Empty Promises

Chris. “Then I’ll be leaving.”
    10:00 or 11:00 A.M. : Jeff Caston calls. Jami’s anxious to leave before Steve gets home. He has found the receipt from the Crest Motel in her purse. He’s starting to lose it. He goes to the motel, looks for the ring, checking the bed in the room. No one has slept in the bed.
    11:45 A.M. : Jami’s on her way to her folks’house. She plans to stop by the Bear Creek Taco Time. She tells Judy, “I’ll bring food when I come.” It’s a fifteen-minute drive to Judy’s from the Sherer home.
    12:15 P.M. : Steve Sherer calls Judy, asking for Jami. He talks to Jeff Caston and says Jami has disappeared.
    12:30 P.M. : Steve calls Judy.

    “At that point,” Richardson said quietly, “Jami was dead. Somehow he knew she’d disappeared at 12:15.”
    Kristin Richardson told the jurors that Steve had changed his usual behavior. Instead of calling the Hagels’ house every fifteen minutes, on this Sunday they heard nothing at all from him from 1:00 to 5:00. “Utter silence. He had four hours, and they heard not one word.
    “He called his sister, Saundra, during Star Trek , and said, ‘Jami’s disappeared.’ How did he know so soon?
    “He threw out Jami’s birth control pills.”
    To Richardson, the most obvious lie Steve Sherer told all day was when he said to Jeff Caston, “We decided to go our separate ways until this can be straightened out.”
    “Inconceivable!” Richardson said vehemently.
    And during that afternoon when no one heard from Steve Sherer, he had been busy. Kristin Richardson asked rhetorically, “Who had the best car to hide a body? The Bronco.” His mother’s Bronco.
    “His actions after Jami disappeared form a picture—all incidents of a cover-up.” She itemized the elements of that picture:
    “He broke the window to Sherri Schielke’s house. To sleep? Why? He wasn’t looking for Jami at all.
    “He sleeps in another house for a week. Why not be there at their home to take Jami’s call if it came? He was ‘uncomfortable’ there. Because he committed murder there?
    “He signed a cleaning order for the carpet in his house. It was only four months old. His mother cleaned the house. She had never cleaned it before when Jami left.
    “He tells his uncle Roger to look for Jami’s car in his patrol sector in north Seattle. How did he know the car would be there?
    “He knew about Jami’s duffel bag.
    “He stages a suicide attempt. He never intended to die. He’s got the picture of Jami in her wedding dress. A picture of Chris. A note and a cell phone. It was a cry for help—to get out of being interviewed by the detectives.
    “He puts Jami’s panties around his biceps. He has sexual control of her even after death. Her most intimate thing tied around his muscle.”
    Kristin Richardson’s voice was a metronome, ticking off the actions that simply didn’t compute with what a normal, innocent man might be expected to do after his wife had vanished.
    Steve never helped in the search for Jami. “He took a pile of flyers to look good, but he left them in his glove compartment. He started dating twenty-five to thirty other women within two weeks. He ‘missed sex.’ He told a girl in a bar ‘The bitch is gone,’ but he told Bettina, ‘I’m sorry I hurt you or her.’
    “He never asked the police for an update on the investigation; he never asked Jami’s friends.”
    Kristin Richardson spoke of how the car seat of the Mazda was pushed too far back for Jami to reach the pedals. The alarm wasn’t on, she reminded the jury, and the duffel bag was hastily packed with things Jami would not have chosen. “He had a key to her car, but he said he didn’t. Carolyn Willoughby found it.” Nor, Richardson suggested, had Sherri Schielke ever left a key to her house for Steve.
    “There was Kilz sealant under the carpet in the basement near the garage. [Steve] said ‘The dog did it,’ but something had evacuated there,” Richardson said. “He bought more carpet for that house in January 1991 … a piece five by three feet in the hall.
    “He liquidated Jami’s assets. Sherri wanted her money back two months later. They both knew that Jami wasn’t coming back.”
    Steve’s Achilles’ heel, Richardson suggested, was his drinking. “When he drank, he leaked out things. [To his uncle]: ‘They can’t prove murder without a body.’ To Ron Coates: ‘I’m the prime suspect—she was going to leave me anyway,’ and ‘I’ve done something