A Silence of Mockingbirds

by Karen Spears Zacharias

  “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.”

  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.

  Demarest asked Sarah to explain to the jury her mental state in the first six days following Karly’s death.

  “I don’t know if I could exactly describe what my thought process was. If any of you get migraines…your head hurts so bad, everything is fuzzy and painful. It was really difficult to imagine that my daughter was dead. I had a hard time accepting that. I didn’t even know where Shawn Field was the first few days.”

  Sarah paused, sighed heavily, and paused again before continuing. “So that first week was really hard to come to terms with losing my daughter, obviously. It was the most painful, but there was also the loss of other key people in my life. It just felt like one day I had a family and then I didn’t. I had a hard time understanding. I just kind of shut down for a while.”

  Sarah may have been referring to her broken relationship with her brother. In those early days after his niece’s murder, Doug Brill told investigators, “I seriously thought that Sarah was going to get arrested. I really did.” Police wanted to know why he would think that. “Sarah has a really wicked temper,” Doug said. He thought perhaps she had just imploded and accidentally killed Karly, or maybe she had left a bottle of Benadryl within Karly’s reach. “Sarah just doesn’t think about future consequences, or any sort of future. There’s no thought and she kind of feels like people owe her things,” he said. Doug could not forgive his sister for Karly’s death.

  Sarah’s friendship with Shelley Freeland had been strained prior to Karly’s death; now it was history, as were most of the relationships she had with coworkers and friends around town.

  And despite the efforts of Gene and Carol Brill to reach out to their daughter, Sarah repeatedly pushed her parents away, turning down their invitations to join them for meals between court proceedings. Police and others, who saw the tender way the Brills treated Sarah, were annoyed when they would later hear her testify that her parents didn’t support her.

  Demarest asked Sarah if, when she went golfing on Wednesday night, she had any idea Shawn Field was abusing her daughter. Clark Willes jumped to his feet in objection. Field had not yet been found guilty. Judge Holcomb sustained the objection and Demarest restated her question.

  “When you left for golf on Wednesday, June 1, 2005, did you have any idea Karly was being abused?”

  Willes objected again and Holcomb granted the objection.

  Joan Demarest was tired of playing around.

  Yanking a black cloth from a huge poster-sized color photo of the dead Karly, battered and bruised, on a cold postmortem table, Demarest called out, “Sarah, did you do this to your daughter?”

  Sarah began sobbing uncontrollably.

  “Mrs. Sheehan, did you do this to your daughter?” Demarest fired off her question again.

  “No, I did not,” Sarah said through tears.

  At the defense table, Clark Willes turned to Dan Koenig, and whispered, loudly enough to be heard, “That was kind of mean.”

  Dan Koenig answered, “It was more than mean. That’s what she wanted.”

  Sarah continued sobbing. Demarest told Judge Holcomb she had no further questions. Demarest had issued a preemptive strike against the defense by getting Sarah to break down before they could.

  “Would you like a moment?” Willes asked Sarah. When Sarah failed to answer, Willes walked back to the defense table and said to Koenig, “I’ve never seen anything crueler in my whole life.”

  Judge Holcomb recessed the jury. Some jurors were pretty distraught themselves. They were upset with Demarest.

  “When she brought out that picture of Karly on the slab, it was one of the lowest moments of the trial, quite frankly,” a juror said. “It was cheesy theatrics. You could tell by the looks in everyone’s eyes, we were all thinking, ‘What the hell was that?’ What was she trying to do? Whipping out grand evidence, breaking down a witness. It’s like she was saying, ‘Look at me, I’m a grand lawyer.’”

  Even so, the very same juror admitted, “It was one of the few times I actually pitied poor Sarah.”

  Koenig had it right. Demarest’s actions elicited the response from the jurors that Demarest had intended. They had been provoked to pity Sarah, to see her as a victim.

  It may have been the most important moment in the trial. “Showing Sarah that postmortem photo of Karly was one of the most difficult things I’ve done,” Demarest said. “I was not proud of it. I couldn’t look the jurors in the eyes for the rest of the day. But I still believe it had to happen. Sarah’s rea
ction was the most powerful moment: pure, raw, devastated emotion.”

  It was a made-for-TV moment. Up until then, Sarah displayed a flat affect. She took long pauses and often seemed confused by questions. Some observers felt she might be too heavily medicated. “Sarah had been relatively stoic. The jury needed to see her with emotion,” Demarest said.

  Judge Holcomb was displeased with drama unfolding in her courtroom.

  “She cleared the room and yelled at me for being so heartless and cruel,” Demarest said. “I felt really bad but it had to be done. The defense was trying to say Sarah had killed Karly, and her reaction made it absolutely clear she couldn’t have.”

  Chapter Forty

  Over the course of a month, the jury heard from nearly everyone in Karly’s life: father, mother, babysitter, doctors, grandparents, state child protective services, and law enforcement officials. Everyone except Shawn Field.

  Shawn did not take the stand to testify, so the jury heard excerpts of tapes from the prolonged police interviews made in the early hours and days following Karly’s death.

  In a voice that was measured, almost imperceptibly quiet at times, Shawn explained to Detective Jason Harvey that Sarah left for work around 11:30 that morning and called him at 1:37 p.m. to say she was on her way home. Did he want her to bring home some frozen yogurt? He’d said no. Shawn said he was holding Karly during the phone call and that she was really tired. Before Sarah got home, he put her down for a nap, gave her a compress for her eye, and covered her with a blanket.

  “So she was already asleep by the time Sarah got in the house?” Detective Harvey asked.

  “Sarah didn’t go in there right away. We were talking about her allergies and I was asking her what her dad said. I was asking about the medicine because her dad had told her to get some eye thing, I don’t know what.”

  “What happened after that?”

  “Sarah and I both walked in there, and I opened up the curtains.”

  “Why did you guys walk in there?”