Empty Promises (7 page)

6

In 1990, Jami Sherer was twenty-six years old, and she had made some terrible choices in her life. She was not perfect, but she was a loyal daughter and sister, a wonderful mother and a dependable and intelligent employee. Then something happened that gave her hope that she could divorce Steve and leave all the bad memories behind. Ironically, it was Steve himself who introduced her to the man who would be the catalyst for her leaving. Lew Adams* was no prize; like Steve, he was addicted to cocaine. Technically, he was married, but he was separated from his wife. He was certainly not a man a woman should base her hopes on, but to Jami he looked like a lifeline. She came to know Lew because he was one of the sources of Steve's cocaine supply. Steve often suggested that Lew come home with him to make up a sexual threesome. He sometimes insisted that Lew spend the night on their living room couch. Steve even boasted to Lew that he enjoyed the idea of watching Jami with another man, but added that he would kill her if she ever cheated on him.
When Lew met Jami Sherer, his heart melted. She was a dainty little thing with huge dark eyes and a tremulous smile. Although Steve treated her badly, she never fought back. Lew soon learned that Steve had a way of making people do what he wanted. He wanted to see Jami again, but not with Steve anywhere around. Lew certainly wasn't in a position to offer her anything but a shoulder to cry on and an understanding ear, but he called Jami at Microsoft, and she was touched that he had. He felt sorry for Jami. He listened to her and told her she didn't deserve Steve's abuse.
Lew was a few years older than Steve, five feet ten, and a slender 160 pounds. He was handsome enough, but in a dissipated, tight-wired way that reflected his addiction. Lew had graduated from high school in 1978, but his recall of the eighties was only a drugged blur. He took a job with Costco, the huge warehouse-store chain based in Washington State. Later he transferred to a new branch that opened in California as the company boomed. But when the company cut back its work force, Lew was one of the first to go.
He later admitted that his cocaine use was out of control. He dealt from an ounce to five or six ounces at a time in order to supply his own needs. He snorted enough, however, to damage his nasal membranes. Concerned, he had gone to a doctor who told him, "I can't help you. You have to help yourself."
Lew did himself little good; all he did was switch to freebasing crack cocaine. His dealing was a penny-ante operation: He took buyers' money, bought some crack, kept a little, and gave the rest to his buyers. During those years, he married a pretty young woman, Dru Adams,* who worked for the warehouse stores, and they had two children. "I stole to support my habit," he
admitted, "and to support my family. I didn't get caught every time I stole."
By 1990, Lew Adams was separated from his wife and living with his parents in the north end of Seattle. He had a job with a local Chevrolet dealer where he repaired used cars that were turned in for new models. He continued to sell cocaine, and Steve Sherer was one of his customers. There were parallels certainly between Steve Sherer and Lew Adams, but there were just as many areas where they differed: Lew had a conscience, no matter how deep he tried to bury it. Lew also respected women, and he did not believe in mistreating them.
His fledgling relationship with Jami was no storybook romance. How could it be? Steve was orchestrating the whole thing. Steve even urged Lew to make the first call to Jami at work, although she didn't know it. Steve had decided that Lew would be part of their first threesome.
Jami was drowning, starving, and struggling to be free of Steve. In her desperation, she perceived a great deal more in Lew Adams than he was able to provide. He was as embarrassed by Steve's sexual scenarios as Jami was.
Meanwhile, by September 1990, Jami's friends at Microsoft saw a change in her. For the first time in a long time, she seemed optimistic as she told them she'd met a man who really seemed to care about her. She was like a schoolgirl when she talked about Lew, and even though they could see trouble ahead, her friends were so glad to see Jami smile again that they didn't have the heart to tell her to slow down. Surely she didn't have to be reminded that there would be trouble if Steve found out. They had no inkling that Steve had set it all up.
Lew and Jami spoke on the phone a few times during the final days of the month. They met on Thursday, September 27, and Jami confided to several friends that
she was going to see him alone on the weekend. On Friday, Jami told Brenda Yamamoto that she was so happy— she was going to meet Lew on Saturday.
Kay Eck, who always felt like a kind of mother figure to Jami at Microsoft, recalled talking with her that week. "She put on a good front," Kay said, "[but] she felt like someone was stalking her for a few weeks.… She had hang-up phone calls. But she was so happy on Friday [September 28] —like a weight was lifted from her shoulders."
