Instead of offering to help the police officers and other medical personnel as they had attended to Karly, Shawn busied himself pushing a heavy wood dining room table up against a bedroom door. He then tossed the dining room chairs atop it.
Andy Louden, a battalion chief with the Corvallis Fire Department, at first thought Shawn was moving the furniture to make way for the medic crew. He’d witnessed Shawn attempt to comfort Sarah earlier. As Shawn embraced her, he rested his hands on Sarah’s breasts, momentarily fondling them. It was a crass gesture that struck Louden as wildly inappropriate.
Gary Thurman, one of the emergency medical technicians, went outside to get the backboard to put Karly on. As he was going back inside the duplex, he overheard Shawn talking to Sarah.
“Don’t talk to the paramedics, don’t talk to the police,” he urged.
Lieutenant Steve Bowen, also with the Corvallis Fire Department, heard the same thing. Bowen told Chief Louden what he and Thurman overheard. Louden offered to take both Sarah and Shawn to the hospital, but Shawn said no, he’d better not go, that his daughter Kate was due home soon. He didn’t know dispatchers had already called the school and told them to keep Kate there.
Sergeant Fieman told Shawn investigators were going to need his help around the place in order to determine why Karly stopped breathing. Fieman called headquarters and told them he was pretty sure they had a homicide on their hands, that somebody needed to get some search warrants in order. The Benton County Major Crime Investigation Team had been notified. Harvey and Wells were en route.
Fieman looked around the place. The car in the driveway, a pristine white Aspire, had a child’s car seat in the back and a Bush/Cheney sticker on the bumper. An empty Starbucks cup was in the console. An American flag hung motionless from the apartment’s doorpost.
An assortment of tennis shoes, big ones and little ones, were lined up just inside the doorway. The child had been found lying partly on the white carpet of the living room and the cold linoleum before emergency crews had whisked her away. A child’s pink coat hung from the coat rack. On the wall behind the rack was a framed copy of famous love quotes.
Pushed up against the west wall was a leather sectional, all white, draped with an orange-and-black Oregon State Beaver throw. A black-and-white cat lay asleep on the couch. A child’s white rocker sat motionless in the sunrays coming through the sliding-glass door onto the south patio. Dishes were washed and stacked.
Down the hallway were several ornately framed oversize portraits of a dark-haired girl, Shawn’s daughter, Kate. A Hillary Duff poster was pinned to the shut door on Fieman’s right. He opened it cautiously. Bold letters spelled out the child’s name on one wall: K-A-T-E. To his immediate left, a set of metal-frame bunk beds was pushed up against the wall. Red curtains hung from the window across the room.
The leopard-print bedding of the top bunk had been left unmade. There was no mattress on the bottom bunk; just a couple of small boxes, holding frames or books, and various other belongings. There were more posters pinned to the ceiling.
Missing was any sign to indicate a three-year-old lived in this home. The only photos were Kate’s, the only artwork hers. The clothes in the closet were Kate’s. There wasn’t a bed, not even a mattress on the floor for Karly. There was an absence of anything that spoke to her life in the place, that Karly had even been a guest there. She slept on the floor where the cats prowled, with only a pink pillow and a blanket.
Fieman continued down the hallway. Just past the bathroom, he saw the pile of dining room furniture Shawn had shoved up against a door. It didn’t take police officers long to figure out the reason for the barricade. Fieman noted there were six planting pots on the counter in the kitchen.
Fieman looked over at Shawn, who’d put on a t-shirt and was pacing around the living room.
“My daughter will be home from school very soon,” Shawn said. “What am I going to tell her?”
Fieman didn’t answer, not at first. Then, tucking his chin down and cutting his eyes toward Shawn, Fieman offered him a bit of advice: “If it was me, I’d tell anyone who asked me the straight-out truth.”
Shawn stopped pacing as Fieman continued, “I’m not going to ask you any questions about Karla at this time, but let’s just say I did, or somebody else was to—if it were me, I’d tell the whole truth so everybody would know exactly what happened.”
Shawn stood still.
