Empty Promises

Sherer’s whereabouts.
    Ron Coates maintained the reward didn’t matter to him. What mattered was his fear of Steve Sherer. He had written down statements for the police before, he said, but he always held some things back. It was far easier for him to reveal everything that Steve told him after Steve was arrested for Jami’s murder. “So I wouldn’t be like a sitting duck out there.”
    Dozens of witnesses took the stand. It had been ten years since Jami’s disappearance, and many lives had changed. Two women who had seen someone with long hair riding in a car that looked like Jami’s Mazda on that Sunday in 1990 tried to recall what they had seen. One of them had suffered brain damage during the intervening decade and couldn’t even recognize her own signature. As a witness, she was worse than useless. The other woman wasn’t sure any longer who she had seen.
    Lew Adams’s mother remembered Sunday afternoon; she had been selling “duster gloves” at the church bazaar—“canvas gloves with fingernails and rings on them, and yarn on the bottom,” she explained. Yes, she said, Lew had come to see her. “He looked normal.”
    Lew drove his bubble-gum pink Volkswagen Beetle in those days, and treated it like a baby, washing it again and again. It was not a car that anyone would forget. And it was not a car that could have maneuvered off-road to dump a body, low-centered as it was.
    Sara, who had married one of Steve’s good friends and once heard Jami’s regrets about her own marriage, testified that Steve propositioned her within weeks of Jami’s disappearance. He glared at her as she stepped down from the stand.
    That night, Sara received a phone call from the King County Jail. Steve Sherer was calling. She didn’t accept his collect call, the only way the inmates could make phone calls. Frightened, Sara reported his attempt to talk to her, and detectives warned him that there would be big trouble if he tried again to intimidate a witness.
    There were witnesses who said that Steve had rented a steam cleaner for his carpet a few times after Jami vanished. The first carpet cleaner said he had cleaned the carpet at 10709 161st Avenue N.E. in Redmond on October 9, 1990. He knew the police had searched the Sherer house the day before. His records a decade later showed that he had marked a large spot to be pretreated. “It was six inches by eighteen inches,” he said. He could not recall if he had cleaned the lower level of the home. One of the spots had been in the living room, a pinkish spot near the coffee table. The police had already tested it for blood and found it negative. Steve’s sister thought it was Kool-Aid. His mother told Carolyn Willougby it was grape juice.
    There was sealant under the carpet in the basement near the door to the garage. The carpet and pad had been cut out, because someone had evacuated there, leaving a urine and fecal stain. Steve blamed it on their dog. After so much steam cleaning, no criminalist could say what species had lost body fluids there. Someone had treated the floor with Kilz.
    Records showed that the original carpet purchased for the basement in the spring of 1990 measured 11.8 square yards. That made sense because Jami and Steve were refurbishing their home at that time, getting ready to move in. However, Steve had purchased more carpet in January 1991, and some of it was used to patch the 3- by 5-foot area near the garage.
    All of the pieces of the giant puzzle that Jim Taylor, Mike Faddis, and Greg Mains had set out to solve were now being set in place. Separately, many of the witnesses would have had little impact. Together, however, they formed a picture that was cruel and grotesque.
    It was May 18 and the prosecution case was winding down. Throughout the trial, Judy Hagel had listened to horrific testimony and managed to maintain her composure. In the next row, Sherri Schielke appeared concerned but unruffled.
    However, when Dr. Katherine Taylor, a medical investigator and forensic anthropologist for the King County medical examiner’s office took the witness stand to discuss what happened to a human body disposed of in the wild, Judy Hagel tensed. Taylor spoke in the matter-of-fact way of a professional. She had tramped through forests and desert and examined numerous human remains. She was not a grief counselor, but a scientist.
    Jami’s image smiled from the Missing poster facing the gallery—and the defense table—as Taylor began. “A body