Antiguan woman who killed 5-year-old girl sentenced to 12 years in prison

A stepmother has been sentenced to 12 years in prison for killing a five-year-old girl by scalding her in a hot bath nearly half a century ago. Janice Nix, 67, was convicted of manslaughter for the death of Andrea Bernard in Thornton Heath, south London, in 1978.

The sentencing at Isleworth Crown Court on Friday marks the conclusion of a case that was only reopened after Andrea’s older brother, Desmond Bernard, went to police in 2022 with a new account of what happened. The death had been treated as an accident for 44 years.

Nix, a retired probation officer, was also sentenced for cruelty against Desmond Bernard between October 1975 and June 1978, when he was seven to nine years old.

On June 6, 1978, Nix became furious after Andrea ignored instructions not to leave the house and to help clean instead. Nix, then in her late teens and in a relationship with the children’s father, shouted at Andrea before beating her.

Desmond Bernard testified he later heard the bath running. He told the court: “I could hear Janice shouting: ‘Get in the bath’, and I could hear Andrea saying: ‘The bath is too hot, mummy.'”

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“I could hear Janice shouting: ‘Get in the bath, get in the bath’, and then I heard screaming and splashing,” he continued. “Then I heard the screaming stopped and I could hear Janice calling Andrea to ‘wake up, wake up’.”

He entered the bathroom to see Nix cradling Andrea, who was limp and wrapped in a towel. “I could see skin falling off her,” he said.

Nix then asked him to lie about what happened. “She asked me to say it was an accident… and to say that we were in the garden when it happened and that she would never beat me again,” Bernard testified.

Andrea died nearly six weeks after arriving at hospital with burns to 50 percent of her body.

Judge Nicholas Lavender told Nix: “I’m sure that you ran the bath, you knew how hot it was, you told Andrea to get in the bath, she said it was too hot, but you either put her in the bath or made her get into it.”

“And you heard her screams,” he added. “At the very least the risk ought to have been obvious to you.”

Silver-haired Nix, dressed in a white shirt and black blazer, cried through most of the hearing and wept loudly during the judge’s remarks.

A burns expert told the trial that a child exposed to water hot enough to cause Andrea’s injuries would instinctively try to get out by standing up, not remain seated. Prosecutors argued this meant Nix must have forcibly held parts of Andrea’s body underwater.

In a victim impact statement read in court, Desmond Bernard said the abuse he and his sister suffered led to Andrea’s death and left him “broken.” The abuse included beatings with a belt and being forced to eat cat food.

“The last memories I have of my sister’s life are piercing screams and lying about her death to survive,” he said.

He then addressed Nix directly: “You took away her future and changed mine forever. Your contrived grief at Andrea’s funeral, the lies, the tears. You fooled my family because they couldn’t imagine the unimaginable.”

“You took their kindness for weakness and you manipulated them so that you couldn’t be found out,” he continued. “The time has come for you to acknowledge what you have done to Andrea and myself.”

A statement from Angela Bernard, the children’s mother, described Andrea as “so sweet and loving.” She wrote: “When she died, it completely destroyed me. She deserved to have a life, not be lying around in a cemetery. I think about her every single day.”

During the 1978 inquest, Nix initially claimed Andrea took a bath on her own and later complained of itchy legs before fainting. But she admitted during her trial to giving a false account to the coroner because she was “in a panic” over having failed to supervise Andrea.

During a 2022 police interview, Nix gave a version of events that differed significantly from her original statement. She also claimed the coroner found Andrea’s death was due to an overheated bath caused by a faulty boiler — something not mentioned in the report.

The year before the police investigation was launched, Nix published a book on her life titled “Breaking Out.” In it, she told the story of how she went from being a major drug dealer dubbed “Mama J” to becoming an award-winning probation officer.

Nix worked for the Probation Service between 2014 and 2019 and won its diversity and engagement award in 2015. She had previously served two “substantial” terms of imprisonment for drugs offences. She will serve two-thirds of her sentence before she can be released on licence.

Note: This article was created with Artificial Intelligence (AI).

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