KARLY SHEEHAN: True Crime behind Karly's Law

by Karen Spears Zacharias

  The jury was not swayed by the emotional abuse argument presented by the prosecution. “They tried to paint Sarah as being scared of Shawn, but everyone saw Sarah as a much stronger woman than that. She’s not the type to put up with that, but apparently she didn’t care if her child got beaten.”

  But ultimately, the defense attorney’s closing arguments directed at Sarah Sheehan proved to be of little merit. The evidence against Shawn was too great, and, besides, the district attorney had not charged Sarah with any crime for the jurors to consider.

  “We weren’t there to judge Sarah. We were there to judge Shawn. Whether I thought she had fault in the crime didn’t matter. Shawn Field killed that little girl. I would have been perfectly happy giving him life without parole,” a juror related.

  Every juror I spoke with expressed the greatest degree of compassion for David Sheehan. David was, several jurors said, a real class act. They remain distraught that the system failed Karly and David. So many people got so many things wrong, and nothing was more glaring than early suspicion by the state and the police that David Sheehan was abusing his daughter. “I think David felt hunted,” said one juror.

  After the verdict was read, the jurors headed over to McMenamins pub, where they drank frothy brew and freely talked about the aspects of the trial they had not been able to discuss previously. On their way out of the courthouse, they were greeted by Gene Brill. The grandfather, who had shown up in court every single day wearing a suit, wanted to thank the jurors for all their hard work on his granddaughter’s behalf.

  “I was amazed he was thanking me,” said one juror. “I would have thought he’d be upset at us for not coming through on capital murder charges. Gene Brill is such a gentleman.”

  The defense responded to the verdict by moving for a mistrial. Judge Holcomb denied the motion. Sentencing began on Wednesday, November 8, 2006. The day opened with Dan Koenig asking Judge Holcomb to allow Shawn Field to be taken back to the jail and given the opportunity to dress in a suit and tie, rather than the jail jumpsuit and shackles. Koenig said that Shawn was “not dressed in appropriate attire for the proceedings in a case of this gravity.” The state opposed the defense’s request, noting that Shawn was a convicted murderer. Koenig responded that Shawn was not a convicted murderer until sentencing took place.

  Judge Holcomb assured Koenig that the court would not be prejudiced based on what Shawn Field was wearing. “I will not allow the defendant to go back and change his clothes,” Judge Holcomb ruled. Given his obsession with his looks, Shawn Field couldn’t have been too happy with Judge Holcomb’s decision.

  Six months pregnant and stricken with a winter bug, Joan Demarest apologized for her scratchy, almost-gone voice as she asked the court to hand down the maximum sentence for Shawn Wesley Field. “This is so much more than a murder case, Your Honor, and the jury’s verdict indicates that. Shawn Field tortured Karly Sheehan. The defendant intentionally inflicted intense physical pain on her.”

  Under the felony murder charge, Oregon Law provided that Shawn Field would receive life in prison with the possibility of parole. Demarest asked the court to consecutively apply maximum sentences for the additional guilty convictions of assault, criminal mistreatment, manufacturing a controlled substance, and endangering the welfare of minor.

  “The court can impose another twenty-eight years on top of the twenty-five years before the defendant will be eligible for parole, and we are asking the court to do that,” Demarest said.

  Throughout the next week the court heard witness statements from dozens of people whose lives had been impacted, most often regrettably, by Shawn Wesley Field. One of the first to testify, and one of the angriest, was Brenda Baze, Eileen Field’s mother and Kate’s grandmother. She spoke with such force and power that the courtroom reverberated with the electricity of her anger.

  “I am appalled at what Shawn Field has put my granddaughter through,” Baze said. “Kate feels guilty for being so afraid to tell anyone what she heard. Kate blames herself for not telling anyone; she blames herself for not speaking up to you; she blames herself for being scared; and most of all she blames herself for leaving Karly with you that morning. She. Heard. You. Hitting. Karly. She will hear you hitting Karly forever. Dads are supposed to be our protectors, our heroes, not murderers and not torturers. You have destroyed Kate’s life. Every Christmas, every holiday, every birthday that her dad is not there will be a reminder of what you did to Karly. I only pray that Kate will someday realize that what happened to Karly was not her fault.”

