Empty Promises: And Other True Cases

  It was Jim Taylor's contention all along that someone with guilty knowledge of Jami Sherer's fate would have a compulsion to confess. As Faddis and Caston drew closer to a short road that cut over to the Schielke house in Mill Creek, Jeff Caston gestured toward a desolate area to the east and said, "You know, when we went by here, Steve kind of waved his arm and said, 'You could get rid of a body out there, and no one would ever find it.' "

  Greg Mains and Mike Faddis would spend days driving up and down those back roads, especially along 35th S.E., the area where Jeff Caston had quoted Steve's telling remark. They found three locations that appeared to be reasonable places to look for Jami's remains. One was the property of a company called Pacific Topsoil on the east side of 35th S.E.

  Fortunately for the detectives, if not for the owner, Pacific Topsoil was under constant surveillance by environmental agencies, that wanted to be sure the topsoil operation didn't interfere with waterways or forests. So every so often, the owner had arranged for aerial photographs to be taken of the area. He showed the detectives the photos from 1987, 1989, 1990, and 1993.

  In essence, the land was a massive peat bog, and from time to time over that period, it was covered with water. "There were a couple hundred acres there," Taylor said, "where someone could dispose of a body."

  The other two sites they thought likely were close by. They knew that Steve needed to dispose of his wife's body rapidly so he could check in with her mother by early evening. First, the investigators had a chemical analysis done to determine the makeup of the soil and the peat bogs in the area. Depending on the acidity and the alkalinity of the substance tested, bodies left in a site will either decompose rapidly or will last forever: the outer layers will turn to a soap-like substance known as adipocere while the internal organs remain relatively unchanged. Test results indicated that if Jami was in the peat bog or in the other two locations, she would be frozen in time, and if her body should ever be found, she could be identified.

  Cadaver dogs were brought in to search those areas. Necro-search dogs, or cadaver dogs, are trained much like bloodhounds, with rewards and praise when they find what they are supposed to. But different dogs are suited to different search items. Some dogs like to look for living things; cadaver dogs home in on dead tissue, bones, and teeth. Many of them are used in flooded areas, where they can actually sniff down a chimney to see if anyone is alive in houses below water. The best cadaver dogs can smell a body 20 feet below the sur face of a body of water. They are incredible creatures, and not in the least macabre. When they're not working, they are as friendly and cheerful as any pet. And like most search-and-rescue dogs, they travel in their own plane seats and are never relegated to the baggage areas deep in the bowels of the plane.

  Andy Rebmann, retired from the Connecticut State Police, is known worldwide for his work with cadaver dogs. He agreed to bring his dogs in to search for Jami.

  * * *

  Every Saturday the Redmond detectives were on the 35th S.E. site, watching the dogs work and looking for Jami. Although they had never met her, she was very real to them. They wanted very much to bring her home.

  "We were probing and looking," Jim Taylor recalls, "but we didn't find her. What we were able to determine was that on the east side of 35th S.E. there had been an office and a security system at the time of Jami's disappearance, but farther up, on the other side of the road, there was no gate at that time [1990], and people would go in to dump garbage, or lovers would go there to park. Given that knowledge and the proximity to Steve's mother's house— which was a mile, mile and a half at the very most— and what Caston had said, we knew we had to be in the area where he left Jami, or relatively close."

  Although they had never given much credence to psychics, one of the seers had sent word that Jami Sherer would be found near a "block building" with a big tower with "arms." About half a mile south of the area the Redmond investigators finally focused on, there was a Seattle City Light building, now fully fenced. When Greg Mains contacted them, one supervisor remembered that there had been a cinder-block building there at one time. It had since been dismantled.

  Taylor, Mains, and Faddis believed they were close to Jami. They went back again and again to wooded areas in South Snohomish County and in the northeastern part of King County. Twice they used police divers and sonar equipment to search the murky bottom of Lake Stevens. There was no way to search Lake Washington where Steve often took his power boat. The vast lake is so cold and so deep that it rarely gives up its secrets.

  And then the winter storms roared in and made any further searches impossible until the spring came again.

  It was Christmas 1998. The Hagels had spent nine Christmases without Jami and without closure.

  14

  Judge Robert Lasnik was appointed to the Washington State Supreme Court, and Superior Court Judge Bill Downing took over as the inquiry judge in the matter of Steve Sherer. Steve was fully aware now that the IJ was hearing witnesses for the second time. He scoffed to friends, "I don't know why they keep looking for Jami— there's nothing to find."

  Steve finished his eight-month jail sentence on May 24, 1999. He knew who his enemies were, and his rage erupted within a short time. Incensed by Lieutenant Jim Taylor and Marilyn Brenneman's unrelenting investigation of his life, Sherer made three incredibly stupid phone calls. Taylor had given Steve his business card eighteen months before, and for some reason, he'd kept it in his wallet ever since.

  His first call was to Taylor: "Hey, Lieutenant Dickhead," Steve snarled. "Now that I'm out, why don't you come fuck with me now, you piece of shit," and he hung up.

  He called back: "I want you to stop messing with me. If you don't have [the investigators] back off, I'm going to go out and cut someone's fucking throat."

