Free Empty Promises by Ann Rule Page A

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 questionable— 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."

She noted that Steve talked a great deal about his sex life, and was surprised to find out that he was married to her old friend, Jami Hagel. But she was revolted to hear the way he talked about Jami.

A number of women who worked with Steve soon learned that he slyly turned most conversations into sexual revelations. He often invited them to bring their boyfriends and come to parties at the Sherers' house inRedmond. Most said no at once, but a few were trapped into accepting when they ran out of excuses. Steve never threw any real parties, however. He invariably gathered the men into the den, where he showed them pornographic videos. Jami, while polite, always seemed embarrassed and uneasy when they entertained like this.

There was no question that Steve had the toys to attract people to his home or his mother's vacation homes. He was able to persuade a few couples to go for boat rides on Lake Washington. Once he and Jami threw a Murder Mystery Game at their house in Redmond. But Steve most often turned people off by the way he treated his wife. All his joviality and energy were nullified by his cruelty toward Jami.

"He had a