Stark thought it odd that Shawn would immediately be on the defensive when he hadn’t asked a single question yet. He reassured Shawn he was there to inquire specifically about Karly’s recent visit to the doctor’s office.
“You don’t have to answer any questions you don’t want to,” Stark said.
“I have my own daughter to take care of, and I don’t want you guys snooping around, threatening my daughter’s safety.”
“I just want to ask you a few questions about Karly,” Stark said. “Have you noticed any changes in her behavior recently?”
“She hasn’t been sleeping well,” Shawn said. “And she throws these big fits for no reason. Karly’s been unhappy ever since Sarah moved in.”
“Do you think someone is abusing Karly?” Stark asked. He studied Shawn’s face as he answered.
“No,” Shawn said, shaking his head. “When she has these temper tantrums, she slaps her head and pulls out her hair, fistfuls of it.”
“What do you do when she does that?”
“We—me and Sarah—will grab Karly’s hands and tell her not to do that,” Shawn said. “We’ve even threatened to send her to the corner if she doesn’t stop, but that doesn’t do any good. Karly will go to the corner on her own, punish herself. Karly does not want to be to here, and she does not want her mom here.”
“Do you think Karly’s afraid of you?” Stark asked.
“No,” Shawn replied. “She’d be that way even if I weren’t around. Karly acts out because of the change in routine, not because of anything I do.”
“Was Karly sick this week?” Stark asked.
“Sick?” Shawn asked. “No, she hasn’t been sick. She was really thirsty but otherwise she ate okay. She did throw up once, but I think that was more nerves than anything else.”
“Would you mind if I spoke with Kate?” Stark asked.
“Sure,” Shawn said. “But only with me here.”
“Okay,” Stark agreed.
Shawn called Kate to the door. He stood off to one side as Stark asked Kate some questions. “Do you remember me from our previous visit?”
“Yes,” Kate said, nodding.
“How has Karly been?” Stark asked.
“She’s been sick,” Kate said. “She threw up.”
“Did you see her throw up?” Stark asked.
“No,” Kate said. “I think I just heard her.”
“Do you know what happened to Karly’s hair?” Stark asked.
“She’s been pulling at her hair,” Kate said. “And slapping her face.”
“What did your daddy or Sarah do when Karly did that?”
“I dunno,” Kate replied.
“You can’t remember?” Stark asked.
“No. I think I was asleep then,” Kate said.
“Thank you, Kate,” he said. “Would you tell Sarah I want to speak to her again?”
“Sure,” Kate said.
Stark asked Sarah about her plans to move out of Shawn’s place.
Sarah said she’d decided to let Karly stay with David for now.
Back at the office, Stark went over the day’s events with his supervisor. “We were both concerned over Mr. Field’s apparent defensiveness,” Stark said.
Two days later, on Thursday, December 16, as promised, Sarah took Karly for evaluation at the Old Mill Center for Children and Families. Sarah told the counselor, Caitlyn Chisholm, that Karly had been having extreme fits of anger, marked by Karly screaming until she turned purple and sometimes hitting herself. Sarah said it was heartbreaking to watch Karly behave in this fashion because she was usually such a vibrant, bouncy, and fun girl.
“Do you know when Karly started acting out?” Chisholm asked.
“Yes,” Sarah said. “A couple of months ago. In October. It was right after I moved in with my new boyfriend, Shawn.”
Sarah said DHS got involved after Karly made some startling statement about her daddy hitting her. Sarah was so concerned she’d had a long talk with Karly about whom she meant when she said “Daddy hits me.” Sarah said Karly would only identify David as her daddy, not Shawn. DHS had been investigating the issue, and closed the case out a week ago.
“But then Karly went crazy last week at Shawn’s house and pulled nearly all her hair out. So my ex called Children’s Services again,” Sarah said. “The real reason he made the call is because he’s angry that I’ve moved on in my life. He got pissed and took Karly to the neighbor’s house and told my girlfriend there what a terrible parent I am. He even sent a police over to my boyfriend’s house at midnight. My ex is crazy jealous. Now Children’s Services has reopened the case and that’s why I’m here.”
