Empty Promises

investigator asked me about a couple of different items [that Steve and Jami] said I had given her, and I told them, ‘Yeah, [I gave them] a couple of the things.’ They called me back and kept conversing with me on it. The insurance company guy said, ‘I know this is a fraud, but I can’t prove it. Can you help me?’ I told him, ‘No, I don’t know what they had.’ ”
    But Judy Hagel did remember her daughter’s engagement ring, the ring worth almost $14,000 which was supposedly lost in the burglary. Sometime after Jami’s marriage, she was sitting at her mother’s table and Judy felt a chill: “I looked at the ring [Jami had on], and I said, ‘Jami, you know that is the same ring you’ve always had.’ And she looked at me sort of funny, and I said, ‘You know, that insurance, that was a fraud. Jami, that is your ring!’ ”
    “How do you know, Mom?”
    “That is the same ring,” Judy repeated.
    “Yes,” Jami said, “it is.”
    “How could you do something like that? You’ve been brought up to know better.”
    Jami looked away. “I didn’t know at the time what was going on,” she said quietly. “Then it was too late.”
    Judy felt sick, but she didn’t turn her daughter in. How could she? It wasn’t Jami who had thought up the scam; she was sure of that. It was Steve; Jami did anything he asked of her.
    She did anything, that is, except abandon her family. When Jami visited Judy and Jerry, she could put on a happy face, even if it was often a mask. Steve seldom accompanied her, but Jami was a frequent visitor and her parents were always delighted to see her. Still, Jami rarely enjoyed an undisturbed visit; Steve called constantly to ask when she was coming home. Wherever Jami went without him, Steve’s phone calls were sure to follow, as if he had her on an invisible leash. He demanded that she account for every minute of each day.
    There was, however, one side of Jami that didn’t buckle under to Steve. When she and Steve returned from Palm Desert in 1987 and she went to work for Microsoft, she was a valuable employee from the very beginning. Since Steve’s employment record was so spotty, it helped a lot that Jami had a position with Bill Gates’s booming software company, whose campus was located on the east side of Lake Washington. The complex was bigger than many towns, and Gates by then was well on his way to being the richest man in America.
    Jami was highly thought of at Microsoft. She had worked her way up steadily, eventually finding a secure niche in the human resources department. Jami was responsible for setting up offices for new hires, ordering the software they needed, and helping them adjust to the unique ambience of Microsoft. Her outgoing personality and natural friendliness made her a natural in her job. No one she dealt with at work even imagined the smothering atmosphere she faced in her marriage.
    “She had a fantastic work ethic,” a co-worker recalled, also noting that Jami never talked about Steve until the time she broke off her engagement to him. Jami and Steve, of course, reconciled and many of her co-workers were invited to the wedding. The Jami at Microsoft was totally different from the Jami who sat silently beside Steve when they went to clubs or bowling or out with his friends. On the job, she was confident and competent, and she made life so much easier for newcomers lured to Seattle by the exciting new company. Jami was always punctual and rarely missed a day’s work because of illness.
    The newlyweds moved continually, usually from one apartment to another. Jami longed to have her own home, and finally they rented a little house. It wasn’t long after that when Jami learned she was pregnant. She was elated; motherhood was something she had always longed for. As tiny as she was, she carried her pregnancy proudly.
    Steve seemed pleased that he had demonstrated his virility, but a baby wasn’t the first thing on his list. He was still interested in the bar scene and in bowling, where he won a number of tournaments. He had begun to gamble on football games, and he worked out a schedule with several of his friends, charting professional sports wins and losses. Cocaine and alcohol mattered more than ever to him, often igniting his already short fuse. Steve was a man whose own needs always came first, and he was constantly looking for ways to enhance his sex life as well as his ability to party.
    Steve baffled many of Jami’s co-workers, when