Empty Promises (8 page)

Judy recalled, "the phone rang and it was Steve. He said, 'I can't stay here. Can I come back?' I said, 'Yes. Bring Chris.' "
By ten o'clock her grandson was asleep at her house, and Judy turned to Steve, determined to get some answers. She asked him what he'd done that afternoon and he told her he'd stayed at home until two o'clock and then gone over to his mother's house and fallen asleep. He hadn't heard from Jami all day. Steve explained that his mother and stepfather were away on vacation in Cancún, Mexico, and he'd promised to stay there part of the time, check on the mail, and generally keep an eye on their home to give them a break. She thought that was peculiar; Judy knew that Sherri Schielke invariably turned to her daughters, Laura and Saundra, to look after things while she was away. As far as Judy knew, Steve didn't even have a key to Sherri and her third husband Wally's home in Mill Creek. But Steve was insistent that this time he had been asked to stop by.
The next morning, Steve was up at six and announced that he was going over to his mother's house again to see if Jami had shown up there. Judy stared at him. Why in the world would Jami go to Sherri's house? Even if she had gone there, she would have seen Steve's car in the driveway and left to avoid a confrontation. If she was going anywhere, she would have come home to her family, or she would have gone to Lisa's or some other girlfriend's.
Steve called a little while later from his mother's home and said Jami wasn't there.
"I started calling Microsoft about seven-thirty A.M.," Judy Hagel said. "I started calling her office and then started getting scared. Up until then, I wasn't as scared.
I was calling Microsoft and she never answered the phone."
By then Judy was beginning to panic, and she did something that was out of character for her. She hadn't heard from Jami since she said she was on her way home with tacos for everyone. That had been
twenty hours ago.
"I thought about [Lew Adams and his wife] and Costco. So I called Costco and asked for Lew's wife. I didn't quite know what I was going to say to her, but I had to know what was going on. The first time she answered the phone, I told her I was Steve's mother, because I knew she didn't know me. She said, 'I have nothing to say to you.' "
That struck Judy as odd. Why would Lew's wife be angry with Steve or with his mother?
"Then I called back," Judy said. "I'm sorry, but this is who I am. I'm Jami Sherer's mother. Your husband was with my daughter last night, and I need to know if they're still together."
Dru Adams said she knew that Lew had come home early in the morning and had gone to work. He was just getting off his shift.
"Where is she? Where is my daughter?" Judy asked desperately.
"I know nothing about this," Dru Adams said and hung up.
Moments later Judy's phone rang. It was Lew Adams, and he sounded distraught. "What do you mean, Jami's not there?"
"She's not here," Judy said, "and she's not home either."
"I told her not to go home," he said. "She was so scared to go home, and I told her, 'Don't go home.' I kept telling her not to go home."
Judy didn't know what to think, but she had a feeling that something terrible had happened to Jami. She kept hearing Jami's voice saying, "I'm on my way. I'll be there." And underneath that, although Judy tried not to remember, she kept hearing Jami say, "All he can do is kill me."

7

On Monday, October 1, 1990, Judy Hagel could wait no longer. She called the Redmond Police Department and reported Jami as a missing person. It really should have been Steve's place to do that, but he hadn't mentioned doing it. When Steve came back from his mother's house, he agreed to go with Judy to the police station to make a formal complaint. The two rode in his car, a 1987 Blazer. The rig was in terrible shape, with both doors smashed from wrecks. Its dents and holes were patched with Bondo and the interior was awash with junk and crumpled wrappers. It was filthy and muddy. But that day, Judy Hagel didn't notice anything different about Steve's vehicle. It was always like that.
Patrol Officer Brian Steinbus took the first missing persons report on Jami Sherer. After Steve and Judy had filled out forms at the police station, an officer accompanied them to the Sherers' house on Education Hill in Redmond. The policeman walked through the house, opening up doors and poking his head in to
check each room. Everything seemed normal, but Judy noted a large suitcase sitting on the bed in the master bedroom. Jami had been packing to leave Steve; why hadn't she taken the suitcase with her?
