Empty Promises

abused.
    Klingbeil had found Steve Sherer a “classic abuser,” who demonstrated nearly all the characteristics of a chronic wife-beater. “On a scale of one to ten,” she testified, “his danger level is an eleven.” His alcohol and drug use, and his controlling and manipulative relationships with Jami and with his previous girlfriends, made him the quintessential abuser. “The batterer carries his behavior on to different relationships,” Klingbeil said. “That appears to be the case in most of Mr. Sherer’s relationships.”
    Klingbeil was adamantly against the defense’s stance that killing a wife or husband when a spouse loses control is such a common thing that “everybody’s doing it,” and not a crime as reprehensible as stranger-to-stranger murder.
    The time had come. Judge Wartnik sentenced Steve Sherer to sixty years in prison, twice what the standard sentence is and many more years than either Jami’s family or the prosecution team had hoped for. If he lives that long, Steve will be almost 100 years old when he walks out of prison.
    As he was led in handcuffs from the courtroom, Steve turned once more toward Judy Hagel, his former mother-in-law and the woman who had fought for so long to find some justice for her daughter. He didn’t swear at her this time. He blew her an insolent kiss.
    Judy realized there was little chance that he would ever tell her where Jami’s body lay. She wanted so much to have a grave for Jami, someplace she could take flowers from her garden, someplace just to sit and talk to her lost daughter.
    “I definitely do not think he’s guilty,” Sherri Schielke told reporters. “We will be appealing, and it will all come out then. This was an injustice.”

Afterword
    Judy Hagel believes she knows what happened in her daughter’s Redmond house ten years ago. She can close her eyes and visualize it, even though Steve Sherer will probably never admit his crime.
    “I know that Jami was finally going to leave Steve that day,” Judy says firmly. “She had made up her mind that nothing he could do would stop her. She told me she was on her way, and I believe she was. Steve would have pulled out that videotape and threatened to show it to me. He’d probably done that many times, but this time, I think Jami told him, ‘I don’t care anymore. Go ahead and show it to my mother. I’m still leaving you.’
    “That [videotape] was the one thing he could hold over her head to keep her in line. When he realized that Jami was really going and that he had no power left over her, the only way he had to stop her was to kill her. I think he choked her at the top of the stairs and she fell down them.”
    Judy’s voice choked a little as she spoke of that. “I wouldn’t have liked to see that awful videotape, but it would not have changed how I felt about my daughter one bit. I would still have loved her. Nothing would have changed my love for her. She would have been welcome with us, and safe with us. I wish she could have understood that sooner. When I think of how my daughter must have suffered during those four years she was married to Steve, I can hardly bear it.
    “I never knew just how bad it really was.”

Bitter Lake
    Children are often involved in the tangled lives their parents choose. They are the complete innocents, and their stories the ones that make you cry. The little boy in the following story had no choices in his life. Nor, in the end, did his mother.

T he old man tossed and turned, caught in that drifting place between wakefulness and deep sleep. He wished for the thousandth time for the vigor of his youth when nothing had kept him awake at the end of a hard day’s work. Roused from the edge of a nightmare, the elderly resident of the cozy house on the shore of Bitter Lake snapped awake, startled by angry shouting outside. When he bought this place, the Bitter Lake shoreline had been buffered by thick stands of evergreen. It was isolated and peaceful then, but the neighborhood had changed; the building boom around Seattle had crept out even to this serene little lake with its deceptive name. Where there had once been trees and marshes full of wild geese, there were now condos and apartment houses with every beehive unit populated by young people who seemed to come and go at all hours of the day and night.
    This was a Saturday night during the last weekend of March. Though it was the threshold of spring, the weather was cold and windy. But the stormy