A Silence of Mockingbirds

by Karen Spears Zacharias

  So unsure was she that Andrea rang her brother back.

  “David, how do you know Karly’s dead? She can’t be dead! Are you sure?”

  “As sure as I can be,” David replied. “That’s what the doctor just told me.”

  David’s parents, James and Noreen Sheehan, were on the dance floor swaying to a slow song. Noreen had been facing the door when Jason had first come to get Andrea. She’d watched the two of them leave together. There was something about the way they were walking, an urgency to it that bothered Noreen.

  “James, there’s something wrong,” she said. “Maybe something’s wrong with one of the grandkids.” The couple held their spot on the dance floor facing the door, waiting, watching, expecting.

  Andrea was soon back, making her way across the crowded dance floor. When she reached her parents, Andrea took them both by the hand and led them outside.

  “What’s wrong?” Noreen asked first, then James. “Andrea, what’s wrong?”

  They kept repeating their question, but Andrea would not answer them. She wanted to get them as far away from the wedding reception as possible. Once outside, Andrea spoke as plainly as she could.

  “Karly is dead!” she cried.

  “Andrea! Don’t say things like that!” Noreen scolded. But then she saw the darkness in her daughter’s eyes. “Oh my God!” she cried. “Why? How?”

  But Andrea didn’t know why or how. Jason was kneeling on the ground, weeping. They all were weeping.

  “We’ve got to get home,” Noreen said. She turned to her husband. “We all have to get home. Right now! I need to talk to David.”

  A friend took them to the hotel, where they picked up their bags, and then drove them the thirty miles home to County Kerry.

  “We were very anxious to get home,” Noreen said. “David was going to ring us when he had information for us. At that stage, we had no details as to what had happened. Unfortunately, we had a fair idea that Sarah was involved.”

  Nearly all of Andrea’s childhood memories include David. The two, who were born only a year apart, were as close as any siblings could be. They spent nearly every weekend with their own grandparents. In the mornings, David would tag along with their grandfather and Andrea along with their grandmother. In the afternoons, the two siblings would go off frogging.

  “We would spend hours playing in the field, climbing into drains with old tin cans and catching frogs and putting them into a barrel,” Andrea recalled “Our record was about fifteen frogs. We were very proud!”

  As they grew older, David took pride in looking after his younger sister. When she was in her final year of college and pregnant with her daughter, Chantelle, Andrea developed a kidney infection.

  “I didn’t want to ring Mom and Dad as I was afraid that they would worry, and also I didn’t want to put them under pressure financially as there were three of us in college that year, which can’t have been easy,” Andrea said. “So I rang David, who told me to get myself to a doctor, and that he would send down money for me. A check arrived in the post the following day.”

  Now her big brother was across a wide ocean from her, desperately hurt, and there was nothing Andrea, or anyone else, could do to bring Karly back.

  Still driving south on I-5, David called his friend John Hogan. There were a million scenarios running through his head, but David was trying his best to stay focused as he told John what little he knew.

  “John, when I get there, I don’t want to see that prick Field,” David said.

  John was waiting at Good Samaritan Hospital when David pulled into the parking lot. Before getting out of the car, David dropped his head to the steering wheel and prayed for strength.

  David felt lead-footed entering the ER. John embraced him and handed him a bottle of water. His priest, Father John Mitchell from St. Mary’s Catholic Church, was there as well. They spoke briefly before Detective Karin Stauder and Detective Shawn Houck showed up to interview David.

  Three hours and a penile swab later, when David finally emerged, John Hogan was still there. Despite the warmth of that June day, David felt a chill deeper than any he’d ever known.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Karla Isabelle Ruth Sheehan was declared dead by Dr. Paul Hochfeld, the attending emergency room physician, at 2:20 p.m. on Friday, June 3.

  Detective Mike Wells was at his desk tending to paperwork that afternoon when his cell phone buzzed. He turned it over, looked at the incoming number. It was Jason Harvey. Wells flipped the phone open. “Mike?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Maclean needs some help on a death investigation out on Aspen. I’m going out there. You want me to swing by and get you?”