"Then we went into the kitchen," Judy recalled, "and right by the fridge, there was a little [dried] red spot on the floor. The policeman was standing there and could see, so I reached down and picked it up, and I said, 'What is this?' …And Steve took a towel and grabbed it and said, 'Oh, that's just juice of Chris's,' and threw it in the garbage."
The police explained that they couldn't mount a full-scale search for Jami until there was more evidence that she was the victim of foul play. She was an adult, and their experience told them that the vast majority of husbands and wives who disappear during an argument come home of their own accord. If they mobilized to look for every missing adult, they could do nothing else.
Jami Sherer had said she was leaving Steve; her car— the 1980 Mazda RX7 she was so proud of— was missing; and she knew that Chris was safe with her mother. In the investigators' minds, there was every reason to believe she was probably giving herself an opportunity to think things out— or perhaps she was with another man.
Judy Hagel knew better, and so did Jami's friends and her co-workers at Microsoft. Jami would never worry her family this way, and most of all, she would never have left Chris for a whole day without explaining to him why Mommy was going away and promising to be back very soon.
Friends began to gather at the Hagels' house. They mapped out the area around Jami and Steve's house on Education Hill, Sherri Schielke's house, the Bear Creek
Taco Time, and Judy and Jerry's house. Then they broke up into search groups. Microsoft management immediately agreed to print up thousands of flyers with pictures of Jami on them. They also gave many employees paid leave to join the search.
Steve Sherer seemed reluctant to stay in his own home. He spent a lot of time at the Hagels' house, even though they suggested that he stay at his own house in case Jami called. The search for Jami was in high gear, but Steve didn't join in, nor did he pick up any flyers from the stack on the hall table. If he was looking for her at all, he kept it to himself. He seemed upset; he slept uneasily and said he couldn't understand why this had happened to
him.
"Steve felt very sorry for himself," one of Jami's friends recalled. "It was 'Poor me, poor me,' instead of 'Poor Jami.' "
Steve was behaving oddly, to say the least. When he walked into Judy's kitchen, she and Sheila, her son's girlfriend, saw that he had some kind of lacy material twisted around one of his biceps, like a sleeve garter.
"What's that?" Rich Hagel asked.
"Jami's panties," Steve answered. "I'm wearing them because it makes me feel closer to her."
The Hagels stared at each other in shock. That was crazy.
Steve wore the panty-garter into a bar he often frequented, and told patrons there the same thing. He also started wearing a necklace he'd given Jami for Valentine's Day; it was a diamond heart, definitely a woman's necklace. Steve explained that wearing her things kept him connected to Jami.
How odd that he never joined one of the search parties that had fanned out all around Redmond and Belle
vue as scores of volunteers searched for Jami or her car. There were so many places to look; someone as tiny as Jami could be in the woods, in Lake Sammamish, or even in Lake Washington and no one would ever know. No one understood why Steve wasn't helping them look for her. If she was in trouble, the more people out there the better. If she was dead, at least her family would know the truth. As it was, they were in agony.
Judy Hagel tried not to think that Jami could be dead. She questioned Steve again and again, trying to get him to remember what had happened after Jami vanished on Sunday at noon. He shook his head, saying that he'd been gone when she left, on his way to check his mother's home in Mill Creek and repeated that he'd fallen asleep there. "No way," Judy said flatly. "No way you were sleeping, Steve. You would have been on the phone every fifteen minutes if Jami was gone. You always are."
She kept counting the hours between Steve's phone calls that Sunday. It had been five or six hours! He called after Jami said she was on her way to Taco Time— he called twice, fifteen minutes apart, as he always did. And then he didn't call again until six-thirty. That behavior was so unlike him that Judy felt cold dread. She had to be careful about questioning him; if he became annoyed, he would take Chris and leave— and she couldn't let Chris go with him. So she tried to space out her questions.
During the first or second day he stayed with the Hagels— Monday or Tuesday— Judy heard Steve making a phone call, evidently to an auto detailer. She knew cars and all the lingo because she worked at a dealership in Bellevue.
"I heard him call," she said. "He wanted a detail on his vehicle." Steve wanted all the trash inside cleaned
up, and the interior vacuumed and shampooed, with a wash and wax on the outside. He'd never bothered to have his cars cleaned before; Steve's vehicles were always a mess. Why now? What did it matter if his Blazer was clean when his wife was lost somewhere?
