by Ann Rule
Jami felt that her destiny lay with Steve— that he needed her and loved her so much that she had no choice but to marry him. It was as if her innate kindness was much stronger than the part of her that had once been confident and outgoing. Steve always came first. Quite simply, he orchestrated her life, told her what to think, what to wear, and even when to speak.
"He created what he wanted," one of Jami's friends remembered. "Eventually he did manage to turn Jami into a Barbie doll."
The Hagels' friends and Jami's peers recalled that Steve never complimented her, no matter how hard she tried to please him. "He was always demeaning her," said Jeff Daniels, a longtime friend of the Hagels. "Jami was bright and cheerful and pleasant, but Steve put her down a lot. She was on edge and she lost her spark. She was very guarded around him."
Daniels recalled one night when he visited the Hagels and they played the board game Balderdash with Jami and Steve. "It wasn't a fun evening.… Steve kept calling Jami useless and stupid for the way she played."
Jami had always loved M&M's. Judy Hagel usually kept a bowl of the multicolored candies on the table when company came over. "Jami would go to pick them up, and Steve said, 'You put those back. You put those back!' And she would put them back in the dish. [He was concerned] that she would gain weight."
Because the Hagels had always included their four children not only in holidays but also in bowling, cards, dancing, and, of course, softball, they tried to include Steve, too. Judy bowled on a team with Steve and Jami. Bowling was one sport he was interested in.
Jami's brothers and their girlfriends often went places with Jami and Steve. Rich Hagel's girlfriend, Timarie, whom he dated for ten years, remembered what an effort it was to plan an evening or a trip with Steve. Rich was one of Jami's twin brothers and he was protective of her. "She and Rich were very close," Timarie said. She described Jami as "fun, sweet, nice, and caring.
"We met Steve when they came up from California," Timarie recalled. "We tried to hang out with them. We went to Lake Chelan with them and we tried to go out to the movies, but we always ended up trying to find cocaine for Steve instead."
It wasn't just the drunk driving, reckless driving, and burglaries that drew police attention to Steve. Cocaine was what drove him and made him lose control: cocaine and alcohol and sex and card rooms and power. Anyone who accepted an invitation to go on a trip or to double-date with Steve and Jami learned that much of their time would be spent in a frenzied search for a dealer when Steve ran out of cocaine. There was no question of talking to him about it; he always wanted more. Jami learned early on that if she could hold back at least some of his coke supply, Steve wouldn't spiral completely out of control. But he soon figured out she was hiding some of his stash.
"If he didn't get all of it from her," Timarie explained, "he'd yell at her and pester her until there was a huge fight."
Steve's mother, Sherri, often loaned her vacation home on Lake Chelan to Steve. Timarie remembered one trip to the lake, a four-hour journey across Snoqualmie Pass from Seattle, when Steve's addiction ruined the weekend. He drank from two-liter bottles of Coors beer as he drove the winding roads of the mountain pass. He refused to let either Jami or Timarie take over the wheel. Despite his intoxication, they arrived at the luxurious cabin safely, only to have another fight when Steve accused Jami of once again hiding cocaine from him. He stormed out of the lakefront residence and walked to the small downtown section of Chelan, threatening to catch a bus back to Seattle.
"Rich went to get him and brought him back to the lake," Timarie said. The Hagels' sons tried to hide a good many of Jami's activities from their parents. The elder Hagels already felt bad enough. Jami's brothers hoped she might still free herself from Steve. In the end, however, Steve's persuasive powers drew her brothers into the world of drugs, although they never got in as deep as he did.
"The next day, Steve's mother arrived and he stopped his tantrums about finding more cocaine. Steve could put on a good act for his mother, who naturally didn't approve of his drug use. She put him through drug rehabilitation programs, but none of them took. Since his mother could be a significant source of money for him, Steve often fooled her. Despite his fre quent arrests and the numerous charges against him, Steve spent comparatively little time in jail and slid free of most of the consequences of his lifestyle. He laughed at the justice system, bragging to Rich Hagel once that "The first two DWIs are the hardest, and after that, they lose you [in the system]."
Steve certainly had the experience to comment on that. Between May 1982 and January 2000, Steve racked up twenty-one arrests in Washington State alone, and there was a steady exacerbation of the seriousness of the charges against him. Many of his confrontations with police resulted in fines or probation. He was the consummate rich kid who always ended up avoiding jail time and getting what he wanted.
What Steve wanted in the summer of 1987 was Jami Hagel. And Jami desperately wanted to marry him.
4
There was nothing that Judy and Jerry Hagel could do to keep Jami from marrying Steve, so they gave her the best wedding they could afford. Steve's sisters gave Jami a wedding shower, and she listed her china and silver patterns at a local department store. Many of her relatives gave her place settings for her china, Imperial Blossom. Jami was always sentimental; she saved all the minutiae, including the cards and the guest lists, just as any old-fashioned bride would. She wrote thank-you notes for shower and wed ding gifts. She wanted to relegate all the bad scenes with Steve to the past and make a fresh start.
