A stepmother has been jailed for 12 years for killing a five-year-old girl by scalding her in a hot bath as a punishment nearly half a century ago.
Janice Nix, 67, was sentenced at Isleworth Crown Court on Friday for the manslaughter of Andrea Bernard in Thornton Heath, south London, in 1978.
Andrea’s death had been treated as an accident until her older brother Desmond Bernard went to police in 2022 with a new account of what happened, the trial previously heard.
Nix, a retired probation officer, was also sentenced for cruelty against Mr Bernard between October 1975 and June 1978, when he was seven-to-nine years old.
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.”
Prosecutor Kerry Broome read out the statement of Angela Bernard, Desmond and Andrea’s mother, which described the little girl as “so sweet and loving”.
“When she died, it completely destroyed me,” the statement read.
“She deserved to have a life, not be lying around in a cemetery. I think about her every single day.”
On June 6 1978, Nix was “furious” after Andrea ignored instructions not to leave the house and to help clean instead.
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.
She shouted at Andrea in an “extremely loud” voice before beating her, the trial was told.
Mr Bernard, giving evidence, told jurors 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’.”
Mr 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, Mr 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.”
Andrea died nearly six weeks after arriving at hospital with burns to 50% 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.
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.
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.
The year before the police investigation was launched, Nix published a book on her life titled Breaking Out and written with Elizabeth Sheppard.
In the book, Nix told the story of how she went from being a major drug dealer dubbed “Mama J” to turning her life around and becoming an award-winning probation officer.
The defendant, of Clapham, south London, worked for the Probation Service between 2014 and 2019 and won the Probation Service’s diversity and engagement award in 2015.
She had previously served two “substantial” terms of imprisonment for drugs offences, the court was told.
She will serve two-thirds of her sentence before she can be released on licence.
