Tracy Clemons was only 5 years old when she heard a boom and a bang and saw a flash as she and her mother, Geneva Clemons, stood with their backs against a tree outside their home on West Washington Street in Athens.

Mom and daughter were posing for a photo for a woman named Jackie, who had arrived to photograph Geneva’s 16-day-old son, James, for a beautiful baby contest.

It was Jan. 21, 1980.

After the noise, Geneva slid to the ground. A bewildered Tracy asked her mother what was wrong. All Geneva could muster was “Run!”

Tracy, covered in her mother’s blood, heeded the directive and ran next door to the home of her daddy’s aunt and uncle and told them “Mama! Mama! Help! Help!”

Meanwhile, the photographer and her young daughter, who had been holding baby James while Geneva and Tracy posed, fled with the infant in their Chevrolet Malibu, which had been backed into the Clemons driveway. Jackie’s husband, Harold, was also in the car.

Jackie Schut was a con artist who had approached Geneva three times that day to enter James in a beautiful baby contest to win $500. She had first approached Geneva in a grocery store and gushed about her beautiful son. She told Geneva she was a magazine photographer, and Geneva had given Schut her address. Schut stopped by Geneva’s home unannounced later that day, but Geneva’s sister and brother-in-law were visiting. Schut returned again unannounced around 8 p.m. with her own daughter, Tammy. (Geneva’s husband, Larry, was working that night in Decatur.)

Jackie didn’t want to enter James in a beautiful baby contest…she wanted to steal and sell him.

Geneva, 27, died that night.

Baby James, who had been dumped in a pasture miles away, was found alive several hours later after a farmer’s headlights hit something in the field and he went to investigate. He would not have lasted long in the cold temperatures that night.

It would be years before the Schuts, who then lived in Yakima, Washington, would be identified as the killers and finally brought to justice in Limestone County.

Noted crime writer Ann Rule details the entire story in her latest true-crime book. “Lying in Wait: Ann Rule’s Crime Files: Volume 17,” has sold out at the Athens Wal-Mart, but a manager hopes to get more in soon. The book is also available on Amazon, at Books-A-Million and Barnes & Noble and other stores.

Unravels

For a while, the Schuts got away with Geneva Clemons’ murder and the murder of Cheryl Ann Jones, another mother with an infant baby who was killed in Texas in March 1980.

Then, an acquaintance of the Schuts, who had been arrested in Washington, decided to tell detective Bob Regimbal something, possibly to save his own skin. He said a hitchhiker had once told him that Jackie had confessed to killing a mother and child in Athens, Alabama. (Jackie had wrongly assumed baby James had died in the field that night). The skeptical detective, who was working on a sex-crimes case, telephoned Athens Police Chief Richard Faulk and the mystery began to unravel. Faulk died in 2012.

A Limestone County jury indicted the Schuts for capital murder/kidnapping in 1985. Harold Schut was brought to Athens on the murder charge after being arrested in Reno, Nevada, on charges of molesting his daughter in 1985. Jackie, who was serving a sentence for child abuse in Washington state, fought extradition to Alabama. She was brought to Alabama only after then-Limestone County District Attorney Jimmy Fry agreed to reduce the capital murder charge so she could avoid the death penalty.

A Limestone County jury convicted Jackie in March 1987 after her own daughter, who had been sexually abused and rented out by her own mother and stepfather, testified against her. Schut lost her appeal for a new trial and remains in Julia Tutwiler Prison for Women in Wetumpka.

Harold pleaded guilty to both the Clemons murder and the murder of Cheryl Ann Jones in Houston, another case in which the couple kidnapped a woman and her child, killed the mother and sold the child. He is imprisoned in Ellis Unit in Huntsville, Texas, in connection with the Jones case. Jackie was never tried on the Jones case since she has a life sentence here.

Local law officers dig

Fry said he, Faulk and Bobby Smith, who most recently served as an investigator for former Limestone County District Attorney Kristi Valls, helped investigate the case. Specifically, they went to Washington in an attempt to prove the Schuts were in Athens when the Clemons murder occurred. Fry and Smith also went to Washington for Jackie’s extradition hearing, he said.

Faulk and Assistant Chief George Clem, who helped investigate the murder and kidnapping, have since died. Police Chief Floyd Johnson said he reviewed the Clemons case file earlier this year because Jackie was up for a parole hearing. He sent a letter objecting to her release. Her request for parole was denied. She will be eligible again in 2017.

One odd fact about the Schut case was that Harold was raised by his great aunt, who was one of the women who claimed she was raped in the infamous Scottsboro Boys case, Fry said.

He believes the Schuts dumped baby James that cold night in 1980 after realizing as they fled that James had a clubfoot. He believes the kidnappers believed this would prevent them from selling the baby.

James, who overcame the defect, lives in Florence. Tracy, who was raised along with James by their dad and their grandparents, lives in the Owens community and works at Athens-Limestone Hospital. Geneva’s husband, Larry, who grew up with Fry and graduated from Athens High School with him, also lives in Owens near his daughter. In 2005, Tracy, Larry, Fry and the Schuts’ daughter, Tammy Zimmerman, the one present during the murder of Geneva and the kidnapping of James, were interviewed on the Montel Williams show.

Glad for the book

Tracy is glad Rule decided to write about the murder, even though the horrific event changed her life.

“It was very tragic time, and it’s something I don’t think I’ll ever forget,” she said.

She hopes people will buy the book for many reasons.

“There were people who I work with who did not know it happened to me or they really didn’t know the whole story,” Tracy said. “I’m glad she offered to do it. It needed to be told, not just thrown in the dirt and forgotten about after all those years.”

She hopes the book will also remind people to be more aware of the existence of “monsters” like the Schuts.

Fry said the one thing that stood out about the Clemons murder case was the family.

“I tried the Betty Wilson murder case in Huntsville and others in Athens that were notorious, but that humble family. … After Jackie was convicted, the family hugged me and shook my hand,” he said. “God looked down and smiled and made it turn out right.”