By Ashley M. Casey

Staff Writer

Dozens of alumni from Baker High School’s Class of 1977 are gathering this weekend to celebrate their 40-year reunion, but one classmate will be conspicuously absent: murder victim Cheryl Pecore Jones.

As Cheryl’s classmates prepare for a fun-filled weekend to reminisce about their high school days, her daughter, Amanda Jones Bell, is getting ready for the parole hearing of her mother’s alleged killer.

Jackie Sue Schut will face the Alabama Board of Pardons and Paroles on Aug. 29. Amanda Bell has started a petition on Change.org to ask the parole board to keep Schut in prison. She also plans to write the board a letter every day until Schut’s hearing, detailing her milestones that Cheryl has missed: her graduations, her wedding, the birth of her children.

“I’m going to send a letter every day for the next 25 days so they see my face and my name,” Bell said.

In March 1980, Cheryl was lured from her home in New Orleans to Houston by Harold and Jackie Sue Schut, a couple who claimed Amanda was in the running for a magazine’s “most beautiful baby” contest. In reality, the Schuts wanted to kidnap and sell her infant daughter. Cheryl was killed on March 8, 1980. A third person, perhaps the guilt-stricken woman who bought Amanda from the Schuts for $2,000, paid a taxi driver $20 to take 8-week-old Amanda back to her father, Dennis Jones.

Today, Harold Schut is serving a life sentence in Texas for Cheryl’s murder. Jackie Sue Schut sits in the Julia Tutwiler Prison for Women in Alabama.

While her then-husband implicated her in Cheryl’s death and Amanda’s kidnapping, Jackie Sue Schut was never charged for those crimes. Instead, she is serving life plus 20 years for a similar case: the shooting death of Geneva Clemons and the kidnapping of her 15-day-old son, James.

Cheryl’s older sister, Diane Pecore Olney, still puzzles over the mysteries of her sister’s death: What really happened in Houston, where medical examiners first deemed Cheryl’s death a suicide? Why was Jackie Schut was never prosecuted for Cheryl’s murder? Who sent Amanda back home, and why?

‘The sweetest person’

Cheryl Ann Pecore Jones was born in 1959, the youngest of Margaret and Alfred Pecore’s six children. Bubbly, optimistic and a little mischievous, Cheryl was “almost the perfect sister,” Olney recalled.

“She was everybody’s special person,” said Olney, who still resides in B’ville.“They broke the mold when she was born.”

The youngest Pecore was creative. Proficient in sewing, she made blouses and dresses without a pattern.

“She made a quilt one time; it was a scenery picture,” Olney said. “She cut out every piece herself and sewed it on herself.”

Tracey Morrissette Sperry, Cheryl’s best friend throughout high school, can attest to Cheryl’s sewing skills as well. In home economics class, Cheryl made a ragdoll for Sperry, embroidering it with a heart. Unfortunately, Sperry lost the doll in a move, which pains her to this day.

Sperry, of Clay, remembers Cheryl as “the sweetest person.” She has fond memories of making mud pies with Cheryl in the field next door, coming home covered in mud, much to Mrs. Pecore’s dismay. Bill Pecore, Cheryl’s brother, used to throw the girls over his shoulders and twirl them around or take them for rides in his convertible. “We were kind of crazy teenagers,” Sperry said.

While still in high school, Cheryl married her sweetheart, Dennis Jones.

No matter what, Cheryl always saw the good in everything and everyone, according to Sperry.

“She would always strive to make people see the good in themselves when they couldn’t,” she said.

Cheryl had a soft spot for animals. She used to scoop up stray cats and bring them home.

“Mom didn’t have the heart to tell her she couldn’t keep it,” Olney said.

In addition to her furry friends, Cheryl adored children and dreamed of having one of her own. Debbie Mack Steves, Cheryl’s friend since their Durgee days, said Cheryl visited her after the birth of Steves’s second child in 1979.

“She came to tell me that she was pregnant and that she knew it was a girl. … She had always wanted a little girl named Amanda and [to] call her Mandy,” said Steves, who now lives in Lakeland. “That was the last time I saw her.”

When the news broke of Cheryl’s mysterious death, her friends and family were devastated.

“I was overwhelmed with grief because of the way I had heard that she died. I couldn’t believe it,” Steves said. “It still gets to me because I know how happy she was and how excited she was to finally be pregnant. … She was robbed of a beautiful life to raise her daughter, and her daughter was robbed as well.”

Cheryl’s death rocked the close-knit Pecore family.

“Death is not an easy thing to deal with to begin with,” Olney said, “but if it was something like if she was ill it was easier to accept than the fact that somebody killed her.”

Investigators found a suicide note at the lavish hotel where Cheryl’s body was found. The three-page note claimed Cheryl was having an affair and decided to kill herself after the other man left her. Cheryl’s loved ones remain skeptical — that didn’t sound like Cheryl at all.

“I remember part of the story after her death [said] she was going to leave Dennis,” Sperry said. “They were perfect for each other. … That’s nonsense.”

At the time of Cheryl’s death, the Joneses lived in New Orleans, where Jones was stationed with the Navy.

