Life in prison for vicious murder
Man sentenced after tearful reading by victim’s sister
MORGAN HILL >> On Wednesday afternoon, 65-year-old Margaret Waskey rode a snowmobile 20 miles to the nearest airport from her home in Mountain Village, on the western reaches of Alaska.
From there, she flew two hours to Anchorage and got onto another plane to Los Angeles, where she got on yet another flight, to San Francisco.
After covering 4,500 miles — equal to nearly two cross-country flights — she traveled 60 more, so that she could be in a Morgan Hill courtroom Friday morning to face the man who brutally murdered her sister, Bertha Paulson, nearly five years ago.
“I’m here to share my fami-
ly’s pain for losing Bertha,” Waskey said. “And to ask for justice.”
After a series of poignant and tearful remarks that Waskey traveled so far to deliver, the man convicted of killing Paulson, 64-yearold Michael Sheppard, was sentenced to 15 years to life in prison for the seconddegree murder conviction handed down by a jury in November.
Sheppard, who once dated Paulson, declined to speak at the Friday hearing presided by Judge Edward F. Lee. Paulson’s body was found June 15, 2013 near railroad tracks along Monterey Road in Morgan Hill. She was half-naked, which prosecutors said was Sheppard’s attempt to stage her death to look like a stranger rape.
But Morgan Hill police contend that the killing actually occurred at Sheppard’s nearby apartment on Monterey Road, after which the 45-year-old Paulson was stuffed in a shopping cart and wheeled over where her body was discovered. She was beaten so savagely from head to toe that the coroner’s office could only theorize that she had either been bludgeoned with a baseball bat, punched, or stomped, or some horrible combination of such violence.
Waskey was the relative who first got word of her baby sister’s death, and
on Friday recalled the heartbreaking and painstaking task of preparing her battered body for her funeral.
“We made handmade mittens, but it was difficult to put on because her hands were shattered,” she said.
She added that three months before Paulson died, relatives in Seattle were pooling money and arranging to get a plane ticket to her, hoping to pry her from Sheppard.
“When we heard Bertha was being abused in Northern California, we really wanted her to come back,” Waskey said, pausing for a moment to cry before continuing. “But she didn’t get the chance.”
Paulson was the youngest of nine children raised in a Yu’pik Eskimo family in Mountain Village, a hamlet of about 800 people nestled within the Yukon Delta National Wildlife Refuge.
“We remember Bertha as a very loving person, very cheerful. She never hurt anyone,” Waskey said. “She was always willing to extend a helping hand.”
After graduating from high school in the area, Paulson moved south to Bethel, and eventually had four children. Waskey adopted two of her sister’s daughters.
Margaret Petros, executive director of the victim-advocacy organization
Mothers Against Murder, helped Waskey travel to the Bay Area and served as the family’s proxy during the trial. Judge Lee ordered that a portion of the restitution owed by Sheppard go toward covering Waskey’s travel costs.
During the sentencing, Petros read a statement submitted by Kevin Keyes, Paulson’s nephew.
“We can no longer enjoy birthdays, holidays, those special days where we find great happiness with family,” Keyes wrote.
But then, to provide closure, Keyes offered a gesture of compassion, for closure and to keep himself from being consumed with anger.
“I forgive you, as the days grow long and lonely in a correctional center for the years to come,” he wrote.
During the trial, Sheppard denied attacking Paulson, despite apparently giving an initial confession to police. Sheppard’s attorney presented his client’s alcoholism as a potential defense, arguing that he was drunk and enraged about her relationship with another man when she was beaten.
Jurors needed less than five hours to find him guilty. At the sentencing, Waskey asked for a stiff punishment.
“This man should never be able to walk out of prison,” Waskey said, “and never hurt another human being.”