A woman has been jailed for 12 years for killing her five-year-old step-daughter in a scalding bath.
Janice Nix, 67, was sentenced at Isleworth Crown Court after being found guilty of the manslaughter of Andrea Bernard. The child died nearly six weeks after she was forced into an unbearably hot bath as a punishment at the family home in Thornton Heath, south London, in July 1978. She suffered severe burns covering 50 per cent of her body and later died of sepsis.
For almost half a century the death was officially recorded as an accident. That changed only when Andrea’s older brother, Desmond Bernard, came forward to police in September 2022 — more than 44 years later — to reveal what he had witnessed and the lie he had been told to tell.
‘The bath is too hot, mummy’
Desmond Bernard, now 56, was eight years old at the time of the incident. He told jurors at Isleworth Crown Court that on 6 June 1978, Andrea had left the house rather than help Nix with the cleaning. When she returned, Nix beat her. He then heard the bath running.
“I could hear Janice shouting, ‘Get in the bath’ and I could hear Andrea saying, ‘The bath is too hot, mummy’,” he said. “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’.”
He walked into the bathroom and saw Nix cradling Andrea, who was limp and wrapped in a towel. “I could see skin falling off her,” he told the court.
Desmond said Nix then turned to him and asked him to lie. “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,” he recalled. He sobbed in the witness box as he described the years of abuse he and his siblings endured at Nix’s hands — beatings with a belt, being bitten, burnt with a cigarette, and forced to eat cat food.
During the trial, a burns expert told the court that a child in water hot enough to cause Andrea’s injuries would have instinctively tried to escape. The expert’s evidence suggested Nix must have forcibly submerged parts of Andrea’s body.
Nix initially claimed the death was an accident caused by a faulty boiler or that Andrea had bathed herself. She later admitted giving a false account to the coroner, saying she panicked over her failure to supervise the girl. She claimed she had not realised how hot the water was and described her actions as negligence by a teenager.
Detectives reopened the investigation in September 2022 after Desmond came forward. Officers reviewed numerous historical documents and records, facing significant challenges because of the passage of time. Nix was arrested at Heathrow Airport in February 2025, having returned from Antigua.
Details of Nix’s past also emerged during the proceedings. She had previously lived a double life as a drug dealer known as “Mama J”, was involved in deals worth tens of thousands of pounds, and served a nine-year prison sentence for drug offences. The year before the police investigation was launched, she published a memoir titled Breaking Out. At the time of Andrea’s death, Nix was in her late teens and in a relationship with the children’s father, also named Desmond Bernard.
Cruelty conviction
In addition to the manslaughter sentence, Nix was also convicted of cruelty to Desmond Bernard between October 1975 and June 1978 — when he was aged between seven and nine. The abuse included beatings with a belt, being bitten, burned with a cigarette, and made to eat cat food. Nix, of Clapham, south London, received a 12-year term for manslaughter. No separate sentence was imposed for the cruelty conviction.
