by Ann Rule
But both Dennis and Cheryl knew what they wanted. Cheryl was still in high school when they got married on December 30, 1977.
Dennis decided on a career in the navy, and when Cheryl graduated, they moved to Louisiana where he was stationed.
On Christmas Day, 1979, Cheryl gave birth to Amanda Rae. They joked that she was their Christmas present to each other—the only gift they gave each other that year.
It was Cheryl’s dream come true. All she had ever wanted was a family of her own. Now, she had a kind husband who adored both her and their baby.
They planned to have more children one day and buy a house with a big backyard for the kids to play in. But for now, Cheryl was happy with their little apartment on the navy base where it was fun to play with Mandy and to cook meals for her husband—another thing she was good at. She especially liked to make breakfast.
Life was happy for the Jones family. It looked like they were headed down a charmed path—until Cheryl encountered evil. Initially, there was no reason to believe that the woman who said her name was Sally was anyone other than what she appeared to be—a rather dowdy woman on a photography assignment.
Sally took photos of baby Amanda in the parking lot of the PX. She told Cheryl that she thought there was a very good chance that the baby would win the beautiful baby contest, because she was so pretty.
If she should win, Sally warned Cheryl, then they would show up at her place early in the morning, and she would have to be prepared to leave immediately.
The very next morning at around seven o’clock, Sally was at Cheryl’s door. She had good news and bad news. The bad news was that Amanda hadn’t won first prize. But the good news was that she did win a shopping spree in Houston.
If the photographer had been a man, Cheryl probably wouldn’t have gone with him. But there was nothing threatening about Sally. She appeared to be middle-aged, though she was actually only twenty-seven.
And Amanda was so beautiful, the young mother didn’t even question the news that she had won a prize. Sally seemed happy for them that Amanda had been a finalist.
Cheryl packed up the baby and the diaper bag and all of the other things she would need for a long day trip to Houston.
Cheryl may not have been aware of the man until she climbed into the car. He was a small man—short and skinny, with a wispy mustache. He was apparently married to Sally.
It was about a five-hour drive to Houston, a long time to be in a car with people she did not know well.
No one knows exactly what was in Cheryl’s head as she got farther and farther from the cozy little apartment she shared with Dennis, but investigators believe that the young mother began to get nervous.
Before long, Cheryl realized that her journey was no longer voluntary. There was no beautiful baby contest, and Sally was no photographer.
The woman had only pretended to take pictures, and the camera probably didn’t even have film in it, according to Houston detective Gil Schultz. “If any were ever taken, we never located them,” he says.
Sally had been so friendly in the beginning, but that was an act. Cheryl didn’t know it, but she was trapped in the car with a woman so sadistic that her crimes would shock even seasoned detectives.
Cheryl’s captors wanted to calm her down, but not because they cared about her feelings. They simply could not have the young mother’s hysteria foil their plans.
At some point, perhaps before they arrived at the swanky hotel in Houston, the couple drugged Cheryl. That probably wasn’t necessary; even if Cheryl saw an opportunity to run away, she wouldn’t have tried, because she would never risk putting Amanda in danger.
There is no doubt that Sally used Cheryl’s love for Amanda against her. If she should try to get away or to signal anyone she was in trouble, she was afraid they would harm her baby.
When Cheryl was pregnant with Amanda, she had written to a friend, telling her that she already loved her baby so much that she knew she would give up her own life for her. Now, those words turned out to be prophetically tragic.
Once in the hotel room, Sally forced Cheryl to write a suicide note. Sally dictated ugly things—thoughts so foul that when the FBI handwriting experts finally examined the letter years later, they would determine that the note was hatched in the mind of a “sexually deviant female.” The FBI could also tell by the pinched handwriting that though it came from Cheryl’s hand, she had been coerced into writing it.
The gist of the note was that Cheryl was killing herself because she had run off with another man and he had abandoned her. She regretted that she had betrayed Dennis, and the other man didn’t want her.
“I have nothing to live for,” the fake suicide note ended.
Sally and her companion slipped drugs into a soda and forced Cheryl to drink it until she overdosed.
It was a bad ending to a good life.
“She died trying to save me,” says Amanda Jones, who is now thirty-four and a mother herself.
Cheryl’s friends and family agree that she would have done anything to save her baby. Cheryl’s death was senseless. If her captors were so eager to have Mandy, then why didn’t they keep her?
Later that day, a taxi driver in New Orleans rolled up to a hotel to pick up a passenger who had called for a ride. A woman walked out to the car and set a baby down in the front seat. She handed the driver an address and a twenty-dollar bill, and instructed him to take the baby to her father, who was in the navy.
The taxi driver told the woman that he couldn’t take a baby by itself, and that she would have to come along, too.
“Okay,” said the woman, coolly. “Let me just get my luggage.” She turned and walked back into the hotel. When she didn’t come back out, the driver went into the lobby to look for her.
The front desk employees told him that she wasn’t a guest at the hotel—just someone who had asked to use the phone to call a cab. She had walked in one door and out the other. Now she was long gone.
The taxi driver decided to just go ahead and take the baby to the address the woman had given him. He didn’t have a car seat, so he strapped the infant to the seat beside him as best he could, and he drove her to the naval base.
