Empty Promises (11 page)

Beasley had Steve under watchful eyes by the next morning, in a sporadic surveillance operation that continued for fourteen months. Whenever Steve moved, Greg Mains was blocking his path, although Steve didn't always know that. When Mains found an important witness in Southern Pines, North Carolina, Taylor realized that yet another member of the IACP board was the chief of police in Southern Pines: Gerald Galloway. "He told me he had been to a breakfast with the woman [the witness] that morning," Taylor marveled. "She had been in Jami's wedding party, and all Jerry had to do was run down to the bank where she worked!"
It was as if Mains and Faddis and Taylor were meant to solve this case. And of course the contacts Taylor had maintained for three decades were vitally important. If they needed surveillance of Steve Sherer's travels outside Washington, they had it. If they needed to find women he had been in touch with since Jami disappeared, Jim Taylor could usually come up with an associate who could get the information within hours. He got help from Two Rivers, Wisconsin, and Palm Springs, California, and many spots in between. Of the
ten people who attended IACP committee meetings with Taylor, three had access to exactly what the Redmond investigators needed.
Greg Mains and Mike Faddis had no idea how many people they would eventually talk to: not dozens but hundreds. Starting with the original case file, school yearbooks, old neighborhoods, Microsoft co-workers, friends, friends of friends, old tips, and new tips, Taylor wanted them to follow up every single lead with the full expectation that they would find more. "Even if you get nothing from a contact but the name of another person to talk to," he told them, "you've got another place to go, and another and another… or at the very least, you know you've checked that lead and proved that it ended nowhere."
In the end, Greg Mains and Mike Faddis would talk to more than three hundred people in their search for Jami Sherer.
The Redmond investigators knew they had to find enough information to convince Marilyn Brenneman that she had a case solid enough to take before an inquiry judge— the Washington State counterpart of a grand jury. Just as in a grand jury session, witnesses would be called, many of whom had devoutly hoped that the search for Jami was over and that suspicion was no longer focused on Steve.
But that wasn't going to happen.
Finding Jami Sherer's killer began as Greg Mains and Mike Faddis's occupation, but it would become their avocation, and then their obsession. Steve Sherer was in the crosshairs of their microscope of Jami's life, but they were also looking for Lew Adams. He had moved away from Seattle. They eventually found him in Idaho, and as before, his involvement with drugs
made him anxious. He still felt guilt over Jami, but he was willing to testify against Steve Sherer if it came to that.
What Mike Faddis and Greg Mains eventually uncovered was amazing. Much of it came about because of hard work and some of it by luck.
But perhaps some of it came through angels.

11

In order to establish that Jami had not simply run away and begun a new life somewhere, the Redmond detectives contacted every state to see if, after September 30, 1990, Jami Sherer or Jami Hagel had applied for a driver's license or for unemployment benefits or welfare. She had not. She hadn't filed an income tax return, used her credit cards, or tried to get new credit cards. She had not attempted to get a passport. She had never touched her bank accounts. In the past seven years, no one had ever done a credit check on her. She had never been arrested. There were no death certificates in her name in any state.
All human beings— who are still alive— leave paper trails. But Jami Sherer left no trail at all.
Taylor, Faddis, and Mains called police departments all over the Northwest to see if they had found any unidentified bodies. "It was interesting," Taylor said. "Often the police departments told us they had no bodies that were unaccounted for, but when we called the
coroners' offices, they often said, 'Yeah, we do,' so we checked a lot of those out. Maybe a dog had brought in bones, or someone had found a skeleton we could compare to what we knew about Jami."
They had Jami's dental records, medical records from knee surgery she once had, and the information from her breast augmentation surgery. They had blood samples from Judy and Jerry Hagel and from Chris Sherer for mitochondrial DNA testing. "We also had some of Jami's hair," Taylor said. "Judy had asked for years to have Jami's things. Finally Steve gave her a box of things, all taped shut. It sat in Judy's garage until Greg Mains and Mike Faddis opened it to inventory it, and Jami's hairbrush was in there— with strands of her hair caught in it."
But none of the bodies or bones they checked matched the information they had on Jami Hagel Sherer.
As the two Redmond detectives expanded their investigation, they found more and more incidents between Steve and the police. They contacted every police department in western Washington to see if their officers had ever stopped Steve Sherer or someone using one of his three aliases. Even when they weren't on duty, Mains and Faddis dropped in at police stations all across the state. "Greg got so he wouldn't take a vacation," Jim Taylor said, "without stopping to check at every little department on his route to see if they recognized Steve."
And they found more arrests, mostly for drunken or reckless driving. Again and again they heard, "When Steve drinks, he's a crazy man with a terrible temper. He's out of control."
One of the problems with potential witnesses to Jami's fate initially was that they were afraid of Sherer.
But years had passed and people who had stories to tell about Steve had grown up. "Many witnesses with key information— through the process of becoming more mature— became responsible," Faddis said, "and came forward. Some were just too afraid to say anything. For others, the more they thought about their interaction with Sherer, the more their memories started to click."
