A Silence of Mockingbirds (19 page)

“What do you remember about that?”

“I said goodnight to her when she had the bruise. My dad was
holding her. I was on the top bunk. I hugged her.”

“Did Karly go to bed, too?”

“No. I don’t remember what she did.”

Clutching a stuffed animal, she testified through tears that she’d
heard slapping sounds coming from the kitchen the night before Karly
was killed. She did not get out of bed to check on Karly.

“What happened after you went to bed?”

“I heard some noises.”

“What kind of noises?”

“Banging noises, kind of.”

“What did they sound like?”

“Um,” Kate paused, and tugged at the stuffed animal in her hands.

“Kind of like, I can’t really sound it, but I know what it sounded like.”

“Have you described those sounds before?” Demarest asked. She
knew, of course, that Kate had told the forensic interviewer at the ABC
(All Because of Children) House exactly what those sounds had been
like.

“Yes.”

“Did you use anything to describe those sounds before?”

“Yes.” Kate was a defense attorney’s star witness, expertly parsing
her answers.

“What did you use?” Demarest was a patient prosecutor who had
practiced for this moment.

“A spoon,” Kate replied.

“Like a big plastic spoon?”

“I think it was plastic. I don’t know,” Kate replied honestly.

“Did you hear any voices?”

“Yes.”

“What were those voices doing?”

“Well, they were,” Kate said. She paused and thought through the
question carefully. “What do you mean?”

“Were they talking, yelling, crying, anything like that?” Demarest
seemed annoyed that Kate had come back at her with a question. Did
she fault the child for trying to protect her father?

“Uh. Karly, she said mmmm,” Kate replied, mimicking a quiet,
moaning sound. “I think that was the sound.”

“Did you hear your dad’s voice?”

“I don’t remember.”

“What did you do with the spoon to make the sound?”

“Can you repeat the question?” Kate was stalling.

“Can you tell us what you did with the spoon to make the sound?”

“I hit it,” Kate said. “It’s hard to explain.”

“Would it be helpful if you had a spoon to show the jury?” Demarest
asked.

“No. Not really,” Kate replied.

Demarest would not be denied. She pulled a large black plastic
spoon, the sort used for ladling stews, from a paper sack.

“Have you ever seen a spoon like this before?”

“Yes. At my dad’s house. Except it was, mmm….”

“Was it broken like this?”

“No.”

“Kate, what would you do with a spoon like that to make the sound
you heard that night?”

Kate slapped her hands together.

“How do you know it was a spoon you heard that night?” Demarest
asked.

“Because I know what spoons sound like,” the girl replied.

“What did you do when you heard the spanking sounds?”

“I stayed in bed.”

“Did you think about going outside your bedroom to see what the
sound was from?”

“No,” Kate said, “because I didn’t know it was…” She stopped herself.
“Just no.”

Kate never told the jurors or anyone else how she knew what
spanking noises sounded like. If her father had ever abused her in any
way, Kate never admitted to it. Her mother, Eileen Field, told the court
about how abusive her ex-husband had been. How he’d once dropped-kicked
a puppy in front of their young daughter. How, when angered,
he’d threaten to harm Kate’s beloved kittens. How he’d constantly berate
her, screaming obscenities in front of Kate.

The defense team decided not to interrogate the young girl. Whether
that was because it might further implicate their client or because their
client begged them not to question his daughter, the jurors thought it
was the right call.

Despite Demarest’s belief that Kate’s testimony was a critical turning
point in the trial, many of the jurors said the young girl’s statements
really didn’t change their minds one way or another. Most felt sorry for
Kate—sorry that she had to be in the courtroom at all. Some were angry
at Joan Demarest for putting Kate on the stand.

“Kate never made eye contact with her father,” recalled one juror.
“Her voice was barely audible and the answers she gave were not clear.
She did meekly admit Shawn spanked Karly with a spoon, but not
convincingly. It was not clear where, when, or how hard Karly was hit.
The defense attorneys, to their credit, did not challenge Kate’s responses,
which they easily could have done.”

