Empty Promises (10 page)

* * *

It was a stormy autumn, and the winter rains of the Northwest moved in to take the last of the golden leaves off the deciduous trees. Hunters fanned out in Washington State, hiking off-trail and through woods. Every year, men looking for deer and elk stumbled across a body or two, and 1990 was no different. But none of the weathered skulls turned out to be Jami Sherer's.
She hadn't used her credit cards or her checkbook, nor had she applied for new cards. She made no phone calls to her home. Weeks became months, and it was a new year.
For a time in January 1991, Redmond police officers and detectives put a round-the-clock surveillance on Steve Sherer, following him as he went to work, to card rooms, to bowling alleys, and home again.
Steve continued to attract police attention long after they stopped tailing him.
In June 1991 he got into a fight outside a bar in Bellevue with a man who pulled out a pistol and shot him in the forearm. He wasn't badly hurt. In 1992 he spent a short time in jail for violating his probation by using cocaine and failing to meet with his probation officer.
If Steve knew where Jami rested, he didn't visit her.
Her family had somehow gotten through the first Christmas without her. They could never have imagined how many more there would be before they would know what happened to her.

10

It would be virtually impossible to list all of the investigators and prosecutors who spent thousands of hours looking for Jami Sherer. She was precious to her family, but her life and her fate would soon become, in a different way, as valuable to the professionals who took over her case. Jami had once been the four-year-old who helped her mother raise her twin baby brothers, the bubbly little girl who was an indispensable member of the Hagel family, the popular teenager who seemed to have a wonderful future, and the responsible employee at Microsoft who was on her way up— but she had now become the photo image smiling from thousands of flyers in windows and tacked on telephone poles. She was a young wife and mother who had completely disappeared, and though her face was now familiar to thousands, her fate remained completely mysterious. The task of finding Jami Sherer was an awesome challenge. Several of the investigators who worked on her case in 1990 and 1991 finally announced that it was impossible to find Jami— that the case was, in the words of one detective, a "loser" that would never be solved. The years passed, and Jami's
case file was pushed to the back as new cases demanded attention.
Unless someone offered new information or confessed to harming Jami Sherer, the search for her was over. A new team of detectives would have to pick up the gauntlet flung down by those who termed the case hopeless. A relatively small police department like Redmond's might not have the resources to find a team like that.
Judy and Jerry Hagel, however, refused to give up. They tried another route: They hired a private investigator who came highly recommended. "He told me it was a cut-and-dried case," Judy recalled. "He promised that he would find Jami within six months. He said, 'No problem.' "
The P.I. traced Steve Sherer's battered Blazer to the Deep South, where he arranged to have a private lab test the rig for blood. There were positive reactions, which meant only that someone had shed blood in Steve's Blazer. After so long, it was impossible to determine whose blood it was or even whether it was animal or human blood. The sample wasn't large enough, and it had been years since Jami vanished.
For all anyone knew, Jami Hagel might never have bled at all. She was so delicate that it wouldn't have taken much to strangle her or break her neck.
"That first P.I. took our money," Judy said, "but he didn't find Jami— didn't come close. He found out it wasn't as cut-and-dried as he thought."
Stung once but desperate to have some closure to their pain, the Hagels hired another private investigator. Allegedly, this man was a retired FBI agent. That seemed to them to qualify him as a superior investigator. "We paid him, too," Judy recalled, "and nothing
happened. I told him that I felt sure there were friends and family connected to Steve who knew more than they were admitting and asked him to interview them. That day, I'd even taken a thousand dollars in cash with me to pay him because he said what I wanted would cost more than we'd already given him. But that wasn't enough either. The next day, I went back and gave him two thousand dollars. I waited a few days before I called to see if he'd learned anything. His phone was disconnected! He took our money and left us hanging."
Judy and Jerry Hagel never accepted that whoever had killed Jami— and they finally had to believe that she was dead— would escape punishment. The Hagels were awarded custody of Chris and raised him as they had raised their own four children. But Judy and her family had lost a good deal of faith in the system.
Judy Hagel, attractive, slender, and blond, was worn down from years of waiting and dashed hopes, and she was quietly angry that her daughter could disappear and apparently no one cared enough to try to find her.
