On February 9th, at 10.57 p.m., Matthew Eappen, aged 8 1/2 months, died after five days on life support in the Children's Hospital, Boston. His brain had swelled through a 2 1/2-inch crack in the back of his skull. His head, neck and spinal cord were wracked by haemorrhaging. While Matthew Eappen's parents - both physicians - sat by their youngest son's bedside, their au pair sat in a Massachusetts jail, charged initially with assault, then with murder.
Some seven months later, on October 30th, the 19-year-old British woman was found guilty of second-degree murder. After an unexpectedly lengthy deliberation, a Massachusetts jury of nine women and three men, found that Louise Woodward caused Matthew Eappen's death on the afternoon of February 4th by shaking him violently and throwing him on to the bathroom floor. The conviction carries a mandatory sentence of life imprisonment with the possibility of parole after 15 years.
Defence lawyer Barry Scheck took a high-stakes gamble on his client's innocence last Tuesday when he persuaded Middlesex Superior Court Judge Hiller B. Zobel to restrict the jury to only three verdicts: find Woodward guilty of either first-degree or second-degree murder, or acquit her. And Barry Scheck was not the only person to be astonished when his gamble backfired. "Every lawyer we had on our show during the trial was stunned when the jury didn't deliver an immediate acquittal," Betsy Meyer, producer of Greater Boston, a WGBH TV current affairs programme, said yesterday. "They felt that the government failed to prove its case and that Barry Scheck did a great job of casting doubt on the medical evidence."
"The only 12 people who believe she is guilty are the 12 people on the jury," Woodward's defence team insisted after the verdict was read on Thursday night, adding that it would appeal the decision. But Assistant District Attorney, Martha Coakley responded that "this case was never a close call". Louise Woodward did not make a final statement. She collapsed in the dock, sobbing violently when the verdict was announced, repeatedly crying "I didn't do anything".
Whatever the outcome of the defence appeal and whatever the subsequent media pronouncements, every parent's worst nightmare now has a name and a face. Louise Woodward. An ordinary name and an ordinary face, belonging to an apparently ordinary young woman from Elton, near Liverpool. Her only eccentricity appeared to be an infatuation with the musical Rent, which she saw approximately 20 times.
Louise Woodward's trial, however, became extraordinary - a soul-searching media event that briefly exposed one of modern society's deepest anxieties. Who is looking after the children? If O.J. Simpson put race in the US on trial, then 19-year-old Louise Woodward put American motherhood on the stand.
Months before jury selection began, respected commentators identified the underlying topic in what quickly became known as "The British Nanny Trial". "The criminal justice system will take a hard look at what happened to Matthew Eappen," Eileen McNamara wrote in the Boston Globe, the day before Matthew's death. "It is up to the rest of us to take an even harder look at who is minding our children."
Louise Woodward may be guilty, but who else is to blame, her defenders asked? Viewers accustomed to seeing morality and justice dramatised on countless television talk shows anticipated an emotional, cathartic trial. And Louise Woodward's defence team did not disappoint them. Early criticism of the childcare agency that had provided Woodward with four days' training when she came to the US, soon became a background issue. The agency was, after all, financing Woodward's defence.
Any serious attempt to hold the agency responsible also increased the likelihood of a civil suit against it by Deborah and Sunil Eappen.
It was clear from the outset that Matthew's 41-year-old working mother, not the au pair agency or government policy, would be judged daily in the Cambridge courtroom. Mrs Eappen's tears, her smiles and, above all, her priorities, were examined. "This trial is not about anyone's lifestyle," Woodward's lawyer, Barry Scheck assured the jury in his closing argument. Only days before, however, defence attorney Andrew Good relayed a different message. He repeatedly asked Deborah Eappen if her life was "busy", if she failed to ring home on February 4th because she was "too busy", if she found balancing work and motherhood "stressful".
On the final day of testimony, Louise Woodward held up two index cards showing the telephone and pager numbers for Deborah and Sunil Eappen. Many viewers, however, saw only one message written on the cards - neglect. The positive image of a respected physician, out-sourcing her domestic duties with executive efficiency, was deftly replaced with that of the heartless career woman. At that moment, Deborah Eappen was portrayed as an electronic presence in her baby's life, nothing more.
"There were people marching around with placards, blaming the poor mother for leaving her child," says Diane Eyer, author of Motherguilt. "It's absolutely outrageous. But it shows once again how impossible it is for mothers to measure up today. If you're a working mother, you're neglecting the kids. If you're at home full-time, you're a bad role model. If you're a welfare mother, you're a monster."
Even the Eappens' most sympathetic supporters conceded the existence of a fundamental irony in American life: that many affluent couples who lament teenage motherhood nonetheless employ teenagers to care for their babies. "For free room and board with a weekly stipend of $115 you get an au pair as young as 18 providing 45 hours of childcare," Eileen McNamara wrote in the Boston Globe. "The glossy brochures from the agencies licensed to bring au pairs into America invariably feature attractive young women with degrees in early childhood education. But that's unlikely to be the background of the young woman who comes to live in your home."
The homicidal stranger-childminder is just one more anxiety for an anxious generation of parents, according to David Elkind, author of The Hurried Child And Miseducation: Preschoolers At Risk, among other works. "Parents today believe they can make a difference in their children's lives, that they can give them an edge that will make them brighter and abler than the competition," he observes. The result is often a "hurried child" and a compulsively vigilant - but frequently absent - parent.
Even the home itself, the family's traditional refuge, is increasingly presented as a danger zone where technological protection is deemed vital. Parents Magazine, in an illustrated supplement, recently recommended not decorating the nursery but "Danger Proofing Your Home, Room by Room" for a new baby. "Lead Poisoning Alerts" and "Airbag Updates" are now regular features alongside cosier tips on head lice control and musical birthing.
All of which, columnist Mike Barnicle insists, is the preoccupation of an affluent minority. "Never mind that this type of hideous violence occurs every day," Barnicle wrote in the Boston Globe, comparing Matthew Eappen's murder with that of Dymitrius Baker, a seven-month-old boy who was killed in September 1996 when his crack-addicted father swung him into a wall. "The Eappens look like us, act like us, work long hours like us, and have paid help just like us." But class and race identification only partly explain US and international fascination with the Woodward trial. The other component was the general uneasiness with the bargain struck between career and child rearing.
A week after the closing arguments were made in the Louise Woodward trial, Hillary Clinton discussed what she called the "silent crisis" in child care. "Many parents will go to work but they will have trouble focusing on work," Hillary Clinton told a panel of experts, "because they are worried about the sniffle that their daughter had or wondering how their son is faring."
President Clinton subsequently presented a proposal to ease the shortage of affordable, safe child care, warning that the country would be "profoundly weakened" if the problem remains unsolved. He also called for better tracking of criminal histories "to weed out the people who have no business taking care of our children in the first place".
The Massachusetts legislature was thinking about another dead child - 10-year-old Jeffrey Curley, murdered last month by two men in Boston - when it resurrected the death penalty this week after 47 years. But even its adherents admit that the punishment cannot provide the assurance that anxious America craves.
Jeffrey Curley's killers were unsavoury companions with a history of deviant behaviour. The young woman who came to live in the Eappens' home, however, to look after two-year-old Brendan and baby Matthew, would not have set off any alarms. "Out of all the au pairs they interviewed, they liked me the best," Louise Woodward testified. If the educated, successful Eappens could not be sure, how can any parent be sure? That is the question that even this guilty verdict cannot answer.