Empty Promises

down there living with David. She knew from a number of sources that Steve had never gotten along with his father, and Steve had never been the type to rush to anyone’s rescue to cheer them up.
    Indeed, the detectives learned that Steve told as many versions of how his father had committed suicide as he did about Jami’s disappearance. Maybe he was simply a pathological liar; maybe he had other reasons for clouding the details of both incidents.
    Mains and Faddis learned that Sherri Sherer had remarried in 1984, less than a year after her first husband died. Her second marriage—to Jack Johnson—lasted only until 1985, but they remained good friends. Greg Mains found that Johnson still lived in Mill Creek, not far from Sherri. Johnson told Mains that David Sherer had been a difficult man to live with—“with a very bad temper, a drunk.” He said flatly that Steve and his father had never gotten along. “Steve had a bad temper just like his dad, David, did,” Johnson said. “David Sherer was an animal when he was drunk, and Steve is just like him.”
    Johnson characterized his ex-wife, Sherri, as a “very moral and upstanding person,” and told Mains he was friendly with her third husband, Wally Schielke. The men even occasionally golfed together.
    Johnson was well acquainted with Jami Sherer, and he was adamant that he knew of no reason why she would disappear.
    “Would she ever abandon her son or quit her job and leave without a trace?” Mains asked.
    “Jamie would never leave Chris.”
    “Would she have committed suicide?”
    “No way!”
    “Why do you think Jami Sherer disappeared?”
    “Oh, I believe Steve killed her,” Johnson said, almost casually, as if it was a foregone conclusion. He said he suspected that Wally Schielke felt the same way.
    Anyone who had seen an example of Steve’s temper had come to suspect him in Jami’s disappearance.

    Although Steve took various jobs from time to time, he seemed to expect a fortune to drop into his lap one day, if not from his gambling then from one of his scams. “He was always on the phone or the computer,” Judy Hagel commented. “He always had some big deal going.”
    But in the early nineties, none of Steve’s scams seemed to net him much. He sold posters from a sports company he worked for—but he kept the money. One co-worker said, “He was basically scamming under the books. And there was something with snowboards. He was just a scamming kind of a person. Mostly scamming in, like, money and drugs and stuff, because I’d do my share of drugs with him. He did his share of drugs with me. And at the same time, what he was doing was trying to get me involved in it so he didn’t have to pay for all of it. You know what I mean?”
    After the house on Education Hill was sold, Steve lived in a number of places. He still traveled between Seattle, California, and Arizona, almost always staying in property that his mother owned. Sherri Schielke had sold the country club house where her first husband had died and had bought a more secluded ranch near Palm Springs.
    She also had a luxurious condominium in Scottsdale, Arizona, where Steve lived much of the time. Neighbors there didn’t see much of Steve, but some of them told Mains and Faddis how chagrined they were when their morning papers began to disappear. Getting up early to play detective, one woman discovered that Steve was tiptoeing out each morning to steal a morning paper before his neighbor could pick it up. She laughed as she told them that the paper thief was always careful to vary his pattern, so that he didn’t steal the same condo’s paper too many times in a week.
    Steve’s basic personality hadn’t changed. He took what he wanted. He was in his mid-thirties when the investigation into Jami’s disappearance began again in earnest, but he acted more like a juvenile delinquent.
    Only a small portion of the money realized from the house or from Jami’s Microsoft stock went directly to Chris, who was living with the Hagels. Had Jami lived, and kept the Microsoft stock that she gave to Sherri Schielke as collateral, in a decade it would have been worth more than any of Steve’s deals. If Jami had simply held on to that $27,000 worth of stock, she would have been one of the company’s scores of millionaires. By 2000, Jami’s Microsoft stock would have soared and split again and again until its value would have been $928,524! And Steve still retained other shares.
    For