Empty Promises (15 page)

14

Judge Robert Lasnik was appointed to the Washington State Supreme Court, and Superior Court Judge Bill Downing took over as the inquiry judge in the matter of Steve Sherer. Steve was fully aware now that the IJ was hearing witnesses for the second time. He scoffed to friends, "I don't know why they keep looking for Jami— there's nothing to find."
Steve finished his eight-month jail sentence on May 24, 1999. He knew who his enemies were, and his rage erupted within a short time. Incensed by Lieutenant Jim Taylor and Marilyn Brenneman's unrelenting investigation of his life, Sherer made three incredibly stupid
phone calls. Taylor had given Steve his business card eighteen months before, and for some reason, he'd kept it in his wallet ever since.
His first call was to Taylor: "Hey, Lieutenant Dickhead," Steve snarled. "Now that I'm out, why don't you come fuck with me now, you piece of shit," and he hung up.
He called back: "I want you to stop messing with me. If you don't have [the investigators] back off, I'm going to go out and cut someone's fucking throat."
Taylor signaled frantically to Greg Mains to come to his desk and gestured for him to write down what he was saying. He had no recording device on his phone, so Taylor deliberately repeated everything Steve was saying to him. "What you're telling me, Mr. Sherer," Taylor said calmly, "is that if I don't have my detectives back off, you're going to go out and cut somebody's fucking throat? Is that right?" Greg Mains wrote down the whole call, just as Taylor was repeating it. There was a click and the line went dead.
Marilyn Brenneman wasn't in her office when Steve called her, so he left a message on her answering machine: "This is Steve Sherer. I'm out now and I want to talk to you. You better call me back. I want what's mine. I want my wife's car back. I want her ring back. I want it
all
back. I'm not gonna go away. You better not fuck with me. It's my turn to fuck with you. You'd
better
call me back." There was a short pause and then he said, "Have a good life."
When she listened to the message, Brenneman doubted that he meant the last part of his message, but she believed the first part absolutely.
Sherer had just committed a felony: Threatening a public official with bodily harm is against the law. He
had been more explicit with Jim Taylor, however. Steve had been out of jail less than a month, and he was about to go back in. On June 23, 1999, he was arrested by King County sheriff's deputies. Seattle District Court Judge Eileen Kato set his bail at $30,000, cash only.
Steve told the judge he had no money for bail. He asked to be released so he could make a court appearance in Wenatchee, Washington, where he had posted $6,100 bail for traffic violations. His protestations were to no avail.
The court record was sealed. The public knew only that Steve had been arrested for allegedly threatening a Redmond police officer and a King County senior deputy prosecutor whose names were not given.
Eventually, Steve's family came up with his bail and he was free again. He moved into his mother's Mill Creek home.
Jim Taylor and Marilyn Brenneman had bigger fish to fry than the threat charges. The inquiry judge had finally decided that there was indeed enough evidence to make the reasonable assumption that a crime had been committed: the murder of Jami Sherer. They had a massive amount of circumstantial evidence, dozens of witnesses, and the "autopsy" of Steve Sherer that Jim Taylor had sent Greg Mains and Mike Faddis out to create.
Beginning in early January 2000, Redmond detectives and the FBI worked a round-the-clock stakeout of Sherri Schielke's Mill Creek home and Steve's usual haunts. Steve must have felt the net ready to drop over him. Armed with an arrest warrant, Greg Mains and Mike Faddis waited on Friday morning, January 7, at the office of Steve's probation officer in Lynnwood, but Steve did not show up for his appointment. For the next twenty-four hours, the Redmond investigators searched
the area around the Schielkes' Mill Creek home without spotting Steve. All local police agencies were asked to have their personnel watch for him.
On Saturday FBI agents, watching for any activity around Steve's mother's home, spotted one of Steve's friends knocking on the door. The agents slid through the tall evergreens in the yard and were standing behind the friend when Steve opened the door. Before he could protest, they grabbed him.
Nine years and three months after Jami Sherer vanished into some never-never land where no one could find her, the man who was the main suspect in her disappearance was at last in police custody. At 1:00 P.M. on January 8, Steven Sherer was arrested on a charge of first-degree murder. His bail was set at a million dollars.
The Redmond detectives and Marilyn Brenneman did not release much information: "We have unearthed every bit of information possible on this case," Jim Taylor said. "Now it will be judged by a jury of his peers."
"I'm not going to deny this is a circumstantial case," Marilyn Brenneman said. "But we believe the charging documents show a very strong case, and we're prepared to go to trial. We are just convinced a jury should hear the evidence, and when they do, they will do the right thing."
