Empty Promises (12 page)

It was abundantly clear that Steve had used the disappearance of his wife in an attempt to turn himself into a "babe magnet," the forlorn widower who needed love. He attracted women all right, but in doing so, he had made some significant mistakes.

12

There was another aspect of the Sherer case that the Redmond investigators found disturbing. Within a month of Jami's disappearance, Steve, who was unemployed, as he often was, applied for Jami's last paychecks, her accumulated vacation pay and her sick pay at Microsoft. He received a check for the full amount. One of the perks at Microsoft was the stock offered to its employees. Jami had taken advantage of that and had begun buying company stock on December 12, 1987. Records showed she had bought more whenever she could: June 16, 1988; December 7, 1988; December 12, 1989; and June 30, 1990. Up through
1989 it had been possible to change ownership or add payees by e-mail. At one time Jami had asked to have Steve's name removed from the stock certificates, but she later put him back on.
So Steve was able to cash in a number of Microsoft stock certificates within a month or so of Jami's disappearance.
In November 1990, Sherri Schielke moved Jami's Microsoft stock— the collateral Jami had put up for their house loan the previous spring— into her own stock account. At that point, Microsoft was trading stock at under three dollars a share, and Jami had many, many shares. Sherri explained that Steve was out of work and that she had been making the mortgage payments on his house, since Jami was no longer around to pay them. Steve retained some of Jami's Microsoft stock.
Without the wife who had supported him for four years, Steve was having financial trouble. In early December he asked Judy Hagel if she would loan him $15,000 to "clear up Jami's credit." It was an outrageous request. Judy knew that Jami always kept current on her bills and that she also saved receipts, bills, and all manner of documents that would validate her yearly IRS forms. Judy had co-signed with Jami so she could buy her Mazda RX7 because Steve's credit was worth nothing. There was simply no way Judy would lend Steve $15,000.
Evidently, he went to his mother too. Sherri suggested that he rent out part of the house to help him make the mortgage payments. He rented one bedroom to a man who soon moved out. Next, a couple named Troy and Pam moved in. They told the Redmond detectives that they remembered a tanning bed in the garage, and also
several boxes stored there. Troy never went through the boxes, but Pam was curious. She found they were full of women's clothing and other feminine items. Steve told her she could take anything she wanted. She took a few pieces of clothing, but most of them were far too small for her. The couple didn't stay in Steve's house for long.
Seven months after Jami vanished, Sherri Schielke retained an attorney so that she could be named trustee and manage Jami's estate. The Hagels were looking after Chris, and spending as much as they could afford to pay to the private investigators who were, shockingly, taking cruel advantage of them. They assumed that whatever Jami had owned would come to her son, to pay for his education and for the things he needed as he grew up. Still, they hoped that Jami was alive somewhere, and that was what mattered the most to them. They were unsophisticated about financial matters.
Sherri Schielke published an announcement in several small newspapers that she intended to take over Jami's assets as her trustee. The probate matter was filed in King County Superior Court, which noted that "the Court being fully advised in these premises: the Court finding that notice having been published and the whereabouts of the absentee remain unknown and cannot be ascertained."
Responding to Sherri's attorney's motion, "In the matter of the estate of Jami Sue Sherer, Absentee," Sherri's request was granted: "(1) It is hereby ordered that Sharon Schielke be appointed trustee of the Absentee Estate of Jami Sue Sherer; (2) That trustee shall file an oath for faithful performance of duties and shall prepare an inventory of the estate and file such within sixty days of the date of this order."
The date was May 17, 1991.
Both Steve and Sherri were anxious to retrieve the diamond ring and watch that had been found taped on the console in Jami's car. The police had had the ring appraised and knew that it was now worth $13,500. The watch, worth $1,700, and Jami's Mazda were being held in evidence by the Redmond Police Department, which galled Steve and his mother.
On June 10, Sherri wrote to inform the Redmond Police Department that she was now the trustee of Jami's estate. "It is my understanding that you are still holding her wedding ring and also her car, which is a Mazda RX7. In order to have these appraised, I will need to have them released. Could you get back to me as soon as possible regarding this matter? Thanks for your cooperation."
To Steve's chagrin, the police were not very cooperative and the items of value were not returned to him or his mother. Nor was the Department of Social and Human Services eager to decide on permanent placement of Chris Sherer. Legally, Chris's mother was not dead. He was being well cared for by his maternal grandparents. It was far too soon to grant custody of Chris to anyone.