“It was hard being in the military and having to move, but she was so happy with Dennis she would go anywhere with him,” Sperry said.

Taboo topic

After Cheryl’s death, Dennis Jones, remarried and had two more children. According to Olney, Jones and his new wife kept no pictures of Cheryl in the house.

Bell said she felt out of place growing up.

“I always felt like I just didn’t belong. I always felt like something was missing,” she said. “It’s very heartbreaking to not have the person who gave birth to you.”

Throughout Bell’s life, the specter of Cheryl’s death has hovered over her.

“When I was growing up it was awkward for me to go to family gatherings,” she said. “I wasn’t Mandy — I was ‘Cheryl’s daughter.’ That’s how I was introduced all the time.

Bell is looking forward to attending the Class of 1977’s reunion this weekend, where she hopes her mom’s classmates can share their memories of her. But she knows it may be difficult.

“It’s awkward … to be known by an event when you walk into a room instead of the person you’ve tried to be,” she said. “When I walk in that room, the first thing they’re going to think of is the day she died. I understand why people feel that way but it’s a horrible burden to bear.”

As a preteen, Bell came across a briefcase full of newspaper articles about her mother’s death. When she asked about what happened to her mother, her stepmother told her, “We’re not going to talk about this anymore because it makes Dad sad — and you don’t want to make Dad cry, do you?”

“This wasn’t something that my family talked about a lot,” Bell said. “It was kind of a taboo topic.”

While he rarely spoke of Cheryl to their daughter, Jones began drinking after his first wife’s death; Bell said it “haunted him for the remainder of his life.” It was only in his later years that he began to open up to his daughter about her mother.

“Before he died [in a boating accident in 2009], he did start to talk about these things. I didn’t push the issue and I let him talk,” Bell said. “It’s one of my biggest regrets that I didn’t ask more questions. What did she like to eat? What did she like to do?”

Jones deterred his daughter from delving into the story of Cheryl’s death. While he received victim notifications about Jackie Schut’s status, he never attended a parole hearing.

“My father didn’t really want me involved in any of that, and he himself wasn’t involved in any of that,” Bell said.

Author Leslie Rule contacted Bell about a book her mother — famed crime writer Ann Rule — was working on. The elder Rule was writing about the murder of Geneva Clemons and wanted to include Cheryl Pecore Jones’s death as well. Dennis Jones wanted nothing to do with it.

“He forbid me a long time ago to contact her,” Bell said. “I wrote hundreds of letters to her — I just never sent them.”

But after Jones’s death, Bell and her aunt, Kathy Pecore Taylor, agreed to be interviewed for volume 17 of Ann Rule’s Crime Files series. “Lying in Wait” was released in November 2014; the author passed away the following summer.

“Even though it was against the wishes that he had, I felt I had to give my mother a voice,” Bell said.

The campaign

Bell continues to amplify her mother’s voice as Schut’s parole hearing approaches. She maintains a blog and a Facebook page about her mother’s murder, both called “My Journey for Justice.” At press time, Bell’s online petition had 632 signatures; her goal is 10,000.

“There’s no way that parole board can ignore 10,000 people that don’t want her out of prison,” she said.

In addition to signing the petition, Bell is encouraging people to contact the parole board directly. (See sidebar for contact information.)

“They do actually read the letters and place them in Jackie’s file,” Bell said. “There’s also an email, and they do respond back.”

Olney said the only thing to do besides contacting the parole board is to pray. She said Cheryl and Dennis are watching over their loved ones and she believes things will work out.

“My mother died of pancreatic cancer. It was hard to lose my mother but it was nothing like [losing Cheryl],” Olney said. “At least I know my mother is at peace and out of pain, but Cheryl will never be at peace until this woman is charged with her death.”

If Schut is paroled, Bell said she plans to speak to prosecutors about reopening Cheryl’s case.

“I realized I can’t just sit and watch if there’s potential for them to let her go,” Bell said of Schut. “She committed crimes all over the country. Who knows how many children she sold? … What bothers me the most is there could be people my age or older — doctors, lawyers, nurses — it could be anybody, and they don’t even know they don’t belong.”

Schut has never admitted guilt for Cheryl’s murder. She has said she simply “fell in with the wrong crowd.”

“She may pretend to have remorse or pretend to have changed. I don’t believe that for a minute,” Sperry said. “There are children who are going on without their mothers. These children will never be free.

“Cheryl should have lived. She should still be living; she should be spending time with her grandchildren,” Sperry added. “That was all taken away from her.”

Today, Bell is a mother of four, raising a blended family with her husband in Auburn. She owns a housekeeping business, prefers “reading real books that you can touch” over digital media and is a “normal soccer mom” in her own estimation. She said she deals with the absence of her mother “in small doses,” but in general, she’s happy.

As for the possibility of seeing Schut at the hearing, Bell said she is curious about the woman who she believes killed her mother: her mannerisms, her voice, the way she carries herself.

“I just want to hear her say, ‘I did that and I am sorry,’” Bell said. “I don’t think that’ll ever happen, which is why I don’t think she should be paroled at all.”