Examining Deadly Flaws of a System Manipulated

VENTURA —  The criminal justice system failed to save Vicki Shade, in large part because her killer hid behind a smoke screen of aliases and benefited from Ventura County’s low-bail policies in domestic violence cases.

Roland Sheehan had walked out of jail after posting $20,000 bail on charges of stalking and making terrorist threats, allegations that carry an automatic $150,000 bail in surrounding counties.

Aside from that, Sheehan had an extensive criminal past that included murder charges, armed robbery and sexual assault.

That past would have kept him in jail, local prosecutors say, had they uncovered the record. For years, Sheehan had used a string of aliases to hide his background.

But it may have been a simple computer problem in Rhode Island that set in motion the final sequence of events that led to Shade’s death. Before Sheehan’s last court appearance in November, prosecutors--familiar with his name-changing tactics--initiated a computer search that failed to turn up anything.

Without proof of serious criminal behavior, prosecutors said, they were unable to raise Sheehan’s bail. After he was released, Sheehan broke into the Ventura hairstylist’s house, held her hostage nine hours and finally stabbed her to death as SWAT officers rushed into the upstairs bedroom where he was hiding. Police shot and killed Sheehan when he lunged at them with the butcher knife he used to kill Shade.

In the end, then, Sheehan benefited both from luck and a bail policy that officials in nearby counties say is out of date.

“Obviously, Ventura County is not on board on this issue,” said Marlene Sanchez, who in her capacity as assistant chief deputy district attorney prosecutes domestic violence cases in Los Angeles.

The district attorney’s office has created a two-person unit dedicated to the prosecution of stalking charges. Rhonda Saunders, a prosecutor on L.A.’s stalking and threat assessment team, said she has requested bail hikes as high as $5 million for repeat stalkers, and seen bail denied altogether for others.

“To me, the most important thing here is to keep the suspect away from the victim, to prevent things just like what happened [to Shade],” Saunders said. “And that means keeping these guys locked up.”

In hindsight, Ventura Police Lt. Carl Handy agrees that, “knowing what we know now, there is no way this guy should have been out on the street. But unfortunately, the information systems we rely on don’t always do what they are supposed to do. I guess if there is any lesson to be learned here, we need to identify the real bad guys and make sure they stay in jail.”

That lesson comes too late for Vicki Shade. Those who knew the 37-year-old woman couldn’t understand what attracted her to Sheehan, 43, a verbally abusive man with a string of ex-wives and an addiction to methamphetamine. Maybe it was her ability to look for the best in everyone, and a mothering quality that compelled her to help those in trouble, friends and family said.

Early Signs Were There

There was a lot of trouble surrounding Sheehan. Born and raised in Providence, R.I., he got in trouble with the law at an early age, his ex-wife Elaine Bourdeau said. He dropped out of school around the ninth grade, and was cycled in and out of reform schools on a variety of minor offenses, she said.

Bourdeau said she met Sheehan when she was 17, through friends. Early on, he was abusive toward her, once dragging her through the house by her hair. But they stayed together and had a baby shortly after she graduated from high school.

“I just thought he needed help; I felt badly for him,” Bourdeau said in an interview. “I thought I could save him. When I found out what happened [to Shade], I thought, ‘Oh my God, he found another Elaine.’ ”

Their relationship improved after their daughter, Alisha, was born. He spent time with the baby and held down a steady job refinishing old buildings. They married a couple of years later, and he started using the name Roland Bourdeau, his father’s last name. Sheehan is his mother’s name.

But the relationship grew stormy. Roland, known as Ronnie, was laid off from work, started using drugs and began hanging out with his old friends, the ones with whom he used to get in trouble.

He robbed a convenience store and went to prison, Bourdeau said. She was 20 then, and three months pregnant with their second child, Melissa. But she still didn’t leave, figuring it was Sheehan’s first real run-in with law enforcement since they’d been together.

