Empty Promises (19 page)

Afterword

Judy Hagel believes she knows what happened in her daughter's Redmond house ten years ago. She can close her eyes and visualize it, even though Steve Sherer will probably never admit his crime.
"I
know
that Jami was finally going to leave Steve that day," Judy says firmly. "She had made up her mind that nothing he could do would stop her. She told me she was on her way, and I believe she was. Steve would have pulled out that videotape and threatened to show it to me. He'd probably done that many times, but this time, I think Jami told him, 'I don't care anymore. Go ahead and show it to my mother. I'm still leaving you.'
"That [videotape] was the one thing he could hold over her head to keep her in line. When he realized that Jami was really going and that he had no power left over her, the only way he had to stop her was to kill her. I think he choked her at the top of the stairs and she fell down them."
Judy's voice choked a little as she spoke of that. "I wouldn't have liked to see that awful videotape, but it would not have changed how I felt about my daughter one bit. I would still have loved her. Nothing would have changed my love for her. She would
have been welcome with us, and safe with us. I wish she could have understood that sooner. When I think of how my daughter must have suffered during those four years she was married to Steve, I can hardly bear it.
"I never knew just how bad it really was."

Bitter Lake

Children are often involved in the tangled lives their parents choose. They are the complete innocents, and their stories the ones that make you cry. The little boy in the following story had no choices in his life. Nor, in the end, did his mother.
The old man tossed and turned, caught in that drifting place between wakefulness and deep sleep. He wished for the thousandth time for the vigor of his youth when nothing had kept him awake at the end of a hard day's work. Roused from the edge of a nightmare, the elderly resident of the cozy house on the shore of Bitter Lake snapped awake, startled by angry shouting outside. When he bought this place, the Bitter Lake shoreline had been buffered by thick stands of evergreen. It was isolated and peaceful then, but the neighborhood had changed; the building boom around Seattle had crept out even to this serene little lake with its deceptive name. Where there had once been trees and marshes full of wild geese, there were now condos and apartment houses with every beehive unit populated by young people who seemed to come and go at all hours of the day and night.
This was a Saturday night during the last weekend of March. Though it was the threshold of spring, the weather was cold and windy. But the stormy night didn't seem to stop any of his new neighbors. They were partying, as they always did. Didn't they know that some folks needed their sleep? It was no use going to bed early. Cars were backfiring, tires screeching, and somebody was still shouting. He rolled over and looked at the clock beside his bed. It was nearly 2:00 A.M. The
taverns would be closing in a few minutes. It was Sunday morning now.
Sitting on the side of his bed with his bare feet on the cold floor, the old man realized that a car had pulled up just below his window. He could hear someone talking loudly, and he figured it was some teenagers whooping it up when they should have been sleeping. But then something caught his attention and he listened more closely as the shouts outside grew sharper. There was a frightening hostility in the voice that carried up through his open window, an anger that seemed to swell and then recede. Holding his breath instinctively, he got out of bed and walked across his dark bedroom to a window that looked out on Bitter Place North.
Below, he could see a shiny reddish sports car. A very tall man stood next to the car, shouting at someone inside. The old man could tell that the occupant of the car was a female by the sound of her voice, although he couldn't see her. Her voice was loud too, high-pitched and full of stress, or maybe fear; the pair seemed to be engaged in a violent argument. Unaware that he was being observed, the man walked around to the driver's side of the car and grabbed the door handle. But the woman had apparently triggered the locks and the door didn't budge. Suddenly the big man's foot rose and crashed against the door with a crunching sound. He kicked the window until it smashed.
Later, it would be hard for the old man to remember if what he was watching had happened rapidly or if it was really being played out as it seemed— in slow motion. The driver's door was flung open and the woman emerged, running almost gracefully at first as she crossed the street, heading away from the lake shore. Then she scrambled up a terraced slope. The silent wit
ness observed this from his bedroom window, shocked to see that the woman was half naked; she wore only a bra and a light skirt, or maybe a half-slip. The man was dressed, and as he whirled beneath the streetlight, the old man saw that he had a thick head of hair and a beard.
The woman had apparently surprised him by running away, and she labored up the grassy bank, through a dark patch of ivy and was almost to the giant fir trees at the edge of a lawn when she began to scream. "Help! Help me!" she cried, although she surely couldn't see the old man standing there in the window.