The next day, a maid found Cheryl dead in the Houston hotel. The medical examiner noted that Cheryl’s left wrist was cut but hadn’t bled. She had died from an overdose of Tuinal, a type of barbiturate. The ME ruled her death a suicide.
Homicide detectives Paul Motard and Gil Schultz did not believe it. And neither did Cheryl’s family.
It would be five years before the manner of Cheryl’s death was changed to murder.
* * *
Months rolled by, and Geneva’s killer was still on the loose. Tracy’s sleep continued to be riddled with nightmares. What if the killer returned and tried to hurt her? The idea frightened her. And it worried her family, too. As the only witness to the murder of her mother, she was in a dangerous spot.
If police were ever to capture the killer, Tracy would be able to identify her. A woman so evil that she could kill a mother as she stood by her five-year-old could be capable of eliminating a witness—no matter how young.
She had, after all, left baby James for dead. If Clyde Reeves hadn’t found him when he did, the infant would surely have died.
“I was scared when I started school,” Tracy confides. Not only did she feel the sorrow of her mother not being there to pick out her dress for the first day of kindergarten and to brush her shiny brown hair, she struggled with the fear that the bad lady could appear at any moment and shoot her. “I had a nightmare that she came to school and got me and took me away with her.”
Though her teachers were protective of her, and the school administrators tightened security, the child was aware of how quickly bad things could happen.
Both sets of Tracy’s grandparents rallied around and helped Larry care for the children. Tracy’s aunts and uncles helped, too.
They all did their best to go on with life without Geneva,
but everyone would have felt so much safer if only the police could find the killer.
The anxiety-ridden days and the sleepless nights dragged on for five years. James turned five—the same age his sister had been when he was kidnapped. Tracy was ten. She had now spent half her life as a motherless child.
The murderer could be anywhere. For all Larry Clemons knew, the woman who had stolen his joy could be living just blocks away, and she could appear at any moment and try to hurt them again.
But there were no new leads in the case. Everyone feared that the killer would never be caught.
Though Athens detectives could never have guessed it, the answers were two thousand miles away in Yakima, Washington. Geneva’s killer was happily going about her life, enjoying shopping sprees during the day and playing bingo and partying at night.
Her story began on October 7, 1952—the same day that sports headlines were dominated by the news that the New York Yankees had won the World Series for the fourth time in a row. Theaters across the country were showing the movie The Winning Team, starring Doris Day and Ronald Reagan. American Bandstand made its debut on a Philadelphia TV station.
And in Yakima, Washington, a killer was born.
Jackie Sue Gardenhire was a bit of a shock to her parents. George and Gladys were not exactly thrilled when they learned they were going to be parents again. They had four grown kids from former marriages, and they thought they were done raising children.
The Gardenhire and the Cornelison familes had strong Cherokee roots, and in the early 1900s, they lived on tribal land, including reservations in Muskogee, Oklahoma; Tahlequa, Oklahoma; and Siloam Springs, Arkansas.
George Gardenhire, who was born in Sequoyah, Oklahoma, on October 9, 1911, was charmed by the Cornelison sisters, Gladys and Ruth.
Gladys, the older of the sisters, was born in Arkansas and was the same age as George. She was very young the first time she got married—only seventeen when she and Rodney Stowe* were wed in Washington County, Arkansas, in March 1928. Ten and a half months later, they welcomed their first child, Luke,* born in 1929. Their daughter, Rosemary,* was born about three years later.
Ruth Cornelison, born in Arkansas in 1915, wed four years after her sister. At age eighteen, she married George Gardenhire in Siloam Springs. They soon had two little girls, Clara,* born in 1934, and Anita,* in 1935.
Sadly, poor Ruth died at age twenty-four in 1939, leaving George a widower with two small girls.
George and the girls lived for a while with his uncle, Steve Gardenhire, and his family, in their home in Greenland, Arkansas, in the Ozarks. George contributed to the household with his income from pumping gas at a filling station.
Though Gladys was still married, she realized after her sister died that she and George felt a strong attraction for each other. Her feelings for her husband had changed from the time she was a teenage bride. The love she had once had for Rodney was overpowered by the feelings she had for George.
Their families didn’t approve, but George and Gladys knew they were meant to be together. It was painful, but Gladys broke it off with Rodney. Though now commonplace, divorce was scandalous in the 1940s—particularly when it was motivated by a love triangle.
When Gladys married George, her nieces became her stepdaughters. She vowed to be a wonderful mother to all four of the kids.
George and Gladys moved to Yakima, Washington, to escape the disapproval that their union inspired and to start a new life.
George’s uncle Steve and other close relatives also moved to Yakima, and soon there were a number of people from both the Cornelison and Gardenhire families settled there.
The years rolled by, and one by one, the kids grew up and started families of their own. Gladys and George had finally raised their brood, and now they were looking forward to their golden years.
But suddenly, in early 1952, they found themselves rearranging their lives to make room for a new baby. They hadn’t planned for it, but they decided to make the best of it.
