A woman has been jailed for 12 years for killing her five-year-old stepdaughter by putting her in a scalding hot bath in 1978.
Janice Nix, 67, who denied the manslaughter of Andrea Bernard, was found guilty at a previous court hearing in May.
The court heard how Bernard punished the five-year-old by forcing her to take the bath in Thornton Heath nearly 50 years ago.
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.
Giving evidence during the trial, Mr 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.
Mr 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”, describing her as physically “strong” with a “heavy-set build”.
Andrea suffered serious burns to half of her body and died in hospital on 13 July 1978, five weeks after the incident.
Mr Justice Nicholas Lavender, sentencing, told the defendant: “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,” the judge added.
“At the very least the risk ought to have been obvious to you.”
Silver-haired Nix, who sat in the dock dressed in a white shirt and a black blazer jacket and trousers, cried through most of the hearing and wept loudly while the judge read his remarks.
In a victim impact statement he read out in court, Mr Bernard said the abuse he and his sister suffered – which involved beatings with a belt and being forced to eat cat food – led to Andrea’s death and left him “broken”.
“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, saying: “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.
“The time has come for you to acknowledge what you have done to Andrea and myself.”
Nix, a retired probation officer, was sentenced at Isleworth Crown Court on Friday for the manslaughter of Andrea Bernard.
She was also sentenced for cruelty against Mr Bernard between October 1975 and June 1978, when he was seven-to-nine years old.
