A Silence of Mockingbirds (15 page)

Three hours and a penile swab later, when David finally emerged,
John Hogan was still there. Despite the warmth of that June day, David
felt a chill deeper than any he’d ever known.

K
arla Isabelle Ruth Sheehan was declared dead by Dr. Paul
Hochfeld, the attending emergency room physician, at 2:20 p.m.
on Friday, June 3.

Detective Mike Wells was at his desk tending to paperwork that afternoon
when his cell phone buzzed. He turned it over, looked at the incoming number.
It was Jason Harvey. Wells flipped the phone open. “Mike?”

“Yeah.”

“Maclean needs some help on a death investigation out on Aspen.
I’m going out there. You want me to swing by and get you?”

“What kind of death?” Wells asked.

“A kid.”

Wells had been with Corvallis Police Department nearly ten years, but he’d
only been a detective for the past few months. Wells is a handsome man, with
a runner’s frame. He keeps his brown hair clipped in military style. He is
deliberate man— some would say calculating. He’s a thinker, but he’s no diplomat.
Wells says what he thinks, plainly and frankly. He’s a take-charge, help-or-get-out-of-my-way
kind of guy.

Harvey, by contrast, is a broad-chested fellow with a slow smile and
an intimidating presence to those on the wrong side of the law. Harvey
prefers the company of dogs to people.

Wells was still gathering up equipment—baggies, tape, swab kits,
gloves, video equipment—when Harvey showed up a few minutes later.
The two men loaded all the stuff they’d need to collect evidence into the
back of Harvey’s patrol car.

Picking up the radio handset, Wells called dispatch.

“What’s the address of the death investigation that Maclean is on?”

“2652 NW Aspen Street.”

“What do you know about it?”

“A child stopped breathing. Fire crew is there now.”

Medics were loading a gurney into the ambulance when the two
officers arrived. The emergency crew sped away with lights and siren
blaring before the two men got out of their car.

Sergeant Fieman walked over to greet the detectives.

“Poor girl’s been beat, beat bad,” Fieman said. The veteran cop was
visibly shaken.

“How old is she?” Harvey asked.

“Three,” Fieman replied. “She wasn’t breathing. Didn’t have a pulse. I
don’t think she’s gonna make it.” He shook his head the way disbelieving
people do. “I know her momma. Sarah Sheehan. Fire crew took her to
the hospital. Her boyfriend, Shawn Field, is inside the house. Officer
Teeter’s with him.”

“Wells, why don’t you head on over to the hospital? Monitor the
mom and kid,” Harvey said. “I’ve got a couple of questions I’d like to ask
the mom’s boyfriend.”

Wells located Officer Maclean in the emergency room. He had
a box camera and was taking photos of the little girl.

“We’ll do an autopsy to confirm it, but it appears she died of blunt force
trauma,” Dr. Hochfeld advised Detective Wells. “Her mom’s in the waiting room.
You want to come with me while I tell her?”

The two men walked the hospital hallway, heads down and somber,
to a private waiting room where Sarah Brill Sheehan waited with her
roommate, “Auntie” Shelley Freeland.

Shelley was sitting on the couch. She saw the men enter before
Sarah did. With her back to the door, Sarah was kneeling on the floor in
front of Shelley. The two women had weathered ten years of friendship,
often strained by the fraying of financial or moral cords. They grasped
at each other. Their hands entwined, they prayed and wept like the
sisters of Lazarus, wailing for God’s intervention. The two of them had
made untidy promises, the way they had a thousand times before. They
promised to be good girls if only God would heal Karly, right now, right
this very minute.

Shelley knew when she saw the doctor’s fretted brow that all their
ardent prayers and silver-tongued promises could cease.

Sarah turned toward the door. A familiar blankness shrouding her
face.

“Dr. Hochfeld,” the man in the white coat said, introducing himself.
He did not offer a handshake. Neither woman rose. They continued to
grasp each other.

“Karla is dead,” he said. His tone was terse—an even-tempered man
standing two steps beyond agitated.

The wailing resumed.

“But they told me they got a pulse!” Sarah screamed through tears.
Fists balled up, she beat the couch. “They told me they got a pulse!”

Shelley lacked Sarah’s fury, but her tears fell, too, hard and steady.

