Empty Promises

Jerry Hagel saw nothing about Steve that erased their first impression of him, but they were smart enough not to voice their feelings to Jami; finding fault with Steve would just have made him seem more appealing.
    To a parent, Steve was anything but appealing. He was a spoiled rich kid whose rap sheet was longer than his job résumé, although Judy and Jerry Hagel didn’t know about that when Jami first brought him home. He was also possessed of a truly ugly temper and just about every bad habit and addiction available. He drank, used marijuana and cocaine, gambled at racetracks and card rooms, and believed that women were basically chattels. When Jami answered his questions about men she had been with before she knew him, Steve was furious.
    Greg Coomes, her high school boyfriend, received a call in 1986 that at first seemed to be a wrong number. A man on the phone started swearing at him, using the worst gutter language. “He said he was going to kill me,” Coomes recalled. “I had no idea who he was.”
    Finally, Coomes heard a woman’s voice and recognized Jami. She apologized for the caller and said he was her “lover” and the “person she lived with.”
    In the beginning, shocked as she was by Steve’s need to possess her, she also saw it as a sign that he was very much in love with her. Steve’s jealousy made her feel happy and secure.

    Steven Frank Sherer was born at 6:57 A.M. on November 4, 1961, at Our Lady of Perpetual Help Hospital in Santa Maria, California. His father, David Kent Sherer, was twenty-two years old and worked as a bricklayer. Like Jami’s parents, David Sherer came from North Dakota. His mother, Sharon Ann Bleiler Sherer, known as Sherri, who was born and raised in California, was only seventeen when she gave birth to Steven. She and David would have two more children—Saundra and Laura.
    Sherri was a very pretty petite brunette. David Sherer was five feet six and had blue eyes. His son would grow to resemble him physically and be genetically predisposed to some of his father’s weaknesses, but he didn’t inherit David Sherer’s strengths. From his early days as a bricklayer, the elder Sherer worked his way up with business savvy and hard work.
    The Sherers left California and moved to Lynnwood, Washington, where the building boom had just begun. Their younger daughter, Laura, was born there. David Sherer started a construction company—Sherer Quality Homes—in Everett. He caught the wave of the Northwest’s construction boom in the seventies. He bought acreage cheap where no one but his partner saw any promise. Some of that land became Mill Creek, which would soon be one of the most desirable suburbs of Seattle.
    The Sherers were soon richer than they could ever have envisioned. They had a house in Lynnwood as well as vacation homes in Scottsdale, Arizona, and Palm Desert, California, near Rancho Mirage.
    Steve drove a new blue Ford pickup truck when he was still in high school. One of his school friends, David Harrington, recalled that the Sherers were a very nice family. “Things were pretty darn good in his house,” David said. Sherri Sherer had invited him to live with them for the last half of his senior year in Alderwood High School, and he was amazed at the good life that Steve took for granted.
    After they graduated, David and Steve rented a “dumpy little house” together in Montlake Terrace. They were eighteen then and far more interested in partying than in education. For a year, the two of them held a full-time open house and enjoyed having liquor and marijuana available with no one to stop them. They also did some cocaine, although that was mostly light experimentation. There were girls and discos, but eventually David and Steve vacated their rental house. “We might have gotten tossed out because of the parties,” David said later, looking back to that time.
    In 1982, David Harrington joined the Marine Corps and his close association with Steve Sherer ended. He saw Steve occasionally on leaves, but Steve hadn’t changed. He was still involved in the same kind of life they had shared when they were eighteen—girls and booze and drugs. It was as if time had stood still for Steve Sherer. When David saw Steve in 1987 after his own discharge from the marines, they had virtually nothing left in common.
    It wasn’t that Steve hadn’t faced tragedy in his life; he had—but tragedy seemed not to affect him. The month that Steve turned twenty-two, his