Fremont mother’s disappearance still baffles police
Detective gathers evidence about her leaving home that rainy morning
Nearly 30 years ago, Sheri Muhleman left her Fremont home. Despite the rainy weather, she didn’t take her coat. And, she’s been missing ever since.
That, and other details, continue to gnaw at Fremont homicide investigators, who for the better part of three decades have sought to uncover why the doting mother of a
5-year-old daughter would suddenly disappear.
Fremont police Detective Jacob Blass is merely the latest in a handful of detectives hoping new information might shed some light on the cold case from 1989. Despite the decades of dust collecting on the case files, he’s not giving up.
“What I’m learning as you start opening this can of worms is: People feel more comfortable now,” he said.
“The stories are getting more elaborate, they’re getting more detailed. There are a little more legs to this than there were in the ’90s.”
Muhleman was 25 when she disappeared, “a bit of a thing” standing just over 5 feet tall, weighing a mere 90 pounds, with flowing brown hair, warm brown eyes and a dimpled smile, said her mom, Pat Muhleman.
“She was just adorable, really cute,” she said. “But she had her issues with people she hung out with.”
Her friends sometimes did drugs, her mom said, and it was clear to Pat Muhleman that her daughter was still trying to find her way in life.
At the time she disappeared, her daughter was unemployed, working sometimes for a landscaping company with her boyfriend, but mostly spending her time raising her 5-yearold daughter.
“She became a bit transient,” Pat Muhleman said, referring less to her daughter’s housing situation as to her state of mind. “I tried to get her to come home so many times. It just seemed like her friends at that time were a little more important.”
Sheri Muhleman met her longtime boyfriend through mutual friends in Newark, her mom said, where she lived and graduated from high school. They started dating and eventually had a daughter, Jennifer. But their relationship was tumultuous; like “oil and water,” Pat Muhleman said. Sometimes, the couple would fight furiously, and Sheri Muhleman would stay at her parents’ home, police said.
Blass, the Fremont detective, said Sheri Muhleman also went out quite a bit, dabbling in drugs and “having a good time.” She was facing a $2,500 arrest warrant on charges of being under the influence of drugs when she disappeared, Blass said.
Blass thought maybe she
“She was still trying to be that young mother. She loved her daughter very much, and she loved her mom very much.” — Jacob Blass, Fremont police detective
skipped town to evade the arrest warrant, but when he searched records of a name change or to see if she wound up in custody while on the lam, he came up with nothing.
Nor would leaving her daughter and family behind jibe with her character, he said.
Sheri Muhleman was incredibly close to her family, calling home often just to say hi.
She had a strong support network of friends.
“She was still trying to be that young mother,” Blass said, adding, “She loved her daughter very much, and she loved her mom very much.”
When her mom hadn’t heard from Sheri Muhleman in more than two weeks, she called the police. And that’s where things get a little murkier.
Investigators do know that Sheri Muhleman was at her boyfriend’s home on Feb. 27, 1989, the morning of her disappearance. Her boyfriend’s sister came by to chat with her, Blass said, and she took her daughter to the bus stop to see her off to school. Around 9:30 a.m., the sister left, and then something happened in that Fremont home that made Blass, and other investigators on the case, think Sheri Muhleman didn’t just walk out and leave town.
Blass won’t say why he thinks that — citing the ongoing investigation — but he said evidence from the scene supports that conclusion.
At the time, police suspected the boyfriend, who told investigators he last saw the mother of their child sleeping around 8 a.m., when he left the house for his job at his landscaping business.
When he got home, she was gone, he told detectives, but he never filed a police report or made any inquiries as to her whereabouts, Blass said. After the initial interview, he has stopped speaking with investigators.
Because police never arrested or filed charges against the boyfriend, this news organization is not naming him.
Their daughter, Jennifer Abraham, however, who has only the thinnest fragments of memories left of her mom and was raised by her father, doesn’t believe he was to blame.
“My father was an amazing dad,” she said. “Not having a mother didn’t affect me. I have a lot of family and aunts who supported me over the years.”
Anyone with information about the case, no matter how trivial, can contact Fremont police’s Blass at 510-790-6963 or jblass@fremont.gov.
Contact Erin Baldassari at 510-208-6428.