Empty Promises

by Ann Rule

  Judy was surprised to finally hear Jami say, "Steve, it's over. I don't love you anymore. I want a divorce. It's over."

  But as flatly insistent as Jami was, Judy could tell that Steve was wearing her down, begging for a meeting.

  "Finally," Judy remembered, "she says, 'Okay. I'll meet you down the hill at the Samena Club.' I asked her not to go, and she went to get Chris, but Chris was still in his jammies, so she left him with me. I said, 'Well, Jami, I don't want you to go.' She walked out the door, and she said, 'All he can do is kill me, Mom.' "

  Judy ran after Jami, calling, "I'm going to give you twenty minutes, and then I'm going to be down there."

  The house was quiet, as the clock ticked way past twenty minutes. Frantic, Judy called Jerry and asked him to go down to the Samena Club. "Please go over there!"

  And then it was all right again. At 8:40, before Jerry could even run to their car, the phone rang, and it was Jami. She told her mother she was at home. She was a little upset because when she drove up to meet Steve, he jumped into her car, grabbed her purse, and ran off with it. Jami said she knew he'd taken it to their house, so she drove there to get it back and to pack a few clothes for herself and Chris.

  "Jami," Judy said with frustration, "You can't keep going back to him. If you're going to leave him, you're going to leave him. You can't say you're going to do it and keep going back."

  "Mom," Jami said firmly, "this time I mean it."

  "And I knew she did," Judy said later. "I knew she meant it. She went and got clothes for Chris. I asked her to please hurry and come home. She said, 'I'm just going to jump in the shower and change clothes and I'll be there.' "

  It was a morning suspended in time, where every event would be frozen in Judy Hagel's mind. She was frightened, but she kept telling herself there was no need to be. At last Jami was coming back to them. Judy stayed close to the phone all morning, holding her breath as she waited for Jami to call.

  "I didn't hear from her again until a quarter to twelve," Judy said. "She called me and said, 'Hi Mom! I'm on my way; I'm going to be stopping at Taco Time,' because she always used to stop by Taco Time and bring the food to the house and eat it there.… She said, 'I'll be there.'

  "And she never came."

  Jami should have been in and out of Taco Time within a few minutes, and the drive from her house in Redmond to her parents' home in Bellevue shouldn't have taken more than twenty minutes. Judy told herself that Jami must have run some other errand on the way. She looked after Chris and armed herself for a typical barrage of phone calls from Steve. Sure enough, he called at 12:15 and asked for Jami. Told she wasn't there yet, he hung up, only to call again at 12:30. Jami still wasn't there, and Judy told him so.

  She expected him to follow his usual pattern and call every fifteen minutes until Jami got there, but he didn't. Steve didn't call the Hagels again until 6:30 that evening. Judy's heart sank; that surely meant that he had found Jami and the two of them were together, with Steve begging Jami to forget all the nonsense about leaving him. He was so good at talking circles around Jami.

  Or maybe Jami was with Lisa Cryder, working out the details of their plan to move in together, or with someone else. Judy just didn't know.

  Steve had said he was coming to get Chris, but when he got there, Judy smelled alcohol on his breath. He wasn't supposed to be drinking. She didn't want him driving like that with Chris in the car, so she invited Steve to stay the night. He refused, took his two-year-old son and left.

  Judy still hadn't heard from Jami and she was beginning to feel very anxious. "About nine or nine-thirty," Judy recalled, "the phone rang and it was Steve. He said, 'I can't stay here. Can I come back?' I said, 'Yes. Bring Chris.' "

  By ten o'clock her grandson was asleep at her house, and Judy turned to Steve, determined to get some answers. She asked him what he'd done that afternoon and he told her he'd stayed at home until two o'clock and then gone over to his mother's house and fallen asleep. He hadn't heard from Jami all day. Steve explained that his mother and stepfather were away on vacation in Cancún, Mexico, and he'd promised to stay there part of the time, check on the mail, and generally keep an eye on their home to give them a break. She thought that was peculiar; Judy knew that Sherri Schielke invariably turned to her daughters, Laura and Saundra, to look after things while she was away. As far as Judy knew, Steve didn't even have a key to Sherri and her third husband Wally's home in Mill Creek. But Steve was insistent that this time he had been asked to stop by.

