Empty Promises

the bodies or bones they checked matched the information they had on Jami Hagel Sherer.
    As the two Redmond detectives expanded their investigation, they found more and more incidents between Steve and the police. They contacted every police department in western Washington to see if their officers had ever stopped Steve Sherer or someone using one of his three aliases. Even when they weren’t on duty, Mains and Faddis dropped in at police stations all across the state. “Greg got so he wouldn’t take a vacation,” Jim Taylor said, “without stopping to check at every little department on his route to see if they recognized Steve.”
    And they found more arrests, mostly for drunken or reckless driving. Again and again they heard, “When Steve drinks, he’s a crazy man with a terrible temper. He’s out of control.”
    One of the problems with potential witnesses to Jami’s fate initially was that they were afraid of Sherer. But years had passed and people who had stories to tell about Steve had grown up. “Many witnesses with key information—through the process of becoming more mature—became responsible,” Faddis said, “and came forward. Some were just too afraid to say anything. For others, the more they thought about their interaction with Sherer, the more their memories started to click.”
    They noted that Bettina Rauschberg’s name appeared frequently in Steve’s rap sheet. She was the girlfriend just before Jami. When Greg Mains talked to her, he realized she was still terribly afraid of Steve. But Bettina finally opened up and told Mains how often she had feared Steve was going to kill her. She gave Mains the name of the woman who had befriended her in Balboa Beach years before.
    Interestingly, when Mains located Marj Tuttle* and said he was calling about Bettina Rauschberg, Marj gasped. She told him, “When I heard you were calling about Bettina, and that you were a detective, I knew it was an almost absolute certainty that the reason you were calling me was to let me know she had been killed…. I was wondering if she had died back then [1984] or recently and he had dumped her body.”
    It had been five years since Marj had seen Bettina, but she remembered a grotesque encounter with Steve Sherer very clearly. From her description of Bettina, she might have been describing Jami. “She was a very pretty girl, very thin … real young,” Marj recalled of the girl she met at the accounting firm where they both worked. “I believe she was nineteen years old then, with blond, very curly, long hair. She took very good care of herself. She was a really nice, sweet—a very innocent—young girl.”
    Marj, who was twenty-six at the time she met Bettina, told Mains that Bettina had come to work with a black eye. “She said her boyfriend had hit her.”
    Marj said she’d met Bettina’s boyfriend only once and described Steve Sherer as “blond-haired and very good-looking. Back in those days we called ’em surfer dudes.”
    After she’d been beaten and left with a black eye, Bettina had accepted an offer to move in with Marj and her husband. “She drove her own car and followed me to get her things. I remember we walked into her apartment and there were small stuffed animals and dolls lying there with their heads cut off. There was a butcher knife there on the floor.”
    It was a huge butcher knife, Marj told Mains, bigger than any she had ever seen, and she was sure it was sharp enough to cut off someone’s head.
    Marj thought there must have been forty little toy animals and about a dozen dolls scattered around, their little heads rolling. Most of all, she remembered the note: “It said, ‘If you ever leave me, that’s what I’m going to do to you—cut your head off the same way.’ ”
    Marj said that Bettina hadn’t been intimidated into staying—not at that point. She had followed Marj and her husband and daughter to their house and stayed with them for a few weeks. But then Bettina’s mother had become concerned because Marj was a Jehovah’s Witness.
    “I don’t think her mom really understood the situation,” Marj said. “I was a complete stranger to her and she evidently knew Steve. She encouraged Bettina to go back to her boyfriend and move back to Washington. She left within a day or two and went home. And I never heard from her again after that. I was always afraid of what might have happened to her.”
    Marj was sad for Jami, a woman she never knew, but she was