"It was a nice wedding," Judy remembered. "We did as much as we could for her. It was in a park and there were a lot of family and friends."
Jami and Steve's wedding in July 1987 was a formal affair at Robinswood Park, with its gloriously landscaped grounds that had once been a multimillionaire's estate. Steve wore a white tux with a swallowtail coat and white shoes. He had bleached his hair so blond that he resembled a California beach boy. No one could ever have guessed he was only two months out of jail on burglary charges. He looked like the handsome scion of a wealthy family— which indeed he was.
Jami looked lovely, but shockingly unlike the girl many of the guests recalled. Steve's sister Saundra was with her when she picked out her wedding dress. Far from the demure, simple style Jami had always preferred, the wedding gown she chose was cut so low that, given Jami's enhanced breasts, it verged on indecent.
"Steve loved it," a friend said. "He enjoyed the way men were staring at Jami; it was as if she was the prize and he was the one who owned her.… He said the guys there all had hard-ons because of the way Jami looked."
A few months after their wedding, Steve was arrested for drunken driving. At the Bellevue police station, Officer Bernard Molloy brought Steve out of the holding cell for questioning. Steve had been so combative earlier when he was booked that he had to be restrained. Now he pleaded with Molloy to remove his handcuffs because they hurt him, and Molloy— noting that Sherer wasn't a very large man— took the cuffs off. While there were other officers in the room, Steve was well behaved and cooperative. But when the others left, Steve leaped at Molloy, choking him with both hands and threatening to kill him.
Remembering that night, Officer Molloy said, "Many times as a police officer, I guess we all have times when you feel like you're gonna die. This time, I really thought I was going to die. I was beginning to black out; the guy was strong and there was a look in his eyes. His eyes… his eyes… It's hard to describe the look that came into them. I'm not exaggerating. I was moments from dying when someone came in and pulled him off me."
Steve was convicted of felonious assault, but he didn't serve much time. As usual, he walked away with "community supervision."
* * *
Steve owned Jami now.
But marriage didn't make Jami feel any more confident. If anything, she deferred to Steve's wishes even more than she had when they were only living together. When he was sober, he could be nice to her, but
she was the main target of his derision when he was under the influence of drugs or alcohol. "She just went into a shell then," one of Steve's friends said.
Jami had gone into the marriage with full awareness of Steve's faults, despite the pleas of her parents and her friends. Before her wonderful career at Microsoft, she had lost jobs because of him, and she was cut off from her friends because of him. But she still made excuses for him. Whatever Steve said or did remained gospel to her.
"I never, ever, ever would have believed in brainwashing," Judy Hagel said. "But I sat and watched it before my very eyes. I watched my daughter change. She got depressed. She was not happy anymore."
Judy was most shocked to realize that Jami had begun blaming others for anything that went wrong in her marriage. Jami had always been totally honest and had a strong conscience, but that had changed too.
"She wasn't the daughter I raised," Judy said, as she related her suspicions after talking with an insurance investigator about the burglary claim Steve and Jami had filed in Palm Desert. "The investigator asked me about a couple of different items [that Steve and Jami] said I had given her, and I told them, 'Yeah, [I gave them] a couple of the things.' They called me back and kept conversing with me on it. The insurance company guy said, 'I know this is a fraud, but I can't prove it. Can you help me?' I told him, 'No, I don't know what they had.' "
But Judy Hagel did remember her daughter's engagement ring, the ring worth almost $14,000 which was supposedly lost in the burglary. Sometime after Jami's marriage, she was sitting at her mother's table and Judy felt a chill: "I looked at the ring [Jami had on], and I said, 'Jami, you know that is the same ring you've always had.' And she looked at me sort of funny, and I said, 'You know, that insurance, that was a fraud. Jami, that is your ring!' "
"How do you know, Mom?"
"That is the same ring," Judy repeated.
"Yes," Jami said, "it is."
"How could you do something like that? You've been brought up to know better."
Jami looked away. "I didn't know at the time what was going on," she said quietly. "Then it was too late."
Judy felt sick, but she didn't turn her daughter in. How could she? It wasn't Jami who had thought up the scam; she was sure of that. It was Steve; Jami did anything he asked of her.
She did anything, that is, except abandon her family. When Jami visited Judy and Jerry, she could put on a happy face, even if it was often a mask. Steve seldom accompanied her, but Jami was a frequent visitor and her parents were always delighted to see her. Still, Jami rarely enjoyed an undisturbed visit; Steve called constantly to ask when she was coming home. Wherever Jami went without him, Steve's phone calls were sure to follow, as if he had her on an invisible leash. He demanded that she account for every minute of each day.
There was, however, one side of Jami that didn't buckle under to Steve. When she and Steve returned from Palm Desert in 1987 and she went to work for Microsoft, she was a valuable employee from the very beginning. Since Steve's employment record was so spotty, it helped a lot that Jami had a position with Bill Gates's booming software company, whose campus was located on the east side of Lake Washington. The complex was bigger than many towns, and Gates by then was well on his way to being the richest man in America.
