Empty Promises

by Ann Rule

  They went next to a restaurant for a late lunch and sat at an outdoor table, drinking beer and talking. Lew, sensing that Jami was eager for someone to listen to her, just sat quietly and listened. She was such a sad woman, and so trapped in her marriage, but he could see a little sparkle in her. He wondered what she had been like before she met Steve, and he was sorry that she ever had. There was really nothing Lew could do to help her, except listen to her and warn her to be careful.

  It was a good Saturday, with the first sense of true autumn in the air, and they watched the sun go down over Elliott Bay. Jami called her mother to check on Chris, and then called her friend Lisa to cover herself with an alibi, in case Steve started looking for her. Then she and Lew went to a pizza place for dinner, where they drank more beer.

  They had, Lew admitted, decided to spend the night together at the Crest Motel. He was adamant that they used no drugs at all. This time they didn't have Steve with a video camera aimed at them, calling directions and suggestions.

  They parted company at about seven the next morning, after stopping for apple juice. Lew liked Jami and felt sorry for her. He said again how fearful he had been for her when he dropped her off at her car, advising her to go to her mother's house and not to her own. Then he headed home to his parents' house.

  "That was the last time I ever saw or heard from her."

  Jami had promised Lew that she would go to her mother's house and stay there. She would call an attorney about a divorce or separation on Monday morning.

  Interviewed again the next night in the Redmond police station, Lew said he felt personally responsible for Jami's absence. "If I hadn't become involved with her, she wouldn't be missing."

  "Do you have any idea where she is now?" one of the investigators asked.

  "In heaven," he said, with a sigh. "I don't know."

  Was that a confession? Or was it only an utterance from a man who felt tremendous guilt for contributing to the death of a woman simply by being out all night with her? Lew Adams seemed to be genuinely remorseful, but then, a lot of killers appear the same way.

  He went through Sunday with the detectives questioning him. "After I left Jami at her car," he said, "I went to my parents' house, and my mom let me in. I went to bed until about eleven, and then I went to Al's Car Quest and bought some glass tint.… I washed and waxed my car."

  His mother had been selling something in a booth at a church bazaar at Saint Thomas's in Lynnwood, and Lew said he dropped in there sometime in midday. After that, he went back to his parents' place and tried to tint the windows of his pink Volkswagen. His estranged wife came by about three so they could show a prospective buyer a car they were trying to sell.

  "I didn't see Jami at all on Sunday," Lew Adams insisted. He readily agreed to give saliva and hair samples and to take a polygraph, if needed.

  Dru Adams, Lew's wife, verified that he no longer lived with her and their children. Asked about any phone calls she received on Sunday, September 30, she remembered that Steve had called early, looking for Lew. That wasn't unusual; Steve called often and repeatedly, "every half hour," until he found Lew.

  Dru said she was aware that Lew and Steve were using drugs, but she didn't question Lew. She just wanted to live her own life. She had seen Steve Sherer in person only two or three times, and she had never seen either man doing drugs in her home.

  It was something of a surprise for her when Jami Sherer called about ten or ten-thirty, asking for either Lew or Steve. Dru had met Jami only once— six months earlier, in a restaurant. "I told her neither of them were here and that Lew didn't live here anymore."

  Jami had probably been trying to find Lew to warn him that Steve knew she'd been with him the night before, but she could not very well have left that message with Dru Adams.

  While hardly the ideal husband and father, Lew Adams had been willing to talk to the Redmond investigators whenever they asked, and the only questions that made him sweat were about drugs. He got tears in his eyes at questions about Jami, but the tears seemed real, as if he was grieving for her.

  Steve Sherer was not at all anxious to talk in depth with the police. He told them he had no idea where Jami was. The last time he saw her, he said, she was packing a bag to leave him. It had been a quiet end to their sometimes explosive marriage, and he was coming down from a night of cocaine use and exhausted. But he had gone about keeping his promise to check his mother's house while she was in Cancún. He fell asleep on the Schielkes' couch and awakened an hour or two later to call the Hagels to talk to Jami.

  There was a cockiness about Steve Sherer, strange in a man whose wife had stepped through some hidden door and completely vanished. Steve continued to wear Jami's panties around his biceps, drawing either sym pathy or incredulous stares from those who frequented the same bars and card rooms he did.

  9

  Steve Sherer's reaction to Jami's infidelity was ambivalence. Initially, he had been a man on fire with jealousy, but once she disappeared, he seemed more like a bystander than the one person who should be most concerned.

  Although he did not sign a formal statement, Steve did agree to talk with Steve Hardwick, a Redmond police detective whom he knew slightly. To Hardwick, Steve gave his recollection of that bizarre last weekend in September. Lew Adams had been willing, actually eager, to talk about Jami's disappearance— even with a polygrapher— but nervous about any discussion of his drug use. Steve Sherer was the opposite; he was voluble when he spoke of his cocaine addiction, but he didn't see much point in talking about Jami, and was definitely leery about taking a polygraph.

