Karly was only three months old when her parents first separated. How could she not be adjusted to her parents living apart?
Stark made a similar record of the interview.
Ms. Sheehan does not suspect abuse by Shawn or David. She indicated that David is a good dad. She could not explain why Karly said her dad hits her head and does not believe it is true. Ms. Sheehan indicated that she talked with Karly’s doctor regarding a condition called Trichotillomania and that Karly may have suffered from the disorder. Ms. Sheehan agreed to contact the Old Mill Center to get Karly into counseling.
If Sarah believed David was a good dad, and not abusing Karly, why was she keeping a detailed journal to the contrary?
11.19.04. Friday
Karly woke up in a good mood, having had a good night sleep. She had a bath and breakfast. While helping me put laundry away, Karly began to cry & told me she did not like it when her daddy pulled her hair. I said, “Who pulls your hair Karly?” & she said, “Daddy David pulls my hair like this.” She then grabbed a small strand of hair & lifted up, but did not pull it out. I asked her to stop crying & told her it was okay. She stopped crying, but said she was scared of her daddy several times. Later this morning, again Karly saying she is scared of her daddy, that he pulls her hair. I ask why & she said, “It’s not fair, Mommy.”
This whole entry is a total fabrication that Sarah later admitted to in court. Karly wasn’t with Sarah that night or the next morning; she was with her father the entire time. Sarah said Shawn forced her to make these journal entries targeting David as Karly’s abuser.
Most every failure in this case is tethered to some lie, some deception, and some denial. The question must be asked: why would a woman who has only been in a relationship with a man for less than three months go to such great lengths to construct elaborate lies? What would compel Sarah to frame her ex while allowing her child to be abused by a man she barely knew?
Addressing Shawn before a crowded courtroom, Sarah identified who she considered responsible for Karly’s death: “I’m angry at God for allowing you into our lives, only so you could take hers.”
We blame God when children die as a way of deflecting the truth, a way to shift responsibility away from the real source: ourselves.
Chapter Twenty-One
Unfounded for abuse!
On December 7, 2004, upon the recommendation of Detective Karin Stauder and Matt Stark, the Oregon Department of Human Services ruled the case for abuse of Karly Sheehan closed. Detective Stauder’s report stated:
Case Unfounded. Based on the information I learned in my investigation, I do not believe Sarah or David are physically abusing Karly; nor anyone else I identified. I believe the cause and start of Karly’s hair pulling is the result of her new living arrangement with her mother moving in with her boyfriend. According to Sarah, Karly was fine when she visited her at her boyfriend’s house, but when she actually moved in with her boyfriend it caused a great deal of stress for Karly.
Stauder did not reach this ruling in isolation. She depended upon the insights and input of Matt Stark. Tasked by the Oregon Department of Human Services with providing for the protection of minor children, it was Stark who decided “there was no reasonable cause to believe Karly was the victim of physical abuse. She did not provide a statement herself to indicate she had been.”
Ninety percent of the 1,500 children who die in this country every year as a result of child abuse are age three and under. Experts believe abusers choose their prey based upon a child’s very inability to tattle.
Experts in the field say fear is the most common reason children don’t report their abusers. Many victims recount stories of telling their mothers of abuse, only to be confronted with doubt and disbelief, or worse yet, to be accused of lying outright. Karly may have tried to tell her mother that Shawn was hurting her, only to be dismissed or reprimanded for it.
It is oddly coincidental that I sit typing this six years to the day since Detective Stauder and Matt Stark concluded three-year-old Karly was not the victim of child abuse. It’s a cold, rainy, dark day in Oregon. Over the random airwaves of Pandora, Celtic Woman, a female ensemble, is singing “Away in the Manger”: “Be near me, Lord Jesus, I ask you to stay close by me forever and love me I pray. Bless all the dear children in thy tender care and take us to heaven to live with you there.”
I am overcome with a sorrow darker than a starless midnight. As a woman of faith, I look for comfort in my beliefs, but if faith becomes our balm for such heinously wrong acts, doesn’t that serve to make us bystanders, if not participants, in such evils?
Up on the mountain where Karly’s maternal grandparents reside, the driving conditions are often dangerous during the winter. Years ago, the new head football coach from Pendleton, his wife and two daughters were killed there. The family had gone in search of a Christmas tree. They were headed back to town with it loaded onto their truck when angry winds bit off a chunk of an evergreen near the road and spit it out. The tree struck the truck’s windshield and killed them on impact.
Theirs was the only group funeral I’ve ever attended. I remember the younger girl’s casket best. It was shiny pink, and oh, so tiny. A bassinette crafted from cold metal, designed to deliver a child straight to God’s front door. The Bentley of coffins. A coffin not unlike the one that delivered Karly from evil. The “system” was supposed to do that, and keep her alive, but we all failed her. We are all guilty.
On what should have been Karly’s sixth birthday, I sent David a note telling him I didn’t have any idea what it must be like to have a daughter’s birthday without the daughter around. In postscript, I added my wish that he didn’t know either.
David wrote back: “Thanks for acknowledging Karly’s birthday. She was so big, bright, loving, and such good company at three that I wonder what she would have been like now. I imagine I will wonder that for the rest of my life, with every passing age.”
