Buddy continued to munch on the treats, oblivious to Dana Rose’s discovery. Dana Rose nudged him and tried to get him to stop eating, but Buddy ignored her.
Dana Rose glanced around and noted that the Schuts appeared to be dirt poor. While Dana Rose had lived in trailers, as well as little houses and cramped apartments, they were mansions compared to Elmer and Ruby’s place!
With his obvious connection to the widely publicized Ruby Bates, there was no way Harold Lee Schut could deny his connection to Limestone County. He could not take the same stubborn stance that Jackie had taken and claim he’d never set foot in the state of Alabama.
But he did deny involvement in the Athens homicide.
Investigators found Lee near Reno, Nevada, where he had been working for the Circus Circus Hotel and Casino, and they took him into custody. Regimbal and polygraph examiner Ron Gidge flew to Reno, where they met Chief Faulk and Bobby Smith.
When Lee was escorted into a room at police headquarters to meet with Regimbal, he sheepishly hung his head.
“I think he was ashamed because he’d run after he gave me his word he wouldn’t,” says Regimbal. “He felt bad about that.”
Regimbal thought he had a pretty good sense of who Lee was. The man obviously felt guilty whenever he was caught doing something wrong. Unlike Jackie, he seemed to have a conscience.
But Lee was no genius, and he was certainly not the brains of this operation. Lee seemed to be easily influenced by others. He denied any involvement in the murder of Geneva Clemons or the kidnapping of her infant.
“Will you take a polygraph?” asked Regimbal.
“Sure,” Lee agreed amicably. He took the test, and he “blew ink all over the walls.” The test showed he was lying.
Regimbal told him, “Lee, you didn’t do real well on the polygraph.”
“Well, I didn’t do it,” Lee said. “But if I had done it, this is how I would have done it.” And then he proceeded to describe the murder to the detective.
“He gave me details about the crime scene that only someone who was there could have known,” explains Regimbal.
Lee wanted to draw the layout of the house and yard so that he could demonstrate where he would have parked the Chevy Malibu if he had been there. Regimbal gave him a pen and a piece of paper.
Lee knew just where the driveway was, and he added it to his diagram. Regimbal watched, fascinated, as Lee drew an accurate image, complete with trees surrounding the house.
Lee’s illustration showed the car backed into the driveway.
“Why did you back in?” asked Regimbal, deliberately dropping the pretense that they were talking about a hypothetical situation.
“Well, you know,” replied Lee, “if you need to make a fast getaway, it’s better to back in.”
Harold Lee Schut had used a ploy implemented by any number of killers—including Ted Bundy—to distance themselves from the murder while feeding details to investigators.
The roundabout “confession,” coupled with his failure of the lie detector test, was enough for Alabama to get a warrant for Lee’s arrest.
“I still had the rape warrant for Lee,” explains Regimbal. “But I told them, ‘If Lee will waive extradition, take him with you.’ ”
Soon Lee was in handcuffs, on his way back to Limestone County, Alabama.
* * *
What was the motivation for the murder of Geneva Clemons? What could possibly compel the Schuts to travel two thousand miles to murder a young mother and kidnap her newborn—only to abandon him in a ditch?
There was no evidence that the Schuts knew the Clemons family, so they certainly could not have held a grudge against them. The Clemonses were not a wealthy family, so obviously ransom was not the motive.
But money was.
While the Clemonses did not have a stack of cash to pay to get their baby back, there were childless couples who did have money and were willing to pay hefty fees for healthy babies to adopt.
Though it took a while to pry the information from Harold Lee Schut, he and other witnesses eventually told detectives enough for them to build a case that was based on the premise that the Schuts were involved in a kidnapping ring. At the center of the ring was an unidentified doctor who paid two thousand dollars for each baby that was brought to him—no questions asked.
If the doctor was paying thugs two grand a head for each infant, it followed that he earned much more than that in the “adoption fees” he charged to infertile couples who were desperate for babies.
