KARLY SHEEHAN: True Crime behind Karly's Law

by Karen Spears Zacharias

  “No. Not really,” Kate replied.

  Demarest would not be denied. She pulled a large black plastic spoon, the sort used for ladling stews, from a paper sack.

  “Have you ever seen a spoon like this before?”

  “Yes. At my dad’s house. Except it was, mmm….”

  “Was it broken like this?”

  “No.”

  “Kate, what would you do with a spoon like that to make the sound you heard that night?”

  Kate slapped her hands together.

  “How do you know it was a spoon you heard that night?” Demarest asked.

  “Because I know what spoons sound like,” the girl replied.

  “What did you do when you heard the spanking sounds?”

  “I stayed in bed.”

  “Did you think about going outside your bedroom to see what the sound was from?”

  “No,” Kate said, “because I didn’t know it was...” She stopped herself. “Just no.”

  Kate never told the jurors or anyone else how she knew what spanking noises sounded like. If her father had ever abused her in any way, Kate never admitted to it. Her mother, Eileen Field, told the court about how abusive her ex-husband had been. How he’d once dropped-kicked a puppy in front of their young daughter. How, when angered, he’d threaten to harm Kate’s beloved kittens. How he’d constantly berate her, screaming obscenities in front of Kate.

  The defense team decided not to interrogate the young girl. Whether that was because it might further implicate their client or because their client begged them not to question his daughter, the jurors thought it was the right call.

  Despite Demarest’s belief that Kate’s testimony was a critical turning point in the trial, many of the jurors said the young girl’s statements really didn’t change their minds one way or another. Most felt sorry for Kate—sorry that she had to be in the courtroom at all. Some were angry at Joan Demarest for putting Kate on the stand.

  “Kate never made eye contact with her father,” recalled one juror. “Her voice was barely audible and the answers she gave were not clear. She did meekly admit Shawn spanked Karly with a spoon, but not convincingly. It was not clear where, when, or how hard Karly was hit. The defense attorneys, to their credit, did not challenge Kate’s responses, which they easily could have done.”

  This particular juror noted how distraught Shawn was to see his daughter on the stand. He also came away with the distinct impression Kate “knew a lot more than she revealed, but she was torn about having to testify against her father, and/or she was intimidated by the environment.”

  Another juror noted, “Little, if any, of Kate’s testimony was useful for a juror looking at evidence. I felt it was unnecessary to have put her through it.”

  But Demarest remains resolute that putting Kate on the stand was the right thing to do.

  “She heard Karly getting beaten the night before Karly was killed when only Kate, Karly, and Field were home. No one else could have testified to that.”

  Demarest did not like interrogating a child before a jury. “I had to do some very hard things in this trial in order to get an evil man behind bars. I felt badly about putting Kate on the stand then and I feel badly about it now.”

  By the time Kate stepped down from the stand, many of the jurors were growing increasingly agitated. They were bored to tears with tedious, seemingly useless information about Karly’s clothing in an attempt to prove possible sexual abuse.

  Dr. Hochfeld, the doctor who saw Karly in Good Samaritan’s ER the day she died, reported that Karly had “quite a bit of bruising” along with dilation in her privates, something the doctor said “was not inconsistent with some recent sexual assault.” Semen spots were found on the carpet in Karly’s room but none was found in her diaper. Dr. Hochfeld conducted a sexual assault evaluation on Karly, but subsequent postmortem exams ruled the suspected sexual abuse inconclusive. In those early hours after Karly’s death, both Shawn and David had provided semen specimens per investigators’ requests. David asked the coroner outright if his daughter had been sexually abused, and was told that she had not been.

  It had been previously determined in pre-trial hearing that the sexual assault question would not be part of the trial. But when the defense referred to in an an effort to discredit investigators, Demarest was forced to address it, lest it become an unanswered question lingering in some juror’s mind later.

  The tedious testimony about what Karly was wearing the day she was murdered served another purpose.