Judy walked into the room where the phone was. "Steve," she said carefully, "why do you want a detail on your car?"
"Oh, well," he stuttered. "Ah, ahh, Rich spilled beer in it. I'm not supposed to be drinking beer, so I want to get it detailed so the smell won't bother me— tempt me, I guess."
Judy had ridden in Steve's Blazer the day before. There was no smell of beer in it. Nevertheless he was adamant that he was going to have it detailed. She wasn't sure if he ever accomplished that, but as he drove the Blazer, more and more mud and weeds dropped off. The Redmond investigators had not searched the Blazer, nor had they put it up on a hoist to look at the undercarriage. One of the best methods criminalists use to determine where a vehicle has been is to test the mud, dirt, and vegetation caught beneath it. It was too late for that now.

* * *

By October 4, 1990, there had been no word at all from Jami Hagel. Her smiling face beamed from telephone poles, store windows, and bulletin boards all over the eastside. Microsoft printed up a second flyer with a picture of Jami's car and a description of the charcoal-gray RX7 with a sunroof, and Washington plates: 541-AHX. The last time her parents had seen Jami, she had been wearing blue jeans, a white T-shirt, and new white tennis shoes.
The Redmond police no longer believed that she had
run away or taken a vacation from her life. They worked now to learn as much about her world as possible. It didn't take long for them to find out that Steven Sherer had a long rap sheet, mostly for traffic offenses and harassment, and that he was on record for having an incredibly violent temper. But then, Lew Adams, the man Jami had seen the night before she vanished, wasn't exactly an upstanding citizen either. Both Sherer and Adams were known cocaine users. The obvious conclusion was that one of them knew what had become of Jami, but there was always the slight chance that she had been abducted by a stranger who spotted the beautiful young mother somewhere between her home and her parents' home early Sunday afternoon.
Jami would have made a perfect victim. She was distraught and frightened about what would happen now that she was finally leaving Steve, and she told her mother during their last phone call that she was hurrying to get out of her house before Steve came home. She would have been a prime target for someone who wanted to grab her— too distracted and too tiny to put up much of a fight. The chances of a stranger abduction were slim, but it had to be considered.
If the investigators couldn't find Jami, they needed to find her car, which might contain evidence or, in the worst-case scenario, Jami's body. Meanwhile they set out to learn what motivation someone might have had to kill her.
On October 2, Sergeant L. M. "Butch" Watson got a page from Lew Adams shortly after 8:00 P.M. When he talked to Adams, Watson noted that the man was extremely emotional, and concerned that Steve Sherer had harmed Jami. Asked why he felt that way, Lew Adams said that Steve had "many things over Jami"
and that Steve was a recovering alcoholic with a gambling addiction. Steve had apparently confided in Adams that he had committed a number of crimes, including robberies in California.
That was interesting, but not necessarily a motive for murder. Finally, Lew Adams admitted that he had been sexually involved with Jami on about five occasions. The first three had been Steve's idea. "He likes to watch," Adams said.
Steve had manipulated both Lew Adams and Jami into having sex. He woke Adams up as he slept one night, intoxicated, on the Sherers' couch and told him to come into the master bedroom. There he awakened Jami too and began to remove her nightclothes as if offering a prize to Adams.
Over the next few weeks, Lew Adams said, he had watched Steve badger Jami, drug her, and coax her until she finally capitulated and participated, albeit unwillingly, in the threesome that Steve wanted. Steve's impotence made him a voyeur rather than a participant.
On the third occasion, Lew Adams said that Steve had videotaped them. It had all been for Steve's pleasure, Adams said. He was positive that Jami had been mortified over the whole episode.
What Steve didn't count on was that Jami was so desperate for a helping hand and kind words that she began to visualize an actual relationship with Lew.
After being married to Steve for three years, her self-esteem was practically nonexistent, and Lew Adams was the first man in years who had roused her long-dormant belief that she could love a man again— or that any man would want her.
