Empty Promises: And Other True Cases Read online

  Steve was out of work, a fairly common situation, and he said he would look after Chris. Vaguely worried, Jami agreed— until she came home one day and found the floor covered with broken glass. Steve had deliberately smashed all their framed wedding pictures in one of his fits of rage. Chris could have crawled in the glass and cut himself badly; at the very least, he must have been witness to his father's tantrum.

  The next day, Jami placed Chris in day care. If she had to be gone on a weekend, Jami could usually count on her mother to look after Chris. One weekend, Jami called Judy to ask her to baby-sit because Steve wanted to go someplace and Jami had a commitment. But Judy couldn't get off work early enough to suit Steve. "Jerry will be home at four o'clock," she said. "He'll be glad to take Chris then."

  But Steve wouldn't wait. He didn't leave eighteen-month-old Chris home alone; he took the baby with him, wherever he was headed. Jami and her mother were worried sick and called each other all evening to see if Steve had left Chris with one or the other of them. Finally, just before eleven that night, Steve and Chris showed up. He had taken the toddler to the racetrack, stayed until the last race, and arrived home long after Chris was exhausted and hungry.

  Judy edged along a tightrope, trying to help Jami but afraid to appear to be a meddler in her daughter's marriage. Steve constantly made it clear that he didn't want her involved and told Judy so often. "I was told [by Steve]: 'Leave us alone. If you don't stay out of our business, I'm going to take Chris and Jami and move. We're going to move to California.' So I knew I just couldn't show up when I wasn't supposed to," Judy said.

  Judy feared that if Steve moved her daughter and grandson back to California, she would never see them again. "I don't know if Jami would have moved, but I wasn't going to push him on that."

  In a sense, Steve now had control not only over Jami but also over her mother and the rest of her family. Occasionally, he would grudgingly allow Judy to come over and work in the yard with them, but he didn't want her doing anything to help Jami fix up the interior of their house. Judy was a slender and pretty blond woman who looked much younger than her age. She had a job at an auto dealership, and she was never the kind of mother-in-law who hovered, but she had reason to be worried about Jami and Chris.

  June Young, Jami's longtime friend, who hadn't seen her since the wedding, came to visit Jami when Chris was less than a year old. "I'm not sure of the date," June recalled, "but Chris was sitting up, so he was probably about eight months old."

  When June called to arrange the visit, she heard tears in Jami's voice. She regretted that they hadn't been as close as they once were, but she suspected it was because she had warned Jami not to marry Steve. "He didn't treat her well," June recalled, with massive understatement.

  This time, Jami urged her to come over for a visit. When June arrived at Jami's house in Bothell, Washington, she quickly learned why Jami was crying. Jami confessed that Steve had hit her and pulled her down the hall by her hair. And it wasn't the first time.

  "You're going to pack your things and come with me," June said firmly. "Nobody deserves to be treated like this."

  For a moment, June thought Jami was going to come with her. Then Steve came home. When he saw June there, he glared at her and grabbed Jami's arm, pulling her into the bedroom, slamming the door behind them.

  "Steve came out yelling and swearing," June said, "And then Jami came out, and she was crying. She told me that I should go, that she could take care of it."

  Saddened, June had no choice but to leave, but she was troubled for a long time, remembering how dimin ished Jami was; her dear friend had lost all of her exuberance and her zest for life and there was nothing June could do to change it. She wondered if she would ever see Jami again.

  Apparently, Jami was able to appease Steve after the incident with June— but not for long. Like almost all domestic abusers, Steve's assaults on Jami only escalated. Now he not only put her down verbally but he was also increasingly physically abusive when she annoyed him.

  And Jami seemed to annoy Steve frequently; it was almost impossible to please him. He was given to large and sudden shifts of mood, alternately depressed, euphoric, and angry. It was hard for Jami to tell if this was a result of the drugs or his natural unstable personality. Jami continued to withhold a portion of his cocaine, but it was like mending a huge, oozing wound with a Band-Aid.

  Most distressing of all to the few who knew about it, Jami herself sometimes used cocaine. Steve had finally coaxed her into trying the drug. Timarie couldn't fathom how anyone could truly enjoy getting higher and higher all night long— only to land with a crash when the supply of cocaine inevitably ran out. When Timarie asked Jami why she used cocaine, Jami answered, "Because the more I do, the less [Steve] will— and the less I will have to put up with. We won't have so much fighting.… I do it just to keep the peace."

  Steve had pulled Jami down with him in his endless pursuit of newer and grander sensations. As impossible as it seemed for the little girl who had loved to climb trees, ride horses and play softball, Jami had long been caught up in Steve's shadowy world of chasing drugs. Not only that but what most people would consider "normal" sex didn't turn him on much anymore either, and Steve talked constantly to Jami about his increasingly bizarre sexual fantasies. She hated it, but she didn't know how to escape.

  On November 5, 1989, King County Police Officer Paul Guerraro was dispatched to check on a domestic dispute at a house in Bothell. He found a near-hysterical Jami Sherer holding her toddler son. The right side of her face was bright red and there was a bloody spot on her scalp.

