Empty Promises: And Other True Cases

  The Jami Sherer case was probably the most daunt ing case Marilyn Brenneman ever took on. Few prosecutors relish homicide cases without bodies. Most people think corpus delicti refers to the corpse of the victim, but, in truth, it means the body of the case, which is made up of all the circumstantial and physical evidence gathered by the investigators, the witnesses, the profiles of the principal characters, and the motivation behind the crime. Physical evidence can be seen, touched, smelled, by a jury. Circumstantial evidence, however, can be just as strong if there are enough factors present to lead a reasonable person to believe there is far more than coincidence involved when a number of circumstances combine to point to a suspect as guilty.

  The detectives who had worked the Jami Sherer disappearance seven years earlier had done a yeomanlike job as far as they went, but Jim Taylor and Marilyn Brenneman believed that much remained hidden. As Mains and Faddis brought in the first fragments of new information, they all began to weave a spiderweb of information and evidence, with each new contact a strand that linked with other strands until, they all hoped, they would catch a suspect firmly in the center.

  One of the first things Taylor, Faddis, and Mains did was to list the names of Jami's high school classmates. They then added Judy Hagel's list of everyone Jami had known in her life. "We sent letters to every one of them," Taylor said, "asking 'Have you heard from Jami since the end of September 1990?' and even though no one had seen her, we got leads out of the answers to our letters."

  They conferred with a prosecutor in Marion County, Oregon— Diane Middle— and Alan Scharn, a lead detective who had successfully prosecuted a double mur der case with no bodies found. "We got tips from them and expanded on them," Mike Faddis said.

  The Redmond detectives didn't want to make the mistake that the Boulder Police Department had when they refused assistance from other agencies as they investigated the JonBenét Ramsey murder. Boulder hadn't investigated a homicide for two decades before the Ramsey case, and by the time they acknowledged that they needed expert advice, their crime scene was contaminated, and it was too late.

  Of course, there was no crime scene in the Sherer case. No one knew where— or if— Jami had died. But everyone was heartened when Mains and Faddis uncovered one detail that had been overlooked by the original investigators. Steve Sherer had replaced some carpeting in the lower level of his house— in an area where the rug was almost brand new. There was no rational reason for him to have patched the carpet there. They set out to find the workman who had installed it.

  It was a start. And if they had one new direction to go, they knew there would be others.

  Legally, Jami was dead. But how could they prove that to a jury? It wasn't going to be as simple as saying she met the legal time limit for a missing person to be construed as deceased.

  A forensic anthropologist told them that their chances of finding any identifiable part of Jami Sherer's body were slim to none. In Washington State, where the rocky clay soil challenges gardeners who attempt to dig down more than 12 to 18 inches, all graves are shallow graves. Unless the weather is freezing cold, the detectives learned that a body buried a foot or slightly more beneath the surface or left on the surface in some isolated wilderness could completely disinte grate within twenty-eight days! When the soft tissue is gone, little animals carry away small bones and large animals take the femurs and humeri and skull.

  The trail was seven years cold, but to these detectives, that didn't matter. They would make up the seven years. Among them, Jim Taylor, Greg Mains, and Mike Faddis had nearly seventy years of experience in law enforcement, with Faddis, the "rookie," having only a decade on the Redmond Police Force. Taylor had thirty-one years in police work, and Mains twenty-seven. "All of us had tremendous curiosity," Taylor said. "And my detectives were totally focused; Greg Mains was like a bulldog who got his teeth into something, and he was never going to let go."

  One of the best things they had going for them was the fact that Mike Faddis was currently assigned to the Puget Sound Violent Crimes Task Force. This was an innovative way to let Seattle area law enforcement agencies pool their resources— and their officers— to wage war on crime. It allowed the agencies instant access to each other's personnel and special knowledge. There were six FBI special agents, four Seattle Police detectives, two King County sheriff's detectives, and representatives from the Secret Service; Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms; the Drug Enforcement Administration; and a number of small-town police departments in the area.

  Mike Faddis had been tapped to represent Redmond on the Violent Crimes Task Force. The task force goals were to cut down on the bank robberies that put Seattle at the top of the list in America for such crimes and to bring closure to a number of unsolved homicides in the Puget Sound area— including the case of Jami Sherer. Having Faddis in the task force opened up information opportunities that the Redmond Police Department had never before had. The computer age had opened up a whole new world of information, and Mike Faddis was now able to utilize it in the search for Jami.

  Jim Taylor's network of police contacts was prodigious, and it was almost uncanny the way he could pick up a phone and find an old friend willing to assist in tracking Steve Sherer. When he needed a surveillance on Steve in Scottsdale, Arizona, Taylor called Norm Beasley, who was a colonel in the Arizona State Police and a fellow member of the board of the International Association of Chiefs of Police. Beasley told Taylor, "Just tell me what you need."