  “Pounds and inches don’t say much,” Demarest said. “But Karly’s sweatsuit gave the jury a real tangible feel for how tiny and helpless she was against the tall and muscley Field.”

  Demarest also brought in computer geeks to testify about the forensics of Shawn’s computers in an effort to show how he planned to extort money from David, a theory that most of the jurors rejected due to lack of evidence. The jury had been led down so many rabbit trails they were getting frustrated.

  If the state had proof that Shawn Field battered this child to death, they needed to ante it up, quickly. The jury was weary of all the piddling details. They needed concrete evidence, something they didn’t think they had yet.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Fat pumpkins squatted side by side on the doorsteps of clapboard houses throughout town. Felt spiders and cotton webs hung in the windows of bookstores and drugstores. End shelves at the corner market were stacked with bags of candy corn. The University’s colors, black and orange, were even more evident during the month of October when Sarah Brill Sheehan stepped up to the witness stand in the Benton County Courthouse, raised her right hand and swore to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

  Joan Demarest might not have been aware of the jurors’ unease regarding her decision to put Kate on the stand, but she did fear they might be harboring an increasing disdain for Sarah.

  Sarah had a favorite outfit she wore to the trial: black pants with a black top. She coupled the ensemble with a selection of brightly colored scarves. Jurors wondered if she was purposefully wearing black to evoke the image of a grieving woman, or if her wardrobe was really that limited.

  They didn’t trust Sarah.

  “You could tell she’s used to flirting her way out of a lot of things,” noted one juror.

  Sarah wasn’t the one on trial, but the jurors were forming their own judgments about her.

  “She was out playing golf, drinking, while her daughter was being beaten, and she couldn’t figure out anything to do about it?”

  The jurors were troubled by Sarah’s coy mannerisms and her seemingly blatant disregard for Karly’s well-being. “We were keeping a tally of who is to blame and how much. Shawn was at the top and Sarah wasn’t far behind.”

  Many of the jurors were having a difficult time controlling their own emotions over the testimony they were hearing and the photos they were seeing.

  In the courtroom, Sarah’s sexual history was off limits. But Clark Willes had managed to ask enough of the right questions that the jurors knew that while her daughter’s worst nightmare was unfolding, Sarah was giving some guy a blowjob.

  “We knew that she was at the bar and that at some point she disappeared into the parking lot with the beer distributor. We could read between the lines,” one juror said.

  While the prosecutor treated Sarah with kid gloves, the jurors felt little empathy for her. They simply could not understand how Sarah could come into the courtroom day after day and remain so detached. She didn’t cry. She didn’t bolt. She didn’t even rage much. If anything, she seemed way too collected for the jury.

  “She was either callous, which I didn’t think,” said one juror, “or caught up in her own world. A narcissist.”

  Two people in the courtroom considered Sarah a victim: Demarest and Sarah. Asked by Demarest to describe herself, Sarah said, “I have a fairly difficult time opening up to people. In my experience, it seems like when I do I get hurt.”r />
  Sarah told the jurors how she’d met Shawn Field at a bar and invited him over to her house that very same night. Within a week or two of that meeting, Sarah said she and Shawn were talking about getting married. The woman who had a hard time trusting people thought nothing of moving in with a man only a week or so into the relationship and turning over her paycheck and her tips to him.

  Something wasn’t adding up—not for the jurors, anyway.

  “The whole theory that Shawn did this for money was a total joke,” a juror recalled. “We kept expecting some grand revelation but it never came. You really had to stretch the imagination to make Joan’s theory work. The case was hers to lose by going with that whole theory of motive. It was pointless.”

  Shawn Field may very well have been abusing Karly to extort money from David Sheehan, as the prosecution believed, but if so, they failed to provide enough evidence to convince the jury of it.

  “It was way too complicated,” another juror said. “The string of events didn’t make that much sense. It made no sense to abuse Karly to get financial gain.”

  But what other motive would possibly make any sense?

