by Ann Rule
Steve's basic personality hadn't changed. He took what he wanted. He was in his mid-thirties when the in vestigation into Jami's disappearance began again in earnest, but he acted more like a juvenile delinquent.
Only a small portion of the money realized from the house or from Jami's Microsoft stock went directly to Chris, who was living with the Hagels. Had Jami lived, and kept the Microsoft stock that she gave to Sherri Schielke as collateral, in a decade it would have been worth more than any of Steve's deals. If Jami had simply held on to that $27,000 worth of stock, she would have been one of the company's scores of millionaires. By 2000, Jami's Microsoft stock would have soared and split again and again until its value would have been $928,524! And Steve still retained other shares.
For Chris's sake, Judy maintained a friendly relationship with his other grandmother, and Chris visited Sherri's home occasionally. Sherri and Wally had him over for birthday parties and at Christmastime, and sometimes Chris went on trips to Lake Chelan with his aunts and Sherri and Wally. Less often, he spent time with his father, although it was agreed by everyone that it would be best if he didn't travel alone to visit Steve in Arizona. His grandmother Sherri escorted him on his visits to the Southwest.
He saw Chris infrequently, however. Mains and Faddis learned there was good reason not to leave Chris alone with his father for long. One day, when Chris was about eight, Steve told him that he had business to take care of. They drove out into what was essentially desert. There, Steve left Chris in the car in the hot sun for almost an hour. The boy survived, but apparently Steve hadn't the slightest concern for his son's safety.
Steve lived in Scottsdale most of the time from the mid- to late nineties. He seemed to sense that Jim Taylor, Mike Faddis, and Greg Mains were circling closer and closer. He usually worked as a cabdriver, and he somehow fashioned an I.D. that didn't draw dozens of hits for traffic violations when he applied for an Arizona cabdriver's license. His boss, Joseph Volpe, told the Redmond detectives that a clean driving record was mandatory for their drivers. Volpe said that Steve lived in his mother's home in the Spanish Oaks section of Scottsdale. "One day he told me his son was coming out to visit," Volpe recalled. "He said his mother was bringing him, and then he said, 'My wife was killed in a car crash.' "
Steve's year with the cab company ended abruptly. "One day he called," Volpe said. "He said he'd met some girls and was partying and still drunk. I went to get our car and the pager at his mother's house."
Steve's drinking and drugging continued, making him emotionally chaotic. One night while he was living in Arizona, he called his sister and threatened to kill himself, but the family managed to talk him out of it— if, indeed, he had really intended to take his own life.
There was something peculiar about Steve's travels: He always carried a heavy suitcase with him. It was an old suitcase, made of light blue simulated leather, with wide straps that buckled over the zipper so that the contents were secure. Even during the times when he was without funds and had to ride the bus, Steve lugged that blue suitcase with him.
The only constant they were discovering in Steve Sherer's life was that there were no constants. Over the eight years since Jami disappeared, Steve had continued to tell different stories to different people about what had become of his wife. He embroidered the story as the years passed, sometimes showing new acquaintances creased and yellowed newspaper stories about Jami. He usually varied his accounts of her disappearance by sticking to three basic scenarios: Jami had been kidnapped, Jami had been killed in a car accident, or Jami had divorced him. He had a more chilling version, however: he told one friend that Jami was the "last victim of a serial killer."
A Phoenix, Arizona, man told Greg Mains that he knew Steve from playing poker with him at the Casino Arizona in 1998.
"Did he ever talk about his wife?" Mains asked.
"Steve told me that his wife was murdered five or six years ago," the man recalled. "He said the person who did it was in prison."
One woman told Mike Faddis and Greg Mains that she had been romantically involved with Steve's friend Ron Coates in 1990. She and Ron had spent a night at Steve's house during the autumn after Jami disappeared.
"I met Steve at a café. There was another woman there. We went out on Steve's boat." This informant— Victoria— said she and the other woman, Steve's date, later went to buy more beer. During the time they were gone, Ron and Steve evidently did a good deal of talking. Ron was curious after Steve explained that his wife was missing. "He [Ron] was somewhat alarmed about what Steve had told him," Victoria recalled. "Ron told me later, 'I think he did it!' "
Ron Coates went to the top of their list to interview. Mains and Faddis only needed to locate him.
On February 26, 1998, Greg Mains met with a man on the other side of the Cascade Mountains in Yakima, Washington. Alan Aboli* had worked with Steve at a sports merchandise company in Seattle, and they had become friends. "He's a pretty nice person when you meet him. He has a bit of charm, a bit of personality. He doesn't have any problems getting along with people pretty well. As I got to know him, my vision of him decreased— we'll put it that way. It got worse and worse," Aboli said. "I noticed more and more things he was into: the scamming, the drugs, the women. I basically lost respect for him."
Aboli said Steve usually looked fairly clean-cut and that he bleached his hair blond. He had been the warehouse manager, Aboli's boss.
"Was Steve Sherer married?" Mains asked.