He realized now that what he was witnessing was more than a quarrel. This woman was in trouble. "This isn't the usual little thing," he told himself. "I'd better call the police." But before he could move to the phone, the man reached out an improbably long and muscular arm and grabbed the fleeing woman around the waist. He dragged her back down the embankment as if she was weightless. She was very slender and small. Next to her, the man looked huge.
There was no phone in his bedroom, so the old man had to leave the window to get to the phone in the kitchen to call the police. That was probably just as well. If only he were younger, he berated himself, he could go out to help the woman, but he knew that at his age, he would be no match for the bearded man. Where were all the rowdy young guys now, when they were needed? The street was deserted, save for the frightened woman and the man who had caught her in her flight.
The old man's call for help was recorded at Central Communications on the 911 line just before 2:00 A.M. The Seattle Police Department dispatcher immediately alerted Officers J. R. Sleeth and R. T. Mochizuki in pa
trol car 3N12. At this time of night, most calls were about drunks weaving along the roadways between the taverns and their homes.
"We've got an assault that's taking place now in the 13300 block of Bitter Place North, the dispatcher announced." Sleeth and Mochizuki weren't far away; they reached the address in minutes. Nothing could have prepared them for what they found.
The cries for help had stopped, the street was deserted, and the red car was gone. All that was left was a pitiful and tragic sight. After one look, Sleeth picked up his radio mike and said tightly, "We've got an assault here. Bad one. Better start us an aid car. Have the aid car enter off Greenwood."
"Received. What type of injuries?"
"Checking right now." The dispatcher waited until Sleeth replied, "You'd better send Medic One. I hope they make it. We've got a lady with a serious head injury. And we've got a little child here that's also been injured."
With their flashlights and the paler glow of the streetlight, the uniformed officers saw that the woman lay face down in a pool of blood that was rapidly seeping into the damp grass. Her face was a horror of bruises and cruel cuts; one of her eyes had actually been kicked or beaten out of its socket.
A little boy lay beside her. He appeared to be two or three years old. He was dressed in yellow clown pajamas and a tiny Seattle Seahawks jacket. His face, too, had been so brutally beaten that the patrol officers could hardly bear to look at him.
As they knelt over him, they held their breath, but they could detect no sign that he was breathing. Sleeth and Mochizuki performed CPR, breathing into the toddler's mouth, and pressing carefully on his tiny chest so
they wouldn't break a rib or do more damage. They continued to work on him, stopping to listen for some sign that he was drawing in air on his own.
The woman moaned and tossed. She was breathing, but she was unconscious. As the Medic One rig's siren came closer and closer, Sleeth picked up the radio mike again. "You'd better notify homicide," he said tightly. "And get them out here right away."
The Seattle Fire Department paramedics looked at the little boy and shook their heads. They were too late to save him. They worked frantically over the woman, knowing that it would be a miracle if she lived.
More officers arrived on the scene. They questioned the elderly witness who had watched the struggle from his home. He was able to give them a remarkably detailed description of the man he'd seen chasing the woman. "He wore a brown jacket, maybe leather. He was big, husky," the man said carefully. "Not a teenager but not old either. Maybe in his twenties or early thirties. He looked like that basketball player from Portland, that Bill Walton. He had a beard like him. I could see him driving away in the red car after I came back from calling you."
It hadn't been that long. Maybe ten minutes at the most. The dispatcher alerted all police units in the area to be on the lookout for the suspect in the shiny red sports car.
The area was soon alive with police vehicles and Medic One units. What had happened had occurred with deadly speed, and neither the stunned policemen nor the paramedics could do much to help the victims, but they might have a chance to trap the attacker within the net of patrol cars that were blocking exits from the Bitter Lake neighborhood.
It was 2:05 A.M. on March 30 when the phone rang
in Homicide Detective Sergeant Don Cameron's home. Cameron's crew was on call for the weekend. When the regular shift of detectives left the homicide offices in the Public Safety Building at 11:45 P.M., the calls automatically went to the standby crew. "Patrol units are on the scene of a very brutal assault," the dispatcher said tersely. "They're requesting Homicide."
Cameron threw on his clothes as he talked. He called two of his detectives, Mike Tando and John Boatman, at home and asked them to swing by Homicide to pick up the cameras and investigative kits and bring them to Bitter Lake. "I'll head there now and meet you," he told them.