  Taylor signaled frantically to Greg Mains to come to his desk and gestured for him to write down what he was saying. He had no recording device on his phone, so Taylor deliberately repeated everything Steve was saying to him. "What you're telling me, Mr. Sherer," Taylor said calmly, "is that if I don't have my detectives back off, you're going to go out and cut somebody's fucking throat? Is that right?" Greg Mains wrote down the whole call, just as Taylor was repeating it. There was a click and the line went dead.

  Marilyn Brenneman wasn't in her office when Steve called her, so he left a message on her answering machine: "This is Steve Sherer. I'm out now and I want to talk to you. You better call me back. I want what's mine. I want my wife's car back. I want her ring back. I want it all back. I'm not gonna go away. You better not fuck with me. It's my turn to fuck with you. You'd better call me back." There was a short pause and then he said, "Have a good life."

  When she listened to the message, Brenneman doubted that he meant the last part of his message, but she believed the first part absolutely.

  Sherer had just committed a felony: Threatening a public official with bodily harm is against the law. He had been more explicit with Jim Taylor, however. Steve had been out of jail less than a month, and he was about to go back in. On June 23, 1999, he was arrested by King County sheriff's deputies. Seattle District Court Judge Eileen Kato set his bail at $30,000, cash only.

  Steve told the judge he had no money for bail. He asked to be released so he could make a court appearance in Wenatchee, Washington, where he had posted $6,100 bail for traffic violations. His protestations were to no avail.

  The court record was sealed. The public knew only that Steve had been arrested for allegedly threatening a Redmond police officer and a King County senior deputy prosecutor whose names were not given.

  Eventually, Steve's family came up with his bail and he was free again. He moved into his mother's Mill Creek home.

  Jim Taylor and Marilyn Brenneman had bigger fish to fry than the threat charges. The inquiry judge had finally decided that there was indeed enough evidence to make the reasonable assumption that a crime had been committed: the murder of Jami Sherer. They had a massive amount of circumstantial evidence,
dozens of witnesses, and the "autopsy" of Steve Sherer that Jim Taylor had sent Greg Mains and Mike Faddis out to create.

  Beginning in early January 2000, Redmond detectives and the FBI worked a round-the-clock stakeout of Sherri Schielke's Mill Creek home and Steve's usual haunts. Steve must have felt the net ready to drop over him. Armed with an arrest warrant, Greg Mains and Mike Faddis waited on Friday morning, January 7, at the office of Steve's probation officer in Lynnwood, but Steve did not show up for his appointment. For the next twenty-four hours, the Redmond investigators searched the area around the Schielkes' Mill Creek home without spotting Steve. All local police agencies were asked to have their personnel watch for him.

  On Saturday FBI agents, watching for any activity around Steve's mother's home, spotted one of Steve's friends knocking on the door. The agents slid through the tall evergreens in the yard and were standing behind the friend when Steve opened the door. Before he could protest, they grabbed him.

  Nine years and three months after Jami Sherer vanished into some never-never land where no one could find her, the man who was the main suspect in her disappearance was at last in police custody. At 1:00 P.M. on January 8, Steven Sherer was arrested on a charge of first-degree murder. His bail was set at a million dollars.

  The Redmond detectives and Marilyn Brenneman did not release much information: "We have unearthed every bit of information possible on this case," Jim Taylor said. "Now it will be judged by a jury of his peers."

  "I'm not going to deny this is a circumstantial case," Marilyn Brenneman said. "But we believe the charging documents show a very strong case, and we're prepared to go to trial. We are just convinced a jury should hear the evidence, and when they do, they will do the right thing."

  Sherri Schielke hired Peter Mair and his associate, Peter Camiel, to defend Steve on the first-degree charges. Marilyn Brenneman would lead the prosecuting team, which included co-counsels Hank Corscadden and Senior Deputy King County Prosecutor Kristin Richardson. Trial was set for May.

  On the evening of April 14, Greg Mains and Detective Anne Malins prepared to execute a warrant on the Schielke residence. The warrant specified that they would search the entire house and the vehicles parked there for Steve Sherer's personal papers and the suitcase he reportedly carried with him from state to state. According to their information, Chris Sherer should have left after visiting Sherri Schielke by the time they served the search warrant. Mains and Malins rang the doorbell at the front door of the large Heatherstone residence. There was no response and no noise from inside the house. But a car belonging to Steve's sister Laura was parked in the driveway, along with a pickup truck and another car. They knocked on the door and this time Laura came to the door. The whole family seemed to be there: Laura, Saundra, Chris, and Sherri Schielke.

  Mains and Malins saw that a birthday party planned for Chris Sherer that Friday evening was still going on, and they were sorry to interrupt. The last thing they wanted to do was to hurt twelve-year-old Chris any more than he had already been hurt. His mother was dead and his father was in jail awaiting trial for first-degree murder. Sherri asked them to wait an hour before they began to search. But of course they could not do that. Had they known, they would have arrived later, but once they were there, they could not leave for fear that vital evidence might be moved or disposed of. They had no choice but to proceed with the search.