  Beasley had Steve under watchful eyes by the next morning, in a sporadic surveillance operation that continued for fourteen months. Whenever Steve moved, Greg Mains was blocking his path, although Steve didn't always know that. When Mains found an important witness in Southern Pines, North Carolina, Taylor realized that yet another member of the IACP board was the chief of police in Southern Pines: Gerald Galloway. "He told me he had been to a breakfast with the woman [the witness] that morning," Taylor marveled. "She had been in Jami's wedding party, and all Jerry had to do was run down to the bank where she worked!"

  It was as if Mains and Faddis and Taylor were meant to solve this case. And of course the contacts Taylor had maintained for three decades were vitally important. If they needed surveillance of Steve Sherer's travels outside Washington, they had it. If they needed to find women he had been in touch with since Jami disappeared, Jim Taylor could usually come up with an associate who could get the information within hours. He got help from Two Rivers, Wisconsin, and Palm Springs, California, and many spots in between. Of the ten people who attended IACP committee meetings with Taylor, three had access to exactly what the Redmond investigators needed.

  Greg Mains and Mike Faddis had no idea how many people they would eventually talk to: not dozens but hundreds. Starting with the original case file, school yearbooks, old neighborhoods, Microsoft co-workers, friends, friends of friends, old tips, and new tips, Taylor wanted them to follow up every single lead with the full expectation that they would find more. "Even if you get nothing from a contact but the name of another person to talk to," he told them, "you've got another place to go, and another and another… or at the very least, you know you've checked that lead and proved that it ended nowhere."

  In the end, Greg Mains and Mike Faddis would talk to more than three hundred people in their search for Jami Sherer.

  The Redmond investigators knew they had to find enough information to convince Marilyn Brenneman that she had a case solid enough to take before an inquiry judge— the Washington State counterpart of a grand jury. Just as in a grand jury session, witnesses would be called, many of whom had devoutly hoped that the search for Jami was over and that suspicion was no longer focused on Steve.

  But that wasn't going to happen.

  Finding Jami Sherer's killer began as Greg Mains and Mike Faddis's occupation, but it would become their avocation, and then their obsession. Steve Sherer was in the crosshairs of their microscope of Jami's life, but they were also looking for Lew Adams. He had moved away from Se
attle. They eventually found him in Idaho, and as before, his involvement with drugs made him anxious. He still felt guilt over Jami, but he was willing to testify against Steve Sherer if it came to that.

  What Mike Faddis and Greg Mains eventually uncovered was amazing. Much of it came about because of hard work and some of it by luck.

  But perhaps some of it came through angels.

  11

  In order to establish that Jami had not simply run away and begun a new life somewhere, the Redmond detectives contacted every state to see if, after September 30, 1990, Jami Sherer or Jami Hagel had applied for a driver's license or for unemployment benefits or welfare. She had not. She hadn't filed an income tax return, used her credit cards, or tried to get new credit cards. She had not attempted to get a passport. She had never touched her bank accounts. In the past seven years, no one had ever done a credit check on her. She had never been arrested. There were no death certificates in her name in any state.

  All human beings— who are still alive— leave paper trails. But Jami Sherer left no trail at all.

  Taylor, Faddis, and Mains called police departments all over the Northwest to see if they had found any unidentified bodies. "It was interesting," Taylor said. "Often the police departments told us they had no bodies that were unaccounted for, but when we called the coroners' offices, they often said, 'Yeah, we do,' so we checked a lot of those out. Maybe a dog had brought in bones, or someone had found a skeleton we could compare to what we knew about Jami."

  They had Jami's dental records, medical records from knee surgery she once had, and the information from her breast augmentation surgery. They had blood samples from Judy and Jerry Hagel and from Chris Sherer for mitochondrial DNA testing. "We also had some of Jami's hair," Taylor said. "Judy had asked for years to have Jami's things. Finally Steve gave her a box of things, all taped shut. It sat in Judy's garage until Greg Mains and Mike Faddis opened it to inventory it, and Jami's hairbrush was in there— with strands of her hair caught in it."

  But none of the bodies or bones they checked matched the information they had on Jami Hagel Sherer.

  As the two Redmond detectives expanded their investigation, they found more and more incidents between Steve and the police. They contacted every police department in western Washington to see if their officers had ever stopped Steve Sherer or someone using one of his three aliases. Even when they weren't on duty, Mains and Faddis dropped in at police stations all across the state. "Greg got so he wouldn't take a vacation," Jim Taylor said, "without stopping to check at every little department on his route to see if they recognized Steve."

  And they found more arrests, mostly for drunken or reckless driving. Again and again they heard, "When Steve drinks, he's a crazy man with a terrible temper. He's out of control."

  One of the problems with potential witnesses to Jami's fate initially was that they were afraid of Sherer. But years had passed and people who had stories to tell about Steve had grown up. "Many witnesses with key information— through the process of becoming more mature— became responsible," Faddis said, "and came forward. Some were just too afraid to say anything. For others, the more they thought about their interaction with Sherer, the more their memories started to click."

  They noted that Bettina Rauschberg's name appeared frequently in Steve's rap sheet. She was the girlfriend just before Jami. When Greg Mains talked to her, he realized she was still terribly afraid of Steve. But Bettina finally opened up and told Mains how often she had feared Steve was going to kill her. She gave Mains the name of the woman who had befriended her in Balboa Beach years before.