  When Sarah Sheehan took the stand to give her witness impact statement she was alternatively weepy and angry, but she was the most animated she had been throughout the trial. “How can you ask your own daughter to carry the burden of a brutal murder and torture around? You are the epitome of a self-centered, narcissistic psychopath,” Sarah said.

  The emotional restraint that David Sheehan had displayed throughout the months leading into the death of his daughter, and over the course of the trial, was frayed. As he gave his witness impact statement, David spoke rapidly, his Irish brogue more pronounced than ever, and he paused often, sighing heavily and swallowing back tears.

  “In the months following Karly’s death, I battled depression and lost my will to live. I still agonize over what Shawn Field did to my baby. I can’t imagine what Karly felt when she was left alone with that monster,” David said. “Karly is the strongest person I have ever known. I urge the court to remember and reflect on the word ‘torture’ when considering sentencing.”

  On Wednesday, November 15, 2006, Judge Holcomb did just as David Sheehan bid her to do: she remembered the suffering of Karly. “Mr. Field, this is a very sober moment in our community. When you administered that last blow on June 3, 2005, the one that finally killed Karly Sheehan, you dealt a blow to our entire community, which was saddened and horrified by that murder,” Judge Holcomb said.

  “You have forever changed the lives of David and Sarah Sheehan and Gene and Carol Brill. You have changed the lives of their community of friends and other family members. You have changed the lives of fifteen community members, the jurors, who sat for over five weeks, listening to evidence that was deeply troubling and viewing photos that no one should ever have to see. Finally, you have moved our community, which has closely followed the reports of this case,” the judge continued.

  “As a community we have to do some deep soul-searching about how, or if, we might have responded sooner. Might there have been an intervention that could have saved this child’s life? I don’t know, but after hearing all the evidence it seems there was a continuum of failure after the first hint that there was something terribly, terribly wrong. If we are really willing to look at ourselves, this soul-searching might be the very little bit of good that we can create from this otherwise senseless loss.

  “Mr. Field, in my nearly twenty years in the criminal justice system, this is one of the worst cases of brutality I have ever seen. The jury found you to be responsible, and it is now for me to hold you responsible and accountable.” With those words, Judge Holcomb handed down exactly what Joan Demarest and the state had asked for, the maximum sentence allowed under the law: more than forty-six years without possibility of time off for good behavior.

  When I spoke with Judge Holcomb, she wanted to know if I had had a chance to interview the jurors. I told her I had.

  “They were an incredible jury,” she said.

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Stephen Meyers, a New York native, believes in resurrections. He’s been through a couple himself. Before coming to Oregon State University to work on his Ph.D. in botany, Stephen worked as an air traffic controller, then as a stonecutter.

  “A stonecutter?” I asked when we met for coffee at New Morning Bakery in Corvallis in March 2008.

  “Yeah,” Stephen said, pushing back his shoulder-length hair. “The person who carves the headstones for graves.”

  I’ve been to hundreds of gravesites in m
y lifetime, and never gave a passing thought to the person with the job of carving in all those names and dates—until I met Meyers.

  Stephen was one of the eight men and four women who found Shawn W. Field guilty of torturing Karly to death. The jurors’ lives have been forever altered by the death of Karly Sheehan. Some still have nightmares.

  Stephen’s been to Karly’s grave a couple of times since the trial.

  “I think about Karly a lot,” Stephen said. “I think about Kate, too. I wonder, does she have a chance at being okay?”

  I wonder that myself.

  Kate is in high school now. Driving, dating, picking out dresses for the dances, doing all the things Karly will never do.