  Sherri led them to the guest room and pointed out a suitcase with a Greyhound tag on it. There was nothing in it. They didn't find the blue suitcase that he carried with him always. It wasn't anywhere in the large two-story home.

  A few days after the Redmond detectives left, carrying away the items they had found that were listed on the search warrant, Sherri happened to be in her garage. There she saw the blue suitcase that Steve took with him whenever he moved. "I thought he had left it in Arizona," she commented later. "The last time he came home, he was on a bus."

  Sherri told Steve's attorney, Pete Mair, that she had found the blue suitcase and that she didn't want to give it to the detectives. He explained to her that he had no choice; as an officer of the court he could not withhold evidence from the police. He called them on April 20 to say that the blue suitcase was in his office.

  At last, the battered pale blue suitcase was turned over to Taylor, Mains, and Faddis. With some trepidation about what they might find, they undid the buckles and straps. Jami Sherer had been tiny, and although they didn't say it out loud, they all had the same thought: Could Jami's remains be inside?

  In a sense, they were. Steve Sherer had kept things in this heavy suitcase that represented Jami to him. There were numerous pieces of clothing in sizes so small they would have fit a child, but they were not childlike: a sheer black negligee, a black bra, a black slip, the black leather skirt he had asked other women to try on, and elbow-length black gloves. There were eight pairs of transparent bikini and thong panties in various colors, a bikini bathing suit, and a black silk dress with a peplum and a pattern of pink, white, and purple tropical flowers. In contrast, he had also packed Jami's long-sleeved cotton nightshirts and her T-shirts that said "Super Mom" and "Moms Are Wonderful People!" The suitcase also contained their bowling shirts and a key to a Mazda.

  Jami's clothes were as light as gossamer, but their wedding album and yearbooks were heavier. There were framed pictures, and for some reason, Steve had carried Jami's accordion file with all her paperwork everywhere he went: IRS receipts, credit card bills, and anything Steve could find with Jami's distinctive rounded script. The file also held the contract for her car loan. She had put $3,000 down on the $11,429.26 cost of her Mazda and carefully taken out insurance to cover the loan if she was disabled or deceased; Judy Hagel had co-signed for the car loan.

  The way she kept such careful track of her bills and records helped the investigators to know Jami; she had been Steve's opposite. He honored no contracts or bills, while Jami had been meticulous and dependable. The clothes Steve kept were mostly her Barbie clothes, but a few of them must have brought back an image of Jami in the kitchen, fixing breakfast or feeding Chris.

  How bizarre that a man who began dating two weeks after his wife disappeared should have carried the essence of her with him for almost a decade. "He had it all," Marilyn Brenneman commented. "A beautiful wife who loved him, a wonderful little boy, and they would have been rich by now. And he destroyed it."

  15

  Steve Sherer's trial for the murder of his wife was set for April 17, 2000. The trial was held in King County Superior Court Judge Anthony Wartnik's courtroom, but it took until May 3 before a jury was selected: half women and half men, who looked to be from their early thirties to their early seventies.

  The courthouse had once been majestic, but it now faced demolition. Seismologists had declared its marble halls unsafe in case of a major earthquake. The wooden gallery benches seemed to turn to stone after a few hours, but Judge Wartnik's courtroom was as modern as any, with paintings gracing the wall, and plants drooping in the windowless room.

  Brenneman, Corscadden, and Richardson sat on the left side of the courtroom. Flanked by defense attorneys Peter Camiel and Pete Mair, Steve Sherer sat at a table facing Judge Wartnik. The twelve jurors and four alternates sat in padded chairs that were the envy of the spectators. Both the Hagels and the Sherer-Schielkes were represented each day by a dozen or more family members and friends. Since he knew it would be a long trial, Judge Wartnik decreed the two families would alternate sitting in rows two and three on a weekly basis.

  Despite his effect on the women in his life, Steve Sherer was not a prepossessing man. He was short with very small hands and feet. His California blond hair had grown out to its natural faded brown, and it looked as if it had been cut by an amateur. The jury never saw the long, wavy hair and goatee he usually affected. He wore slacks and a jacket that didn't match, an open-necked shirt without a tie, and white socks with black shoes. To those who knew nothing of his background, he appeared to be a weak, alm
ost pathetic-looking man down on his luck. That may well have been the image the defense wanted. He never looked at the gallery except when he stood up to be handcuffed during breaks in the trial. And then his icy eyes swept the reporters who sat on the front bench.

  The rage was still there, but it was suppressed.

  * * *

  Marilyn Brenneman made the opening statement for the prosecution. Brenneman, tall and attractive with thick, blunt-cut hair that tumbled over her forehead when she concentrated intensely, looked from one juror to another and told them that Jami Sherer had never been found and possibly never would be: "Jami was a devoted mother who never would have absented herself from her young son's life. And [Sherer] has a long history of control and domestic violence against Jami."

  She described a chaotic, abusive four-year marriage that ended when the defendant "hit [Jami] in the face, and she bled. Ten years ago there was a vicious punch to the face, a rush of blood, and a fall." Brenneman promised to present a witness who would recall Steve Sherer's description of Jami's fall down a flight of stairs and her death.