Empty Promises (14 page)

* * *

Steve Sherer was in jail, but planning to be free soon. Quite possibly he was unaware of how numbered his days really were. He had come back to turn himself
in to Washington State authorities, bringing his oddly bulging blue suitcase with him on the bus. Sherri Schielke said he could store his things in her home and garage, but she didn't pay too much attention to the bags and boxes he left there.
Steve Sherer had used and discarded many people in his past. One of his closest associates at the time Jami vanished was a man named Jeffrey Caston. The new investigators wanted to talk to him, and in 1999 Taylor assigned Mike Faddis to find him.
Caston was still in the area. Faddis noted that Caston was about fifteen years older than Steve and that he had served in Vietnam in the mid- to late sixties. He had been remodeling houses in early 1990, finding customers by putting "work wanted" ads in the newspaper, when Steve and Jami called in response to his ad. They told him they were looking at a house they wanted to buy, but it would need considerable work. Caston went to the Redmond house to give them a bid. He recalled that Jami had come home on her lunch break from Microsoft to meet him.
Steve hired Jeff Caston as their remodeler, and the two had soon become "very good friends." Caston was frank in admitting to Mike Faddis that he had been addicted to heroin off and on throughout his life, beginning at the age of fourteen. He had managed to stay clear of the drug for many years, however, while he was raising his daughter, and he was clean when he first met Steve Sherer. Not surprisingly, Caston also had some convictions for theft during the heroin periods. He wouldn't make a very credible witness for any prosecutor, but as he spoke, it was clear he knew things that no one else did.
Becoming best friends with Steve Sherer wasn't the best thing that ever happened to Caston. For a man with
an addictive personality, it was akin to putting the honey jar in front of Winnie-the-Pooh. Caston told Faddis he had joined Steve in a number of activities: "Card rooms, the racetracks, car races, Mariner games, various things…"
During the two months that Caston worked on the Redmond house, he saw Steve every day. "I finished the remodel in July— August, maybe. It was in the summertime in 1990."
Even though the job was finished, Caston and Sherer continued to be friends, with Caston far more dependent on Steve Sherer than the other way around. Caston said that Steve was cunning. Both Mike Faddis and Greg Mains had heard that before.
"He has a criminal mind smarter than any I've ever met in prison. But as a normal human being, he wasn't that smart," Jeff said. "But put him in a criminal situation where he needs to figure out a device to cheat anyone out of money, he was brilliant. He knew how to do it and keep himself distanced from it. He was the mastermind. He would get someone else to do it."
Caston recalled a time when he was broke and Steve phoned him from Arizona. "He asked me, 'Are you hungry?'
"I told him, 'Yeah, I haven't eaten.' He asks me what I want and we hung up. And then Steve calls me back and says, 'Go over to the McDonald's next to where you are. And pick up what's waiting for you.' Steve had called the McDonald's and said, 'Hey, I ordered a bunch of stuff and the order is all wrong. I'd like to pick up the stuff I paid for.' "
Caston shook his head, remembering. Steve's scam had worked and he had done it all from Arizona. "I
walked in and they gave me a big bag of hamburgers and fries, milk shake, all free."
While they were in Redmond, Caston said Steve sold him a computer and the two, along with some other friends, put together a gambling pool on the computers. "We had a pool and whoever won the most games at the end of the season was supposed to get the pool," Caston said. "It was depending on which players you had drafted to your team."
Caston wasn't adept at working with computers, so Steve helped him. He said he and Steve worked on their strategy for winning every weekend. They were either together or on the phone for most of the morning on both Saturday and Sunday and quite often in the evening as well.
Caston was an early riser; he was wide awake by 5:30 or 6:00 A.M. "I would watch the clock so I could find a decent hour to call. Usually I would get Jami first, and she would be upset because I was calling so early, and I'd say I would call back. I would usually wind up getting hold of them maybe by nine or ten."
When Mike Faddis asked him about a particular weekend— September 29 and 30, 1990, Caston said that he hadn't been able to reach either Jamie or Steve on that Saturday. "So I started calling earlier on Sunday." He finally got an answer to his calls.
"Who did you first talk to?" Faddis asked.
"Jami."
It was somewhere between 10:00 and 11:00 A.M. by then, and Jami was in a hurry. "She eventually told me," Caston recalled, "that they had been gone all weekend and that they had an argument. And she was trying to pack some stuff and get out of there and go over to her mom's."
Caston thought she sounded apprehensive and upset. "She seemed a little scared."
