Empty Promises: And Other True Cases Read online

  Steve called the Riverside County Sheriff's Department on November 4 to report that someone had broken into the mobile home and stolen a number of items, including Jami's ring. Their claim form listed computers, cameras, miscellaneous jewelry, silver dishes, and a Colt .357. They estimated that their total loss, allowing for depreciation, was well over $32,000. They had paid only the first quarter of the premiums due on their renter's policy, and their coverage was due to expire on January 2, 1987. The claim agent for Farmers' was uneasy about the timing, but the insurance company decided eventually to pay off Steve and Jami's claim.

  They should have used the insurance money for something practical, but it didn't last long. Steve still had expensive tastes— and more expensive habits. Although he had been raised in a wealthy family, he was nowhere near the entrepreneur his father had been. Soon Steve and Jami were barely able to pay the rent on the mobile home on Portola Avenue. It was a far cry from the posh country club home his parents had once owned in Palm Desert, the house where his father died.

  Steve may have consciously or unconsciously hoped to recapture that splendor in his own life. But he was failing miserably. Finally, Jami placed an ad in a local paper seeking someone to move in and share the rent. Sally Kirwin,* a twenty-six-year-old woman from Wisconsin, found herself in a situation where she had to move in a hurry. Her landlord was an alcoholic and she was afraid of him. She answered the ad and arranged to meet Jami.

  "Jami was about twenty-two then," Sally remembered. "She was very, very small." Sally liked Jami and was relieved to learn that she could move into the extra bedroom in the mobile home without putting down a deposit or paying first and last months' rent. Later she met Steve Sherer, Jami's boyfriend. He seemed pleasant enough. He had long hair, and she wasn't sure what he did for a living. It didn't really matter, though, because Sally wasn't looking for roommates with whom she had a lot in common; she just needed a place she could afford where her cat would be welcome, too. Jami and Steve said a cat would be fine with them. They occupied the master bedroom at the back of the mobile, they used one bedroom for their exercise equipment, and said Sally could have the extra one for only $300 a month.

  Sally had a job as a publicist for famous and wanna-be famous people, and it kept her so busy that she wasn't home much. However, she accepted Jami and Steve's invitation to join them for Thanksgiving dinner. The three of them posed for photos around a heavily laden buffet. She didn't really know them, but she liked Jami, and Steve had a good sense of humor. Sally was planning to stay in the mobile home only long enough to build a nest egg so she could get her own apartment.

  There was nothing at all to warn Sally Kirwin that she had walked into a volatile situation. She had never been exposed to domestic violence and the thought never occurred to her.

  A few days before Christmas 1986, Sally was packing to head home to Wisconsin for the holidays. She was terribly afraid to fly, trying to psyche herself up for the next day. She accepted a beer Jami offered her and sat down with Jami and Steve, trying to relax and convince herself that flying was a perfectly safe mode of transportation.

  As they visited, she realized how little she knew about her housemates. She'd had a drink with Jami just that once, but Jami hadn't confided in her; they had simply discussed the possibility of Sally's moving in.

  Now Steve seemed to be on edge. He and Jami were arguing listlessly about something at his work, when he suddenly turned to Sally and said, "You think you're too good for us, don't you, Sally? You never bring your friends over to meet us."

  She stared at him, sure that he must be kidding. She worked with a number of celebrities, but there was no reason to introduce them to Steve. She didn't socialize with them very much herself. She just worked for them.

  Jami looked embarrassed and told Steve to mind his own business. As Sally watched them, stunned, the couple's comments grew louder until they were yelling at each other.

  "It very, very quickly escalated into a fight— an all-out brawl," Sally recalled. "They were screaming and shouting at each other. Glass was breaking."

  As small as she was, Jami stood up to Steve. "This is it!" she screamed. "This is it. It's over!"

  Steve made a move toward Jami and said, breathing heavily, "Shut the fuck up! I'll kill you."

  Horrified, Sally ran to grab the phone in her bedroom, but first she pushed Jami behind a table in the hallway to give her a little protection from Steve, who was trying to get to her, swinging his arms and swearing.

  Sally did manage to connect with 911 and let out a cry for help, but then she rushed out of her room to see that Steve was holding a kitchen knife. He had an odd, almost vacant look on his face. "Shut the fuck up," he snarled at Jami. "I'll kill both of you." He was either drunk or crazy— and it had happened so rapidly.

  Sally believed him, but she could hear sirens approaching the mobile home park. She grabbed her cat and tossed it into her room. She didn't know how she could help Jami, but she was going to try. For the moment, Steve couldn't reach Jami where she huddled behind the table.

  With a sharp flick of his wrist, he turned the knife so that it pointed toward his own belly.

  "Steve!" Jami cried. "Don't!"

  There was no expression on Steve's face as he slid the knife into his flesh. Sally thought it must have been some sleight of hand until she saw blood burst from his belly. She was amazed that he was still on his feet, and then he disappeared. She wasn't sure just how he got out of the trailer. By that time, both she and Jami were screaming and hysterical.

