Empty Promises: And Other True Cases

  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 n
ext 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.

  8

  Although Steve Sherer wasn't participating in the search for Jami, he did conduct a search of his own shortly after 10:00 A.M. on Sunday morning, September 30. He knew from the receipt in Jami's purse that she had been at the Crest Motel the night before. He went there and said he wanted to search the room she was in because she had lost her diamond ring. The clerk finally allowed him into the room Jami and Lew had used, but wrote down the time and his license number on the room ticket. No one knew whether he had really been looking for that same expensive ring or just snooping to find evidence that Jami had cheated on him.

  Sergeant Watson, along with Detectives L. C. Conrad, Steve Hardwick, and Oscar Guttormsen, processed Jami's Mazda RX7 at 7:30 A.M. on October 6. They dusted it for latent prints on the outside and the interior door windows, and bagged the fur seat covers, floor mats, and front and rear carpeting for further examination. They located a set of keys to the Mazda in the pocket of the woman's leather coat.

  The Mazda's seat was pushed back to accommodate a driver at least five inches taller than Jami. Judy Hagel had told the investigators that Jami had such short legs that she could drive her car only if the seat was pushed all the way forward, and even then she had to have a pillow behind her back. Judy also told them that Jami was a fanatic about never leaving her car unless the alarm was turned on. Detectives found that the alarm was off.

  As they ran their hands along the console, they found what Steve had been looking for in the Crest Motel. There, in a small manila envelope that someone had stuffed under the driver's side of the console, were Jami's ring and her diamond-studded wristwatch. For her own reasons, perhaps, she had hidden them there. If Jami had run away of her own accord, why would she have left jewelry worth thousands of dollars behind? For that matter, why would she have left her car behind? She loved her car, and she had just put a new CD stereo system in it. Her mother had given her the sunroof as a present.

  And who would she have run away with? She was a very open woman, who shared her intimate thoughts with several girlfriends and with her mother. She was involved with a man other than her husband, just on the verge of a full-blown affair, but that man wasn't missing. The detectives knew right where Lew Adams was, and all of her friends swore she had never cheated on Steve before.

  No one who knew her could even imagine that Jami Sherer was devious enough to pretend she was excited about being with Lew just to hide a real affair with a man she planned to run away with.

  The bag behind the driver's seat held clothes, all right, but it was an odd assortment for a woman to have packed as she prepared to leave her husband for good. Although it contained items like shampoo, curlers, and a hairbrush, the clothes made no sense. There were only sports clothes— sweatshirts and T-shirts. There were no clothes that Jami could wear to her job at Microsoft, no nightclothes, no diapers for Chris. There was no underwear at all; it looked as if someone had grabbed things mindlessly and stuffed them into the duffel bag.

  Had Jami been truly frightened that Steve would hurt her, she might have done that. But all reports indicated that she wasn't afraid that last Sunday morning. She had even felt safe enough to take a shower in her own house. And she had evidently already packed when she called her mother to say she was on her way to Taco Time and then to the Hagels'. Moreover, Jami was too well organized to have packed such a jumble of things in such a haphazard manner. More likely, she had packed carefully, and someone, enraged, had grabbed the duffel bag and dumped her things out. Perhaps, Judy Hagel thought, the suitcase she had seen on the bed in the master bedroom had been Jami's bag.

  Forensic testing of the items taken from Jami Sherer's car revealed no blood or fingerprints that might have helped build a case against a suspect. It was unlikely that Jami, injured or dead, had been transported in the Mazda RX7. The car appeared to have been left there by someone who wanted to make it look as if she had driven away from her home and then deliberately abandoned the Mazda.

  Steve insisted there had been only one key to the Mazda, and that Jami had it. He identified the key found in her leather coat pocket as that key. Redmond detectives again asked permission to walk through Steve Sherer's house. He agreed.

  "We did a general walk-through," Butch Watson wrote in his follow-up report. "The upper level consisted of a living room, dining room, kitchen, bathroom, and three bedrooms. The lower level consisted of a fam ily room, bathroom, washroom, and garage. A general inspection of the residence revealed no obvious signs of a struggle although it should be noted that the residence was very unkempt and disorderly, with clothing stacked everywhere… We checked some carpet stains with hemo-test tablets and found no obvious signs of blood."

  Hemo-test tablets could detect the presence of blood and give criminalists reasons to test it further for origin and type, but that was all they could do. The tablets themselves could not differentiate between human blood, deer blood, and rabbit blood, for that matter. Steve's explanation for the stain in his living room was that it was Kool-Aid, and it might very well have been. It was not blood.

  Lew Adams had told the detectives that Steve was interested in swinging, and indeed they did find magazines called Swing and Sway and Let Us Entertain You, which catered to couples and singles who wanted to mix and match with strangers. They located one smashed videotape and an intact tape, which they took for viewing to see if it had any bearing on Jami Sherer's disappearance. The other tapes in the Sherers' bedroom were all commercially made movies.

  The intact tape was clearly the one Lew Adams had described. It showed Lew and Jami, obviously drugged, with Steve Sherer playing director and producer. The Redmond detectives had seen it all, but they were disgusted by the flickering images, the sickening desecration of a man's marital vows to cherish his wife.

  Days went by, but the search parties didn't let up, despite the sometimes fierce rain and windstorms that buffeted the north end. It was terrible to think of Jami out there in the icy cold, alone, and it was inconceiv
able that she would not have called to see if Chris was okay. "Chris was her life," her friends said often. "He was the most important thing in the world to her."

  Jami had no car, and she hadn't cashed her last paycheck for just over $500. Her normal habit was to deposit her check in Key Bank on the day she got it. This time, she had not. Nor did they find any other bank accounts that she might have maintained secretly to have running-away money.

  Meanwhile, Lew Adams was rapidly becoming a basket case. He felt tremendous guilt because he had been unable to talk Jami out of going back to Steve's house. He regretted that he hadn't been more forceful in convincing her that she was in danger.

  Of course Lew had a second worry. He had been with Jami at the Crest Motel the night before she disappeared. He knew he had to be a prime suspect in whatever had happened to her, and he had his own secrets. He was a grown man, still married but living with his parents, and he was involved in the drug world. When Lew was interviewed again on October 8, he said he had known Steve for ten years and been a cocaine source for him in the early 1980s, before Steve moved to Palm Desert. "I met Steve through his cousin," Lew said. "I ran into the cousin again about eight months ago, and he put me back in touch with Steve."