At the same time Gladys Gardenhire was carrying her baby, Martha Burgett was pregnant with Geneva. Both women carried baby girls with Cherokee blood, and both women had nothing but hope for the new lives growing inside them.
They lived on opposite sides of the country, and though neither Martha nor Gladys was aware of each other’s existence, they had more in common than their Cherokee heritage. They shared a tragic future.
The daughters they carried would one day cross paths in a moment so violent it would break the hearts of both Martha and Gladys.
But violence was the furthest thing from Gladys’s mind as she busied herself getting the nursery ready for the new baby.
As it turned out, there would be two new babies in the Gardenhire family. George’s second daughter was pregnant, too. Anita was a young mother at seventeen, while Gladys was at the other end of the age spectrum. Though it’s not unusual today, few women over forty gave birth back in the 1950s.
Anita was too old to be a playmate for Jackie, but her baby daughter, Sandra, would be just the right age, and everyone looked forward to watching Sandy play with her soon-to-be-born aunt Jackie.
But in the middle of a hot summer, as Gladys grew big and round in her seventh month, the Gardenhires suffered a heartbreak. On August 6, baby Sandra died shortly after she was born.
The loss rocked the family.
Sandy would have been like a sister to Jackie, but now Jackie would grow up without her. Even though Jackie had four siblings, she might as well have been an only child, for they were all old enough to be her parents. Her four half siblings—two of them also her first cousins—adored Jackie, and they were grateful that she was healthy.
The family spoiled her rotten, according to Ellen Turner,* a retired teacher who once lived down the road from the Gardenhires.
It’s easy to see how a family that had tragically lost an infant might be tempted to overcompensate. If the baby so much as whimpered in her sleep, Gladys rushed to make sure she was okay.
Jackie learned early on that her needs came first. “Whatever Jackie wanted, she got,” Ellen explains. “She never heard the word no. It got worse as she got older.”
Kelly Gilmore,* a girl a couple of years older than Jackie, played with her a few times when Jackie was about six. She remembers that Jackie was a cute little girl. “I had a birth defect, and other kids made fun of me, but Jackie never did,” says Kelly.
Though she never saw Jackie be mean, she did notice that she was a little bit bossy when they played, and that she got whatever she wanted. “She’d run to her mom and ask for a cookie, and Gladys always gave it to her,” says Kelly. “I thought she was spoiled, but I never thought she was evil. When I read about her in the paper, I was shocked. I couldn’t believe it.”
Jackie may have been a cute kid, but she was a handful—more than her aging parents could handle. The Gardenhires had a reputation as nice people. One acquaintance remembers that George was distant and hard to get to know, but he was always polite. Gladys was very warm and friendly, and “never had an unkind thing to say about anyone.”
The minute a visitor stepped into her home, Gladys would offer them a glass of iced tea and either cake or cookies she had baked. She made everyone feel welcome.
Neighbors say she was a nice woman, and not the kind of person who liked to see people hurt. She wanted to do the right thing. She and George certainly not did not set out to spoil Jackie. If they’d had a crystal ball and could have seen the future for their overindulged child, they would have been shocked.
Unfortunately, there was no way for the Gardenhires to see what their daughter would become. She would one day break their hearts, but they could not have known that then.
As Jackie got older, she became more defiant. She stayed out past her curfew, drove too fast, and mouthed off to teachers at school. “She had no respect for authority,” remembers Ellen.
But despite her bad traits, Jackie was fiercely loyal to her parents. She would n
ot stand for anyone saying anything unkind about George and Gladys.
Some people remember Jackie as a normal kid who was generally happy, but her mood could turn quickly if she didn’t get her way.
Ellen describes Jackie as “too smart for her own good,” adding, “She could have gone far in life if she wasn’t so impatient to have everything she wanted right away. Other kids had to do chores for an allowance, but not Jackie.”
According to Ellen, Jackie was once hired to babysit for a friend of hers, Nancy Osbourne,* who had five little girls, the youngest still in diapers.
The Gardenhire home was on Rosenkranz Road in Tieton, Washington, a small town in Yakima County about fourteen miles northwest of the city of Yakima. Jackie was a teenager at the time, and the Osbourne family lived only a few blocks from the Gardenhire home.
“Jackie loved to eat baby food,” remembers Ellen. “But she was afraid she would get in trouble for eating the little one’s food, so she made all the older kids eat the baby food, too. She figured if they all did it that the kids would get the blame.”
The girls did not care for their babysitter, and they told their mother that Jackie had ordered them around and treated them as if she were the queen, and they were her servants.
The Osbourne family was struggling financially, while Jackie’s family was better off. Even the children sensed that the teenager looked down upon them because she had nicer things than they did.
Worst of all, she had neglected to change the baby’s diaper—which was desperately in need of changing. Nancy came home to find a garbage can full of empty baby-food jars and her baby waddling around in a heavy, drooping diaper.
Nancy was livid. “She marched over to the Gardenhire home and told Gladys what Jackie had done,” recalls Ellen.
Gladys was obviously embarrassed, but she was gracious as always. She told Nancy that she could certainly understand why she was angry and that she should not pay Jackie. She was never again asked to babysit for the Osbourne children, and whenever she saw them, she was rude.