A Silence of Mockingbirds (8 page)

A
larmed by troubling changes she observed in Karly,
Delynn Zoller was the first person to file an official complaint
of possible abuse. Delynn, owner of Rugrats Traditional
Home Child Care, was required by law to call Oregon Department of
Human Services Child Welfare if she suspected abuse. That first call
was made nine months before Karly’s death and a few short weeks after
Sarah started dating a man named Shawn Wesley Field. He was a nice-looking guy. Clean-shaven, lean, with expressive eyes. Dark mirrors
that reflected shadows of things yet unseen.

Sarah met Shawn in late September at Suds and Suds, a beer-only
bar located inside Woodstock’s Pizza Parlor. Woodstock’s is a multi-purpose facility that caters to families and the college crowd. Sports
jerseys and posters line the parlor’s high walls. On the building’s east
side is a coin-operated laundry facility.

Suds is a typical neighborhood bar, not unlike the one seen on the
popular television series
Cheers
, only smaller, about a quarter of the size.

“I thought he came from a good family,” Sarah said. By “good”, Sarah
meant he came from a family with money. “He was driving a Volvo. His
parents had homes in Corvallis and in Arizona. Shawn had a daughter.
He presented this package that said, ‘Hey, you’re lucky you have me.’”

Shawn’s neighbors would later describe him as athletic, like a
runner or something, but Shawn’s classmates at Crescent Valley High
knew him as a pudgy, awkward kid. Crescent Valley, the school on the
north side of Corvallis, is generally regarded as the rich kids’ school.
The Fields’ home bordered a golf course.

On their first meeting, Shawn smiled disarmingly and introduced
himself to Sarah. A flirt by nature, Sarah responded without reservation.
They hooked up that very night. “We hung out at my place, playing
cards,” Sarah told the court. “I consider that as when we began dating.”

The M-word came up within a couple weeks of their first date.
Shawn was the first to raise it. It wasn’t exactly a proposal but, as Sarah
explained, it was close enough. “We were at Suds. I wasn’t working. I
was there socially. We were sitting outside on the patio with some of
my friends. Shawn picked up my left hand and said, ‘A ring would look
really good there.’ Shortly after that we talked of moving in together.”

Shawn was living in a duplex off Aspen Street, in a quiet, residential
part of town, close to Hoover Elementary School, the kind of
neighborhood college professors and Hewlett-Packard employees call
home. An area where barking dogs are the most common complaint.

Sarah, who had been sharing an apartment with a girlfriend,
decided to move in with Shawn, though she barely knew him. She
insisted they had this rare thing: chemistry, a connection, the kind that
doesn’t come along every day.

“I really liked Shawn at that point and was very interested in being
in a committed relationship. Besides, I didn’t have Karly most nights;
David did. It was Shawn’s idea, not mine, that I bring Karly for an
overnight visit. He thought it was time that Karly and Kate meet.”

Shawn’s first marriage, to a girl named Molly Church, was
annulled in 1994. Molly’s father, Jim Church, a Portland attorney, told
investigators it was out of concern for his daughter’s well-being that he
sought an annulment on her behalf.

If the annulment bothered him, Shawn didn’t mope around much.
He met his next wife, Eileen, on a blind date shortly thereafter. Two
weeks later, just like in Sarah’s case, Shawn raised the idea of marriage.
When Shawn and Eileen married in 1995, Eileen was twenty-two years
old and two months pregnant with the couple’s only child, the daughter
I call Kate. According to Eileen, the marriage was fraught with violent
outbursts. The couple divorced in July 2002 and shared custody of Kate.

David forewarned me that Delynn probably wouldn’t want to talk to
me. “I think she wants to put all this behind her,” he said. David was
right; Delynn was reluctant. It was nearly a year after I first contacted
her before Delynn e-mailed me.

“I got your message but have had to pray about this a little so
forgive me for not getting back to you sooner,” Delynn said. “Yes, this is
a painful subject for me, but a happy one as well and I sometimes forget
that.”

