Empty Promises

prosecution called a number of tiny, attractive young blondes who had been involved with Steve and had left the relationships after being abused. Bettina Rauschberg hadn’t seen Steve in years, but her fear of him was palpable as she entered the courtroom and took the stand, a position that forced her to face him. She described in detail her hospitalizations and the injuries she had suffered at Steve Sherer’s hands.
    One witness came as a complete surprise to the prosecution and the Redmond investigators. Her name was Connie Duncan.* In May 2000 she was twenty-five years old, but when she met Steve in 1991, she had been sixteen. She had called Marilyn Brenneman when Steve Sherer’s trial was well under way.
    “I happened to be home that day,” Connie said. “My daughter was sick, so I had to stay home with her. The news was on and I wasn’t even paying that close attention. And then I saw the courtroom, and I saw Steve. I didn’t get to hear exactly what was going on because my daughter wouldn’t stop talking to me. [But] I knew he was on trial for murder.”
    Connie worked for the state of Washington as a financial service specialist. She coached small children in gymnastics and soccer in her spare time.
    Connie Duncan explained to Marilyn Brenneman that she had once dated Steve Sherer and remembered a long-ago nightmare trip to California with him. As she listened, Brenneman realized that this was the witness who would fill in a very important chink in the prosecution’s case.
    It was May 15 when Connie Duncan walked forward to be sworn in. It must have been a shock for Steve to see her again, but he maintained his composure as he had done for most of the trial, his usual expression half-bland and half-glowering. Only rarely had jurors seen the icy threat in his eyes as he stared hard at a prosecution witness.
    Connie Duncan fit the pattern; she was slender and softly pretty with dark blond hair. She looked remarkably like the huge Missing poster of Jami Sherer that had been propped up against the court clerk’s desk during the prosecution’s case.
    Brenneman stood far back from her witness, near the alternate jurors’ box, as she often did. She was not a prosecutor who got in witnesses’ faces. “Could you tell us when you first met Mr. Sherer?” Marilyn Brenneman asked.
    “I met him at Lake Chelan in August of 1991.”
    “How old were you?”
    “Sixteen, seventeen years old.”
    The witness explained that she and her girlfriend had met Steve at a hamburger stand in the small town. He would have been thirty at that time, and he had charmed the teenagers. “We ended up staying at his mother’s cabin…. We had planned on camping.”
    “How long do you think you stayed at the house with Mr. Sherer and his friends?” Brenneman asked.
    “A couple of days.”
    “What was your relationship with Mr. Sherer in that couple of days?”
    “It was an intimate relationship.” Connie explained that she had dated Steve Sherer for a few months after that.
    “Do you recall meeting Mr. Sherer in Seattle during those few months?”
    “I went up to his house in Redmond that he had bought with Jami.”
    “When did you first hear about Jami Sherer?”
    “It was after some time. It could have been a few weeks. At first I heard a different story than what I heard later.”
    “Tell me what you first heard.”
    “He was telling me about a situation where Jami was having sex with another guy, and he was watching. And he told me that a bigger, more powerful man had taken Jami away from him.”
    Connie explained that she had been spending the weekend with Steve at the time.
    “Did he provide alcohol for you?”
    “He always did.”
    “How about drugs?”
    “Not at that point. I think that came later.”
    Connie testified that she had opened Steve’s glove compartment and found a stack of flyers with a picture of Jami and her son on it. “One thing I remember is that he made the comment that it was a dumb picture because people thought that his son was missing also.”
    “Did you have further conversation?”
    “He did fill me in a little bit on the disappearance. He said she went to Taco Bell or Taco Time and she disappeared, no trace after that. He stated they found her car later, abandoned.”
    Connie said that Steve drove past the Taco Time and showed it to her.
    “In your conversations with the defendant about his ex-wife, did he ever show you any items of hers?” Brenneman asked.
    “He had me