By February 1997, Judy was out of patience. How could the world simply go on without Jami— or at least some acknowledgment that her daughter was important enough to merit a continuous investigation until her killer was arrested?
Three months later, Dr. Donald Reay, the King County Medical Examiner, officially declared Jami Hagel Sherer dead. He wasn't uncaring— not at all— but it had been almost seven years, and there were no indications at all that Jami still lived.
Judy Hagel marched down to the Redmond Police Department with fire in her eyes. "I've
had
it! Why doesn't
someone
try to find my daughter?" she demanded.

* * *

The City of Redmond had grown tremendously between 1990 and 2000, and there was a new city hall and police station. Most of the original detectives who had searched for Jami Sherer had retired or moved on to other departments or other professions. Sergeant Butch Watson had become a massage therapist. Detective Steve Hardwick was an investigator for an insurance company. They had given the investigation into Jami's disappearance their best efforts and anything more seemed futile.
In January 1997, Lieutenant James Taylor was appointed to head the major crimes unit of the Redmond Police Department. J.W.B. Taylor isn't easy to describe. More Irish than the Kennedy family, Taylor's unit is almost booby-trapped with Irish paraphernalia that would intimidate the stoutest Scandinavian— of which there are many in Seattle. Taylor marches with the Greater Seattle Pipe Band in kilt and full regalia, equally adept at bagpipes and drums. In August 2000 the Seattle group joined 10,000 other pipers and drummers in the Millennium March Past the Castle in Edinburgh, Scotland, to raise funds for the Marie Curie Cancer Nursing Service. Taylor's mother and father had marched the same royal mile fifty-eight years earlier with the Canadian and British forces, and his grandfather had marched one hundred years ago with the Gordon Highlanders.
In addition to being a police lieutenant, Taylor is a special agent with the Coast Guard Investigative Services, a board member of the American Association of Chiefs of Police, and a member of a task force that specializes in investigating Asian gang crime. As an investigator, he is also as stubborn as they come. He listened to Judy Hagel's harangue with interest— and sympathy. Like everyone else in his department he knew of the
disappearance of Jami Sherer, although he had been head of a traffic unit at the time she vanished. Now he pulled out the file on Jami Sherer and committed it to memory. The fact that it had been deemed an impossible case was probably what challenged him the most.
"I went down to where Judy Hagel worked," Taylor said, remembering his first visit to the car dealership where Judy manned the front desk. "I introduced myself and told her I'd been reviewing the case for a few months and that I thought it was solvable."
"She didn't trust me," he recalled. "She looked at me as if she had heard too many promises before and she didn't believe anything. I told her I'd prove her wrong."
He didn't say
when
he'd prove her wrong because he had no idea how long it was going to take. And he didn't say
how
because he didn't know yet exactly how he was going to do it, but Taylor knew he
would
do it. "Judy Hagel was angry and upset at the whole Redmond Police Department, and she vented some at me. I didn't blame her. She said, 'I supplied you people with information. I told you what happened, and you never did anything with it. I even walked through the house with you and pointed out clues, and the officer with me just overlooked them.' "
Judy told Taylor that the first year Jami was gone, she cried out loud every night for her lost daughter. "After that, over the next years, when I went to bed, I cried in my heart."
She looked directly into Taylor's eyes. "Do you know what happened to my daughter?"
"Yes, I do," Taylor answered.
"What?"
"Your daughter is dead."
"Yes," Judy said quietly. "I know."
"But," Taylor promised her, "I will do my very, very best to determine how it happened, who did it, and— if we can— hold them responsible."
In the hour that Judy spent telling Taylor of her frustrations, he heard several aspects of the case and bits of information that were new to him. Perhaps they were buried somewhere in the thick file on Jami Sherer and he had missed them. Perhaps not. "What you need to do," he said to Judy, "is to sit down like you're writing a college thesis and, once again, tell me
everything,
everything at all that you told the police department that you feel perhaps we overlooked."
A few weeks later, Jim Taylor received a package in the mail: a written record of Judy Hagel's seven years of suspicion, frustration, and unending loss.
Winning alliances are often composed of disparate components. Hundreds of people had looked for Jami and her killer. Now seven would join forces to avenge her:
Three cops.
