This week, a Manhattan mother came home to find two of her children dead—their nanny the main suspect in their murders. As this horrific situation develops, The Daily Beast takes a look back at notorious nanny cases over the years.
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Police say Marina Krim returned to her Upper West Side apartment Thursday evening to find her two young children had been stabbed to death and their nanny slashing herself in the neck with a knife. The unconscious 50-year-old caretaker, Yoselyn Ortega, was taken to New York-Cornell Hospital under police custody; several blocks uptown at St. Luke’s Hospital, Leo, 2, and Lucia Krim, 6, were pronounced dead and their mother was taken for trauma treatment. As of late Thursday, Ortega, laying in critical yet stable condition, had not been charged. But investigators say they believe she is responsible for the murders.
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In 1997, when Louise Woodward was found guilty of second-degree murder of 8-month-old Matthew Eappen, she cried, “I didn’t do anything… I’m only 19!” But the jury had already made up their minds about the British teenager, who’d worked as an au pair for the Eappen family in Newton, Mass. The teen was on thin ice with the family for refusing to adhere to their curfew before Matthew died. Days after the Eappens told Woodward they’d fire her if she wasn’t home by 11 p.m. every night, the au pair struggled to wake Matthew from a nap. She called 911 and later told police that she “lightly shook” the baby to wake him up and that she may have been “a little rough” with him. She said she’d “popped” the baby on the bed—a British English term for “put” or “placed” that was later misunderstood to mean “dropped.” Prosecutors determined that Matthew’s death was caused by violent shaking and a hit against a blunt surface that cracked his skull. The au pair service that trained and assigned the teen hired a team of lawyers—and set to work portraying Woodward as an innocent girl who cared deeply for the Eappen children, while simultaneously arguing that Matthew’s skull fracture had occurred weeks before his death, likely caused by some rough playing with a sibling. Ultimately, Woodward opted for a risky “all-or-nothing” verdict that would result in either her acquittal or being convicted of murder. The jury went with the latter—sentencing Woodward to life in prison. The defense appealed the decision after it was revealed that the jury had actually been split. Her charges were reduced to involuntary manslaughter, cutting her sentence to 279 days in prison—exactly the period of time Woodward had already spent in jail.
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Just a few years after the Woodward case, another British nanny was sentenced to 25 years in prison, for shaking to death the 13-month-old baby she’d been hired to care for in San Diego. Unlike Woodward, who the judge in the case acknowledged in delivering his verdict, Manjit Basuta, originally from Berkshire, was 44 years old. “She’s not like a young teenager who does not have a clear understanding of right and wrong,” the judge said. On the contrary, he felt that Basuta had “a dark side to her,” noting that “at no time during her interview with the probation officer… did the defendant show any remorse or concern for the victim or his family. This has troubled me.” Basuta was the first person convicted under a then-new California law requiring anyone who uses enough force to produce “great bodily injury” against a child under the age of 8 to serve at least 25 years in prison.
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Ada Cuadros-Fernandez was convicted not once, but twice of capital murder for the death of Texas 14-month-old Kyle Lazarchik. In 2005, Lazarchik had been in his Peruvian nanny’s care when he died of blunt force trauma to the head—injuries equal to that of a six-story fall. Cuadros-Fernandez insisted the child had accidentally run into a door frame, causing him to vomit, stop breathing, and then die. Investigators said they believed that Kyle hadn’t hit his head by accident but that, instead, Cuadros-Fernandez had smashed it. A year later, she was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison. However, Texas’s Fifth Court of Appeals in Dallas determined that two errors made in the trial rendered the sentencing moot. Still, when she was finally re-tried in 2012, Cuadros-Fernandez found the exact same fate.
Two decades after 5-month-old Ryan Baurley died, his former babysitter Melissa Haskell was convicted of third-degree murder and sentenced to 10–20 years in prison. Originally, Baurley was believed to have been afflicted with sudden infant death syndrome, but a coroner later determined that the child had been intoxicated with alcohol and suffocated. In 2011, the babysitter’s ex-husband went to police claiming Haskell had told him she’d killed the baby, which caused the case to be reopened. According to some reports, Haskell admitted to police that she’d been “violently ill, going through heroin withdrawal” while babysitting Baurley, causing her to grow extremely agitated by the child’s crying and prompting her to feed him alcohol and then smother his face when the booze did not soothe him.
One of the more recent alleged nanny murder cases began this past summer, when Sarah Gumm allegedly grew impatient trying to change Rylan Koopmeiner’s diaper. The 3-month-old’s parents had dropped their daughter off early in the morning at Gumm’s Waukegan, Ill., home, where they’d been taking her every day for six weeks. Late that afternoon, Gumm called police to report that the infant was not breathing and, after being rushed to the hospital, Rylan was declared dead. Despite claims that she was home all day, neighbors reported seeing Gumm leave her house in a taxi and investigatiors say her credit-card reports show she made purchases at a local drugstore. Gumm later told police that she left the baby at home to go to the drugstore in the morning and, according to an assistant state’s attorney, she also said “later in the afternoon the baby was getting very fussy and squirming around while she was trying to change her on a wooden table … She was holding the child above the table. She got frustrated.” An autopsy showed the child’s skull was severely fractured. Gumm is in a Lake County jail with a bail set at $3 million. Gumm has pleaded not guilty.
Waukegan police