  The next morning, Steve was up at six and announced that he was going over to his mother's house again to see if Jami had shown up there. Judy stared at him. Why in the world would Jami go to Sherri's house? Even if she had gone there, she would have seen Steve's car in the driveway and left to avoid a confrontation. If she was going anywhere, she would have come home to her family, or she would have gone to Lisa's or some other girlfriend's.

  Steve called a little while later from his mother's home and said Jami wasn't there.

  "I started calling Microsoft about seven-thirty A.M.," Judy Hagel said. "I started calling her office and then started getting scared. Up until then, I wasn't as scared. I was calling Microsoft and she never answered the phone."

  By then Judy was beginning to panic, and she did something that was out of character for her. She hadn't heard from Jami since she said she was on her way home with tacos for everyone. That had been twenty hours ago. "I thought about [Lew Adams and his wife] and Costco. So I called Costco and asked for Lew's wife. I didn't quite know what I was going to say to her, but I had to know what was going on. The first time she answered the phone, I told her I was Steve's mother, because I knew she didn't know me. She said, 'I have nothing to say to you.' "

  That struck Judy as odd. Why would Lew's wife be angry with Steve or with his mother?

  "Then I called back," Judy said. "I'm sorry, but this is who I am. I'm Jami Sherer's mother. Your husband was with my daughter last night, and I need to know if they're still together."

  Dru Adams said she knew that Lew had come home early in the morning and had gone to work. He was just getting off his shift.

  "Where is she? Where is my daughter?" Judy asked desperately.

  "I know nothing about this," Dru Adams said and hung up.

  Moments later Judy's phone rang. It was Lew Adams, and he sounded distraught. "What do you mean, Jami's not there?"

  "She's not here," Judy said, "and she's not home either."

  "I told her not to go home," he said. "She was so scared to go home, and I told her, 'Don't go home.' I kept telling her not to go home."

  Judy didn't know what to think, but she had a feeling that something terrible had happened to Jami. She kept hearing Jami's voice saying, "I'm on my way. I'll be there." And underneath that, although Judy tried not to remember, she kept hearing Jami say, "All he can do is kill me."

  7

  On Monday, October 1, 1990, Judy Hagel could wait no longer. She called the Redmond Police Department and reported Jami as a missing person. It really should have been Steve's place to do that, but he hadn't mentioned doing it. When Steve came back from his mother's house, he agreed to go with Judy to the police station to make a formal complaint. The two rode in his car, a 1987 Blazer. The rig was in terrible shape, with both doors smashed from wrecks. Its dents and holes were patched with Bondo and the interior was awash with junk and crumpled wrappers. It was filthy and muddy. But that day, Judy Hagel didn't notice anything different about Steve's vehicle. It was always like that.

  Patrol Officer Brian Steinbus took the first missing persons report on Jami Sherer. After Steve and Judy had filled out forms at the police station, an officer accompanied them to the Sherers' house on Education Hill in Redmond. The policeman walked through the house, opening up doors and poking his head in to check each room. Everything seemed normal, but Judy noted a large suitcase sitting on the bed in the master bedroom. Jami had been packing to leave Steve; why hadn't she taken the suitcase wi
th her?

  "Then we went into the kitchen," Judy recalled, "and right by the fridge, there was a little [dried] red spot on the floor. The policeman was standing there and could see, so I reached down and picked it up, and I said, 'What is this?' …And Steve took a towel and grabbed it and said, 'Oh, that's just juice of Chris's,' and threw it in the garbage."