  "Her hair was pulled out," Guerraro remembered. "I remember it well because that's the only time I had actually seen scalp fragments attached to hair."

  In her statement, Jami said that Steve had been out most of the night, coming home at 4:00 A.M. She suspected that he'd been with another woman, and they had an argument about it. Jami said she had Chris in her arms and was preparing to leave: "I was at the door, turning the knob when my husband grabbed me by my hair and pulled me six feet across the floor."

  She dropped Chris in the struggle and the baby got up and ran over in a pitiful attempt to help her. But when Steve saw her holding Chris, he was further enraged. He balled his hand into a fist. "He said he'd kill me if I didn't let go of Chris," Jami told Officer Guerraro. "He pulled the phone cord out of the wall when I tried to call 911. I finally got the plug back in."

  Shortly thereafter in the foggy November morning, the Hagels' phone rang. Judy answered and it was Jami. She was crying and asking her mother to come and get her. "She said Steve had been out drinking and she reproached him and he was pulling her around the floor with Chris hanging on to her legs," Judy said. "So Jerry and I jumped in the car, and the police were there when we got there. [Steve] was gone. I took Chris from Jami and on the table was this long [lock] of hair— her scalp and hair lying on the table."

  Guerraro gathered up the clumps of Jami's hair and scalp and bagged them into evidence.

  Judy and Jerry took Jami and the baby home with them, hoping that this would be the last time— that even Jami would now see through this man she was married to. But she didn't.

  "Within a day or two," Judy said, "Steve kept calling and calling. We got up the next day and there were flowers on her car.… He got her to come back and talk to him, and she moved back."

  Steve had printed on a giant sign on the lawn, "I love my wife!"

  It was inevitable that when Steve's court date came, Jami didn't show up to testify against him. He had sweet-talked her and promised never to hurt her again, urging her to think of Chris's need for both a father and a mother and begging her to save their marriage. As in so many other cases involving domestic abuse, the charges against Steve Sherer were dismissed. The piece of Jami's scalp and her long beautiful hair were tossed out of the evidence room; the case was closed, and there was no reason to keep the evidence.

  Jami had more support than a lot of women caught in
marriages where they became punching bags and objects of derision. She had a good job and a family who wanted to help her. But she seemed to have long since passed the point where she could distinguish between being loved and being owned. Judy could barely count the times she'd rushed over to get Jami and the baby and move them to the safety of her house, only to listen helplessly as Steve began his incessant phone calls.

  "He would never give up. It would keep ringing and ringing and ringing," Judy said. "Every ten, fifteen minutes. He'd insist on talking to her. And at night we had to take the phone off the hook and cover it with a blanket."

  Jami still had her one link to safety. During the times she and Steve were reconciled, Jami insisted on visiting her parents. If he was at the racetrack, as he often was, Steve didn't object so much to her taking the baby to the Hagels' house. She liked to eat Monday dinner with them; that was chicken and rice night, Jami's favorite. She usually managed to sneak away from Steve and attend family birthday dinners and holiday get-togethers. Her image is there in most of the family pictures, with Jami most often sitting next to her father. Anyone looking at the Hagels' photo album would have seen a smiling, pretty young woman.

  Jami Sherer was living in two worlds, trying in vain to balance them.

  * * *

  As the eighties drew to a close, Jami Sherer became desperate to hold a lid down on a relationship that was constantly threatening to explode. In her job at Microsoft, she was calm, friendly, and efficient. Someone who didn't know her well would have supposed that she didn't have a problem in the world.

  Jami was bringing home a good salary, and, perhaps more important, she was eligible for stock options at Microsoft. The company's stock was doubling and redoubling constantly. Not only was Bill Gates a multi-billionaire, but a large number of his employees were also instant millionaires. The dress code at Microsoft was casual but the work ethic was intense and well rewarded. Jami interviewed job applicants and helped choose those she knew would fit in.

  Steve's job offered less of a future. He was working as a sales rep for an air freight company. He and Jami had decided to buy a house, but their credit wasn't good and they didn't have a down payment. Steve's mother, Sherri, agreed to loan them enough to get them into a house. Jami may have held on to the slight hope that Steve would change if they gave up the transitory feel of living in a series of apartments and had their own place with a yard for Chris.

  Sherri Sherer Schielke wanted her son's marriage to last, and it wasn't really a financial risk for her because Jami put up her Microsoft stock as collateral. Steve added a bit more collateral with his small portfolio of Nordstrom and Longview Fiber stocks, an inheritance from his father.

  Steve and Jami started looking for a house. Jami knew she would have to put some sweat equity into it, because the area's burgeoning real estate market put most homes on the east side out of their range.

  A house represented safety, respectability, and a chance to live like other young families. Maybe Steve would settle down and they could work toward a future that would be good for Chris— and for themselves, too.

  5

  The Hagels had no idea how much their daughter was hiding from them. Jami might have been using cocaine only to escape momentarily from the ugliness of her life or, as she said, to be sure Steve wouldn't use it all, but she was using. She had not been using enough for her friends at work to notice or enough to compromise her life, but the small amount she consumed made her more amenable to Steve's suggestions or, rather, less able to fight him.