  It was obvious from the drawings Kate did for the ABC House that she witnessed far more violence than she was able to testify to. On one of her doodles, done on white paper with black bold writing, Kate wrote: Dad, kidnap, scary, kids, strangers. On another she wrote the words, perfectly spelled: Bitch. Fuck. On another she helped identify in a drawing the layout of the house. In the center of it are two stick figures. On the back she wrote, again in black bold letters: Share. Eye. Spoon. And she’s blacked out the upper left corner, where she had written the words: Dad, I wanted…

  I can’t make out the rest of what it is Kate wanted from her dad.

  In those early days of his arrest, Shawn wrote letters to Kate. I don’t know if she ever saw the letters or not. In one, Shawn tells his daughter:

  I know it’s hard to understand why Daddy is not with you. But understand that life can sometimes be unfair to all of us. We must just do the best we can and move on. Please go give your mommy a big hug and tell her that I love the both of you.

  Love always and forever, Daddy

  It’s obvious from his “life is unfair” remark, Shawn is trying to say he’s a victim in all of this. In another letter written from jail, Shawn tells Kate:

  Hello again Princess!

  This is daddy again. It’s about 5:30 on Monday, June 13,

  2005. I was just thinking of you and wanted to write you some

  more. Daddy got a little sad earlier today. But I just thought of

  you and your wonderful smile and your big hugs and kisses and

  I got happy. I wonder if you are in Disneyland right now. All wet

  from the log ride and with a tummy full of good treats.

  Remember to always keep that beautiful smile on your face and give all the love you have to others. Your (sic) such a special person and I love you with all my heart and soul.

  Love, Daddy

  I believe Shawn loved his daughter, however imperfectly. I believe Shawn couldn’t imagine hurting Kate as he did Karly.

  I spoke with Kate’s maternal grandmother, Brenda Baze. She told me Kate has no contact with Shawn, or with her paternal grandparents.

  Shawn’s lead defense attorney, Dan Koenig, met me at Starbucks in Hermiston one winter’s night. He and Shawn were hammering out an appeal on his conviction. A former Marine, Dan has a commanding presence, a head full of dark hair, and unflinching gray eyes. He’s as comfortable packing a rump sack over the rough terrain of the Wallowa-Whitman National Forest as he is stringing a jury along. He can converse easily about the best places to hunt elk or about the wrongs inflicted upon Chief Joseph and his people. And he can recite with the accuracy of a history teacher every major Civil War battle and why the losers lost.

  He grew up in Kelso, Washington, among loggers and green-chain gangers. He knows how to read a jury.

  “My only concern is that twelve-person jury. I don’t even care what the judge thinks,” Dan said. His thick fingers were wrapped around a cup of bold roast coffee, a diamond ring on one finger.

  Dan spent eight years as a district attorney before switching over to criminal defense. Predictably in Shawn’s case, he thinks the jury flubbed up. “That Corvallis jury is different than any other I’ve ever had. Almost all of them had a master’s degree or were working on one. Corvallis is a big town trying to be small.”

  Dan thought Sarah’s motivation for killing Karly was better than Shawn’s.

  “So you don’t think Shawn was trying to extort money from David?” I asked.

  “Why?” Dan said. “At the time of Karly’s death, Shawn was bringing in as much money as David between his parents and his school loans. Check it out,” he challenged.

  So I did. Shawn’s parents were reportedly giving him $11,000 each, all part of keeping his inheritance tax-free for as long as possible. He worked part time at a restaurant but had only been doing that for a few weeks. His jobs at OSU were all drummed up. It’s hard to know how reliable his school loans were, given that Shawn’s claims about pursuing his degree were bogus.

  “There’s some dirty little secret behind why Heiser didn’t charge Sarah,” Dan said.

  “What kind of secret?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” Dan said, shrugging. “But most courts would have charged them both and let them hang each other.”

  That’s true. I had witnessed that time and time again during my days covering the court beat in Eastern Oregon. Prosecutors usually had no trouble getting one defendant to rat out the other one. And the quickest way to justice usually hinged on charging both people whenever a crime duet was in doubt.

