Woman Freed in Toddler’s Beating Death

Twenty-one months after she was sentenced to prison for the highly publicized beating death of her boyfriend’s 2-year-old son, a North Hollywood woman was released from custody late Tuesday on the instructions of a judge who ordered a hearing into new evidence pointing to her innocence.

Eve Wingfield, 24, tearfully embraced her sister, Holly Nichols, in the inmate reception area of the Twin Towers jail and huddled with Nichols’ husband and Michael E. Goodman, the lawyer who persuaded a judge last week to reopen her case.

Wingfield had been serving a 10-year term for the Nov. 6, 1995, death of Lance Helms in North Hollywood, a slaying that prompted state legislators to change child-custody laws.

After a change from jail clothes into jeans and an oversize T-shirt, Wingfield hurried into the humid night air down Bouchet Street and into a white jeep Cherokee headed for an undisclosed location.

Wingfield declined to comment on her case, but her time behind bars was obviously fresh in her mind. As family members urged her to jaywalk to get to their car, she refused, saying: “I don’t want to get in trouble.”

The family agreed to seek a crosswalk.

Wingfield pleaded no contest to child-endangerment charges in January, 1996. She was allowed to withdraw that plea Friday and enter a plea of not guilty to the original charge of murder after her lawyer presented the results of an investigation by LAPD detectives indicating that she could not have been at home at the time of the toddler’s fatal beating.

The detectives’ report said the boy was injured while in the sole care of his father, David Helms, who the report said is now a suspect in the death. Although police asked the district attorney’s office in November to bring murder charges against him, prosecutors refused to do so and say the investigation is continuing.

Goodman said Wingfield pleaded no contest to the child-endangerment charge only because she was advised to do so by a public defender, who counseled her that otherwise she might be convicted of murder.

Van Nuys Superior Court Judge Michael Hoff, who set a hearing in the case for Oct. 27, ordered Wingfield’s immediate release on Friday. But she quickly found herself stuck in the criminal-justice bureaucracy.

First, it was learned that Dependency Court had ordered a no-bail hold placed on Wingfield in an unrelated case involving custody of her own children, which kept her locked up through the weekend. Another judge lifted the order, clearing the way for her release Monday, but she was not actually freed until after 7 p.m. Tuesday.

Her attorney said a work slowdown by Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies appeared to have contributed to the delay.

“Although it took the Sheriff’s Department a while to release her from custody, we are relieved to have her back home with the family,” Goodman said Tuesday, adding that “the next step is convincing the district attorney that they’ve charged the wrong person.”

The right person, according to a report submitted last fall to the district attorney by LAPD Det. Terry Lopez, is David Helms, the father of Lance Helms and Wingfield’s on-again, off-again boyfriend.

The report said that Helms, who has an extensive criminal background including convictions for burglary, prostitution, narcotics and robbery, was the only person home with Lance when the toddler was severely beaten on his abdomen.

The report reached that conclusion after the medical examiner’s office revised its estimate of how much time passed after the beating before the little boy died.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Martin Herscovitz, who agreed to accept Wingfield’s original plea, said the revision in the medical report could not have been foreseen. Deputy Dist. Atty. Steven Slavitt, now in charge of the Wingfield case, declined to comment, citing the ongoing criminal investigation. In court last week he voiced objections to Wingfield’s release on grounds that her original plea was an admission of her role in the crime.