  By 1990, Jami was no longer fooling herself; she knew that her marriage was a horrible mistake, but how would she ever get free of Steve? She agreed to buy a house, but she told friends that she probably wouldn't stay with Steve after they moved. She had finally come to understand that another move or a new job for Steve or a baby would never change him. Now that she was a mother, she felt such love and concern for Chris that she dared not continue to risk exposing him to Steve's chaotic rages. Motherhood had made her more vulnerable because she had so much more to lose, but it had also made her stronger. She would fight for Chris.

  Sara Smith,* who was dating one of Steve's high school friends— Eric Linde— met Jami and Steve in the summer of 1989. They went skiing and bowling together a few times and Eric and Steve went to Reno that winter. Sara liked Jami better than Steve and spent time with her. One evening the two women watched television and ate pizza while the men were out. Sara had already noted that Jami never said much when Steve was there. She was a little surprised when Jami opened up to her that night as the two of them ate pizza. "She wasn't happy," Sara recalled. "She planned to divorce Steve after they moved into their new house."

  That seemed a little odd to Sara. She wondered why Jami didn't just leave— but then she realized that leaving Steve wouldn't be easy.

  As alien as it might sound to women who were not involved in an abusive relationship, Jami had believed for a long time that Steve's violence erupted, in her words, because "he just loves me so much." But Jami had finally concluded that Steve really didn't love her and that her value to him was as a possession, not as an equal partner.

  Nevertheless, in May 1990, Jami went along with buying a split-level house on Education Hill in Redmond. As agreed, with Jami's Microsoft stock as collateral, Sherri loaned them the down payment and the closing costs on the house: $27,186.53. Since Steve's employment was sporadic, Jami's salary would be used for the monthly payments on the house. Two months later they moved in.

  "It was in awful shape," Sherri recalled of the house they bought. "It was a fixer." The previous owners had kept animals in the basement rec room, and they had urinated and defecated on the floor until the linoleum had practically melted and stuck to the floor. Jami and Steve bought a product called Kilz, applied it, and finally got rid of the odor. They found a carpenter who partitioned the basement into separate rooms, and Jami worked to fix up the rest of the house. It began to look better. It was a standard split-level plan, built in the seventies, but it was theirs.

  Steve made a few halfhearted attempts at landscaping the backyard, which adjoined a thick woods. There was a single tree in the yard, and Steve had a load of sand dumped near it for Chris to play in, although he never actually made a sandbox. The rest of the backyard was only gravel and some never-planted flower areas edged with untreated wood. Steve had no interest in gardening.

  Indeed, all of Steve Sherer's interests lay in things that could bring him an instant high or instant excite ment. The new house made no difference at all in his behavior— except that Steve could now throw private parties without having to worry about people in an apartment next door overhearing. Despite the new house, all the vacation homes he had access to, his powerboat, and his little boy who was not yet two years old, Steve Sherer was bored, still looking for new thrills, and still spending a lot of time gambling in card rooms and at the racetrack. He set up his own weekly gambling pool with friends who bet on NFL games and draft choices, but even that kept his interest for only a little while. Steve was an empty vessel that needed to be filled constantly.

  No longer satisfied by his sexual relations with Jami, Steve continually urged her to join him in "swinging." He took out an ad in a swingers' magazine without her knowledge. It was written from Jami's point of view, as if she was the one who was seeking sexual excitement by adding another man to her life. Steve received several replies, with photographs of naked males enclosed, at the post office box address he listed. They wrote that they were anxious to join Jami in her fantasies. It was, of course, Steve who was interested in threesomes; for a long time, he had talked about watching Jami have sex with another man. She was disgusted by his constant nagging at her to acquiesce to his sick scenarios about inviting people into bed with them. He was often impotent, which was not surprising considering the quantity of drugs he ingested, and he needed something to spice up his jaded sex life.

  Whether Jami actually participated in threesomes with Steve is questionab
le— at least at that point. But something happened during that time that hurt Jami so badly that she wanted to go far away from him.

  Nothing in his marriage was sacred to Steve. At one of his jobs, he regaled fellow employees with intimate— and exaggerated— details of his sex life with Jami. A young woman recalled working in a warehouse where Steve was her foreman. "He told everyone around about his sex life, where he made love with his wife, all about her physical characteristics. He said all the guys at his wedding were excited over Jami because of her breasts. He was bragging about it. He liked to talk about what they did in hotel rooms— wherever. He put it all out there whether we wanted to hear it or not."

  Steve regaled the warehouse workers with stories about, in his words, "people who shall be nameless" who came to orgies at his house. He would then describe what happened in lascivious detail. "He hinted to me that I should come over some night," the woman said, embarrassed.

  Through sheer coincidence, one of Jami's good friends since junior high school met Steve in the air freight building where she worked. She knew him only as a sales rep with a smooth pitch and a slightly skewed attitude. "He was giving away wine coolers once," she recalled, "because he said he became a very 'bad and evil person' when he drank— so he had to give it away."