Empty Promises

by Ann Rule

  Peter Camiel asked Coates on cross-examination why he had waited five years to tell the Redmond police about his conversations with Steve. He said he had left messages, but no one called him back. He admitted he hadn't given anywhere near the details he had just testified about. Camiel suggested that Coates had called the police again within ten minutes of reading that there was a $20,000 reward for information about Jami Sherer's whereabouts.

  Ron Coates maintained the reward didn't matter to him. What mattered was his fear of Steve Sherer. He had written down statements for the police before, he said, but he always held some things back. It was far easier for him to reveal everything that Steve told him after Steve was arrested for Jami's murder. "So I wouldn't be like a sitting duck out there."

  Dozens of witnesses took the stand. It had been ten years since Jami's disappearance, and many lives had changed. Two women who had seen someone with long hair riding in a car that looked like Jami's Mazda on that Sunday in 1990 tried to recall what they had seen. One of them had suffered brain damage during the intervening decade and couldn't even recognize her own signature. As a witness, she was worse than useless. The other woman wasn't sure any longer who she had seen.

  Lew Adams's mother remembered Sunday afternoon; she had been selling "duster gloves" at the church bazaar— "canvas gloves with fingernails and rings on them, and yarn on the bottom," she explained. Yes, she said, Lew had come to see her. "He looked normal."

  Lew drove his bubble-gum pink Volkswagen Beetle in those days, and treated it like a baby, washing it again and again. It was not a car that anyone would forget. And it was not a car that could have maneuvered off-road to dump a body, low-centered as it was.

  Sara, who had married one of Steve's good friends and once heard Jami's regrets about her own marriage, testified that Steve propositioned her within weeks of Jami's disappearance. He glared at her as she stepped down from the stand.

  That night, Sara received a phone call from the King County Jail. Steve Sherer was calling. She didn't accept his collect call, the only way the inmates could make phone calls. Frightened, Sara reported his attempt to talk to her, and detectives warned him that there would be big trouble if he tried again to intimidate a witness.

  There were witnesses who said that Steve had rented a steam cleaner for his carpet a few times after Jami vanished. The first carpet cleaner said he had cleaned the carpet at 10709 161st Avenue N.E. in Redmond on October 9, 1990. He knew the police had searched the Sherer house the day before. His records a decade later showed that he had marked a large spot to be pretreated. "It was six inches by eighteen inches," he said. He could not recall if he had cleaned the lower level of the home. One of the spots had been in the living room, a pinkish spot near the coffee table. The police had already tested it for blood and found it negative. Steve's sister thought it was Kool-Aid. His mother told Carolyn Willougby it was grape juice.

  There was sealant under the carpet in the basement near the door to the garage. The carpet and pad had been cut out, because someone had evacuated there, leaving a urine and fecal stain. Steve blamed it on their dog. After so much steam cleaning, no criminalist could say what species had lost body fluids there. Someone had treated the floor with Kilz.

  Records showed that the original carpet purchased for the basement in the spring of 1990 measured 11.8 square yards. That made sense because Jami and Steve were refurbishing their home at that time, getting ready to move in. However, Steve had purchased more carpet in January 1991, and some of it was used to patch the 3- by 5-foot area near the garage.

  All of the pieces of the giant puzzle that Jim Taylor, Mike Faddis, and Greg Mains had set out to solve were now being set in place. Separately, many of the witnesses would have had little impact. Together, however, they formed a picture that was cruel and grotesque.

  It was May 18 and the prosecution case was winding down. Throughout the trial, Judy Hagel had listened to horrific testimony and managed to maintain her composure. In the next row, Sherri Schielke appeared concerned but unruffled.

  However, when Dr. Katherine Taylor, a medical investigator and forensic anthropologist for the King County medical examiner's office took the witness stand to discuss what happened to a human body disposed of in the wild, Judy Hagel tensed. Taylor spoke in the matter-of-fact way of a professional. She had tramped through forests and desert and examined numerous human remains. She was not a grief counselor, but a scientist.

  Jami's image smiled from the Missing poster facing the gallery— and the defense table— as Taylor began. "A body above the ground is affected by the environment: temperature, sunlight, rainfall, insects, carnivores, how close it is to water," she told the court. "Human bodies are a valuable food source. Under ground, it depends on whether the body is clothed or unclothed, the biomass [size of the body] —larger bodies take longer, how deep they are buried."

  Taylor quoted a study done in 1989 that concluded the fastest a body would be reduced to a skeleton in Washington State was twenty-eight days. After that, all manner of natural phenomena— running water, rockslides, high winds— separate the bones left behind. "Coyotes, dogs, bears, squirrels, rats, mice, take hair for their nests." Small and large bones are dispersed "one half mile to a mile away. The cranium is the easiest to mark as human." Dr. Taylor explained that body recovery around Seattle would be difficult.

  "What's left after a year?" Brenneman asked.

