Empty Promises

solve this case and traveled all over,” Corscadden said. “Would they actually go to your house and further harm Chris?”
    “Of course I don’t think that.”
    Sherri seemed relieved to be talking about the Redmond investigators’ annoying invasion of her family’s life. But before she could comment further, Corscadden brought her back abruptly to the real issues at stake. “You believed Jami was dead somewhere along the line?”
    “Yes.”
    “Do you know where … when … how she died?”
    “No. No. No.”
    Mair and Corscadden argued. The defense attorney could sense that his witness was faltering.
    Sherri Schielke had done her best to support Steve’s story. Did the jury believe that he had free access to her house and her cars? Her Bronco would have traversed the wilderness off-road far more easily than Steve’s Blazer, but would she really have allowed Steve to drive her vehicles when he had so many traffic violations on his record? She had a Mercedes and the new Bronco; any damage to them when Steve was driving would probably not have been covered by her insurance. She was too good a businesswoman to have allowed that.
    Sherri Schielke seemed to be trying valiantly in her testimony to show that Steve had as much access to her home and her vehicles as his sisters did. She had gone to the wall so many times for her firstborn, figuratively walking behind him and cleaning up the messes and catastrophes he left in his wake. As he entered his thirties, Sherri had tried to make Steve more responsible for his own life, but he hadn’t really changed. Now he stood accused of first-degree murder, and she reverted to her protective stance, trying to save him from a life behind bars.
    As Sherri stepped down from the witness chair, obviously relieved, Pete Mair recalled Richard Schurman, the bloodhound handler, in an attempt to erase his earlier devastating testimony. This time Mair asked the witness about a dog named Major, who had also participated in the search for the last driver of Jami Sherer’s Mazda in October 1990. Police records noted that Major had gone off in an entirely different direction from Maggie and the other search dogs, showing “intense interest” in another area and ending up two blocks from the car and nowhere near the freeway or the bus stop.
    “It’s apparent you don’t understand dogs,” Schurman said to Pete Mair. “That dog has never made a find in its life.”
    He explained that Major had been a dog in training. “His handler retired after Major proved unreliable,” Schurman said. “That dog would show ‘intense interest’ in a Milk-Bone dog biscuit.”
    Marilyn Brenneman could not resist one question on cross. “Is that where the expression ‘That dog won’t hunt’ comes from?”
    Schurman nodded. “That dog was not a good search dog.”
    If Steve Sherer was going to testify in his own defense, the time would be now. But he sat, as always, at the defense table, somehow detached from the whole legal process. The defense rested without the jury’s ever hearing from Steve himself.
    That was probably a good move on the part of Camiel and Mair. If Steve had testified, he would have been subject to cross-examination, and those who knew him also knew he was given to bursts of fury. There would undoubtedly have been questions that he didn’t want to answer. Still, for the gallery—and the jury, too—one question remained unanswered: Who was Steven Sherer?

17
    N either the prosecution nor the defense denied that somehow, some way, Jami Sherer had died. There was simply great disagreement about whether Steve Sherer had caused her death.
    On May 24, 2000, Peter Camiel asked that Judge Wartnik dismiss all charges against Steven Sherer for lack of evidence and, barring that, to dismiss the charge of first-degree murder because the prosecution had failed to establish premeditation. “Because we don’t know the manner and means of death,” Camiel argued, “all we can do is speculate about premeditation.”
    Judge Wartnik denied both motions after the prosecution team cited a Kansas case where appellate judges had ruled that premeditation can be proved by circumstantial evidence and what a jury may infer from prior events. Steve Sherer had made threats against Jami before she disappeared, they contended, and that showed he planned to destroy her.
    The two charges against Steve Sherer were still in place: premeditated murder in the first degree and second-degree murder