Chisholm noted that while Karly seemed calm and cooperative, because of the balding, Karly looked like a child undergoing chemotherapy.
“Have you or Karly seen other counselors?” Chisholm asked.
“I’ve pretty much been in therapy my whole life,” Sarah said, chuckling. “I’m adopted and my parents made me go. I don’t have the best relationship with them.”
“And Karly? What about her?” Chisholm asked.
“No,” Sarah said.
“Any other symptoms she’s having that concern you?”
“She has nightmares,” Sarah said. “And she talks a lot about monsters.”
Chisholm turned to Karly who was playing nearby.
“Tell me about the monsters, Karly.”
“Sometimes the monsters bother me,” Karly said.
At the end of only one short session, Chisholm diagnosed Karly with acute anxiety and depression. Chisholm concluded that Karly was suffering adjustment disorder. When Sarah repeated this to David, she seemed elated. David thought the diagnosis was complete bullshit and he told Chisholm so in Karly’s only follow-up visit.
At no time did Sarah mention to either Dr. deSoyza, David, or the counselor at the Old Mill Center that Sarah had been bedridden the week Karly reportedly “went crazy.” Sarah was in bed that week, the result of a miscarriage or an abortion. Police were never able to determine if she really had either one. But Sarah said she was knocked out with sleeping pills, pills she later claimed Shawn Field had been plying her with while he looked after Karly. None of that came out, however, until five days after Karly’s death, during an interview with Corvallis Police Detective Mike Wells.
Since their divorce, David and Sarah had a formal custody agreement, which included rotating holidays. It was Sarah’s turn to have Karly for Christmas.
Shawn and Kate were headed to Arizona to visit his parents at their winter home. Shawn was angry with Sarah about the investigation. He blamed her for getting him and Kate involved. He wanted to end his relationship with her but the two were wildly attracted to each other, in all sorts of unhealthy ways. Shawn thought going to Arizona would give him breathing room, time to clear his head of her. Sarah was not invited along, and that pissed her off. They fought over it but Shawn didn’t change his mind.
Before he and Kate left, Sarah gave him his Christmas gift: a BB gun. By Sarah’s own admission, it was an odd gift for a thirty-three-year-old man.
On Christmas Eve morning, Shawn dropped Sarah off in Portland on his way to the airport. Sarah was going to visit her mom, Carol, who was in the hospital again, dealing with cancer and a multitude of serious ailments. Sarah was often dismissive of her mother’s ongoing health problems, referring to her as a hypochondriac. David, who was working in Hillsboro, agreed to pick up Sarah after work and give her a ride back to Corvallis. They went together to get Karly at Delynn’s that evening.
Afterward, Sarah asked David to drop her at Shawn’s place. As David made the turn onto Aspen Street, to pull into the driveway at Shawn’s duplex, Karly began to whimper from her car seat in the back. David looked in the rearview mirror and saw a look of sheer panic on his daughter’s face. Rapidly maneuvering the steering wheel, David swerved away from the driveway and edged up to the curb instead. Karly calmed down after David reassured her that he was just dropping Sarah
off.
The next morning, Christmas Day, he went back to the apartment that Sarah shared with her roommate Shelley, to be with Karly as she opened her gifts. Sarah cooked a holiday meal for the three of them.
Then David took Karly and went back to his place. Later, with Karly dressed in the beautiful lace and red velvet dress David had bought, the two of them headed out for a Christmas gathering at John Hogan’s house. Hogan was one of David’s best friends. David covered Karly’s bald head with a Santa hat.
“I was feeling very hurt for her,” David recalled. He knew Karly was very much aware of how startling she looked. Somebody asked Karly to go stand by the inflatable reindeer so they could take her picture. Karly complied but then pulled her father close and whispered, “That reindeer is not Rudolph because Rudolph has a red nose and that reindeer doesn’t!”
Nothing escaped Karly’s keen eye. She was intuitive and inquisitive, perceptive and observant. Girls born to neglectful mothers learn early that the world is fraught with dangers and they need to stay alert.
