Empty Promises
diamond ring Steve claimed was stolen that night in 1986 had turned up taped to Jami’s car, it would really help their case against him to have a witness to an insurance ruse.
Sally Kirwin said she remembered the burglary very well. “I thought it was phony the whole time,” she said. “I know that Steve did that.”
“That’s what I understand,” Greg Mains said.
“But that one other night,” Sally went on, “that was awful! I’ll never forget it the rest of my life. It was so scary.”
“What other night are you talking about?” Mains asked.
“That night Steve was chasing Jami around and going to kill her with that butcher knife—it was horrible,” Sally said, her voice hushed with remembered terror. “She had to get behind a table to protect herself! I thought we were both going to die that night.”
Mains had gone looking for verification of something they already knew. They got that and more. He hit the mother lode. They had heard only vague rumors that Steve had stabbed himself once when Jami decided not to marry him, but they didn’t know when or where or if it had ever really happened. Jami had told her mother bits and pieces of what really happened during that terrible Christmas season. Since his Christmas Eve arrest occurred a week later in the Hagels’ home in Bellevue, Jami probably hadn’t wanted to go into detail about the stabbing incident.
“That’s when it all happened,” Mains said. “But we were on our way to trial and we still weren’t sure—not until we found Sally.” Sally Kirwin described Steve’s rage as he broke up the mobile home and ended up stabbing himself. “And, finally,” Mains said, “we had a witness to the whole thing.”
Steve Sherer was in jail, but planning to be free soon. Quite possibly he was unaware of how numbered his days really were. He had come back to turn himself in to Washington State authorities, bringing his oddly bulging blue suitcase with him on the bus. Sherri Schielke said he could store his things in her home and garage, but she didn’t pay too much attention to the bags and boxes he left there.
Steve Sherer had used and discarded many people in his past. One of his closest associates at the time Jami vanished was a man named Jeffrey Caston. The new investigators wanted to talk to him, and in 1999 Taylor assigned Mike Faddis to find him.
Caston was still in the area. Faddis noted that Caston was about fifteen years older than Steve and that he had served in Vietnam in the mid- to late sixties. He had been remodeling houses in early 1990, finding customers by putting “work wanted” ads in the newspaper, when Steve and Jami called in response to his ad. They told him they were looking at a house they wanted to buy, but it would need considerable work. Caston went to the Redmond house to give them a bid. He recalled that Jami had come home on her lunch break from Microsoft to meet him.
Steve hired Jeff Caston as their remodeler, and the two had soon become “very good friends.” Caston was frank in admitting to Mike Faddis that he had been addicted to heroin off and on throughout his life, beginning at the age of fourteen. He had managed to stay clear of the drug for many years, however, while he was raising his daughter, and he was clean when he first met Steve Sherer. Not surprisingly, Caston also had some convictions for theft during the heroin periods. He wouldn’t make a very credible witness for any prosecutor, but as he spoke, it was clear he knew things that no one else did.
Becoming best friends with Steve Sherer wasn’t the best thing that ever happened to Caston. For a man with an addictive personality, it was akin to putting the honey jar in front of Winnie-the-Pooh. Caston told Faddis he had joined Steve in a number of activities: “Card rooms, the racetracks, car races, Mariner games, various things …”
During the two months that Caston worked on the Redmond house, he saw Steve every day. “I finished the remodel in July—August, maybe. It was in the summertime in 1990.”
Even though the job was finished, Caston and Sherer continued to be friends, with Caston far more dependent on Steve Sherer than the other way around. Caston said that Steve was cunning. Both Mike Faddis and Greg Mains had heard that before.
“He has a criminal mind smarter than any I’ve ever met in prison. But as a normal human being, he wasn’t that smart,” Jeff said. “But put him in a criminal situation where
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