by Ann Rule
It seemed her entire family was on Jackie’s side: All of Dana Rose’s aunts, and her uncle Luke. Dana’s beloved grandparents—Gladys and George. Even her brother Buddy! They had all traveled to Limestone County to support Jackie.
Dana Rose hadn’t had much communication with her family, but in the few exchanges they did have, they made it clear to the girl that they did not approve of the stance she was taking. She was forcing them to choose sides, and they chose Jackie.
Poor Jackie, they moaned. How dare Dana Rose do this to her? How dare she try to hurt Jackie like this?
Dana Rose was bewildered. The grown-ups in her family had seen the proof that Jackie had sexually abused her—seen the photographs of the twisted things that her alleged mother had done to her. The detectives had shown them the evidence!
And Jackie had, after all, pled guilty to the crime. According to Dana Rose, not a single relative had reached out to tell her they were sorry for what she had gone through. They didn’t seem to care.
“They swept that under the rug,” Dana Rose says. “It was as if it didn’t even happen.”
Gladys and George had taken Dana to the Pentecostal church with them many times over the years. They had told her about God—taught her about right and wrong. Brother Luke was the pastor there, and Dana Rose had listened very carefully when he preached.
And she had believed her uncle. She had believed what her grandparents and Luke had told her about God. They said that if she was good, she would go to Heaven when she died. And if she wasn’t, she would go to Hell.
When she was trying to gather the courage to testify against Jackie, Dana Rose imagined what it would be like to meet God. “I thought about how someday I would have to face God,” she explains. She wondered what she would tell Him if she didn’t try to stop Jackie. How could she stand before God and say that she hadn’t had the courage to stand up against evil?
“I knew in my heart that I had to do the right thing,” says Dana Rose. “I couldn’t allow another little person to be hurt.”
Dana Rose also knew that if she did not stand up to her now, Jackie would probably kill her. If she was released from prison, Dana Rose was as good as dead.
In the eyes of the Gardenhire family, Jackie was the victim, and Dana Rose was a liar who was determined to destroy them.
Detective Regimbal shakes his head as he remembers how Dana Rose’s family abandoned her. “They just threw her to the wolves,” he says.
Dana Rose felt alone that day in the Athens courtroom. On shaky legs, she approached the stand and took her seat. She stole a glance at her family. They sat together, stone-faced, all in a row on one of the long wooden benches.
Dana Rose did not want to look at Jackie. And she managed to avoid the defendant’s eyes when prosecutor James Fry questioned her. He was on her side, of course, and Dana Rose knew him and was comfortable with him.
Detective Regimbal was there, too. He had rescued her and Deanna—he’d taken them out of school that day, and no one had touched her since. It was reassuring to know that he was there.
The courtroom was hushed as Dana Rose described the trip they had taken in the blue Malibu, the thousands of miles they had driven that ended in murder.
“I remember my mother taking the baby from her,” said Dana Rose. “My mother told me to get in the car . . . Then I heard two shots.”
At one point in her testimony, Dana Rose said something that shocked the entire courtroom. She confided that the Clemons murder wasn’t the only homicide she had witnessed.
Jackie had shot another mother and abducted her infant, too.
Barksdale objected but was overruled. Dana Rose’s memory was vague about this other murder, and details of the case were not forthcoming.
Dana braced herself for cross-examination. She’d been warned that Jerry Barksdale would try to unnerve her, and he did. “He badgered me and badgered me and badgered me,” she said. “It was horrible.”
Worse, Barksdale made a point of standing next to Jackie while he questioned Dana Rose. The girl was forced to look in his direction—forced to meet Jackie’s icy glare.
The attorney had positioned himself intentionally to rattle Dana Rose, and it worked. As Dana Rose answered Barksdale’s questions, Jackie communicated with her through angry eyes. “It was like she was saying, ‘You just wait. You’re going to get it later!’ ”
But Dana told the truth. “I knew it was the right thing to do,” she confides. “I knew I had to make sure that she couldn’t hurt anyone else.”