This particular juror noted how distraught Shawn was to see his
daughter on the stand. He also came away with the distinct impression
Kate “knew a lot more than she revealed, but she was torn about
having to testify against her father, and/or she was intimidated by the
environment.”

Another juror noted, “Little, if any, of Kate’s testimony was useful
for a juror looking at evidence. I felt it was unnecessary to have put her
through it.”

But Demarest remains resolute that putting Kate on the stand was
the right thing to do.

“She heard Karly getting beaten the night before Karly was killed
when only Kate, Karly, and Field were home.  No one else could have
testified to that.”

Demarest did not like interrogating a child before a jury. “I had to
do some very hard things in this trial in order to get an evil man behind
bars. I felt badly about putting Kate on the stand then and I feel badly
about it now.”

By the time Kate stepped down from the stand, many of the jurors
were growing increasingly agitated. They were bored to tears with
tedious, seemingly useless information about Karly’s clothing in an
attempt to prove possible sexual abuse.

Dr. Hochfeld, the doctor who saw Karly in Good Samaritan’s
ER the day she died, reported that Karly had “quite a bit of bruising”
along with dilation in her privates, something the doctor said “was not
inconsistent with some recent sexual assault.” Semen spots were found
on the carpet in Karly’s room but none was found in her diaper. Dr.
Hochfeld conducted a sexual assault evaluation on Karly, but subsequent
postmortem exams ruled the suspected sexual abuse inconclusive.
In those early hours after Karly’s death, both Shawn and David had
provided semen specimens per investigators’ requests. David asked the
coroner outright if his daughter had been sexually abused, and was told
that she had not been.

It had been previously determined in pre-trial hearing that the
sexual assault question would not be part of the trial. But when the
defense referred to in an an effort to discredit investigators, Demarest
was forced to address it, lest it become an unanswered question lingering
in some juror’s mind later.

The tedious testimony about what Karly was wearing the day she
was murdered served another purpose.

“Pounds and inches don’t say much,” Demarest said. “But Karly’s
sweatsuit gave the jury a real tangible feel for how tiny and helpless she
was against the tall and muscly Field.”

Demarest also brought in computer geeks to testify about the
forensics of Shawn’s computers in an effort to show how he planned to
extort money from David, a theory that most of the jurors rejected due
to lack of evidence. The jury had been led down so many rabbit trails
they were getting frustrated.

If the state had proof that Shawn Field battered this child to death,
they needed to ante it up, quickly. The jury was weary of all the piddling
details. They needed concrete evidence, something they didn’t think
they had yet.

F
at pumpkins squatted side by side
on the doorsteps of clapboard houses throughout town. Felt spiders and cotton
webs hung in the windows of bookstores and drugstores. End
shelves at the corner market were stacked with bags of candy corn. The
University’s colors, black and orange, were even more evident during
the month of October when Sarah Brill Sheehan stepped up to the
witness stand in the Benton County Courthouse, raised her right hand
and swore to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

Joan Demarest might not have been aware of the jurors’ unease
regarding her decision to put Kate on the stand, but she did fear they
might be harboring an increasing disdain for Sarah.

Sarah had a favorite outfit she wore to the trial: black
pants with a black top. She coupled the ensemble with a selection of brightly
colored scarves. Jurors wondered if she was purposefully wearing black to
evoke the image of a grieving woman, or if her wardrobe was really that limited.

They didn’t trust Sarah.

“You could tell she’s used to flirting her way out of a lot of things,” noted
one juror.

Sarah wasn’t the one on trial, but the jurors were forming their own
judgments about her.

“She was out playing golf, drinking, while her daughter was being
beaten, and she couldn’t figure out anything to do about it?”

The jurors were troubled by Sarah’s coy mannerisms and her
seemingly blatant disregard for Karly’s well-being. “We were keeping a
tally of who is to blame and how much. Shawn was at the top and Sarah
wasn’t far behind.”

Many of the jurors were having a difficult time controlling their
own emotions over the testimony they were hearing and the photos
they were seeing.

In the courtroom, Sarah’s sexual history was off limits. But Clark
Willes had managed to ask enough of the right questions that the jurors
knew that while her daughter’s worst nightmare was unfolding, Sarah
was giving some guy a blowjob.