So Jami obediently dressed in the garish outfits Steve bought her: spike heels, diaphanous lingerie,
miniskirts, and long black gloves. But that wasn't her; that was a woman acting out a part that her husband had written for her. Lew and Jami halfheartedly went through the motions, following Steve's directions for his homemade porno movie. Lew couldn't imagine that a man would use his own wife like that, and he was ashamed afterward.
In the resultant videotape, it was obvious that Jami was under the influence of some drug Steve had given her. It was also clear that she wasn't enjoying herself. Her eyes were hollow and vacant. She was acting— and clumsily— responding to the director, who was just out of camera range.
Lew Adams told Sergeant Watson that he had been with Jami the day before she disappeared, that they had gone to the Crest Motel on Aurora Avenue and stayed until early in the morning. Lew suspected that Steve knew what had happened because he learned from his estranged wife that Jami had called Dru's house the next morning. So had Judy Hagel, and of course Judy learned from Jami that Steve had run off with Jami's purse, in which he would have found Lew's business card and the motel receipt. Lew felt that Jami had been trying to get a message to him to warn him.
"Steve never called me on it," Adams said, "and that might be because he took out his anger on Jami."
Lew Adams feared that Steve had killed Jami or driven her so far away that she couldn't get home. He told Sergeant Watson that the videotape Steve took of them had been filmed on the night of September 21, and though Jami said that Steve promised to destroy it, Lew didn't know if he had done so.
Lew Adams was not eliminated as a suspect, but he had certainly raised some questions about Steve
Sherer. Lew had nothing to gain from Jami's death or disappearance, but Steve did: revenge, for one thing. Steve had told a number of people, including Jami's brothers, that she was as good as dead if she ever cheated on him.
Jami's Microsoft co-workers cooperated fully with the Redmond detectives. Two of her friends remarked that Jami had stopped wearing her diamond ring a few days before she disappeared. It was the same ring, of course, that Steve had already collected insurance on. Jami was reportedly afraid that Steve would pawn it, as he had done with several other items they owned. Steve was not drinking for the time being, but he had threatened to start again if Jami left him. He'd also told her he would commit suicide if she deserted him.
If Jami was dead, however, Steve would realize much more financial gain than he would from pawning her ring. Microsoft provided life insurance to its employees. In Jami's case, the payoff would be twice the amount of her salary. She was making $23,000 a year, so her beneficiary would collect $46,000. Steve Sherer was that beneficiary in May of 1987, designated as Jami's "fiancé." However, Jami had changed the beneficiary on July 21, 1988. Her son, Chris, would now collect her insurance. Whether Steve knew about the change in her beneficiary is questionable.
But Microsoft was an excellent company to work for, and there were other benefits that would probably go to Steve if Jami was dead, including the company stock she still owned, which was exploding exponentially.
On October 5, King County sheriff's deputy Roger Bleiler, who was Steven Sherer's maternal uncle, found
Jami Sherer's car. It was parked in a grassy area near the parking lot of the Unitarian church at 14724 First Avenue N.E., just to the north of the Seattle city limits. Several Redmond investigators joined King County detectives at the site. The address was in Bleiler's patrol sector, and he remarked that Steve had called him and asked him to be on the lookout for Jami's car in his patrol area. Coincidentally, the Mazda
was
found in his uncle's sector.
Actually, the caller who spotted the car first was someone from the church office. The Mazda had been there so long that they thought it might have been abandoned or stolen. Jami Sherer always kept her car clean and polished. It still was, but now it had water spots on it. That was easy to explain. A wild windstorm had hit Seattle in midweek. There were downed branches lying around the car, but the area beneath the car was clear and dry. The driver's door was unlocked, and they could see a black leather coat on the passenger seat and a duffel bag on the floor behind the driver's seat.
The hatchback portion of the Mazda was empty; if Jami had been in the car when it was driven to this spot, she was not here now. There was no other place in the small car to hide a body. East of the car was a large tract of undeveloped land, with trees, blackberry bushes, and weeds.
Before any human touched the car, the investigators put in a call for help from the Search and Rescue bloodhounds. Since there was clearly no one in the car now, they needed to know who might have driven it last, but no one except that person could tell them that. They needed a creature with a sense of smell beyond human capability to identify the last driver.