That bright and sunny final week of September 1990 stood out in many people's minds. Lisa Cryder recalled it well. She and Jami had been friends since they were little girls playing in front of their houses in Bellevue, and they'd ridden horses together. "Then in the middle of the eighth grade," Lisa said, "my mother got remarried. Jami was an eastside kid and we moved across Lake Washington to Seattle, but we stayed friends."
Lisa and Jami became really close again as adults when they gave birth to their babies only nine months apart. They got together to do fun things with their infants. At first, Lisa was surprised at Jami's changed physical appearance, but she soon realized that she was the same Jami underneath. Lisa's reaction to Steve, however, was similar to that of Jami's other friends; she was outraged by the way he treated Jami. On the last Saturday of September, Jami confided to Lisa, "I've met someone who listens to me— who's comforting me."
Lisa was glad for Jami. "I told her to leave Steven," Lisa said, "that she should divorce him."
Lisa offered Jami a place to run to. Her own marriage wasn't working well, and she and her husband were about to embark on a ninety-day trial separation. There was room in her Rose Hill home for Jami and
Chris. This time, Jami said yes. She was enthusiastic about moving in with Lisa.
Jami was finally ready to leave Steve. She knew he would be furious, but she felt strong enough to face him. If it meant leaving her house too, that was the price she would have to pay.
Jami Sherer was playing a dangerous game, though. In order to spend Saturday, September 29, with Lew Adams, she told several untruths: She told her mother that Lisa had an advertising promotion event in Tacoma on Saturday, and she was going with her. She told Steve the same thing. She was lying to both of them, something that she had never done until she met Steve. Other things about her personality had changed; they were ways of surviving. Jami learned to be devious from a master, doing what she had to do to avoid violent fights, but she was ill equipped for deceit. She didn't feel strong enough to face life alone, so she lied about her date with Lew. Steve had undermined her self-confidence to a point where she couldn't leave him until she had another man to leap to.
The old Jami would never have considered Lew Adams a safe jumping-off spot, but she no longer felt pretty or smart or interesting or lovable. Steve had chipped away at her self-esteem with his constant derogatory comments. If she had ever really been his "little rose," he'd long since forgotten about that and all the promises he'd made to her.
On Friday night, Jami visited her parents and left Chris with her mother. On Saturday, she spent the day with Lew Adams. Remarkably for her, when Jami found out that her mother had to work on Saturday morning until almost noon, Jami had agreed to leave Chris with Steve for a few hours. But Steve called Judy
Hagel in a short time and said he had decided to go out himself and he was going to bring Chris to her.
It was a fairly ordinary Saturday for the Hagels; they often had Chris on weekends. Steve picked him up at about five-thirty that evening, and Judy assumed Jami would be home at the Redmond house within half an hour. But Jami called her mother about seven and said that she would be a little bit late.
"I told her to call and tell Steve that," Judy remembered. "So she did and Steve brought Chris back over to our house and left him with us and went out."
Jami's twin brothers, Rich and Rob, went out with Steve. They would remember later how angry he seemed and that he spoke again of what he would do to Jami if he ever caught her being unfaithful.
At 2:00 A.M., Judy Hagel answered her phone and it was Steve asking if Jami was at her house. She could tell he was on something, but didn't comment on it. "I said, 'No, Jami isn't here,' " she recalled, "and then I didn't hear from him again until he called one more time and asked for her."
Judy was concerned. She had never known Jami to stay out so late, but Jami knew that Chris was safe with Judy, so maybe she had gone to Lisa's to sleep. Judy tried to tell herself that.
Steve called Judy Hagel again at seven-thirty in the morning to tell her that Jami had come home and was on her way to the Hagels'.
That was a relief for Judy, who felt that her worries of the night before had been silly. "I gave Jami a big hug, and she walked in and Jerry was sitting at the table. She crawled up on Jerry's lap and she said, 'Daddy, I want to come home.' So we said,
'Okay!
Gladly!' "
Judy could tell that Jami had something on her mind, so she asked her husband to take Chris downstairs so they could talk. "I asked her what was going on. I said, 'Where were you last night?' "
"I was with Lew— he's a friend of Steve's. We went out for a pizza."