“We knew that she was at the bar and that at some point she
disappeared into the parking lot with the beer distributor. We could
read between the lines,” one juror said.

While the prosecutor treated Sarah with kid gloves, the jurors felt
little empathy for her. They simply could not understand how Sarah
could come into the courtroom day after day and remain so detached.
She didn’t cry. She didn’t bolt. She didn’t even rage much. If anything,
she seemed way too collected for the jury.

“She was either callous, which I didn’t think,” said one juror, “or
caught up in her own world. A narcissist.”

Two people in the courtroom considered Sarah a victim: Demarest
and Sarah. Asked by Demarest to describe herself, Sarah said, “I have a fairly
difficult time opening up to people. In my experience, it seems like when
I do I get hurt.”

Sarah told the jurors how she’d met Shawn Field at a bar and invited
him over to her house that very same night. Within a week or two of
that meeting, Sarah said she and Shawn were talking about getting
married. The woman who had a hard time trusting people thought
nothing of moving in with a man only a week or so into the relationship
and turning over her paycheck and her tips to him.

Something wasn’t adding up— not for the jurors, anyway. “The whole theory that
Shawn did this for money was a total joke,” a juror recalled. “We kept expecting
some grand revelation but it never came. You really had to stretch the imagination
to make Joan’s theory work. The case was hers to lose by going with that whole
theory of motive. It was pointless.”

Shawn Field may very well have been abusing Karly to extort money from David
Sheehan, as the prosecution believed, but if so, they failed to provide enough
evidence to convince the jury of it.

“It was way too complicated,” another juror said. “The string of events didn’t
make that much sense. It made no sense to abuse Karly to get financial gain.”

But what other motive would possibly make any sense?

Shawn Field had never worked any job for very long. He never finished those
degrees in economics he kept boasting about. He’d gladly accepted money from
his parents, and when they didn’t give it freely, he’d lied and cheated them
out of it. Investigators discovered Shawn had taken out credit cards in his
father’s name and, without his father’s knowledge, had run those cards up
thousands of dollars. It infuriated Hugh Field when he learned the extent
of his son’s lying, cheating ways.

Shawn knew that with his only sibling dead, he stood to inherit all the money
and property his hardworking parents had cobbled together over the years.
There was really no reason for him to work. He just needed to find a way to
get by until that substantial inheritance was his.

The abuse of Karly began within weeks of Sarah moving in with Shawn Field.
But it was after Shawn saw David Sheehan’s W-2s for 2005 in early 2006, according
to Sarah, who had given them to Shawn, that he began to insist she needed
to have full custody of Karly. It was Shawn’s idea to blame David for the
numerous injuries Karly sustained over the course of the eight months leading
up to her death. At Shawn’s urging, Sarah had even made an appointment with
attorney Hal Harding to tell him she suspected David was abusing their daughter.

From the witness box, Sarah unraveled the tale of her relationship with Shawn.
She claimed they’d broken up several weeks prior to Karly’s death, after she
found gay pornography on his computer—that Shawn had been extremely angry
with her over it, and that Shawn had been very irate that last Thursday of
Karly’s life because Sarah hadn’t paid the water bill and the city had shut
off their water. He’d warned her if she didn’t get it turned back on that
very afternoon, there would be hell to pay. Sarah also recalled the look of
utter devastation on Karly’s face as she drove away.

David Sheehan was tense the entire time his ex-wife was testifying. He worried
she would trip up, get caught in her own deceitful web. He wasn’t sure what
she might say. Whatever feelings he may have had for Sarah at one time had
turned to an exhausted sigh of relief once they divorced. Now he was focused
on one thing: making sure Shawn Field was convicted of Karly’s murder. He
hoped and prayed to God that Sarah wouldn’t say anything to screw that up.

Sarah was soft-spoken, her words measured, alternately interrupted by the
nervous gesture of her tongue clicking against the roof of her mouth, a lapse
in concentration. Her testimony was littered with long pauses, or “um”s. As
the day dragged on, Sarah grew increasingly more subdued, almost to the point
of sounding drugged. The jurors studied her carefully, taking copious notes
as Sarah explained what she remembered from those last few hours of Karly’s
life.

