Empty Promises (13 page)

* * *

So far, Steve Sherer had played the system and won.
But in the fall of 1998 he returned to Washington and said he wanted to surrender on his numerous drunk-driving warrants. He was sentenced to eight months in the King County jail, his longest jail time ever. Before then, he had deftly managed to creep out of areas where he was wanted without being arrested. If he was arrested, he'd been sentenced to probation or threatened with house arrest. He always seemed to call the shots and live the life he wanted. But this time he'd guessed wrong.
It would be the summer of 1999 before Steve walked out of jail.
As he sat in the crowded jail pods and considered what had been done to him, Steve Sherer grew more and more angry. And when Steve got angry, he acted out. But he'd never been angry in jail before and acting out was frowned upon by the guards. He could only seethe inside and consider what he would do when he was free again.
When Steve turned himself in for those DUI warrants, Jami had been gone for eight years. During most of those years, Steve had lived an entirely self-indulgent life, most of it far away from the house on Education Hill where she was last known to be alive. His little boy, Chris, was thriving in Judy and Jerry Hagel's care,
and the world was going on. But for Judy and Jerry, a life without answers was bleak.
Marilyn Brenneman was impressed with the growing pile of reports and interviews the Redmond detectives were bringing her. True to form, she sent the men back to find more. And true to
their
form, they grinned and went back out to see what else they could find out about Steven Sherer.
They all knew it was going to take a mountain of circumstantial evidence to bring this case before an inquiry judge and convince him that a crime had been committed.
So the "autopsy" on Steve Sherer's life continued, but it wasn't easy. For every person who opened up and gave the Redmond detectives a solid opinion or an anecdote that helped, there seemed to be three who were still afraid of Sherer. Taylor, Mains and Faddis listened to everyone, even psychics, believing that there was someone out there who could fill in the pieces of their baffling puzzle. They were getting a much more comprehensive understanding of Steve Sherer, but there were still too many empty spots where there were no pieces at all to fit in.
Most significant, they now understood how Steve was able to keep so many people under his thumb. He choreographed his illegal and illicit activities so they involved his friends, while he kept his own hands clean. That allowed him to control the balance of power; he always threatened to turn his friends in if they talked too much. It wasn't that he didn't partake of the fruits of his con games and drug schemes. He always did, but he managed to put other people in a position where
they
would be hung out to dry if he chose to snitch on them.
But the longer Steve remained in jail, the more will
ing those people were to come forward. They could see now that he wasn't nearly as much in control as he wanted them to believe.

