Empty Promises

by Ann Rule

  "He never asked the police for an update on the investigation; he never asked Jami's friends."

  Kristin Richardson spoke of how the car seat of the Mazda was pushed too far back for Jami to reach the pedals. The alarm wasn't on, she reminded the jury, and the duffel bag was hastily packed with things Jami would not have chosen. "He had a key to her car, but he said he didn't. Carolyn Willoughby found it." Nor, Richardson suggested, had Sherri Schielke ever left a key to her house for Steve.

  "There was Kilz sealant under the carpet in the basement near the garage. [Steve] said 'The dog did it,' but something had evacuated there," Richardson said. "He bought more carpet for that house in January 1991… a piece five by three feet in the hall.

  "He liquidated Jami's assets. Sherri wanted her money back two months later. They both knew that Jami wasn't coming back."

  Steve's Achilles' heel, Richardson suggested, was his drinking. "When he drank, he leaked out things. [To his uncle]: 'They can't prove murder without a body.' To Ron Coates: 'I'm the prime suspect— she was going to leave me anyway,' and 'I've done something bad. I'm going to miss her.'

  "And then there was silence until he was arrested," Kristin Richardson said. "And then he said, 'So you found the body?' "

  She asked the jury to remember Steve Sherer's Halloween card to Chris in which he urged his son never to drink or do drugs because they had ruined his life.

  "Remember, [most of] the witnesses don't know each other, but their stories dovetail. Nuns or priests make better witnesses, but these are the people who want to spend time with this man, people on his level. Remember his history, his actions, his reactions and his statements.

  "Just because we don't know how she died doesn't mean Jami isn't dead. We heard of shallow graves and animals.

  "He took Jami's purse so she'd have to come home to get it. He lured her," Richardson said, winding down her final arguments. "She told her parents on the phone on Sunday morning, 'Steve's here but it's okay— I'm getting ready to leave.'

  "He called Judy Hagel as if Jami wasn't already dead. And now Steve Sherer is in a place where his desire for control has no power whatsoever. He has lost control at last."

  * * *

  Pete Mair, in his final argument, of course, attacked the state's case. "It's way too long on theories. It's very long on speculation. But it's very short on what I consider to be evidence. They have no evidence of when, where, how, the victim died," he said with a shadow of contempt in his voice. "They haven't proved their case beyond a reasonable doubt. What they do is decide he did it, and then they work backwards. At some point they just assumed that Steve must have done it. Then they dredged and they dredged until they found people to support their theory."

  The jury watched Mair alertly, their mouths looking oddly pinched. "Don't let the state put it on you!" he warned them.

  Mair offered his own timetable:

  2:21 A.M. Sunday: Steve calls for information to Lisa Cryder.

  8:45 A.M.: He tries to call Lew Adams.

  9:43 A.M.: Jami calls Lew Adams.

  9:51 A.M.: Lew's at work.

  10:00: Jeff Caston speaks to Jami.

  10:30: Jeff calls Steve.

  Mair suggested that Steve did everything he could to find Jami and that he grieved for her intensely. "He was in the hospital for three weeks after his suicide attempt."

  At least three jurors had a look on their faces that seemed to say they had shut Mair's arguments out.

  "At 7:00 P.M. that night, Steve took Chris to their home in Redmond. At 8:00, he called his sister. He tried to call Lew. He went back to the Hagels'."

  Steve, Mair said, had called Microsoft looking for Jami and gone to the Redmond Police Department to report her missing. He had met a uniformed officer at his house, given an interview at the police station the next day, Wednesday. "He was interviewed again on Thursday by the police. He gave a consent to search his car. On Friday, he gave them scent items."

  According to Mair, Steve had been the epitome of the helpful spouse, whose suicide attempt was very real. "He hooked up a hose to bring carbon monoxide into his car. He had to be put in a hyperbaric chamber.… From his house to the church [where the Mazda was] was 17.4 miles, or a forty-six-minute trip. It was 14.7 miles to his mother's house, or thirty minutes. It was fifteen minutes back to the Hagels'. [Getting rid of a body] would be an awesome task to accomplish in three to five hours."

  Pete Mair suggested that the real killer was probably Lew Adams. "He had eighteen hours without observation.… No one searched Lew's place… while Steve is frustrated after looking under every rock for evidence [of Jami]."

  Mair disparaged the number of witnesses who hadn't come forward for years: Ron Coates who, he suggested, talked to police only after a reward was offered; Rich Hagel, who spent most of Saturday night with Steve and never told the police or his own family that Steve had said, "She's cheating on me. I've gotta kill her," until after Steve's arrest.

  "No neighbors heard or saw anything on Sunday afternoon." Again, Mair emphasized that the prosecution was trying to force the jury to make an impossible deci sion, to bring in a verdict on a case that could never be proved.

  Marilyn Brenneman was the last to speak in this very long trial. Over the past seven weeks, the plants in the courtroom had grown dustier and droopier; everyone had memorized the paintings on the wall.