  Shawn Field had never worked any job for very long. He never finished those degrees in economics he kept boasting about. He’d gladly accepted money from his parents, and when they didn’t give it freely, he’d lied and cheated them out of it. Investigators discovered Shawn had taken out credit cards in his father’s name and, without his father’s knowledge, had run those cards up thousands of dollars. It infuriated Hugh Field when he learned the extent of his son’s lying, cheating ways.

  Shawn knew that with his only sibling dead, he stood to inherit all the money and property his hardworking parents had cobbled together over the years. There was really no reason for him to work. He just needed to find a way to get by until that substantial inheritance was his.

  The abuse of Karly began within weeks of Sarah moving in with Shawn Field. But it was after Shawn saw David Sheehan’s W-2s for 2005 in early 2006, according to Sarah, who had given them to Shawn, that he began to insist she needed to have full custody of Karly. It was Shawn’s idea to blame David for the numerous injuries Karly sustained over the course of the eight months leading up to her death. At Shawn’s urging,

  Sarah had even made an appointment with attorney Hal Harding to tell him she suspected David was abusing their daughter.

  From the witness box, Sarah unraveled the tale of her relationship with Shawn. She claimed they’d broken up several weeks prior to Karly’s death, after she found gay pornography on his computer—that Shawn had been extremely angry with her over it, and that Shawn had been very irate that last Thursday of Karly’s life because Sarah hadn’t paid the water bill and the city had shut off their water. He’d warned her if she didn’t get it turned back on that very afternoon, there would be hell to pay. Sarah also recalled the look of utter devastation on Karly’s face as she drove away.

  David Sheehan was tense the entire time his ex-wife was testifying. He worried she would trip up, get caught in her own deceitful web. He wasn’t sure what she might say. Whatever feelings he may have had for Sarah at one time had turned to an exhausted sigh of relief once they divorced. Now he was focused on one thing: making sure Shawn Field was convicted of Karly’s murder. He hoped and prayed to God that Sarah wouldn’t say anything to screw that up.

  Sarah was soft-spoken, her words measured, alternately interrupted by the nervous gesture of her tongue clicking against the roof of her mouth, a lapse in concentration. Her testimony was littered with long pauses, or “um”s. As the day dragged on, Sarah grew increasingly more subdued, almost to the point of sounding drugged. The jurors studied her carefully, taking copious notes as Sarah explained what she remembered from those last few hours of Karly’s life.

  Shawn had woken up in a bad mood, angry Kate hadn’t yet finished

  her big school project.

  “He yelled at her to finish her project, asking her if she wanted to repeat third grade,” Sarah said. “He yelled, ‘Do you want to grow up to be a stupid bitch like your mother?’”

  “Can you illustrate for the jury how he said it?” Demarest asked.

  “I’ll try,” Sarah said. “May I stand?”

  “Sure,” Demarest said.

  Sarah stood up from her seat in the witness box; facing the jury, she took on a decidedly intense demeanor and yelled, “DO YOU WANT TO GROW UP AND BE A STUPID BITCH LIKE YOUR MOTHER?”

  One or two of the jurors flinched from the sheer volume of Sarah’s voice.

  While Shawn yelled at his daughter, Karly remained asleep on the floor in Kate’s room, a pink blanket covering her. Sarah testified she had not seen her daughter since the day before, when she’d left her daughter in Shawn’s arms, as she drove off to pay the water bill. She did not check on Karly when she got home around midnight on Thursday.

  Shawn woke Karly Friday morning. He carried her past the dining room table where Sarah was helping Kate with her homework.

  Sarah told the jurors that Shawn had said, “Geez, babe, her allergies must be really bad. She’s been picking at her eye.”

  Shawn sat Karly on the countertop while he took ice out of the freezer to make her a compress. Sarah stroked her daughter’s head as she held the compress to Karly’s eye.

  “I was trying to figure out how it got to be that swollen and trying to get her to stop rubbing it because I didn’t want her to make it worse,” Sarah recalled.