The doctor and detective stood by, silently, waiting for a break in
the squall. One minute, then two, passed before Dr. Hochfeld spoke
sternly, eyes blurred by despair.

“Karla had numerous bruises to her face. Do you have any idea
where those came from?” he asked.

Sarah looked up. Dr. Hochfeld turned toward the officer at his side.
As a warning to her, he said, “This is Detective Wells with the Corvallis
Police Department.”

There was another pause as choking sobs subsided. Sarah was
struggling to find her breath to speak.

“She jumped off the bed last night,” Sarah offered. “Those bruises,
they came yesterday, to her eye and her arm.”

When a child lies beaten to death, a reckoning is called for. Dr.
Hochfeld’s next question let Sarah know he didn’t believe her.

“Karla’s eye was very swollen.”

“She has very bad allergies,” Sarah said. “She’d been rubbing her
eye.”

Unconvinced, Hochfeld left the room without another word. Never
in his twenty-seven years of medical practice had he ever seen a child
so severely beaten. The little girl’s head injuries alone couldn’t have been
worse if she’d fallen from a two-story window.

Shortly before Karly was declared dead, Lieutenant Tim Brewer
notified Benton County District Attorney Scott Heiser. Brewer told him a three-year-old
child had been transported to Good Samaritan Hospital and that investigators
on the scene were saying she had been badly beaten.

Heiser was serving his second term as DA, a job he’d held since
1999. Heiser has a sharp chin, disarming smile, and clipped hair. He
was a local boy who obtained his undergraduate in Economics from
OSU and his law degree from Northwestern School of Law at Lewis and
Clark, a private college in Portland.

Heiser prosecuted a number of child abusers, though most were sex offenders,
but among his cases he couldn’t recall any abused child who had died. As he
headed across the street to the Corvallis Police Department, he hoped Brewer
was wrong, and that the EMTs had been able to revive the little girl.

In a private room at the hospital, a police investigator
pulled up a chair in front of Sarah and Shelley.

“I’m Detective Wells with the Corvallis Police Department,” he said.

Both women nodded, still crying.

Wells placed a tape recorder between them.

“I’m not really good at writing things down so I’m going to go ahead and just
record this so I can make sure I get everything when we talk, okay?”

The women bobbed their heads, unable to say anything coherent.

“What’s your name again?”

“Sarah.”

“And what’s your relationship?” Wells asked, looking at Shelley.

“Um, she’s my best friend and my roommate,” Sarah replied.

“Okay, and your roommate?”

“But we’re not lesbians,” Sarah said.

The detective thought that was an unusual clarification to make at such a
time. He asked Shelley to spell her name. Both women were crying so hard that
even with the recorder it was difficult to decipher their answers.

“I’m Karly’s godmother,” Shelley Freeland said. She added that Karly and Sarah
lived with her. They covered all the basics, including that Shawn Field lived
at the duplex on Aspen Street, where Karly was last seen alive. But Sarah
clarified that relationship, too.

“He’s not actually my boyfriend anymore. We just broke up.”

“When did you guys break up?”

“Um, two weeks ago, two or three weeks ago today.”

Wells asked who was at the house when Karly stopped breathing.

“Shawn.”

Wells made a couple of notes regarding Shawn, where he worked— Grempsey’s
Restaurant— and information about Shawn’s daughter.

“Can you tell me what happened? What’s been going on? I heard Karla’s been
sick,” Wells said.

“She has really bad allergies,” Sarah replied.

Someone knocked on the door. Wells excused himself and said he’d be right
back after he made a phone call. He left the recorder running.

Sarah, crying harder, said, “Shelley, my baby’s gone. I can’t do anything,
oh, Shelley.”

Shelley simply could not offer Sarah any consolation. Karly was dead. What
comfort was there now?

“She was supposed to grow up and be beautiful and popular and fun and funny,
now she’s dead,” Sarah cried. “Why did this have to happen? No, no, no, God,
oh, my God, I didn’t do enough. What didn’t I do? What could I have done?”

Shelley urged Sarah to take a drink of water.

“No,” Sarah said, pushing it away. “I just want to know why she is dead. There
has to be a reason. You just don’t decide to die. I just can’t believe, oh
my God, I can’t breathe.”