  The rail in front of the judge's bench was decorated with photos and written mementos of a tragic marriage: wedding photos of Steve and Jami, Jami and little Chris on the Missing posters, stacks of greeting cards, the blue suitcase, paper bags full of Jami Sherer's panties and filmy black negligees, contracts she had signed long ago. In essence, the pieces of her life, and perhaps her death, were all scattered over the varnished wood. Jami's likeness still smiled toward Steve from a huge poster— a grown woman, yes, but one who looked like a high school girl, happy and unafraid.

  Marilyn Brenneman told the jury that Steven Sherer's threats against her gave her "no personal ax to grind. I've been threatened before and I will be again," she said.

  She described the defendant as a very angry man. "He told me, 'I want what's mine!' And he owned Jami, too. He had plenty of time Sunday morning to lie in wait for her. They had a fight. She went to her mother's, and he wanted control again."

  But finally, she said, Jami wanted a divorce. Brenneman suggested that Steve's searches of the motel, Jami's purse, and her Microsoft office were not about Jami at all. He was looking for the diamond ring.

  Of course, the neighbors heard no noises that Sunday almost a decade earlier. "She was taken off guard. He didn't need to make a sound to strangle her. He didn't need to shed her blood or fire a shot," Brenne man said. "Strangulation causes voiding or evacuation [of the bowel]," she explained. "He objectified Jami and he broke her, and we should all feel sorry for him?" Marilyn Brenneman asked incredulously. "Chris needed a mother who was alive, not a seventeen-year-old who looked like her.

  "Justice grinds slow but exceedingly fine. It's taken ten years, yes. But it bleeds out. Steve told Ron Coates little bits and pieces: 'She bled from the nose.' It's a little bit of a confession— but not all true. Steve has to be a tough guy.

  "Silence is a form of affirmation. When Saundra asked about his 'bad thing. Is this anything to do with Jami?' There was only silence.

  "It bleeds out a little bit more in the [Halloween] letter to Chris and the suicide note, and what he said to Ron Coates and to Bettina. Steve Sherer made a promise to his victim of what would happen if she did certain things."

  Brenneman pointed out that Steve knew all the back roads between his house and his mother's house. "He had the time, the motive, the opportunity, the knowledge, and the vehicle.

  "Justice delayed is justice denied," Marilyn Brenneman quoted. "But that's not always true." She pointed out that Pete Mair had tried to suggest that Jami was not the person they thought she was. "But she had dreams. She had everyday events in her life, as we all do. She went t
o work and to day care. She bought groceries and went home to cook supper— only she often got beaten up.

  "The justice system must protect the least of us to protect all of us," Brenneman said, as she acknowledged that Jami Sherer might have done some things that others would not. "She made some bad life choices."

  But Jami Sherer did not deserve to die at the age of twenty-six, just when she was finally escaping the man who controlled her, just when she saw a future for herself and her little boy, just when she once again longed for the safe place that waited for them in her parents' home.

  * * *

  Late on Thursday, June 1, 2000, the jurors drew lots to pick the dozen who would remain to deliberate whether Steven Sherer was innocent or guilty. Eight women and four men remained. Their job now would be far from the easiest case a jury had ever received. Their first task would be to elect a foreperson, and then the actual deliberation would begin. They chose a retired teacher as their foreperson.

  Jurors— all jurors— are inscrutable and no one in the gallery or at the prosecution or defense tables, for that matter, knew what they were thinking for the seven weeks they listened to testimony.

  "The first thing we did," one juror said later, "was to decide how we would deliberate. We decided to go back through all the evidence from the beginning. Many of the jurors had filled their notebooks, and some of us seemed to feel more of a sense of the truth by watching the defendant and the attorneys."

  There had been a great deal of evidence and testimony. The sessions were "intense," as the jurors deliberated from nine to four each day. "We kept from getting claustrophobia," a juror commented, "because we had a window in the jury room and Judge Wartnik let us take occasional breaks outside the jury room."

  A jury is always made up of diverse personalities with different backgrounds, professions, education, and yet somehow they usually meld into a solid entity. They acknowledged that Jami was dead from the beginning. Most of them were in agreement on a verdict within the first two days on the murder charge, but of course no one waiting anxiously outside the closed door knew that.

  Again and again, the twelve of them went over the points that seemed the most important: Jami would never have willingly left Chris; Steve apparently had uncontrollable fits of anger; he was physically and mentally capable of killing; the odd collection of items in Jami's duffel bag; the suicide attempt that seemed orchestrated; the extra key; and— very important— the trail the search dogs followed.

  A few jurors had seen Steve Sherer mouth what seemed to be threats to certain witnesses, especially Rich Hagel and Bettina Rauschberg, even though his usual expression had been cold and stony.

  It was much harder for one juror, in particular, to grasp the concept of premeditation. Within her frame of reference, the thought that anyone would deliberately plan to kill another human being was incomprehensible. Humans just didn't do that.

  The frustration level in the room mounted, although no one actually got angry. Finally the juror who couldn't comprehend premeditated murder said suddenly, "He thinks differently than the way the rest of us do! I've just realized that I've been basing my decisions on how I think. Murder on purpose? I couldn't even imagine it."

  And still the days crept by without any signal from the jurors that they had reached a verdict. Someone had suggested they go through all the salient points one more time, just to be sure.