It was 2:30 A.M. when Cameron arrived at the scene. Patrol officers told him the Seattle Fire Department rig had just left with the injured woman. "She's not expected to live, according to the medics," Sleeth said. "The baby's still here. He's over there."
Cameron walked to the second Medic One rig. The child lay inside. The huge detective sergeant whom everyone called Mr. Homicide took a deep breath and peered into the brightly lit ambulance. He could see that the little boy had suffered numerous blunt-impact-type injuries to his head, and Cameron forced himself into the objective mode of a detective. If he didn't, he wouldn't be able to do this. He saw a strange pattern emblazoned in the middle of the toddler's forehead; he had been hit with something that left a circular indentation with several distinct impressions in the center of the circle. Not a hammer. A hammer would have left a solid circle. What then? A ring? Maybe.
There would be no rush to the hospital for the baby. It was too late. The woman, who was drawing in air with great difficulty, was alive when the ambulance
reached Harborview Hospital on the highest hill overlooking downtown Seattle. If anyone could save her, it would be the physicians in Harborview's trauma center, where they were accustomed to treating terrible damage inflicted by car crashes, industrial accidents, and the extremes of human rage.
The obvious question remained unspoken. How could anyone do this to a fragile woman? To a helpless child? What could they possibly have done to send someone into such a violent rage?
Don Cameron called the medical examiner's office, and when John Boatman and Mike Tando arrived, he assigned them to measure the area where the attacks had occurred and to pick up any evidence the killer might have dropped. It had to be done, of course, and he wanted to keep them away from the paramedics' rig. "Don't look at the baby," he told them. They had toddlers, too; the sight of the dead child had been rough enough for Cameron, whose children were older.
Homicide detectives do what they have to do, but all of them will admit that the murder of a child always affects them deeply. This little blond boy in his clown pajamas was one of the most shocking victims any of them had ever encountered. It didn't matter how much tragedy they had seen or how impervious they seemed in the face of death; the murder of a child could make tough cops cry.
Dr. John Eisele, the King County assistant medical examiner, arrived and examined the child. He gave official verification that the youngster had succumbed to severe trauma to the head within the preceding hour: "Massive head trauma with a large laceration and skull fracture at the rear of the head. It happened just a short time ago."
The baby's body was moved to the medical examiner's vehicle and transported to the morgue to await autopsy.
Mike Tando and John Boatman walked up the bank to the spot where the attack had occurred. The uniformed officers cordoned off the entire grassy slope with yellow crime scene tape.
In addition to the old man, another witness told them he had seen the tall, bearded suspect beating and kicking both the victims. He too said it had happened very quickly and he could only watch the huge man as he sped away in a small red car.
"Anybody know who they are?" Tando asked the officers who had been first on the scene. "Did they live in one of the apartment houses?"
"No," Mochizuki said. "Nobody here knows them."
But the officers who had seen the woman speculated that the victims had probably been a mother and child. They both had the same blond hair. The police found no identification— the woman's purse was gone. It was clear they had been in the car with the killer. The prime witness was certain he'd seen the woman emerge from the vehicle and run away.
The grassy slope where the woman and baby were attacked was across the street from the homes fronting Bitter Lake. There was no moon, and the area was only dimly lit by streetlights at 3:00 A.M. But the detectives' auxiliary lighting revealed three distinct blood splotches on the grass: the place where the woman had been found was still marked by a blood pool 13 inches by 11 inches, and the baby had lain in a puddle of blood 7 inches by 6 inches. The third pool of blood marked where the child's head rested as responding officers
tried to save him. The detectives photographed the blood and took samples for typing.
It was ten minutes to four in the morning when the investigators cleared the scene and returned to homicide headquarters downtown. They had retrieved very little in the way of physical evidence, and there was nothing more they could do until morning light made it possible to search the scene further.
Tando and Boatman drove up the hill to Harborview Hospital to check on the condition of the woman victim. The head resident in the ER told the two detectives that she was in "very critical" condition. She was still in surgery, where doctors were attempting to reduce the swelling in her brain, which had been so traumatized that it was now being crushed by her skull. "There's very little chance that she will survive," the doctor said. "But we're trying. Do you know who she is?"
Tando shook his head. "No idea at all."
The night's work was far from over for Cameron and his crew, but they didn't mind working through the night; a suspect in the brutal attack had surfaced. He had been caught in the police net they had dropped over the Bitter Lake neighborhood. And based on first reports, he certainly sounded like the huge bearded man their prime witness had described.