As far as Barksdale was concerned, her testimony was fiction. It seemed to Dana Rose that the defense attorney pestered her for hours. She thought he sounded sarcastic and angry, and he continued to hover over Jackie, so that when the girl answered his questions she saw both their unfriendly faces staring back at her. But she stood up to him as he tried to break her down. Every so often, Judge Blizzard interrupted to offer Dana Rose a break and a drink of water.
Finally, it was over. Dana Rose stepped down from the stand, exhausted and mentally drained.
Tracy, too, was nervous about facing her mother’s killer. “I was scared,” she remembers. “But I was also relieved because it was finally coming to an end.”
When Tracy glanced at Jackie, she was startled to see how blasé she appeared. Jackie showed no more emotion than you would expect from a person waiting for a bus.
James Fry asked Tracy the questions she had been expecting, and she sat up straight as she answered him in her polite southern drawl. She pointed at Jackie and said, “That is the woman that killed my mother. I wasn’t but five years old at the time, but I saw her kill my mom. I can never forget it.”
Tracy described how the predator had come to their home two times that day, and how she had promised to give them cash if she could take pictures of the baby.
Then it was Barksdale’s turn. Tracy’s heart quickened as he approached. Barksdale was well aware that he had to tread lightly with this girl. Any jury would be sympathetic to a child who saw her mother murdered. If he took too hard a stance, he would alienate them.
Still, he had to discredit the witness. He would do that as gently as possible. Barksdale decided to poke holes in her memory. He tried to get the girl to admit that she didn’t remember the day her mother was killed, because she was too young.
She was amazingly calm and firm as she stood up to him. “I remember it well,” she insisted as she held her head high. “I didn’t talk about it at first, but I can never forget it. I know I was just five, but I remember.”
Larry Clemons was extra proud of his daughter that day. He wished her mother could see what a brave girl their daughter had grown into.
* * *
At the end of the day that Dana Rose had testified against her, Jackie asked to see her. It hurt Dana Rose to see the woman she called mother in chains. The girl asked the guard if he could remove them for a moment. He complied, but kept a watchful eye.
“Jackie put her arms around me,” Dana says. “I kind of melted into her, as kids do when their parents hug them.” Though she had never found warmth in Jackie’s embrace, she found herself still hoping for affection.
But the woman was as cold as she had always been as she stiffly held her. Her mouth close to the girl’s ear, Jackie said, “I forgive you.”
The words were as cold as the hug, and Dana Rose felt a chill.
Throughout the five days of the trial, a number of witnesses took the stand, including Geneva’s sister and brother-in-law, who placed the suspect at the scene of the crime. Kathy and Wayne McMeans identified Jackie Sue Schut as the woman they had seen at the Clemons home a short while before the murder. They testified that the defendant had been trying to persuade Geneva to allow her to photograph James for the beautiful baby contest.
Seven of Jackie’s loyal supporters had traveled two thousand miles to swear that she could not have been in Alabama on the day of the homicide.
A middle-aged Yakima couple, Will and Ca
rla Stemm,* said that they had seen Jackie at a restaurant in Washington on January 21, 1980.
Jackie’s son, Buddy, who was now fifteen, took the stand to say he had no memory of his mother leaving the state of Washington during January 1980. “I guess you could say I was a mama’s boy,” he said. “Wherever she went, I’d have to go . . . I don’t recall her ever going away for a night.”
On cross-examination, Fry fished for a possible motive for Buddy to lie, and the boy admitted that he loved his mom, “and I don’t want her in prison in Alabama. I want her back home.”
Fry asked Buddy if he had ever seen his mother with a gun.
“No sir,” said the teen. Asked about his admission to Regimbal about seeing his mother hold up a man, Buddy denied he had ever said such a thing.
Buddy’s testimony was in direct contradiction to his sister’s earlier testimony. Dana Rose had stated that Buddy was left behind when they took the trip to Athens, Alabama. She also said that Marcy* and Earl Small* had been living with the Schuts, and that they had stayed with Buddy while the rest of the family was gone on the trip.