“Take a deep breath,” Shelley advised. “Hold it. You can do it.”

“Oh, my God, it’s all my fault,” Sarah said, gasping, sobbing. “Why didn’t
I think of something to do? I should have known something was wrong. I should
have known it was something besides allergies.”

S
arah had an idea of who
had done this horrible, horrible thing to her daughter.

David.

At the hospital, during those early hours following Karly’s death, Sarah
met with Detective Wells and others from the Corvallis Police Department,
and told them about the Children’s Services investigation and about her jealous
ex-husband.

“Karly was with David more than she was with me because I’m
going back to school and working. I’ve always worked but David’s just,
you know, more established,” Sarah said.

Sarah said that over the past several months Karly had been saying
that her daddy hits her. “I’d asked Karly, ‘Why does he hit you?’ and
Karly said, ‘He hits me because I go pee pee.’ Karly was very afraid of
going to the toilet. I’d ask her again, ‘Where does your daddy hit you?’
and she’d point to her bottom or someplace else.”

Detective Wells asked if Karly was potty-trained. Sarah replied
mostly but that she was wearing a diaper that morning because Sarah
hadn’t done the wash and Karly didn’t have any clean panties.

Sarah told Detective Wells that Karly had really loved being at
Shawn’s, that she loved Kate and the cats, but that David had stirred up
trouble by asking Karly, “Is Shawn going to be your new daddy? You
love Shawn and not me, don’t you?” According to Sarah, that’s when
Karly’s attitude started to change, when she started pulling her hair out
and hitting herself.

“Karly has been showing up with all these injuries,” Sarah said.
“Shawn is convinced David is harming Karly. Shawn said he put
cortisone on her because it brings out bruises faster and he wanted to
see what else David had done because he’s convinced that David’s not
appropriate with Karly. He’s trying to bring the bruises out so we can
show what David does.”

Shawn had been taking pictures to document the abuse, Sarah said.
Shawn had even shown her photos that very morning of some of Karly’s
injuries.

“When Karly got to our house she was pretty bruised already, and
then, you know, the bruises tend to get worse before they get better,”
Sarah said.

Sarah had noticed a bump on Karly’s head earlier that week, and
asked Karly what happened.

“She said her daddy hit her with a spoon. She had also said that her
dad had hit her on her feet with a spoon for going potty.”

Detective Wells asked if Sarah had noticed any bruising on Karly’s
feet.

“This morning she was crying so I was tickling her feet and it hurt
her really bad. I looked at her feet; they were really swollen, and I said,
‘What’s wrong?’ And she said, ‘My daddy hit them with the spoon.’ They
were real tender.”

Karly’s feet weren’t the only thing bruised that Friday morning,
Sarah said. “When Karly got up this morning, it was totally shocking to
see her. Her eye was swollen shut.”

The more questions police asked, the more animated Sarah became,
and the more convinced she was she’d better leave the hospital before
David showed up. Sarah appeared so terrified of David that police
considered him a real threat.

“Based on everything Sarah told us, we saw David as a threat and a
potential suspect,” Wells said. They began to make plans to keep David
and Sarah away from each other, not only at the hospital, but also later
throughout the night.

Police told Sarah and Shelley they could not return to their
apartment. It had been secured by police and would be searched. No
problem, Shelley said; they could stay at her parents’ house in nearby
Salem.

In his summary notes, Wells said Sarah had trouble keeping information straight. “Based on my training and experience, her demeanor,
reactions, emotional state, and ability to recall information were
consistent with victims of crimes and those who have been traumatized
by events,” Wells said.

The detective would later change his mind about why Sarah couldn’t
keep her story straight. “Interviewing Sarah was exhausting,” Wells said.
“She was the most draining individual I’ve ever interviewed. If I asked
her what her address was, she’d take twenty minutes to answer. She
couldn’t remember anything. She was quiet, had an almost monotone
voice. She never volunteered anything.

“Sarah was extremely cautious, watching her own back, always
making sure she wasn’t going to get tripped up and charged with
anything. She is way smarter than she comes off.”