13

Finally, even Jami's brother Rob decided to tell the police what he had not wanted to acknowledge as anything more than his brother-in-law's usual rantings on the Saturday night before Jami vanished. Steve had been blindly furious when Jami didn't come home that night. He and her twin brothers and their girlfriends had looked for her in vain.
Rich and the girls had finally gone home, and Rob was alone with Steve when he muttered, "If I find out she's cheating on me, I'll kill her."
But Steve was always threatening to kill people, or making grandiose— and violent— statements. It was difficult for a brother to accept that he hadn't paid enough attention to the man who probably had actually destroyed the sister he loved. As the years passed, and Jami didn't come home, Rob agonized about what might have been if only he had done something. Finally, he told the Redmond police about Steve Sherer's threat against Jami.
On October 6, 1998, Marilyn Brenneman and Hank Corscadden felt they had enough evidence to begin calling witnesses before Inquiry Judge Robert Lasnik. IJ hearings are secret, just as grand jury proceedings are. The testimony is secret to protect the target of an
investigation. If the inquiry judge should decide that there is not reasonable suspicion to believe that a crime had been committed, the suspect's name would never have been broadcast throughout the media. If the judge agreed with the prosecutors and a trial lay ahead, the media would have plenty of opportunities from testimony in open court for headline stories.
"What I try to do," Marilyn Brenneman says, "is think like a defense attorney. What would
I
do in this instance?"
It was important to have the potential witnesses in an actual trial testify before the inquiry judge, not only to give information and build a case, but also so that transcripts of what they said could later be used either to help them or to haunt them.
To Brenneman's relief, Lew Adams said he would be glad to testify. She phoned Lew in Idaho and tried to reassure him that any drug charges against him in the state of Washington took second place to the tremendous help he could offer to the Sherer investigation. He told her he wanted to straighten things out, but he was nervous. She assured him that he wasn't going to be arrested the moment he crossed into Washington State. Lew needed to come to Seattle and tell what he knew about what were, quite probably, the last two days of Jami Sherer's life.
On the first day before Judge Lasnik, Carolyn Willoughby* testified. She was one of Sherri's closest friends, and she and Sherri had often speculated about what might have happened to Jami. Despite the front that Sherri kept up to protect Steve, Carolyn sensed that even his own mother sometimes had doubts about his innocence.
Carolyn Willoughby was disturbed by that, but she
was more disturbed by something she had found when she was helping Sherri clean the Sherers' house after Jami vanished. She knew Steve had told the detectives that there was only one key to Jami's Mazda RX7. That was the key found in the pocket of Jami's leather coat on the seat of her car when it finally turned up in the church parking lot.
If that was truly the only key, then it seemed likely that Jami herself had driven the car there. But to Carolyn's horror, she found another key to Jami's Mazda in the laundry area of Steve and Jami's house. That meant that Steve had lied to the detectives. Carolyn didn't want to know why he had lied, but she had a pretty good idea. Her first concern was for her best friend, Sherri, and so Carolyn kept the secret of the key to herself. It took a toll on her, however. When she was subpoenaed to the inquiry court, she was apprehensive.
At a certain point in her testimony, her words came out in a rush. She admitted she had found the second key— a key that Steve must have had all along. She was convinced that her information would do great damage to her best friend's son and cause pain to Sherri. It certainly was valuable information, but it was only one small detail. Carolyn Willoughby need not have felt like such a traitor.
Judge Lasnik listened to a number of witnesses over three days. New names surfaced and new information spilled out. If there was not an organized effort to protect Steve Sherer from the detectives who trailed too close behind him, there certainly appeared to have been a tacit agreement among the social circles Sherri Schielke moved in to avoid saying anything more than was absolutely necessary.
The picture emerging was that of a sadistic hedonist. Steve Sherer's rap sheet showed he had been flouting the law since he was eighteen, and people who had gone to school with him before that remembered him as a mean, enraged child and teenager.
The first session with the inquiry judge ended, but there would be another. The investigation continued even as the inquiry process had begun. In the meantime, Steve himself languished in jail.
Many people around Steve were worried. Greg Mains had heard rumors about Steve's stealing a gun. In October 1998 he and Detective Lon Shultz traveled to the little eastern Washington town of Chelan to follow up on a report that Steve had stolen a .357— from one of Wally Schielke's houses. "We were concerned about officer safety," Mains explained. "We needed to know if Steve was armed."
Because a number of new names had come up, Greg Mains and Lon Shultz wanted to talk to some longtime friends of the Sherer-Schielkes who lived in Chelan. Sherri had owned a summer place there for many years and Steve had spent a great deal of time partying in it when his mother was not present.
One report came to Greg Mains from someone on the Chelan Police Department who said his parents lived next door to the Schielkes' place.
Mains and Shultz met first with a couple who owned one of the largest resorts on Lake Chelan and learned nothing that would help their investigation. They did, however, learn the names of other Chelan friends of the Sherers.
John Walcker, who owned the Caravel Resort, offered Mains the cell phone number of another friend of the late David Sherer and his widow, Sherri. Mains
called Grant Logan,* another friend, who agreed to drive to the resort and speak with the two detectives.
Logan picked up his wife, Nyssa,* on the way, and the two showed up at the resort within fifteen minutes. They seemed friendly enough— until Greg Mains said he and Shultz were investigating Jami Sherer's disappearance. "The case is still open, you know," he explained. "We're investigating any new leads we can find."
Grant Logan said he and his wife had been friends of Sherri Schielke's for over twenty-five years. They had known her and David Sherer since the early days of construction in Mill Creek. The Logans, along with Wally Schielke and the Sherers, often wintered in Palm Desert. The men played golf together in the California sun while Chelan was covered with drifting snow.
"What was Steve like when he was growing up?" Mains asked.
"We only saw him once in a while— during the summer when he vacationed over here with Sherri."
"Was he a problem kid?"
"Never violent or aggressive," Logan said quickly. "Just the usual preteen, pubescent temper tantrums."
When Mains said he understood that Logan and Wally Schielke sometimes played golf together, and that they had a conversation about the theft of a gun from Wally's house, Logan tensed. "Can you recall the details of that conversation?" Mains asked.
Logan said that Wally
had
told him a gun was stolen, and that it was "inferred" that Steve took it because he was the only one in the house when the theft occurred.
"About David Sherer's suicide…" Mains began.
"What does that have to do with Jami being missing?" Logan asked.
"Part of our investigation always looks at family vi
olence and the long-term effect it has, sometimes for generations," Mains answered.
Grant Logan said he had no idea why David Sherer had killed himself. He knew he was an alcoholic and he and Sherri had been fighting. He could only surmise that David had probably been drunk and alone. Beyond that, he had no answers.
"Who found David Sherer?" Mains asked.
"Sherri— and she called me and John Walcker."
Mains was never an overtly tough interrogator; his forte was his dogged pursuit of what he wanted. He was deliberately mild as he asked the Logans to give him a written statement about the conversation Grant had with Wally over his stolen gun. Mains looked up from his paperwork and saw the Logans exchange a glance.
"I don't think I should do that," Logan said. "I don't think I should write anything down, until I get the opportunity to talk to my attorney."
At that point, the interview was abruptly over. When they again contacted the Logans' son and asked him to give a statement about the gun theft, he stonewalled them too. His parents insisted that they wanted nothing to do with a reopening of the suicide investigation into the death of David Sherer. As far as Jami Sherer's disappearance was concerned, they had nothing to offer the detectives.

