Woman convicted after 1978 hot bath killing of stepdaughter in London

Janice Nix was jailed after a case that had sat for nearly half a century as an accident was finally rebuilt as a killing. The 67-year-old was sentenced to 12 years in prison at Isleworth Crown Court after being found guilty over the death of her five-year-old stepdaughter, Andrea Bernard, in Thornton Heath, south London.

Jurors heard that on 6 June 1978 Nix was furious with Andrea, shouted at her to get into the bath, and the child screamed that the water was too hot before the noise stopped. Desmond Bernard later found his sister limp and wrapped in a towel, with skin coming off her legs. Andrea suffered burns to 50% of her body and died nearly six weeks later after arriving at hospital. For decades, the death was treated as accidental, with the original coroner concluding that sepsis caused by burns led to her death.

The case reopened only after Desmond Bernard contacted police in September 2022 with a new account of what happened inside the family home. Nix was arrested at Heathrow Airport in February 2025 after arriving from Antigua and was charged the same day. Investigators later re-examined the evidence through The Met’s Cold Case Homicide team, reviewing thousands of archived local-authority and hospital documents and tracing people who may have remembered the incident.

The Crown Prosecution Service said the case showed that prosecutions can still be brought even after nearly five decades when new evidence emerges. That shift, more than any single forensic breakthrough, appears to have made the difference: a fresh witness account, a paper trail preserved in files and hospital records, and a willingness to revisit a death once written off as an accident.

Nix was also convicted of cruelty to Desmond Bernard between October 1975 and June 1978, when he was between seven and nine years old. He told the court he had endured a pattern of abuse that included beatings with a belt, cigarette burns, biting, being hit with a metal pot, being made to eat cat food and being forced to sit in cold baths. Desmond said he had first described Andrea’s death as an accident because Nix had promised not to hit him again if he stayed silent, and that coming forward finally lifted “a burden that was not his to carry.” In a statement, he described Andrea as “talkative, brave and very smart,” and said he was glad Nix would now be made to take responsibility for her actions.