He estimated that he talked with her for ten or fifteen minutes. She told him that Steve would probably be back soon, and if he ever needed to talk to her again, he would have to call her at her mother's house.
Caston said he waited for twenty minutes and then started calling Steve. Within a few calls, Steve answered. "He was upset," Jeff Caston said. "I didn't let on that I had already talked to her. I didn't want to take sides. Steve told me pretty much what Jami told me, about their having a fight and her going to her mother's house."
One rather odd thing happened as they talked. "Steve said, 'Did you hear that?' and I said, 'Hear what? Is she still there?' He said, 'I'll call you back,' and he hung up."
It was about half an hour before Steve called Caston back, asking him if he had heard Jami yelling in the background.
"I never heard her at all," Caston said, "but he told me she had come back for her purse or money or something and that they spoke for a couple of minutes, and then she'd left. He was pretty upset. He didn't sound like normal."
Jeff Caston said he'd offered to go over and talk with Steve, but Steve declined, which in itself was unusual. Steve always liked to have someone who would listen to his troubles when he was upset. When Steve called Caston next, it was about one o'clock in the afternoon. "Steve told me Jami had disappeared. He was
really
upset then."
Steve told Caston that Jami had never arrived at her parents' home, and Caston had tried to calm him down, saying that she probably stopped on the way or that maybe her mother was just telling him that. "I told him
to get some sleep— they both should get some sleep— and something to eat and talk about it later."
Later that afternoon, when Caston called back, there was no answer at Steve's house. Sometime in early evening, Steve had called him, saying he was at his mother's house to sleep because he just wasn't "comfortable" at his house.
"Did you ever talk to Jami again?" Faddis asked.
"Never."
Jeff Caston described Jami as a wonderful mother and said he was sure she would never have left Chris voluntarily, "never in a million years," he said.
Over the next few days, Caston recalled that Steve continued to be agitated and upset. He picked up Jeff Caston to ride with him while he drove around, looking for Jami's car. Indeed, Steve ultimately called him to tell him that the car had been found, and Caston said they drove to the place where it was parked, by the church.
"Were the police there?" Faddis asked, intrigued. He had been there himself soon after the car was located, but he hadn't seen Steve there.
"No." Caston said. "The car was just sitting there, and there wasn't any yellow police tape on it and there was no one around."
Is it possible that Steve actually drove Jeff Caston to Jami's car
before
the police found it? Is it possible that he had known where it was all along?
A few days after Jami vanished, Caston said, Steve asked him to go with him to his mother's house. "He had forgotten his key to his mother's house, and he said he had to break a window to get in," Caston said. "He asked me to repair it."
Caston agreed to that, and Steve drove him to Sherri
and Wally Schielke's house in Mill Creek so he could take measurements to get glass cut. He was surprised at that time to see a shovel in the back of Steve's Blazer. Caston had never known him to carry tools because he just wasn't handy. Steve told Caston that he had borrowed the shovel from his mother and had to return it.
Steve wanted the long, narrow window beside the front door of his mother's house repaired as quickly as possible, as she was on her way home from Cancún after hearing about Jami's disappearance. Faddis knew that Sherri Schielke had come back from Mexico on Wednesday, October 3, three days after Jami vanished. That pinned down the time of the window repair.
When Mike Faddis reported his interview with Jeff Caston, it sounded to Jim Taylor as if Steve never had a key to his mother's house— but that something had distressed him so much on that last day when anyone talked to Jami that he couldn't bear to stay in his own house. His own house scared him, and so he ran to his mother's even though she wasn't there, and he broke a window to get in.
"Mike," Taylor said, "go find Jeff Caston. Take him up to the Schielke house, but don't tell him how to get there. He's going to tell you— and be sure that
he's
the one who determines the route. I don't care where he takes you. He can take you to Mount Vernon, for all I care. You drive and just follow his directions."
As hopeless as such a search might seem, they were still looking for Jami's body. They worked within the framework of the five hours when Steve was incommunicado on the afternoon of September 30. The very fact that he had missed his every-fifteen-minute call that afternoon made his activities highly suspect. No one they had talked to—
no one
—
had heard from Steve between
1:00 P.M. and 6:00 P.M. If Steve had killed Jami in their own home, he would have had to dispose of her body, probably bury it somewhere, and get back to his house in time to call her mother again. The Redmond investigators figured he had a period of an hour and a half to actually get Jami's body out of the house, dispose of it, and be back at his mother's house.