Karly didn’t see her mother again until a week later, on New Year’s Eve, when Sarah dropped by David’s place for a brief visit, after David asked if Sarah intended to spend any time with her daughter during the holidays since it was “her turn” to have Karly. Sarah popped in but only for a few minutes. She had a full night of partying ahead.
On January 4, 2005, Karly’s third birthday, David presented his daughter with a delicate necklace adorned with a crucifix. Some of Karly’s friends at daycare had started to shun her, undoubtedly scared off by her rapidly deteriorating condition and her appearance. For that reason, David decided against having a birthday party for Karly. If David hoped the crucifix would ward off the monsters that threatened his daughter, it did not work. Karly did not see another birthday.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Sarah’s parents were unaware of the ongoing investigation. She’d never mentioned it to Gene or Carol.
In early November, Sarah and Karly met Gene at Timberhill’s Starbucks in the neighborhood mall on Corvallis’s north side. Carol was ill and unable to attend. Gene and two other grandkids were on their way down to Springfield to visit Sarah’s sister, Kimberly, and her husband Tony. One of the grandkids was having a birthday party, and they were taking Karly along.
Gene saw that Karly had a bruise on her left cheek. It looked like Karly had been slapped. Gene asked Sarah about it and she dismissed it as nothing. Karly had run into something, Sarah said. Gene studied his granddaughter for a moment. She was running frantically around Starbucks.
“She didn’t hardly stop,” Gene said. “She ran almost constantly, in a nervous way.” But by the time Karly arrived at her aunt and uncle’s home, an hour away, she didn’t want to play. Gene recalled she seemed unhappy over everything, which wasn’t like Karly. Kim was so troubled by her niece’s behavior and by the bruise on her face that she took Karly aside and asked her about it. All Karly would say is that she fell.
“It was very suspicious to Kim,” Carol later told police investigators. “She was mad.”
When David drove down to pick up Karly a day later, Gene asked David how it was that Karly came to have such a bruise. David said he thought she had fallen or run into something.
Karly saw her grandparents again over Thanksgiving. They noticed she had even less hair than before, but Karly’s appearance in November left them ill-prepared for what they saw on February 8, 2005.
Carol had a doctor’s appointment at Oregon Health Science University Hospital. David met Gene at Washington Square Mall, just outside Portland, to drop off Karly. She was going back to Pendleton with her grandparents for a brief stay. Karly was prepared for the trip, with her backpack in tow and wearing a jaunty traveling hat. Gene and Karly headed back up to the hospital on Portland’s west side. Because it was early, Gene and Carol took Karly to get some breakfast in the cafeteria. Karly seemed famished. She ate all of her breakfast, and then helped her grandfather finish off his.
Carol’s doctor, who had joined them for breakfast, asked Karly to take off her hat so he could see her princess blonde hair. But when Carol lifted it off, everyone gasped: Karly hardly had any hair at all.
“My doctor couldn’t believe she wasn’t a chemo patient,” Carol said. “She looked just like one.”
Neither Sarah nor David had warned Gene and Carol ahead of time about Karly’s hair loss. Gene and Carol knew that Sarah was seeing a new boyfriend but they had never met Shawn, and knew nothing about him other than his name. Sarah did not like her parents asking questions, and she volunteered very little information. Gene and Carol had a better relationship with David than they did Sarah, but David hadn’t wanted to worry to them, so he hadn’t said anything either.
•
It is a four-hour drive east from Portland, where Gene picked up Karly, to where Gene and Carol live. After Sarah and her siblings had grown up and moved away, Gene and Carol sold their home and built their dream home on on a hillside, east of Pendleton, designed for comfort and grandchildren, with breathtaking views that span the Blue Mountains.
During that particular February visit, as Carol was washing up the dinner dishes, Karly let out a bloodcurdling scream. Carol ran to her granddaughter and found Karly cowering next to an overturned plant.
“I’m sorry, Grandma,” Karly cried. “I broke your plant!”
“Oh, honey,” Carol said, wrapping the trembling child in her arms, “you never, ever have to be afraid in Grandma’s house. There is nothing in my house more important than you.”
