A Silence of Mockingbirds (13 page)

Before he and Kate left, Sarah gave him his Christmas gift: a BB
gun. By Sarah’s own admission, it was an odd gift for a thirty-three-year-old man.

On Christmas Eve morning, Shawn dropped Sarah off in Portland
on his way to the airport. Sarah was going to visit her mom, Carol,
who was in the hospital again, dealing with cancer and a multitude of
serious ailments. Sarah was often dismissive of her mother’s ongoing
health problems, referring to her as a hypochondriac. David, who was
working in Hillsboro, agreed to pick up Sarah after work and give her a
ride back to Corvallis. They went together to get Karly at Delynn’s that
evening.

Afterward, Sarah asked David to drop her at Shawn’s place. As
David made the turn onto Aspen Street, to pull into the driveway at
Shawn’s duplex, Karly began to whimper from her car seat in the back.
David looked in the rearview mirror and saw a look of sheer panic on
his daughter’s face. Rapidly maneuvering the steering wheel, David
swerved away from the driveway and edged up to the curb instead.
Karly calmed down after David reassured her that he was just dropping
Sarah off.

The next morning, Christmas Day, he went back to the apartment
that Sarah shared with her roommate Shelley, to be with Karly as she
opened her gifts. Sarah cooked a holiday meal for the three of them.

Then David took Karly and went back to his place. Later, with Karly
dressed in the beautiful lace and red velvet dress David had bought,
the two of them headed out for a Christmas gathering at John Hogan’s
house. Hogan was one of David’s best friends. David covered Karly’s
bald head with a Santa hat.

“I was feeling very hurt for her,” David recalled. He knew Karly was
very much aware of how startling she looked. Somebody asked Karly
to go stand by the inflatable reindeer so they could take her picture.
Karly complied but then pulled her father close and whispered, “That
reindeer is not Rudolph because Rudolph has a red nose and that
reindeer doesn’t!”

Nothing escaped Karly’s keen eye. She was intuitive and inquisitive,
perceptive and observant. Girls born to neglectful mothers learn early
that the world is fraught with dangers and they need to stay alert.

Karly didn’t see her mother again until a week later, on
New Year’s Eve, when Sarah dropped by David’s place for a brief visit, after
David asked if Sarah intended to spend any time with her daughter during the
holidays since it was “her turn” to have Karly. Sarah popped in but only for
a few minutes. She had a full night of partying ahead.

On January 4, 2005, Karly’s third birthday, David presented his
daughter with a delicate necklace adorned with a crucifix. Some of
Karly’s friends at daycare had started to shun her, undoubtedly scared
off by her rapidly deteriorating condition and her appearance. For that
reason, David decided against having a birthday party for Karly. If
David hoped the crucifix would ward off the monsters that threatened
his daughter, it did not work. Karly did not see another birthday.

S
arah’s parents were unaware of the ongoing investigation.
She’d never mentioned it to Gene or Carol.

In early November, Sarah and Karly met Gene at Timberhill’s
Starbucks in the neighborhood mall on Corvallis’s north side. Carol
was ill and unable to attend. Gene and two other grandkids were on
their way down to Springfield to visit Sarah’s sister, Kimberly, and her
husband Tony. One of the grandkids was having a birthday party, and
they were taking Karly along.

Gene saw that Karly had a bruise on her left cheek. It looked like
Karly had been slapped. Gene asked Sarah about it and she dismissed
it as nothing. Karly had run into something, Sarah said. Gene studied
his granddaughter for a moment. She was running frantically around
Starbucks.

“She didn’t hardly stop,” Gene said. “She ran almost constantly, in
a nervous way.” But by the time Karly arrived at her aunt and uncle’s
home, an hour away, she didn’t want to play. Gene recalled she seemed
unhappy over everything, which wasn’t like Karly. Kim was so troubled
by her niece’s behavior and by the bruise on her face that she took Karly
aside and asked her about it. All Karly would say is that she fell.

“It was very suspicious to Kim,” Carol later told police investigators.
“She was mad.”