  "There's good body dispersal, but heavily altered. The body would be unrecognizable after two years, even more so if small animals had chewed on the bones. Trauma attracts carnivores. They smell blood."

  Marilyn Brenneman had warned Judy Hagel that this part of the trial would be very difficult for her, but she had opted to stay in the courtroom. Even with her back to the gallery, however, Marilyn could sense Judy's despair. Every mother in the courtroom could.

  "Wrapped bodies last longer," Dr. Taylor continued.

  "What about the areas where they are left?"

  "Anywhere from neighborhood parks to open areas to forests. Sometimes, no one finds the bodies or they don't recognize them as human. Hidden bodies have usually died of unnatural causes."

  "After nine years?" Brenneman asked.

  "[Around] an ungraved body or one in a shallow grave there would be excessive vegetation growth. When you dig a grave, you aerate the soil. Two feet down, you hit rock or clay around here," Taylor said. "You wouldn't have to have a rectangular grave. A small biomass only requires a small hole in the ground."

  After all these weeks, Judy Hagel had come to a point where she could not bear to hear such details. She let out a wail of grief and stumbled past eight members of her family as she fled into the corridor, sobbing.

  The testimony was awful to hear, but Taylor soldiered on. She explained that the most they could hope to find of Jami would be a skull and some small bones.

  And if she was in the water?

  "Adipocere is common," Taylor said, "but Lake Washington has a very uneven, muddy bottom. You'd have to be looking for her and have a pretty good idea where she was."

  On cross-examination, Dr. Taylor said the human teeth don't decompose.

  "Do silicon implants decompose?" Mair asked.

  "My assumption would be no."

  Mair pointed out that cadaver dogs had failed to find Jami and ground-penetrating radar had also found nothing. She could be in blackberry thickets or in the roots of trees.

  "Yes," Taylor answered. "It's difficult to say."

  "How time-consuming would it be," Brenneman asked, "to find a place to leave a body on the surface in this area?"

  "Not hard at all. Cadaver dogs need an area in which to search, though."

  And that was true. There were endless miles where Jami could have lain, undetected, for almost a decade. The snow, the rain, the sun, had come every year. Leaves had brightened and died and fallen to cover her, perhaps, in nature's blanket. Many bodies in the Green River murders had proved to be "self-buried" —that is, left on th
e surface of the ground but covered by so many seasons of decomposing leaves that they appeared to be buried.

  It was, in the end, academic. Jami could be anywhere within an hour or two of the house she had decorated so lovingly.

  But no one in Judge Wartnik's courtroom believed that Jami was alive, living another life far from her son, her mother and father, and her brothers.

  The prosecution called their last witness on June 23.

  Judge Wartnik denied two motions from the defense— the first to dismiss the case for lack of evidence and the second to dismiss the charge of first-degree murder because the prosecution had failed to establish premeditation.

  The trial would proceed.

  16

  It was the defense's turn to call witnesses. Would Steve Sherer testify in his own defense, a decision that is usually dangerous for a defendant? If he took the stand, he would open himself up to cross-examination by the prosecution. No one had yet heard his voice. Did he have some explanation for what had happened to Jami?

  If he chose not to testify, the defense would have to resort to only a handful of witnesses. Sherer was not a man laden with friends. His sisters had both been witnesses for the state, however reluctantly. Laura, the younger of Steve's two sisters, had testified that Steve had told her that he and Jami had an argument and "she just left."

  As far as Laura knew, Steve had not had a key to his mother's house. Usually she or her sister took care of their mother's home when she was away.

  Saundra, who was next to Steve in birth order, admitted in the state's case that she had a nonexistent relationship with Steve. "I love him," she said, "but I don't like him."

  Steve had spent at least half of the 1990s in Arizona. Saundra remembered he had called her from Phoenix in the fall of 1995, and that he'd been very upset and sounded as if he'd been drinking. He told her that he had done "bad things" that would upset people if he told them. Saundra remembered that call vividly because Steve was extremely distraught and thought he should sit down and talk with a priest. Saundra had asked if it had something to do with Jami's disappearance, but Steve didn't answer. Saundra had been concerned enough to call Laura and ask her to call their uncle who worked at the Seattle crisis clinic. Steve was sounding suicidal again. But he hadn't killed himself or staged an attempt, as before.

  On the Sunday Jami vanished, Saundra recalled that Steve had phoned her in the evening while she was watching a Star Trek rerun. "That would have been between six and seven P.M." She wasn't sure if he had called an hour or so later, too.

  Now, with the defense case beginning, Saundra was about to testify for the other side.

  There was a legal scuffle as Marilyn Brenneman and Pete Mair both claimed the same witness. In the end, Judge Wartnik allowed Brenneman to cross-examine Saundra, who was now Mair and Camiel's witness.

  "Do you think that Steve felt guilty because he had something to do with Jami's disappearance?" Brenneman asked.

  Saundra hesitated, and then answered, "That crossed my mind."

  "Did you try to help Steve get custody of Chris at your mother's behest? Would you say that was a family obligation?"