"Yes," Aboli replied, "he was previously married." Then Aboli told Mains that Steve had said, "My wife was the last victim of the Green River Killer."
The Green River Killer was believed to have struck in the Seattle area for the last time in April 1984. Jami, of course, disappeared on September 30, 1990, so that story sounded suspect to both Aboli and Mains.
At the time Aboli visited Steve in his West Seattle apartment, it would have been late 1992. "He said he loved his wife and he missed her," Aboli recalled, "that his son really needed her, and he worried about how his son was gonna be without her."
Aboli also recalled that he and Steve had often socialized outside of work, and especially after Alan took a job in a bar down in Puyallup, Washington. "Steve had dated a lot. I remember one girl named Lisa and one named Monique. He dated both at the same time."
The biggest problem with Steve, Aboli said, was that he was a mean drunk who "made a fool of himself" in bars, insistently trying to pick up women. If a woman turned him down, he got angry. "The drunker he got," Aboli said, "the more of an asshole he became." Aboli said he had been embarrassed to be asso ciated with Steve, especially when he came into the bar where Aboli worked. "When he's drunk, he's a completely different person."
When women did accept Steve's offer to buy them a drink, he characterized himself sometimes as a widower and sometimes as a divorcé. Whatever he told women, he was dating often, meeting women in diverse spots. It didn't seem to matter to him, Aboli said, if they were nice girls or prostitutes, eventually Steve treated them all badly.
Alan Aboli remembered a woman who was a cocktail waitress in a card room at a bowling alley in West Seattle. "They got together a few times and they were apparently getting along pretty well. The third time they got together, they were going to California for a weekend. But she called me up on the phone at work, and said he had left her there. I ended up getting hold of him, and he basically told me he left her there because she was being a bitch. She called me, trying to get back home."
Aboli wired her some money to get home, since she'd been left in the middle of a street, completely without funds, in a strange city.
"Do you have any opinions," Greg Mains asked, "as to what happened to Steven Sherer's wife, Jami Sherer?"
"My personal opinion," Aboli began, and then paused. "My opinion is that it's between him and God."
"Okay."
"And that's all I can say about that," Aboli said, but he continued to talk. "He is capable. He is capable of doing it, th
ough. He's more than capable.… He blacks out. I've had to go into the deepest part of Seattle and bail him out of the ghettos— high, drunk, whatever it is, and walking out with his jacket on upside down and backwards.… You know, 'cause he was drunk and couldn't remember where he was. Lost his pickup a few times."
"So what do you think about what happened to Jami?" Mains asked again.
Aboli shook his head, repeating only that it was "between him and God."
* * *
So far, Steve Sherer had played the system and won.
But in the fall of 1998 he returned to Washington and said he wanted to surrender on his numerous drunk-driving warrants. He was sentenced to eight months in the King County jail, his longest jail time ever. Before then, he had deftly managed to creep out of areas where he was wanted without being arrested. If he was arrested, he'd been sentenced to probation or threatened with house arrest. He always seemed to call the shots and live the life he wanted. But this time he'd guessed wrong.
It would be the summer of 1999 before Steve walked out of jail.
As he sat in the crowded jail pods and considered what had been done to him, Steve Sherer grew more and more angry. And when Steve got angry, he acted out. But he'd never been angry in jail before and acting out was frowned upon by the guards. He could only seethe inside and consider what he would do when he was free again.
When Steve turned himself in for those DUI warrants, Jami had been gone for eight years. During most of those years, Steve had lived an entirely self-indulgent life, most of it far away from the house on Education Hill where she was last known to be alive. His little boy, Chris, was thriving in Judy and Jerry Hagel's care, and the world was going on. But for Judy and Jerry, a life without answers was bleak.
Marilyn Brenneman was impressed with the growing pile of reports and interviews the Redmond detectives were bringing her. True to form, she sent the men back to find more. And true to their form, they grinned and went back out to see what else they could find out about Steven Sherer.
They all knew it was going to take a mountain of circumstantial evidence to bring this case before an inquiry judge and convince him that a crime had been committed.
So the "autopsy" on Steve Sherer's life continued, but it wasn't easy. For every person who opened up and gave the Redmond detectives a solid opinion or an anecdote that helped, there seemed to be three who were still afraid of Sherer. Taylor, Mains and Faddis listened to everyone, even psychics, believing that there was someone out there who could fill in the pieces of their baffling puzzle. They were getting a much more comprehensive understanding of Steve Sherer, but there were still too many empty spots where there were no pieces at all to fit in.
Most significant, they now understood how Steve was able to keep so many people under his thumb. He choreographed his illegal and illicit activities so they involved his friends, while he kept his own hands clean. That allowed him to control the balance of power; he always threatened to turn his friends in if they talked too much. It wasn't that he didn't partake of the fruits of his con games and drug schemes. He always did, but he managed to put other people in a position where they would be hung out to dry if he chose to snitch on them.
But the longer Steve remained in jail, the more will ing those people were to come forward. They could see now that he wasn't nearly as much in control as he wanted them to believe.