But why did the kidnappers abandon James Clemons by the side of the road? According to Lee, they had heard sirens and thought the police were in hot pursuit. Panicked, they had dumped the kid.
As cold as that sounds, Tracy suspects that the Schuts abandoned her brother for another even more callous reason.
Buyers’ remorse.
“My brother had a clubfoot,” says Tracy. “They wanted a perfect baby they could sell.” She suspects that once the Schuts got the baby in the car, they examined him and were not pleased when they saw the infant’s left foot, curled and turned inward.
Children with this birth defect typically require medical treatment so that they can walk normally, though it often results in uneven shoe sizes, with one foot requiring a shoe up to one and a half sizes larger than the other. The child’s mobility could also be limited.
If untreated, arthritis will likely develop, the curled foot can result in an odd gait, and there could also be muscle development problems. As it turned out, James was lucky. His defect eventually corrected itself, and he grew into a strong man.
But Jackie could not see the future, of course, and if she noticed the curled foot, it could have triggered her temper. She had been angry when Geneva foiled her plans and refused to go away with them in the car. Lee told detectives that nobody was supposed to have gotten hurt, and that he had been shocked when he heard the gun go off.
Jackie did not like being told no, but Geneva had refused to follow the plan. Jackie was so infuriated that she had killed her.
Jackie had been fed up after spending days in the Malibu, with Lee and the girls getting on her nerves for hundreds of miles. She had put a lot of thought and energy into her kidnapping plan. And she had had to go back to that house two times, and still, Geneva had not cooperated with her.
She blamed the baby’s mother for being so stubborn—for forcing her to do something that she could go to prison for. And after all that, when Jackie looked closely at the baby, she saw that he was flawed.
This may have been the last straw for Jackie. She may have even blamed Geneva for deceiving her. Why hadn’t she mentioned the kid had a clubfoot when Jackie told her that she was looking for a perfect baby for the contest?
How was she supposed to sell the kid now? The baby was a burden—a noisy burden that needed its diaper changed.
Enraged by the final insult of discovering the kid’s clubfoot, it would not have been out of character for Jackie to discard him in a ditch out of spite.
In Harold Lee Schut’s version, they had heard sirens screaming and believed the police were catching up to them. But they had already driven thirty miles and were a safe distance from the crime scene.
According to Limestone County prosecutor James Fry, investigators checked police records that night, and they found no indication there were any cars in the vicinity that activated their sirens.
Fry agrees with Tracy Clemons. “Most likely,” says Fry, “they didn’t discover the baby had a clubfoot until they were in the car. When they unwrapped the baby blanket, they saw the foot and said, ‘We can’t sell this baby.’ And then they dumped him in the field.”
Whatever the reason for leaving James behind, one would hope there would be a shred of humanity between Jackie and Lee—just a tiny drop of compassion—that would compel them to find a phone booth and make an anonymous call. They could have told someone where the baby was.
But they didn’t.
* * *
After hearing Harold Lee Schut’s hypothetical confession, Detective Regimbal flew to Palm Springs, California, to meet with Dana Rose.
The eleven-year-old was a witness to murder. She had been there when Jackie shot Geneva Clemons. She remembered how Jackie had barged into the Clemons home, scooped up the baby, and handed him to her. “Take him to the car,” she had whispered.
Dana Rose had been terrified, but she did as she was told. She was in the backseat, crouched on the floor, when she heard the deafening blasts of the gun. The poor baby was screaming his head off, and Dana Rose started screaming, too.
She would never forget how Lee had reached back and hit her so hard that blood gushed from her nose. “I was bleeding, and they didn’t care,” she remembers.
Dana Rose’s description of the crime matched the hypothetical scenario that Lee had described.
Dana Rose was given a polygraph test, and she passed.
Meanwhile, Jackie Sue Schut had lawyered up, and she was sticking to her story that she had never been to Alabama. The Gardenhires hired Yakima attorneys Adam Moore and Tim Ford to represent her.