Sherri Schielke hired Peter Mair and his associate, Peter Camiel, to defend Steve on the first-degree charges. Marilyn Brenneman would lead the prosecuting team, which included co-counsels Hank Corscadden and Senior Deputy King County Prosecutor Kristin Richardson. Trial was set for May.
On the evening of April 14, Greg Mains and Detective Anne Malins prepared to execute a warrant on the Schielke residence. The warrant specified that they would search the entire house and the vehicles parked
there for Steve Sherer's personal papers and the suitcase he reportedly carried with him from state to state. According to their information, Chris Sherer should have left after visiting Sherri Schielke by the time they served the search warrant. Mains and Malins rang the doorbell at the front door of the large Heatherstone residence. There was no response and no noise from inside the house. But a car belonging to Steve's sister Laura was parked in the driveway, along with a pickup truck and another car. They knocked on the door and this time Laura came to the door. The whole family seemed to be there: Laura, Saundra, Chris, and Sherri Schielke.
Mains and Malins saw that a birthday party planned for Chris Sherer that Friday evening was still going on, and they were sorry to interrupt. The last thing they wanted to do was to hurt twelve-year-old Chris any more than he had already been hurt. His mother was dead and his father was in jail awaiting trial for first-degree murder. Sherri asked them to wait an hour before they began to search. But of course they could not do that. Had they known, they would have arrived later, but once they were there, they could not leave for fear that vital evidence might be moved or disposed of. They had no choice but to proceed with the search.
Sherri led them to the guest room and pointed out a suitcase with a Greyhound tag on it. There was nothing in it. They didn't find the blue suitcase that he carried with him always. It wasn't anywhere in the large two-story home.
A few days after the Redmond detectives left, carrying away the items they had found that were listed on the search warrant, Sherri happened to be in her garage. There she saw the blue suitcase that Steve took with
him whenever he moved. "I thought he had left it in Arizona," she commented later. "The last time he came home, he was on a bus."
Sherri told Steve's attorney, Pete Mair, that she had found the blue suitcase and that she didn't want to give it to the detectives. He explained to her that he had no choice; as an officer of the court he could not withhold evidence from the police. He called them on April 20 to say that the blue suitcase was in his office.
At last, the battered pale blue suitcase was turned over to Taylor, Mains, and Faddis. With some trepidation about what they might find, they undid the buckles and straps. Jami Sherer had been tiny, and although they didn't say it out loud, they all had the same thought: Could Jami's remains be inside?
In a sense, they were. Steve Sherer had kept things in this heavy suitcase that represented Jami to him. There were numerous pieces of clothing in sizes so small they would have fit a child, but they were not childlike: a sheer black negligee, a black bra, a black slip, the black leather skirt he had asked other women to try on, and elbow-length black gloves. There were eight pairs of transparent bikini and thong panties in various colors, a bikini bathing suit, and a black silk dress with a peplum and a pattern of pink, white, and purple tropical flowers. In contrast, he had also packed Jami's long-sleeved cotton nightshirts and her T-shirts that said "Super Mom" and "Moms Are Wonderful People!" The suitcase also contained their bowling shirts and a key to a Mazda.
Jami's clothes were as light as gossamer, but their wedding album and yearbooks were heavier. There were framed pictures, and for some reason, Steve had carried Jami's accordion file with all her paperwork everywhere he went: IRS receipts, credit card bills, and
anything Steve could find with Jami's distinctive rounded script. The file also held the contract for her car loan. She had put $3,000 down on the $11,429.26 cost of her Mazda and carefully taken out insurance to cover the loan if she was disabled or deceased; Judy Hagel had co-signed for the car loan.
The way she kept such careful track of her bills and records helped the investigators to know Jami; she had been Steve's opposite. He honored no contracts or bills, while Jami had been meticulous and dependable. The clothes Steve kept were mostly her Barbie clothes, but a few of them must have brought back an image of Jami in the kitchen, fixing breakfast or feeding Chris.
How bizarre that a man who began dating two weeks after his wife disappeared should have carried the essence of her with him for almost a decade. "He had it all," Marilyn Brenneman commented. "A beautiful wife who loved him, a wonderful little boy, and they would have been rich by now. And he destroyed it."

15

Steve Sherer's trial for the murder of his wife was set for April 17, 2000. The trial was held in King County Superior Court Judge Anthony Wartnik's courtroom, but it took until May 3 before a jury was selected: half women and half men, who looked to be from their early thirties to their early seventies.
