Nearly half a century after a five-year-old child lost her life to suspected abuse, a UK court has delivered a guilty verdict in a long-cold case that stumped investigators for decades.
67-year-old Janice Nix, an Antiguan national, was found guilty of manslaughter by a jury at a London trial. The guilty finding closes one of the UK’s longest-running unresolved child homicide cases, connected to the 1978 death of Andrea Bernard, Nix’s five-year-old stepdaughter.
Prosecutors laid out a harrowing account of the incident: At the family’s home in Thornton Heath, South London, Nix forced the young child into a scalding hot bath as disciplinary punishment for misbehavior. Andrea suffered catastrophic, full-body burns from the extreme water temperature, and ultimately died from her injuries days after the attack.
For 48 years, the case went cold, with gaps in evidence and shifting leads keeping investigators from securing a conviction. That momentum shifted in 2023, when Nix was taken into custody immediately after landing on a flight returning to the UK from Antigua, where she had resided for many years following the child’s death. After almost 50 years of the case remaining open, the criminal trial wrapped up with the jury’s unanimous guilty ruling, bringing a belated sense of closure for Andrea’s surviving family members.