Athens prosecutor Jimmy Fry was ready for a fight. The murder of Geneva Clemons had disturbed him more than most homicide cases he handled. What could be crueler than shooting a mother in front of her child, and then leaving her baby in a field to die?
Whoever did this was diabolical.
It bothered Fry even more because he knew the victim’s husband. In fact, he had known Larry Clemons since they had gone to grade school together.
“I’ve tried hundreds of cases,” says Fry. “But the Schut case was meaningful to me.” Serendipity, he points out, played a role in the arrest and prosecution of the Schuts. “So many pieces had to come together in order to prosecute the case,” he says. And “so much could have gone wrong,” but it didn’t. “We were lucky to make our case.”
Fry was relieved when he heard that the Schuts were apprehended, and he wasted no time in getting to work building a case against them.
In January 1985, a Limestone County grand jury indicted Lee and Jackie on capital murder and kidnapping charges. Lee had taken back his confession, and now he said he was innocent.
Jackie was well aware that Alabama had the death penalty, and she was nervous—especially after hearing the comments by “Electric Chair Charlie.”
Judge Charles Graddick, attorney general for the state of Alabama from 1978 to 1987, had been dubbed Electric Chair Charlie because of his enthusiasm for the death penalty. During his campaign in 1978, Graddick had said that when it came to murderers, he’d like to “fry ’em till their eyes pop out, and blue and yellow smoke pours from their ears.”
Graddick’s graphic description of the electrocution process must have been more than Jackie could bear, for she made a calculated move to avoid extradition to Alabama. She pled guilty to the child molestation charges in the case involving her young daughters—the case she had originally been arrested for. She was given a ten-year prison sentence in Yakima, Washington.
Limestone County prosecutor Jimmy Fry told reporters that he was outraged that Jackie Schut had found a way to sidestep extradition. “I was so mad I could have blown the roof off the courthouse,” Fry said.
If Alabama had to wait ten years before they could try Jackie Schut, it would make it difficult to prosecute her for the murder of Geneva Clemons.
Fry was also frustrated by the fact that he had followed Washington authorities’ directions for filing extradition papers for Jackie Schut, but was stonewalled when he was told the papers were not properly prepared.
“The lack of cooperation frightens us,” he told a reporter for the Associated Press. “We want to make sure that Mrs. Schut is not released from prison under a work release program until she stands trial here.”
Fry’s concerns were well grounded.
Washington State did indeed have a disturbing record for releasing violent offenders into work-release programs. In the 1960s and 1970s, I was the Northwest stringer for several true crime detective magazines, and I covered over one thousand crimes.
It was not unusual for me to report on a case of rape or murder, only to find that the offender had already been released from prison by the time my story was published six months later. Sometimes they were put on work release programs, and sometimes they were sent to the Honor Farm in Monroe, Washington, where security was so relaxed it was easy to escape. Almost invariably, they offended again.
Jackie Schut dug in her heels and refused to face the Alabama charges, but Fry would not let it drop. He requested that the Alabama Department of Corrections direct Washington State officials to put a detainer on the defendant so she would be forced to face the capital murder charges.
It was challenging enough to prosecute a murder case without the added burden of an evasive defendant. Fry and Regimbal and their teams worked together, building the case against the Schuts, so that they would be ready when legal arguments about Jackie’s extradition were settled.
In an April 1985 press conference, Electric Chair Charlie made a prediction about the impending prosecution of Lee and Jackie Schut. Charles Graddick told reporters, “The evidence will be overwhelming,” and “If found guilty here, they should be electrocuted.”
Jackie’s attorneys took issue with Graddick’s comments. They asked Washington State governor Booth Gardner to refuse to extradite their client on the grounds that Graddick’s remarks would make it impossible for her to get a fair trial. The Alabama public had been “poisoned” by Graddick’s remarks, her attorneys argued.
