Empty Promises

bad. Just better each and every day…. Life is only worth the love that one can share with another and I’d like to make mine worth billions with you!
    Love forever ,
    Steven

    Steve always called Jami his little rose. “To the flower of my life,” he wrote. “Soon to be future wife with all the love in my heart. I care for you with my life, giving it up for you at any moment. I can’t stand not having you within my sight. Forever I will love you, no matter what the future holds, you’ll never leave my heart and I’ll always see you as my ROSE!”
    Jami was working, trying to keep up with their bills. She missed Steve too, and no woman could ask for more romantic mail.
    But it was easy for a man in jail to feel romantic. The bruises and scratches that were always with Jami when she lived with Steve began to heal. Her faith began to blossom. Of course, when Steve came home, he lost much of his romantic veneer. His mother was trying tough love, so they had money problems. Steve couldn’t live the way he wanted to.
    Judy Hagel didn’t know about most of Jami’s problems, but Jami called her one night and she was crying. “They were down around a swimming pool somewhere and he was not being nice to her,” Judy said. “I told her to leave, and she said that he had threatened to kill himself with a knife if she left him, and I told her she had to come home. I said, ‘I will catch a flight to Los Angeles and I will get you and we’ll pick up your car and we’ll come home.’ And she says okay…. The next morning I call her and of course everything was okay and she wasn’t coming home.”
    Worried, Judy and Jerry Hagel arranged to meet Jami and Steve in Las Vegas in October 1986. It was the first time they had seen Jami’s shocking metamorphosis. “I walked into this casino,” Judy recalled in a hushed voice. “Jami was just a very small person. She weighed probably all of ninety pounds dripping wet…. All I saw was cheekbones and big brown eyes and blond hair. She had dyed her hair blond…. She was so thin it was awful. I could not believe this was Jami, but it was. And we tried to go have a talk, but we just couldn’t be left alone [by Steve] and so we left and she went back to California with Steve, and Jerry and I went home.”
    Judy and Jerry Hagel had no idea the kind of life Jami was living or the terror that she felt more and more often. They didn’t care for Steve, but if he made Jami happy, they respected her right to choose a mate.
    By November 1986, Jami and Steve were living in a double-wide mobile home on Portola Avenue in Palm Desert, California. They were secretly engaged, and Steve gave Jami an heirloom ring. It was a size four, yellow gold with three round full-cut diamonds. The center stone was perfect and over a carat in weight; the side stones were .24 carats each, and it was appraised at $13,500. Steve suggested they take out insurance on it and their other expensive possessions. The policy, which went into effect in October, was written by Farmers’ Insurance for a year.
    Steve called the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department on November 4 to report that someone had broken into the mobile home and stolen a number of items, including Jami’s ring. Their claim form listed computers, cameras, miscellaneous jewelry, silver dishes, and a Colt .357. They estimated that their total loss, allowing for depreciation, was well over $32,000. They had paid only the first quarter of the premiums due on their renter’s policy, and their coverage was due to expire on January 2, 1987. The claim agent for Farmers’ was uneasy about the timing, but the insurance company decided eventually to pay off Steve and Jami’s claim.
    They should have used the insurance money for something practical, but it didn’t last long. Steve still had expensive tastes—and more expensive habits. Although he had been raised in a wealthy family, he was nowhere near the entrepreneur his father had been. Soon Steve and Jami were barely able to pay the rent on the mobile home on Portola Avenue. It was a far cry from the posh country club home his parents had once owned in Palm Desert, the house where his father died.
    Steve may have consciously or unconsciously hoped to recapture that splendor in his own life. But he was failing miserably. Finally, Jami placed an ad in a local paper seeking someone to move in and share the rent. Sally Kirwin,* a twenty-six-year-old woman from Wisconsin, found herself in a