Karly came back for one more visit that winter, in mid-March, to join her cousins for an early Easter celebration. She was thinner than ever and pale as death. Her eyes were red-rimmed and seemed full of an unspoken strain. Carol asked Karly what she thought of Shawn. Karly replied he “was poopy.”
The usually gregarious Karly refused to participate in the Easter egg hunt with her cousins. She had to be taken by the hand and led through the motions.
“She looked so lost, so forlorn, so sad, scared,” Carol said.
Sarah, who had agreed to pick up Karly, arranged to meet her parents halfway. Karly spoke to Sarah on the cell phone several times as her grandparents drove west through the Columbia River Gorge that afternoon. Each time, she asked for David, over and over again. Karly’s begging for her father upset Gene Brill.
“I remember it so vividly because I was hurting for Sarah. I knew Sarah just wanted to talk to her daughter, but the whole time Karly kept saying, ‘I want my daddy. I want my daddy,’” Gene said.
Gene and Carol discussed their concerns about Karly with other family members, but they stopped short of naming the thing they feared most: that their granddaughter was being abused.
Gene and Carol had a handful of uneasy observations, but nothing more came of it. Karly’s grandparents didn’t learn of the state’s abuse investigation until after Karly’s murder, when the Corvallis police called them in for interviews.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Carol Brill’s mother died the first week in May. Sarah called her brother, Doug, and asked if she could hitch a ride down to Redding, California, for their grandmother’s funeral.
It was a grueling trip: eight people packed together in an SUV for the six-hour drive: Doug, his wife Gretchen, their four kids, plus Sarah and Karly. Sarah sat in the very back between Karly and her cousin Emily.
Somewhere north of Redding, Doug pulled the car into a rest area to give the kids a break. They ran. They hollered. They jumped in puddles. No one could remember what exactly set Sarah off, but something did. She grabbed Karly by the shoulders, shook her, and then threw her sobbing daughter into the car seat in the very back of the vehicle and began to scream at her.
“Be quiet!”
Karly continued to cry.
“Why don’t you just shut your mouth? I don’t want to hear any more of it!”
Doug and Gretchen were stunned.
“She’s just being a kid,” o
ne of them muttered.
At the family dinner following the funeral, Sarah complained to those within earshot that David would hardly have anything to do with Karly, that she was a single mom having to manage all by her lonesome, putting herself through college. Sarah probably didn’t notice the family members who knew better rolling their eyes.
Gretchen walked away. “None of it was true,” she later told detectives. It was more fiction crafted to evoke sympathy for Sarah.
Meanwhile, as Sarah stood in the church fellowship hall, talking about herself, Karly was running around the church parking lot unsupervised.
“The thing that disturbed me the most was Sarah just seemed so disconnected from Karly,” Gretchen recalled. “Karly would run inside and see her mom and she didn’t get anything out of her mom, attention or anything.
“Sarah would keep talking to whoever she was talking to, and just totally ignore her, so Karly would run back to where the excitement was with the kids,” Gretchen said. “There was no emotional attachment that I could see at all. Karly was just a little prize, kind of: this is my daughter.”
The next day, Karly rode back with her aunt and uncle while Sarah rode in her parents’ car, sleeping mostly. Nearly every five minutes, Karly asked the same questions, over and over again.
“Uncle Doug, do you know how to get to my daddy’s house? Are you sure you know where my daddy lives?”
Karly’s anxiety made the trip seem twice as long. Finally, she went absolutely wild with joy when Doug pulled over at a gas station along Interstate 5 and David was there to get her.
That Sunday, Mother’s Day, Karly spent the day with her father. Sarah dropped by briefly. She spent less than an hour with her daughter.
The very next week, after Sarah had her for a couple of days, Karly came to David’s with a knot in the middle of her forehead. It was a bruise about an inch long and very narrow. Angry and distraught, David sent Sarah a text message: “We have 2 talk in the morning re: Karly. She has new cuts & bruises, and I haven’t seen her this upset since the hair loss.
KARLY SHEEHAN: True Crime behind Karly's Law Page 13
