Free Empty Promises by Ann Rule

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.

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    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 tocompromise 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 believedfor 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 excitement. 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