Empty Promises

company in Seattle, and they had become friends. “He’s a pretty nice person when you meet him. He has a bit of charm, a bit of personality. He doesn’t have any problems getting along with people pretty well. As I got to know him, my vision of him decreased—we’ll put it that way. It got worse and worse,” Aboli said. “I noticed more and more things he was into: the scamming, the drugs, the women. I basically lost respect for him.”
    Aboli said Steve usually looked fairly clean-cut and that he bleached his hair blond. He had been the warehouse manager, Aboli’s boss.
    “Was Steve Sherer married?” Mains asked.
    “Yes,” Aboli replied, “he was previously married.” Then Aboli told Mains that Steve had said, “My wife was the last victim of the Green River Killer.”
    The Green River Killer was believed to have struck in the Seattle area for the last time in April 1984. Jami, of course, disappeared on September 30, 1990, so that story sounded suspect to both Aboli and Mains.
    At the time Aboli visited Steve in his West Seattle apartment, it would have been late 1992. “He said he loved his wife and he missed her,” Aboli recalled, “that his son really needed her, and he worried about how his son was gonna be without her.”
    Aboli also recalled that he and Steve had often socialized outside of work, and especially after Alan took a job in a bar down in Puyallup, Washington. “Steve had dated a lot. I remember one girl named Lisa and one named Monique. He dated both at the same time.”
    The biggest problem with Steve, Aboli said, was that he was a mean drunk who “made a fool of himself” in bars, insistently trying to pick up women. If a woman turned him down, he got angry. “The drunker he got,” Aboli said, “the more of an asshole he became.” Aboli said he had been embarrassed to be associated with Steve, especially when he came into the bar where Aboli worked. “When he’s drunk, he’s a completely different person.”
    When women did accept Steve’s offer to buy them a drink, he characterized himself sometimes as a widower and sometimes as a divorcé. Whatever he told women, he was dating often, meeting women in diverse spots. It didn’t seem to matter to him, Aboli said, if they were nice girls or prostitutes, eventually Steve treated them all badly.
    Alan Aboli remembered a woman who was a cocktail waitress in a card room at a bowling alley in West Seattle. “They got together a few times and they were apparently getting along pretty well. The third time they got together, they were going to California for a weekend. But she called me up on the phone at work, and said he had left her there. I ended up getting hold of him, and he basically told me he left her there because she was being a bitch. She called me, trying to get back home.”
    Aboli wired her some money to get home, since she’d been left in the middle of a street, completely without funds, in a strange city.
    “Do you have any opinions,” Greg Mains asked, “as to what happened to Steven Sherer’s wife, Jami Sherer?”
    “My personal opinion,” Aboli began, and then paused. “My opinion is that it’s between him and God.”
    “Okay.”
    “And that’s all I can say about that,” Aboli said, but he continued to talk. “He is capable. He is capable of doing it, though. He’s more than capable…. He blacks out. I’ve had to go into the deepest part of Seattle and bail him out of the ghettos—high, drunk, whatever it is, and walking out with his jacket on upside down and backwards…. You know, ’cause he was drunk and couldn’t remember where he was. Lost his pickup a few times.”
    “So what do you think about what happened to Jami?” Mains asked again.
    Aboli shook his head, repeating only that it was “between him and God.”

    So far, Steve Sherer had played the system and won.
    But in the fall of 1998 he returned to Washington and said he wanted to surrender on his numerous drunk-driving warrants. He was sentenced to eight months in the King County jail, his longest jail time ever. Before then, he had deftly managed to creep out of areas where he was wanted without being arrested. If he was arrested, he’d been sentenced to probation or threatened with house arrest. He always seemed to call the shots and live the life he wanted. But this time he’d guessed wrong.
    It would be the summer of 1999 before Steve walked out of jail.
    As he sat in the crowded jail pods and considered what had