Empty Promises

fighting…. I do it just to keep the peace.”
    Steve had pulled Jami down with him in his endless pursuit of newer and grander sensations. As impossible as it seemed for the little girl who had loved to climb trees, ride horses and play softball, Jami had long been caught up in Steve’s shadowy world of chasing drugs. Not only that but what most people would consider “normal” sex didn’t turn him on much anymore either, and Steve talked constantly to Jami about his increasingly bizarre sexual fantasies. She hated it, but she didn’t know how to escape.
    On November 5, 1989, King County Police Officer Paul Guerraro was dispatched to check on a domestic dispute at a house in Bothell. He found a near-hysterical Jami Sherer holding her toddler son. The right side of her face was bright red and there was a bloody spot on her scalp.
    “Her hair was pulled out,” Guerraro remembered. “I remember it well because that’s the only time I had actually seen scalp fragments attached to hair.”
    In her statement, Jami said that Steve had been out most of the night, coming home at 4:00 A.M. She suspected that he’d been with another woman, and they had an argument about it. Jami said she had Chris in her arms and was preparing to leave: “I was at the door, turning the knob when my husband grabbed me by my hair and pulled me six feet across the floor.”
    She dropped Chris in the struggle and the baby got up and ran over in a pitiful attempt to help her. But when Steve saw her holding Chris, he was further enraged. He balled his hand into a fist. “He said he’d kill me if I didn’t let go of Chris,” Jami told Officer Guerraro. “He pulled the phone cord out of the wall when I tried to call 911. I finally got the plug back in.”
    Shortly thereafter in the foggy November morning, the Hagels’ phone rang. Judy answered and it was Jami. She was crying and asking her mother to come and get her. “She said Steve had been out drinking and she reproached him and he was pulling her around the floor with Chris hanging on to her legs,” Judy said. “So Jerry and I jumped in the car, and the police were there when we got there. [Steve] was gone. I took Chris from Jami and on the table was this long [lock] of hair—her scalp and hair lying on the table.”
    Guerraro gathered up the clumps of Jami’s hair and scalp and bagged them into evidence.
    Judy and Jerry took Jami and the baby home with them, hoping that this would be the last time—that even Jami would now see through this man she was married to. But she didn’t.
    “Within a day or two,” Judy said, “Steve kept calling and calling. We got up the next day and there were flowers on her car…. He got her to come back and talk to him, and she moved back.”
    Steve had printed on a giant sign on the lawn, “I love my wife!”
    It was inevitable that when Steve’s court date came, Jami didn’t show up to testify against him. He had sweet-talked her and promised never to hurt her again, urging her to think of Chris’s need for both a father and a mother and begging her to save their marriage. As in so many other cases involving domestic abuse, the charges against Steve Sherer were dismissed. The piece of Jami’s scalp and her long beautiful hair were tossed out of the evidence room; the case was closed, and there was no reason to keep the evidence.
    Jami had more support than a lot of women caught in marriages where they became punching bags and objects of derision. She had a good job and a family who wanted to help her. But she seemed to have long since passed the point where she could distinguish between being loved and being owned. Judy could barely count the times she’d rushed over to get Jami and the baby and move them to the safety of her house, only to listen helplessly as Steve began his incessant phone calls.
    “He would never give up. It would keep ringing and ringing and ringing,” Judy said. “Every ten, fifteen minutes. He’d insist on talking to her. And at night we had to take the phone off the hook and cover it with a blanket.”
    Jami still had her one link to safety. During the times she and Steve were reconciled, Jami insisted on visiting her parents. If he was at the racetrack, as he often was, Steve didn’t object so much to her taking the baby to the Hagels’ house. She liked to eat Monday dinner with them; that was chicken and rice night, Jami’s favorite. She usually managed to sneak away from Steve and attend family