Empty Promises

in front of the judge’s bench was decorated with photos and written mementos of a tragic marriage: wedding photos of Steve and Jami, Jami and little Chris on the Missing posters, stacks of greeting cards, the blue suitcase, paper bags full of Jami Sherer’s panties and filmy black negligees, contracts she had signed long ago. In essence, the pieces of her life, and perhaps her death, were all scattered over the varnished wood. Jami’s likeness still smiled toward Steve from a huge poster—a grown woman, yes, but one who looked like a high school girl, happy and unafraid.
    Marilyn Brenneman told the jury that Steven Sherer’s threats against her gave her “no personal ax to grind. I’ve been threatened before and I will be again,” she said.
    She described the defendant as a very angry man. “He told me, ‘I want what’s mine!’ And he owned Jami, too. He had plenty of time Sunday morning to lie in wait for her. They had a fight. She went to her mother’s, and he wanted control again.”
    But finally, she said, Jami wanted a divorce. Brenneman suggested that Steve’s searches of the motel, Jami’s purse, and her Microsoft office were not about Jami at all. He was looking for the diamond ring.
    Of course, the neighbors heard no noises that Sunday almost a decade earlier. “She was taken off guard. He didn’t need to make a sound to strangle her. He didn’t need to shed her blood or fire a shot,” Brenneman said. “Strangulation causes voiding or evacuation [of the bowel],” she explained. “He objectified Jami and he broke her, and we should all feel sorry for him?” Marilyn Brenneman asked incredulously. “Chris needed a mother who was alive, not a seventeen-year-old who looked like her.
    “Justice grinds slow but exceedingly fine. It’s taken ten years, yes. But it bleeds out. Steve told Ron Coates little bits and pieces: ‘She bled from the nose.’ It’s a little bit of a confession—but not all true. Steve has to be a tough guy.
    “Silence is a form of affirmation. When Saundra asked about his ‘bad thing. Is this anything to do with Jami?’ There was only silence.
    “It bleeds out a little bit more in the [Halloween] letter to Chris and the suicide note, and what he said to Ron Coates and to Bettina. Steve Sherer made a promise to his victim of what would happen if she did certain things.”
    Brenneman pointed out that Steve knew all the back roads between his house and his mother’s house. “He had the time, the motive, the opportunity, the knowledge, and the vehicle.
    “Justice delayed is justice denied,” Marilyn Brenneman quoted. “But that’s not always true.” She pointed out that Pete Mair had tried to suggest that Jami was not the person they thought she was. “But she had dreams. She had everyday events in her life, as we all do. She went to work and to day care. She bought groceries and went home to cook supper—only she often got beaten up.
    “The justice system must protect the least of us to protect all of us,” Brenneman said, as she acknowledged that Jami Sherer might have done some things that others would not. “She made some bad life choices.”
    But Jami Sherer did not deserve to die at the age of twenty-six, just when she was finally escaping the man who controlled her, just when she saw a future for herself and her little boy, just when she once again longed for the safe place that waited for them in her parents’ home.

    Late on Thursday, June 1, 2000, the jurors drew lots to pick the dozen who would remain to deliberate whether Steven Sherer was innocent or guilty. Eight women and four men remained. Their job now would be far from the easiest case a jury had ever received. Their first task would be to elect a foreperson, and then the actual deliberation would begin. They chose a retired teacher as their foreperson.
    Jurors—all jurors—are inscrutable and no one in the gallery or at the prosecution or defense tables, for that matter, knew what they were thinking for the seven weeks they listened to testimony.
    “The first thing we did,” one juror said later, “was to decide how we would deliberate. We decided to go back through all the evidence from the beginning. Many of the jurors had filled their notebooks, and some of us seemed to feel more of a sense of the truth by watching the defendant and the attorneys.”
    There had been a great deal of evidence and testimony. The sessions were “intense,” as the jurors deliberated from nine