The courthouse had once been majestic, but it now
faced demolition. Seismologists had declared its marble halls unsafe in case of a major earthquake. The wooden gallery benches seemed to turn to stone after a few hours, but Judge Wartnik's courtroom was as modern as any, with paintings gracing the wall, and plants drooping in the windowless room.
Brenneman, Corscadden, and Richardson sat on the left side of the courtroom. Flanked by defense attorneys Peter Camiel and Pete Mair, Steve Sherer sat at a table facing Judge Wartnik. The twelve jurors and four alternates sat in padded chairs that were the envy of the spectators. Both the Hagels and the Sherer-Schielkes were represented each day by a dozen or more family members and friends. Since he knew it would be a long trial, Judge Wartnik decreed the two families would alternate sitting in rows two and three on a weekly basis.
Despite his effect on the women in his life, Steve Sherer was not a prepossessing man. He was short with very small hands and feet. His California blond hair had grown out to its natural faded brown, and it looked as if it had been cut by an amateur. The jury never saw the long, wavy hair and goatee he usually affected. He wore slacks and a jacket that didn't match, an open-necked shirt without a tie, and white socks with black shoes. To those who knew nothing of his background, he appeared to be a weak, almost pathetic-looking man down on his luck. That may well have been the image the defense wanted. He never looked at the gallery except when he stood up to be handcuffed during breaks in the trial. And then his icy eyes swept the reporters who sat on the front bench.
The rage was still there, but it was suppressed.

* * *

Marilyn Brenneman made the opening statement for the prosecution. Brenneman, tall and attractive with
thick, blunt-cut hair that tumbled over her forehead when she concentrated intensely, looked from one juror to another and told them that Jami Sherer had never been found and possibly never would be: "Jami was a devoted mother who never would have absented herself from her young son's life. And [Sherer] has a long history of control and domestic violence against Jami."
She described a chaotic, abusive four-year marriage that ended when the defendant "hit [Jami] in the face, and she bled. Ten years ago there was a vicious punch to the face, a rush of blood, and a fall." Brenneman promised to present a witness who would recall Steve Sherer's description of Jami's fall down a flight of stairs and her death.
There was a suitcase and the jury would see "items in the suitcase that are all that is left of the life of Jami Sherer."
Sherer, Brenneman pointed out, didn't participate in the search for his missing wife, began dating other women two weeks after she vanished, cashed in her stock options, and spent her vacation and sick-leave pay.
"Jami Sherer vanished without a trace," Brenneman said. "She left behind a loving family. She left behind her friends. She left behind all her worldly possessions. And she left behind her most precious possession of all, her two-year-old son, Chris."
Steve Sherer rested his head on his hand, and shook his head from time to time as Brenneman spoke. Other than that, he showed no emotion at all.
Pete Mair, a onetime football star, rose to give the defense's opening statement, favoring knees damaged by his gridiron days. His attitude was deprecating, and he stopped just short of being amused that the state would bring such a "flimsy" case into court.
Mair didn't deny that his client's marriage had been stormy and that he had once pulled out a clump of Jami Sherer's hair during an argument. "You may not like him," Mair told the jurors, "but proving a first-degree murder case is a big jump. At the end of this case, we'll be where we were in 1990— with an unsolved mystery, as unpleasant as it is."
Mair said there was not even conclusive evidence that Jami was dead, although he allowed that she probably was. "Proof," he reminded the jurors, "has to be beyond a reasonable doubt."
Mair characterized Steve Sherer as an innocent widower being falsely accused, even badgered, by detectives whose investigation was based on the recent memories of a cast of shady characters, one of whom might even be the real killer.
And it was certainly true enough that the prosecution's roster of witnesses contained characters whose own histories were not stellar. Brenneman, Corscadden, and Richardson knew that. But Steve Sherer was a man whose life revolved around drugs and sex, and he interacted with people with similar interests.
The previous Halloween, Steve had sent his son Chris a card from jail, perhaps the most honest communication he ever had with his son: "You have my bad blood in you. Don't do drugs and alcohol. They've ruined my life.… But you have your mother's blood, too. I'll be watching you."
Lew Adams took the stand on May 11. He was one of the witnesses the gallery was most curious about, the man who had spent the last night of Jami Sherer's life with her on that Saturday, September 29, 1990, at the Crest Motel. He was thin and tightly wired, wearing a
long-sleeved silk shirt with a bright pattern. He had dark circles under his eyes.
As Marilyn Brenneman questioned him, Adams almost vibrated with tension.
"When did you learn that Jami Sherer was missing?"
