Empty Promises

bad. I’m going to miss her.’
    “And then there was silence until he was arrested,” Kristin Richardson said. “And then he said, ‘So you found the body?’ ”
    She asked the jury to remember Steve Sherer’s Halloween card to Chris in which he urged his son never to drink or do drugs because they had ruined his life.
    “Remember, [most of] the witnesses don’t know each other, but their stories dovetail. Nuns or priests make better witnesses, but these are the people who want to spend time with this man, people on his level. Remember his history, his actions, his reactions and his statements.
    “Just because we don’t know how she died doesn’t mean Jami isn’t dead. We heard of shallow graves and animals.
    “He took Jami’s purse so she’d have to come home to get it. He lured her,” Richardson said, winding down her final arguments. “She told her parents on the phone on Sunday morning, ‘Steve’s here but it’s okay—I’m getting ready to leave.’
    “He called Judy Hagel as if Jami wasn’t already dead. And now Steve Sherer is in a place where his desire for control has no power whatsoever. He has lost control at last.”

    Pete Mair, in his final argument, of course, attacked the state’s case. “It’s way too long on theories. It’s very long on speculation. But it’s very short on what I consider to be evidence. They have no evidence of when, where, how, the victim died,” he said with a shadow of contempt in his voice. “They haven’t proved their case beyond a reasonable doubt. What they do is decide he did it, and then they work backwards. At some point they just assumed that Steve must have done it. Then they dredged and they dredged until they found people to support their theory.”
    The jury watched Mair alertly, their mouths looking oddly pinched. “Don’t let the state put it on you!” he warned them.
    Mair offered his own timetable:

2:21 A.M. Sunday: Steve calls for information to Lisa Cryder.
    8:45 A.M. : He tries to call Lew Adams.
    9:43 A.M. : Jami calls Lew Adams.
    9:51 A.M. : Lew’s at work.
    10:00: Jeff Caston speaks to Jami.
    10:30: Jeff calls Steve.

    Mair suggested that Steve did everything he could to find Jami and that he grieved for her intensely. “He was in the hospital for three weeks after his suicide attempt.”
    At least three jurors had a look on their faces that seemed to say they had shut Mair’s arguments out.
    “At 7:00 P.M. that night, Steve took Chris to their home in Redmond. At 8:00, he called his sister. He tried to call Lew. He went back to the Hagels’.”
    Steve, Mair said, had called Microsoft looking for Jami and gone to the Redmond Police Department to report her missing. He had met a uniformed officer at his house, given an interview at the police station the next day, Wednesday. “He was interviewed again on Thursday by the police. He gave a consent to search his car. On Friday, he gave them scent items.”
    According to Mair, Steve had been the epitome of the helpful spouse, whose suicide attempt was very real. “He hooked up a hose to bring carbon monoxide into his car. He had to be put in a hyperbaric chamber…. From his house to the church [where the Mazda was] was 17.4 miles, or a forty-six-minute trip. It was 14.7 miles to his mother’s house, or thirty minutes. It was fifteen minutes back to the Hagels’. [Getting rid of a body] would be an awesome task to accomplish in three to five hours.”
    Pete Mair suggested that the real killer was probably Lew Adams. “He had eighteen hours without observation…. No one searched Lew’s place … while Steve is frustrated after looking under every rock for evidence [of Jami].”
    Mair disparaged the number of witnesses who hadn’t come forward for years: Ron Coates who, he suggested, talked to police only after a reward was offered; Rich Hagel, who spent most of Saturday night with Steve and never told the police or his own family that Steve had said, “She’s cheating on me. I’ve gotta kill her,” until after Steve’s arrest.
    “No neighbors heard or saw anything on Sunday afternoon.” Again, Mair emphasized that the prosecution was trying to force the jury to make an impossible decision, to bring in a verdict on a case that could never be proved.
    Marilyn Brenneman was the last to speak in this very long trial. Over the past seven weeks, the plants in the courtroom had grown dustier and droopier; everyone had memorized the paintings on the wall.
    The rail