UK stepmother killed girl in scalding bath in 1978, jury finds

A stepmother killed a five-year-old girl by scalding her in a hot bath as a punishment nearly half a century ago, jurors found.

Janice Nix, 67, was found guilty of the manslaughter of Andrea Bernard by forcing her into the bath in Thornton Heath, south London, in 1978.

Andrea’s death was treated as an accident until her older brother Desmond Bernard went to police in 2022 with a new account of what happened, Isleworth Crown Court heard.

Nix, of Clapham, south London, shook her head before weeping in the dock as she was also convicted of cruelty to Bernard between October 1975 and June 1978, when he was seven to nine-years-old.

Giving evidence during the trial, Bernard, now 56, tearfully told jurors that he had initially described his sister’s death as an accident because he wanted Nix to stop beating him.

Bernard said that Nix beat him with a belt, burned him with a cigarette, bit him and made him eat cat food.

He said that Nix regularly beat the children, even for not folding their clothes “to her standards”.

Bernard described Nix as physically “strong” with a “heavy-set build”.

Jurors heard that on June 6th, 1978, Nix was “furious” after Andrea ignored instructions not to leave the house and to help clean instead.

Nix shouted at Andrea in an “extremely loud” voice before beating her, the court heard.

Bernard said he later heard the bath running.

He went on: “I could hear Janice shouting ‘get in the bath’ and I could hear Andrea saying ‘the bath is too hot mummy’.

“I could hear Janice shouting ‘get in the bath, get in the bath’ and then I heard screaming and splashing.

“Then I heard the screaming stopped and I could hear Janice calling Andrea to ‘wake up, wake up’.”

Asked by prosecutor Kerry Broome how Nix sounded, he replied: “She sounded scared.”

Bernard said he then entered the bathroom and saw Nix cradling Andrea, who was “limp” and wrapped in a towel.

He added: “I could see skin falling off her.”

Asked whether Nix said anything, Bernard replied: “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.”

Asked what he did, he said: “I lied, I told everyone that story.”

Asked why, Bernard replied: “Because I didn’t feel protected, I just wanted it to stop.”

He told jurors he lived in “constant fear” of Nix’s beatings and did not tell anyone because he feared being “punished more”.

Speaking about why he decided to tell others about his sister’s death, Bernard said: “I couldn’t carry on dealing with it, so that’s what I did.”

He added: “To place this burden where it should go.”

Andrea died nearly six weeks after arriving at hospital with burns to 50 per cent of her body, the court heard.

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.

Nix, then called Janice Thomas and in her late teenage years, had been in a relationship with the children’s father, also named Desmond Bernard, and was in effect their stepmother, the court heard.

During the 1978 inquest investigation, Nix had initially claimed Andrea took a bath on her own and later complained of itchy legs before fainting, jurors heard.

But she admitted during her trial to giving a false account of the events to the coroner because she was “in a panic” over having failed to supervise Andrea while she took a bath.

“I realised I had done something I shouldn’t have done: I should have been with Andrea,” she told jurors.

“I was young and I was clearly not thinking. On hindsight now, I see my negligence as a teenager.”

The defendant further told the court she did not at the time realise the bathwater was scalding hot, adding: “All I know is that she was in distress, her legs were red, they had bubbles on them… I didn’t know how hot the water was.”

During a 2022 police interview, Nix gave a version of events that differed “significantly” from her original statement from the time, having not been told that investigators had found it, the Metropolitan Police said.

She also claimed that the coroner found Andrea’s death was because of an overheated bath caused by a faulty boiler — something not mentioned in the report.

Nix was arrested at Heathrow Airport on February 18th, 2025, after arriving on a flight from Antigua, and was charged later that day.

Nix had denied both the charges of manslaughter and cruelty to a child.

Detective inspector Louise Caveen, from the Met’s cold case homicide team, said: “This is a particularly tragic case and my thoughts ultimately remain with Andrea’s family, whose lives were changed irrevocably back in 1978.

“In particular, I want to pay tribute to Desmond, who bravely made the decision to come forward and speak to us, as well as giving evidence at trial.

“It is thanks to his courage that Nix has now been found guilty and will finally be held responsible for her actions.”

Aisling Hosein of the Crown Prosecution Service said: “This was a harrowing case where Janice Nix subjected Andrea and her older brother to a sustained period of abuse, culminating in the tragic death of a five-year-old girl after she was forced into a scalding hot bath.

“This prosecution only came about after Andrea’s brother reported his stepmother’s actions to police in September 2022, resulting in the circumstances into what happened on that day in 1978 being re-examined.

“I can only imagine the enormous courage this must have taken to come forward after being told as a child to say the incident was just an accident.

“It is thanks to him that we have been able to secure justice today on behalf of Andrea almost five decades on.”