  The police explained that they couldn't mount a full-scale search for Jami until there was more evidence that she was the victim of foul play. She was an adult, and their experience told them that the vast majority of husbands and wives who disappear during an argument come home of their own accord. If they mobilized to look for every missing adult, they could do nothing else.

  Jami Sherer had said she was leaving Steve; her car— the 1980 Mazda RX7 she was so proud of— was missing; and she knew that Chris was safe with her mother. In the investigators' minds, there was every reason to believe she was probably giving herself an opportunity to think things out— or perhaps she was with another man.

  Judy Hagel knew better, and so did Jami's friends and her co-workers at Microsoft. Jami would never worry her family this way, and most of all, she would never have left Chris for a whole day without explaining to him why Mommy was going away and promising to be back very soon.

  Friends began to gather at the Hagels' house. They mapped out the area around Jami and Steve's house on Education Hill, Sherri Schielke's house, the Bear Creek Taco Time, and Judy and Jerry's house. Then they broke up into search groups. Microsoft management immediately agreed to print up thousands of flyers with pictures of Jami on them. They also gave many employees paid leave to join the search.

  Steve Sherer seemed reluctant to stay in his own home. He spent a lot of time at the Hagels' house, even though they suggested that he stay at his own house in case Jami called. The search for Jami was in high gear, but Steve didn't join in, nor did he pick up any flyers from the stack on the hall table. If he was looking for her at all, he kept it to himself. He seemed upset; he slept uneasily and said he couldn't understand why this had happened to him.

  "Steve felt very sorry for himself," one of Jami's friends recalled. "It was 'Poor me, poor me,' instead of 'Poor Jami.' "

  Steve was behaving oddly, to say the least. When he walked into Judy's kitchen, she and Sheila, her son's girlfriend, saw that he had some kind of lacy material twisted around one of his biceps, like a sleeve garter.

  "What's that?" Rich Hagel asked.

  "Jami's panties," Steve answered. "I'm wearing them because it makes me feel closer to her."

  The Hagels stared at each other in shock. That was crazy.

  Steve wore the panty-garter into a bar he often frequented, and told patrons there the same thing. He also started wearing a necklace he'd given Jami for Valentine's Day; it was a diamond heart, definitely a woman's necklace. Steve explained that wearing her things kept him connected to Jami.

  How odd that he never joined one of the search parties that had fanned out all around Redmond and Belle vue as scores of volunteers searched for Jami or her car. There were so many places to look; someone as tiny as Jami could be in the woods, in Lake Sammamish, or even in Lake Washington and no one would ever know. No one understood why Steve wasn't helping them look for her. If she was in trouble, the more people out there the better. If she was dead, at least her family would know the truth. As it was, they were in agony.

  Judy Hagel tried not to think that Jami could be dead. She questioned Steve again and again, trying to get him to remember what had happened after Jami vanished on Sunday at noon. He shook his head, saying that he'd been gone when she left, on his way to check his mother's home in Mill Creek and repeated that he'd fallen asleep there. "No way," Judy said flatly. "No way you were sleeping, Steve. You would have been on the phone every fifteen minutes if Jami was gone. You always are."

  She kept counting the hours between Steve's phone calls that Sunday. It had been five or six hours! He called after Jami said she was on her way to Taco Time— he called twice, fifteen minutes apart, as he always did. And then he didn't call again until six-thirty. That behavior was so unlike him that Judy felt cold dread. She had to be careful about questioning him; if he became annoyed, he would take Chris and leave— and she couldn't let Chris go with him. So she tried to space out her questions.

  During the first or second day he stayed with the Hagels— Monday or Tuesday— Judy heard Steve making a phone call, evidently to an auto detailer. She knew cars and all the lingo because she worked at a dealership in Bellevue.