They noted that Bettina Rauschberg's name appeared frequently in Steve's rap sheet. She was the girlfriend just before Jami. When Greg Mains talked to her, he realized she was still terribly afraid of Steve. But Bettina finally opened up and told Mains how often she had feared Steve was going to kill her. She gave Mains the name of the woman who had befriended her in Balboa Beach years before.
Interestingly, when Mains located Marj Tuttle* and said he was calling about Bettina Rauschberg, Marj gasped. She told him, "When I heard you were calling about Bettina, and that you were a detective, I knew it was an almost absolute certainty that the reason you were calling me was to let me know she had been killed.… I was wondering if she had died back then [1984] or recently and he had dumped her body."
It had been five years since Marj had seen Bettina, but she remembered a grotesque encounter with Steve Sherer very clearly. From her description of Bettina, she might have been describing Jami. "She was a very pretty girl, very thin… real young," Marj recalled of the girl she met at the accounting firm where they both worked. "I believe she was nineteen years old then, with blond, very curly, long hair. She took very good care of herself. She was a really nice, sweet— a very innocent— young girl."
Marj, who was twenty-six at the time she met Bet
tina, told Mains that Bettina had come to work with a black eye. "She said her boyfriend had hit her."
Marj said she'd met Bettina's boyfriend only once and described Steve Sherer as "blond-haired and very good-looking. Back in those days we called 'em surfer dudes."
After she'd been beaten and left with a black eye, Bettina had accepted an offer to move in with Marj and her husband. "She drove her own car and followed me to get her things. I remember we walked into her apartment and there were small stuffed animals and dolls lying there with their heads cut off. There was a butcher knife there on the floor."
It was a huge butcher knife, Marj told Mains, bigger than any she had ever seen, and she was sure it was sharp enough to cut off someone's head.
Marj thought there must have been forty little toy animals and about a dozen dolls scattered around, their little heads rolling. Most of all, she remembered the note: "It said, 'If you ever leave me, that's what I'm going to do to you— cut your head off the same way.' "
Marj said that Bettina hadn't been intimidated into staying— not at that point. She had followed Marj and her husband and daughter to their house and stayed with them for a few weeks. But then Bettina's mother had become concerned because Marj was a Jehovah's Witness.
"I don't think her mom really understood the situation," Marj said. "I was a complete stranger to her and she evidently knew Steve. She encouraged Bettina to go back to her boyfriend and move back to Washington. She left within a day or two and went home. And I never heard from her again after that. I was always afraid of what might have happened to her."
Marj was sad for Jami, a woman she never knew, but she was relieved that it was not Bettina who was dead. Marj reiterated, "I remember making the statement to my husband, 'She'll probably wind up dead if she goes back to him.' "
Bettina was still alive, but Greg Mains could see she dreaded coming face-to-face with Steve again. In one of his interviews with her, Bettina told Mains how cruel Steve had been to Jami in the mid-eighties when he was going back and forth between Jami and her. If she had ever been jealous of Jami, Bettina said she got over that quickly and was simply grateful to be free— and alive. "One time we were all in my spare bedroom," Bettina recalled, "and he said he wanted to come back to me. Jami was upset and crying. He just picked up a vase or something and hit Jami on the head with it."
After Jami disappeared, Bettina said she had seen Steve twice. "Once I ran into him in a video store and he came up to me and grabbed my arm. He said he really needed to talk to me. He started talking about Chris, and saying, 'He's a nice boy, he'd like you.' I told him, 'Get away from me!' "
Bettina saw Steve again at the Flamingos in the Alderwood Mall in Lynnwood, and he was obviously very drunk. "He was crying," she remembered, "and saying that Jami hated me. I don't think she did. He was talking about her disappearance and he said, 'A drug dealer probably got her.' "
Bettina ran from the club, but before she could get her car started, Steve jumped in. "I had a charcoal Mazda RX7, like Jami's, and Steve said, 'You stole Jami's car.' Then he kept saying, 'I never meant to hurt you.… I never meant to hurt Jami.… I never meant to hurt you.'
"He told me what he'd said before— that he believed a drug dealer probably got her."
The Redmond investigators also talked to Sara Smith, the wife of Steve's old friend, the woman who had eaten pizza with Jami the year before she died. Jami had opened up to Sara, telling her how miserable she was with Steve.
"Jami and Steve came to our wedding in August 1990," Sara told Greg Mains and Mike Faddis. "And I talked to Steve two weeks after Jami disappeared. He called me between 1:00 and 2:00 A.M. and said he was lonely and how much he loved Jami. He told me he thought Jami might have been kidnapped. And then he said, 'We probably wouldn't have anything in common to have an affair.' I was taken aback! He said that he and Jami had a good sex life, and he missed the sex."
Sara had only been married for two months, and Steve was slyly suggesting she have an affair with him. When Sara turned him down, he asked for her sister's phone number.