Everything outside on this cold day is as still as a child in death. Silent tears will fall into soft pillows this Christmas season and seasons to come as those who loved Karly best, and even those who only know her from the stories retold, continue to remember the cries of a child distressed.
Others have spoken to me about the tears that Detective Stauder has shed. It’s difficult to read the words of her report, knowing what we all know now, and not see the warning “Danger Ahead” embedded in Stauder’s own words: “I believe the cause and start of Karly’s hair-pulling is the result of her new living arrangement with her mother moving in with her boyfriend.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
As David drove by a gleaming glass office building shortly before their last Christmas together, Karly pointed at the mirrored building and said, “When I’m big and I’m a dada, I’m going to work there.”
David corrected her and said, “But Karly, when you’re big you won’t be a dada. You’ll be a mommy.”
“I don’t want to be a mommy!” Karly cried. “I want to be a dada! I want to be a dada!”
David would recall that incident later in court as the moment when he knew something was terribly amiss between daughter and mother. “I told Sarah, ‘Your relationship with Karly is beginning to crumble here and you’d better take some steps to address it.’”
Delynn was expecting Karly at daycare on Tuesday, December 7, 2004, the same day the state ruled the abuse case unfounded, but Sarah called and said she wouldn’t be bringing Karly that day because she was taking her Christmas shopping instead. Delynn was flustered by the call. By this time neither David nor Delynn trusted Sarah, yet Delynn felt she didn’t have the authority to intervene. “I was in a weird position between David and Sarah. I didn’t trust Sarah, but I thought, what could I do? The state’s been notified and nobody’s done anything.”
There were times when Delynn considered she could be wrong. “I was hoping things would get better,” Delynn said. But Sarah called on Wednesday, too, and said Karly was sick and she wouldn’t b
e bringing her that day either. And then, on Thursday and Friday, Sarah didn’t call or bring Karly to daycare.
Delynn was worried. “She was gone for the whole week she was with her mom,” Delynn said. With David in Portland for work that week, Delynn didn’t know what to do about Karly’s absence, if anything. If she called David and complained, Sarah would get angry with her. It was clear David and Sarah weren’t on good terms with one another. Delynn didn’t want to contribute to the aggravation between the two of them. Besides, really, what business of it was hers if Sarah wanted to keep her daughter during the week her daddy was out of town?
On the weekends, David and Sarah had a routine for swapping Karly. They would meet at the Starbucks at Timberhill Mall on Saturday mornings. But on that Saturday, December 11, 2004, Sarah called David to make different arrangements for the swap. Sarah wanted to know if it would be okay if they could meet at his place instead of at Starbucks. Sure, he agreed, suspecting nothing out of the ordinary.
“She said Karly didn’t look all that good,” David recalled. “I thought she meant Karly had the flu or something like that.”
Sarah showed up with Karly in tow at about ten o’clock that morning. David was completely unprepared for what he saw: Karly was completely bald, save only for a few wisps of flyaway hair. Her face was bruised. There was some yellowing—evidence the bruising was a day or two old. One eye was slightly swollen. There was a teardrop-shaped scratch under her left eye. Her lips were badly chapped, like those of a person severely dehydrated. A silent, shell-shocked Karly reached for her daddy. David wrapped his frail daughter in a protective embrace and stared, open-mouthed, at Sarah, waiting for her to say something, anything, to explain what had happened to their daughter.
“I was in shock,” David recalled. He questioned Sarah, demanded to know what had happened to Karly. What had she done to their daughter now? The only thing Sarah said as she handed Karly over to David was, “This happened on my watch.”
David didn’t know what the hell Sarah meant. Was that some sort of admission of abuse on her behalf? Sarah turned to leave before he could spit out another word but not before David realized making the switch at his house had been a very bad idea. Nobody had seen Sarah with the battered Karly.
Bloody hell.
It was a trap designed to fix suspicion on David. Under any other circumstances David would have done what any reasonable person would do, the thing her mother should have done, and taken Karly straight to the hospital. His mind was racing, his blood pumping as David sought to soothe his distraught daughter.
“It was very out of the ordinary for Sarah to drop Karly at the house, instead of at Starbucks,” David said. “I thought she was reckless and irresponsible. She gave me no prior warning that anything was wrong with Karly. She simply dropped her off and washed her hands of it.”
A trip to the hospital would ensure the abuse case would be reopened, but it would be his word against Sarah’s, and the state agency had already made it abundantly clear he was the primary suspect in the investigation they’d just closed. Besides, David worried that if he took Karly to the hospital the staff would insist on separating him from Karly, and there was no way he was letting her out of his sight now.
Terror seized his stomach. Clenching his jaw, he carried Karly into the house and sat on the couch. Karly clung to him like a baby chimp, frightened. Nuzzled in her father’s neck, she didn’t cry, didn’t move, and didn’t speak. She wanted nothing more from her father but that he never let her go.
David was furious. He no longer questioned whether Shawn was abusing Karly—he was sure of it. The problem was figuring out a way to convince the investigators they had the wrong person. “I was very concerned about getting blamed,” he said. “I was frustrated with their decision-making process. I thought it was ridiculous they were accusing me.”