When David drove down to pick up Karly a day later, Gene asked
David how it was that Karly came to have such a bruise. David said he
thought she had fallen or run into something.

Karly saw her grandparents again over Thanksgiving. They noticed
she had even less hair than before, but Karly’s appearance in November
left them ill-prepared for what they saw on February 8, 2005.

Carol had a doctor’s appointment at Oregon Health Science
University Hospital. David met Gene at Washington Square Mall, just
outside Portland, to drop off Karly. She was going back to Pendleton
with her grandparents for a brief stay. Karly was prepared for the trip,
with her backpack in tow and wearing a jaunty traveling hat. Gene and
Karly headed back up to the hospital on Portland’s west side. Because
it was early, Gene and Carol took Karly to get some breakfast in the
cafeteria. Karly seemed famished. She ate all of her breakfast, and then
helped her grandfather finish off his.

Carol’s doctor, who had joined them for breakfast, asked Karly to
take off her hat so he could see her princess blonde hair. But when Carol
lifted it off, everyone gasped: Karly hardly had any hair at all.

“My doctor couldn’t believe she wasn’t a chemo patient,” Carol said.
“She looked just like one.”

Neither Sarah nor David had warned Gene and Carol ahead of time
about Karly’s hair loss. Gene and Carol knew that Sarah was seeing a
new boyfriend but they had never met Shawn, and knew nothing
about him other than his name. Sarah did not like her parents asking
questions, and she volunteered very little information. Gene and Carol
had a better relationship with David than they did Sarah, but David
hadn’t wanted to worry to them, so he hadn’t said anything either.

It is a four-hour drive east from Portland, where Gene picked
up Karly, to where Gene and Carol live. After Sarah and her siblings grew
up and moved away, Gene and Carol sold their home and built their dream home
on on a hillside, east of Pendleton, designed for comfort and grandchildren,
with breathtaking views that span the Blue Mountains.

During that particular February visit, as Carol was washing up the
dinner dishes, Karly let out a bloodcurdling scream. Carol ran to her
granddaughter and found Karly cowering next to an overturned plant.

“I’m sorry, Grandma,” Karly cried. “I broke your plant!”

“Oh, honey,” Carol said, wrapping the trembling child in her arms,
“you never, ever have to be afraid in Grandma’s house. There is nothing
in my house more important than you.”

Karly came back for one more visit that winter, in mid-March, to
join her cousins for an early Easter celebration. She was thinner than
ever and pale as death. Her eyes were red-rimmed and seemed full of an
unspoken strain. Carol asked Karly what she thought of Shawn. Karly
replied he “was poopy.”

The usually gregarious Karly refused to participate in the Easter egg
hunt with her cousins. She had to be taken by the hand and led through
the motions.

“She looked so lost, so forlorn, so sad, scared,” Carol said.

Sarah, who had agreed to pick up Karly, arranged to meet her
parents halfway. Karly spoke to Sarah on the cell phone several times
as her grandparents drove west through the Columbia River Gorge that
afternoon. Each time, she asked for David, over and over again. Karly’s
begging for her father upset Gene Brill.

“I remember it so vividly because I was hurting for Sarah. I knew
Sarah just wanted to talk to her daughter, but the whole time Karly kept
saying, ‘I want my daddy. I want my daddy,’” Gene said.

Gene and Carol discussed their concerns about Karly with other
family members, but they stopped short of naming the thing they feared
most: that their granddaughter was being abused.

Gene and Carol had a handful of uneasy observations, but nothing
more came of it. Karly’s grandparents didn’t learn of the state’s abuse
investigation until after Karly’s murder, when the Corvallis police called
them in for interviews.

C
arol Brill’s mother
died the first week in May. Sarah called her brother, Doug, and asked
if she could hitch a ride down to Redding, California, for their grandmother’s funeral.

It was a grueling trip: eight people packed together in an SUV for
the six-hour drive: Doug, his wife Gretchen, their four kids, plus Sarah
and Karly. Sarah sat in the very back between Karly and her cousin
Emily.

