World

Au Pair: Cameras Added Stress

By CBSNews.com staff CBSNews.com staff

August 31, 1998 / 4:37 PM EDT / CBS

Louise Woodward, the former au pair convicted of killing an American baby, made a rare public appearance Monday in a debate on whether to allow television into British courts. She said television made a difficult situation worse.

CBS News Corresondent Pamela McCall reports that Woodward said, "It added a lot of stress to what was already a stressful situation."

With her American lawyer Barry Scheck, who defended O.J. Simpson, the 20-year-old said that television turned her trial into a soap opera with a painful legacy: a nervous giggle is her best-remembered testimony. Autograph hunters haunt her.

"It is hard enough being handcuffed in the dock without having a camera trying to take a shot of your handcuffs," she said.

Woodward, the first British woman to be tried on live TV, returned home June 18 after a Massachusetts court upheld her conviction of involuntary manslaughter in the death of 8-month-old Matthew Eappen. He died of head injuries in February 1997 while in her care.

Since returning to Britain, she has given only one TV interview, promised not to sell her story, and until Monday's appearance at the Edinburgh International Television Festival disappeared from public view.

Had she been found innocent, Woodward would have received huge offers for her story. However, British media guidelines generally bar paying convicted criminals for their stories.

Scheck said having cameras in the courtroom should happen only if all participants agree, a stipulation he maintained would effectively bar TV from most U.S. trials. Woodward said TV should never be allowed.

Initially convicted of murder, Woodward maintained total innocence and in court, Scheck tried to prove Matthew died from an old injury.

He argued Monday that media hype surrounding the trial distracted the jury from the scientific evidence, with the issue becoming whether Woodward was "the nanny from hell" or whether Matthew's parents, both doctors, were to blame for hiring an inexperienced teen-ager.

People said things like "no wonder she snapped," commented Scheck, adding wryly. "And these were the people who were supposed to be on our side."

Woodward, dressed in a black suit and platform sandals, was composed during the 90-minute session in a paneled hall at the Court of Assembly of the (Presbyterian) Church of Scotland. The session was attended by several hundred TV producers, but no cameras were allowed.

Organizers also barred questions about her guilt or innocence.

Afterward, Woodward appeared slightly nervous at a news conference in the courtyard of the 19th-century building dominated by a forbidding statue of the 16th-century Scottish Calvinist, John Knox.

"It must have been a tremendous stress for everyone ... I am sure it must have been the same for the Eappen family as well," she said of the televising of her trial.

She escribed coming home she comes from a small north England village, Elton to a life as a sort of reluctant "minor celebrity."

Even when memories of the trial recede, she is resigned to generating new media interest at the next big stages of her life: going to university, getting married, having children.

She has refused to say whether she will enroll in college this fall.

"People ask me to sign baseball caps and things like that ... I am trying to be a normal person but people won't let me do that," she said.

Who's to blame the millions on both sides of the Atlantic who watched her Massachusetts trial? Woodward laughed and acknowledged, "I think I would have watched it too."