On Thursday, June 2, 2005, David sent Sarah a text message asking how Karly was doing, and whether she’d made it back from daycare all right. David worried less when Karly was with Delynn than he did when she was with Sarah. At 10:03 a.m., only minutes after David sent that text, Sarah texted back: “Staying home. Karly much better 2day despite jumping on bed when told NO!”
That text, Willes told the jury, was a setup. Karly already had injuries. The nurses who tended to Karly on Friday, June 3, 2005, said they knew from experience that some of her injuries had to have been several days old. “Sarah knows she’s going to have to deliver her daughter back to David Sheehan in two days, and she’s setting up the excuses,” Willes explained. Just like in December 2004, when Sarah told David, “This happened on my watch.”
Sarah had gone so far as to call her boss on Thursday morning to say she wouldn’t be in to work because Karly had fallen from the bunk bed and Sarah needed to take her to the doctor, Willes said. Only Sarah didn’t take Karly to the doctor on Thursday, or on Friday. Instead, Sarah worked later in the day on Thursday, from 4:30 to 7:30 p.m., although she didn’t get back to Shawn Field’s home, and to Karly, until midnight.
“Sarah wanted to convince you that she worked off the clock during those hours,” Willes said. “But when did the manager go home? Nine o’clock. The manager went home at nine because the raffle was over. Sarah wants you to believe she was working off the clock,” Willes said. “And the district attorney wants you to believe that Sarah is a controlled woman, who doesn’t have an independent thought or an independent mind. But when she wants to go out and play, Sarah goes out to play. When she wants to go out and drink, and party, and go to the parking lot with somebody else, she does it. Remember, she has her own place. She lives with her child by herself sometimes. She has her own job, her own checking account, and she pays her own bills, sometimes.”
Willes reminded jurors that as early as October 2004, Sarah was blaming David Sheehan for Karly’s injuries, and when Karly died, Sarah blamed David for that, too.
And on that last day of Karly’s life, Sarah claimed that she could not take Karly to the hospital because Shawn wouldn’t let her, wouldn’t give her the car—yet, Sarah received fifteen phone calls between 9:48 a.m. and 1:37 p.m.
“This is what her child looked like Friday morning when Sarah woke up,” Willes said, displaying a photo of a battered Karly for the jury to see. “Sarah gets fifteen phone calls on a regular basis that day, and the district attorney wants to indicate to you that Sarah Sheehan couldn’t get help, didn’t have a car, couldn’t take her child to the hospital. Couldn’t Sarah have talked to any one of the people she spoke to that day, asked for help, including her good friend Shelley Freeland? Yet she didn’t mention a word of it.”
Shawn Field was not responsible for Karly Sheehan’s death, Willes said. Shawn had nothing to gain from it. Sarah, on the other hand, did have a motive. “We have a little girl, Karly, who is getting in the way of her mother having some fun,” Willes said.
The only reason Shawn Field was taking photos of Karly was because Sarah told him that David Sheehan was doing this to Karly, Willes said. “You couldn’t miss the sixty bruises on the little girl’s body. Wouldn’t you take pictures?” Willes asked the jurors.
Willes offered no explanation for why it was that Shawn Field didn’t take Karly to the emergency room himself. He offered no explanation for Shawn Field’s behavior at all. He didn’t have to, he told the jurors.
“We don’t have the burden of proving who did this—the state does. We don’t have to present anything. The question before you is has the state met the burden of proof beyond a reasonable doubt.
“Let me put it in different terms. If Sarah Sheehan were sitting where Shawn Field is now, and evidence had been presented like it is, would you start considering that Sarah Sheehan was guilty?” Willes asked.
Keep in mind, Willes told jurors, that when Sarah Sheehan was under oath, she answered, “I can’t confirm or deny that statement” more than thirty times.
“Wow!” Willes said.
As sirens wailed by the open windows of the courtroom, Willes apologized for taking up so much of the jurors’ time.
“You are parents, and that’s what the state is really relying on: your gut reaction, we have to get somebody. Use the facts. Don’t use your gut, because if guts were right, Susan Smith in North Carolina wouldn’t be in jail today, Diane Downs in Oregon wouldn’t be in jail today, Andrea Yates in Texas wouldn’t be in jail today. It’s because somebody followed the facts, and that’s what Mr. Field is asking you to do in this case. Thank you.”
Clark Willes finished his closing statements and Judge Holcomb excused the court for an afternoon recess.
“We will reconvene at 3:45 p.m.,” Holcomb said.
Following the break, Joan Demarest offered a fairly direct rebuttal, when she replayed the 911 call from Friday, June 3, 2005.
Once more the jurors heard the voice of Sarah Sheehan:
“911. What’s your emergency?” Thompson asked.
“OH MY GOD! OH MY GOD! OH MY GOD!” came a female voice.
“I need you to calm down. Where are you?”
Inaudible, hysterical crying.
“Hello? I need you to stop crying.”
“Tww…gasp…Tww…sob. Northwest Aspen Strrrreeeeetttt!”
“I can’t understand you.”
“Twenty-six-fifty-two. Twenty-six-fifty-two Northwest Aspen Street. Twenty-six-fifty-two Northwest Aspen Street. Aspen Street. Twenty-six-fifty-two Aspen Street.”