In early 2008, I made a trip to Salem to the Court of Appeals office
to look at the evidence that had been presented to the jury. At the
time, I was teaching at Central Washington University in Ellensburg,
Washington, and preparing to head off to Fairhope, Alabama. The
Fairhope Center for the Writing Arts had invited me to be their writer-in-residence, and I needed to gather as much information as possible
before I headed south. I wanted to wrap up interviews and compile the
information I’d spent the better part of the past year collecting. Delynn’s
e-mail gave me some hope I could also meet with her face to face. But
I was running out of time, and if Delynn didn’t meet with me now, I
wasn’t sure when, or if, that meeting would take place.

It was late afternoon on an unusually warm day in Oregon’s
Willamette Valley. I’d left the Court of Appeals after spending the better
part of the day holed up in a corner under the watchful eye of the court
administrator, rifling through boxes of evidentiary materials. Bracing
myself for a look at the post-mortem photos of Karly, I’d inadvertently
pulled out a photo from a stack of 8x10s, and nearly collapsed in a heap
when I discovered I’d grabbed hold of an autopsy photo.

I was prepared, but barely, to see Karly as the police had found
her that afternoon in June, 2005. I knew I would have to look at those
photos in order to understand the documents I’d spent the past eight
months studying. But I didn’t yet know about the autopsy photos.

Tough as I can be, I don’t watch
CSI
, or any of those other forensic
shows. I’ve been on the scene of all sorts of crimes, but I don’t want to
see people carved up, even on television. I’d kept my act together while
I was in the Appeals office, but as soon as I got to the car, I broke down
sobbing. I called Connie, a dear friend in nearby Albany. “This is one of
those moments when I think I might actually have reached my breaking
point,” I said. “I’m not sure I can go on with this.” Connie calmed me
with words of thoughtful encouragement. As soon as we hung up, my
cell rang. It was a number I didn’t recognize.

“Hello,” I said.

“Hi. Is this Karen? This is Delynn Zoller.”

No matter how many times it occurs, I continue to be amazed by such strong
coincidence.

Delynn agreed to meet me for dinner at New Morning Bakery,
the same place where I’d met with David. We picked a table near the
front window where we could talk freely, out of the eavesdropping
range of others. The evening rush was in full swing. A steady line of
people shuffled past the glass and chrome cases filled with spinach
and mushroom quiche, fruit salads, hazelnut tortes, and lemon bars.
Steaming soups, thick with tomatoes or white sauce, were ladled into
heavy ceramic bowls. People called out to one another from behind the
self-service coffee pots.

A pretty woman, Delynn is bright-eyed. Her back is strong and
straight. She sits erect on the edge of her chair, ready to move at a
moment’s notice to put out whatever fire might need it. She’d be a ringer
for the actor Julianne Moore if she dyed her brown hair red and put
on a smack of red lipstick. Delynn is a reserved woman who lacks the
self-confidence and the assertive attitude common among women who
know they are pretty.

Delynn began caring for Karly in June 2004. Providing childcare
for over two decades has made Delynn a keen observer of children’s
behavior. She knows when something is not right. Her intuition is
sharp. Yet the daycare provider’s voice, as that of a high school dropout,
may have been easily dismissed in a community where over half the
population has at least one college degree. Some may have tuned
Delynn out simply because she was a born-again evangelical and openly
expressed her faith in God.

At her home, Delynn kept a framed photo of her deceased mother
on a coffee table. Karly would point to it and ask Delynn about her
mom, about heaven, about Jesus. “Karly talked more about God than
any of my other daycare children,” Delynn said. “We talked a lot about
Heaven, about what would happen there. I told her Heaven is the most
wonderful thing. I told her how much God loves us, how much I love
God. Karly said, ‘I love God, too, Delynn.’”

When tussles broke out among the other children, Karly would
often intervene. “She would referee,” Delynn recalled. “She understood
what was right and wrong.” Karly was a peacemaker. She wanted
everybody to play nicely, to get along, and to be happy. Much more
verbal than other children her age, Delynn said, “Karly could carry on
a conversation like an adult.”

But Karly refused to tell others about the ongoing horrors she
endured. Whether she did that because of threats from her abuser or
because of her own tender heart is something we will never know.

Picking through the grapes and melon of her fruit salad, Delynn
paused her fork midair and said she regarded Sarah as a distant mother.
“Sarah really had this unnatural way about her.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Karly would cry and this blankness would wash over Sarah,”
Delynn said.