"Early on Monday morning. I was sleeping, and my mother woke me up and said Jami was missing, and then she said, 'What's going on? Who is this Jami?' "
Lew Adams admitted that he had spent Saturday, September 29, with Jami. "I had no intentions toward her. She was beautiful— a special lady. We both had problems in our marriages."
Tears streamed down Adams's face and choked his voice as he berated himself, still, for letting Jami go home to an angry husband.
Mair grilled Adams hard, but the witness insisted he would never hurt a woman. Yes, he'd fought once with his wife, and they'd thrown food at each other. Yes, he had dealt drugs and used drugs.
Lew Adams's ex-wife took the stand. She recalled that fight. It was in September 1997. Lew
had
kicked at her and pushed her down, even smeared his lunch in her face, but she had spit in it, she admitted.
The defense maintained that Dru Adams had told police that Lew told her during that fight, "I've killed before. I can kill again." Dru, who had known Lew longer than anybody, said that "he wouldn't have the guts to hurt anyone. If he did have the guts to hurt anyone, he would have hurt me— and I'm still here."
It was obvious that Dru Adams no longer cared for Lew, but just as obvious that she hadn't left him because he was violent or abusive. She was embarrassed to have been dragged into the trial, and she left the courtroom hurriedly.
The prosecution called a number of tiny, attractive young blondes who had been involved with Steve and had left the relationships after being abused. Bettina Rauschberg hadn't seen Steve in years, but her fear of him was palpable as she entered the courtroom and took the stand, a position that forced her to face him. She described in detail her hospitalizations and the injuries she had suffered at Steve Sherer's hands.
One witness came as a complete surprise to the prosecution and the Redmond investigators. Her name was Connie Duncan.* In May 2000 she was twenty-five years old, but when she met Steve in 1991, she had been sixteen. She had called Marilyn Brenneman when Steve Sherer's trial was well under way.
"I happened to be home that day," Connie said. "My daughter was sick, so I had to stay home with her. The news was on and I wasn't even paying that close attention. And then I saw the courtroom, and I saw Steve. I didn't get to hear exactly what was going on because my daughter wouldn't stop talking to me. [But] I knew he was on trial for murder."
Connie worked for the state of Washington as a financial service specialist. She coached small children in gymnastics and soccer in her spare time.
Connie Duncan explained to Marilyn Brenneman that she had once dated Steve Sherer and remembered a long-ago nightmare trip to California with him. As she listened, Brenneman realized that
this
was the witness who would fill in a very important chink in the prosecution's case.
It was May 15 when Connie Duncan walked forward to be sworn in. It must have been a shock for Steve to see her again, but he maintained his compo
sure as he had done for most of the trial, his usual expression half-bland and half-glowering. Only rarely had jurors seen the icy threat in his eyes as he stared hard at a prosecution witness.
Connie Duncan fit the pattern; she was slender and softly pretty with dark blond hair. She looked remarkably like the huge Missing poster of Jami Sherer that had been propped up against the court clerk's desk during the prosecution's case.
Brenneman stood far back from her witness, near the alternate jurors' box, as she often did. She was not a prosecutor who got in witnesses' faces. "Could you tell us when you first met Mr. Sherer?" Marilyn Brenneman asked.
"I met him at Lake Chelan in August of 1991."
"How old were you?"
"Sixteen, seventeen years old."
The witness explained that she and her girlfriend had met Steve at a hamburger stand in the small town. He would have been thirty at that time, and he had charmed the teenagers. "We ended up staying at his mother's cabin.… We had planned on camping."
"How long do you think you stayed at the house with Mr. Sherer and his friends?" Brenneman asked.
"A couple of days."
"What was your relationship with Mr. Sherer in that couple of days?"
"It was an intimate relationship." Connie explained that she had dated Steve Sherer for a few months after that.
"Do you recall meeting Mr. Sherer in Seattle during those few months?"
"I went up to his house in Redmond that he had bought with Jami."
"When did you first hear about Jami Sherer?"
"It was after some time. It could have been a few weeks. At first I heard a different story than what I heard later."
"Tell me what you first heard."
"He was telling me about a situation where Jami was having sex with another guy, and he was watching. And he told me that a bigger, more powerful man had taken Jami away from him."
Connie explained that she had been spending the weekend with Steve at the time.
"Did he provide alcohol for you?"
"He always did."
"How about drugs?"
"Not at that point. I think that came later."
Connie testified that she had opened Steve's glove compartment and found a stack of flyers with a picture of Jami and her son on it. "One thing I remember is that he made the comment that it was a dumb picture because people thought that his son was missing also."
"Did you have further conversation?"
"He did fill me in a little bit on the disappearance. He said she went to Taco Bell or Taco Time and she disappeared, no trace after that. He stated they found her car later, abandoned."
