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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 Washington, 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.

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    S teve’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