Shawn Field’s behavior hadn’t been normal either. Emergency
crews who arrived at 2652 NW Aspen Street thought it odd that the sandy-haired
man, wearing nothing but athletic shorts and sunglasses shoved back on his
head, kept pacing back and forth, “like a trapped animal.”

Instead of offering to help the police officers and other medical
personnel as they had attended to Karly, Shawn busied himself pushing
a heavy wood dining room table up against a bedroom door. He then
tossed the dining room chairs atop it.

Andy Louden, a battalion chief with the Corvallis Fire Department,
at first thought Shawn was moving the furniture to make way for the
medic crew. He’d witnessed Shawn attempt to comfort Sarah earlier.
As Shawn embraced her, he rested his hands on Sarah’s breasts,
momentarily fondling them. It was a crass gesture that struck Louden
as wildly inappropriate.

Gary Thurman, one of the emergency medical technicians, went
outside to get the backboard to put Karly on. As he was going back
inside the duplex, he overheard Shawn talking to Sarah.

“Don’t talk to the paramedics, don’t talk to the police,” he urged.

Lieutenant Steve Bowen, also with the Corvallis Fire Department,
heard the same thing. Bowen told Chief Louden what he and Thurman
overheard. Louden offered to take both Sarah and Shawn to the hospital,
but Shawn said no, he’d better not go, that his daughter Kate was due
home soon. He didn’t know dispatchers had already called the school
and told them to keep Kate there.

Sergeant Fieman told Shawn investigators were going to need
his help around the place in order to determine why Karly stopped
breathing. Fieman called headquarters and told them he was pretty
sure they had a homicide on their hands, that somebody needed to
get some search warrants in order. The Benton County Major Crime
Investigation Team had been notified. Harvey and Wells were en route.

Fieman looked around the place. The car in the driveway, a pristine
white Aspire, had a child’s car seat in the back and a Bush/Cheney
sticker on the bumper. An empty Starbucks cup was in the console. An
American flag hung motionless from the apartment’s doorpost.

An assortment of tennis shoes, big ones and little ones, were lined
up just inside the doorway. The child had been found lying partly on the
white carpet of the living room and the cold linoleum before emergency
crews had whisked her away. A child’s pink coat hung from the coat
rack. On the wall behind the rack was a framed copy of famous love
quotes.

Pushed up against the west wall was a leather sectional, all white,
draped with an orange-and-black Oregon State Beaver throw. A
black-and-white cat lay asleep on the couch. A child’s white rocker sat
motionless in the sunrays coming through the sliding-glass door onto
the south patio. Dishes were washed and stacked.

Down the hallway were several ornately framed oversize portraits
of a dark-haired girl, Shawn’s daughter, Kate. A Hillary Duff poster was
pinned to the shut door on Fieman’s right. He opened it cautiously.
Bold letters spelled out the child’s name on one wall: K-A-T-E. To his
immediate left, a set of metal-frame bunk beds was pushed up against
the wall. Red curtains hung from the window across the room.

The leopard-print bedding of the top bunk had been left unmade.
There was no mattress on the bottom bunk; just a couple of small boxes,
holding frames or books, and various other belongings. There were
more posters pinned to the ceiling.

Missing was any sign to indicate a three-year-old lived in this home.
The only photos were Kate’s, the only artwork hers. The clothes in the
closet were Kate’s. There wasn’t a bed, not even a mattress on the floor
for Karly. There was an absence of anything that spoke to her life in
the place, that Karly had even been a guest there. She slept on the floor
where the cats prowled, with only a pink pillow and a blanket.

Fieman continued down the hallway. Just past the bathroom, he
saw the pile of dining room furniture Shawn had shoved up against a
door. It didn’t take police officers long to figure out the reason for the
barricade. Fieman noted there were six planting pots on the counter in
the kitchen.

Fieman looked over at Shawn, who’d put on a t-shirt and was pacing around the
living room.

“My daughter will be home from school very soon,” Shawn said.
“What am I going to tell her?”

Fieman didn’t answer, not at first. Then, tucking his chin down and
cutting his eyes toward Shawn, Fieman offered him a bit of advice: “If it
was me, I’d tell anyone who asked me the straight-out truth.”

