Death after the talk show
A confession on a talk show, three days later a fatal shot: the Scott Amedure case shook the United States.
On 9 March 1995, Jonathan Schmitz drove with a shotgun to Scott Amedure's trailer in Lake Orion, Michigan. He shot him twice in the chest. Amedure did not survive. He was thirty-two.
Three days earlier, the two acquaintances had sat together on a stage in Chicago. "The Jenny Jones Show" was recording an episode about secret crushes. Schmitz had been invited because a secret admirer wanted to reveal himself. He later said he had not known it would be a man. In front of a hooting audience, Amedure confessed his feelings and described a fantasy. Schmitz laughed, declared that he was heterosexual and seemed relaxed.
The episode was never broadcast. Shortly before the crime, Schmitz found a suggestive note on his door. He bought a gun, killed Amedure and then turned himself in to the police. He had been humiliated on television, he said.
In court, the defence relied on the so-called "gay panic" defence, the idea that a man's interest could throw a heterosexual man into a state of emergency. Activists such as Jeffrey Montgomery of the Triangle Foundation in Detroit fought against this image. The case changed how hate crimes against queer people were dealt with in courtrooms and by the police. Schmitz was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to twenty-five to fifty years. The first verdict was overturned, and a second trial confirmed the sentence. After twenty-two years he was released on parole.
The show also ended up in court. A jury awarded Amedure's family twenty-five million dollars, but the verdict did not survive on appeal. The producers were not responsible, the court found. The case nevertheless became a symbol of a kind of television that paraded people for ratings. And of a young man who paid with his life for an honest confession.