Earl Small took the stand, and his version of events matched Dana Rose’s.
Jackie’s sister, Anita, also supplied her with an alibi, insisting that the night before the Athens murder, Jackie had visited her apartment in Yakima.
“Jackie came to our apartment and told my husband about a job,” Anita said. She was quite sure of the date, even though seven years had now passed.
When Fry questioned Anita, she confessed that she would “do anything to get my sister out of this and back home.”
It wasn’t the answer Jackie’s attorneys would have liked to hear, but it was honest.
When Gladys Gardenhire took the stand, she said that Jackie “depended on us for everything,” and she would certainly have noticed if her daughter was gone for any significant period of time.
It was true that Jackie leaned on her family. Dana Rose remembers that George, Gladys, and Luke were constantly rescuing Jackie—bringing her groceries when the cupboards were empty, paying the electric bill when the power was turned off, or driving her to the hospital when she got one of her frequent migraines.
The jury wasn’t privy to all of the evidence investigators had gathered—including the results of polygraph tests taken by both Jackie and Dana Rose.
Polygraphs are not always accurate, and some detractors claim that 28 percent of the time the tests give false results. Because they are unreliable, polygraphs are usually not admissible in court. Jackie had failed her test, but Dana Rose had passed hers.
The State wanted the jury to know about the test results and tried to slip in the information in a roundabout way. When Chief Faulk was on the stand, Fry asked him what steps he had taken to determine that Dana Rose was truthful.
Faulk replied, “We made arrangements with the local police department there to have their polygraph examiner give Dana Rose a polygraph examination.”
Barksdale was on his feet. “Your Honor,” he said, “I’m going to move that that be excluded as not being responsive to the question and that the jury be instructed to disregard it.”
Judge Blizzard said, “All right. I’ll strike it. I don’t think it’s an issue. The jury can disregard it.”
The question of the so-called confessions was another issue. Barksdale told reporters he would like to put Jackie on the stand, but that he would do so only if Judge Blizzard suppressed statements she had made to Chief Faulk.
Barksdale was worried about the conversation she had had with Faulk—the conversation when she suggested that “self-defense” or “an accident” could be factors in Geneva Clemons’s death. Fry, of course, was eager to ask her about the comments she’d made, but he could not if the judge blocked those questions.
In the end, Jackie did not take the stand—much to the disappointment of spectators, who were dying to hear from the overweight, plain woman from Yakima who had been accused of doing such monstrous things.
The jury would not get to hear about Jackie’s conversation with Faulk, nor would they hear about Lee’s hypothetical confession to Regimbal.
Court watchers were also hoping to see Harold Lee Schut on the stand. Lee, represented by a court-appointed attorney, Limestone County public defender Dan Totten, listened to Judge Blizzard’s advice as he stood before him on Friday afternoon. “Harold Lee,” said the judge, “I want to explain the law to you. You are a co-defendant in this case, but will be tried at a later date. The State has agreed to give you immunity, but you do not have to testify. I want you to know that. The law gives you the right to decide whether to testify or not.”
Lee replied, “After talking to my attorney, I’ve decided that I do not want to testify, Your Honor.”
Lee was to be the last witness, and because he’d chosen not to take the stand, final arguments began.
“Somebody in Yakima, Washington, knew about this case in Athens, Alabama,” Fry told the jury. “The Yakima police didn’t dream it up.” The killer, he said, was “Jackie Sue Schut. She pulled the trigger to the gun that killed Geneva Clemons. She kidnapped that baby.”
Fry reminded the jury that they had heard from four eyewitnesses that put Jackie Schut at the scene of the crime. “Two of them saw her kill Mrs. Clemons. We also presented two witnesses from Yakima who told you that Jackie Sue and Harold Schut left for a trip four days before the murder and kidnapping.”
When Barksdale addressed the jury for the last time, he said, “It is a sad thing that Geneva Clemons was killed. But the killer is still out there. Jackie Schut did not kill Geneva Clemons. I just hope you, the jury, can see that.”