By 1992, Sherri decided that she and Steve should sell the Education Hill house, and it was purchased by Russian immigrants. Part of the proceeds of the sale went to Sherri, to pay off the mortgage and Steve's bills. When he never paid his mother back for her loss on the house, she sued him in civil court for $32,000. It was a business matter. Sherri had a good head for business, and Steve apparently took no offense at the suit.
When Jim Taylor, Mike Faddis, and Greg Mains came aboard the Sherer case, one of the things that bothered them the most was how soon Jami had been
virtually swept under the rug. Her assets were under her mother-in-law's supervision, Steve was giving her clothing away to anyone who wanted it, and her child's permanent placement was under contention long before it was time. For Steve and some members of his family, it was like "Jami's gone, let's get on with our lives with as little fuss as possible."
Sherri had apparently always had a very tight mother-child bond with her oldest child. Whatever Steve did, she backed him up, although she didn't count on him to take care of her house in Mill Creek. Despite his protestations that he had been there on September 30, 1990, to mail packages, leave a mortgage check and generally oversee things, Faddis and Mains learned that it was invariably her daughters, Saundra and Laura, who were given keys to their mother's house in Mill Creek.
There had apparently been two incidents where Steve got inside the Schielkes' home when they were out of town, but it hadn't been with a key. The front door of the Mill Creek house was flanked by narrow panels of glass. Once Sherri came home to find shards and sprinkles of glass in the foyer, although the window itself had been repaired. The detectives learned there had also been a second broken window, one that was repaired so neatly that even Sherri never realized it.
Mains and Faddis discovered that on the Sunday Jami disappeared, Steve did not have a key to Sherri and Wally's house in Mill Creek. The only way he could have gotten in was to shatter the glass panels again. The Redmond detectives didn't hear this from Sherri; she was very defensive about Steve.
Lieutenant Jim Taylor suggested that Mike Faddis and Greg Mains look into David Sherer's alleged sui
cide in Palm Desert. At first, the Riverside County Sheriff's Office couldn't locate any records of the incident. Officially, it might never have happened; there was no file on it in the sheriff's office. Finally, they found a death certificate and a two-page report from a Riverside County coroner's deputy. It said, of course, that the elder Sherer had been alone and depressed on that Thanksgiving Day, and that Sherri Sherer had flown down there and discovered her estranged husband's body.
Judy Hagel told the two detectives that she had always wondered about David Sherer's death, although it had happened a few years before Jami met Steve. She said that Steve had explained it to Jami, who in turn told Judy: "She said Steve told her he was living down there with his dad— to help cheer him up," Judy recalled. "The night David Sherer died, Steve said he told his father he was going out for the evening. And when he came home, he was the one who found the body. The only reason I know that is because Steve confided in Jami. I don't believe he ever thought she would tell me."
When Jami told her mother about this entirely different version of the elder Sherer's death, Judy wondered why on earth Steve would have been down there living with David. She knew from a number of sources that Steve had never gotten along with his father, and Steve had never been the type to rush to anyone's rescue to cheer them up.
Indeed, the detectives learned that Steve told as many versions of how his father had committed suicide as he did about Jami's disappearance. Maybe he was simply a pathological liar; maybe he had other reasons for clouding the details of both incidents.
Mains and Faddis learned that Sherri Sherer had re
married in 1984, less than a year after her first husband died. Her second marriage— to Jack Johnson— lasted only until 1985, but they remained good friends. Greg Mains found that Johnson still lived in Mill Creek, not far from Sherri. Johnson told Mains that David Sherer had been a difficult man to live with— "with a very bad temper, a drunk." He said flatly that Steve and his father had never gotten along. "Steve had a bad temper just like his dad, David, did," Johnson said. "David Sherer was an animal when he was drunk, and Steve is just like him."
Johnson characterized his ex-wife, Sherri, as a "very moral and upstanding person," and told Mains he was friendly with her third husband, Wally Schielke. The men even occasionally golfed together.
Johnson was well acquainted with Jami Sherer, and he was adamant that he knew of no reason why she would disappear.
"Would she ever abandon her son or quit her job and leave without a trace?" Mains asked.
"Jamie would never leave Chris."
"Would she have committed suicide?"
"No way!"
"Why do you think Jami Sherer disappeared?"
"Oh, I believe Steve killed her," Johnson said, almost casually, as if it was a foregone conclusion. He said he suspected that Wally Schielke felt the same way.
Anyone who had seen an example of Steve's temper had come to suspect him in Jami's disappearance.