“Twenty-six-fifty-two Aspen?” Thompson repeated back.
“Yes. Yes. Northwest. Right across from Hoover.”
“What’s the problem?” Thompson asked.
“Karla! Karla! Come back! Karla! Come baaaack!”
It was nearly five o’clock when Judge Holcomb dismissed the jury. “Members of the jury, that concludes the arguments in the case. I have fourteen pages of instructions, and given the hour, and as long as the day has been, we are going to stop. I am sure you have families you’d like to get home to, and, perhaps, celebrate or give out candy for trick-or-treating.”
Chapter Forty-Two
Judge Janet Holcomb gave the jury instructions on Wednesday, November 1, 2006. “Members of the jury, it is your sole responsibility to make all the decisions about the facts of the case. You must evaluate the evidence to determine how reliable and how believable it is. Remember, any witness who lies in some part of their testimony is likely to lie in other parts of their testimony.
“Do not allow bias or sympathy. Do not decide on guesswork, conjecture, or speculation. When you make your decision about the facts, you must apply legal rules to those facts to reach your verdict. A defendant has the constitutional right to not testify. This cannot be considered an indication of guilt.”
It took the jury three days to reach a verdict in the month-long murder trial. The jury returned their verdict on Friday, November 3, 2006. They declared Shawn Wesley Field not guilty on all five charges of aggravated murder and one count of murder, but they found him guilty of the remaining seventeen charges, including felony murder and torture. Some of the jurors wept as the verdict was read.
Consensus among the jurors did not come easily. Initially, five jurors were ready to give Shawn Field the death penalty. One juror wanted to throw out everything but the manslaughter charge. “We spent many hours talking a few fellow jurors down from what I considered an emotional, perhaps even justifiable, impulse,” one juror said. “We insisted, time and again, to ‘show the evidence’ for intentional murder, as opposed to intentional, excessive abuse that led to death, which we’d already voted for unanimously. In the end, we voted unanimously against these charges, not because everyone was convinced Shawn was not guilty, but because we couldn’t find evidence to support them.”
The question they hemmed and hawed over was not whether Shawn was guilty but to what degree he was guilty. Did he intentiona
lly murder Karly or was he “just” torturing her? Explained one juror: “I felt a little manipulated by the torture charge, as it was not something that came to mind during the trial, but was written and defined in such a way that we had to sign on, and one of the biggest traps, to me, was the total number of charges against him. We were instructed to consider each charge independently, and not pick the most severe charges, as one might think.”
Intent proved to be as difficult to determine as Joan Demarest warned it would be. “We don’t know that he intended to kill her. That’s what hung us up for a long, long time,” said a juror. “Was the murder the result of some other crime? Did he intend to kill her?”
Another juror recalled how fraught with emotion jury deliberations had been. “We concluded from the evidence we had that the abuse was not accidental. There had been a pattern of abuse, but there was no evidence to show that killing Karly was intentional. Shawn would have gotten rid of the marijuana plants if he’d planned to murder Karly that day. It was an afternoon of tearful exchange.”
Jurors found little evidence backing up the prosecutor’s claim that Shawn Field was abusing Karly for financial gain. A more likely scenario, they reasoned, was that he was abusing Karly as a means of payback at Sarah. “Who knows? Maybe Shawn became frustrated with Sarah’s catting around,” said one juror. “I know what he did, but I can’t tell you why he did it. All I can conclude is there is barely a rational thought in the man’s head. Nothing stirred him, with the exception of when his daughter testified.”
The jurors had noticed how pained Shawn Field appeared when his daughter was on the stand. “It was clear that he loved her,” said a juror.
Several of the jurors were upset that Joan Demarest put such a young child on the stand. “Kate was traumatized,” said another juror. “I felt sorry for her.”
The prosecution had taken such care to provide proof of Shawn and Karly’s DNA on the two large spoons found in the trash can at Shawn’s house, but the fact that the spoons were recovered from the trash was more problematic than helpful for the scientists among the group. “Anything in the trash is a mixing ground for DNA,” a juror explained. “We never accepted the spoons as evidence because of that.”
The evidence that ultimately persuaded the jurors that Shawn Field killed Karly Sheehan came down to the photos of the battered Karly taken on Shawn’s own camera; the timeline, which included text messages from Sarah Sheehan’s phone; and lastly, the expert testimony of Dr. Carol Chervenak.
“Finally, we just decided we couldn’t figure out what was going on in Shawn Field’s mind, it is so twisted and dark,” said a juror. “There was a lot of crying but I think everyone realized, let’s go with what we’ve got, or we’ll be a hung jury, and none of us wanted that.”
In regards to the defense’s closing argument that Sarah Sheehan had played a part in the killing of her daughter, Karly Sheehan, many of the jurors agreed. “I don’t understand why the district attorney didn’t charge her with reckless endangerment at the very least,” said one juror.
Sarah may not have delivered the blow that killed Karly, but she was complicit in the murder, said another. “We saw the pictures of what Karly looked like that last day of her life. I couldn’t see a total stranger looking like that and not do something.”
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 tesify, 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 throu
ghout 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.
A Silence of Mockingbirds Page 22
