Empty Promises (17 page)

* * *

Sharon Ann "Sherri" Schielke took the stand. She was very attractive, with soft dark hair worn in a pageboy with feathered bangs. She had perfect features, and, like her missing daughter-in-law, she was very petite.
Sherri explained how she had helped Jami and Steve buy their home on May 31, 1990. She said she had never seen the shattered window beside her front door, so she had no personal knowledge that it had been broken on Sunday, September 30. "I saw fresh putty around the glass around New Year's 1990."
"Did you get some Missing posters of Jami?"
"Yes, Carolyn Willoughby gave them to me, and then Steve had some."
"How many?" Mair asked.
"A stack about that high." She held her hands about a foot apart. "I have about twenty left. Carolyn and I and my daughters left them along the Bothell Highway and in Lynnwood."
Sherri admitted that she had never seen Steve take
any to distribute. She had heard that Jami was missing when she was in Cancún on Sunday morning.
Mair asked Sherri to explain the arrangement she had with Steve to be in her house that Sunday.
"Well, I paid the mortgage, and they paid me back on the first of the month. On the twenty-ninth Steve was going to bring me a check—"
"Objection," Hank Corscadden interrupted. "Hearsay."
Corscadden's style was very different from Brenneman's and Richardson's. Almost military in his bearing, he fired off objections and questions in a staccato fashion that left witnesses stuttering. He knew his law and he caught every slip away from proper questions and answers. He shot out "Hearsay" again and again.
Sherri Schielke picked up the thread of her testimony at Mair's urging. "I asked him to mail packages for me whenever he could," she said. "He was coming the next day anyway. I asked him to drop off the check for the mortgage and put it in the bank. I left a deposit slip. We had a hidden key. Wally had two kids; I had three. Laura had lived at home, and she still had her key."
Sherri explained how she had cut her trip short and arrived home on Wednesday. "I went to the Hagels'. Steve was extremely upset."
She was the first witness who had noticed that, and they had been in trial for weeks. Steve's mother told the jury that she thought it would be a nice thing for her and Saundra to clean Jami's house October 8 so it would be clean when she got home. Sherri intimated that she was sure Jami was coming home.
Steve's mother cried as she read his suicide note, especially when it said, "I've lost Jami one way or the other." Once more, she detailed the financial arrange
ments about the house and why eventually they had to rent it and then sell it: Jami was no longer there to make the mortgage payments.
Hank Corscadden cross-examined Sherri. He peppered her with questions about the Microsoft stock, the house sale, the broken window, the replacement carpet next to the garage door and why she had chosen to clean Jami's house this time when she had never done it before.
"The other times when he assaulted Jami, you didn't clean the house?"
"I picked her up after one assault."
"How long have you been in court?"
"Four weeks." Sherri had heard seventy witnesses testify.
"You talked with Mr. Mair?"
"I spoke with him every day about the witnesses' impact."
Sherri's brother had been a police officer and was now a private investigator. She agreed that she had signed a note for a loan to set up his business with no collateral.
"You knew that any information your brother uncovered would incriminate your son?"
"No!"
"You confided to Carolyn Willoughby that there was a good chance that Steve was involved?"
"No— I said that
anyone
could be involved."
Corscadden prodded her with questions until Sherri Schielke answered, "There is always that possibility, but I hoped it wouldn't be true."
"You knew of your son's assaultive behavior."
"I only knew about that one time with Jami."
"Actually two," Corscadden reminded her. "There was another time where Steve was arrested for pulling Jami's hair out."
That was a coup for the prosecution; the memory of earlier testimony brought back ugly images of a piece of Jami's scalp lying on the floor. Sherri was clearly downplaying Steve's propensity for physical violence. Bettina had called her for help from California once and Sherri had ignored her plight, too.
"Do you believe your son is involved in Jami's disappearance?" Corscadden asked rapidly.
"I don't know."
Sherri said there was no way for her to know if her front windows had been broken. "I usually don't inspect my house for damage or broken windows. If it was well done, I wouldn't have noticed."
"Your son took your car [a Bronco] at New Year's? You would not have entrusted your son with a key— but he drove your car?"
"I didn't know."
"There is no doubt in your mind that Jami is dead?"
"No."
As Corscadden pelted her with facts and with the many times Steve had taken advantage of her, Sherri's answers grew foggier and less precise.