  Jami talked to the police. They found Steve, put him in an ambulance, and took him away.

  Sally Kirwin was so shocked that all she could think of was getting away from the madness. She went to a friend's house. "I came back in the wee hours of the morning," she recalled. "No one was there."

  Now she could see the damage. The bedroom door was broken, and she could see that Steve had knocked the glass out of several windows. The desert wind blew through the mobile home, the only sound left after all the crashing and splintering of glass and wood.

  Sally didn't know Steve Sherer well enough to know if he'd had some kind of psychotic break or if this was how he behaved when he was drunk or mad, or both. One minute they had been having a routine conversation and the next, he was white with rage.

  Around dawn, Jami came home. She had dark circles under her swollen eyes, and she seemed very contrite. "This wouldn't have happened," she told Sally, "if Steve didn't love me so much."

  Sally stared at Jami, dumbfounded. "Aren't you going to leave him?" she asked.

  Jami shook her head. "He just loves me so much— we can work it out. It will never happen again."

  Sally tried to reason with Jami, and she suggested places she could go where she would be safe. Sally said her friend had volunteered to take Jami in until she could get home to her family. Jami looked at her as if Sally didn't understand. She was adamant that she could never leave Steve, because he needed her. She was sure that things were going to be fine. He wasn't badly hurt, but he had shown her how devastated he would be if Jami ever left him, and she could never do that to him. People just didn't understand how sensitive he was.

  Jami and Steve spent Christmas 1986 in Washington. On Christmas Eve, he was arrested by a Snohomish County sheriff's deputy for driving under the influence, driving with no valid license, and violating a protection order from his old girlfriend, Bettina.

  Sally flew home to Wisconsin and spent Christmas with her family. Her friend fed her cat while she was gone. When she returned to Palm Desert a week later, Sally saw the mobile home at 99 Portola Road for the last time. She was "too afraid of Steve" to press charges for her financial loss. By the time she got back, neither Jami nor Steve was at the mobile home. They were still in Washington when she moved her things out, and that was fine with her. She never expected to see them again.

  Steve's temper tantrums over the holiday season had been expensive. Beyond the new fines he'd racked up in W
ashington, the mobile home on Portola was heavily damaged. He had broken four wall panels so badly they had to be replaced and other walls had to be repainted. That came to $981.40. He had shattered the bedroom and closet doors trying to get to Jami with a knife. That cost another $497.00. And then there were all the broken windows. The landlord was not happy.

  Jami was the one who kept track of their expenses. She saved every estimate, receipt, bank statement, and stub from the bills she paid each month. Years later it would be easy to look at her life with Steve simply by thumbing through her meticulous records.

  3

  Steve's attempts to make big money in California didn't work out. The money from the insurance payoff on their burglary was dwindling. Once again he headed back to Washington State. The Hagels were relieved to know that Jami was going to be living close to them again, although they continued to be stunned at how she had changed, as were Jami's friends. She wasn't the dark-haired bundle of energy they all remembered. She was very thin and very blond. "Steve likes me blond," Jami confided. "And he likes me really thin."

  Shortly after they came back to Washington, Steve told Jami that she was too flat-chested to really please him. He had always preferred women with very large breasts, and he insisted that Jami agree to breast augmentation surgery. She went along with it reluctantly. Her mother took care of her after the surgery, which was much more painful than Jami had expected.

  Jami regretted the plastic surgery almost at once. The implants left her top-heavy and out of proportion for a woman as petite as she was. Steve, however, was delighted with the results and made a point of showing her off. Where Jami had always worn clothes with clean, sporty lines, she now wore clothes that were so feminine they were almost ridiculous— flowered silk dresses, tiny miniskirts with tight tops, revealing bikinis. She showed her girlfriends lingerie in her drawer that looked to be straight out of a Frederick's of Hollywood catalog: tiny thong panties that were hardly more than G-strings.

  There were spates of calm in her relationship with Steve, but inevitably there were also arguments and temporary breakups. Jami visited her family as often as Steve would let her, and when she was with them it seemed as though everything was going to be all right after all. At one point, Jami broke off with Steve completely; she had enough strength to stop being a "Stepford Barbie girlfriend" as one of her friends called her changed persona.

  The separation didn't last.

  Concurrent with his return to the Northwest, Steve Sherer's Washington State rap sheet sprouted new entries. He already had the arrest on Christmas Eve 1986, when the Bellevue police found him at the Hagels' home. Judy had seen a strange car driving by their house at all hours of the day and night and wondered about it. It was Steve's bail bondsman, who figured Steve and Jami might come home to spend Christmas with their families. When Steve showed up, the bail bondsman spotted him. He'd skipped out on the bond posted the time he laid open Bettina's scalp with the shot glass. Bail bondsmen who have been stiffed are notoriously dedicated to finding their quarry, and Steve was arrested where he hid in Jami's family's home.

  He was anathema to the Hagels. Never in a million years could they have imagined that Jami would align herself with a man like Steve or that they would have the police coming into their home at Christmas to arrest him.

