Empty Promises

tried to reassure him that any drug charges against him in the state of Washington took second place to the tremendous help he could offer to the Sherer investigation. He told her he wanted to straighten things out, but he was nervous. She assured him that he wasn’t going to be arrested the moment he crossed into Washington State. Lew needed to come to Seattle and tell what he knew about what were, quite probably, the last two days of Jami Sherer’s life.
    On the first day before Judge Lasnik, Carolyn Willoughby* testified. She was one of Sherri’s closest friends, and she and Sherri had often speculated about what might have happened to Jami. Despite the front that Sherri kept up to protect Steve, Carolyn sensed that even his own mother sometimes had doubts about his innocence.
    Carolyn Willoughby was disturbed by that, but she was more disturbed by something she had found when she was helping Sherri clean the Sherers’ house after Jami vanished. She knew Steve had told the detectives that there was only one key to Jami’s Mazda RX7. That was the key found in the pocket of Jami’s leather coat on the seat of her car when it finally turned up in the church parking lot.
    If that was truly the only key, then it seemed likely that Jami herself had driven the car there. But to Carolyn’s horror, she found another key to Jami’s Mazda in the laundry area of Steve and Jami’s house. That meant that Steve had lied to the detectives. Carolyn didn’t want to know why he had lied, but she had a pretty good idea. Her first concern was for her best friend, Sherri, and so Carolyn kept the secret of the key to herself. It took a toll on her, however. When she was subpoenaed to the inquiry court, she was apprehensive.
    At a certain point in her testimony, her words came out in a rush. She admitted she had found the second key—a key that Steve must have had all along. She was convinced that her information would do great damage to her best friend’s son and cause pain to Sherri. It certainly was valuable information, but it was only one small detail. Carolyn Willoughby need not have felt like such a traitor.
    Judge Lasnik listened to a number of witnesses over three days. New names surfaced and new information spilled out. If there was not an organized effort to protect Steve Sherer from the detectives who trailed too close behind him, there certainly appeared to have been a tacit agreement among the social circles Sherri Schielke moved in to avoid saying anything more than was absolutely necessary.
    The picture emerging was that of a sadistic hedonist. Steve Sherer’s rap sheet showed he had been flouting the law since he was eighteen, and people who had gone to school with him before that remembered him as a mean, enraged child and teenager.
    The first session with the inquiry judge ended, but there would be another. The investigation continued even as the inquiry process had begun. In the meantime, Steve himself languished in jail.
    Many people around Steve were worried. Greg Mains had heard rumors about Steve’s stealing a gun. In October 1998 he and Detective Lon Shultz traveled to the little eastern Washington town of Chelan to follow up on a report that Steve had stolen a .357—from one of Wally Schielke’s houses. “We were concerned about officer safety,” Mains explained. “We needed to know if Steve was armed.”
    Because a number of new names had come up, Greg Mains and Lon Shultz wanted to talk to some longtime friends of the Sherer-Schielkes who lived in Chelan. Sherri had owned a summer place there for many years and Steve had spent a great deal of time partying in it when his mother was not present.
    One report came to Greg Mains from someone on the Chelan Police Department who said his parents lived next door to the Schielkes’ place.
    Mains and Shultz met first with a couple who owned one of the largest resorts on Lake Chelan and learned nothing that would help their investigation. They did, however, learn the names of other Chelan friends of the Sherers.
    John Walcker, who owned the Caravel Resort, offered Mains the cell phone number of another friend of the late David Sherer and his widow, Sherri. Mains called Grant Logan,* another friend, who agreed to drive to the resort and speak with the two detectives.
    Logan picked up his wife, Nyssa,* on the way, and the two showed up at the resort within fifteen minutes. They seemed friendly enough—until Greg Mains said he and Shultz were