Fieman shrugged his shoulders, lifted his chin, and looked straight into Shawn’s eyes. “The police are going to find out the truth anyway; you might as well tell it to them up front.”
Shawn’s head dropped so low his chin was almost resting on his chest. Closing his eyes, Shawn whispered, “Oh, God.”
The veteran police officer took Shawn’s sigh to mean one thing: defeat.
Fieman shared his observations with Detectives Harvey and Wells when they arrived.
“Situations like this require we do an investigation,” Detective Harvey said after introducing himself to Shawn.
“I understand,” Shawn replied. His voice was soft, agreeable, but his demeanor was anxious. There were no tears, no outbursts of grief, but Shawn seemed nervous.
“I’d like to search the place, see if there’s anything that might help us determine what happened to Karla, if that’s okay with you,” Harvey said. “There’s not anything illegal in the house that you’re worried about, is there?”
Just moments later, Shawn confided to Officer Steve Teeter: “I can’t believe what I did in my bedroom. My life is over.”
“What do you mean your life is over?” Teeter asked, his eyes widening.
“That guy over there will tell you all about it,” Shawn said, nodding his head toward Harvey, who had walked outside to talk privately with Sergeant Fieman.
A few minutes later, when Harvey returned, Teeter told him about the exchange with Shawn.
“He’s got a marijuana grow in the bedroom,” Harvey said.
That explained the blockade Shawn had constructed from the dining room furniture, but it raised other questions. For starters, who worries about getting in trouble with the law for growing marijuana plants when there’s a battered child lying on the floor, not breathing?
That’s one of the questions Detective Harvey hoped to settle when he asked Shawn to join him at the Law Enforcement Center. Shawn Field was not under arrest.
Not yet.
Shawn said he’d be glad to go in for questioning, but first he’d have to see to his daughter. School was nearly out. Sure, go ahead, not a problem, Harvey said. But Shawn changed his mind, called Eileen Field, his ex-wife, and asked if she could pick up Kate. Something had come up that needed his undivided attention.
In the patrol car, on their way to the police station, Harvey got a call from Wells.
“The girl’s dead. Beaten to death,” Wells said.
“Got it,” Harvey said, cutting his eyes at Shawn.
“There’s more,” Wells said, pausing. “The emergency room doctor said there’s evidence she was sexually assaulted.”
David spent a fitful Friday night at John Hogan’s place. Earlier that evening, Detective Stauder and another officer had interviewed David at the hospital. The three-hour interview was grueling, particularly given that David was still in a state of shock. The detectives asked if he had anything to do with Karly’s death. David replied that he hadn’t seen Karly since Monday.
“What do you think happened?” Detective Stauder asked.
“I suspect Karly was over at Shawn’s house—she doesn’t like being over there—so Karly was acting out and Sarah couldn’t deal with that. I think she overreacted,” David said.
“Have you ever had any funny feelings about Shawn?” Detective Stauder asked. “Like a mother’s intuition kind of thing?”
“He’s a liar and a fraud,” David said.
Detective Stauder warned David that his own house had been sealed off so Corvallis Police Department’s evidence team could gi
ve it a thorough search. They seized the sheets from the laundry and an unlaundered Nike t-shirt that belonged to Karly. It had a red stain on the front. David told them it was from their last meal together, the pizza they had before he dropped her at Sarah’s on Monday.
Wells warned investigators to be on the lookout for wooden spoons. Sarah told Wells that David used wooden spoons to discipline Karly. Every drawer, every cupboard, all closets, and all garbage cans were checked for a wooden spoon; the Corvallis Police found none. What investigators did find in David’s home were toys galore, dozens of framed snapshots of Karly, and racks of the girl’s clothes hanging in the closet. “It was apparent Mr. Sheehan was dedicated to Karly,” the police report concluded.
Detective Wells came to the same conclusion. “Once we did the search and met David we could tell he was a victim. For most of us, David was out of the picture as a prime suspect that night.”
Chapter Thirty-One
Emmet Whittaker was in the south of France, two months into a six-month trip around the world, in June 2005 when he received a disturbing e-mail from his good friend David Sheehan.
