A Silence of Mockingbirds

Author Karen Spears Zacharias
has been featured on
Huffington Post, Good Morning America
, and
CNN
.
Her commentary has been featured in the
New York Times
,
Washington
Post, USA Today
, and on
NPR
. Karen blogs at Patheos.com and
teaches journalism at Central Washington University. Karen wrote this book
while serving as writer-in-residence at the Fairhope Center for the Writing
Arts, Fairhope, Alabama. She divides her time between the Columbia River in
Oregon and Mobile Bay in Alabama.

Author photo by Stephen Savage,
Fairhope AL

Investigative journalist and
author Karen Spears Zacharias never anticipated that she would become one
of the characters involved in a high-profile murder. But when she reconnects
with a young woman named Sarah, who lived in the Zacharias home at one time
and was treated like family, Karen discovers that something unspeakable has
happened to Sarah’s daughter, Karly. Compelled to consider her own culpability
in this tragic case, Karen pieces together what happened to Karly through
court documents, investigators’ interviews, and interviews with friends, family,
law enforcement officials, and key witnesses. As the terrible story unfolds,
the hard question emerges for everyone involved, indeed all of us:
Why
was no cry raised to protect Karly?

Dedication
Chapter   1
Chapter   2
Chapter   3
Chapter   4
Chapter   5
Chapter   6
Chapter   7
Chapter   8
Chapter   9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Epilogue

Note to Readers
Author's Note

T
he envelope on my desk is addressed to
Inmate 16002306. Inside is a letter
of request. It is not the first one I’ve sent, and I don’t expect it will be
the last. I am tempted to mail one every day until I get what I want: a face-to-face
interview.

In the military, the enlisted are most often referred to by their last
names, not their serial numbers. I don’t know what the appropriate
protocol is inside the slammer when referring to an inmate. Do they
call him by his first name or his last name? Or do they call out to him—
Hey, Baby Killer!—the way so many protestors did to those American
soldiers who were fortunate enough to return home from Vietnam?

I don’t know Shawn Wesley Field personally. I only know what
I’ve learned about him from plowing through thousands of pages of
court documents, or from talking to others who’ve known him, or from
listening to the audio tapes of the police interrogations.

It is uncharacteristic of David Sheehan to speak unkindly about
anyone, even when it is justified. David refuses to speak Inmate
16002306’s name. He refers to him as a monster. There’s no question
that David has earned the right to call Shawn Field any name he damn
well pleases. There’s not a jury in this land that would have convicted
David of murder if he had taken a baseball bat and beaten the life out
of Shawn.

Born and bred in Ireland, David Sheehan displays few of the
archetypical behaviors often attributed to the Irish. He’s neither loud
nor boisterous. While he enjoys a good party, he doesn’t need to be the
center of attention. He’s humble, soft-spoken, kindhearted and a hard
worker.

It was his job with Hewlett-Packard (HP) that lured him to America.
He came straight out of Kenmare, County Kerry, Ireland. In 1996,
David, an engineer, joined about two hundred other Irish, employees
of HP and their families, who came to Corvallis for training at HP’s
campus.

It was not, however, his first trip to America. That took place when
David was only six years old. Even then, his mother suspected the day
would come when her oldest would leave Ireland and make a new home
across wide waters. David was a boy born to adventure, always lining
up his cars along the fireplace and imagining the journeys that awaited.
But no child or adult imagines the sort of terrors the grown-up David
would encounter in Oregon.

David Sheehan is the father of three-year-old Karly Sheehan, who was murdered
by Inmate 16002306, Shawn Wesley Field.

Located west of Oregon’s main north-south drag, Interstate
5, Corvallis literally means “heart of the valley.” In 1845, Joe Avery staked
out his own emerald plot at the junction where Mary’s River slips into the
Willamette. For a short time, the city served as the capital of the Oregon
Territory.

Corvallis is the proud home of Oregon State University. There are
more highly educated people per capita living in Corvallis than any
other city in the state. You hear it often in the post office, at the library,
or at the local bakery. Everyone’s said it and it is true: Corvallis is a good
place to raise kids.

