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The case had swung dramatically in and out of Woodward's favor ever since she dialed 911 in February and said to the dispatcher, "Help. There's a baby. He's barely breathing." Shortly after the infant was taken to the hospital, police arrived at the home of Deborah and Sunil Eappen in Newton, Mass. Officers later said that the au pair told them she may have been "a little rough" with the baby, tossed him on a bed, and "dropped" him on some towels on the bathroom floor. In testimony, she denied making the statements. Woodward was arrested the following day and, shortly after the baby's life-support system was turned off, charged with murdering Matthew by shaking him violently. Legal opinion saw an open-and-shut case, with Woodward the loser.
However, over the summer, as lawyers working for Woodward did extensive tests on blood and tissue samples from Matthew Eappen and re-examined X rays and photographs of the damaged skull, an alternative hypothesis began to emerge: that the baby had been suffering from a fractured skull for some weeks and a jolt was enough to restart the bleeding that finally killed him. Evidence of a three-week-old fracture of the wrist as well as signs of apparent healing of the skull fracture appeared to support the scenario. The argument seemed so compelling that most observers thought the medical testimony for the prosecution and the defense canceled each other out--or that at least the defense had introduced a sufficient element of doubt to ensure the jury would have to acquit.
And then there was Woodward's testifying in her own defense. Despite tough questioning by prosecuting attorney Gerard Leone Jr., she stuck to her story, denying that she hurt Matthew. With a smile often threatening to break out on her face, she showed no sign of anger or malice that might support a murder charge. "I don't think any of us really believed this was a murder case per se," said Laurence Hardoon, former head of the child-abuse prosecution unit in Middlesex County. "It would have been different if she had dropped him from a three-story building or stabbed a knife into him. But shaking--that's a real gray area."
From the beginning, the case was more than a private domestic tragedy. For one thing, there was the overseas audience in Britain, watching for the very first time a fellow citizen being tried in a legal system that had previously been reserved for such spectacular but very American melodramas as the O.J. Simpson saga. When the guilty verdict was announced, an audience watching in a pub in Woodward's home village of Elton, in northern England, was so taken aback that for a time all that could be heard was the amplified sound of the teenager crying in the courtroom 3,000 miles away. The American justice system came under attack. Alarmed by Leone's masterful summation, some complained that the defense should have had the final word, as it does in Britain. Furthermore, says British legal expert Stephen Jakobi, "Massachusetts, home to the witch-hunt--we have a lot of problems here."