David was convinced the state agency was looking for any excuse to take Karly away from him. “They were so busy trying to compile a case against me, they never bothered to find out what was happening to Karly,” David said. “They continued to assume I was abusing Karly, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.”
David put balm on Karly’s lips. He tried to get her to drink as much as possible. He knew he had to document the condition she was in, so he held out a digital camera and snapped pictures of an emaciated-looking Karly, battered, and bruised, clinging to her daddy. Then, around two o’clock that afternoon, he took Karly next door to the home of his good friends, Dave and Jennifer Woolley.
Jennifer and Sarah had been friends since 1994, but their friendship had worn thin in 2000. Jennifer told police investigators Sarah often failed to pay her share of the rent when they were roommates, and Sarah still owed her quite a bit of money. Moreover, Jennifer said she wanted to distance herself from Sarah’s irresponsible reputation. Sarah simply could not be trusted. Despite the breakdown in the relationship between Jennifer and Sarah, David had continued his friendship with the Woolleys after the divorce.
David knocked on their front door.
“David was holding Karly,” Jennifer said, later recalling that disturbing day. “She was very pale. Her hair sparse. She looked like a cancer patient. She was bruised and scratched from head to toe.”
David haltingly explained that Sarah had brought Karly to him in that condition and he wanted Jennifer to be an eyewitness.
“He was very somber,” Jennifer said. “He seemed to be at a loss for words.”
Jennifer Woolley was not alone. She had a friend visiting who did not know David, who did not know what kind of father or man he was. She only knew she saw a man holding a battered child.
Karly clung to her father so much that every time he’d attempted to put her down, Karly woke up whimpering and terrified. His daughter refused to be left alone. But finally, and probably out of sheer exhaustion, David was able to get Karly to sleep.
As soon as he was sure she was asleep, David put her to bed and attempted to file a report with DHS. He called Matt Stark at about seven-thirty that evening but Stark’s phone went to voice mail. David left him a message, asking him to return the call.
Exhausted emotionally and physically, David crawled into bed around nine o’clock. Earlier that evening Corvallis Police Department received a phone call from a woman who identified herself as a teacher, and thus a mandatory reporter. She wanted to talk to a police officer about a possible abuse case. The child, bruised and bald, was at her father’s home on Walnut Street. Her name was Karly Sheehan.
Hours after David had fallen asleep in his own bed, someone banged on his front door. Roused by the pounding and still a bit dazed, David opened the door.
“Officer Cox with the Corvallis Police Department,” said the young police officer. Cox was a general patrol officer. He’d been with the department for three years, but he’d already distinguished himself, earning an Officer of the Year award for his extraordinarily high number of arrests for DUIs, drivers impaired by drug or alcohol abuse. (Cox would later resign from his post at Corvallis following an internal investigation into the aggressive and questionable tactics he employed to earn that award.)
Officer Cox told David he wanted to see his daughter. David told the policeman Karly was sleeping but the officer insisted he needed to see her. So David escorted Cox upstairs to Karly’s room. The officer shined his bright flashlight on the sleeping toddler. Alarmed, Karly bolted upright and commenced crying.
“I took a look at her body,” Officer Cox recalled later in court. “Much of her hair was missing. It looked like her hair had been pulled out of her head.”
Cox studied the bruises splotched across Karly’s face and head and made note of the numerous scratches on her face and the side of her head. He did not take any pictures of Karly, but he looked at the ones David had captured earlier on his digital camera.
David explained how Sarah Sheehan had dropped the bald-headed and badly bruised Karly off that morning. The lawman told David he was headed over to vi
sit Sarah, but before leaving he issued an ominous warning: “If your story doesn’t check out, I will be back for you.”
After the officer left, David checked on Karly. She was in his bed, snuggled under the covers and so physically exhausted she couldn’t keep her sleepy eyes open. David knew his own fate and Karly’s would be determined in part by Sarah. Would she lie and say Karly had been perfectly fine when she’d dropped her off earlier? If she did, David figured the policeman would be back to arrest him. Such an arrest would undoubtedly mean he would lose his job, and it would likely mean deportation. At the time, running seemed like the worst of his options, but David didn’t yet know the full extent of the evil Karly encountered, or he might have snatched up his daughter’s hand and caught the next plane.
Every loving parent understands that while their best dreams revolve around their children, so do their worst nightmares. David had woken up in the middle of Karly’s nightmare and he was at a complete loss as to how he should rescue them both.
Even though it was well past midnight when Officer Cox left David Sheehan’s home, the policeman drove straight to Shawn Field’s duplex at 2652 NW Aspen Street. He knocked on the door and both Sarah and Shawn answered.
It is standard procedure for a lawman to separate people he thinks may have conflicting stories, such as suspects or victims, but Cox didn’t separate Sarah and Shawn. Shawn made it clear he didn’t want Sarah talking to the police alone. That should have set off all sorts of alarms in Officer Cox’s head.
KARLY SHEEHAN: True Crime behind Karly's Law Page 11