Empty Promises

above the ground is affected by the environment: temperature, sunlight, rainfall, insects, carnivores, how close it is to water,” she told the court. “Human bodies are a valuable food source. Underground, it depends on whether the body is clothed or unclothed, the biomass [size of the body]—larger bodies take longer, how deep they are buried.”
    Taylor quoted a study done in 1989 that concluded the fastest a body would be reduced to a skeleton in Washington State was twenty-eight days. After that, all manner of natural phenomena—running water, rock-slides, high winds—separate the bones left behind. “Coyotes, dogs, bears, squirrels, rats, mice, take hair for their nests.” Small and large bones are dispersed “one half mile to a mile away. The cranium is the easiest to mark as human.” Dr. Taylor explained that body recovery around Seattle would be difficult.
    “What’s left after a year?” Brenneman asked.
    “There’s good body dispersal, but heavily altered. The body would be unrecognizable after two years, even more so if small animals had chewed on the bones. Trauma attracts carnivores. They smell blood.”
    Marilyn Brenneman had warned Judy Hagel that this part of the trial would be very difficult for her, but she had opted to stay in the courtroom. Even with her back to the gallery, however, Marilyn could sense Judy’s despair. Every mother in the courtroom could.
    “Wrapped bodies last longer,” Dr. Taylor continued.
    “What about the areas where they are left?”
    “Anywhere from neighborhood parks to open areas to forests. Sometimes, no one finds the bodies or they don’t recognize them as human. Hidden bodies have usually died of unnatural causes.”
    “After nine years?” Brenneman asked.
    “[Around] an ungraved body or one in a shallow grave there would be excessive vegetation growth. When you dig a grave, you aerate the soil. Two feet down, you hit rock or clay around here,” Taylor said. “You wouldn’t have to have a rectangular grave. A small biomass only requires a small hole in the ground.”
    After all these weeks, Judy Hagel had come to a point where she could not bear to hear such details. She let out a wail of grief and stumbled past eight members of her family as she fled into the corridor, sobbing.
    The testimony was awful to hear, but Taylor soldiered on. She explained that the most they could hope to find of Jami would be a skull and some small bones.
    And if she was in the water?
    “Adipocere is common,” Taylor said, “but Lake Washington has a very uneven, muddy bottom. You’d have to be looking for her and have a pretty good idea where she was.”
    On cross-examination, Dr. Taylor said the human teeth don’t decompose.
    “Do silicon implants decompose?” Mair asked.
    “My assumption would be no.”
    Mair pointed out that cadaver dogs had failed to find Jami and ground-penetrating radar had also found nothing. She could be in blackberry thickets or in the roots of trees.
    “Yes,” Taylor answered. “It’s difficult to say.”
    “How time-consuming would it be,” Brenneman asked, “to find a place to leave a body on the surface in this area?”
    “Not hard at all. Cadaver dogs need an area in which to search, though.”
    And that was true. There were endless miles where Jami could have lain, undetected, for almost a decade. The snow, the rain, the sun, had come every year. Leaves had brightened and died and fallen to cover her, perhaps, in nature’s blanket. Many bodies in the Green River murders had proved to be “self-buried”—that is, left on the surface of the ground but covered by so many seasons of decomposing leaves that they appeared to be buried.
    It was, in the end, academic. Jami could be anywhere within an hour or two of the house she had decorated so lovingly.
    But no one in Judge Wartnik’s courtroom believed that Jami was alive, living another life far from her son, her mother and father, and her brothers.
    The prosecution called their last witness on June 23.
    Judge Wartnik denied two motions from the defense—the first to dismiss the case for lack of evidence and the second to dismiss the charge of first-degree murder because the prosecution had failed to establish premeditation.
    The trial would proceed.

16
    I t was the defense’s turn to call witnesses. Would Steve Sherer testify in his own defense, a decision that is usually dangerous for a defendant? If he took the stand, he would open himself up to