"After the case was filed," Corscadden said, "you gave the
Seattle Times
an interview over the phone?"
"I spoke to someone. I don't recall."
"You said, 'Ten years later, this is a little bit much.' If your daughter was murdered, would you feel the same way?"
Mair roared out an objection, and Hank Corscadden moved on to other aspects of the case.
"Did you think the police meant to interrupt Chris's birthday party?" he asked Sherri, who had complained bitterly that the Redmond police had deliberately ruined Chris Sherer's birthday.
"I think they knew Chris was there."
"You've heard all the police who have worked to solve this case and traveled all over," Corscadden said. "Would they actually go to your house and further harm Chris?"
"Of course I don't think that."
Sherri seemed relieved to be talking about the Redmond investigators' annoying invasion of her family's life. But before she could comment further, Corscadden brought her back abruptly to the real issues at stake. "You believed Jami was dead somewhere along the line?"
"Yes."
"Do you know where… when… how she died?"
"No. No.
No."
Mair and Corscadden argued. The defense attorney could sense that his witness was faltering.
Sherri Schielke had done her best to support Steve's story. Did the jury believe that he had free access to her house and her cars? Her Bronco would have traversed the wilderness off-road far more easily than Steve's Blazer, but would she really have allowed Steve to drive her vehicles when he had so many traffic violations on his record? She had a Mercedes and the new Bronco; any damage to them when Steve was driving would probably not have been covered by her insurance. She was too good a businesswoman to have allowed that.
Sherri Schielke seemed to be trying valiantly in her testimony to show that Steve had as much access to her home and her vehicles as his sisters did. She had gone to the wall so many times for her firstborn, figuratively walking behind him and cleaning up the messes and catastrophes he left in his wake. As he entered his thirties, Sherri had tried to make Steve more responsible for his
own life, but he hadn't really changed. Now he stood accused of first-degree murder, and she reverted to her protective stance, trying to save him from a life behind bars.
As Sherri stepped down from the witness chair, obviously relieved, Pete Mair recalled Richard Schurman, the bloodhound handler, in an attempt to erase his earlier devastating testimony. This time Mair asked the witness about a dog named Major, who had also participated in the search for the last driver of Jami Sherer's Mazda in October 1990. Police records noted that Major had gone off in an entirely different direction from Maggie and the other search dogs, showing "intense interest" in another area and ending up two blocks from the car and nowhere near the freeway or the bus stop.
"It's apparent you don't understand dogs," Schurman said to Pete Mair. "That dog has never made a find in its life."
He explained that Major had been a dog in training. "His handler retired after Major proved unreliable," Schurman said. "That dog would show 'intense interest' in a Milk-Bone dog biscuit."
Marilyn Brenneman could not resist one question on cross. "Is that where the expression 'That dog won't hunt' comes from?"
Schurman nodded. "That dog was not a good search dog."
If Steve Sherer was going to testify in his own defense, the time would be now. But he sat, as always, at the defense table, somehow detached from the whole legal process. The defense rested without the jury's ever hearing from Steve himself.
That was probably a good move on the part of
Camiel and Mair. If Steve had testified, he would have been subject to cross-examination, and those who knew him also knew he was given to bursts of fury. There would undoubtedly have been questions that he didn't want to answer. Still, for the gallery— and the jury, too— one question remained unanswered: Who was Steven Sherer?

17

Neither the prosecution nor the defense denied that somehow, some way, Jami Sherer had died. There was simply great disagreement about whether Steve Sherer had caused her death.
On May 24, 2000, Peter Camiel asked that Judge Wartnik dismiss all charges against Steven Sherer for lack of evidence and, barring that, to dismiss the charge of first-degree murder because the prosecution had failed to establish premeditation. "Because we don't know the manner and means of death," Camiel argued, "all we can do is speculate about premeditation."
Judge Wartnik denied both motions after the prosecution team cited a Kansas case where appellate judges had ruled that premeditation can be proved by circumstantial evidence and what a jury may infer from prior events. Steve Sherer had made threats against Jami before she disappeared, they contended, and that showed he planned to destroy her.
The two charges against Steve Sherer were still in
place: premeditated murder in the first degree and second-degree murder that occurred as the killer was in the process of committing a felony. In this case the felony was assault in the second-degree.