  It only got worse. Two months later, Steve was identified as the person seen fleeing a just-burglarized home in a posh neighborhood near Lake Sammamish in Bellevue. The Bellevue police found his truck parked nearby, and Jami Hagel walked up as police were checking it. She refused to say who owned the truck, but by now the Bellevue police knew Steve. They knew him as Steven Sherer a.k.a. Steven Frank Sherer a.k.a. Steven Jeffrey Sherer a.k.a. Steven Christophe Michaels. He used aliases and reversed his Social Security number just enough so his name wouldn't draw a hit on police computers. But this time they had his fingerprints, and they matched them to the prints in the house that had been burglarized. He was arrested a week later and sentenced to sixty days in the county jail.

  In May 1987 Steve Sherer was spending his days and nights in jail, and Jami was desolate without him. Even though he was locked up, and she was free and working at her new job at Microsoft, Steve was still manipulating her. He had groomed her carefully to be totally dependent on him and to accept the blame for whatever went wrong in their lives.

  A letter she wrote to him on May 24 is a classic example of the thought process of an emotionally abused woman: "Dear Steve, I have done so much thinking since last night after I left you. I have been so selfish and stupid… feeling sorry for myself lately and taking it out on you. I have this bad habit of holding everything inside for too long. I just didn't want to burden you with my problems when you're in jail, and instead you think I don't care about you."

  Jami wrote that she was miserable because he was the only person she could trust enough to talk to: "My whole problem is that I miss you so much. Nobody (especially you) can believe that I am not out enjoying myself while you are in jail.… I should be fine because I'm not locked up, right? Wrong, because actually, Steve, I am locked up too. The only difference is that somebody else is holding the key to your cell and you're holding the key to my heart.… Every time we are apart, I want to crawl into a hole until you come home."

  Again and again, Jami reiterated that Steve was "all I have." It was clear that she was filled with anxiety because he had suggested it might be better if they broke up:

  But you said something the other day about us being too dependent on each other and that was the first time you actually talked to me about a problem with us. I only wish you would write me a letter regarding your feelings. Because sometimes I feel more like just your "friend" visiting you in jail. Have your feelings changed to friendship? …Please don't hold back on me. On three occasions since you have been in jail, you have told me we are over. I used to convince myself you feel that way because you're in jail, but you have done a lot of things to me when I should [have] ended us, but I never could say it was over, and I still couldn't— which makes me realize I have only been thinking about me and my feelings because you are always telling me I don't love you anymore, but you are the one always trying to end us.… It is you who doesn't love me the way you used to. I get the feeling you're hoping I will give you the strength to get rid of me. Is that true? Are you just afraid of hurting me?

  It was obvious that Steve had been dangling Jami like a puppet, pretending that he wanted to leave her— an idea difficult to give much credence to because it seemed only a sadistic game with which he could occupy himself while he was in jail.

  I would never leave you, so you aren't threatened.… It is my fault for being so in love with you.… Honey, I don't want us to end. God, you hurt me so much last night when you said you thought of me as your enemy.

  I know I can be moody and bitchy… that is what makes me want to be more spontaneous and easy going (and positive) like you. Because I see how depressing it is to be around a negative person everyday. I know that is why I love to be with you, because you are positive and full of life.

  I love to think back to the day we first met up until now. I only have a few minor regrets, but the rest of it has been the most exciting time of my life. You have shown me things and places I never thought I would see. When I think of marrying you, all I think about is a life full of excitement and love.… I don't know what you see in me since I was and still am a boring, unexciting person, while you are such an adventurous and fun-loving person. You must have just felt sorry for me, huh? And wanted to show me what life really had to offer. Because there is no comparison to that life I had before as to that life you have given me and hopefully still want to give me.

  Jami's "minor regrets" probably involved bruises and suicide threats and being terrorized at knifepoint, but she had grown adept at denial. The bad things paled as Steve drew her deeper and deeper under his control.

  To those who loved Jami, it was unthinkable that she should stay with Steve. But his plea
s were convincing to her, and when he withheld his love, he was even more convincing.

  Trilby Jordan, whose daughter, Lori, was Jami's oldest friend, recalled how relieved she had been to hear about a time when Jami had broken away from Steve and was saying that she would never go back to him. "I remember telling Jami," Trilby said, " 'I'm so glad you've broken up with Steve. You know, Jami, that statistics show that if he hits you before your wedding, he'll hit you after.' "

  Jami smiled and nodded. But later Trilby heard that Jami and Steve were not only back together; they had set a wedding date. Her heart sank. Like Judy and Jerry Hagel, Trilby had wished so much more for Jami.

  It was as if her family and friends saw an entirely different man than Jami did when they looked at Steve. There was no reasoning with her. Even her friend June Young begged her to reconsider. When Jami introduced June to Steve in a bowling alley in Bellevue, June saw that her bubbly friend had changed drastically. After that, Jami just drifted away. "He was pretty much in control," June recalled. "I might have seen them together five times after that— mostly, I saw Jami alone. Steve would talk to other girls in the bowling alley and I commented to Jami about it, but she said, 'That's just Steven.' "