Tot’s Fatal Beating Case Goes to Jury

VAN NUYS —  The trial of a Hollywood man accused of beating his 2 1/2-year-old son to death went to the jury Wednesday, with the defense arguing that his girlfriend--already imprisoned for the crime and then freed--may have been the killer after all.

Defense attorney Jack Stone summed up his case by insisting that conflicting medical testimony raised reasonable doubts as to whether David Helms or his former live-in girlfriend, Eve Wingfield, beat Helms’ son Lance to death three years ago in a North Hollywood apartment.

Stone told jurors that conflicting testimony given by Los Angeles County Deputy Medical Examiner James K. Ribe was “frightening.”

Ribe has been “tailoring his scientific opinion to coincide with the facts,” Stone alleged.

The prosecutor, Deputy Dist. Atty. Eleanor Hunter, said Ribe showed integrity by “sticking with the case” and changing his opinion when he felt he had erred.

At a preliminary hearing for Wingfield shortly after the killing, Ribe testified that the boy died 30 to 60 minutes after he was beaten--putting the beating in a time period when Wingfield was taking care of the boy. On the strength of that testimony, a public defender persuaded Wingfield to plead guilty to felony child endangerment and accept a 10-year prison term, warning her that otherwise she faced the strong possibility of a murder conviction.

Wingfield was later freed by a judge when Ribe told LAPD detectives in late 1996 that the boy died immediately from the beating--putting it in a time period when his father was caring for him, after Wingfield had left the apartment.

Testifying this week at Helms’ trial, Ribe said he has since researched the medical issues more thoroughly. He dismissed his original estimate of the time of death as “just ridiculous.” Lance was hit hard enough to split his liver, Ribe testified, and died as quickly as if he had been hit by a truck.

But Stone said Ribe had earlier stuck to his story about a delay between the beating and Lance’s death, suggesting that only when he was approached by LAPD detectives reinvestigating the crime did he change his conclusion.

Hunter said it was Helms who beat the toddler, calling him “an angry man under pressure.”

In her summing up, Hunter reminded the jury that Gail Helms--the defendant’s mother and the victim’s grandmother--and a half-dozen other witnesses testified they had heard or seen Helms abusing Lance. Hunter recalled the testimony of neighbors like Jody Fasone, who said she saw Helms strike Lance on several occasions, including once when he hit the boy hard enough to knock him out of his stroller.

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Hunter referred to Helms’ giving conflicting statements about the death and said he appeared to show no emotion when his son died.

The prosector also returned to Wingfield’s testimony in which she portrayed her former boyfriend as a controlling personality, obsessed with cleanliness. She recalled Wingfield’s testimony that Helms had threatened to kill her if she told authorities what she knew about the time period leading up to Lance’s death.

The killing of Lance led to a change in state child custody law. Born heroin-addicted, the boy had been placed with a relative to raise but was later returned to his father’s custody under laws that encouraged family reunification. The killing led to widespread criticism of such laws, and the Legislature amended the state code to make the child’s safety paramount in custody cases.