* * *

Kristin Richardson rose to present the final argument to the jury. Dark-haired, with a calm manner, Richardson had been impressive throughout the State's case. Now she could not keep the scorn from her voice as she spoke of Steve Sherer's "squalid, voyeuristic life."
She began by stressing that fear was Steve Sherer's weapon. "He had tight control over other people: his mother, his in-laws. He threatened that he would take Jami and Chris away from them. And finally, Jami."
Kristin Richardson told the jury that sometimes a prosecution team cannot offer them a situation where there is no doubt about the guilt of the defendant. "We can't always have an eyewitness or a videotape or a diary. But you don't have to have a body to convict," she stressed. "If you're smart enough about where to put a dead person— the bottom of a lake, the base of a tree, a hole somewhere in the wilderness, you
can
get away with murder. We will probably never know the last minutes of Jami's life. We may never know why she stayed with him or how he got rid of her body.
"But the body is
not
the case. [The case is] the final picture of the little pieces of a puzzle— the forest made up of the single trees."
Richardson explained the elements of a murder case: Did this murder take place in the state of Washington? Yes. Was there an intent to kill Jami Hagel Sherer? Yes. Premeditation, she explained, means that intent was present for more than a moment in time, even a minute or two before the murder itself. Was there premeditation? Yes.
"Look at Steve's treatment of Jami: control," she said. "The first time they met, he picked her up in a bar and talked her into leaving her friends and coming with him. He sent her a dozen roses. He was forceful. He gave Jami a full-court press. He was quickly in control of her. Jami's biggest mistake? Moving to California with him. He threatened suicide with a knife. And Jami said, 'It wouldn't have happened if he didn't love me so much.' He put a sign in their yard, 'I love my wife!' He sent her roses to Microsoft. He gave her diamonds.
"And then" —Kristin Richardson's voice rose— "he embarrassed her. He called her stupid, worthless. He put her down in the Balderdash game. That was the way it was going to be. He missed her labor by two hours. All she wanted to be was a mommy, but he discussed the most private moments of their sex life. He was happy to talk about his sex life to anyone who would listen. He kept sex photos of her, her underwear.
"He made her have a boob job with the money from insurance fraud. At their wedding, he bragged that 'all the guys had hard-ons.' Jami was the proverbial inflatable doll to him."
Richardson made no effort to deny that Jami had indeed engaged in three-way sex with Steve and Lew Adams, but she pointed out that it was at Steve's coercion. "Lew said that Steve called him into the bedroom, saying, 'I need help here.' Steve was undressing Jami, who was just roused from sleep. Steve was taking her bra off. Steve couldn't maintain an erection. Jami told Lew later that she was humiliated.
"Steve wasn't working. He spent his time obsessing over whether her job was lessening his control over Jami. He had no concern at all for Jami. Jami would do
anything
to avoid a fight, but she was unable to break the cycle, although everyone pulled out the stops to get her free of him."
Kristin pointed out what Steve had said the night before Jami vanished: "If I ever catch her cheating, I'm gonna kill her."
And Jami had finally cheated on him, going out with Lew Adams because, in Jami's words, "Lew listened to me and gave me the courage to leave."
"She asked her dad, 'Daddy, can I come home?' She took the ring," Kristin submitted. "It was a metaphor— the final payment to her, a symbol of her value to him. She taped it under her car seat."
Kristin Richardson gave a timetable for September 30, 1990, the last day she believed Jami was alive:
7:30 A.M.: Steve calls Judy Hagel and says, "Jami's home."
Before 8:00 A.M.: Jami is at Judy's. Steve calls, calls, calls. Judy prevails upon her to speak to him. Jami agrees to meet Steve at the Samena Club. Steve grabs her purse.
8:40 A.M.: Jami calls Judy. She's just getting clothes together for Chris. "Then I'll be leaving."
10:00 or 11:00 A.M.: Jeff Caston calls. Jami's anxious to leave before Steve gets home. He has found the receipt from the Crest Motel in her purse. He's starting to lose it. He goes to the motel, looks for the ring, checking the bed in the room. No one has slept in the bed.
11:45 A.M.: Jami's on her way to her folks' house. She plans to stop by the Bear Creek Taco Time. She tells Judy, "I'll bring food when I come." It's a fifteen-minute drive to Judy's from the Sherer home.
12:15 P.M.: Steve Sherer calls Judy, asking for Jami. He talks to Jeff Caston and says Jami has disappeared.
