Louise Woodward The Killer Nanny. did she do it?

[HeckinMiffed]

This was such a huge case when I was younger. Anyone else watching?
I always thought she didnt deliberately kill the baby.

@Worried456776, she didn’t get away with it. She was convicted of manslaughter.

‘Got away with it’

She didn’t. She was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter and served her required sentence. She admitted to shaking him but not to the degree that would have caused life threatening or fatal injury. The science behind ‘Shaken baby’ cases is iffy and Matthew’s injuries weren’t consistent with being vigorously shaken (no neck injuries for a start).

Her manner in the courtroom and on the stand was odd but I think that was mostly nerves and terror at the prospect of life imprisonment but that doesn’t make her guilty of battering a baby to death.

She has been in the press since and I believe has since trained in law, though I’m not sure if she practices.

I think she ended up as a dance teacher maybe? I read something that she had given up law and met a ballroom dancer? I think she did something but I also think it’s weird that the baby had a fractured arm from previously. So who knows - right thing to reduce to manslaughter although it did cause an outcry I think.

She got a degree in law but then dropped out of her work placement (to become a solicitor) to become a ballroon and latin dance teacher.

Vitamin D is added to milk and to baby formula in the US.

If Matthew was bottle fed then vitamin D deficiency wouldn't have been a problem. Even if breastfed, the likelihood of having a diet of breastmilk alone at 8 months would have been very low.

He would have had yogurt, cheese, and other dairy items in his solid food diet, and in the 90s he would have started on solids somewhere between 4 and 6 months.

Pondering diet as a cause or a contributory cause of a skull fracture and wrist fracture is grasping at straws.

Nobody is 'grasping at straws', it's an interesting fact about Vitamin D that I certainly didn't know. We also don't know what type of milk Matthew was drinking at 8 months old. We don't know anything of his diet, he could have been the world's pickiest baby.
We don't know any of this, and are never going to find out, but it's a discussion on MN, nothing more.

I wonder how the brother feels whenever this is dredged up for some documentary or other.

After all, his nanny killed his brother, that must bring up all sorts of stuff for him, not least that he had a lucky escape, especially when they bring up these documentaries trying to suggest she was innocent when actually, she was convicted of killing him.

It’s had ripples everywhere hasn’t it - I just found out her parents were charged with defrauding the trust fund (judge directed they be cleared).

SparklingBrook He was a chubby little baby, clearly not wasting away, and there is no way his injuries were caused by a vitamin deficiency. That is not how specific injuries happen. Fractured skulls are the result of great force applied to the skull. Fractured wrists most often happen due to being accidentally trapped (perhaps in a fold-out stroller that collapsed with the baby in it) or if furniture or something heavy fell on it, or if the baby's hand and forearm were held and twisted in opposite directions - this would be a case of physical abuse.

Agree, @AlternativePerspective. This must have been very hard for the Eappen family to come to terms with. The fact that their two subsequently born children and the older child seem to have thrived in the care of their parents says a lot about them.

He's 27 now and is at Harvard Medical School, it must be weird for him, and for the other two children that came along after when all this gets dredged up again.

@mathanxiety

SparklingBrook He was a chubby little baby, clearly not wasting away, and there is no way his injuries were caused by a vitamin deficiency. That is not how specific injuries happen. Fractured skulls are the result of great force applied to the skull. Fractured wrists most often happen due to being accidentally trapped (perhaps in a fold-out stroller that collapsed with the baby in it) or if furniture or something heavy fell on it, or if the baby's hand and forearm were held and twisted in opposite directions - this would be a case of physical abuse.

Agree, @AlternativePerspective. This must have been very hard for the Eappen family to come to terms with. The fact that their two subsequently born children and the older child seem to have thrived in the care of their parents says a lot about them.

I'm not saying his injuries were caused by a vitamin deficiency, I said that it was an interesting discussion @mathanxiety, we don't know how the injuries were caused. We are no further on than before the documentary aired. We could guess forever and make up possible scenarios...

I wonder what their childcare arrangements were with the younger children.

@ancientgran

I wonder what their childcare arrangements were with the younger children.

I wondered that too. Did one of them stay at home I wonder?

@mathanxiety

Vitamin D is added to milk and to baby formula in the US.

If Matthew was bottle fed then vitamin D deficiency wouldn't have been a problem. Even if breastfed, the likelihood of having a diet of breastmilk alone at 8 months would have been very low.

He would have had yogurt, cheese, and other dairy items in his solid food diet, and in the 90s he would have started on solids somewhere between 4 and 6 months.