  Interestingly, when Mains located Marj Tuttle* and said he was calling about Bettina Rauschberg, Marj gasped. She told him, "When I heard you were calling about Bettina, and that you were a detective, I knew it was an almost absolute certainty that the reason you were calling me was to let me know she had been killed.… I was wondering if she had died back then [1984] or recently and he had dumped her body."

  It had been five years since Marj had seen Bettina, but she remembered a grotesque encounter with Steve Sherer very clearly. From her description of Bettina, she might have been describing Jami. "She was a very pretty girl, very thin… real young," Marj recalled of the girl she met at the accounting firm where they both worked. "I believe she was nineteen years old then, with blond, very curly, long hair. She took very good care of herself. She was a really nice, sweet— a very innocent— young girl."

  Marj, who was twenty-six at the time she met Bet tina, told Mains that Bettina had come to work with a black eye. "She said her boyfriend had hit her."

  Marj said she'd met Bettina's boyfriend only once and described Steve Sherer as "blond-haired and very good-looking. Back in those days we called 'em surfer dudes."

  After she'd been beaten and left with a black eye, Bettina had accepted an offer to move in with Marj and her husband. "She drove her own car and followed me to get her things. I remember we walked into her apartment and there were small stuffed animals and dolls lying there with their heads cut off. There was a butcher knife there on the floor."

  It was a huge butcher knife, Marj told Mains, bigger than any she had ever seen, and she was sure it was sharp enough to cut off someone's head.

  Marj thought there must have been forty little toy animals and about a dozen dolls scattered around, their little heads rolling. Most of all, she remembered the note: "It said, 'If you ever leave me, that's what I'm going to do to you— cut your head off the same way.' "

  Marj said that Bettina hadn't been intimidated into staying— not at that point. She had followed Marj and her husband and daughter to their house and stayed with them for a few weeks. But then Bettina's mother had become concerned because Marj was a Jehovah's Witness.

  "I don't think her mom really understood the situation," Marj said. "I was a complete stranger to her and she evidently knew Steve. She encouraged Bettina to go back to her boyfriend and move back to Washington. She left within a day or two and went home. And I never heard from her again after that. I was always afraid of what might have happened to her."

  Marj was sad for Jami, a woman she never knew, but she was relieved that it was not Bettina who was dead. Marj reiterated, "I remember making the statement to my husband, 'She'll probably wind up dead if she goes back to him.' "

  Bettina was still alive, but Greg Mains could see she dreaded coming face-to-face with Steve again. In one of his interviews with her, Bettina told Mains how cruel Steve had been to Jami in the mid-eighties when he was going back and forth between Jami and her. If she had ever been jealous of Jami, Bettina said she got over that quickly and was simply grateful to be free— and alive. "One time we were all in my spare bedroom," Bettina recalled, "and he said he wanted to come back to me. Jami was upset and crying. He just picked up a vase or something and hit Jami on the head with it."

  After Jami disappeared, Bettina said she had seen Steve twice. "Once I ran into him in a video store and he came up to me and grabbed my arm. He said he really needed to talk to me. He started talking about Chris, and saying, 'He's a nice boy, he'd like you.' I told him, 'Get away from me!' "

  Bettina saw Steve again at the Flamingos in the Alderwood Mall in Lynnwood, and he was obviously very drunk. "He was crying," she remembered, "and saying that Jami hated me. I don't think she did. He was talking about her disappearance and he said, 'A drug dealer probably got her.' "

  Bettina ran from the club, but before she could get her car started, Steve jumped in. "I had a charcoal Mazda RX7, like Jami's, and Steve said, 'You stole Jami's car.' Then he kept saying, 'I never meant to hurt you.… I never meant to hurt Jami.… I never meant to hurt you.'

  "He told me what he'd said before— that he believed a drug dealer probably got her."

  The Redmond investigators also talked to Sara Smith, the wife of Steve's old friend, the woman who had eaten pizza with Jami the year before she died. Jami had opened up to Sara, telling her how miserable she was with Steve.
r />   "Jami and Steve came to our wedding in August 1990," Sara told Greg Mains and Mike Faddis. "And I talked to Steve two weeks after Jami disappeared. He called me between 1:00 and 2:00 A.M. and said he was lonely and how much he loved Jami. He told me he thought Jami might have been kidnapped. And then he said, 'We probably wouldn't have anything in common to have an affair.' I was taken aback! He said that he and Jami had a good sex life, and he missed the sex."

  Sara had only been married for two months, and Steve was slyly suggesting she have an affair with him. When Sara turned him down, he asked for her sister's phone number.

  As one source passed them on to another, Mains and Faddis realized that Steve Sherer probably tried to pick up almost every attractive woman he encountered. The two detectives reported to Lieutenant Jim Taylor that their investigation was turning up more and more women whom Steve had approached for dates. Most men would have been out searching for their missing wives, but not Steve Sherer. Within two weeks of "losing" his wife, Steve had begun to date other women. He had evidently approached women from his past, his friends' wives, and their girlfriends first.