  "I heard him call," she said. "He wanted a detail on his vehicle." Steve wanted all the trash inside cleaned up, and the interior vacuumed and shampooed, with a wash and wax on the outside. He'd never bothered to have his cars cleaned before; Steve's vehicles were always a mess. Why now? What did it matter if his Blazer was clean when his wife was lost somewhere?

  Judy walked into the room where the phone was. "Steve," she said carefully, "why do you want a detail on your car?"

  "Oh, well," he stuttered. "Ah, ahh, Rich spilled beer in it. I'm not supposed to be drinking beer, so I want to get it detailed so the smell won't bother me— tempt me, I guess."

  Judy had ridden in Steve's Blazer the day before. There was no smell of beer in it. Nevertheless he was adamant that he was going to have it detailed. She wasn't sure if he ever accomplished that, but as he drove the Blazer, more and more mud and weeds dropped off. The Redmond investigators had not searched the Blazer, nor had they put it up on a hoist to look at the undercarriage. One of the best methods criminalists use to determine where a vehicle has been is to test the mud, dirt, and vegetation caught beneath it. It was too late for that now.

  * * *

  By October 4, 1990, there had been no word at all from Jami Hagel. Her smiling face beamed from telephone poles, store windows, and bulletin boards all over the eastside. Microsoft printed up a second flyer with a picture of Jami's car and a description of the charcoal-gray RX7 with a sunroof, and Washington plates: 541-AHX. The last time her parents had seen Jami, she had been wearing blue jeans, a white T-shirt, and new white tennis shoes.

  The Redmond police no longer believed that she had run away or taken a vacation from her life. They worked now to learn as much about her world as possible. It didn't take long for them to find out that Steven Sherer had a long rap sheet, mostly for traffic offenses and harassment, and that he was on record for having an incredibly violent temper. But then, Lew Adams, the man Jami had seen the night before she vanished, wasn't exactly an upstanding citizen either. Both Sherer and Adams were known cocaine users. The obvious conclusion was that one of them knew what had become of Jami, but there was always the slight chance that she had been abducted by a stranger who spotted the beautiful young mother somewhere between her home and her parents' home early Sunday afternoon.

  Jami would have made a perfect victim. She was distraught and frightened about what would happen now that she was finally leaving Steve, and she told her mother during their last phone call that she was hurrying to get out of her house before Steve came home. She would have been a prime target for someone who wanted to grab her— too distracted and too tiny to put up much of a fight. The chances of a stranger abduction were slim, but it had to be considered.

  If the investigators couldn't find Jami, they needed to find her car, which might contain evidence or, in the worst-case scenario, Jami's body. Meanwhile they set out to learn what motivation someone might have had to kill her.

  On October 2, Sergeant L. M. "Butch" Watson got a page from Lew Adams shortly after 8:00 P.M. When he talked to Adams, Watson noted that the man was extremely emotional, and concerned that Steve Sherer had harmed Jami. Asked why he felt that way, Lew Adams said that Steve had "many things over Jami" and that Steve was a recovering alcoholic with a gambling addiction. Steve had apparently confided in Adams that he had committed a number of crimes, including robberies in California.

  That was interesting, but not necessarily a motive for murder. Finally,
Lew Adams admitted that he had been sexually involved with Jami on about five occasions. The first three had been Steve's idea. "He likes to watch," Adams said.

  Steve had manipulated both Lew Adams and Jami into having sex. He woke Adams up as he slept one night, intoxicated, on the Sherers' couch and told him to come into the master bedroom. There he awakened Jami too and began to remove her nightclothes as if offering a prize to Adams.

  Over the next few weeks, Lew Adams said, he had watched Steve badger Jami, drug her, and coax her until she finally capitulated and participated, albeit unwillingly, in the threesome that Steve wanted. Steve's impotence made him a voyeur rather than a participant.

  On the third occasion, Lew Adams said that Steve had videotaped them. It had all been for Steve's pleasure, Adams said. He was positive that Jami had been mortified over the whole episode.

  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.