  At some point, Sarah reached over to tickle Karly’s feet, but Karly yanked them away, so Sarah turned Karly’s tender feet over and saw they were swollen.

  Sarah had already told the jury that Shawn and his ex-wife Eileen had once run a daycare and that Shawn had learned that sometimes people abuse a child by striking them on the bottoms of their feet so the abuse isn’t readily apparent. But what Sarah didn’t tell the jury was why she would leave her daughter in the care of a person who boasted about knowing how to abuse a child?

  Sarah said she was shocked by Karly’s appearance that morning and wanted to take her to the doctor right away, but Shawn discouraged it, saying they’d take her the next day if Karly’s eye wasn’t better.

  Once Kate left for school, Sarah said she gave Karly some trail mix for breakfast and left her alone in the living room while she and Shawn slipped away to the bedroom to have sex.

  Afterward, Shawn headed to for the gym.

  “What did you do after Shawn left?” Demarest asked.

  “I immediately called my father,” Sarah said. She asked him about allergies but he was distracted. Sarah’s mother was at Oregon Health Science Center having a heart procedure.

  “Call your sister,” Gene urged.

  Sarah did call Kim. She told her that Karly’s eye was swollen. She didn’t tell either of them it looked as though Karly had been punched. Sarah would later tell detectives that her first impression of the bruising around Karly’s eye was that it “looked like a fist” had done the damage.

  “Because of talking with my father and my sister and the responses I got, allergies seemed reasonable,” Sarah told the jury. Neither Gene nor Kim had seemed alarmed. Both her father and sister recommended Sarah give Karly Benadryl.

  Sarah subtly blamed her father and sister for her own failure to take Karly to a doctor. When Shawn came home from the gym, Sarah left for work.

  A short time later, Karly’s morning prayer was answered—she went home to Jesus, as the child had explained her method of escaping her abuser. The law would call it murder.

  Sarah had been on the stand since 9:45 a.m. It was now approaching 3:30 p.m. Demarest knew it was time to wrap up the day’s questioning.

  As sirens echoed eerily outside the courtroom window, Demarest asked, “Did you ever strike Karly besides a spanking?”

  “No,” Sarah answered.

  “Did you ever punch her?”

  “No.”

  “Did you kill Karly?”

  “No,” Sarah said. />
  The echo of the siren faded into the distance.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  The next day, during a fairly routine grilling by defense attorneys, Sarah was asked about the diary she kept and the statements she made to detectives following Karly’s death—those statements where she had blamed David and defended Shawn, Sarah was asked about the ever-perplexing hair braid incident. Then, Demarest called Sarah back to the stand.

  Despite nearly two days of testimony from one of the last people to see Karly alive, her own mother, nothing critical had been introduced that would convince this jury Shawn Field was guilty. The jury hoped the prosecution was going to connect the dots for them. Thus far, the state had failed to give them anything concrete with which to convict Shawn Field. Sarah’s testimony had only served to raise a lot of questions about her own role in her daughter’s death.

  Worried Sarah’s actions, or rather her inaction, could be problematic for the prosecution, Demarest addressed that very matter with Sarah on Friday, October 20, 2006, on redirect.

  “If you were free to leave (Shawn) at any time, why didn’t you leave?” Demarest asked.

  Sarah tried to explain. She seemed weary, or perhaps medicated, tired of being on the witness stand.

  “I didn’t leave because Kate was there and I felt like she really needed me. Shawn Field would lay a guilt trip on me. ‘How can you leave Kate—she’s attached to you. You’re a good role model in her life.’

  “I had grown to love Kate very much, and I still do,” Sarah continued. “Shawn knew that and he would make me feel really guilty about not being involved in her life anymore. He would say, ‘Then you can’t see Kate anymore.’ Occasionally, he would randomly say, ‘I can hire somebody to track you down. I’ll always know where you’re at.’”

  Okay. Good. Demarest moved to the next question: “Up until Karly’s death and after, did you still love Mr. Field?”

  “I believed I did,” Sarah said.