* * *

Although Steve took various jobs from time to time, he seemed to expect a fortune to drop into his lap one day, if not from his gambling then from one of his scams. "He was always on the phone or the computer,"
Judy Hagel commented. "He always had some big deal going."
But in the early nineties, none of Steve's scams seemed to net him much. He sold posters from a sports company he worked for— but he kept the money. One co-worker said, "He was basically scamming under the books. And there was something with snowboards. He was just a scamming kind of a person. Mostly scamming in, like, money and drugs and stuff, because I'd do my share of drugs with him. He did his share of drugs with me. And at the same time, what he was doing was trying to get me involved in it so he didn't have to pay for all of it. You know what I mean?"
After the house on Education Hill was sold, Steve lived in a number of places. He still traveled between Seattle, California, and Arizona, almost always staying in property that his mother owned. Sherri Schielke had sold the country club house where her first husband had died and had bought a more secluded ranch near Palm Springs.
She also had a luxurious condominium in Scottsdale, Arizona, where Steve lived much of the time. Neighbors there didn't see much of Steve, but some of them told Mains and Faddis how chagrined they were when their morning papers began to disappear. Getting up early to play detective, one woman discovered that Steve was tiptoeing out each morning to steal a morning paper before his neighbor could pick it up. She laughed as she told them that the paper thief was always careful to vary his pattern, so that he didn't steal the same condo's paper too many times in a week.
Steve's basic personality hadn't changed. He took what he wanted. He was in his mid-thirties when the in
vestigation into Jami's disappearance began again in earnest, but he acted more like a juvenile delinquent.
Only a small portion of the money realized from the house or from Jami's Microsoft stock went directly to Chris, who was living with the Hagels. Had Jami lived, and kept the Microsoft stock that she gave to Sherri Schielke as collateral, in a decade it would have been worth more than any of Steve's deals. If Jami had simply held on to that $27,000 worth of stock, she would have been one of the company's scores of millionaires. By 2000, Jami's Microsoft stock would have soared and split again and again until its value would have been $928,524! And Steve still retained other shares.
For Chris's sake, Judy maintained a friendly relationship with his other grandmother, and Chris visited Sherri's home occasionally. Sherri and Wally had him over for birthday parties and at Christmastime, and sometimes Chris went on trips to Lake Chelan with his aunts and Sherri and Wally. Less often, he spent time with his father, although it was agreed by everyone that it would be best if he didn't travel alone to visit Steve in Arizona. His grandmother Sherri escorted him on his visits to the Southwest.
He saw Chris infrequently, however. Mains and Faddis learned there was good reason not to leave Chris alone with his father for long. One day, when Chris was about eight, Steve told him that he had business to take care of. They drove out into what was essentially desert. There, Steve left Chris in the car in the hot sun for almost an hour. The boy survived, but apparently Steve hadn't the slightest concern for his son's safety.
Steve lived in Scottsdale most of the time from the mid- to late nineties. He seemed to sense that Jim Taylor, Mike Faddis, and Greg Mains were circling closer
and closer. He usually worked as a cabdriver, and he somehow fashioned an I.D. that didn't draw dozens of hits for traffic violations when he applied for an Arizona cabdriver's license. His boss, Joseph Volpe, told the Redmond detectives that a clean driving record was mandatory for their drivers. Volpe said that Steve lived in his mother's home in the Spanish Oaks section of Scottsdale. "One day he told me his son was coming out to visit," Volpe recalled. "He said his mother was bringing him, and then he said, 'My wife was killed in a car crash.' "
Steve's year with the cab company ended abruptly. "One day he called," Volpe said. "He said he'd met some girls and was partying and still drunk. I went to get our car and the pager at his mother's house."
Steve's drinking and drugging continued, making him emotionally chaotic. One night while he was living in Arizona, he called his sister and threatened to kill himself, but the family managed to talk him out of it— if, indeed, he had really intended to take his own life.
There was something peculiar about Steve's travels: He always carried a heavy suitcase with him. It was an old suitcase, made of light blue simulated leather, with wide straps that buckled over the zipper so that the contents were secure. Even during the times when he was without funds and had to ride the bus, Steve lugged that blue suitcase with him.
The only constant they were discovering in Steve Sherer's life was that there
were
no constants. Over the eight years since Jami disappeared, Steve had continued to tell different stories to different people about what had become of his wife. He embroidered the story as the years passed, sometimes showing new acquaintances creased and yellowed newspaper stories about
Jami. He usually varied his accounts of her disappearance by sticking to three basic scenarios: Jami had been kidnapped, Jami had been killed in a car accident, or Jami had divorced him. He had a more chilling version, however: he told one friend that Jami was the "last victim of a serial killer."