It wasn’t so much wanderlust that took Emmet away from his job at HP as it was this nagging feeling that there had to be something more purposeful to life than work. Emmet wasn’t yet sure if he wanted to settle in the U.S. He had come to Corvallis in 1996 along with David Sheehan and a host of other Irish natives for training at HP’s headquarters, and he’d fallen in love with a girl named Sanna, who also worked at HP.
When Emmet’s tenure on the green card was up, Emmet took Sanna home to Dublin, where he continued to work for HP. But while Sanna loved Emmet’s Ireland, it wasn’t home for her. Sanna went back to HP in Corvallis, and Emmet took a leave of absence from work and set out to see the world.
Keeping in touch with friends, even good friends, can be difficult when traveling.
“Dave and I are the kind of friends who like to sit down over coffee, breakfast or a pint and discuss life a bit,” Emmet said. His distinct Dublin accent carries a weightiness of wars fought and lost.
As he traveled, Emmet kept in touch with David primarily by e-mail and the occasional phone call, but David had not told Emmet about Karly’s deteriorating condition, the state’s investigation, or Sarah’s new boyfriend. Nor had David discussed with Emmet his fear of deportation, although it’s a common fear among immigrants.
“If you are on a green card, you are a guest of that nation,” Emmet said. “If you show up on the radar for anything, even if it’s unwarranted, you can be deported. It’s a very real fear.”
Still, Emmet knew nothing of the terror Karly had endured or the fears David left unspoken until the bright June day in 2005 when Emmet received a phone call from an HP coworker who told him Karly was dead, and shortly thereafter an e-mail from David, telling him the same. Emmet sat down before a computer screen in an Internet café in the south of France and logged into his e-mail.
“I was greatly shocked,” Emmet said. “The e-mail was quite short. He said Karly was dead. I believe he said she was murdered. I was absolutely horrified.”
Emmet left the café after sending David a note back, telling him if he needed anything at all that Emmet was there for him. Then Emmet when straight to the home of his goddaughter and her mother, where he’d been staying, and wept freely for David and Karly.
“I was horrified by it, thinking about Karly. It was gut-wrenching.”
Emmet followed the news of Karly’s murder from afar, reading the local newspaper reports in the Gazette Times. He called Sanna and asked her to go to David, to see if there was anything she could do to be of help.
News of Karly’s death spread rapidly through the offices and hallways at Hewlett-Packard. Although Liz Sokolowski and David Sheehan worked for the same company, the two had never spoken. Still, she knew who he was, knew he was married, or had been. When she heard about Karly’s murder from her friend Sanna, she was staggered by the news.
“You have this perception that those things happen, but not to anyone you know,” Liz said. “There was this disbelief that it could happen at all, but that it happened to someone I’d seen around, who seemed like a very gentle and kind individual… you don’t expect that.”
Tragedy is the unseen sibling of every Polish child. Liz had grown up in Chicago, a member of one of the largest Polish communities outside of Warsaw. Sacrifice and suffering were common topics of discussion at the dinner table, as her parents told and retold the story of how Liz’s great-grandmother had been a POW in Siberia. Soldiers had marched into the house and snatched her away from her terrified children. Twice Poland has been completely wiped from the maps, first by the Germans and then by the Russians— their daughters and mothers raped, their sons and fathers slaughtered. “I heard all those sad things growing up,” Liz said.
It’s a gift, knowing where you come from and who your people are. It enables a person to see a connectedness from country to country, from generation to generation, from person to person, and it keeps us from being too self-centered, too self-interested.
Liz was shocked and horribly sad for David, but she didn’t know him well enough to approach him, to tell him how terribly sorry she was for his loss, to give him a hug, the way she’s prone to do for anyone, any time they are hurting. The hearts of so many people at HP and in the broader community of Corvallis went out to David, but it’s hard to know what to say, what to do, when a child is murdered. They wept and prayed for him, they sent hundreds of condolence cards, and they swore that from here on out they would be more watchful, for all the children’s sakes.