Shawn had woken up in a bad mood, angry Kate hadn’t yet finished her big school
project.

“He yelled at her to finish her project, asking her if she wanted to repeat
third grade,” Sarah said. “He yelled, ‘Do you want to grow up to be a stupid
bitch like your mother?’”

“Can you illustrate for the jury how he said it?” Demarest asked.

“I’ll try,” Sarah said. “May I stand?”

“Sure,” Demarest said.

Sarah stood up from her seat in the witness box; facing the jury, she took
on a decidedly intense demeanor and yelled, “DO YOU WANT TO GROW UP AND BE
A STUPID BITCH LIKE YOUR MOTHER?”

One or two of the jurors flinched from the sheer volume of Sarah’s voice.

While Shawn yelled at his daughter, Karly remained asleep on the floor in
Kate’s room, a pink blanket covering her. Sarah testified she had not seen
her daughter since the day before, when she’d left her daughter in Shawn’s
arms, as she drove off to pay the water bill. She did not check on Karly when
she got home around midnight on Thursday.

Shawn woke Karly Friday morning. He carried her past the dining room table
where Sarah was helping Kate with her homework.

Sarah told the jurors that Shawn had said, “Geez, babe, her allergies must
be really bad. She’s been picking at her eye.”

Shawn sat Karly on the countertop while he took ice out of the freezer to
make her a compress. Sarah stroked her daughter’s head as she held the compress
to Karly’s eye.

“I was trying to figure out how it got to be that swollen and trying to get
her to stop rubbing it because I didn’t want her to make it worse,” Sarah
recalled.

At some point, Sarah reached over to tickle Karly’s feet, but Karly yanked
them away, so Sarah turned Karly’s tender feet over and saw they were swollen.

Sarah had already told the jury that Shawn and his ex-wife Eileen had once
run a daycare and that Shawn had learned that sometimes people abuse a child
by striking them on the bottoms of their feet so the abuse isn’t readily apparent.
But what Sarah didn’t tell the jury was why she would leave her daughter in
the care of a person who boasted about knowing how to abuse a child.

Sarah said she was shocked by Karly’s appearance that morning and wanted to
take her to the doctor right away, but Shawn discouraged it, saying they’d
take her the next day if Karly’s eye wasn’t better.

Once Kate left for school, Sarah said she gave Karly some trail mix for breakfast
and left her alone in the living room while she and Shawn slipped away to
the bedroom to have sex.

Afterward, Shawn headed to for the gym.

“What did you do after Shawn left?” Demarest asked.

“I immediately called my father,” Sarah said. She asked him about allergies
but he was distracted. Sarah’s mother was at Oregon Health Science Center
having a heart procedure.

“Call your sister,” Gene urged.

Sarah did call Kim. She told her that Karly’s eye was swollen. She didn’t
tell either of them it looked as though Karly had been punched. Sarah would
later tell detectives that her first impression of the bruising around Karly’s
eye was that it “looked like a fist” had done the damage.

“Because of talking with my father and my sister and the responses I got,
allergies seemed reasonable,” Sarah told the jury. Neither Gene nor Kim had
seemed alarmed. Both her father and sister recommended Sarah give Karly Benadryl.

Sarah subtly blamed her father and sister for her own failure to take Karly
to a doctor. When Shawn came home from the gym, Sarah left for work.

A short time later, Karly’s morning prayer was answered—she went home to Jesus,
as the child had explained her method of escaping her abuser. The law would
call it murder.

Sarah had been on the stand since 9:45 a.m. It was now
approaching 3:30 p.m. Demarest knew it was time to wrap up the day’s questioning.

As sirens echoed eerily outside the courtroom window, Demarest asked, “Did
you ever strike Karly besides a spanking?”

“No,” Sarah answered.

“Did you ever punch her?”

“No.”

“Did you kill Karly?”

“No,” Sarah said.

The echo of the siren faded into the distance.