Shawn stopped pacing as Fieman continued, “I’m not going to
ask you any questions about Karla at this time, but let’s just say I did,
or somebody else was to—if it were me, I’d tell the whole truth so
everybody would know exactly what happened.”

Shawn stood still.

Fieman shrugged his shoulders, lifted his chin, and looked straight
into Shawn’s eyes. “The police are going to find out the truth anyway;
you might as well tell it to them up front.”

Shawn’s head dropped so low his chin was almost resting on his
chest. Closing his eyes, Shawn whispered, “Oh, God.”

The veteran police officer took Shawn’s sigh to mean one thing:
defeat.

Fieman shared his observations with Detectives Harvey and Wells
when they arrived.

“Situations like this require we do an investigation,” Detective
Harvey said after introducing himself to Shawn.

“I understand,” Shawn replied. His voice was soft, agreeable, but his
demeanor was anxious. There were no tears, no outbursts of grief, but
Shawn seemed nervous.

“I’d like to search the place, see if there’s anything that might help us
determine what happened to Karla, if that’s okay with you,” Harvey said.
“There’s not anything illegal in the house that you’re worried about, is
there?”

Just moments later, Shawn confided to Officer Steve Teeter: “I can’t
believe what I did in my bedroom. My life is over.”

“What do you mean your life is over?” Teeter asked, his eyes
widening.

“That guy over there will tell you all about it,” Shawn said, nodding
his head toward Harvey, who had walked outside to talk privately with
Sergeant Fieman.

A few minutes later, when Harvey returned, Teeter told him about
the exchange with Shawn.

“He’s got a marijuana grow in the bedroom,” Harvey said.

That explained the blockade Shawn had constructed from the
dining room furniture, but it raised other questions. For starters, who
worries about getting in trouble with the law for growing marijuana
plants when there’s a battered child lying on the floor, not breathing?

That’s one of the questions Detective Harvey hoped to settle when
he asked Shawn to join him at the Law Enforcement Center. Shawn
Field was not under arrest.

Not yet.

Shawn said he’d be glad to go in for questioning, but first he’d
have to see to his daughter. School was nearly out. Sure, go ahead, not
a problem, Harvey said. But Shawn changed his mind, called Eileen
Field, his ex-wife, and asked if she could pick up Kate. Something had
come up that needed his undivided attention.

In the patrol car, on their way to the police station, Harvey got a
call from Wells.

“The girl’s dead. Beaten to death,” Wells said.

“Got it,” Harvey said, cutting his eyes at Shawn.

“There’s more,” Wells said, pausing. “The emergency room doctor
said there’s evidence she was sexually assaulted.”

David spent a fitful Friday night at John Hogan’s place.
Earlier that evening, Detective Stauder and another officer had interviewed
David at the hospital. The three-hour interview was grueling, particularly
given that David was still in a state of shock. The detectives asked if he
had anything to do with Karly’s death. David replied that he hadn’t seen Karly
since Monday.

“What do you think happened?” Detective Stauder asked.

“I suspect Karly was over at Shawn’s house—she doesn’t like being over there—so
Karly was acting out and Sarah couldn’t deal with that. I think she overreacted,”
David said.

“Have you ever had any funny feelings about Shawn?” Detective
Stauder asked. “Like a mother’s intuition kind of thing?”

“He’s a liar and a fraud,” David said.

Detective Stauder warned David that his own house had been
sealed off so Corvallis Police Department’s evidence team could give
it a thorough search. They seized the sheets from the laundry and an
unlaundered Nike t-shirt that belonged to Karly. It had a red stain on
the front. David told them it was from their last meal together, the pizza
they had before he dropped her at Sarah’s on Monday.

Wells warned investigators to be on the lookout for wooden
spoons. Sarah told Wells that David used wooden spoons to discipline
Karly. Every drawer, every cupboard, all closets, and all garbage cans
were checked for a wooden spoon; the Corvallis Police found none.
What investigators did find in David’s home were toys galore, dozens of
framed snapshots of Karly, and racks of the girl’s clothes hanging in the
closet. “It was apparent Mr. Sheehan was dedicated to Karly,” the police
report concluded.

Detective Wells came to the same conclusion. “Once we did the
search and met David we could tell he was a victim. For most of us,
David was out of the picture as a prime suspect that night.”