A Silence of Mockingbirds

My colleague Karen Spears Zacharias set out to write the story of Karly Sheehan as a journalist, using research and interviews to communicate the facts, but because Karly’s mother Sarah had been part of the Zacharias family for a year, the story Zacharias needed to tell became more personal, resulting in A Silence of Mockingbirds: The Memoir of a Murder.

In 2005 in Corvallis, OR, Karly Sheehan, age three, died as a result of injuries caused by abuse. Initially, the prosecution focused on Karly’s father David Sheehan, but eventually, Shawn Wesley Field, Sarah’s boyfriend, was convicted based on evidence that should have triggered law enforcement involvement in the case much earlier. The failure of law enforcement in this case resulted in Karly’s Law, which requires medical evaluation and record-keeping when children present suspicious injuries.

A Silence of Mockingbirds tells the poignant story of Karly’s brief life and its aftermath without sensationalizing it, instead carefully juxtaposing elements of the story to encourage readers to consider how the community failed Karly, perhaps even before she was born. The first two pages of the memoir introduce Shawn Field as “Inmate 16002306,” relate David Sheehan’s background as a Hewlett-Packard engineer from Ireland, and then identify David as Karly’s father and Shawn as Karly’s murderer. There is no mystery: from the beginning we know Karly is dead. The task remaining to readers is to understand the events that led to her death.

As indicated in Zacharias’s research, the evidence of abuse was overwhelming, beginning nine months before Karly’s death, when Sarah began dating Shawn. Karly lost weight and hair, wanted to sleep all the time, expressed a fear of being hit, and cried for her daddy. Despite some investigation, officials determined that Karly’s injuries were self-inflicted, based on anxiety associated with her parents’ divorce and her mother’s new relationship (125). At the trial, the most damning items of evidence were photographs Shawn took of Karly’s injuries, photographs that might have been used in framing David, except that Karly died from those injuries before anyone besides Shawn had contact with her (262). Shawn clearly committed the crime and was convicted of it.

Yet, Zacharias’s background with Sarah adds a terrifying dimension: the role of Sarah Sheehan in her own child’s murder. Zacharias traces this role back to Sarah’s youth. Sarah was intelligent and pretty but also erratic and selfish, making problematic decisions based on attraction to fancy possessions (63). A similar self-centeredness occurs in the depiction of Sarah two years after Karly’s death when her discussion of her charitable organization Karly’s Angels focused more on celebrity and partying than on protecting children (64-65). Zacharias uses her knowledge of Sarah’s character to make Sarah’s complicity with her child’s death explicit: “Sarah, alone, could have offered her daughter salvation. Instead, she betrayed her” (80-81). Zacharias extends this complicity to herself for not doing more to combat the potential for Sarah to neglect Karly after she divorced David (20) and to the community for not taking action based on signs of child abuse (81).

A Silence of Mockingbirds ultimately extends complicity to the justice system that failed to charge Sarah as an accomplice in her daughter’s death. As early as two months into her relationship with Shawn, Sarah began fabricating a journal intended to implicate David (94, 129). She continued this line of argument in testimony collected following Karly’s death (187). However, the district attorney determined that there was no community benefit to charging Sarah with neglect and that her grief had punished her enough. Once Sarah testified for the grand jury to indict Shawn, she could no longer legally be charged with an associated crime (214-15). Zacharias situates this failure within a tradition of courts viewing mothers as incapable of cruelty toward their children (215). The narrative in Silence of Mockingbirds indicates that, at least in this instance, the mother stereotype was overcome by the desirable-woman stereotype as Sarah intentionally traded Karly’s safety for her own relationship with Shawn.

Zacharias’s juxtaposition of these strands of Karly’s story suggests a community need to hold Sarah accountable for the selfish behavior that made Shawn’s crime possible. Accountability would deliver the justice we expect of our court system. It would also protect Karly’s loved ones from further trauma caused by Sarah’s insensitive behavior in using Karly’s death as an opportunity for self-marketing. However, Zacharias’s selection of memoir over journalistic non-fiction implies an additional need, the desire of a parent, even a parent by choice rather than blood or law, to assist in a child’s moral development, to help the child see the results of her actions in order to become a healthy, responsible adult capable of contributing to the community. In this most quixotic desire, the mourning of a surrogate parent for a child’s lost potential, A Silence of Mockingbirds is doubly tragic. 

Image source: A Silence of Mockingbirds Cover Image. amazon.com. Web. 28 May 2012. http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=Silence+of+Mockingbirds

Work Cited: Zacharias, Karen Spears. A Silence of Mockingbirds: The Memoir of a Murder. San Francisco: MacAdam/Cage, 2012. Print.

Karen Spears Zacharias's website: http://karenzach.com/