  “There’s an hour gap between the last text message Sarah sent Shawn and when she arrived home. How do we know Sarah didn’t do it? She had sent David a text message saying she had a rough night.”

  There was no hour gap. Demarest had proved that in court by entering Sarah’s time-card as evidence.

  “If you have proof that Sarah killed Karly, why didn’t you offer that up in court during the trial?” I asked.

  “Police never even considered Sarah a suspect,” Dan said. “I don’t buy into that victim mentality of hers.”

  Sarah testified that Shawn had only hit her once, and even that was only teasingly; still, it hurt, she had said. That’s why Demarest made a point to talk about all the ways in which emotional abuse can be just as debilitating as physical abuse.

  “Was Sarah given immunity?” Dan asked.

  “In a sense,” I said. “Her testimony before the Grand Jury protected her.”

  I repeated to Dan a remark someone in the Par 3 crowd had made the night I visited with them: “They got the right guy. They just haven’t gotten the girl yet.”

  It was a sentiment I’d heard time and time again from Sarah’s former friends, Karly’s former daycare providers, lawyers and lawmen, and concerned community members.

  Dan smiled. He’d love for a jury to think Sarah was responsible somehow.

  “C’mon, you really believe your guy’s innocent?” I asked. “You’re paid to believe that.”

  “I don’t concern myself with what I believe,” Dan replied. “I worry about what I can prove or not prove. That’s a different question.”

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Karly’s death changed the way Delynn Zoller interacts with her daycare children.

  “There are days when you have so many children you are just going through the motions,” Delynn said. “I wish I’d spent more time with Karly. I wish I hadn’t been so busy.”

  Karly had an animal book at home her daddy used to read to her. There were four animals in it, and whenever David read it, Karly would point to each animal and name it: “That’s Daddy. That’s Mommy. That’s Karly. And that’s Delynn.”

  Call her paranoid, but Delynn said every mother’s boyfriend is now suspect in her mind. If a child cowers behind a chair, crying, “I’m scared of him,” as one tyke recently did, Delynn wastes no time in reporting it.

  Shortly after Karly died, Delynn sat down and wrote a letter to the parents of the other children in her daycare:

  Dear Parents –

  I wrote this newsletter last week and cannot add anything new (computer problems!) but I wanted to say something about Karly before we all move on with the day-to-day life and she fades into my memory like
so many other children in my past.

  Your child’s friend, Karly’s, full name was Karla Isabelle Ruth Sheehan. She was white-blonde with sky blue eyes. She was half Irish and looked like a pixie. She was extremely smart and could talk and think like a 5-year-old even though she was only 3. She wanted to grow up and be Princess Fiona and marry her daddy, Prince Charming.

  She was easy to care for and played very well with all the kids. She could play with them and make up games regardless of their different personalities. She was quiet and talked softly to everyone. Never hit, yelled or threw any type of tantrum. She was easily one of the best-behaved children I have ever had over these many years.

  She turned 3 on January 4th. She used to sing “You say potato, I say patato” and told me her daddy sang that to her. He is Irish and has an accent! She loved to eat the snap peas from my garden and wanted to even dig up the old carrots that I’d left there over the winter—to eat! She hummed while she ate her food. I would tell the kids that she was singing in her mouth!

  She loved Dragon Tales and played “Dragon” with the other kids. Her favorite color was blue, “like my eyes” she would always say. Her daddy told me her favorite foods were fried onions and Shepherds pie. I always told her she was a weird kid. She would laugh and run around and get all goosey and then talk like a baby.

  She asked me a lot about God and Jesus. And she wore a small silver cross around her neck that her daddy gave to her for her birthday. She told me “God protects everyone” and that Jesus was taking good care of her, and that’s why she had his cross.

  I loved Karly and so did all the kids. And I would like to say that God did protect her. He was taking care of her by his dramatic rescue of her. It was an answer to many prayers for her safety. Now she is a princess in heaven.