  The usual rule of thumb is that the more rapidly a jury returns, the more likely they are to find the defendant guilty. As the days passed, both the prosecution and the defense waited with one ear tuned to the phone. For the Schielkes and the Hagels, the hours stretched out interminably, and the Redmond detectives wondered if they should have gotten just a few more interviews or looked for Jami's remains in a wider circle.

  Six days passed. The defense began to be cautiously optimistic. It was quite possible that Steven Sherer was going to walk out of the King County Jail a free man. Steve himself believed he would. Marilyn Brenneman, who admits to eating chocolate at times of stress, admitted to friends that she was going to have to double her workout time in the gym and in her garden to burn off the extra calories. In their offices high up in one of the tallest buildings in Seattle, even the view of Elliott Bay and the ferryboats crisscrossing the water failed to ease the prosecution team's apprehension. Other prosecutors assured Marilyn Brenneman, Kristin Richardson, and Hank Corscadden that they had all had cases under deliberation far longer than this one. They cited juries in some of their cases who had deliberated for two weeks or more and had still come back with guilty verdicts. They may have exaggerated, but they were trying to ease the tension.

  It was 2:00 P.M. on Thursday, June 8, before the jury foreperson signaled Judge Wartnik that they had a verdict. They worried that it might be too late in the day to assemble all the principals in the courtroom. But it was quickly jam-packed with families and friends, and attorneys interested to see if anyone could get a conviction of murder when there was no body.

  Judge Wartnik glanced at the paperwork, and shook his head slightly. The jurors had failed to write in their verdict on both of the charges. He sent them back to the jury room and cleared the courtroom. "We'd made up our minds on both counts," a juror recalled, "but we forgot to sign Count Two. It only took us five minutes, but it took a lot longer to reassemble Mr. Sherer, the lawyers, and all the spectators."

  "Mr. Sherer looked as if he expected to go home that night," another juror said. "He seemed very sure that we were going to acquit him. I read later that he actually told people that."

  But Steve Sherer wasn't going home.

  The foreperson handed the verdicts to the bailiff who passed them to the judge. Judge Wartnik then handed them to the court reporter to read aloud. Some of the jurors avoided looking at the defendant, but several stared directly at him as the verdicts were read aloud.

  Steven Sherer was found guilty on both counts: guilty of first-degree premeditated murder and guilty of second-degree felony murder. He seemed shocked initially, but he turned toward the jurors and shouted across the courtroom, "How do you go to prison for something you didn't do? When Jami comes back, you can all rot in hell!"

  The jurors were quickly escorted from the courtroom and down the back stairs where no one could approach them. "It had been so long," one recalled. "And it was over so shockingly. One of the men told me that he went to the transit station across the street and just caught the first bus going north. He didn't even care if it was the right bus. He wanted to get out of there."

  The jurors didn't know about Steve's next outburst until they read it in the newspaper. As he was being led out of the courtroom by corrections officers, Steve turned toward Judy Hagel, his face contorted with rage. "Fuck you, Judy!" he roared.

  If the jury had any doubt that they had done the right thing, their first look at the anger Steve Sherer was capable of erased that doubt. They had now seen the man that tiny Jami Sherer knew all too well, seen the rage she had encountered perhaps in the last moments of her life. One of the jurors— who had been the single holdout— was almost relieved at the sight of Steve's ferocious temper. "Now, I know," he said, "that my decision was the right one."

  Another said, "It would have been almost criminal if we had not come back with a first-degree verdict of guilty."

  On July 22, Steve appeared for sentencing. Mair and Camiel had sent Judge Wartnik a defense-sentencing memo that somehow made domestic violence seem prosaic. In part, it read, "Inasmuch as domestic violence is a pervasive societal illness and is common in the United States (one need only look to the amount of men and women in our local jails currently on charges associated with domestic violence), it is not a crime of the unfettered exercise of free will and choice."

  Reading this excerpt carefully, one can deduce that the defense now maintained that their client wasn't really responsible for the actions that resulted in Jami's death because almost everyone was committing domestic violence. Pete Mair insisted there was nothing except
ional about Sherer's alleged crimes that would call for a sentence higher than the standard range of up to thirty years for a murder that occurs during spousal abuse.

  In the bright-red jail coveralls worn by King County's most dangerous felons, Steve Sherer pleaded with the judge, "Your Honor, I stand here before you found guilty of a crime I did not commit. I've made a lot of mistakes in my life, but I'm not a murderer. I did not murder my wife. I had nothing to do with it."

  Wartnik was not impressed, apparently, with this argument. Anthony Wartnik looked directly at Steve Sherer as he prepared to hand down the sentence. He said he was concerned about the lasting scars that Chris Sherer, now twelve, would suffer throughout his life because of the loss of his mother and the knowledge that his father had killed her.

  Moreover, in the judge's opinion, it had taken methodical planning for Sherer to murder his wife and to pull off the "cruel hoax" that had only served to prolong her family's suffering, as they spent a decade without knowing where Jami was or how she had died. "A crime that would be a perfect crime doesn't happen by luck or chance," he said to Sherer. "It requires cunning planning and calculation.