A child's death in London, initially ruled an accident, was instead an unlawful killing by the girl's stepmother, a jury has found nearly half a century on. The jury on Monday found 67-year-old Janice Nix guilty of manslaughter in the 1978 death of her 5-year-old stepdaughter, Andrea Bernard, and of cruelty toward Andrea's older brother, Desmond, according to Metropolitan Police. Andrea died from sepsis weeks after suffering severe burns in a scalding bath at the family's home in Thornton Heath, per People. Police did not investigate at the time and a coroner's inquest "lasted just half a day," the BBC reports.
The case was cracked open in 2022 after Desmond, who was 8 at the time of his sister's death, walked into a police station and said Nix had killed Andrea, ordering her into the bath as punishment for not cleaning the house, before demanding that he lie. At trial, he described regular beatings, burns, and being forced to eat cat food, per the BBC.
Detectives, working without hospital records or many surviving witnesses, ultimately found a brief coroner's report that revealed "startling" differences between Nix's original account and what she told them decades later. Expert evidence also undermined her claims that the scalding bathwater was caused by a faulty boiler. Nix, who once wrote a memoir about her past as a drug dealer, was arrested at Heathrow in February 2025 after flying in from the Caribbean. She remains in custody awaiting sentencing, a consequence officers credit to Desmond Bernard's courage.
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