  Steve told Hardwick he'd been with Jami's brothers late on Saturday night, September 29. The beginning of his evening had been spent in a search for cocaine. After he scored, he said, he drove back to the eastside and attended a party near the Hagels' house. When he returned to his home in Redmond in the wee hours of Sunday morning, Jami wasn't there. Steve said that he and her brother Rich had looked for her.

  At that point, Steve said he was very worried about Jami and called everyone he could think of in his attempt to find her. He admitted he was jealous, too. He called Lisa Cryder, the friend Jami was supposed to be with. Lisa said that Jami should have been home by then.

  Steve told Detective Steve Hardwick that Jami finally came home around seven-thirty on Sunday morning. She had lied to him about staying at Lisa's; he already knew she wasn't there. Jami left then and went to her parents' house.

  Steve admitted he was strung out that morning. He'd snorted some more cocaine and then gone back to bed. Hardwick didn't comment on the obvious: cocaine was hardly a sleep aid. Steve contradicted himself when he followed that by saying he had called the Hagels at eight, shortly after Jami left.

  His story was disjointed, and the Redmond detective noted that Steve's time sequence changed often. Steve remembered that he called Lew's house looking for more cocaine, but couldn't find him. He had spoken with Lew's wife. And then, he said, he called the Hagels again, and asked Jami to meet him at the Samena Club, a block away from her parents', so they could talk. She finally agreed to meet him.

  Steve said he had seen an overnight bag behind her seat and her brown leather coat in the car. Still angry and suspicious, he'd taken her purse and run to his truck, locking it. Searching through her handbag for some clue to where she had been, he found the receipt from the Crest Motel from the night before. Steve said he didn't put two and two together "until I found Lew's business card. I still didn't know about their affair."

  Steve explained that the card itself wasn't as damn ing as the fact that Lew had written his parents' address and phone number on the back of it.

  Steve continued pawing through Jami's purse, finding her credit cards, bills, makeup bag, and birth control pills. "I threw [the pills] away," Steve said, smugly.

  Jami had driven off by then. Determined to find out everything he could, Steve said he stopped at a pay phone and called the Crest Motel. He had headed there and convinced the desk
clerk that he had to search the room listed on the receipt. "I told them that my girlfriend had left her jewelry there."

  He did not find the diamond ring he sought, but he said the room had been used, and he insisted he had seen cocaine residue on the headboard of the bed.

  Jami was at their house, Steve said, when he got home. At this point, his attitude changed markedly. He said that he was no longer jealous or furious with Jami. "We agreed to go our separate ways— until we both straightened out," Steve said quietly.

  According to Steve, Jami went to his truck, gathered up her belongings and put them back in her purse. She stayed in their house only long enough to make a few phone calls, and then she walked out the door. He let her go without any objections. It was, he said, a quiet ending. "She didn't say good-bye," he said mournfully.

  Steve reiterated the many errands he had to do for his mother. He had their mortgage check and some packages to mail. So he hadn't called Judy Hagel until about suppertime to see if Jami was back. He recalled that he had also talked to a friend, Jeff Caston, earlier in the day and might have called his sister Saundra. Then he had spent the night at the Hagels'.

  "I got real concerned when Jami didn't show up for work on Monday morning," Steve said. "She didn't say good-bye, but she didn't leave pissed off."

  While Judy Hagel was frantic about Jami's disappearance and had mobilized a huge group of friends who were working day and night to look for her, Steve's mother was not as concerned, but as soon as she heard from Steve, she cut short her vacation and flew home from Cancún four days after Jami vanished. On October 8, Sherri and her daughter Saundra cleaned the Sherers' messy house, after obtaining police permission. "I guess I'm kind of a neat freak," Sherri explained. "I assumed Jami would be back, and I wanted it to be nice." She explained that she didn't want Jami to come home to a dirty house. The place was very clean when she finished. She had the carpets shampooed, and the house looked great.

  For Steve's family, his involvement in a police investigation was almost business as usual. This time, the circumstances were more ominous than a disappearing— and reappearing— diamond ring or broken windows in a mobile home, but most of Steve's relatives felt that Jami would soon come home. Steve didn't have a lawyer, and no one blamed Sherri Schielke for being reluctant to hire still another attorney for her son. He had been putting her through the mill ever since he entered puberty, running up so many bills with lawyers, rehabs, fines, crashed cars, bad debts, gambling.

  Sherri didn't think about hiring a criminal defense attorney at this point.

  Shortly before 2:00 P.M. on October 10, the 911 operator received an emergency call to send help to Education Hill in Redmond. An aid unit had already responded to the Sherers' address, and the Redmond in vestigators arrived in time to see them carrying Steve Sherer from his garage.

  He had apparently tried to kill himself with carbon monoxide. When the first units arrived, they found him in his garage in his Blazer, with the windows down, and the engine running. He appeared to be semiconscious and had trouble speaking or moving.