  "That would be fair."

  "When you saw the spot on the rug [on October 8], was it because you thought it could be blood?"

  "Yes."

  Mair recalled Laura, to establish how worried the whole family had been that Steve was suicidal.

  Then the defense called Christopher Moon, age forty-one. He was positive he had seen Jami Sherer hanging out in a card room three days after she was supposed to have vanished. He remembered her "because she looked like this girl I used to know in Arkansas. She was small, wearing a plaid top and she had light brownish blond hair. She was there forty-five minutes to an hour. She appeared to be killing time, waiting for someone."

  It seemed impossible. Jami had been headed for her parents' house, and she hated card rooms.

  Mair questioned a Redmond businessman who said he had met Steve in September or October 1990, when Steve came into his framing shop. "He was representing an artist who was selling a limited edition of Ken Griffey Jr. baseball prints. He was looking for seed money," the witness said. "Six months later, Sherer came back in. This time he had a handful of posters about his missing wife and asked if he could put one in the window.

  "I had the impression he was in mourning a year later," the witness said. "He wasn't seeing anyone."

  But on cross-examination, the man admitted that he had actually met Steve well before Jami vanished. The defense was antsy: they were afraid that deputy prosecutor Kristin Richardson was going to bring out the information that the witness once gave Steve a reference as a good employee when, in fact, Steve had never worked for him at all.

  Pete Mair began reading from an earlier transcript, and Judge Wartnik stopped him. "You can't read transcripts; you have to ask questions."

  "Why did you believe that Steve was not seeing anyone at that time?" Mair asked the framer.

  "I answered that in 1991 or 1992," the witness said. "Steve seemed to be in mourning."

  "Seeing anyone?"

  "I don't know."

  "Steve Sherer slept with ten women within three months of Jami's death," Kristin Richardson said. "Does that change your opinion?"

  "No. He was upset and concerned."

  The defense now attempted to enter into evidence the videotape of Jami having sex with both Lew Adams and Steve Sherer. Moreover, they wanted to show it to the jury. Their client had been painted with a black brush by witness after witness. Now they wanted to erase Jami's image as a good mother and a loving daughter and show her as a wanton woman.

  But it seemed like such a vicious thing to do. How would the jury react to such a move, and how would Jami's mother and father cope with it? For days, the rumor that the tape was going to be allowed circulated through the courtroom. A number of court watchers vowed to leave the courtroom if the video was shown. At that, it might be a horrendous tactical error on the part of Mair and Camiel; the video reportedly showed their client directing sex play between his drugged wife and another man. That might not endear him to the jury.

  In the end, Judge Wartnik refused to allow it, and there were sighs of relief.

  Pete Mair read Steve Sherer's suicide note, the note he had beside him in his car when he attempted suicide shortly after Jami vanished. The prosecution argued that the suicide was staged, and that Sherer had never intended to die. If he had, why did he have his cell phone so conveniently beside him?

  One of the defense's prize witnesses backfired badly on them. Perhaps Mair and Camiel didn't fully grasp the techniques used in bloodhound searches. They had interviewed Richard Schurman, Maggie's handler, and knew she and other dogs had followed a track from Jami's abandoned Mazda to the bus stop on I-5. Perhaps Peter Camiel's intention was to show that a stranger had dumped her car near the church and then caught a bus.

  By the time Schurman finished explaining how the scent objects obtained from the Sherers' laundry hamper led the dogs to the last spot where their quarry stood, however, the defense had clearly experienced a disaster.

  It was clear that the skin flakes and odor on the back of the driver's seat were not from Jami. Add to that the fact that the seat had been pushed too far back for Jami to reach the accelerator and brake, and any reasonable person would infer that Jami didn't drive her car to the church lot.

  But the dogs had picked up on a scent, and that scent was from Steve Sherer's clothing, which had touched Jami's in the hamper. That was the scent they got off the headrest of the driver's seat and from the hamper. Both Maggie and the second team of bloodhounds had proven that it was Steve Sherer who parked his missing wife's car sometime on Sunday afternoon, September 30, and then walked or jogged to the bus stop.

  It was impossible now for Camiel to deconstruct his own witness; he had spent a long time proving that Schurman was an expert in his field when he brought him to the stand.

  "The dogs pursued the male scent,"
Schurman explained once more, "because the female scent had been eliminated the first day."

  The male scent was that of Steven Sherer.

  * * *

  Sharon Ann "Sherri" Schielke took the stand. She was very attractive, with soft dark hair worn in a pageboy with feathered bangs. She had perfect features, and, like her missing daughter-in-law, she was very petite.

  Sherri explained how she had helped Jami and Steve buy their home on May 31, 1990. She said she had never seen the shattered window beside her front door, so she had no personal knowledge that it had been broken on Sunday, September 30. "I saw fresh putty around the glass around New Year's 1990."

  "Did you get some Missing posters of Jami?"

  "Yes, Carolyn Willoughby gave them to me, and then Steve had some."