With Jeff Caston picking the route, Mike Faddis felt his heart leap when his passenger did
not
take the 405 freeway, but rather directed him to a two-lane back road that led north, winding its way to Mill Creek from Redmond. It was October and the Cascade Mountains off to their right were already dusted with snow. The date and the weather were almost exactly right; Jeff Caston had driven this route with Steve Sherer eight years earlier, and the mountains would have looked the same. They were twenty-five or thirty miles away, but they looked close enough to reach out and touch.
It was Jim Taylor's contention all along that someone with guilty knowledge of Jami Sherer's fate would have a compulsion to confess. As Faddis and Caston drew closer to a short road that cut over to the Schielke house in Mill Creek, Jeff Caston gestured toward a desolate area to the east and said, "You know, when we went by here, Steve kind of waved his arm and said, 'You could get rid of a body out there, and no one would ever find it.' "
Greg Mains and Mike Faddis would spend days driving up and down those back roads, especially along 35th S.E., the area where Jeff Caston had quoted Steve's telling remark. They found three locations that appeared to be reasonable places to look for Jami's remains. One was the property of a company called Pacific Topsoil on the east side of 35th S.E.
Fortunately for the detectives, if not for the owner,
Pacific Topsoil was under constant surveillance by environmental agencies, that wanted to be sure the topsoil operation didn't interfere with waterways or forests. So every so often, the owner had arranged for aerial photographs to be taken of the area. He showed the detectives the photos from 1987, 1989, 1990, and 1993.
In essence, the land was a massive peat bog, and from time to time over that period, it was covered with water. "There were a couple hundred acres there," Taylor said, "where someone could dispose of a body."
The other two sites they thought likely were close by. They knew that Steve needed to dispose of his wife's body rapidly so he could check in with her mother by early evening. First, the investigators had a chemical analysis done to determine the makeup of the soil and the peat bogs in the area. Depending on the acidity and the alkalinity of the substance tested, bodies left in a site will either decompose rapidly or will last forever: the outer layers will turn to a soap-like substance known as adipocere while the internal organs remain relatively unchanged. Test results indicated that if Jami was in the peat bog or in the other two locations, she would be frozen in time, and if her body should ever be found, she could be identified.
Cadaver dogs were brought in to search those areas. Necro-search dogs, or cadaver dogs, are trained much like bloodhounds, with rewards and praise when they find what they are supposed to. But different dogs are suited to different search items. Some dogs like to look for living things; cadaver dogs home in on dead tissue, bones, and teeth. Many of them are used in flooded areas, where they can actually sniff down a chimney to see if anyone is alive in houses below water. The best cadaver dogs can smell a body 20 feet below the sur
face of a body of water. They are incredible creatures, and not in the least macabre. When they're not working, they are as friendly and cheerful as any pet. And like most search-and-rescue dogs, they travel in their own plane seats and are never relegated to the baggage areas deep in the bowels of the plane.
Andy Rebmann, retired from the Connecticut State Police, is known worldwide for his work with cadaver dogs. He agreed to bring his dogs in to search for Jami.

* * *

Every Saturday the Redmond detectives were on the 35th S.E. site, watching the dogs work and looking for Jami. Although they had never met her, she was very real to them. They wanted very much to bring her home.
"We were probing and looking," Jim Taylor recalls, "but we didn't find her. What we were able to determine was that on the east side of 35th S.E. there had been an office and a security system at the time of Jami's disappearance, but farther up, on the other side of the road, there was no gate at that time [1990], and people would go in to dump garbage, or lovers would go there to park. Given that knowledge and the proximity to Steve's mother's house— which was a mile, mile and a half at the very most— and what Caston had said, we knew we had to be in the area where he left Jami, or relatively close."
Although they had never given much credence to psychics, one of the seers had sent word that Jami Sherer would be found near a "block building" with a big tower with "arms." About half a mile south of the area the Redmond investigators finally focused on, there was a Seattle City Light building, now fully fenced. When Greg Mains contacted them, one supervisor remembered that there had been a cinder-block
building there at one time. It had since been dismantled.
Taylor, Mains, and Faddis believed they were close to Jami. They went back again and again to wooded areas in South Snohomish County and in the northeastern part of King County. Twice they used police divers and sonar equipment to search the murky bottom of Lake Stevens. There was no way to search Lake Washington where Steve often took his power boat. The vast lake is so cold and so deep that it rarely gives up its secrets.
And then the winter storms roared in and made any further searches impossible until the spring came again.
It was Christmas 1998. The Hagels had spent nine Christmases without Jami and without closure.