  Detective Steve Hardwick leaned over him and said, "Hang in there, Steve. You'll be all right."

  His condition appeared critical, so the paramedics called for an airlift to the ER at Harborview Hospital in Seattle for treatment of carbon monoxide poisoning. As the helicopter disappeared to the west, the Redmond detectives looked into the front seat of Steve's truck. A picture of Jami in her wedding dress rested there and, beside it, a cordless phone. Steve himself had used it to call for help.

  He had also taken the time to leave a long good-bye:

  I am sorry Everyone

  BUT

  Jami is my life. She made me a better person and kept me under control. But I kept hurting her with games I would play.

  I can't live without her. I really need her and I have lost her one way or another. Maybe now, she won't be afraid to come home. I have been a real bad person in the past and she has changed me. But I had ruined what we had!

  Jami Honey. Just remember I really do love you and Chris, and Chris when you can read and understand this, Please understand that I need your Mom real bad and if she won't come back, I won't be able to handle that, much less your life. Please give everything to Chris and/or Jami. They are the ones I've made suffer.

  I didn't mean too! [Sic]

  Love You ALL

  Steven Sherer

  My dad's ring goes to Chris when he is married.

  Was it a sincere plea for forgiveness from a man who had lost the center post of his life, or was it a carefully contrived letter meant to make him look innocent? Steve Sherer had seen the devastation and the guilt that suicide could bring to a family when his father took his own life. The detectives wondered how he could do that to his own son. Chris had no mother, and now it looked as though he would have no father, either.

  Sherri Schielke and Steve's younger sister Laura rushed to Harborview Hospital and sat anxiously in the waiting room while doctors treated him in the emergency room. Detective Steve Hardwick waited with them there. He couldn't talk to Steve Sherer because he was on a respirator, but the doctors told him that he was not in critical condition, nor had he ever been. He had called 911 in plenty of time to be rescued.

  Hardwick waited for hours to speak with Sherer; it was almost midnight when he was allowed to go in. Steve's mother and sister hovered nearby, and Hardwick had only ten minutes to talk to Sherer alone.

  "I told him no matter what he had done, it was not worth taking his life," Hardwick recalled. "I reminded him that he had to think about his son. He was reflective, somewhat remorseful. He continually made comments such as 'I've made bad mistakes,' and 'It's all my fault.' He also mentioned that 'I'm going to miss Jami.' "

  This struck the detective as somewhat strange since no one was convinced yet that Jami was gone forever. But Steve apparently was: he had begun to speak of Jami in the past tense.

  The next morning, Detectives Hardwick and Conrad returned to Harborview, hoping to interview Steve about the reasons for his attempted suicide. They learned to their surprise that he had already been discharged and taken across the street to the mental health center. No sooner had they located him and asked how he was feeling than Steve's new attorney arrived. He was Peter Mair, a former assistant U.S. attorney and now one of Seattle's better-known criminal defense attorneys.

  Mair, hired by Steve's mother, directed the detectives to stop questioning him immediately and asked them to leave.

  When Hardwick asked about Steve Sherer's taking the polygraph exam, Mair looked at him and said, "I'll get back to you on that."

  It would be weeks before Steve Sherer was released from the hospital, ultimately frustrating weeks for the Redmond investigators. They were working on an impossible case, if indeed it was a case at all.

  A missing person? A runaway wife? A murder?

  If Jami had been murdered, the police had two excellent suspects. However, they had no body, no crime scene, no witnesses, and no physical evidence, and the circumstantial evidence was confusing. They had some bizarre stories from self-styled clairvoyants and a few reports from people in bars and minimarts who thought they had seen Jami.

  If Jami Sue Hagel Sherer was dead, no one knew or no one was telling where she waited for someone to find her.

  The most baffling case in a decade had just begun. For Jami's mother and father, her little boy, her brothers, and the friends and co-workers who loved her, this was a terrible ordeal of hope and disappointment, anxiety, fear, and nightmares.

  Somehow, Jami had stepped through a gap in the here and now and disappeared completely.

  * * *

  It was a stormy autumn, and the winter rains of the Northwest moved in to take the last of the golden leaves off the deciduous trees. Hunters fanned out in Washington State, hiking off-trail and through woods. Every year, men looking for deer and elk stumbled across a body or two, and 1990 was no different. But none of the weathered skulls turned out to be J
ami Sherer's.

  She hadn't used her credit cards or her checkbook, nor had she applied for new cards. She made no phone calls to her home. Weeks became months, and it was a new year.

  For a time in January 1991, Redmond police officers and detectives put a round-the-clock surveillance on Steve Sherer, following him as he went to work, to card rooms, to bowling alleys, and home again.

  Steve continued to attract police attention long after they stopped tailing him.

  In June 1991 he got into a fight outside a bar in Bellevue with a man who pulled out a pistol and shot him in the forearm. He wasn't badly hurt. In 1992 he spent a short time in jail for violating his probation by using cocaine and failing to meet with his probation officer.