By Levi Bakke
Published January 21, 2026
The ashes are in the ground now.
On December 15, 2025, Jean McSherry was interred at Mountain View Cemetery, twenty miles from the home she loved. Her brother wasn't told. Her friends weren't told.
The Guardian denied Lynn McSherry the chance to keep his sister's ashes. She denied him the chance to inter them himself. Just as she had denied him the chance to say goodbye while Jean was dying, she denied him this final dignity. And she charged the estate $1,424.20 to perform the task.
The Guardian simply filed the receipt, asked the court to approve her fees, and requested to be discharged from liability. The deadline to object was December 30.
Jean’s friends—the family she built over forty years of service—met that deadline. They refused to let the silence of her burial become the silence of the record. They filed their stories. They filed their evidence.
But on January 9, 2026, Baker County Circuit Judge Matthew Shirtcliff signed an order striking those objections from the record.
Under Oregon court rules, parties have fourteen days to answer a motion. The Guardian's attorney filed her Motion to Strike on January 2nd. The deadline to respond was January 16th. The judge ruled on the 9th, while the witnesses were still preparing their evidence.
And the evidence they were preparing was damning: Evidence of a suppressed Will. Evidence of a staged emergency. Evidence of a void judgment. Evidence of fraud.
The court didn't want to see it.
But the witnesses filed anyway. And what they found in the days that followed makes the premature ruling look less like an accident—and more like a cover-up.
In forty years as a paramedic, Jean McSherry learned that the people she shared a uniform with were far more than just co-workers.
Family isn't just biology. Family is the person who holds your infant daughter. Family is the voice on the other end of the radio at 3:00 AM when the call goes bad. Family is Wednesday Bible study and four-hour breakfasts after church.
Jean built that family through her work, over fifty people deep, forty years strong. Her generosity was quiet, but it left a mark on everyone who rode in the rig with her. Kris Evensen, a fellow paramedic, remembers working with Jean during the economic collapse. Jean would pick up overtime shifts, eating simple sandwiches to save money, or so it seemed. During the shift, she’d ask to make quick stops, hopping out of the ambulance to hand cash to strangers struggling to pay for heat, food, and rent.
"She was providing medical aid to the community as a paramedic while giving emergency financial aid to people she barely knew, all at the same time," Evensen recalled.
Jayne, her twin sister, was the anchor of that circle. They were inseparable. The community knew what was in each other's refrigerators. They knew each other's children.
When Annie McSherry-Bood drove the twins 300 miles east and filed for emergency guardianship, she didn't just take two elderly women from their home. She tried to erase a family.
She created an "exclusion list" of everyone who loved them. She told staff that visitors needed "Annie's number" to get in. She threw seventy years of photo albums in the garbage, telling a friend: "No one is ever going to see them again."
Jayne died 81 days later. Jean died twenty months after that, isolated, depleted, and alone. When the Guardian filed her final paperwork to close the case, she likely thought the story ended there.
She forgot who she was dealing with.
On January 2, 2026, the Guardian's attorney filed a Motion to Strike the friends who had submitted objections to the Final Accounting, labeling them "meddlesome" outsiders with no legal standing.
But Oregon law defines "interested person" broadly. It includes anyone whose association was restricted by the Guardian. These weren't strangers; they were the keepers of the truth the Guardian tried to bury.
Denise uncovered an email from January 13, 2024. In it, the Guardian admitted to Roger Whaley that she possessed Jean's "Will & Testament" and knew Roger was the named Executor.
"I am in Eugene, will not be able to send her Will & Testament until Tuesday or Wednesday," the Guardian wrote. "I am filing for guardianship Monday."
Four days later, she filed for emergency guardianship—without notifying Roger, without producing the Will, and without telling the court it existed.
Now, the Guardian claims Jean died "intestate" (without a Will). The evidence proves that is a lie. The court had fourteen days to consider this evidence. It gave them seven.
The judge's order surgically removed these witnesses from the case. But striking a filing doesn't make it disappear. The documents remain in the court file, and they expose a fatal legal flaw.
Jon Tardiff's Opposition argues that Judge Shirtcliff never had the authority to approve anything, because the guardianship itself was void ab initio (void from the beginning).
Under ORS 125.060, notice must be given to "the person or persons most closely related to the respondent." Jean had no spouse, parents, or children. Her brother Lynn was the mandatory recipient. The Guardian admitted she never sent notice, telling the Court Visitor: "It never even occurred to me."
But there was another mandatory recipient the Guardian ignored. Under ORS 125.060(2)(e), the petitioner must provide notice to "Any trustee for a trust established by or for the respondent." Roger Whaley was a named Trustee in the Will. The Guardian knew it. She admitted knowing the contents of Jean's estate documents in writing four days before filing. Yet she never served him with notice.
A guardianship entered without mandatory notice isn't just defective; it is a legal nullity. The court never acquired jurisdiction.
That means the $112,000+ in fees were taken without authority. The sale of the Portland home for $391,000 was done without authority. The isolation of Jean was enforced without authority.
