Empty Promises

since.”
    Pete Mair cross-examined Connie. She admitted that she could have been off on the year of the California trip. It could have happened in 1993 rather than 1992. She also admitted that she drank alcohol before she met Steve; he hadn’t introduced her to drinking.
    But Connie Duncan was positive about her memory of Steve’s telling her that Jami got a bloody nose at the top of the stairs in the Redmond house while she was fighting with Steve. The prosecution team and the Redmond detectives had believed all along that Jami Sherer died in her own home as she attempted to leave Steve for good. Connie Duncan wasn’t the only witness who had heard that version of an injury to Jami.
    “When did that statement occur?” Mair asked. “What year?”
    “Well, it must have been 1991.”
    “What month?”
    “I had on shorts. It must have been August—September, perhaps.”

    Steve had joined a number of dating services. A representative of Great Expectations explained that their company simply allowed “members to date more successfully.” Jana Cheney testified that people came into their offices for a free consultation. If they could prove they were single and ready to date, they paid a fee.
    “Steve Sherer was one of our lifetime members,” she explained. When he joined in July 1991, he filled out the standard application form and put his marital status down as “separated.” In January 1995 he changed that to “widowed” and wrote “widowed” again in August of the same year. Steve had no paucity of women. His trouble appeared to be holding on to them.

    Ron Coates met Steve Sherer in a Bellevue nightclub in 1991, less than a year after Jami vanished. They drank together and seemed to hit it off, Coates testified. Coates and his girlfriend, Victoria, ended the evening by following Steve and his date to his home after the bar closed. Steve showed Ron his photo album, and Coates commented how attractive Jami was. Steve told him she had simply disappeared the year before.
    “Do you miss her?” Coates asked.
    “No, she was going to leave me anyway,” Steve answered.
    As the liquor flowed, the group settled in for the night at Steve’s house. His tongue loosened as he talked with Ron Coates. As Victoria had told police, Coates began to suspect that Steve had something to do with his wife’s disappearance. Staring into his glass, Steve talked on and on.
    “He told me that he flew off the handle just before his wife disappeared,” Coates testified. “He told me they’d gotten into an argument and that things got out of hand. He said he was sorry and that he shouldn’t have done that. She lashed out at him, and he gave her a bloody nose.”
    Standing to demonstrate for the jury, Coates drew back his fist and feigned a blow to within an inch of Marilyn Brenneman’s face. “He went ‘Boom’ and caused her nose to be hit, and it proceeded to bleed.
    “It was kind of like a weight lifted off his shoulders, like he wanted me to know,” Coates testified. “He indicated he was the prime suspect.”
    But Steve Sherer also said that the Redmond police were “dumb. He said they could never prove anything, basically.”
    To the prosecution’s frustration, Ron Coates had not asked for many details. “I really didn’t want to know much more than that, to tell you the truth.”
    Despite what was tantamount to a confession to the murder of his wife, Steve was apparently such good company that he and Coates had kept a friendship going. They went water-skiing on Lake Washington in Steve’s boat the next day. Steve’s mind had still been on dark subjects. He remarked to Coates that if anyone drowned in Lake Sammamish, “they would never find her body because the water was too murky.”
    And then Steve had crumpled his beer can and tossed it into the lake and said, “ ‘That’s a good place for your trash,’ ” Coates testified.
    The jurors looked interested in Coates; his story of a bloody fight between Jami and Steve was remarkably like the testimony given by Connie Duncan.
    Peter Camiel asked Coates on cross-examination why he had waited five years to tell the Redmond police about his conversations with Steve. He said he had left messages, but no one called him back. He admitted he hadn’t given anywhere near the details he had just testified about. Camiel suggested that Coates had called the police again within ten minutes of reading that there was a $20,000 reward for information about Jami