Prosecutor Jimmy Fry insisted that there was no lynch-mob mentality in Athens, and that it would not be difficult to find unbiased jurors in Limestone County because many residents had never even heard of the Schut case.
Jackie’s legal team presented Governor Gardner with documents that they said would prove that she had not been to Alabama that January 1980. There was no way, her lawyers maintained, that she could be involved in the Clemons homicide.
Governor Gardner weighed the argument, and in mid-June 1985, his attorney, Terry Sebring, gave a written statement to Jackie’s attorneys saying that Gardner had decided not to “intervene on behalf of your client to delay or prevent her return to the state of Alabama. Only in an adversarial proceeding, such as a criminal trial, could the truth of Ms. Schut’s contentions regarding her whereabouts be adequately tested.
“Granting asylum to Ms. Schut is not an appropriate remedy to curb alleged misconduct in the state of Alabama. These matters could only be resolved through either direct contact with Alabama officials or judicial action in Alabama.”
Even as Gardner refused to block Jackie Schut’s extradition, her attorneys were looking for more ways to prevent her from facing Alabama charges.
Jimmy Fry knew it was detrimental to Geneva’s family and to the case itself to let the tug-of-war drag on. The Clemonses needed justice so that they could go on with their lives. Fry offered a compromise. He would take the death penalty off the table if Jackie would stop fighting the extradition.
Her attorneys found that acceptable, so Fry flew to Washington, and he went to the Purdy Correctional Facility in Gig Harbor, Washington, to claim his suspect and personally escort her back to Limestone County.
She didn’t say much to him on their journey back to Alabama. Asked to describe Jackie, Fry says, “She’s really a troll-like figure, but because I am a southern gentleman, I will say that she is singularly unattractive.”
One week before Christmas, at midnight on Wednesday, December 17, 1986, Jackie Sue Schut arrived at the Athens City Jail to await trial.
Washington authorities had been reluctant to let her go, and they would call Fry repeatedly over the next months to ask for her return so that she could face additional charges there for her sex crimes. “They didn’t seem to grasp the gravity of the crimes committed in Alabama and Texas,” Fry explains.
Fry was angry. The pencil pushers in Washington had made it impos
sible for him to pursue the death penalty for the murderer who had destroyed so many lives—and would certainly continue to hurt others if she were ever freed.
Finally fed up with the constant requests for him to return Jackie Schut to Washington, Fry told them in his charming southern drawl that he planned to make sure that she died in prison and then they could have her back. “I’ll send her dead, rotten corpse back to you in a box,” he said.
That was the last time Washington requested her return.
Six years and eleven months after Geneva Clemons’s murder, the defendant was finally in place and waiting to be prosecuted.
It had been a tough fight just getting her there. The defendant and her family had not only made it difficult to prosecute the case, they also made it difficult to investigate it.
Simply interviewing witnesses had turned out to be a monumental task. Jackie’s big brother, Luke, blocked Detective Regimbal’s access to two of the most important potential witnesses.
“Luke would not let me talk to George and Gladys,” says Regimbal. “He ran the family.”
Luke, a pastor at a Pentecostal church, was in his fifties when Jackie was indicted in the Clemons case, while the elder Gardenhires were in their seventies and growing frail with age. Perhaps Luke wanted to protect them from the fallout of what he apparently believed was a witch hunt. He was Jackie’s staunchest supporter, and he seemed convinced that his baby sister could do no wrong.
It was frustrating for the detective to be banned from speaking to two people who could very well have the answers. Could it be that Luke feared that the elder Gardenhires had information that could hurt Jackie’s case? Regimbal suspected that, but he never got the chance to ask them anything.
Regimbal was a little surprised that Luke allowed him to talk to Buddy. Jackie’s son was about thirteen when he sat down with the detective. Buddy knew nothing about a trip to Alabama, but he did reveal something that shed light on Jackie’s character.
“He told me he was with his mother when she robbed somebody,” says Regimbal.