This works entirely in the favor of the brother, Lynn. If the Will is recognized, his estate stands to recover hundreds of thousands of dollars. Which forces the question: Why is the brother's own attorney fighting to suppress it?
When the Guardian’s attorney accused the witnesses of "harassment" for filing these objections, Denise O'Halloran fired back. In a sur-reply filed this week, she refused to be intimidated by the threat of legal fees.
"I have never been accused of harassment in my life," O'Halloran wrote to the court. "I am a whistleblower providing this Court with direct evidence of fraud that the Fiduciary has concealed."
She dismantled the Guardian's complaint that the witnesses were driving up costs. "The cost was caused entirely by her own choice to suppress the Will... She cannot hide evidence and then blame witnesses for the cost of exposing her."
O'Halloran also flagged the Trustee issue, demanding the court vacate the strike order. She argued that because the Guardian was the last person to possess the Will and now refuses to produce it, the law requires the Court to presume the Will contains exactly what the witnesses say it does: a Trust that voids the guardianship.
The timing of Null’s rescue maneuver is betrayed by the digital record.
The Petition for Intestate Administration bears a handwritten date of "January 6, 2026," suggesting it was prepared a week in advance. But the digital record embedded in the court-stamped PDFs shows a compressed, panic-induced workflow on the morning of January 13—immediately after the Will evidence came to light.
The metadata reveals that the “trigger filing”—Denise’s motion demanding the Will—was stamped at 4:59 AM.
Later that same morning, the digital footprints appear in Null's filing:
This timing is difficult to reconcile with the explanation that the documents already existed in final form on January 6. The sequence suggests a reactive, last-minute document build—assembled in minutes to race against unfolding evidence.
The signature/date on the petition is presented as earlier, but the PDF’s internal history records an edit to the signature page the morning of filing. The simplest way to resolve this is for the filer to produce the original, contemporaneous source page showing when the signed page was truly created. Until then, the metadata stands as evidence of a reactive filing.
On January 13, 2026, Denise O'Halloran served her evidence of the suppressed Will on Lynn McSherry's attorney, J. Glenn Null.
Logically, Null should have used this evidence to void the guardianship and claw back the fees for his client. Instead, he did the one thing that would protect the Guardian.
Just hours after Denise’s filing hit the docket, Null filed a Petition for Administration of Intestate Estate, swearing to the court that Jean died without a Will.
Whether by design or coincidence, this maneuver provided the Guardian with a perfect shield. Three days later, the Guardian’s attorney filed a reply arguing that the Will issue was now "moot" because the brother had already filed for an intestate estate.
In practical terms: The Guardian’s side could point to Null’s "no will" filing and tell the judge there was nothing left to investigate—because the estate itself was already being processed as if the Will didn't exist.
The circular defense was complete. The Guardian didn't need to produce the Will because the heir's attorney swore there was no Will. And the heir's attorney swore there was no Will because he ignored the evidence filed that very morning.
If the handling of Jean's case was fraudulent, the handling of Jayne's case was macabre.
Jayne Peters died 81 days after being taken from her home. But legally, the Guardian wouldn't let her go.
Public records reveal that after Jayne was dead, Annie McSherry-Bood signed real estate documents as "Conservator." A conservatorship ends the moment the protected person dies. You cannot conserve a corpse.
Yet, the Guardian's attorney's office notarized the signature. They notarized the act of a fiduciary signing for a ghost.
And the system played along. The court subsequently appointed an attorney for Jayne, appointing counsel for a woman who no longer existed.
This is the pattern. Rules, deadlines, and even death itself are treated as inconveniences to be ignored.
On January 18, 2026, Jon Tardiff filed a Motion to Disqualify Judge Shirtcliff.
The argument is simple: The judge is now a material witness.
The Court Visitor's Report from January 2024 documented that Jean "was adamant that she did not want a guardian." Yet, twelve days later, Judge Shirtcliff signed an order stating: "No objections have been made or filed."
Both contradictory documents sit in the same case file. Only the judge knows what he read or was told. If the order was obtained by fraud, his testimony is central evidence. Under Oregon law, a judge cannot preside over a case in which he may be called to testify.
The legal deadline passed. The court struck the witnesses. But the friends are not backing down.
Melody Weaver, the keeper of the timeline, has preserved every text message and date. The Motion to Disqualify is on the docket. The evidence of fraud, the metadata, the emails, the Will, is now public for the world to see.
Jean and Jayne cannot tell their story anymore. But their family, the one Jean built, shift by shift, call by call, is telling it for them.
Jean McSherry is 10-7, out of service. But her family is on duty, and they have answered the call.
Saturday, January 24, 2026 at 2:00 PM
Family Baptist Church
Tigard, Oregon
All information in this report is derived from public court records filed in Baker County Circuit Court Cases 24PR00094 and 24PR00095, including motions, declarations, metadata analysis, and billing records on file with the court.
Levi Bakke is an investigative journalist based in La Grande, Oregon.