  “What kind of death?” Wells asked.

  “A kid.”

  Wells had been with Corvallis Police Department nearly ten years, but he’d only been a detective for the past few months. Wells is a handsome man, with a runner’s frame. He keeps his brown hair clipped in military style. He is deliberate man— some would say calculating. He’s a thinker, but he’s no diplomat. Wells says what he thinks, plainly and frankly. He’s a take-charge, help-or-get-out-of-my-way kind of guy.

  Harvey, by contrast, is a broad-chested fellow with a slow smile and an intimidating presence to those on the wrong side of the law. Harvey prefers the company of dogs to people.

  Wells was still gathering up equipment—baggies, tape, swab kits, gloves, video equipment—when Harvey showed up a few minutes later. The two men loaded all the stuff they’d need to collect evidence into the back of Harvey’s patrol car.

  Picking up the radio handset, Wells called dispatch.

  “What’s the address of the death investigation that Maclean is on?”

  “2652 NW Aspen Street.”

  “What do you know about it?”

  “A child stopped breathing. Fire crew is there now.”

  Medics were loading a gurney into the ambulance when the two officers arrived. The emergency crew sped away with lights and siren blaring before the two men got out of their car.

  Sergeant Fieman walked over to greet the detectives.

  “Poor girl’s been beat, beat bad,” Fieman said. The veteran cop was visibly shaken.

  “How old is she?” Harvey asked.

  “Three,” Fieman replied. “She wasn’t breathing. Didn’t have a pulse. I don’t think she’s gonna make it.” He shook his head the way disbelieving people do. “I know her momma. Sarah Sheehan. Fire crew took her to the hospital. Her boyfriend, Shawn Field, is inside the house. Officer Teeter’s with him.”

  “Wells, why don’t you head on over to the hospital? Monitor the mom and kid,” Harvey said. “I’ve got a couple of questions I’d like to ask the mom’s boyfriend.”

  Wells located Officer Maclean in the emergency room. He had a box camera and was taking photos of the little girl.

  “We’ll do an autopsy to confirm it, but it appears she died of blunt force trauma,” Dr. Hochfeld advised Detective Wells. “Her mom’s in the waiting room. You want to come with me while I tell her?”

  The two men walked the hospital hallway, heads down and somber, to a private waiting room where Sarah Brill Sheehan waited with her roommate, “Auntie” Shelley Freeland.

  Shelley was sitting on the couch. She saw the men enter before Sarah did. With her back to the door, Sarah was kneeling on the floor in front of Shelley. The two women had weathered ten years of friendship, often strained by the fraying of financial or moral cords. They grasped at each other. Their hands entwined, they prayed and wept like the sisters of Lazarus, wailing for God’s intervention. The two of them had made untidy promises, the way they had a thousand times before. They promised to be good girls if only God would heal Karly, right now, right this very minute.

  Shelley knew when she saw the doctor’s fretted brow that all their ardent prayers and silver-tongued promises could cease.

  Sarah turned toward the door. A familiar blankness shrouding her face.

  “Dr.
Hochfeld,” the man in the white coat said, introducing himself. He did not offer a handshake. Neither woman rose. They continued to grasp each other.

  “Karla is dead,” he said. His tone was terse—an even-tempered man standing two steps beyond agitated.

  The wailing resumed.

  “But they told me they got a pulse!” Sarah screamed through tears. Fists balled up, she beat the couch. “They told me they got a pulse!”

  Shelley lacked Sarah’s fury, but her tears fell, too, hard and steady.

  The doctor and detective stood by, silently, waiting for a break in the squall. One minute, then two, passed before Dr. Hochfeld spoke sternly, eyes blurred by despair.

  “Karla had numerous bruises to her face. Do you have any idea where those came from?” he asked.

  Sarah looked up. Dr. Hochfeld turned toward the officer at his side. As a warning to her, he said, “This is Detective Wells with the Corvallis Police Department.”

  There was another pause as choking sobs subsided. Sarah was struggling to find her breath to speak.

