Woman jailed for killing stepdaughter in hot bath nearly 50 years later

A woman has been jailed 48 years after a five-year-old girl died from scalding bath injuries in south London, after the child’s brother returned to police with a new account of what happened. Janice Nix, 67, was sentenced to 12 years in prison at Isleworth Crown Court after being found guilty of the manslaughter of Andrea Bernard.

Andrea died in July 1978 in Thornton Heath, south London, after prosecutors said she was forced into a dangerously hot bath. Police and the Crown Prosecution Service said the child suffered burns over about half her body and died several weeks later from complications linked to those injuries. Her death was initially treated as an accident.

The case remained unresolved for decades until Andrea’s older brother, Desmond Bernard, approached police in 2022 with a fresh account of the family’s treatment of the child. That information led detectives to reopen the investigation more than 40 years after Andrea’s death, eventually bringing the case back before the courts. The Metropolitan Police said the conviction followed new evidence that allowed officers to pursue a case long thought to have been closed.

Alongside the manslaughter conviction, Nix was also found guilty of child cruelty toward Desmond Bernard between October 1975 and June 1978, when he was between seven and nine years old. That separate conviction added a further layer to a case that now spans nearly half a century, from the original death in south London to the sentencing in west London on 19 June 2026.

The prosecution has turned on the evidentiary force of family testimony and the possibility that abuse inside a home can remain hidden long after a child dies. In this case, the account of an older sibling helped transform a death once recorded as an accident into a criminal conviction, underscoring how delayed justice can still reach back across generations.