Louise Woodward gets case reaired on British TV
A new British documentary “The Killer Nanny: Did She Do It?” about notorious au pair Louise Woodward won’t change the fact she’ll forever be convicted of killing an infant, the lead prosecutor said.
“She was and remains convicted of killing Matthew Eappen,” Gerry Leone, a former Middlesex District Attorney, said of the 1997 death of the 8-month-old Newton tyke.
“There’s been nothing that’s occurred in the last 20plus years that has done anything to the integrity of that conviction,” Leone, who was the top prosecutor in that case, told the Herald Monday.
Leone said the controversy swirling around shaken baby syndrome does not apply to this case, either. “This was a shaken and impact case,” he stressed.
Little Matthew Eappen, the child of two Newton doctors, was reportedly thrown on the floor and banged his head while under the care of Woodward, a nanny who was 19 at the time, obsessed with the musical “Cats” and was staying out late in the city.
Matthew Eappen fell into a coma in February 1997 and died five days later from a fractured skull and bleeding on the brain.
The case turned into a carnival with the British press accusing Massachusetts of locking up Woodward in a dungeon, or what they called the Framingham’s women prison. Tours were set up to show Woodward was held in a complex that left her free to roam around. She even took off running after seeing members of the press approach while entering her prison block.
A jury found her guilty of second-degree murder and she was sentenced to a minimum of 15 years in jail — but Judge Hiller Zobel ultimately reduced her conviction to involuntary manslaughter and set her free on time served. She was in jail for just 279 days.
Now, this new documentary is revisiting one of the most contentious international cases that put both the grieving Bay State parents and Shaken Baby Syndrome before the court of public opinion.
Woodward, now married and a mother of her own, is front and center again with questions about Matthew Eappen’s other suspected injuries that may have occurred earlier. Louise, it was alleged, had shaken Matthew violently and banged his head against a hard surface.
The defense argued that Matthew’s death had been caused by an old injury sustained weeks before. Now that’s all being dredged up in a three-part documentary. Part One, which aired Sunday, was slammed by viewers who told the Daily Mail they were put off by Woodward’s “very cold” and “extremely emotionless” testimony during her trial.
Newton Detective Sgt. William Burns also said in Part One: “The one thing I’ll always remember is Louise Woodward never asked me how that child was doing,” the Daily Mail added.
The Eappens have described their baby Matthew as a “butterball, plump and content,” with velvet brown eyes and hair as soft as silk.
“We go along thinking that we’re safe and fine. We think life is predictable, that we’re making the right choices,” Dr. Deborah Eappen told the Herald four years ago. “Then something like this happens and your whole world is turned upside down.”