  “She jumped off the bed last night,” Sarah offered. “Those bruises, they came yesterday, to her eye and her arm.”

  When a child lies beaten to death, a reckoning is called for. Dr. Hochfeld’s next question let Sarah know he didn’t believe her.

  “Karla’s eye was very swollen.”

  “She has very bad allergies,” Sarah said. “She’d been rubbing her eye.”

  Unconvinced, Hochfeld left the room without another word. Never in his twenty-seven years of medical practice had he ever seen a child so severely beaten. The little girl’s head injuries alone couldn’t have been worse if she’d fallen from a two-story window.

  Shortly before Karly was declared dead, Lieutenant Tim Brewer notified Benton County District Attorney Scott Heiser. Brewer told him a three-year-old child had been transported to Good Samaritan Hospital and that investigators on the scene were saying she had been badly beaten.

  Heiser was serving his second term as DA, a job he’d held since 1999. Heiser has a sharp chin, disarming smile, and clipped hair. He was a local boy who obtained his undergraduate in Economics from OSU and his law degree from Northwestern School of Law at Lewis and Clark, a private college in Portland.

  Heiser prosecuted a number of child abusers, though most were sex offenders, but among his cases he couldn’t recall any abused child who had died. As he headed across the street to the Corvallis Police Department, he hoped Brewer was wrong, and that the EMTs had been able to revive the little girl.

  •

  In a private room at the hospital, a police investigator pulled up a chair in front of Sarah and Shelley.

  “I’m Detective Wells with the Corvallis Police Department,” he said.

  Both women nodded, still crying.

  Wells placed a tape recorder between them.

  “I’m not really good at writing things down so I’m going to go ahead and just record this so I can make sure I get everything when we talk, okay?”

  The women bobbed their heads, unable to say anything coherent.

  “What’s your name again?”

  “Sarah.”

  “And what’s your relationship?” Wells asked, looking at Shelley.

  “Um, she’s my best friend and my roommate,” Sarah replied.

  “Okay, and your roommate?”

  “But we’re not lesbians,” Sarah said.

  The detective thought that was an unusual clarification to make at such a time. He asked Shelley to spell her name. Both women were crying so hard that even with the recorder it was difficult to decipher their answers.

  “I’m Karly’s godmother,” Shelley Freeland said. She added that Karly and Sarah lived with her. They covered all the basics, including that Shawn Field lived at the duplex on Aspen Street, where Karly was last seen alive. But Sarah clarified that relationship, too.

  “He’s not actually my boyfriend anymore. We just broke up.”

  “When did you guys break up?”

  “Um, two weeks ago, two or three weeks ago today.”

  Wells asked who was at the house when Karly stopped breathing.

  “Shawn.”

  Wells made a couple of notes regarding Shawn, where he worked— Grempsey’s Restaurant— and information about Shawn’s daughter.

  “Can you tell me what happened? What’s been going on? I heard Karla’s been sick,” Wells said.

  “She has really bad allergies,” Sarah replied.

  Someone knocked on the door. Wells excused himself and said he’d be right back after he made a phone call. He left the recorder running.

  Sarah, crying harder, said, “Shelley, my baby’s gone. I can’t do anything, oh, Shelley.”

  Shelley simply could not offer Sarah any consolation. Karly was dead. What comfort was there now?

  “She was supposed to grow up and be beautiful and popular and fun and funny, now she’s dead,” Sarah cried. “Why did this have to happen? No, no, no, God, oh, my God, I didn’t do enough. What didn’t I do? What could I have done?”

  Shelley urged Sarah to take a drink of water.

  “No,” Sarah said, pushing it away. “I just want to know why she is dead. There has to be a reason. You just don’t decide to die. I just can’t believe, oh my God, I can’t breathe.”

  “Take a deep breath,” Shelley advised. “Hold it. You can do it.”

  “Oh, my God, it’s all my fault,” Sarah said, gasping, sobbing. “Why didn’t I think of something to do? I should have known something was wrong. I should have known it was something besides allergies.”