* * *

In the meantime Steve Sherer must have been getting some information from his jail visitors. Even though he had always skated away before, he must have felt a chill in the wind.
Mains and Faddis traveled a lot in 1998, and it probably wasn't good for Steve Sherer's peace of mind to
hear that they had been in Chelan and Scottsdale and Palm Desert and Mill Creek and Redmond and Puyallup and a dozen other places he frequented. Nor would he have been serene if he'd known how many people who knew him or who had once known him had spoken to the detective partners.
Sometimes the cops got really lucky. More often, it took them months, even years, to locate witnesses. One of the dead ends that Greg Mains and Mike Faddis kept running into was an empty space in their chronology of Jami and Steve's relationship: the time they lived in Palm Desert in 1986. Judy Hagel tried to help, but she wasn't sure exactly what had gone on during the months Jami lived with Steve in the mobile home.
She knew that they had shared the rent with a young woman for a while, and she knew her name: Sally Kirwin. Judy even knew that there had been some kind of an incident with a knife and that Steve had been so out of control that Jami had called home, crying.
"But the next day, she said everything was all right," Judy said. "Jami told me not to come."
"We'd been looking for Sally Kirwin for almost
nine years,"
Greg Mains said, "and we couldn't find her. And then I did— back in Wisconsin!" He phoned her and found she was still extremely upset by her memories of Steve Sherer.
Mains wanted to ask Sally about the alleged burglary of the mobile home and hoped that it might have occurred while she was living with Steve and Jami. Since the diamond ring Steve claimed was stolen that night in 1986 had turned up taped to Jami's car, it would really help their case against him to have a witness to an insurance ruse.
Sally Kirwin said she remembered the burglary very
well. "I thought it was phony the whole time," she said. "I know that Steve did that."
"That's what I understand," Greg Mains said.
"But that one other night," Sally went on,
"that
was awful! I'll never forget it the rest of my life. It was so scary."
"What other night are you talking about?" Mains asked.
"That night Steve was chasing Jami around and going to kill her with that butcher knife— it was horrible," Sally said, her voice hushed with remembered terror. "She had to get behind a table to protect herself! I thought we were both going to die that night."
Mains had gone looking for verification of something they already knew. They got that and more. He hit the mother lode. They had heard only vague rumors that Steve had stabbed himself once when Jami decided not to marry him, but they didn't know when or where or if it had ever really happened. Jami had told her mother bits and pieces of what really happened during that terrible Christmas season. Since his Christmas Eve arrest occurred a week later in the Hagels' home in Bellevue, Jami probably hadn't wanted to go into detail about the stabbing incident.
"That's
when it all happened," Mains said. "But we were on our way to trial and we still weren't sure— not until we found Sally." Sally Kirwin described Steve's rage as he broke up the mobile home and ended up stabbing himself. "And, finally," Mains said, "we had a witness to the whole thing."