Three prosecutors.
And one bloodhound.

* * *

Jim Taylor had two young detectives in mind, men he had known since the days when he had commanded them in the traffic division and on patrol: Greg Mains, age forty-seven, and Mike Faddis, thirty-two. Mains was deceptively quiet and looked nothing at all like a homicide detective. Neither did Mike Faddis, a tall, gregarious man with the shoulders of a fullback. Taylor asked them what they remembered about Jami Sherer, and Faddis said quietly, "I was there when they found her car. It's been a long time."
Jim Taylor recruited Greg Mains and Mike Faddis
for a three-year investigation that would take them all around America and even outside the country. If they couldn't find Jami herself, he wanted them to bring him enough evidence to convict her killer.
He asked them to begin with the file that existed on Jami Sherer. "Now," he said, tapping it with his finger, "I don't care if this is true or this is true. I want you to take me to the file and prove that what's in it is fact— or it's not true. I want you to read Judy Hagel's summary and tell me if what she says is true or not. And that's how we're going to start."
Greg Mains and Mike Faddis went through the 1990–1991 file and began to flesh out information that had come in just after Jami Sherer vanished.
"I wanted to be able to give Judy Hagel some hope by our next visit… to tell her we were aggressively pursuing it, but there would be no guarantees," Taylor said. "Even if we were able to arrest someone, it wouldn't be a given that they would be convicted."
For the first time in a very long time, Judy trusted the people investigating her daughter's case. As Greg Mains and Mike Faddis began dropping by to check in with her every other day or so, Judy began to believe that somehow, some way, Jami would finally have justice.
Taylor meant it when he said he wanted Faddis and Mains to pursue every avenue. "I don't care how much money you spend," he told them, "or how long you have to work on it. If I come to work on a Monday and hear you got a tip Friday night that was important to this case, and that tip was in Boston or Paris, you had better have been to Boston or Paris and back by the time I see you— or you're fired."
The two detectives took him at his word and got tips from as far away as Bogotá, Colombia. They never got
to Paris, but they did follow leads in California, Arizona, North Carolina, Hawaii, Wisconsin, British Columbia, Germany, and all over the Northwest.
Taylor's part-time assignment as a special agent with the Coast Guard requires him to do background checks on individuals. He has learned a dozen ways to work back through people's lives and find out who they really are. He decided to send out Greg Mains and Mike Faddis— and whoever else he could pull off other cases, if only temporarily— to find out everything they could about the last man Jami was with: her husband, Steven Sherer.
"We are going to do an autopsy on Steve Sherer's life," Taylor told them, "and we're going to find out everything we can about every phase of his life, starting with the day he was born. I've found out you can see patterns early: if you find a reasonably good kid in junior high and high school, he's probably going to be a good man. If you start to find negative behavior patterns and negative attitudes about truth and the law in high school, you often find an adult criminal later."
One of the other six members on the fresh team investigating Jami Hagel's disappearance was King County Assistant Prosecuting Attorney Marilyn Brenneman. When she first encountered the Sherer case, Brenneman had already successfully prosecuted more than her share of criminally manipulative males. It was Brenneman who prosecuted Randy Roth, the serial wife killer I wrote about in
A Rose for Her Grave.
Another of her successful cases trapped a con man who made millions of dollars by stripping Washington beaches of one of their prime resources: the mammoth geoduck clams. Brenneman also closed down the
Monastery, a nightclub that lured children and young teens into drugs, prostitution— and worse. When she was pregnant with her son Adam, her co-prosecutor was her husband Phil Brenneman. "It had to be the 'Love Beds Scam' case," she said, laughing. That was the name the prosecutor's office gave to a chain of phony water-bed stores set up to get around a statute that closed down prostitution masquerading as massage parlors. Instead of "masseuses" in the windows; the water-bed stores had scantily dressed women offering "demonstrations" of how the water beds worked.
"There I sat," Marilyn Brenneman recalled, "very visibly pregnant. To keep the jurors from giggling at a husband-wife prosecuting team in a case like that, Phil did the legwork while I did the courtroom work."
