A five-year-old girl cried out “the bath is too hot, mummy” before being forced into scalding water that killed her, a court has heard — nearly half a century after her death, which was not treated as suspicious at the time.
Andrea Bernard died in a specialist burns unit five weeks after being pulled limp from the water at the family home in Thornton Heath, south London, in 1978. Her skin was falling off her body. She was five years old. Now, 67-year-old Janice Nix stands trial accused of her manslaughter — allegedly carried out when Nix herself was just 17.
The case came to light only in 2022, when Andrea’s older brother Desmond Bernard, now 56, went to police on 6 October that year, encouraged by his birth mother. For almost five decades, he had kept silent, having been made to lie about what happened as an eight-year-old child. Nix, of Rodenhurst Road, Clapham, denies the manslaughter of Andrea and child cruelty against Desmond.
Taking the witness box at Isleworth Crown Court, Mr Bernard gave an emotional account of the events leading up to his sister’s death. He described how Andrea had been in trouble that day and told to stay home from school to clean the house, but had attended anyway. Walking home together, the two children stopped in an alleyway behind the house. “She was scared,” Mr Bernard told jurors. “She told me she was in trouble and she wanted to go to grandmother’s.” He wept as he recalled telling her no, saying he was not sure how they would get there by bus. “Because I was not in trouble, I was not concerned enough,” he said.
The moment they entered the house, he said, Nix began shouting and beating Andrea. He went to his room and sat on his bed, directly opposite the bathroom. “I could hear her shouting and slapping, and Andrea, of course, screaming and crying,” he told the court. “Next thing I remember is the bath was running. I could hear footsteps back and forth.”
From across the landing, he heard Nix shouting at Andrea to get into the bath. “And I could hear Andrea saying, ‘The bath is too hot, mummy,'” Mr Bernard said. “Then I heard screaming and splashing.” After a couple of minutes, he said the screaming stopped. He heard Nix telling Andrea to wake up.
When he saw his sister, Nix was cradling her in a towel beside the bathtub. “Andrea was limp,” he said. “Her eyes were closed, sort of fluttering.” Describing her injuries, he wept. “I could see skin falling off. It seemed like it was her legs. It was red, there were pieces of skin coming off.”
He said Nix appeared panicked and immediately asked him to lie — to say the children had been in the garden when the accident happened. She promised she would never beat him again. “I lied,” he told jurors. “I told everyone that story.” Asked why, he said: “I didn’t feel protected. I just wanted it to stop, and that was the only way I thought I could stop it.”
The court heard the abuse had begun within two days of Nix entering the family home, after the children’s father separated from their mother. Mr Bernard described how he and Andrea had been difficult with Nix at first — “we kept on saying she wasn’t our mother” — but said the physical violence began the morning after their first meeting, once their father had left the house. “It was harder than I ever felt,” he said of the first beating. “They were not light blows.”
Over time, jurors were told, the abuse escalated significantly. Punishments included beatings with a belt buckle, cigarette burns to the hands, biting, and being forced to eat cat food. Just days before the fatal incident, he said both children had been forced into a freezing cold bath as punishment. “We were shivering in that bath and she knew it was cold, because we told her it was cold,” he said.
Prosecutor Kerry Broome told the court that the death was not treated as suspicious at the time. Police only began their investigation 44 years later, following Mr Bernard’s decision to come forward.
Nix denies manslaughter and child cruelty. The trial continues.
