A South London woman was sentenced to 12 years in prison on Friday after she was found guilty of killing her 5-year-old stepdaughter by scalding her in a hot bath in 1978.
The woman, Janice Nix, 67, a former South London drug kingpin turned probation officer, was found guilty of manslaughter in May in the death of her stepdaughter, Andrea Bernard. The key to Ms. Nix’s conviction was the testimony of Andrea’s brother, Desmond Bernard, who was 8 when his sister died and had kept the truth of her death a secret for nearly 50 years.
“The last memory I have of my sister’s life are my sister’s piercing screams and lying about her death,” Mr. Bernard, 56, said at Ms. Nix’s sentencing hearing.
For nearly half a century, Andrea’s death had been treated as an accident. A coroner’s report said she succumbed to sepsis caused by extensive burns.
But according to prosecutors, Ms. Nix forced the girl into a scalding-hot bath as a punishment, part of a pattern in which Ms. Nix regularly beat the children with belts, burned them with cigarettes and bit them.
Mr. Bernard told the authorities that Andrea was already in trouble with Ms. Nix on June 6, 1978, when she ordered the girl to skip school to help clean their house in Thornton Heath, a district in South London. But Andrea left, fearing another beating, prosecutors said.
When she returned, Mr. Bernard told investigators, Ms. Nix was furious. He recalled hearing her run a bath, and then demand that Andrea get into it.
“What I heard Andrea say was, ‘The bath is too hot, Mummy,’” Mr. Bernard told the BBC. “She said it twice.”
But Ms. Nix “was just telling her to get in the bath,” Mr. Bernard said, adding, “I’ve not heard anything screaming like that before or after.”
When the screams eventually went silent, Mr. Bernard entered the bathroom and found his sister limp, according to the Metropolitan Police.
Andrea died nearly six weeks later in a hospital where she was being treated for severe burns over 50 percent of her body.
According to Mr. Bernard, Ms. Nix promised she wouldn’t beat him anymore if he kept the truth about his sister’s death a secret, he later told investigators.
It wasn’t until September 2022 that Mr. Bernard went to the police and said he wanted to tell the truth about Andrea. Although more than 40 years had passed and many records had been lost, investigators reopened the case and were able to identify clear discrepancies in Ms. Nix’s accounts of Andrea’s death. She was taken off a plane and arrested at Heathrow Airport in February 2025, after arriving from Antigua, the BBC reported.
“Desmond’s words in court made clear how profound an impact Andrea’s death has had on his whole life,” Detective Inspector Louise Caveen of the Metropolitan Police said in a statement on Friday. “Nothing can ever change what happened that day, but we know how important it is to him that Janice has finally faced justice and is now being held responsible for taking his sister’s life.”
Ms. Nix is a former South London drug dealer once known as Mamma J. After spending much of the 1990s in prison on drug charges, her late-in-life rehabilitation as a probation officer in Brixton, South London — along with a 2021 memoir, “Breaking Out” — led to glowing news coverage in Britain and beyond.
“I am not proud about it,” Ms. Nix told the BBC in 2021, referring to her criminal past. “Sometimes I cringe when I think about my criminal history but then I am gentle with myself, because I also understand that without that past I couldn’t have what I have in front of me today.”
In addition to being found guilty of manslaughter in Andrea’s death, Ms. Nix was also found guilty of child cruelty for her treatment of Mr. Bernard from 1975 to 1978. She was separately sentenced to 15 months in prison, to be served concurrently with the manslaughter sentence.
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