Somewhere north of Redding, Doug pulled the car into a rest area to
give the kids a break. They ran. They hollered. They jumped in puddles.
No one could remember what exactly set Sarah off, but something did.
She grabbed Karly by the shoulders, shook her, and then threw her
sobbing daughter into the car seat in the very back of the vehicle and
began to scream at her.

“Be quiet!”

Karly continued to cry.

“Why don’t you just shut your mouth? I don’t want to hear any more of it!”

Doug and Gretchen were stunned.

“She’s just being a kid,” one of them muttered.

At the family dinner following the funeral, Sarah complained to
those within earshot that David would hardly have anything to do with
Karly, that she was a single mom having to manage all by her lonesome,
putting herself through college. Sarah probably didn’t notice the family
members who knew better rolling their eyes.

Gretchen walked away. “None of it was true,” she later told detectives.
It was more fiction crafted to evoke sympathy for Sarah.

Meanwhile, as Sarah stood in the church fellowship hall, talking
about herself, Karly was running around the church parking lot
unsupervised.

“The thing that disturbed me the most was Sarah just seemed so
disconnected from Karly,” Gretchen recalled. “Karly would run inside
and see her mom and she didn’t get anything out of her mom, attention
or anything.

“Sarah would keep talking to whoever she was talking to, and just
totally ignore her, so Karly would run back to where the excitement
was with the kids,” Gretchen said. “There was no emotional attachment
that I could see at all. Karly was just a little prize, kind of: this is my
daughter.”

The next day, Karly rode back with her aunt and uncle while Sarah
rode in her parents’ car, sleeping mostly. Nearly every five minutes,
Karly asked the same questions, over and over again.

“Uncle Doug, do you know how to get to my daddy’s house? Are
you sure you know where my daddy lives?”

Karly’s anxiety made the trip seem twice as long. Finally, she went
absolutely wild with joy when Doug pulled over at a gas station along
Interstate 5 and David was there to get her.

That Sunday, Mother’s Day, Karly spent the day with her father.
Sarah dropped by briefly. She spent less than an hour with her daughter.

The very next week, after Sarah had her for a couple of days,
Karly came to David’s with a knot in the middle of her forehead. It was a
bruise about an inch long and very narrow. Angry and distraught, David sent
Sarah a text message: “We have 2 talk in the morning re: Karly. She has new
cuts & bruises, and I haven’t seen her this upset since the hair loss.
I’m worried about her.”

The message was sent at 9:40 p.m. on Friday, May 13, 2005.

Sarah called him. There was an exchange of heated words.

“Karly’s got a knot on her head,” David began. “What happened?”

“She ran into a tree,” Sarah said.

“Really?” David replied, disbelieving. “She just ran into a tree? She couldn’t
see the tree in front of her?”

“You know how clumsy she is.”

“No. No, I don’t, Sarah. I don’t know anything about Karly’s clumsiness.
I think that maybe we ought to take her back to Dr. deSoyza. Have her take
a look at Karly.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Sarah said. “We can’t be taking Karly to the
doctor for every bump or bruise she gets. She’s a kid. Kids run into
things and get banged up all the time. I did it when I was a kid and my
parents weren’t carting me to the doctor every single time I skinned my
knee.”

“Yeah, well, when you were a kid, were state investigators involved
in your life?” David prodded.

“Yes. Yes, they were,” Sarah snapped back.

David noted a marked difference in Sarah’s tone. In December,
when she’d brought Karly to him so badly bruised and with her hair
missing, Sarah had been conciliatory, apologetic. This time Sarah was
defensive, accusatory.

“Karly is perfectly safe with me,” Sarah continued. “Besides, how
do I know she’s not getting bruised with you? I’m going to start taking
pictures when she arrives at my house.”

Sarah later testified that the picture-taking scheme had been Shawn’s
idea. He wanted to document the bruises on Karly and use those photos
as evidence so Sarah would get full custody of Karly, and the check that
would go along with it.

Sarah knew as she argued with David that the bump on Karly’s
forehead appeared after she left Karly alone with Shawn. The promise
never to leave the two of them alone was one Sarah had broken early.