Richard Schurman III, responded with his dog, Maggie. According to Schurman, Maggie was the most dependable of all the search dogs he had worked with, and that was saying a lot. He'd been working with the bloodhounds since 1984. Although Schurman was a technologist in the aerospace industry, his avocation was Search and Rescue, and his heart was with his dogs. Maggie— formally known as Slo-Motion Magnolia Bark— had been on over two hundred missions, looking for lost children, runaways, disoriented Alzheimer's patients, and others who were so lost that humans couldn't find them.
"We teach [the dogs] obedience first," Schurman explained, "and then scent. They smell the scent article of the quarry [something that smells of the person pretending to be lost] and that person stands in plain sight and calls them. From there, the quarry only half-shows himself. And then a magical thing happens— the bloodhound drops his head to the ground and goes by scent alone."
Maggie and Schurman had worked together for twelve years, and though he had other dogs, he described her as "incomparable."
Schurman volunteered with Northwest law enforcement agencies, the FBI, the Washington State Patrol, and all the county and municipal agencies. He explained that a dog like Maggie, given enough time, could locate a single person in a crowd of many thousands at the Kingdome or Safeco Field, and she certainly could follow the trail of one person.
When Schurman arrived with Maggie, he found that the police had no scent article available. They had no way of knowing who the items in the Mazda belonged to. The next best thing— and maybe
the
best thing— in
this instance was to have Maggie sniff the area around the headrest of the driver's seat. The upper back of a car seat and the headrest itself are areas where a driver's hair and the bare skin at the back of the neck touch most often. Scales of dried skin, hair follicles, and perspiration are all deposited there in infinitesimal amounts.
Maggie clambered into the car and sniffed avidly at the back and top of the Mazda's driver's seat. And then Schurman ordered, "Find!"
Maggie went from the car to an area behind the church and then to a thickly vegetated field. She continued on to fenced-in sections around the church until she found a path that seemed to fascinate her. And then she got down to business.
"You can read your dog," Schurman said. "Maggie raised her tail straight up and put her nose down. She reached a trail between a brushy line along I-5. She seemed to be working a valid scent trail. She tracked the I-5 trail southbound to an off-ramp that led to a bus stop. And then she stopped. She was no longer interested."
It appeared that the driver of the Mazda had left the car in the church lot and made his (or her) way to a narrow path along the freeway until that person reached a transit bus stop. Presumably, they had boarded a bus. At that point, even the best tracking dog in the world would have lost the trail.
The next morning, the detective team decided to do another dog search, this time with scent objects. Accompanied by an officer, Schurman went to the Sherer home at 10709 161st Avenue North in Redmond. Steve gave them permission to search— but only for Jami's clothing, just enough to obtain a scent object that the
Search and Rescue dogs could track. Schurman was able to find what he needed for his dogs.
Schurman had long forceps and sterile bags to be sure that the items he selected would not be contaminated by the odor of anyone but household members. "Our DNA constantly sheds in the skin cells and bacteria," he said later, explaining that stress scents were stronger. Anyone who is tense or afraid exudes more odor. Schurman gathered clothing in three bags. The first was from the floor of the master bedroom, and the next two from the closet and the laundry basket.
The first scent item was Jami's underwear from the bedroom floor. The search dogs circled the car and went nowhere. They couldn't get interested in a scent because, clearly, Jami had never been there in that church parking lot in that car. She was not, apparently, the last person to drive her car.
They had not had permission to take Steve Sherer's clothes, but his clothes and Jami's were mixed in the laundry basket. A pair of Steve's trousers had been entangled with Jami's clothes in the hamper. When those items of Jami's were given to the bloodhounds, they picked up the male scent— Steve's scent that had transferred there; the dogs had already shown a complete lack of interest in Jami's scent. It was the second scent they picked up on. From 9:39 on the morning of October 6, until 10:13, a fresh team of bloodhounds followed the male scent— Steve's scent— on exactly the same route to I-5 that Maggie had tracked the day before. They too stopped in bewilderment when they lost their trail at the bus stop.
If those dogs could have talked— and they almost could have, in their own way— they would have told the detectives that Steve Sherer had left Jami's Mazda
RX7 in the church parking lot and then made his way to the bus stop where he either boarded a bus or was picked up by someone.