Empty Promises

watch, worth $1,700, and Jami’s Mazda were being held in evidence by the Redmond Police Department, which galled Steve and his mother.
    On June 10, Sherri wrote to inform the Redmond Police Department that she was now the trustee of Jami’s estate. “It is my understanding that you are still holding her wedding ring and also her car, which is a Mazda RX7. In order to have these appraised, I will need to have them released. Could you get back to me as soon as possible regarding this matter? Thanks for your cooperation.”
    To Steve’s chagrin, the police were not very cooperative and the items of value were not returned to him or his mother. Nor was the Department of Social and Human Services eager to decide on permanent placement of Chris Sherer. Legally, Chris’s mother was not dead. He was being well cared for by his maternal grandparents. It was far too soon to grant custody of Chris to anyone.
    By 1992, Sherri decided that she and Steve should sell the Education Hill house, and it was purchased by Russian immigrants. Part of the proceeds of the sale went to Sherri, to pay off the mortgage and Steve’s bills. When he never paid his mother back for her loss on the house, she sued him in civil court for $32,000. It was a business matter. Sherri had a good head for business, and Steve apparently took no offense at the suit.
    When Jim Taylor, Mike Faddis, and Greg Mains came aboard the Sherer case, one of the things that bothered them the most was how soon Jami had been virtually swept under the rug. Her assets were under her mother-in-law’s supervision, Steve was giving her clothing away to anyone who wanted it, and her child’s permanent placement was under contention long before it was time. For Steve and some members of his family, it was like “Jami’s gone, let’s get on with our lives with as little fuss as possible.”
    Sherri had apparently always had a very tight mother-child bond with her oldest child. Whatever Steve did, she backed him up, although she didn’t count on him to take care of her house in Mill Creek. Despite his protestations that he had been there on September 30, 1990, to mail packages, leave a mortgage check and generally oversee things, Faddis and Mains learned that it was invariably her daughters, Saundra and Laura, who were given keys to their mother’s house in Mill Creek.
    There had apparently been two incidents where Steve got inside the Schielkes’ home when they were out of town, but it hadn’t been with a key. The front door of the Mill Creek house was flanked by narrow panels of glass. Once Sherri came home to find shards and sprinkles of glass in the foyer, although the window itself had been repaired. The detectives learned there had also been a second broken window, one that was repaired so neatly that even Sherri never realized it.
    Mains and Faddis discovered that on the Sunday Jami disappeared, Steve did not have a key to Sherri and Wally’s house in Mill Creek. The only way he could have gotten in was to shatter the glass panels again. The Redmond detectives didn’t hear this from Sherri; she was very defensive about Steve.
    Lieutenant Jim Taylor suggested that Mike Faddis and Greg Mains look into David Sherer’s alleged suicide in Palm Desert. At first, the Riverside County Sheriff’s Office couldn’t locate any records of the incident. Officially, it might never have happened; there was no file on it in the sheriff’s office. Finally, they found a death certificate and a two-page report from a Riverside County coroner’s deputy. It said, of course, that the elder Sherer had been alone and depressed on that Thanksgiving Day, and that Sherri Sherer had flown down there and discovered her estranged husband’s body.
    Judy Hagel told the two detectives that she had always wondered about David Sherer’s death, although it had happened a few years before Jami met Steve. She said that Steve had explained it to Jami, who in turn told Judy: “She said Steve told her he was living down there with his dad—to help cheer him up,” Judy recalled. “The night David Sherer died, Steve said he told his father he was going out for the evening. And when he came home, he was the one who found the body. The only reason I know that is because Steve confided in Jami. I don’t believe he ever thought she would tell me.”
    When Jami told her mother about this entirely different version of the elder Sherer’s death, Judy wondered why on earth Steve would have been