That next day, Saturday, May 14, David drove Karly to Pendleton
for another short stay with her grandparents. By late Saturday, the bruising
on Karly’s forehead had begun to seep downward, turning the corner pockets
of her eyes a shocking blue. At dinner, Karly ate like a field hand. Later,
while bathing her granddaughter before bedtime, Grandma Carol noticed scratches
in Karly’s armpits, as if she had a rash of some sort. She dried Karly off
and rubbed Neosporin under her arms.

After her bath, Karly began to cry. “I miss my daddy. I want my
daddy. Can we call my daddy?”

Her grandparents were rattled by her cries. Every time they’d been
around her since the previous fall, Karly had done the very same thing.
And it didn’t seem to matter if it was day or night. Karly cried for her
father; she did not cry for her mother.

Karly refused to sleep in her own bed. Her grandparents usually
made her a bed on a cot in their room, but on this trip, even that wasn’t
close enough to soothe Karly.

“She slept with me,” Carol said. “She was too scared to go anywhere
else. She slept in my bed, right up next to me. She refused to go to bed
unless she could lay right next to me.”

David called to check on Karly at least three times a day. Sarah
rarely called. One afternoon, Carol and Karly were in the kitchen baking
cookies. Karly told her grandma all about her daddy’s new girlfriend,
Kendall, about how they sometimes made cookies together, too.

“I really like her,” Karly said. “She’s nice.”

“What about Shawn?” Carol asked. “Do you like him?”

“NO! Grandma!” Karly said.

Carol paused and studied her granddaughter for a minute, and
then asked, “How come? Does he spank you?”

Karly looked down, averting her grandmother’s curious gaze. “No,”
she muttered softly. Then, climbing down out of the chair, she went off
to play by herself.

When Gene and Carol’s Bible study group came over for their
weekly meeting, Carol put on a video for Karly to watch downstairs
in the family room, as was their routine whenever their grandchildren
came to visit. Distraught over being left alone, Karly began to sob
uncontrollably, “I want my daddy! I want my daddy!”

Carol held Karly and soothed her throughout the rest of the evening.
When David picked up Karly on Thursday, May 19, 2005, he told Gene
and Carol he was planning to move with Karly to Portland in August.

“We love our daughter,” Carol said, “but Karly will be better off with
you.”

The pockets around Karly’s eyes had really begun to turn
a deep purple. David and Gene Brill talked about possible reasons why a child’s
eyes might do that. Gene had worked for a medical lab. He urged David to get
Karly in to see her doctor, to get a blood test. David called when he got
back and scheduled Karly for a visit with Dr. deSoyza for the following Wednesday,
May 25. David told the doctor what Sarah had told him, that Karly had run
headlong into a tree almost two week previously, sustaining a significant
bump and bruise on her forehead. Now she had two black eyes.

During the exam, Dr. deSoyza noticed Karly had some bruises on
her back as well. She asked David if he had any idea how Karly got
those.

David said he’d been working in the yard over the weekend and
Karly had tripped over some rhododendron roots and fallen on her
backside. David also told the doctor that when he’d picked Karly up
from daycare on Monday she’d had a bruise on her left arm.

Dr. deSoyza made a note of the bruise on Karly’s left bicep and the
bruises on her back. She told David she thought the black eyes were
caused by the head bruise seeping downward. It would, she suggested,
continue to dissipate and be absorbed by Karly’s body.

It wasn’t until after Karly died that Dr. deSoyza learned that the
day Karly reportedly ran into the tree, she was not with Sarah—she was
alone with Shawn.

“If I had known Karly was back in that same environment, I would
have looked at the last visit in a totally different context,” Dr. deSoyza
said. “But I didn’t know.”

Nine days later, Dr. deSoyza received another call regarding Karly.
This one came from a colleague who worked the emergency room at
Good Samaritan Hospital.

“Karly Sheehan is dead,” he said. “I thought you’d want to know
right away.”

The doctor who had attended to Karly from the moment of her
birth hung up the phone, walked into the living room, sat in a chair,
dropped her head into her hands, and wept.