Empty Promises

personnel watch for him.
    On Saturday FBI agents, watching for any activity around Steve’s mother’s home, spotted one of Steve’s friends knocking on the door. The agents slid through the tall evergreens in the yard and were standing behind the friend when Steve opened the door. Before he could protest, they grabbed him.
    Nine years and three months after Jami Sherer vanished into some never-never land where no one could find her, the man who was the main suspect in her disappearance was at last in police custody. At 1:00 P.M. on January 8, Steven Sherer was arrested on a charge of first-degree murder. His bail was set at a million dollars.
    The Redmond detectives and Marilyn Brenneman did not release much information: “We have unearthed every bit of information possible on this case,” Jim Taylor said. “Now it will be judged by a jury of his peers.”
    “I’m not going to deny this is a circumstantial case,” Marilyn Brenneman said. “But we believe the charging documents show a very strong case, and we’re prepared to go to trial. We are just convinced a jury should hear the evidence, and when they do, they will do the right thing.”
    Sherri Schielke hired Peter Mair and his associate, Peter Camiel, to defend Steve on the first-degree charges. Marilyn Brenneman would lead the prosecuting team, which included co-counsels Hank Corscadden and Senior Deputy King County Prosecutor Kristin Richardson. Trial was set for May.
    On the evening of April 14, Greg Mains and Detective Anne Malins prepared to execute a warrant on the Schielke residence. The warrant specified that they would search the entire house and the vehicles parked there for Steve Sherer’s personal papers and the suitcase he reportedly carried with him from state to state. According to their information, Chris Sherer should have left after visiting Sherri Schielke by the time they served the search warrant. Mains and Malins rang the doorbell at the front door of the large Heatherstone residence. There was no response and no noise from inside the house. But a car belonging to Steve’s sister Laura was parked in the driveway, along with a pickup truck and another car. They knocked on the door and this time Laura came to the door. The whole family seemed to be there: Laura, Saundra, Chris, and Sherri Schielke.
    Mains and Malins saw that a birthday party planned for Chris Sherer that Friday evening was still going on, and they were sorry to interrupt. The last thing they wanted to do was to hurt twelve-year-old Chris any more than he had already been hurt. His mother was dead and his father was in jail awaiting trial for first-degree murder. Sherri asked them to wait an hour before they began to search. But of course they could not do that. Had they known, they would have arrived later, but once they were there, they could not leave for fear that vital evidence might be moved or disposed of. They had no choice but to proceed with the search.
    Sherri led them to the guest room and pointed out a suitcase with a Greyhound tag on it. There was nothing in it. They didn’t find the blue suitcase that he carried with him always. It wasn’t anywhere in the large two-story home.
    A few days after the Redmond detectives left, carrying away the items they had found that were listed on the search warrant, Sherri happened to be in her garage. There she saw the blue suitcase that Steve took with him whenever he moved. “I thought he had left it in Arizona,” she commented later. “The last time he came home, he was on a bus.”
    Sherri told Steve’s attorney, Pete Mair, that she had found the blue suitcase and that she didn’t want to give it to the detectives. He explained to her that he had no choice; as an officer of the court he could not withhold evidence from the police. He called them on April 20 to say that the blue suitcase was in his office.
    At last, the battered pale blue suitcase was turned over to Taylor, Mains, and Faddis. With some trepidation about what they might find, they undid the buckles and straps. Jami Sherer had been tiny, and although they didn’t say it out loud, they all had the same thought: Could Jami’s remains be inside?
    In a sense, they were. Steve Sherer had kept things in this heavy suitcase that represented Jami to him. There were numerous pieces of clothing in sizes so small they would have fit a child, but they were not childlike: a sheer black negligee, a black bra, a black slip, the black leather skirt he