“Like she was ignoring Karly or didn’t know how to handle her?” I
asked.

“Maybe a bit of both,” Delynn said.

In October 2004, Karly arrived at Rugrats Daycare with her blonde,
wispy hair tightly wound into an elegant French braid.

I’d taught Sarah how to French braid. I’d spent untold hours on
school mornings fixing my daughters’ hair. They’d come to me, hair
ribbon or bow in hand, and ask me to put their hair in a ponytail, to
crimp it, curl it, or to French braid it. Sarah would sit on the stool at the
kitchen island and watch as I divided a head of hair into three strands,
wrapping one end over the other. What I did for one daughter, I did for
three daughters.

“Will you teach me to do that?” she asked.

“Sure,” I replied, and I did.

Despite the bakery’s suppertime crowd, Delynn wept unabashedly
as she recalled how lovely Karly had been on that particular day.

“I told Karly how pretty her hair looked but I could tell she had
been crying. Her eyes were all red and watery. ‘Karly,’ I said, ‘you have
princess hair,’ which is what I call a braid.”

Instead of being delighted by Delynn’s comments, Karly was
agitated. “My mom said I don’t have princess hair,” Karly said. “She said
I have ogre hair.”

Karly’s comment startled Delynn. She thought the young girl must
have misheard her mother.

“I told her, ‘No, your hair is beautiful, just like Princess Fiona’s hair.’”

Delynn recalled that Karly behaved oddly all day long. She slept a
lot. When Sarah came to pick her up that evening, Delynn remarked to
Sarah that Karly had been worn out. She asked if Sarah had put any gels
or anything else like that on Karly’s hair, some kind of allergen, because
Karly’s eyes were so irritated. Sarah said no, nothing came to mind.

The next day’s events startled Delynn and haunt her to this day.

“Sarah called and said Karly would be late to daycare because she
had to take Karly in to get her hair cut. I said, ‘Gosh! That’s so sad. Her
princess hair?’ And Sarah said, ‘Yes. It got in a big mat and there was no
way I could comb it out.’”

When Karly showed up later that day, her soft blonde locks had
been hacked off. Her eyes were swollen and red. She had been crying. “I
think Karly was very embarrassed by her short hair.”

Sarah told Delynn she’d left the braid in overnight and she’d woken
to find the braid matted. “Here, I’ll get it,” Sarah said, rushing out to her
car. It was a disquieting moment when Sarah displayed the braid.

“I am sure my face registered shock because I was thinking about
what Karly said the day before about having ‘ogre hair.’ I was so upset for
Karly,” Delynn said. “Sarah kind of laughed and said, ‘Can you believe
this?’ She said she wanted me to see it because she couldn’t believe it
and wondered what I thought about it.”

What Delynn thought was that Sarah was strange as all get out. She
didn’t believe one word Sarah was saying. “I couldn’t figure out what
may have happened, but I was thinking it was weird that any little kid’s
hair could do that over one night and that it was even weirder that her
mother would show it to me.”

“What did it look like?” I asked.

“It looked like the mat on a dog,” Delynn said.

Why are you showing me this?
Delynn wondered. “I’d never had
a parent do something like that before. It made me wonder if she
was hiding something. To be honest, I didn’t believe her. In my gut I
thought, ‘This mom has done something to her daughter’s hair.’ I didn’t
trust Sarah was telling me the truth.”

Her suspicion of Sarah left Delynn feeling guilty. “I didn’t have a
good relationship with Sarah. I felt bad that I didn’t believe what she
said, but I didn’t.”

Despite her issues with Sarah, Delynn put on a front for Karly. “I
told her that I loved her haircut.” But the haircut shamed the little girl.

“My mommy said that I don’t have princess hair now and that I’m
not going to be Princess Fiona,” Karly said.

It infuriated Delynn that the haircut humiliated Karly.

“I told Karly how pretty she was, that she looked like a little pixie.”

Karly snapped at Delynn: “I’m not a princess anymore!”

“Well, you can be a fairy princess because fairy princesses have
short pixie hair like you,” Delynn reassured Karly.

But Karly never again referred to herself as Princess Fiona. From
that moment on, Karly referred to herself as Prince Charming.