Empty Promises

relieved that it was not Bettina who was dead. Marj reiterated, “I remember making the statement to my husband, ‘She’ll probably wind up dead if she goes back to him.’ ”
    Bettina was still alive, but Greg Mains could see she dreaded coming face-to-face with Steve again. In one of his interviews with her, Bettina told Mains how cruel Steve had been to Jami in the mid-eighties when he was going back and forth between Jami and her. If she had ever been jealous of Jami, Bettina said she got over that quickly and was simply grateful to be free—and alive. “One time we were all in my spare bedroom,” Bettina recalled, “and he said he wanted to come back to me. Jami was upset and crying. He just picked up a vase or something and hit Jami on the head with it.”
    After Jami disappeared, Bettina said she had seen Steve twice. “Once I ran into him in a video store and he came up to me and grabbed my arm. He said he really needed to talk to me. He started talking about Chris, and saying, ‘He’s a nice boy, he’d like you.’ I told him, ‘Get away from me!’ ”
    Bettina saw Steve again at the Flamingos in the Alderwood Mall in Lynnwood, and he was obviously very drunk. “He was crying,” she remembered, “and saying that Jami hated me. I don’t think she did. He was talking about her disappearance and he said, ‘A drug dealer probably got her.’ ”
    Bettina ran from the club, but before she could get her car started, Steve jumped in. “I had a charcoal Mazda RX7, like Jami’s, and Steve said, ‘You stole Jami’s car.’ Then he kept saying, ‘I never meant to hurt you…. I never meant to hurt Jami…. I never meant to hurt you.’
    “He told me what he’d said before—that he believed a drug dealer probably got her.”
    The Redmond investigators also talked to Sara Smith, the wife of Steve’s old friend, the woman who had eaten pizza with Jami the year before she died. Jami had opened up to Sara, telling her how miserable she was with Steve.
    “Jami and Steve came to our wedding in August 1990,” Sara told Greg Mains and Mike Faddis. “And I talked to Steve two weeks after Jami disappeared. He called me between 1:00 and 2:00 A.M. and said he was lonely and how much he loved Jami. He told me he thought Jami might have been kidnapped. And then he said, ‘We probably wouldn’t have anything in common to have an affair.’ I was taken aback! He said that he and Jami had a good sex life, and he missed the sex.”
    Sara had only been married for two months, and Steve was slyly suggesting she have an affair with him. When Sara turned him down, he asked for her sister’s phone number.
    As one source passed them on to another, Mains and Faddis realized that Steve Sherer probably tried to pick up almost every attractive woman he encountered. The two detectives reported to Lieutenant Jim Taylor that their investigation was turning up more and more women whom Steve had approached for dates. Most men would have been out searching for their missing wives, but not Steve Sherer. Within two weeks of “losing” his wife, Steve had begun to date other women. He had evidently approached women from his past, his friends’ wives, and their girlfriends first.
    One woman contacted the Redmond police with a rather bizarre story. “I went on one date with him—that Steve Sherer,” she said.
    “When?”
    “In 1990—in November, I believe.”
    The woman, Margaret Ryan,* had an amazingly precise memory. She recalled that she had taken her car, a red Corvette, to be washed on a Wednesday. She knew it was a Wednesday because it was two days after that when she had her one and only date with Steve Sherer. He had been driving an S-10 Blazer two-tone, blue-and-white. Margaret knew cars, and her own car was a classic. Paradoxically, she was a woman who looked more like a spinster librarian than a car buff. Nevertheless, Steve smiled at her as she stood at the car wash desk waiting for her key.
    “It was pretty busy, and he just came up and started talking to me—said hi and introduced himself. And we talked—you know, small talk,” she said. “But he asked me if I wanted to go on a date sometime, and he seemed nice. So I said yes.”
    They exchanged phone numbers, and although they had spoken for only ten or fifteen minutes, Steve called Margaret that very evening. She could not remember the spot, but she arranged to met him someplace on Friday night. She got in his Blazer and he headed toward a