This college town became my first home in Oregon. A transfer
student from Berry College in Rome, Georgia, I came to Corvallis in
1975 to attend Oregon State University. My family had made the move
west a year earlier.

The community of Corvallis wrapped my eighteen-year-old self in
an OSU orange-and-black blanket and drew me in close. It was as a
student of Professor Thurston Doler that I first found my voice. It was
while sitting in the pouring rain cheering on the Beavers, and in the
pews of First Baptist Church singing songs from a hymnal, that I made
lifelong friends. It was under the tutelage of Corvallis High School’s
Rick Wallace that I learned the skills I would need to teach. It was in
the springtime that I first fell in love with the boy who would become
the man I still love. And many years later, because I knew Corvallis to
be a good community where a wounded girl could heal, I would urge
Sarah Brill to move there and to seek her education at Oregon State
University.

In October, maples drop their golden parchments into the
Willamette River, where they are carried downstream, letters for the beavers.
Fog rises up from the still water as some unseen coxswain calls out strokes
for OSU’s crew team. In June, the town’s pace slows. Dozens of bone-white
blossoms unfurl on the magnolias in the campus quad, like sunbathers seeking
an early tan. Students squirrel away grocery-store boxes filled with belongings—textbooks,
puffy down coats—as they prepare for summer jobs on Alaska fishing boats or
driving hay trucks on their uncles’ Eastern Oregon farms.

Downtown on the courthouse square, roses pink as cotton candy cushion the
flat white-plastered brick. From her perch above the entry stands Themis,
Goddess of Justice, the quavering balance in her hands. The eight-foot-tall
statue is not wearing the traditional blindfold. There’s a clock tower above
the lady, and directly above high noon or midnight is the word “OF.” It is
part of a longer statement—
THE FLIGHT OF TIME
—etched into the sides of the
four-sided clock tower.

It was here at the Benton County Courthouse, through the
heavy doors, past the security checkpoint, and up a musty oil-polished stairwell
that Judge Janet Holcomb presided over the trial of
State vs. Shawn Wesley
Field
. Shawn was charged with twenty-three counts for the June 3, 2005,
murder of three-year-old Karla “Karly” Isabelle Ruth Sheehan, the daughter
of David Sheehan and Sarah Brill Sheehan.

The prosecution’s opening statements were made on September
25, 2006. The defense made its closing statement on Halloween. The
trial was contentious, fraught with mind-numbing details and a cast of
characters that would confound even CNN’s Nancy Grace.

Addressing Karly’s killer during the sentencing phase, Judge Holcomb also issued
an admonishment to the citizens of Corvallis:

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.

That failure is something former District Attorney Scott Heiser said
will burden him forever. “This homicide was preventable and we in the
system failed, and I’ll carry that around for the rest of my life.”

Ruefully, he adds, “I was the chief law enforcement officer for the
county. It was my task-force team. I’m not going to point fingers at one
of my staffers. We set protocol and we didn’t follow it.”

There’s plenty of blame and guilt to go around in the case of the
death of Karly Sheehan. Like Scott Heiser, I’ve got my own burden to
bear. More than one person had the opportunity to make a different
choice, a choice that may have saved a sweet child’s life.

Still, as far as the prosecutor was concerned, only one person is
responsible for the death of Karly. That man is Shawn Wesley Field. But
some people—jurors, investigators, medical professionals, bartenders,
and community members, me included—wonder if there isn’t another
person who ought to be sitting in a prison cell for Karly’s death.

In his closing remarks to the jury, Clark Willes, co-counsel for
the defense, said, “The facts tell you something happened with Sarah
Sheehan, and she has not been honest with you. The fact is every time
she turned around, she did not tell police, she did not tell authorities,
and she did not tell Children’s Services what really happened.”

Only three people really know what happened at 2652 Northwest Aspen Street
that bright June morning.

One of them is dead.

One of them is in prison.

And one of them blames me.