Connie said that Steve drove past the Taco Time and showed it to her.
"In your conversations with the defendant about his ex-wife, did he ever show you any items of hers?" Brenneman asked.
"He had me try on a black skirt. At the time, I was very small. Obviously, after having a child, I am not anymore. But I remember it was snug."
"What size were you wearing then?"
"Between a three and a five. I would bounce back and forth between a hundred pounds to a hundred and five."
"And how tall are you?"
"Five-four."
Marilyn Brenneman showed Connie Jami's tiny black leather miniskirt, which they had found in the blue suitcase. "Do you recognize this?"
"Yes, I do. He actually bought me one that was very similar. Mine was suede." Connie Duncan testified that Steve kept the blue suitcase under his bed and that he pulled it out to get the skirt.
"Were there any other items in there?"
"I remember a dress that he said Jami had worn on some special occasion. I thought he also had me try on a jean shirt."
Connie recalled also that he had put a necklace around her neck. "He pulled it out of his closet. He had a safe in the closet."
"What was your response to putting these items on?"
"At first, I didn't think much about it. I was sixteen. I thought I was invincible. I did have a friend with me. She was sitting in the living room and I remember her remarks were something along the line of 'That's gross that you have got her clothes on.' I went and took them off."
"Did you have any further conversations with the defendant in the house about things that happened between him and Jami?"
"There is a spot by the stairs at the very top of the stairs where the kitchen is. There is a wall right here" —Connie pointed to the floor plan of the house on Education Hill— "and then a little wall right there, and the walkway. He told me he had gotten into an argument, fight, with Jami. And I don't know how he did it, but he had given her a bloody nose. I don't know if he
punched her or if he was trying to restrain her or elbowed her. He said he didn't mean to do it, but that he was sorry he did it, but that it had happened."
From her testimony, it was clear that Steve had confided many things to Connie Duncan, a thirty-year-old man telling secrets to a high school junior. He told her about the insurance scam in California and how he had taken things from his house and pretended they were stolen.
"I think he did it while [Jami] was at work. But anyway, one of the things he said was that with the [insurance] money he got her a boob job."
"Did you ever go on a trip with the defendant?" Marilyn Brenneman asked.
"There was one to Canada, and then there was one to California where he drove his truck down.… We stayed at a motel.
"He asked if he could go out with some of his friends because I wasn't twenty-one at the time. And I said, 'Sure.' And he was supposed to be back that night. And he never showed up. He never showed up. He finally showed up late the next afternoon, and he had been up the whole night. He was higher than a kite. He was very agitated, yelling at me. He wanted to go to sleep.
"When his mom came in, his attitude changed. He was totally nice, cordial. And we went to Disneyland with his mother and his son. And as we were getting on the little trolly train to go to Disneyland, Chris called me Mommy."
Marilyn Brennaman had asked Connie Duncan to bring a photograph of herself as she looked in 1991. Brenneman offered it as evidence that Connie had been a dead ringer for Jami. Little Chris Sherer had been confused. He continued to call Connie Mommy
throughout their Disneyland trip. Steve didn't correct him, but Sherri Schielke was upset. "Steve's mom jumped in right away," Connie testified, "to say, 'No, she is just a nice young lady.' "
By the end of the day, Steve had finally said, "No, Chris, she is not your mom."
Connie told the jurors that Steve had suggested some bizarre sexual arrangements. "He asked if one of my fantasies was to have two guys. He said that he had a friend that could fulfill it. I shot that down. I was sixteen, seventeen— that was inconceivable to me. And then he suggested about having sex with another woman while he watched. And I shot that one down too."
The trip to California only got worse. Steve was so "agitated," Connie testified, that she had to drive his truck home.
"When you got back, what was your state of mind as far as being with the defendant any longer?"
"I never wanted to see the man ever again. This is probably the first time I have seen him since."
Pete Mair cross-examined Connie. She admitted that she could have been off on the year of the California trip. It could have happened in 1993 rather than 1992. She also admitted that she drank alcohol before she met Steve; he hadn't introduced her to drinking.
But Connie Duncan was positive about her memory of Steve's telling her that Jami got a bloody nose at the top of the stairs in the Redmond house while she was fighting with Steve. The prosecution team and the Redmond detectives had believed all along that Jami Sherer died in her own home as she attempted to leave Steve for good. Connie Duncan wasn't the only witness who had heard that version of an injury to Jami.
"When did that statement occur?" Mair asked. "What year?"
"Well, it must have been 1991."
"What month?"
"I had on shorts. It must have been August— September, perhaps."