Empty Promises

jail time and getting what he wanted.
    What Steve wanted in the summer of 1987 was Jami Hagel. And Jami desperately wanted to marry him.

4
    T here was nothing that Judy and Jerry Hagel could do to keep Jami from marrying Steve, so they gave her the best wedding they could afford. Steve’s sisters gave Jami a wedding shower, and she listed her china and silver patterns at a local department store. Many of her relatives gave her place settings for her china, Imperial Blossom. Jami was always sentimental; she saved all the minutiae, including the cards and the guest lists, just as any old-fashioned bride would. She wrote thank-you notes for shower and wedding gifts. She wanted to relegate all the bad scenes with Steve to the past and make a fresh start.
    “It was a nice wedding,” Judy remembered. “We did as much as we could for her. It was in a park and there were a lot of family and friends.”
    Jami and Steve’s wedding in July 1987 was a formal affair at Robinswood Park, with its gloriously landscaped grounds that had once been a multimillionaire’s estate. Steve wore a white tux with a swallowtail coat and white shoes. He had bleached his hair so blond that he resembled a California beach boy. No one could ever have guessed he was only two months out of jail on burglary charges. He looked like the handsome scion of a wealthy family—which indeed he was.
    Jami looked lovely, but shockingly unlike the girl many of the guests recalled. Steve’s sister Saundra was with her when she picked out her wedding dress. Far from the demure, simple style Jami had always preferred, the wedding gown she chose was cut so low that, given Jami’s enhanced breasts, it verged on indecent.
    “Steve loved it,” a friend said. “He enjoyed the way men were staring at Jami; it was as if she was the prize and he was the one who owned her…. He said the guys there all had hard-ons because of the way Jami looked.”
    A few months after their wedding, Steve was arrested for drunken driving. At the Bellevue police station, Officer Bernard Molloy brought Steve out of the holding cell for questioning. Steve had been so combative earlier when he was booked that he had to be restrained. Now he pleaded with Molloy to remove his handcuffs because they hurt him, and Molloy—noting that Sherer wasn’t a very large man—took the cuffs off. While there were other officers in the room, Steve was well behaved and cooperative. But when the others left, Steve leaped at Molloy, choking him with both hands and threatening to kill him.
    Remembering that night, Officer Molloy said, “Many times as a police officer, I guess we all have times when you feel like you’re gonna die. This time, I really thought I was going to die. I was beginning to black out; the guy was strong and there was a look in his eyes. His eyes … his eyes … It’s hard to describe the look that came into them. I’m not exaggerating. I was moments from dying when someone came in and pulled him off me.”
    Steve was convicted of felonious assault, but he didn’t serve much time. As usual, he walked away with “community supervision.”
    Steve owned Jami now.
    But marriage didn’t make Jami feel any more confident. If anything, she deferred to Steve’s wishes even more than she had when they were only living together. When he was sober, he could be nice to her, but she was the main target of his derision when he was under the influence of drugs or alcohol. “She just went into a shell then,” one of Steve’s friends said.
    Jami had gone into the marriage with full awareness of Steve’s faults, despite the pleas of her parents and her friends. Before her wonderful career at Microsoft, she had lost jobs because of him, and she was cut off from her friends because of him. But she still made excuses for him. Whatever Steve said or did remained gospel to her.
    “I never, ever, ever would have believed in brainwashing,” Judy Hagel said. “But I sat and watched it before my very eyes. I watched my daughter change. She got depressed. She was not happy anymore.”
    Judy was most shocked to realize that Jami had begun blaming others for anything that went wrong in her marriage. Jami had always been totally honest and had a strong conscience, but that had changed too.
    “She wasn’t the daughter I raised,” Judy said, as she related her suspicions after talking with an insurance investigator about the burglary claim Steve and Jami had filed in Palm Desert. “The