After prosecuting so many woman-killers and bunco artists, nobody would have blamed Brenneman for distrusting all men, but nothing could be further from the truth. She and Phil are happily married, and he now heads the Civil Enforcement Unit for the city of Seattle, while she's mother to a blended brood of four sons— hers, his, and theirs. Although she came to the law in an era when the profession was far more fraternity than sorority, Marilyn Brenneman rolled up her sleeves and plunged into cases that involved stakeouts, death threats, and endless days working beside both female and male detectives. Still, even today she occasionally encounters the good-old-boy syndrome, where male attorneys pontificate that "little ladies" shouldn't worry themselves about bloody homicide.
Such comments roll off her back, and she just laughs when defense attorneys patronizingly call her Marilyn rather than Ms. Brenneman. She knows the jurors aren't fooled by this ploy.
She was raised on St. Simons Island off the coast of Georgia, but she went to school on the mainland in Brunswick. Her dad was an auto mechanic who repaired police cars. He built himself a Ford with the biggest engine around, and often tested its police intercept engine on the straight flat roads of the Georgia coast, sending up a plume of red clay dust as he revved up to 150 miles an hour.
"I was a teenager bent on growing up fast," Marilyn said. "When I was about sixteen, I took my dad's car out and I was hitting over 150 miles an hour too. I was busted when the local cops told my dad they'd seen him out driving— and he knew he hadn't been that day, that it must have been me. He traded in the car he loved for a 1965 powder-blue Mustang with a six-cylinder engine. It wouldn't go very fast, but it looked great. That was the car my mother and I shared. I probably drove my parents crazy."
Like most teenagers, Marilyn Brenneman believed in her own immortality. "Today I can connect with my victims," she says, "because I understand that a woman can get into a relationship without any idea of the consequences. They are sure that nothing bad can happen to them. They can't believe that someone they've been intimate with could kill them. I made my share of bad decisions too," Brenneman admitted, "but I had an angel on my shoulder, and my victims didn't."
For the past two decades, Marilyn Brenneman has worked in the Special Operations Unit of the King County prosecutor's office. It says "Fraud Division" on the door, but the three deputy prosecutors there— Hank Corscadden, Susan Story, and Marilyn Brenneman— work everything from bunco to murder. They also ad
vise police departments who need another opinion, and they often actually prosecute the cases.
In 1990, Marilyn Brenneman read about Jami Sherer's disappearance as did most people of western Washington. But the Special Operations Unit of the King County prosecutor's office doesn't go out looking for business; they are available to police agencies for consultations and for advice,
if
they are asked. "If we could," Marilyn said, "we wanted to be in on a case from the beginning— to brainstorm and form game plans with the investigators. I know I'm always asking the detectives for more— and more again, even when they've brought me piles of statements and evidence. And they do."
Brenneman met once or twice with some of the Redmond investigators who were working on the Sherer case in 1991, but they didn't ask for further help. In truth, as the months passed and they deemed it an unsolvable case, they saw no point in brainstorming with the prosecutor's office. Without a body, the case died of inertia. Entries in the case file became fewer and fewer and further apart.
There were plenty of cases for the Special Unit to work on. Marilyn Brenneman never forgot about Jami Sherer, but her disappearance was filed somewhere in the back of the prosecutor's mind while she went on to more active cases.
In 1997, Jim Taylor contacted Marilyn Brenneman and asked for her assistance. "I knew it was going to be almost impossible," Brenneman said, "to try and find Jami Sherer and her killer— because I always believed she was dead— but it was something I couldn't turn away from. Sometimes you have to do something simply because it's the right thing to do."
The Jami Sherer case was probably the most daunt
ing case Marilyn Brenneman ever took on. Few prosecutors relish homicide cases without bodies. Most people think corpus delicti refers to the corpse of the victim, but, in truth, it means the body of the
case,
which is made up of all the circumstantial and physical evidence gathered by the investigators, the witnesses, the profiles of the principal characters, and the motivation behind the crime. Physical evidence can be seen, touched, smelled, by a jury. Circumstantial evidence, however, can be just as strong if there are enough factors present to lead a reasonable person to believe there is far more than coincidence involved when a number of circumstances combine to point to a suspect as guilty.