Then came the murder charges. Sheehan was behind the wheel when a 74-year-old woman was killed in a drive-by shooting outside an apartment building in Providence. The intended victim escaped.

The murder charges were eventually dropped in exchange for Sheehan’s testimony against two accomplices.

This time, Bourdeau had had enough. She filed for divorce in the early 1980s.

“He used to call me on the phone all the time and tell me how much he loved me and everything else, but I didn’t break down,” she said. “I had gone through too much.”

In March 1981, Sheehan was charged with sexual assault and began serving a sentence for violating probation on the robbery charge, according to a Providence newspaper article.

He moved to Ventura, where he picked up a driver’s license under the name Wayne Cayer--a name he assumed to avoid paying back child support to Bourdeau. Cayer is the name of one of Sheehan’s deceased cousins.

He took on various jobs as a mechanic and construction worker.

During the next few years, Sheehan married and divorced two more times, and had two more children. In 1992, Sheehan was involved in a face-off with SWAT officers in Ventura, but authorities are reluctant to release details, citing the ongoing investigation.

Court records show that Sheehan, still using an assumed name, was charged with domestic violence in 1994 against another woman. He pleaded no contest and got three years probation on the promise to obtain domestic violence counseling.

Fast Friends, Early Problems

In about 1996, a shy, pretty divorcee was hauling boxes and furniture into her new apartment in Ventura, when a man approached, offering to help. He introduced himself as Roland Sheehan, and became Vicki Shade’s first friend in the area. The two hit it off and began dating. They moved in together soon after.

It wasn’t long before Shade, a cosmetologist at the Michael Kelley salon in Ventura, saw Sheehan’s heavy reliance on methamphetamine.

Later that year, Sheehan was arrested on charges of possession of and being under the influence of drugs. He pleaded guilty and was placed on a diversion program for two years.

He worked steadily in construction, and usually turned his paychecks over to Shade. But he typically reclaimed the money later, using an automatic teller machine card to withdraw cash to buy drugs, Shade’s family said.

Shade, the mother of two daughters, now 11 and 13, became pregnant by Sheehan in the summer of 1996 and gave birth to a daughter, Michelle. The couple bought a condominium on Wolverine Street.

In January 1998, Shade made her first call to police after Sheehan, high on methamphetamine, held her wrists and shouted insults at her. Authorities arrested Sheehan on charges of being under the influence of drugs. He pleaded guilty and paid a fine.

With thoughts of leaving in mind, Shade went apartment hunting with her father, but finally decided to stick it out awhile longer, relatives said.

“I’m just so sorry my daughter was so lonely that she fell for someone like this,” Mary Frances Shade said. “She really had that hope that love could straighten him out.”

For Shade, the realization that her husband would not change came last summer, on Aug. 21. In her own words, written in a letter submitted with her application for a restraining order, Shade described Sheehan’s rage when he accused her of being with another man.

“He told me as soon as he found out who it was, he would kill him,” Shade wrote. “I told him I was tired of this and tried to call the police. He told me I wasn’t going to call police. He told me he wasn’t going to jail again. I started to scream, because I felt trapped. He put a pillow on my face. He told me to be quiet and to stop it.”

Less than two weeks later, Sheehan became violent again.

“Roland started yelling, and he told me, ‘If you stay in the house tonight, I’m going to kill you,’ ” Shade wrote, noting that her two older daughters were there and began to cry.

“He told me that he was going to kill me and that he was going to be sneaky. He told me that no one would know it was him. Then he held up his hands and told me that he was going to strangle me. He was shaking and his veins were popping out of his neck.”

A neighbor heard the yelling and called police, who advised Shade to file a restraining order. She did, to no avail.

Between Sept. 9 and Sept. 11, Sheehan contacted Shade nine times, calling her at home, stopping by her workplace, her church and the condominium. Each time, she called police. Each time, he disappeared before they could respond.