Barksdale added that some of the witnesses for the State had out-and-out lied. While some had lied, others, he said, were confused. “Some of Mrs. Clemons’s relatives said Jackie killed her, but I think they were just mistaken. It has been a long time.”
The jury retired at 4:20 on May 8, Friday afternoon. They deliberated for four hours and then sent out for sandwiches. Late that Friday night, they were still at work, when an anxious Jackie was overheard complaining to her attorney. “I can’t stand this,” she said. “This is worse than being in jail!”
It was 11 P.M. when the jury came back. It had taken them six and a half hours to find Jackie Sue Schut guilty of murder, and kidnapping in the second degree.
When she heard the verdict, Jackie cried, “Oh God! Not this!”
Gladys wept and exclaimed, “This is wrong—all wrong! My daughter wasn’t in Alabama!” Jackie’s mother was heartbroken. She had probably convinced herself that her daughter was innocent of the horrendous things of which she’d been convicted. What mother wants to think she has given birth to a monster?
Dana Rose was in a motel with a victim’s advocate, and her eyes were glued to the TV screen when the news broke.
The news camera zoomed in on George Gardenhire’s face. The old man was weeping. Dana Rose felt sick. “I’d never seen my grandfather cry before,” she says.
The girl was torn apart. She had tried to do what she felt was right, but it had hurt people—hurt the only family she had ever known.
Reporters crowded around Larry Clemons and asked how he felt now that his wife’s killer had been found guilty. “This has been seven years—seven long years that have been a nightmare,” he said. “I felt all along that she was guilty. Now this proves it. We can get a little sleep tonight.”
District Attorney Jimmy Fry told reporters the verdict was a “blessing for justice. If ever anyone needed convicting, this woman did. In my opinion, she did the most vicious crime that there is.”
Fry also made a point to single out Detective Regimbal for praise, and added, “If it hadn’t been for Regimbal, we could not have been able to solve the case here.”
When reporters asked Jerry Barksdale to comment, he said, “It’s been a long day, and I just don’t know what we’ll do, but I’d say we are leaning toward an appeal.”
Jackie’s attorney wou
ld later tell reporters that the case against her was “one of the biggest miscarriages of justice that I have ever seen. This case is going to be in court a long time.”
* * *
Jackie Schut lost her appeal for a new trial. She was sentenced to life (with the possibility of parole) for the murder of Geneva Clemons, and two years (to be served consecutively) for the kidnapping of James. She is currently incarcerated at the Julia Tutwiler Prison for Women in Wetumpka, Alabama. Women who have been there say it is truly “hard time.”
Jackie denies any connection with the death of Geneva Clemons and has not yet been charged in the death of Cheryl Ann Jones. She was denied parole in 2014 and her next review will be on May 1, 2017.
Lee Schut pled guilty in both the Clemons case and the Jones case. He is currently incarcerated at the Ellis Unit in Huntsville, Texas. He was recently denied parole and his next parole review will be in January 2017.
* * *
Because my books are about real life, the stories I write never truly end. The victims’ families, the detectives who worked so diligently for justice, and even the killers—who, fortunately, usually continue their stories behind bars—all have lives beyond the endings of my books.
Usually there are questions left unanswered. In some cases, victims are never found, their bodies hidden forever in vast waterways or hidden beneath slabs of concrete or paved roadways. Their families are forced to wonder and worry for the rest of their days.
And then there are the killers who still insist they are innocent and continue to profess that, even after decades in prison. Some of them manage to make news from behind bars, filing legal motions, picking fights, and sometimes even escaping.
Many of the murderers I’ve written about serve their time and are set free among the rest of us without fanfare. Drama usually follows them, but unless they are caught breaking the law again, we seldom hear about it. Still, their stories go on.
The case of the “Baby Seller” has more unanswered questions than any of my other books.
What about that other murder that Dana Rose testified she had seen Jackie commit? Did she really see it, or was it a bad dream that blended with the reality of her nightmare life?