  Chapter Thirty

  Sarah had an idea of who had done this horrible, horrible thing to her daughter.

  David.

  At the hospital, during those early hours following Karly’s death, Sarah met with Detective Wells and others from the Corvallis Police Department, and told them about the Children’s Services investigation and about her jealous ex-husband.

  “Karly was with David more than she was with me because I’m going back to school and working. I’ve always worked but David’s just, you know, more established,” Sarah said.

  Sarah said that over the past several months Karly had been saying that her daddy hits her. “I’d asked Karly, ‘Why does he hit you?’ and Karly said, ‘He hits me because I go pee pee.’ Karly was very afraid of going to the toilet. I’d ask her again, ‘Where does your daddy hit you?’ and she’d point to her bottom or someplace else.”

  Detective Wells asked if Karly was potty-trained. Sarah replied mostly but that she was wearing a diaper that morning because Sarah hadn’t done the wash and Karly didn’t have any clean panties.

  Sarah told Detective Wells that Karly had really loved being at Shawn’s, that she loved Kate and the cats, but that David had stirred up trouble by asking Karly, “Is Shawn going to be your new daddy? You love Shawn and not me, don’t you?” According to Sarah, that’s when Karly’s attitude started to change, when she started pulling her hair out and hitting herself.

  “Karly has been showing up with all these injuries,” Sarah said. “Shawn is convinced David is harming Karly. Shawn said he put cortisone on her because it brings out bruises faster and he wanted to see what else David had done because he’s convinced that David’s not appropriate with Karly. He’s trying to bring the bruises out so we can show what David does.”

  Shawn had been taking pictures to document the abuse, Sarah said. Shawn had even shown her photos that very morning of some of Karly’s injuries.

  “When Karly got to our house she was pretty bruised already, and then, you know, the bruises tend to get worse before they get better,” Sarah said.

  Sarah had noticed a bump on Karly’s head earlier that week, and asked Karly what happened.

  “She said her daddy hit her with a spoon. She had also said that her dad had hit her on her feet with a spoon for going potty.”

  Detective Wells asked if Sarah had noticed any bruising on Karly’s feet.


  “This morning she was crying so I was tickling her feet and it hurt her really bad. I looked at her feet; they were really swollen, and I said, ‘What’s wrong?’ And she said, ‘My daddy hit them with the spoon.’ They were real tender.”

  Karly’s feet weren’t the only thing bruised that Friday morning, Sarah said. “When Karly got up this morning, it was totally shocking to see her. Her eye was swollen shut.”

  The more questions police asked, the more animated Sarah became, and the more convinced she was she’d better leave the hospital before David showed up. Sarah appeared so terrified of David that police considered him a real threat.

  “Based on everything Sarah told us, we saw David as a threat and a potential suspect,” Wells said. They began to make plans to keep David and Sarah away from each other, not only at the hospital, but also later throughout the night.

  Police told Sarah and Shelley they could not return to their apartment. It had been secured by police and would be searched. No problem, Shelley said; they could stay at her parents’ house in nearby Salem.

  In his summary notes, Wells said Sarah had trouble keeping information straight. “Based on my training and experience, her demeanor, reactions, emotional state, and ability to recall information were consistent with victims of crimes and those who have been traumatized by events,” Wells said.

  The detective would later change his mind about why Sarah couldn’t keep her story straight. “Interviewing Sarah was exhausting,” Wells said. “She was the most draining individual I’ve ever interviewed. If I asked her what her address was, she’d take twenty minutes to answer. She couldn’t remember anything. She was quiet, had an almost monotone voice. She never volunteered anything.

  “Sarah was extremely cautious, watching her own back, always making sure she wasn’t going to get tripped up and charged with anything. She is way smarter than she comes off.”

  Shawn Field’s behavior hadn’t been normal either. Emergency crews who arrived at 2652 NW Aspen Street thought it odd that the sandy-haired man, wearing nothing but athletic shorts and sunglasses shoved back on his head, kept pacing back and forth, “like a trapped animal.”