Mains and Shultz met first with a couple who owned one of the largest resorts on Lake Chelan and learned nothing that would help their investigation. They did, however, learn the names of other Chelan friends of the Sherers.
John Walcker, who owned the Caravel Resort, offered Mains the cell phone number of another friend of the late David Sherer and his widow, Sherri. Mains called Grant Logan,* another friend, who agreed to drive to the resort and speak with the two detectives.
Logan picked up his wife, Nyssa,* on the way, and the two showed up at the resort within fifteen minutes. They seemed friendly enough— until Greg Mains said he and Shultz were investigating Jami Sherer's disappearance. "The case is still open, you know," he explained. "We're investigating any new leads we can find."
Grant Logan said he and his wife had been friends of Sherri Schielke's for over twenty-five years. They had known her and David Sherer since the early days of construction in Mill Creek. The Logans, along with Wally Schielke and the Sherers, often wintered in Palm Desert. The men played golf together in the California sun while Chelan was covered with drifting snow.
"What was Steve like when he was growing up?" Mains asked.
"We only saw him once in a while— during the summer when he vacationed over here with Sherri."
"Was he a problem kid?"
"Never violent or aggressive," Logan said quickly. "Just the usual preteen, pubescent temper tantrums."
When Mains said he understood that Logan and Wally Schielke sometimes played golf together, and that they had a conversation about the theft of a gun from Wally's house, Logan tensed. "Can you recall the details of that conversation?" Mains asked.
Logan said that Wally had told him a gun was stolen, and that it was "inferred" that Steve took it because he was the only one in the house when the theft occurred.
"About David Sherer's suicide…" Mains began.
"What does that have to do with Jami being missing?" Logan asked.
"Part of our investigation always looks at family vi olence and the long-term effect it has, sometimes for generations," Mains answered.
Grant Logan said he had no idea why David Sherer had killed himself. He knew he was an alcoholic and he and Sherri had been fighting. He could only surmise that David had probably been drunk and alone. Beyond that, he had no answers.
"Who found David Sherer?" Mains asked.
"Sherri— and she called me and John Walcker."
Mains was never an overtly tough interrogator; his forte was his dogged pursuit of what he wanted. He was deliberately mild as he asked the Logans to give him a written statement about the conversation Grant had with Wally over his stolen gun. Mains looked up from his paperwork and saw the Logans exchange a glance.
"I don't think I should do that," Logan said. "I don't think I should write anything down, until I get the opportunity to talk to my attorney."
At that point, the interview was abruptly over. When they again contacted the Logans' son and asked him to give a statement about the gun theft, he stonewalled them too. His parents insisted that they wanted nothing to do with a reopening of the suicide investigation into the death of David Sherer. As far as Jami Sherer's disappearance was concerned, they had nothing to offer the detectives.
* * *
In the meantime Steve Sherer must have been getting some information from his jail visitors. Even though he had always skated away before, he must have felt a chill in the wind.
Mains and Faddis traveled a lot in 1998, and it probably wasn't good for Steve Sherer's peace of mind to hear that they had been in Chelan and Scottsdale and Palm Desert and Mill Creek and Redmond and Puyallup and a dozen other places he frequented. Nor would he have been serene if he'd known how many people who knew him or who had once known him had spoken to the detective partners.
Sometimes the cops got really lucky. More often, it took them months, even years, to locate witnesses. One of the dead ends that Greg Mains and Mike Faddis kept running into was an empty space in their chronology of Jami and Steve's relationship: the time they lived in Palm Desert in 1986. Judy Hagel tried to help, but she wasn't sure exactly what had gone on during the months Jami lived with Steve in the mobile home.
She knew that they had shared the rent with a young woman for a while, and she knew her name: Sally Kirwin. Judy even knew that there had been some kind of an incident with a knife and that Steve had been so out of control that Jami had called home, crying.
"But the next day, she said everything was all right," Judy said. "Jami told me not to come."
"We'd been looking for Sally Kirwin for almost nine years," Greg Mains said, "and we couldn't find her. And then I did— back in Wisconsin!" He phoned her and found she was still extremely upset by her memories of Steve Sherer.
Mains wanted to ask Sally about the alleged burglary of the mobile home and hoped that it might have occurred while she was living with Steve and Jami. Since the diamond ring Steve claimed was stolen that night in 1986 had turned up taped to Jami's car, it would really help their case against him to have a witness to an insurance ruse.
Sally Kirwin said she remembered the burglary very well. "I thought it was phony the whole time," she said. "I know that Steve did that."
"That's what I understand," Greg Mains said.
"But that one other night," Sally went on, "that was awful! I'll never forget it the rest of my life. It was so scary."
"What other night are you talking about?" Mains asked.
"That night Steve was chasing Jami around and going to kill her with that butcher knife— it was horrible," Sally said, her voice hushed with remembered terror. "She had to get behind a table to protect herself! I thought we were both going to die that night."
Mains had gone looking for verification of something they already knew. They got that and more. He hit the mother lode. They had heard only vague rumors that Steve had stabbed himself once when Jami decided not to marry him, but they didn't know when or where or if it had ever really happened. Jami had told her mother bits and pieces of what really happened during that terrible Christmas season. Since his Christmas Eve arrest occurred a week later in the Hagels' home in Bellevue, Jami probably hadn't wanted to go into detail about the stabbing incident.
"That's when it all happened," Mains said. "But we were on our way to trial and we still weren't sure— not until we found Sally." Sally Kirwin described Steve's rage as he broke up the mobile home and ended up stabbing himself. "And, finally," Mains said, "we had a witness to the whole thing."
* * *
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 h
e 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.