
DATE: Tuesday, November 4, 1997             TAG: 9711040236

SECTION: FRONT                   PAGE: A4   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Focus 

SOURCE: FROM WIRE REPORTS 

                                            LENGTH:  129 lines

FOCUS: THE AU PAIR CASE

Britain is still in shock from last week's jury verdict convicting an English teen-ager of murdering the American baby in her care. The reactions speak volumes about how the two countries see themselves and each other.

Louise Woodward revealed very little of herself as she sat impassively in a courtroom in Cambridge, Mass., day after day, charged with shaking and slamming a baby to death. In her round, placid face, you could read what you wanted to read.

Was she a monster in the guise of an irresponsible teen-ager? Or was she - as many in Britain believed - a kind but naive girl who was exploited and abused by a professional couple whose selfishness seemed peculiarly American?

The case of the 19-year-old English au pair, who was convicted last week of the murder of 8-month-old Matthew Eappen, divided Britons and Americans almost as starkly as the O.J. Simpson trial divided whites and blacks. After the verdict, it was hard to find anyone in Britain who thought that Louise Woodward was guilty.

Somehow, her job, to help Deborah and Sunil Eappen look after their two young children, went terribly wrong. But exactly how will never be clear. The prosecution said Woodward shook and probably slammed the baby against a hard surface. But a defense expert said Matthew's injury was at least several weeks old, and Woodward said she shook the baby only to rouse him when he became alarmingly listless.

How those facts were perceived in Britain and in the United States speaks volumes about how the countries see themselves and each other.

In the United States, the case aggravated the guilt that seems to permeate the lives of working parents. In Britain, the case provoked anger at the parents as employers.

``It would appear from her testimony that she was enslaved by her family,'' a lawyer sympathetic to Woodward told The Independent.

The American criminal justice system seems to have been put on trial, too. There are severe limits in Britain on what can be reported about a trial. Britons, then, were aghast at the prosecutor's pretrial statements to reporters and at the Eappens' appearance on CBS while the jury was still deliberating.

Other articles commented that Boston is anti-British because of its high Irish-American population and that Louise Woodward's British reserve made her seem uncaring to Americans.

Mark Lawson of The Guardian contrasted the ``stoical and quiet'' Woodward family to supporters of the Eappens, who, in a reference to Matthew's favorite toy, wore crocodile pins to the courtroom. The pins ``reek of the kind of mawkish exhibitionism which Europeans have always found repellent in American life,'' he wrote.

``It may officially be the State of Massachusetts vs. Louise Woodward in that courtroom, but it's also America vs. Britain.''

Quiet, a regular churchgoer and a big sister to a brood of young cousins, Woodward was the sort of no-trouble girl teachers like to have in class: as ordinary and respectable as the small, rural town where she was raised.

``If anyone had asked me who was least likely to have been the subject of such a charge, I would have said Louise Woodward,'' David Hudson says.

Hudson is headmaster of Elton Junior School, where Louise started school at age 5 in the north England town of Elton, a struggling cluster of bungalows, two pubs and a couple of thousand people who know each other well.

Her father, a carpenter, built the house where he and his wife, Sue, raised Louise and her younger sister, Victoria.

``I would say they are more stable than the average family - two parents, two children, nice house, very dignified, loads of integrity,'' says Hazel Mayamba-Kasongo, a family friend.

There was not much money, but there was enough. Gary is a popular regular at The Rigger pub; his wife had a secretarial job at a college nearby, before she quit to devote her attention to the trial.

After elementary school, Louise went on to Helsby High School and excelled in English, history, economics and sociology.

``The Louise we knew was a quiet, caring pupil from a stable, supportive family background, who worked hard in school and was never in any trouble,'' says headmistress Elizabeth Lord.

She played the clarinet, swam and delivered newspapers as a young teen-ager.

Unsure what to study at college and yearning for adventure, Louise filled in the forms sent by EF Au Pairs. The Massachusetts agency, which eventually paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for her legal defense, arranged a ticket and she was on her way - full of anticipation, dreaming of the sights she would see and the American friends she would make.

``She was telling me how excited she was,'' says Lynsey Jones, a childhood friend.

But things didn't work out from the start.

``I didn't know what to expect,'' Woodward told the Cambridge court, a headband pulling her brown hair back from her pudgy face.

Her job with the Eappens was her second. The first, outside Boston, she had found too isolating, even after - or perhaps because of - her upbringing in Elton.

With her friend and fellow au pair, Ruhannah Augustin, she went out most nights: They explored Boston, went to fast-food cafes, occasionally drank in bars and lined up 20 times to see their favorite theatrical show, the musical ``Rent.'' Louise was two years shy of the legal drinking age in Massachusetts and used a fake ID.

She also, the Eappens said, arrived home late and then slept in, chatted for hours with her friends on the phone, and took short cuts in the care of Matthew and his 2-year-old brother, Brendan.

Did inexperience, disappointment with the drudgery and boredom of an au pair's long hours alone with small children and frustration at curfews set off a resentment that smoldered behind her placid, sometimes sullen exterior? Did she vent that rage by violently shaking little Matthew?

Among those not surprised by last week's verdict was Richard Afrikian, a Boston-area man whose au pair was a friend of Louise's. Afrikian had banned Louise from his home because he felt she was a manipulative, boy-crazy party girl - a bad influence on his family's au pair.

``It's funny that the murder occurred two weeks later,'' he said in Massachusetts. ``I always had an uncomfortable feeling having her with my kids.''

Now, barring a successful appeal, Louise will spend at least the next 15 years in prison - the soonest she could be paroled from her life sentence. What started out as a grand adventure turned into tragedy - for the Eappens, for Louise, and for a little town mourning a girl they watched grow up and fear might never come home.

MEMO: This story was compiled from reports by The New York Times and The

Associated Press. ILLUSTRATION: Ap photo

Louise Woodward...

SIDE BAR

Trial Revives Child-Care Debate

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