"Why?"
"Because he's somebody to talk to. He understands what's going on." "Jami," Judy sighed, "you're not improving yourself any here. Where does he work?"
Jami had mentioned "Costco, in Lynnwood," but Judy wasn't sure if Jami had said that Lew or his wife, Dru, worked there or if she'd said that both of them worked there. All in all, it didn't sound good to her. Why on earth would Jami go out for a pizza and stay out all night with some friend of Steve's? Why hadn't Jami talked to Dru about her worries? If anyone understood how awful Jami's marriage was, Judy thought it would be Dru.
Jami never got a chance to explain the situation to her mother because the phone began to ring. "It was him [Steve] calling for her, and I said, 'Give us time to talk,' and I hung up. We didn't even get to sit down at the table before he was on the phone again, and she kept saying 'I don't want to talk to him— I don't want to talk to him,' and it just kept on ringing. I finally said, 'Jami, you've got to talk to him, just for a minute.' "
Judy was surprised to finally hear Jami say, "Steve, it's over. I don't love you anymore. I want a divorce. It's over."
But as flatly insistent as Jami was, Judy could tell that Steve was wearing her down, begging for a meeting.
"Finally," Judy remembered, "she says, 'Okay. I'll meet you down the hill at the Samena Club.' I asked her
not to go, and she went to get Chris, but Chris was still in his jammies, so she left him with me. I said, 'Well, Jami, I don't want you to go.' She walked out the door, and she said, 'All he can do is kill me, Mom.' "
Judy ran after Jami, calling, "I'm going to give you twenty minutes, and then I'm going to be down there."
The house was quiet, as the clock ticked way past twenty minutes. Frantic, Judy called Jerry and asked him to go down to the Samena Club. "Please go over there!"
And then it was all right again. At 8:40, before Jerry could even run to their car, the phone rang, and it was Jami. She told her mother she was at home. She was a little upset because when she drove up to meet Steve, he jumped into her car, grabbed her purse, and ran off with it. Jami said she knew he'd taken it to their house, so she drove there to get it back and to pack a few clothes for herself and Chris.
"Jami," Judy said with frustration, "You can't keep going back to him. If you're going to leave him, you're going to leave him. You can't say you're going to do it and keep going back."
"Mom," Jami said firmly, "this time I mean it."
"And I knew she did," Judy said later. "I knew she meant it. She went and got clothes for Chris. I asked her to please hurry and come home. She said, 'I'm just going to jump in the shower and change clothes and I'll be there.' "
It was a morning suspended in time, where every event would be frozen in Judy Hagel's mind. She was frightened, but she kept telling herself there was no need to be. At last Jami was coming back to them. Judy stayed close to the phone all morning, holding her breath as she waited for Jami to call.
"I didn't hear from her again until a quarter to twelve," Judy said. "She called me and said, 'Hi Mom! I'm on my way; I'm going to be stopping at Taco Time,' because she always used to stop by Taco Time and bring the food to the house and eat it there.… She said, 'I'll be there.'
"And she never came."
Jami should have been in and out of Taco Time within a few minutes, and the drive from her house in Redmond to her parents' home in Bellevue shouldn't have taken more than twenty minutes. Judy told herself that Jami must have run some other errand on the way. She looked after Chris and armed herself for a typical barrage of phone calls from Steve. Sure enough, he called at 12:15 and asked for Jami. Told she wasn't there yet, he hung up, only to call again at 12:30. Jami still wasn't there, and Judy told him so.
She expected him to follow his usual pattern and call every fifteen minutes until Jami got there, but he didn't. Steve didn't call the Hagels again until 6:30 that evening. Judy's heart sank; that surely meant that he had found Jami and the two of them were together, with Steve begging Jami to forget all the nonsense about leaving him. He was so good at talking circles around Jami.
Or maybe Jami was with Lisa Cryder, working out the details of their plan to move in together, or with someone else. Judy just didn't know.
Steve had said he was coming to get Chris, but when he got there, Judy smelled alcohol on his breath. He wasn't supposed to be drinking. She didn't want him driving like that with Chris in the car, so she invited Steve to stay the night. He refused, took his two-year-old son and left.
Judy still hadn't heard from Jami and she was beginning to feel very anxious. "About nine or nine-thirty,"