Decade later, callousness of what killer did to 7-year-old hasn’t faded

It’s been 10 years since she was senselessly and brutally murdered in a casino bathroom in Primm Valley. Can you believe it? Ten years.

She would have been 17 now and close to graduating from high school. Maybe she would have been a good student. Maybe she would have excelled at sports, or in the drama club. Anything is possible when you’re a kid.

Unfortunately, worst nightmares are possible, too.

A decade has ground by, and in a jaded world full of hurt you might assume that would be enough time to erase a sweet 7-year-old girl’s face from memory.

Some might have forgotten, but Phil Ramos remembers. How could he forget in 100 years? Ramos and his partner, Jimmy Vaccaro, were the Metro homicide detectives who worked the Iverson case and were changed forever by what they experienced. Child murders trouble even the most hardened detectives, but what chilled them was the manner in which Sherrice’s killer, a 19-year-old Long Beach, Calif., resident named Jeremy Strohmeyer, described his crime.

On May 25, 1997, Strohmeyer sexually assaulted, then strangled the child in a restroom stall at a Primm Valley hotel. The fathers of Iverson and Strohmeyer had stopped off to gamble, and their children were unsupervised late at night. A hotel surveillance tape caught Strohmeyer and his friend, David Cash, following Sherrice Iverson into the bathroom. Cash left shortly after entering, but Strohmeyer remained for 25 minutes.

Strohmeyer eventually took a last-minute plea bargain to avoid the death penalty and received three life sentences without the possibility of parole. Cash never was charged with a crime.

As if the crime weren’t callous enough, during his police interview Strohmeyer matter-of-factly described his actions.

“He just admitted it,” recalls Ramos, who is now retired. “He said, ‘Yeah, I did it.’ He said, ‘I just wanted to see what it was like to kill a little kid.’ It was the most monotone and non-emotional confession I have ever heard. The guy just had no feelings whatsoever. None.

“It was amazing. That was clearly stopping a child serial killer. He sat there and gave us a blow-by-blow description in vulgar detail. He barely blinked. I wish I could have had a camera on my own facial expressions, because I would have been aghast. Just talking about it I get a little worked up. I’ll bet you his pulse didn’t climb above 60. He was just quiet, calm, very sedate.”

Strohmeyer told police he killed the child while high on drugs and alcohol, because, “I wanted to experience death. I never have. I’ve never been that close.”

But when it was time for Strohmeyer to get close to death, he relied on gifted defense attorneys Richard Wright and Leslie Abramson to carve out a compromise that kept him off death row. (In 2000, Strohmeyer turned on his defense team, described once as “the A-Team,” filing an unsuccessful appeal for a new trial based on an argument of ineffective assistance of counsel.)

Along the way, we learned that Strohmeyer and Cash bragged about the crime to their high school friends. Those friends declined to assist in the police investigation. A child had been murdered, and they stood silent.

Part of what made the case so shocking were the words Strohmeyer chose in his 22-page statement to the court following his October 1997 guilty plea. He began by apologizing and accepting responsibility for the crime, but then proceeded to place the blame with a variety of culprits: His friend Cash, a devious ex-girlfriend who apparently forced him to take methamphetamine, his imperfect upbringing, and so on.

“I am not a monster, a pedophile, a delinquent, a sociopath,” he told the court. “I was not a predator waiting to snatch this child from her family. … I am not that different from other people’s sons or brothers or nephews or cousins. … What happened to me could happen to other kids.”

If he was right, heaven help us all.

“To top it all off, the brutality of the way he killed her was just, like, psychopathic,” Ramos says. “The cold way he described it, it was like he was describing how to build a model airplane. There was no emotion at all.

“The poor little thing didn’t have a chance.”

John L. Smith’s column appears Sunday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. E-mail him at Smith@reviewjournal.com or call 383-0295.