It’s only one wrong word in a killer’s confession, but the discovery of a faulty court transcript dramatically changes the picture of what happened the night Brenda Waudby’s baby girl died 15 years ago.

And it’s another piece of evidence of a bungled investigation that the Peterborough mother hopes will help convince an Ontario Superior Court judge this month to overturn her long-standing conviction for child abuse.

More: Babysitter confesses to slaying

“I’m still labelled as a child abuser,” Waudby told the Star. “I need to set the record straight once and for all.”

Waudby was arrested in January 1997 for the murder of her 21-month-old daughter, Jenna, who was badly beaten, suffering from head trauma and more than a dozen fractured ribs.

Still, Waudby accepted a deal to plead guilty to a lesser charge of physically abusing her child in the days and weeks leading up the baby's death, fearful she might lose custody of her two other children with a murder accusation still hanging over her head.

That guilty plea to this day keeps Waudby on the province’s registry as a child abuser.

In a renewed effort to clear her name, Waudby filed an amended affidavit on May 24 before the Ontario Superior Court of Justice claiming that “the police and the Crown failed to disclose . . . evidence that exculpated her on the abuse charge.”

Central to her appeal are new details about the rib injuries and a sexual assault that have emerged from the killer’s confession that has remained secret until recently.

In 2005, police arrested a young man who had babysat for Jenna the night she died, when he was 14 years old. The man, identified in court papers only as “J.D.” because he was a minor at the time of the crime, confessed to an undercover police officer he had badly beaten and sexually molested the child.

He was charged with second-degree murder and two counts of sexual assault, but in a plea deal before the Youth Justice Court in December 2006 he admitted to manslaughter and was sentenced to just 22 months as a minor.

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Waudby’s affidavit states that according to the official transcript of that hearing, the Crown prosecutor told the court that the babysitter confessed to police that although he made “good solid jabs” to the girl’s stomach, his blows “wouldn’t have been enough force to break ribs.”

But it was only five years later — in October 2011 — that Waudby and her lawyer, Julie Kirkpatrick, finally got hold of the killer’s confession as part of the disclosure for her current appeal.

They discovered “J.D.” had told the police the exact opposite: In fact, he had stated that his blows “would’ve had enough force to break ribs.”

The severity and timing of the rib fractures are crucial because when Waudby pleaded guilty to child abuse in 1999, the Crown insisted there were “old rib injuries” inflicted on Jenna before the night she died.

Early this year, Kirkpatrick was able to listen to the tape of the youth court hearing. The audio recording indicates that the prosecutor had in fact correctly reported the babysitter’s statement that his blows “would” have broken Jenna’s ribs. It was the court transcript that erroneously slipped in the words “wouldn’t have” — and it was that transcript that became the only official record of what the babysitter had confessed.

“It was clear that something that had gone horribly wrong,” said Kirkpatrick.

Still, she does not blame the court staff for the error. “It was very difficult to hear, I could see how the mistake could happen,” Kirkpatrick said. Instead, she faults the Crown for taking several years to disclose the babysitter’s confession to Waudby.

“They knew that he had admitted to all this stuff, how could nobody have gone back and told the mother of the baby accused of her death?” the lawyer said. “Had the confession been disclosed, none of these mistakes would have been left to fester. If people don’t have the right information, they can’t ask the right questions.”

In response, Brendan Crawley, spokesman for the attorney-general, said in an email: “As this matter is ongoing, we will not be making any comment.”

Waudby’s affidavit before the Superior Court — referring to a full transcript of the babysitter’s confession filed in a sealed envelope as part of her appeal — also for the first time makes public graphic details of the killer’s statement to police about the extent of the sexual assault.

“There is no word to describe the feeling of reading his confession. It was devastating,” Waudby said. “I was enraged that many people knew the real truth what happened to Jenna and I didn’t. That was my baby — I should have been one of the first people know the extent of what happened that night.”

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The error about the rib injuries recently has been corrected in the official transcript. But the faulty version was included at the explosive inquiry into Smith’s bungled pediatric forensic pathology led by Ontario Court of Appeal Justice Stephen Goudge in 2010.

It was also included in an “Overview Report” on Jenna’s death that the Goudge inquiry released to the media, meaning to this day it remains the widespread if erroneous version of events.

As part of Waudby’s current appeal, her lawyer and the Crown agreed to jointly seek expert advice on the timing of the rib injuries from Dr. Christopher Milroy, a forensic pathologist at Ottawa Hospital who testified at the Goudge inquiry.

In reports filed as exhibits before the Superior Court, he described Smith’s determination that Waudby had been responsible for some of the rib fractures as “misleading” and “unreasonable” and concluded that the pathologist had “mistimed all the injuring, including the rib fractures.”

Milroy also concluded there “was no forensic evidence that Jenna was chronically abused by her mother, Brenda Waudby.”

Waudby was one of the first to publically challenge Smith’s shoddy work, but it took a decade before anyone would listen to her.

Back in 1990s, she was a cocaine addict on welfare. In the months just prior to Jenna’s death, she had to give up her children briefly until she got clean. Waudby was a natural “guilty suspect” in the eyes of the police, the press and the public when her baby was found dead.

In August 2010, the Ontario government awarded Waudby, along with more than a dozen other parents and caregivers wrongly accused of killing their children because of Smith’s errors, up to $250,000 in compensation.

Waudby, now 47, has enrolled in a community college and hopes to graduate next spring as a paralegal law clerk, an ironic choice for someone so badly burned by the justice system.

“I know I can’t change the system on my own but I want to do my best to make sure the rights of people are protected,” she said.

Before that, she will have her own day in court. The hearing of her appeal to have her child abuse conviction overturned is scheduled for June 27 in Peterborough.

Also on the Star:

Babysitter confesses to slaying

Julian Sher can be reached at , on twitter @juliansher and at 514-944-6943.