Babysitter Cathy Lynn Henderson, who lived two blocks away from the Baughs, appeared to be a perfect fit for their infant son Brandon and his 2-year-old sister Megan.

"She's the most sweet endearing person in the world and put forward this good Christian front," Baugh said of Henderson. "She could sell snow to an Eskimo."

Henderson, now 50, is set to die in less than three weeks for the death of Brandon Baugh, a slaying that in early 1994 made her one of the most hated women in Texas. Henderson, whose case has been championed by Sister Helen Prejean of "Dead Man Walking" fame, insists the baby died in an accidental fall and that her decision to bury him and flee was made in panic, not cold blood.

"I was a monster," said Henderson, describing how she was portrayed after she and Brandon disappeared. Instead, the twice-divorced mother of three describes herself as "very sensitive and calm - anybody's next door neighbor."

Henderson and 3-month-old Brandon disappeared weeks after she began caring for him. Search teams fanned out over three Central Texas counties, but it wasn't until her attorney was forced by a court to turn over a crude map Henderson had made did authorities find the boy - 18 days after his disappearance.

Brandon was dead, buried near an oat field between two elm trees along a gravel path known as Short Cut Road about 60 miles north of his home town of Pflugerville. The 12-pound child, his skull crushed, was wrapped in his yellow-trimmed white blanket and stuffed into a taped-shut box that previously held Bartles & Jaymes wine coolers.

Henderson's lethal injection, initially scheduled for last month, was reset for June 13 after lawyers obtained for her by

Prejean won a delay. She and her supporters say new engineering data interpreting Brandon's skull fracture could better support Henderson's contention the child's death was an accident and her life should be spared.

"We're getting experts, a new kind of expert for head injuries," said Prejean, based in New Orleans. "They look into the physics of it."

Henderson would be the fourth woman executed in the nation's busiest capital punishment state, where 393 prisoners have been given lethal injection since 1982. Nationally, she'd be just the 12th woman among the nearly 1,100 convicted killers executed since capital punishment resumed in the United States in 1977.

"It's apparent I wasn't thinking clearly," Henderson told The Associated Press recently from the state's female death row outside Gatesville, calling Jan. 21, 1994, "the worst day of my life."

"I think I was in shock, disbelief. I just didn't know what I was doing. That baby was dead. I didn't want to deal with that. There was too much sorrow. It hurt, it hurt," she said, tearing up. "When I look back at it, it does kind of look like I was guilty, doesn't it?"

Court records show Henderson kept changing her story: she dropped off Brandon in Missouri; his grandmother retrieved him; she didn't know where the baby was; he slipped from her grasp while she was answering the phone and struck his head on the floor.

Henderson said Brandon was cranky that morning so she was swinging him around to try to calm him.

"It sounded better to me to say that I was answering the phone," she said, explaining her most repeated previous account. "I fell. I stepped on a toy. He flew out of my hands. He hit the bottom of the garage, which had been converted to a playroom."

After hitting the concrete floor, he stopped breathing, she said. Henderson said she tried CPR for an hour.

Why not call 911?

"I knew that was a dead end," she replied. "I had tried for too long myself. What good would it have been?"

She fled, driving Brandon's sister and her own preschool daughter to the home of a relative, paying an 11-year-old there $10 to watch them.

"Even though I reacted abnormally, that doesn't make me a bad person," she said, crying. "I just didn't want to face what happened. I felt responsible. I took a life. That is very hard to deal with, especially a child. I didn't know I was going to step on a toy and fall, but I did."

Travis County prosecutors and Brandon's father, who calls the last dozen years "a living hell," aren't buying it.

"If a child sustains an accidental fall. we're going to freak out and get help," prosecutor Dayna Blazey said. "We're going to run to a neighbor, call 911. That's human nature - not to put the baby in a wine cooler box, throw it in the trunk of a car and bury it in a shallow grave. Then she flees to Missouri and changes appearance."

A medical examiner testified Brandon's injuries were inconsistent with an accidental fall of about 4 feet but were the equivalent of a fall from a two-story building.

"Whenever she's stating she's such a wonderful person, was just trying to calm him down and, by the way, smashed his skull in, that doesn't wash," Baugh said.

"We're not talking about linear skull fractures," Blazey said. "The entire back of his head was shattered."

Henderson's lawyers disputed those findings in a new appeal late last week to the state courts, and included in their filings an affidavit from the medical examiner who testified against Henderson at her trial.

Dr. Roberto Bayardo, who retired last year as Travis County's chief medical examiner, said based on new scientific evidence presented to him by experts hired by Henderson's legal team, he "cannot determine with a reasonable degree of medical certainty whether Brandon Baugh's injuries resulted from an intentional act or an accidental fall."

He also said if the new scientific evidence had been available at her 1995 trial, "I would not have been able to testify the way I did."

Henderson's attorney, George Cumming, said it would be up to the courts to determine if the new evidence is strong enough "that a court would conclude if trial were held today she would not be convicted."

"What I would like to happen is to either get a new trial or charge me with what I'm really guilty of, and murder is not one of them, even injury to a child is not one of them," Henderson said. "I think involuntary manslaughter, negligence, something in those areas, because I did not wake up to intentionally harm Brandon."

Henderson said she's the second-oldest among 10 brothers and sisters. She never knew her father and grew up in public housing projects with a welfare mother "who would get us up in the middle of the night and move," she said.

Henderson lost custody of two older daughters and she may have abused at least one of her children, trial testimony indicated. Another witness, a convicted murderer, said he and Henderson had shared methamphetamines. She was placed on probation for writing a bad check, the result of her estranged husband emptying a bank account and not telling her, she said.

Her history was unknown to the Baughs.

"She had us completely fooled," Eryn Baugh said. "Just tell me what happened that day. Tell me exactly what she did and why she did it. Then she can ask me for forgiveness. I'll probably give it - once she drops the lies and tells the truth. There's been too many years of lying. We just want her to come clean."

Henderson insisted she did her job well.

"I took good care of Brandon," Henderson insisted. "In my mind, I thought I was doing the Baughs a favor by not having to tell them their son was dead."