On Sept. 13, Sheehan rode his bike to her church. As Shade went to use a church phone to call authorities, Sheehan slowly drew his finger across his neck in a throat-slitting gesture and fled.

Police found him at the Ventura Beach Resort Motel in Ventura, where he was arrested. Prosecutors charged him with domestic battery, making a terrorist threat, stalking and 12 violations of the restraining order. He was held on $20,000 bail.

The harassment continued behind bars. He called Shade and sent letters asking for reconciliation. That prompted Deputy Dist. Atty. Adam Pearlman to add four new violations of the restraining order.

Shade told prosecutors her stalker had a violent criminal history, including involvement in a murder. Pearlman ran Sheehan’s name through the FBI computer and national databanks looking for aliases and searching for past crimes. But only misdemeanor violations for drug offenses and petty thefts showed up, Pearlman said. Even after learning of several aliases, authorities found no trace of his involvement in murder, sexual assault, or robbery.

Pearlman said an investigator contacted Rhode Island authorities, who explained that several paper files were lost when the courts converted to computerized files in the 1980s. Sheehan’s records were probably among them, they said.

With no proof of a violent background, Pearlman felt he had nothing to present to a judge in asking for an increase in bail at Sheehan’s preliminary hearing Nov. 9.

“I can’t just go into court and say, ‘Your honor, I know this is a really bad guy.’ I can’t say in court that ‘I heard through so and so he was convicted of murder.’ I have to have proof,” Pearlman said.

Instead, Sheehan later posted the $20,000 bail.

Los Angeles prosecutor Saunders noted that in her county, his letters from jail could have been used to raise bail.

“He’s flouting the law here,” she said. “She’s done everything possible; gone to police, reported the order violations. And he’s telling her, ‘Even from jail, you can’t stop me from getting to you.’ I would have asked for a bail [increase]. If this is what he’s doing from jail, what will he do when he’s out?”

Sheehan failed to appear for his court date Nov. 23. When police finally caught up with him, he was barricaded inside Shade’s house, with a knife at her throat.

Call for Change in Ventura’s Bail System

Victims’ advocates and others argue that it’s time to take a look at how bail is set. But even under the current bail schedule, advocates contend that more can be done to protect women fleeing violent husbands or boyfriends.

“I doubt that, if the same kind of threats had been made against a judge, the district attorney or a police officer, bail would have been so low,” said Paige Moser, coordinator for the Simi-Conejo chapter of the National Organization for Women, and head of the statewide group’s membership effort.

“It really makes you wonder how seriously they take these kinds of threats against women,” she said.

In Ventura County, a committee of judges meets at the start of each year to review the bail schedule to determine whether changes need to be made, said Superior Court Judge Vincent J. O’Neill Jr., who chairs the committee.

O’Neill said it’s highly likely that in the wake of Shade’s death the committee will take a hard look at the bail schedule for domestic violence cases.

“The committee routinely considers experiences from throughout the past year in making decisions about whether any bail schedule should be changed,” he said. “It would be quite common for a tragic or highly publicized case to cause us to look at those issues.”

Pearlman said Ventura County policy should be in line with Los Angeles and other counties.

“I wish the bail in Ventura was $150,000,” Pearlman said. “It would make my job a lot easier. A $150,000 bail is much more difficult for probably 95% of the population to make, and I could ensure the safety of everyone at that.”

While noting that the system works in most cases, authorities and victims’ advocates say they hope Shade’s death will teach important lessons about how to do an even better job of protecting women in danger.

“There’s not just one victim; you have a whole community that has been victimized,” said Handy of the Ventura Police Department. “People are wondering how the heck the system failed, how the heck this could have been prevented. Those are legitimate questions and they need to be asked. If any good can come out of this, maybe those questions will effect some change and ensure this doesn’t happen again.”

Times staff writers Fred Alvarez and Tracy Wilson contributed to this story.