KARLY SHEEHAN: True Crime behind Karly's Law Read online

  KARLY SHEEHAN

  -the true crime story behind Karly’s Law-

  by karen spears zacharias

  Crafted with great love for

  Karly Ruth Sheehan

  &

  David Sheehan

  Dear Readers:

  Rarely have I received the sort of impassioned response to a story as I have with tale of Karly Sheehan. I was overwhelmed by the number of people who wrote to me telling stories of their own childhood abuse, usually at the hand of a parent or a trusted loved one. I had been so focused on getting the facts straight in this story, so focused on the murdered child, that I simply didn’t imagine – what about those who survive child abuse?

  The first came from an 80-year-old reader in New York, who ran away from home at age 15 because of the abuse she suffered. Her mother, like Sarah Brill, was complicit in her daughter’s abuse. “She had her reasons,” the reader wrote.

  But the letters most telling to me came from readers who had some connection to Shawn Field. Those letters are chilling. I share excerpts of these letters with you here so that you have some sense of urgency about the importance of Karly’s story. The more we know what to look for, the more likely we will be to prevent such tragedies in the future.

  Dear Ms. Zacharias:

  I was driving to Portland a couple of weeks ago and heard your interview on NPR/OPB. It brought up all of those wretched memories—but I didn’t know that you’d written a book. I immediately ordered it. It arrived yesterday, and I just finished it—you did an incredible job on a very difficult subject. Thank you for writing it, and thank you for providing your email address. I’m not sure what I’m going to say, but I felt a need to talk to you after hearing your interview—thanks for providing a vehicle.

  We lived one house away from the Field family on Vineyard Mountain. The day we moved in, Shawn and Kevin shot my son with a BB gun. As a teenager, Shawn broke into my house several times. Although I suspected him, he went out of his way to look me in the eye and converse with me whenever he saw me. So I concluded that it couldn’t have been him. Both boys had impeccable manners. There wasn’t a single crack in their façade.

  You’re so right that so many people failed Karly, including, perhaps, Hugh and Anne, who publically refused to admit their children had problems. Their whole family was an American tragedy that, unfortunately, allowed Karly’s murder. Shawn is the right person in prison—I cannot believe anyone doubts that. Since

  Sarah contributed—she just didn’t deliver the physical blows—I’m sorry she wasn’t charged in some way. No real mother is that blind. No real mother would subject her child to that abuse.

  S.

  Hi Karen:

  I just got your book last night and had trouble putting it down. Your writing is stellar and the story is powerful. Thank you so much for sharing your gift for writing and for making sure this sweet, adorable child is not forgotten. I live in north Albany and work in Corvallis but I know (from personal experience) that child abuse goes on in every town in America. Thank you for the courage to do something about it.

  G. P.

  Ms.Zacharias:

  I just finished reading Karly’s Story. I felt compelled to tell you how very much Karly reminds me of myself as a little girl. I was emotionally, physically and sexually abused and my mother knew it was happening but had her own reasons for allowing it to go on.

  Sincerely,

  C.O.

  Dear Ms. Zacharias,

  I received the book yesterday and finished it just minutes ago. While I was not entirely prepared to hear Karly's story, I know already that it has changed me on some deep level that I do not quite have the eloquence to put into words.

  The violence in our community seems to be increasing daily and every day I truly wonder if it will strike someone close to me, or God forbid my own children. I know that in my own life I will pay closer attention, listen harder, and watch more carefully over the young people I am blessed to encounter...mine and others.

  Thank you for sharing this story. I do hope that you will visit us here for a discussion of this book.

  Respectfully,

  Dr. J.P. Pediatrician

  Karen,

  My name is Jim Ed Clayton. I am the Executive Director of the Blount County Children’s Center, the child advocacy center for Blount County, Alabama.

  I started your book about Karly two days ago, and stayed up last night until 2:00 a.m. to finish it. Thank you for your thorough efforts in documenting the “perfect storm of failure” that allowed those in the protection system to allow Karly’s abuse and ultimate death.