12:30 P.M.: Steve calls Judy.
"At that point," Richardson said quietly, "Jami was dead. Somehow he knew she'd disappeared at 12:15."
Kristin Richardson told the jurors that Steve had changed his usual behavior. Instead of calling the Hagels' house every fifteen minutes, on this Sunday they heard nothing at all from him from 1:00 to 5:00. "Utter silence. He had four hours, and they heard not one word.
"He called his sister, Saundra, during
Star Trek,
and said, 'Jami's disappeared.'
How did he know so soon?
"He threw out Jami's birth control pills."
To Richardson, the most obvious lie Steve Sherer told all day was when he said to Jeff Caston, "We decided to go our separate ways until this can be straightened out."
"Inconceivable!"
Richardson said vehemently.
And during that afternoon when no one heard from Steve Sherer, he had been busy. Kristin Richardson asked rhetorically, "Who had the best car to hide a body? The
Bronco."
His mother's Bronco.
"His actions after Jami disappeared form a picture— all incidents of a cover-up." She itemized the elements of that picture:
"He broke the window to Sherri Schielke's house.
To sleep? Why?
He wasn't looking for Jami at all.
"He sleeps in another house for a week. Why not be there at their home to take Jami's call if it came? He was 'uncomfortable' there. Because he committed murder there?
"He signed a cleaning order for the carpet in his house. It was only four months old. His mother cleaned the house. She had never cleaned it before when Jami left.
"He tells his uncle Roger to look for Jami's car in his patrol sector in north Seattle. How did he know the car would be there?
"He knew about Jami's duffel bag.
"He stages a suicide attempt. He never intended to die. He's got the picture of Jami in her wedding dress. A picture of Chris. A note and a cell phone. It was a cry for help— to get out of being interviewed by the detectives.
"He puts Jami's panties around his biceps. He has sexual control of her
even after death.
Her most intimate thing tied around his muscle."
Kristin Richardson's voice was a metronome, ticking off the actions that simply didn't compute with what a normal, innocent man might be expected to do after his wife had vanished.
Steve never helped in the search for Jami. "He took a pile of flyers to look good, but he left them in his glove compartment. He started dating twenty-five to thirty other women within two weeks. He 'missed sex.' He told a girl in a bar 'The bitch is gone,' but he told Bettina, 'I'm sorry I hurt you or her.'
"He never asked the police for an update on the investigation; he never asked Jami's friends."
Kristin Richardson spoke of how the car seat of the Mazda was pushed too far back for Jami to reach the pedals. The alarm wasn't on, she reminded the jury, and the duffel bag was hastily packed with things Jami would not have chosen. "He had a key to her car, but he said he didn't. Carolyn Willoughby found it." Nor, Richardson suggested, had Sherri Schielke ever left a key to her house for Steve.
"There was
Kilz
sealant under the carpet in the basement near the garage. [Steve] said 'The dog did it,' but something had evacuated there," Richardson said. "He bought more carpet for that house in January 1991… a piece five by three feet in the hall.
"He liquidated Jami's assets. Sherri wanted her money back two months later. They both knew that Jami wasn't coming back."
Steve's Achilles' heel, Richardson suggested, was his drinking. "When he drank, he leaked out things. [To his uncle]: 'They can't prove murder without a body.' To Ron Coates: 'I'm the prime suspect— she was going to leave me anyway,' and 'I've done something bad. I'm going to miss her.'
"And then there was silence until he was arrested," Kristin Richardson said. "And then he said, 'So you found the body?' "
She asked the jury to remember Steve Sherer's Halloween card to Chris in which he urged his son never to drink or do drugs because they had ruined his life.
"Remember, [most of] the witnesses don't know each other, but their stories dovetail. Nuns or priests make better witnesses, but these are the people who want to spend time with this man, people on his level. Remember his history, his actions, his reactions and his statements.
"Just because we don't know how she died doesn't mean Jami isn't dead. We heard of shallow graves and animals.
"He took Jami's purse so she'd have to come home to get it. He
lured
her," Richardson said, winding down her final arguments. "She told her parents on the phone on Sunday morning, 'Steve's here but it's okay— I'm getting ready to leave.'
"He called Judy Hagel as if Jami wasn't already
dead. And now Steve Sherer is in a place where his desire for control has no power whatsoever. He has lost control at last."