The detectives who had worked the Jami Sherer disappearance seven years earlier had done a yeomanlike job as far as they went, but Jim Taylor and Marilyn Brenneman believed that much remained hidden. As Mains and Faddis brought in the first fragments of new information, they all began to weave a spiderweb of information and evidence, with each new contact a strand that linked with other strands until, they all hoped, they would catch a suspect firmly in the center.
One of the first things Taylor, Faddis, and Mains did was to list the names of Jami's high school classmates. They then added Judy Hagel's list of everyone Jami had known in her life. "We sent letters to every one of them," Taylor said, "asking 'Have you heard from Jami since the end of September 1990?' and even though no one had seen her, we got leads out of the answers to our letters."
They conferred with a prosecutor in Marion County, Oregon— Diane Middle— and Alan Scharn, a lead detective who had successfully prosecuted a double mur
der case with no bodies found. "We got tips from them and expanded on them," Mike Faddis said.
The Redmond detectives didn't want to make the mistake that the Boulder Police Department had when they refused assistance from other agencies as they investigated the JonBenét Ramsey murder. Boulder hadn't investigated a homicide for two decades before the Ramsey case, and by the time they acknowledged that they needed expert advice, their crime scene was contaminated, and it was too late.
Of course, there
was
no crime scene in the Sherer case. No one knew where— or if— Jami had died. But everyone was heartened when Mains and Faddis uncovered one detail that had been overlooked by the original investigators. Steve Sherer had replaced some carpeting in the lower level of his house— in an area where the rug was almost brand new. There was no rational reason for him to have patched the carpet there. They set out to find the workman who had installed it.
It was a start. And if they had one new direction to go, they knew there would be others.
Legally, Jami was dead. But how could they prove that to a jury? It wasn't going to be as simple as saying she met the legal time limit for a missing person to be construed as deceased.
A forensic anthropologist told them that their chances of finding any identifiable part of Jami Sherer's body were slim to none. In Washington State, where the rocky clay soil challenges gardeners who attempt to dig down more than 12 to 18 inches, all graves are shallow graves. Unless the weather is freezing cold, the detectives learned that a body buried a foot or slightly more beneath the surface or left
on
the surface in some isolated wilderness could completely disinte
grate within twenty-eight days! When the soft tissue is gone, little animals carry away small bones and large animals take the femurs and humeri and skull.
The trail was seven years cold, but to these detectives, that didn't matter. They would make up the seven years. Among them, Jim Taylor, Greg Mains, and Mike Faddis had nearly seventy years of experience in law enforcement, with Faddis, the "rookie," having only a decade on the Redmond Police Force. Taylor had thirty-one years in police work, and Mains twenty-seven. "All of us had tremendous curiosity," Taylor said. "And my detectives were totally focused; Greg Mains was like a bulldog who got his teeth into something, and he was never going to let go."
One of the best things they had going for them was the fact that Mike Faddis was currently assigned to the Puget Sound Violent Crimes Task Force. This was an innovative way to let Seattle area law enforcement agencies pool their resources— and their officers— to wage war on crime. It allowed the agencies instant access to each other's personnel and special knowledge. There were six FBI special agents, four Seattle Police detectives, two King County sheriff's detectives, and representatives from the Secret Service; Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms; the Drug Enforcement Administration; and a number of small-town police departments in the area.
Mike Faddis had been tapped to represent Redmond on the Violent Crimes Task Force. The task force goals were to cut down on the bank robberies that put Seattle at the top of the list in America for such crimes and to bring closure to a number of unsolved homicides in the Puget Sound area— including the case of Jami Sherer. Having Faddis in the task force opened up information opportunities that the Redmond Police Department had
never before had. The computer age had opened up a whole new world of information, and Mike Faddis was now able to utilize it in the search for Jami.
Jim Taylor's network of police contacts was prodigious, and it was almost uncanny the way he could pick up a phone and find an old friend willing to assist in tracking Steve Sherer. When he needed a surveillance on Steve in Scottsdale, Arizona, Taylor called Norm Beasley, who was a colonel in the Arizona State Police and a fellow member of the board of the International Association of Chiefs of Police. Beasley told Taylor, "Just tell me what you need."