A Phoenix, Arizona, man told Greg Mains that he knew Steve from playing poker with him at the Casino Arizona in 1998.
"Did he ever talk about his wife?" Mains asked.
"Steve told me that his wife was murdered five or six years ago," the man recalled. "He said the person who did it was in prison."
One woman told Mike Faddis and Greg Mains that she had been romantically involved with Steve's friend Ron Coates in 1990. She and Ron had spent a night at Steve's house during the autumn after Jami disappeared.
"I met Steve at a café. There was another woman there. We went out on Steve's boat." This informant— Victoria— said she and the other woman, Steve's date, later went to buy more beer. During the time they were gone, Ron and Steve evidently did a good deal of talking. Ron was curious after Steve explained that his wife was missing. "He [Ron] was somewhat alarmed about what Steve had told him," Victoria recalled. "Ron told me later, 'I think he did it!' "
Ron Coates went to the top of their list to interview. Mains and Faddis only needed to locate him.
On February 26, 1998, Greg Mains met with a man on the other side of the Cascade Mountains in Yakima, Washington. Alan Aboli* had worked with Steve at a sports merchandise company in Seattle, and they had become friends. "He's a pretty nice person when you meet him. He has a bit of charm, a bit of personality.
He doesn't have any problems getting along with people pretty well. As I got to know him, my vision of him decreased— we'll put it that way. It got worse and worse," Aboli said. "I noticed more and more things he was into: the scamming, the drugs, the women. I basically lost respect for him."
Aboli said Steve usually looked fairly clean-cut and that he bleached his hair blond. He had been the warehouse manager, Aboli's boss.
"Was Steve Sherer married?" Mains asked.
"Yes," Aboli replied, "he was previously married." Then Aboli told Mains that Steve had said, "My wife was the last victim of the Green River Killer."
The Green River Killer was believed to have struck in the Seattle area for the last time in April 1984. Jami, of course, disappeared on September 30, 1990, so that story sounded suspect to both Aboli and Mains.
At the time Aboli visited Steve in his West Seattle apartment, it would have been late 1992. "He said he loved his wife and he missed her," Aboli recalled, "that his son really needed her, and he worried about how his son was gonna be without her."
Aboli also recalled that he and Steve had often socialized outside of work, and especially after Alan took a job in a bar down in Puyallup, Washington. "Steve had dated a lot. I remember one girl named Lisa and one named Monique. He dated both at the same time."
The biggest problem with Steve, Aboli said, was that he was a mean drunk who "made a fool of himself" in bars, insistently trying to pick up women. If a woman turned him down, he got angry. "The drunker he got," Aboli said, "the more of an asshole he became." Aboli said he had been embarrassed to be asso
ciated with Steve, especially when he came into the bar where Aboli worked. "When he's drunk, he's a completely different person."
When women did accept Steve's offer to buy them a drink, he characterized himself sometimes as a widower and sometimes as a divorcé. Whatever he told women, he was dating often, meeting women in diverse spots. It didn't seem to matter to him, Aboli said, if they were nice girls or prostitutes, eventually Steve treated them all badly.
Alan Aboli remembered a woman who was a cocktail waitress in a card room at a bowling alley in West Seattle. "They got together a few times and they were apparently getting along pretty well. The third time they got together, they were going to California for a weekend. But she called me up on the phone at work, and said he had left her there. I ended up getting hold of him, and he basically told me he left her there because she was being a bitch. She called me, trying to get back home."
Aboli wired her some money to get home, since she'd been left in the middle of a street, completely without funds, in a strange city.
"Do you have any opinions," Greg Mains asked, "as to what happened to Steven Sherer's wife, Jami Sherer?"
"My personal opinion," Aboli began, and then paused. "My opinion is that it's between him and God."
"Okay."
"And that's all I can say about that," Aboli said, but he continued to talk. "He
is
capable. He is capable of doing it, though. He's more than capable.… He blacks out. I've had to go into the deepest part of Seattle and bail him out of the ghettos— high, drunk, whatever it is, and walking out with his jacket on upside down and
backwards.… You know, 'cause he was drunk and couldn't remember where he was. Lost his pickup a few times."
"So what do you think about what happened to Jami?" Mains asked again.
Aboli shook his head, repeating only that it was "between him and God."