Pondering diet as a cause or a contributory cause of a skull fracture and wrist fracture is grasping at straws.

@mathanxiety That's where you're very mistaken www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2092128/Vitamin-D-deficiency-Parents-wrongly-accused-murder-abuse-babies.html This was one case where parents were accused of their sons death , but it was discovered child had severe Vit d deficiency ( as did mother) There have been other cases where suggestion of child neglect has been raised but discounted due to Vit d deficiency

Poor and darker-skinned families have children with rickets in the sun-deprived UK where vitamin D is not added to cows' milk, and from this you are extrapolating that a well-off mixed-heritage American family with one healthy toddler whose bones were never fractured could possibly have had a second baby who suffered this deficiency?

The speculation here is nonsense. Rickets is rare in the US, where vitamin D is added to milk and milk products such as cheese and yogurt, and where sunshine can be counted on year round except in the Pacific northwest.

This was one case where parents were accused of their sons death , but it was discovered child had severe Vit d deficiency ( as did mother)

The woman had her baby at age 16, was not well off, lived in cloudy, rainy Britain, where vitamin D is not added to food she might eat.

Absolutely not comparable to a middle class woman in her thirties living in a sunny climate and able to afford a wide variety of vitamin D supplemented foods or milk.

Boston isn't a sunny climate ,the summers might be better than the UK but the winters certainly are not .

TBF it doesn’t matter how sunny it is where you live , it’s how often you get exposed to that sunshine. You can get Vit D through the clouds but if you don’t leave the house much that’s never going to happen.

There are some strange assumptions in this thread. It would be very rare for a toddler to be able to inflict such serious injuries on an 8 month old baby. Yes they could pull them off a sofa or hit them on the head but it’s very unlikely to cause a skull fracture. That is an injury requiring significant force. If he’d fallen down the stairs or something then LW would have found him at the bottom and said something surely?!

Ultimately she was the one who was with Matthew when he was very sick. She admitted to being rough with him and shaking him. I’m not sure why so many are rushing to presume she’s innocent.

I agree using an au pair for this type of childcare is questionable at best but it doesn’t mean that the parents were responsible. I also think it’s reasonable for the parents to discuss problems with LW and 2 hour phone calls are crazy when looking after children! She wasn’t a child, she was an adult and responsible for caring for the children.

I believe Sunil Eappen is an anaesthetist which has different training to a paediatrician. It’s not always straightforward to just ‘go part time’ when training in many specialties. I imagine it was even less straightforward then.

There are some strange assumptions in this thread

The actual details of the case are quite scarce so it’s just discussion of all the things that could have happened. Some likely, some not so likely. We’ll that’s how I see it.

@mathanxiety

SparklingBrook He was a chubby little baby, clearly not wasting away, and there is no way his injuries were caused by a vitamin deficiency. That is not how specific injuries happen. Fractured skulls are the result of great force applied to the skull. Fractured wrists most often happen due to being accidentally trapped (perhaps in a fold-out stroller that collapsed with the baby in it) or if furniture or something heavy fell on it, or if the baby's hand and forearm were held and twisted in opposite directions - this would be a case of physical abuse.

Agree, @AlternativePerspective. This must have been very hard for the Eappen family to come to terms with. The fact that their two subsequently born children and the older child seem to have thrived in the care of their parents says a lot about them.

Not a comment on this specific case but there is a well known phenomenon is child abuse cases of parents targeting a specific child for abuse or neglect and treating the other siblings normally/well. Saying other children thrived in the care of the same set of parents doesn’t necessarily mean innocence can be presumed.

in child abuse cases, not ‘is’

The documentary reminds me of Tiger King in the way that everyone on it was SO weird.

The childhood friend’ who only met her on a weeks holiday but did interviews for 25 years.
Her parents who seems dead behind the eyes.
Baby Matthews parents, also dead behind the eyes.
The juror who was very snarky and almost thrilled to find Louise guilty.
The lawyer who got caught drunk driving and most likely said Louise was dishonest to a few different people when she was sozzled.
The police offer who met her, judged her, found her guilty all in two minutes (in his mind) and smugly buggered off on his boat into the sunset.
The village people who raised money and awareness, decorating the village with yellow ribbons, desperate to bring their Angel Louise home, turns out they didn’t even know her and then decided they didn’t like her and she was a danger to children.
And Louise herself who acted very strangely the entire time.

@IWasHotInTheNineties

Completely agree on the ‘childhood friend’ from a weeks holiday so random.