13
Finally, even Jami's brother Rob decided to tell the police what he had not wanted to acknowledge as anything more than his brother-in-law's usual rantings on the Saturday night before Jami vanished. Steve had been blindly furious when Jami didn't come home that night. He and her twin brothers and their girlfriends had looked for her in vain.
Rich and the girls had finally gone home, and Rob was alone with Steve when he muttered, "If I find out she's cheating on me, I'll kill her."
But Steve was always threatening to kill people, or making grandiose— and violent— statements. It was difficult for a brother to accept that he hadn't paid enough attention to the man who probably had actually destroyed the sister he loved. As the years passed, and Jami didn't come home, Rob agonized about what might have been if only he had done something. Finally, he told the Redmond police about Steve Sherer's threat against Jami.
On October 6, 1998, Marilyn Brenneman and Hank Corscadden felt they had enough evidence to begin calling witnesses before Inquiry Judge Robert Lasnik. IJ hearings are secret, just as grand jury proceedings are. The testimony is secret to protect the target of an investigation. If the inquiry judge should decide that there is not reasonable suspicion to believe that a crime had been committed, the suspect's name would never have been broadcast throughout the media. If the judge agreed with the prosecutors and a trial lay ahead, the media would have plenty of opportunities from testimony in open court for headline stories.
"What I try to do," Marilyn Brenneman says, "is think like a defense attorney. What would I do in this instance?"
It was important to have the potential witnesses in an actual trial testify before the inquiry judge, not only to give information and build a case, but also so that transcripts of what they said could later be used either to help them or to haunt them.
To Brenneman's relief, Lew Adams said he would be glad to testify. She phoned Lew in Idaho and tried to reassure him that any drug charges against him in the state of Washington took second place to the tremendous help he could offer to the Sherer investigation. He told her he wanted to straighten things out, but he was nervous. She assured him that he wasn't going to be arrested the moment he crossed into Washington State. Lew needed to come to Seattle and tell what he knew about what were, quite probably, the last two days of Jami Sherer's life.
On the first day before Judge Lasnik, Carolyn Willoughby* testified. She was one of Sherri's closest friends, and she and Sherri had often speculated about what might have happened to Jami. Despite the front that Sherri kept up to protect Steve, Carolyn sensed that even his own mother sometimes had doubts about his innocence.
Carolyn Willoughby was disturbed by that, but she was more disturbed by something she had found when she was helping Sherri clean the Sherers' house after Jami vanished. She knew Steve had told the detectives that there was only one key to Jami's Mazda RX7. That was the key found in the pocket of Jami's leather coat on the seat of her car when it finally turned up in the church parking lot.
If that was truly the only key, then it seemed likely that Jami herself had driven the car there. But to Carolyn's horror, she found another key to Jami's Mazda in the laundry area of Steve and Jami's house. That meant that Steve had lied to the detectives. Carolyn didn't want to know why he had lied, but she had a pretty good idea. Her first concern was for her best friend, Sherri, and so Carolyn kept the secret of the key to herself. It took a toll on her, however. When she was subpoenaed to the inquiry court, she was apprehensive.
At a certain point in her testimony, her words came out in a rush. She admitted she had found the second key— a key that Steve must have had all along. She was convinced that her information would do great damage to her best friend's son and cause pain to Sherri. It certainly was valuable information, but it was only one small detail. Carolyn Willoughby need not have felt like such a traitor.
Judge Lasnik listened to a number of witnesses over three days. New names surfaced and new information spilled out. If there was not an organized effort to protect Steve Sherer from the detectives who trailed too close behind him, there certainly appeared to have been a tacit agreement among the social circles Sherri Schielke moved in to avoid saying anything more than was absolutely necessary.
The picture emerging was that of a sadistic hedonist. Steve Sherer's rap sheet showed he had been flouting the law since he was eighteen, and people who had gone to school with him before that remembered him as a mean, enraged child and teenager.
The first session with the inquiry judge ended, but there would be another. The investigation continued even as the inquiry pro
cess had begun. In the meantime, Steve himself languished in jail.
Many people around Steve were worried. Greg Mains had heard rumors about Steve's stealing a gun. In October 1998 he and Detective Lon Shultz traveled to the little eastern Washington town of Chelan to follow up on a report that Steve had stolen a .357— from one of Wally Schielke's houses. "We were concerned about officer safety," Mains explained. "We needed to know if Steve was armed."
Because a number of new names had come up, Greg Mains and Lon Shultz wanted to talk to some longtime friends of the Sherer-Schielkes who lived in Chelan. Sherri had owned a summer place there for many years and Steve had spent a great deal of time partying in it when his mother was not present.
One report came to Greg Mains from someone on the Chelan Police Department who said his parents lived next door to the Schielkes' place.
Mains and Shultz met first with a couple who owned one of the largest resorts on Lake Chelan and learned nothing that would help their investigation. They did, however, learn the names of other Chelan friends of the Sherers.