Chapter Thirty-Two
District Attorney Scott Heiser was buckled down writing search warrants for the Benton County Major Crime Investigation Team, per their request, and getting updates from the detectives at the scene. Two things in particular concerned Heiser: Why was Shawn Field taking photos of Karly Sheehan? And what was up with Sarah Sheehan?
“Sarah’s demeanor was almost across the line,” Heiser said. “She was so hysterical you had to wonder if she wasn’t involved in this somehow.”
Heiser drafted a warrant to seize Shawn Field’s camera.
Investigators found photos of a very battered Karly on the camera’s disc. Heiser wasn’t yet sure about all the details of Karly’s death, but by midafternoon, Heiser was certain Shawn was their guy.
And he thought the motive was the same issue that had plagued Sarah her entire adult life: money. Investigators theorized Shawn was abusing Karly and documenting the abuse with photographs for the purpose of extorting money from David.
David had not made child-support payments to Sarah because with her gambling problems, Sarah couldn’t be trusted to spend the money on Karly. David paid for everything Karly needed: childcare, clothing, and medical care. In addition, David was paying off thousands in gambling debt that Sarah saddled him with in the divorce agreement.
David set up a college fund for his daughter. He had even discussed paying for Sarah to complete her college education, reasoning that the better educated Sarah was, the better a mother she’d be to Karly.
Sarah had attended college off and on for ten years, ever since she had left our house and moved to Corvallis, but in all that time, she had never completed her degree. David wanted Sarah to pursue a profession, to be a good role model to Karly. He was willing to help underwrite Sarah’s education to make that happen.
From the beginning of the police intervention, Sarah and Shawn were both fingering David as the primary suspect in Karly’s death, even though David hadn’t even seen Karly in nearly a week.
Investigators, however, suspected Sarah was complicit in her daughter’s death, theorizing that she was out to “prove” David Sheehan was beating his daughter. Then Sarah would get full custody of Karly— and the regular monthly child-support payment that went along with custody. David was making plans to move to Portland in August with Karly. Investigators learned that Sarah had borrowed $1,000 to hire an attorn
ey to fight for custody. Sarah said she was worried that David would take Karly and move out of the country.
She saw an attorney, Hal Harding, in early 2005, and had taken along that sketchy four-day diary that she’d kept, supposedly documenting the ways in which David was abusing Karly. But she told Detective Wells that instead of using the money to hire a lawyer she had used it to pay some bills or something—she couldn’t remember what she’d spent it on exactly.
Detective Harvey finished his last interview with Shawn shortly before 7 p.m. on Friday, June 3, 2005. Shawn said he was tired and asked the officer if there was some place he could lie down. He was shown to a quiet room with a sofa, where he rested until 9 p.m., when Shawn told Harvey he was ready to leave. Harvey arranged for a patrol officer to give Shawn a ride anywhere he wanted to go.
After Shawn left, Harvey informed Heiser that during his preliminary interviews, Shawn “blamed David for everything. At no time during this interview did he blame Sarah for Karla’s injuries.”
Heiser told Harvey to arrest Shawn—not for murder, but for manufacturing a controlled substance. At approximately 9:30 p.m. on Friday, June 3, 2005, Shawn Wesley Field was arrested as he got out of a patrol car in front of the police station. The charge was manufacturing and delivery of a controlled substance within one thousand feet of a school.
That charge was updated on Monday, June 6, 2005, when Shawn Wesley Field was charged with the murder of Karla Sheehan.
Detective Harvey had earlier read Field his Miranda rights, so he just cuffed him and booked him into custody.
Chapter Thirty-Three
God stopped the abuse.
That’s what Delynn had told me the day we met at the bakery. “God was the only one who could stop it,” Delynn said. “We were all failing. Everybody was failing her. I know God intervened because of Karly’s prayers.”
The community learned about Karly’s prayer from Sarah, who testified about it. Sarah said Karly had woken up complaining that her head and tummy hurt. Sarah had not been home on Thursday, June 2, 2005. The bar where she worked had a promotional event that night, and Sarah, who was scheduled to work from 4 p.m. to 7:30 p.m., had left Karly with Shawn earlier that afternoon.
A Silence of Mockingbirds Page 16