grandmother’s home, where he would take Nelams.
Scott told King he killed Michelle Schofield after she offered him a ride to North Combee Road in Lakeland, just after she got off of work. When they arrived, Scott pulled out a knife, telling King he intended to steal her car. Scott said Michelle Schofield fought back, and he killed her.
“I wasn’t thinking, because if I was, I would have never even done what I did,” Scott said. “It wasn’t planned, that shouldn’t never happen.”
By 1988, Scott was imprisoned for another murder and has been behind bars ever since. When approached by prosecutors about the fingerprints found in the car, he initially said he only stole the car stereo. He later told King that was because prosecutor John Aguero, who died in 2017, pushed him to stick to that story, and a judge later didn’t believe his confession.
A clemency application for Leo Schofield was filed by the Innocence Project of Florida, to no avail.
“The courts continue to believe that Jeremy Scott is just a car stereo thief and that he’s a liar and that you can’t believe a word he said,” King told the Sentinel. “And I contend that they never did a full investigation ... because they were trying to protect their conviction of Leo Schofield.”
King said the case is “legally dead” and hopes the podcast persuades the 10th Judicial Circuit, which covers Polk County, to hand the case over to independent investigators.
Scott has been linked to four murders, including the killing of Jewel Johnson, his friend’s 78-year-old mother, in 1985. Scott, 15 at the time, was acquitted as his defense team pointed to another suspect even as he was found with $42 in coins stolen from her home.
He says he killed Michelle Schofield two years later and Lavair six weeks after that. Then, on Halloween 1988, he killed 37-year-old Donald Morehead, which finally sent him to prison for life.
At the sentencing hearing for Morehead’s murder, Scott’s loved ones described an upbringing in which Scott was abused physically and abandoned by his mother. They said a car accident when he was a child left him with brain damage. By the time he was 12, he was homeless.
He told King that he thinks about Michelle Schofield every night and often has nightmares about her.
“I pray for a lot of things. I messed with the spirits too much,” Scott said.
“Jeremy Scott is not a monster,” King said. “He’s a pathetic, abused individual who had an extraordinarily brutal and difficult upbringing and a very chaotic life. He’s mentally tortured.”
Otte said he found comfort in Scott’s confession to killing Lavair but remains frustrated about an investigation he said was “botched from Day 1.”
“It just blows me away,” he said of Scott’s alleged actions. “For one thing I can’t imagine taking a life like that, and to know that he knew they were accusing somebody else? I guess I just grew up different.”
Otte doesn’t have hard feelings for Murphy or Clark, both of whom he said he hugged after the trial was over, as he understood why they testified against him.
He also didn’t hold a grudge against prosecutors, who he said were just doing their jobs. His anger, however, remains directed at Shephard.
“Buddy Shephard went beyond his job to try to convict an innocent man,” Otte said. “That was my life. I sat there all that time in jail thinking, ‘Oh my God, they’re going to frame me for this [expletive] and I’m going to die for it,’ and I don’t have a clue what I’m dying for.”