  As coordinator of our county’s multidisciplinary child abuse response and investigation team, I found this to be an important cautionary tale. I have already asked our staff to read it. Plus, I intend to recommend it to our statewide association of CAC directors; to our agency’s board of directors; and to our multidisciplinary team. I will emphasize the lessons it teaches us all, including law enforcement, child services, victim advocates, medical, mental health, schools, juvenile court, etc… (1.) that each case is too important for us to be wrong; (2.) that we should never build on another team member’s wrong assumptions; (3.) that each of us should welcome another team members to disagree with our opinion, and should seriously pursue alternate hypotheses; and (4.) that each of us should feel free to question the assumptions and decisions of other team members.

  As a concerned father, grandfather, and citizen, I want to offer my thanks for this artfully written book. I hope and pray that it will gain much popularity and, thereby, help to enlighten our society about the horror that is child abuse. I fully believe that children will be rescued and lives will be saved because of your efforts.

  Jim Ed Clayton/Executive Director/Blount County Children’s Center

  I have received dozens and dozens of letters like these. I’ve fielding phone calls from grandparents concerned that their grandchildren are being abused and from fathers like David. Since the publication of Karly’s story, I’ve heard from Shawn Field’s ex-wife Eileen, who told me she would have gladly interviewed with me had she only known. She gave me an update on Katie Field, and she echoed the sentiments expressed in the following letter by an old girlfriend of Shawn’s:

  Dear Karen:

  I attended Santiam Christian with Shawn Field and although many years have passed, the impact that Shawn Field left with me I carry to this day.

  When he first came to our school I became his girlfriend. He was charming, well-dressed and well-spoken with perfect manners and very gentlemanly and I was taken with him almost immediately. It did not take long for the real Shawn to emerge and I found myself in over my head and sinking fast.

  I still fear Shawn Field to this day, and the physical and sexual abuse I suffered at his hand feels like it was just yesterday. To say that he is evil is an understatement and if anyone thinks that murdering Karly was Shawn's first crime they are wrong. The Shawn Field that took the life of that sweet and innocent baby has been alive and well since high school. He is an incredible liar and a master of deception.

  The fact that I was with and had feelings for someone who would become a murderer is very hard for me to understand. How could I have been so wrong about another human being ? I question my own judgment. How could I have been deceived so easily?

  This was a lifestyle for Shawn. He is cold and calculated methodical and evil. Karly’s murder was no isolated incident of violence. She was not his first victim. I am sure Shawn is a model inmate. He has the ability to reinvent himself and become who he needs to be to get exactly the result he is looking for.

  Name W
ithheld

  I have put this book on eBook in hopes that it will be more readily available to readers. Please tell someone you know about Karly Sheehan. Check out the links at the end of this book and find out how you can help bring laws like Karly’s Law to your state.

  My prayer is that you will remember Karly and that the memory of her will compel you to speak up. Tell somebody what you learned from Karly and how it has changed you.

  Thank you for taking this journey.

  Warmly,

  Karen Spears Zacharias

  Chapter

  One

  The 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 hymnbook, 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 Human 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.

  Chapter Two

  I click the icon on my laptop—the one on the desktop marked “Field/Sheehan 911”—and I hear her alternately gasping, screaming and crying. On first listen, it sounds exactly like what you’d think such a call would sound like: a woman in shock.

  A full forty-five seconds passed before seasoned dispatcher Andy Thompson could make out the nature of the call.

  Forty-five seconds. The time it takes to plant a tulip bulb, to steep a cup of weak tea, to floss one’s teeth, or to draw one’s last breath. For emergency personnel like Thompson, forty-five seconds can seem like the implacable drip of water torture, the danger and risk growing with each passing pause. He later told Corvallis Police Sergeant Evan Fieman that the caller was screaming so hysterically he couldn’t understand her.

  “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 flatly, trying unsuccessfully to calm the caller.

  “Karla! Karla! Come back! Karla! Come baaaack!”

  “I need you to calm down,” Dispatcher Thompson said sternly, authoritatively. “What’s the problem?”