Empty Promises

but it looked great. That was the car my mother and I shared. I probably drove my parents crazy.”
    Like most teenagers, Marilyn Brenneman believed in her own immortality. “Today I can connect with my victims,” she says, “because I understand that a woman can get into a relationship without any idea of the consequences. They are sure that nothing bad can happen to them. They can’t believe that someone they’ve been intimate with could kill them. I made my share of bad decisions too,” Brenneman admitted, “but I had an angel on my shoulder, and my victims didn’t.”
    For the past two decades, Marilyn Brenneman has worked in the Special Operations Unit of the King County prosecutor’s office. It says “Fraud Division” on the door, but the three deputy prosecutors there—Hank Corscadden, Susan Story, and Marilyn Brenneman—work everything from bunco to murder. They also advise police departments who need another opinion, and they often actually prosecute the cases.
    In 1990, Marilyn Brenneman read about Jami Sherer’s disappearance as did most people of western Washington. But the Special Operations Unit of the King County prosecutor’s office doesn’t go out looking for business; they are available to police agencies for consultations and for advice, if they are asked. “If we could,” Marilyn said, “we wanted to be in on a case from the beginning—to brainstorm and form game plans with the investigators. I know I’m always asking the detectives for more—and more again, even when they’ve brought me piles of statements and evidence. And they do.”
    Brenneman met once or twice with some of the Redmond investigators who were working on the Sherer case in 1991, but they didn’t ask for further help. In truth, as the months passed and they deemed it an unsolvable case, they saw no point in brainstorming with the prosecutor’s office. Without a body, the case died of inertia. Entries in the case file became fewer and fewer and further apart.
    There were plenty of cases for the Special Unit to work on. Marilyn Brenneman never forgot about Jami Sherer, but her disappearance was filed somewhere in the back of the prosecutor’s mind while she went on to more active cases.
    In 1997, Jim Taylor contacted Marilyn Brenneman and asked for her assistance. “I knew it was going to be almost impossible,” Brenneman said, “to try and find Jami Sherer and her killer—because I always believed she was dead—but it was something I couldn’t turn away from. Sometimes you have to do something simply because it’s the right thing to do.”
    The Jami Sherer case was probably the most daunting case Marilyn Brenneman ever took on. Few prosecutors relish homicide cases without bodies. Most people think corpus delicti refers to the corpse of the victim, but, in truth, it means the body of the case , which is made up of all the circumstantial and physical evidence gathered by the investigators, the witnesses, the profiles of the principal characters, and the motivation behind the crime. Physical evidence can be seen, touched, smelled, by a jury. Circumstantial evidence, however, can be just as strong if there are enough factors present to lead a reasonable person to believe there is far more than coincidence involved when a number of circumstances combine to point to a suspect as guilty.
    The detectives who had worked the Jami Sherer disappearance seven years earlier had done a yeomanlike job as far as they went, but Jim Taylor and Marilyn Brenneman believed that much remained hidden. As Mains and Faddis brought in the first fragments of new information, they all began to weave a spiderweb of information and evidence, with each new contact a strand that linked with other strands until, they all hoped, they would catch a suspect firmly in the center.
    One of the first things Taylor, Faddis, and Mains did was to list the names of Jami’s high school classmates. They then added Judy Hagel’s list of everyone Jami had known in her life. “We sent letters to every one of them,” Taylor said, “asking ‘Have you heard from Jami since the end of September 1990?’ and even though no one had seen her, we got leads out of the answers to our letters.”
    They conferred with a prosecutor in Marion County, Oregon—Diane Middle—and Alan Scharn, a lead detective who had successfully prosecuted a double murder case with no bodies found. “We got tips from them and expanded on them,” Mike Faddis said.
    The