As one source passed them on to another, Mains and Faddis realized that Steve Sherer probably tried to pick up almost every attractive woman he encountered. The two detectives reported to Lieutenant Jim Taylor that their investigation was turning up more and more women whom Steve had approached for dates. Most men would have been out searching for their missing wives, but not Steve Sherer. Within two weeks of "losing" his wife, Steve had begun to date other women. He had evidently approached women from his past, his friends' wives, and their girlfriends first.
One woman contacted the Redmond police with a rather bizarre story. "I went on one date with him— that Steve Sherer," she said.
"When?"
"In 1990— in November, I believe."
The woman, Margaret Ryan,* had an amazingly precise memory. She recalled that she had taken her car, a red Corvette, to be washed on a Wednesday. She knew it was a Wednesday because it was two days after that when she had her one and only date with Steve Sherer. He had been driving an S-10 Blazer two-tone, blue-and-white. Margaret knew cars, and her own car was a classic. Paradoxically, she was a woman who looked more like a spinster librarian than a car buff. Nevertheless, Steve smiled at her as she stood at the car wash desk waiting for her key.
"It was pretty busy, and he just came up and started talking to me— said hi and introduced himself. And we talked— you know, small talk," she said. "But he asked me if I wanted to go on a date sometime, and he seemed nice. So I said yes."
They exchanged phone numbers, and although they had spoken for only ten or fifteen minutes, Steve called Margaret that very evening. She could not remember the spot, but she arranged to met him someplace on Friday night. She got in his Blazer and he headed toward a residential neighborhood in Redmond. He was taking her to his house. As they drove, he told her that he was a recent widower and that he had lost his wife in a car accident.
Steve's voice faltered, and she supposed that the death of his wife was a very emotional subject so she didn't pursue it.
He pulled into a driveway of a home, but it was very dark outside, so she didn't think she could identify the house again.
"It was a split-level," she said. "I don't remember what color it was, and it had a driveway that was sort of
elevated. The living room was on the left and then the dining room right after that and then the kitchen was like right in front." Margaret closed her eyes to remember. "And then we went left. There was a bedroom on the right side that was full of kids' stuff. It was very clean."
She had the floor plan right; that fit the house Steve and Jami had lived in.
She recalled that Steve showed her around, pointing things out, and then led her into the master bedroom. "We just sat on the bed and we were talking."
Steve explained that his child or children— she wasn't sure how many— were at their grandmother's house. He soon began to talk about his wife. "I was wearing a pearl necklace at the time, and he told me that it wasn't real, after he rubbed a pearl on his tooth. And he said he would show me a real pearl necklace. So he went into a closet. He pulled out a pearl necklace and told me that was real and he had bought that for his wife."
At that point, she said, Steve teared up and began to sob. "He was talking about his ex-wife or dead wife or whatever," Margaret said. "And then he brought up the subject of a heart, a diamond heart necklace that he had bought her and went to the closet and took it out and showed it to me, and he got very emotional."
It wasn't the best first date Margaret Ryan had ever had. Steve seemed to her to be not only grief-stricken but somehow guilty. That was the only way she could explain it.
After he showed her the diamond pendant and stopped sobbing, Steve surprised Margaret by lunging at her as she sat on the bed. He pushed her backward and kissed her hard on the lips. "I got bad vibes," she said, "because of the forcefulness of it. I decided that this was not a comfortable situation for me."
When she stood up from the bed and said, "Let's go," Steve stopped trying to force himself on her. They left his house and went out to eat at Azteca, a Mexican restaurant.
Steve never called her for another date, which was fine with Margaret. She didn't think about him again for years, until she saw his face on television in connection with the reopening of the investigation into his wife's disappearance.
Since he had told her several times that his wife had died in a car crash, she was surprised that he was being investigated for the possibility that he had murdered his wife. She was also troubled, of course. Margaret Ryan suffered from agoraphobia, from the Greek for "fear of the marketplace" or, in modern terms, fear of leaving home. Margaret had taken a chance by accepting a date with Steve Sherer, and that had done nothing at all to alleviate her panic attacks.
Over the years since Jamie was gone, Steve became so consumed with meeting women that he almost seemed to suffer from satyriasis, an obsessive and often uncontrollable sexual desire in men, similar to nymphomania in women. Greg Mains and Mike Faddis learned that Steve was a member of several singles clubs on the east side. He also spent a lot of time on his computer making contacts with women all over the world.
He had leaped upon Margaret Ryan only moments after he sobbed at the sight of Jami's diamond heart pendant. Apparently he used any line that he thought would work to add to his roster of women. Was he really grieving for Jami? Or was he posing as a bereaved widower just to soften women up?
Grieving widowers are lonely, but most of them wait
a respectful length of time before they seek out female companionship. Steve Sherer had never shown grief, sadness, or loneliness about losing Jami. The only mourning anyone had noted was for Steve himself, as he asked why such a tragedy should have happened to
him.
Never once had he voiced sorrow or concern for Jami, or for Chris over the loss of his mother. Jami's friend Lisa Cryder had seen Steve out partying with a girl only weeks after Jami's disappearance.