From British Au Pair to Global Media Darling

They mobbed the harbor-front hotel where she spent her first nights of freedom. They buzzed her in a helicopter when she rode the ferry to her lawyers’ office. They formed posses to pursue her limousine. They wrote about her new haircut.

Everywhere she went, every move she made, it seemed, was worthy of attention. Journalists from Britain and the United States treated Louise Woodward as if she were the down-market reincarnation of Princess Diana. Fans besieged the 19-year-old baby sitter who was convicted of murder in the death of an 8-month-old baby--then, in a swift turnaround, saw that conviction reduced last week to manslaughter and her life sentence sliced to time served, 279 days.

Not for years, wrote the Boston Globe, has a story captivated the city’s attention “with such prolonged intensity.” So much so that when Woodward purchased some Calvin Klein perfume over the weekend, the event was presented as news.

Only too aware of her sudden celebrity status, Woodward teased the storeclerk to make sure the transaction was aboveboard. “I don’t want to get arrested for shoplifting!” she quipped.

Such high spirits may have been understandable. After all, just days before her shopping spree, Woodward was serving a life sentence at Framingham State Prison for the murder of Matthew Eappen. Now she was camping out with her parents in a $1,300-a-night hotel suite. Now she was the object of a new legal blitz to clear her name entirely. An appeal effort was in progress, her lawyers said, while requesting supporters and news hounds to stand at least 10 feet from the entrance to their office building.

*

The stunning afterlife of Louise Woodward’s collision with American jurisprudence almost seemed in danger of eclipsing the fact that a little boy was dead.

“We’re talking about a real victim here,” said Martha Coakley, one of three Middlesex County assistant district attorneys who prosecuted the case against Woodward.

But if the legal twists and turns have made the case a media extravaganza, the so-called “Au Pair Murder” has also become a symbol for many nagging issues, including the debate over child care policy and the American legal system.

A jury first found the teenager from Elton, England, guilty of second-degree murder, an automatic life-sentence offense in Massachusetts. But the state Superior Court judge who oversaw the case, Hiller Zobel, exercised his right to review the case and reduced the charge to manslaughter. Zobel, who routinely keeps fresh flowers on his bench and likes to quote from Gilbert and Sullivan, further chose to cut Woodward’s sentence, allowing her to walk out of court a free woman.

In the process, said Margaret Pothier, a nurse-anesthesiologist at the same hospital where Matthew Eappen’s father, Dr. Sunil Eappen, is an anesthesiologist, the baby’s death was trivialized. Two days after Woodward was released, Pothier formed Friends of the Eappens. Pothier swiftly collected almost $10,000 to pay for a quarter-page ad in the Boston Globe expressing the group’s “outrage at the public sentiment directed against the Eappens.”

Pothier said the Eappens had received angry correspondence denouncing them for their two-career status and for hiring someone to care for their two young sons while both parents pursued careers. Deborah Eappen is also a physician, an ophthalmologist who works three days a week for a local HMO. The family lives in a modest three-bedroom house alongside a highway in the suburb of Newton.

While Woodward was “elevated to the status of a folk hero,” Pothier said, the Eappens “found themselves on trial, defending themselves and their 3-year-old son as possible perpetrators” in baby Matthew’s death. Defense attorneys persistently suggested that the child’s fatal head injury was not a clear-cut case of shaken-baby syndrome that occurred the day Woodward called an emergency telephone number to report that the child was experiencing difficulty breathing. Rather, her lawyers argued that the child’s head might have been fractured by an earlier blow--perhaps at someone else’s hands. The strategy galvanized Woodward’s supporters and put the Eappens on the defensive.

“It is shameful that loving, devoted parents who have suffered such a loss should now find themselves viewed by some as the perpetrators,” declared the ad paid for by Friends of the Eappens.

Many Woodward supporters seized on her release from prison as an occasion to heighten their attacks on professional couples, such as the Eappens, who employ outsiders to care for their children. On local radio and television, Deborah Eappen came under particular fire from those factions because she worked outside the home. Pothier, also a working mother, believes the case has gathered such momentum, in part, because of “class warfare: We’re talking about two people who are physicians,” easy targets for charges of elitist exploitation.

But Pothier and others in the Eappen camp also say the media storm has continued to rage because “when we look at Louise Woodward”--a pudgy adolescent who wore headbands and a wide-eyed expression throughout her trial--”we recognize that we might have hired her; in fact, we might have had her in our house, caring for our children,” Pothier said. In light of Matthew Eappen’s death, that possibility is so threatening that many people choose to blame the parents, Pothier said.

“People know there is a dead baby, and if they don’t want to believe Louise Woodward did it, they have to blame someone,” Coakley, the prosecutor, agreed. “If the murderer looks like a sweet 19-year-old that you might have hired, that makes your world seem pretty unsafe. But this is always a problem in child abuse cases. We don’t accept that the priest, or the uncle, or the baby sitter could hurt these kids. If we believe that the people closest to us could hurt our kids, how do we bring order to our lives?”

The Eappens have kept to themselves since Woodward left jail. They took some time off from work, packed up their 3-year-old son, Brendan, and left town for a few days. In suburban Chicago, however, Matthew Eappen’s grandmother, Achamma Eappen, expressed amazement at the circus-like aftermath of the court proceedings against her grandson’s baby sitter.

“She is a convicted child killer, and there are people following her around, watching her shop?” Eappen asked a reporter.

*

By terms of her release from prison, Woodward has surrendered her passport and is forbidden to leave Massachusetts while appeals are pending. She is said to be mulling lucrative interview offers from British media as well as at least one six-figure book option. Massachusetts, unlike some states, has no law barring felons from profiting from their crimes.

A representative for Harvey Silverglate and Andrew Good, Woodward’s Boston-based defense lawyers, said the attorneys would have no comment on Woodward’s activities, or on what tactics might be employed in an appeal of the conviction that still stands against her. The bill for Woodward’s defense, variously estimated at $500,000 to $2 million, has been paid for by EF Au Pair, the agency that brought her to the Eappens’ home. Supporters in England and elsewhere have also raised more than $400,000 on Woodward’s behalf.

Coakley said the appeals process would take at least a year. She vowed, “This case isn’t going to go away.”