British Au Pair Is Found Guilty of Killing Baby

Amid hysterical sobs from the defendant and ashen stares from her corps of expensive attorneys, a jury here on Thursday convicted Louise Woodward, a 19-year-old British au pair, of murdering an 8-month-old boy who was left in her care.

As the forewoman of the jury--nine women, three men--uttered the word “guilty,” Woodward doubled over as if in pain.

“I didn’t do anything. I didn’t do anything,” she screamed. “Why did they do that to me?”

One of her attorneys bent to comfort her. The others stood, seemingly frozen in place.

Woodward’s parents sat silently to one side of the courtroom. The parents of the dead child were not present but watched the verdict on television, officials said.

The case, broadcast live both in this country and in Britain, has attracted international attention as a vivid illustration of many parents’ worst nightmares about child care.

More broadly, the trial has joined the list of those televised events--the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings, the William Kennedy Smith rape trial, the O.J. Simpson double-murder case--that over time became touchstones in a larger national debate on a highly emotional topic: this time, working mothers and child care.

Prosecutors alleged that Woodward killed Matthew Eappen by shaking him violently and slamming his head against a hard object. They argued that she was a temperamental teenager frustrated by caring for a collicky child and angry that his parents had tried to impose a curfew on her. Police testified that when they questioned Woodward after responding to her 911 call reporting that the child was not breathing, she admitted being “a little rough” with the boy.

Woodward denied that statement in her own testimony, saying that she only told police that she had shaken the boy lightly in an attempt to revive him after he passed out. Her defense team, which included former O.J. Simpson attorney Barry Scheck and which cost an estimated $750,000, tried to convince the jury that officials had made a “snap judgment” in blaming Woodward for the child’s head injuries.

Defense experts testified that hemorrhage in the child’s brain could have been a delayed reaction to an accident, weeks earlier, in which he had fractured his wrist. Prosecutors, in their closing arguments, said that theory “defies common sense.”

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“In the medical and legal communities, this case wasn’t a close call,” prosecutor Martha Coakley told reporters after the verdict. “The jury was able to see the medical evidence.”

But defense attorney Andrew Good, vowing to appeal, said his team was “shocked” by the jury’s decision. “Louise put her faith in the system, and it has failed her miserably,” he said.

Until the moment of the verdict, the defense team had appeared more than usually confident that they would win the case. Afterward, the defense attorneys conceded that “there were opportunities along the way” to strike a plea bargain with prosecutors but added that their client “did not consider them.”

Tuesday, just before the case went to the jury, they had rejected the option of having the panel consider the lesser charge of manslaughter in addition to murder--believing that if they gave the jury no alternative between murder and acquittal, their client would prevail. And over the last two days, as jurors requested that Judge Hiller B. Zobel read back portions of testimony, many trial analysts had believed the queries showed a leaning toward the defense.

Instead, Woodward is scheduled to be sentenced today for second-degree murder, which carries a penalty of life in prison with a possibility of parole after 15 years. The jury rejected a charge of first-degree murder, which, under Massachusetts law, required finding that the killing was done with “extreme atrocity and cruelty.”

The case has generated strong emotions on both sides of the Atlantic. Ever since Matthew Eappen died on Feb. 9, after five days in a coma, but particularly since the opening of the trial three weeks ago, an array of callers to radio and television shows have denounced the child’s mother, Dr. Deborah Eappen, for having left her two young boys in Woodward’s care to return to her work as an ophthalmologist.

She worked three days a week and returned home on her lunch hour to breast feed the baby, according to court testimony. Eappen and her husband, Sunil, an anesthesiologist, have reported receiving letters and calls attacking them.

Others have leaped to Eappen’s defense, arguing that she was being pilloried by a society that, the defenders said, seems to criticize some women as lazy if they do not work and others as self-indulgent if they do.

A family spokesman has called the criticism a “class issue” sparked by resentment of two doctors living in a well-to-do Boston suburb. Others argued that the family tragedy illustrates a shortage of reliable child care in a country where two-thirds of mothers with children under the age of 6 work outside their homes.

Finally, the case raised a number of issues about the system of au pairs, in which nonprofit agencies bring about 10,000 young people, mostly girls, to the United States from abroad for a mix of cultural exchange and child care. The program has been popular with many parents because an au pair is generally paid about $140 a week, plus room and board--considerably less than full-time adult child care workers receive, but critics say many of the teenagers lack training and that many of the families they work for require them to work longer hours than the program’s regulations allow.

EF Au Pair agency, the nonprofit group that brought Woodward to the United States, has paid for her defense. Prosecutors have suggested in court papers that the defense strategy was crafted, in part, with an eye toward shielding the agency from potential civil liability.

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Lauter, a Times staff writer, reported from Washington and special correspondent Mowbray from Cambridge.