Jami was highly thought of at Microsoft. She had worked her way up steadily, eventually finding a secure niche in the human resources department. Jami was responsible for setting up offices for new hires, ordering the software they needed, and helping them adjust to the unique ambience of Microsoft. Her outgoing personality and natural friendliness made her a natural in her job. No one she dealt with at work even imagined the smothering atmosphere she faced in her marriage.
"She had a fantastic work ethic," a co-worker recalled, also noting that Jami never talked about Steve until the time she broke off her engagement to him. Jami and Steve, of course, reconciled and many of her co-workers were invited to the wedding. The Jami at Microsoft was totally different from the Jami who sat silently beside Steve when they went to clubs or bowling or out with his friends. On the job, she was confident and competent, and she made life so much easier for newcomers lured to Seattle by the exciting new company. Jami was always punctual and rarely missed a day's work because of illness.
The newlyweds moved continually, usually from one apartment to another. Jami longed to have her own home, and finally they rented a little house. It wasn't long after that when Jami learned she was pregnant. She was elated; motherhood was something she had always longed for. As tiny as she was, she carried her pregnancy proudly.
Steve seemed pleased that he had demonstrated his virility, but a baby wasn't the first thing on his list. He was still interested in the bar scene and in bowling, where he won a number of tournaments. He had begun to gamble on football games, and he worked out a schedule with several of his friends, charting professional sports wins and losses. Cocaine and alcohol mattered more than ever to him, often igniting his already short fuse. Steve was a man whose own needs always came first, and he was constantly looking for ways to enhance his sex life as well as his ability to party.
Steve baffled many of Jami's co-workers, when they finally met him. Like her family and friends, they wondered why a woman with so much going for her would stay with a man who attempted to control every facet of her life. Jami seemed to love him, but it was difficult for anyone to understand why. They had virtually no common interests: Jami hated to bowl and it made her uncomfortable to hang out at the bowling alleys with him. For some reason, he was meaner to her at the alleys than anywhere else in public. Even Steve's friends wondered why he picked on her.
Janet Gilman, who for three years worked closely with Jami at Microsoft, came to learn a great deal about Steve Sherer. She and Jami often ate lunch together, although never anywhere extravagant. Jami's favorite spot was Taco Time.
Jami once commented to Janet that she hated going bowling. Steve loved it and had special shirts made up with his nickname, "Sparky," on his and "Jami" on hers. On the back, Steve's sponsor's name— All But Here's Traveling Software— was embroidered.
Steve was adamant that Jami had to bowl with him. "But I hate it," Jami told Janet.
"Well then, don't go," Janet said. "It can't be comfortable for you when you're pregnant."
"Steve wouldn't allow that," Jami said quietly.
The women continued their lunches at Taco Time. When Jami was pregnant, she had a craving for McDonald's and they went there also.
One day when Jami was nearing the end of her pregnancy, Janet walked into Jami's office to find her doubled over in pain. Janet got Jami to the hospital and the doctors said she was in premature labor.
"I called Steve," Janet remembered. "He was watching something or other on TV and he said he'd come to the hospital when it was over."
Steve eventually made it to the hospital two hours later, but Janet found his attitude "indifferent," far from the way most fathers-to-be acted. It was as if the baby was no part of him and he was a little annoyed to have his plans interrupted. Jami's labor turned out to be false, however, and her obstetrician sent her home.
As she neared childbirth, Jami wanted her mother around, but Steve had made it clear that if Judy came to the hospital when Jami was in labor, he wouldn't be there. He had long since stopped being a real member of the Hagel family, and he resented Judy the most.
"I had been told numerous times," Judy said, "that if I didn't stay out of their business, I wouldn't see Jami."
When Jami went into labor a few weeks later, Judy wanted so much to be with her, but she forced herself to stay home. Jami called her mother at about 11:30 that night, but Judy said, "I was scared to go." She didn't want to cause trouble in Jami's marriage, and Steve was so volatile. However, when Jami was in hard labor and near delivery, Steve himself called Judy at 1:00 A.M. and said that Jami wanted her.
"So then I said okay," Judy recalled. "I did go, and I was with her while she was in labor. I was with her when she ga
ve birth."
After hours of hard labor, Jami gave birth to a baby boy. Chris* Sherer was to be the most important thing in her life.
Jami's life grew happier after the birth of her wonderful, healthy baby boy. She was a devoted mother and very careful with Chris. Although Steve enjoyed showing him off, Jami didn't really trust him to stay with the baby. Steve was not a caregiver and she feared he would get distracted by something he wanted to do and forget about the baby. She didn't complain about that, but she only rarely left Steve alone with Chris. Luckily, Judy Hagel was happy to baby-sit when Jami had to go out. Eventually, Jami's maternity leave was up and she had to return to work at Microsoft.