Five-year-old woman sobbed ‘the bathtub is simply too sizzling mummy’ as she was pressured into scalding tub of water that killed her by stepmother, courtroom advised

A five-year-old girl sobbed: ‘The bath is too hot mummy,’ before she was forced into a tub of scalding water that killed her, a court has heard.

Janice Nix, now 67, is accused of killing her young stepdaughter Andrea Bernard almost 50 years ago, in 1978, when she herself was 17, at their home in Thornton Heath, south London.

Andrea’s older brother, Desmond Bernard, came forward with the allegations that Nix killed Andrea in the hot bath during one of her regular cruel punishments, and then forced him, as an eight-year-old, to lie about what happened.

Andrea died in a specialist burns unit five weeks after she was pulled limp from the water, with her skin falling off.

Nix is also accused of hitting Mr Bernard with a belt, burning him with cigarettes, and forcing him to eat catfood. 

The death was not treated as suspicious at the time, and police only began investigating in 2022 after Mr Bernard went to the police on October 6 that year, encouraged by his birth mother.

Nix, of Rodenhurst Road, Clapham, denies the manslaughter of Andrea and child cruelty against Desmond. She sat in the dock wearing a black suit jacket and trousers over a white blouse.

Mr Bernard, now 56, took the witness box at Isleworth crown court to give an emotional description of the events leading up to Andrea’s death, which came after his father split with his mother, and got together with Nix.

He said: ‘Andrea was in trouble, she was told to stay at home and not come into school, and she would stay home to clean the house.’ 

Mr Bernard told jurors he could not remember what she had done wrong, but recalled Andrea coming into school anyway later that day.

He said: ‘I was surprised she was at school. I thought maybe she had been let out.’

On the way home from school, the two children stopped in an alleyway behind the house.

Andrea told him she was in trouble and she wanted to go to grandmother’s.

‘She was scared,’ Mr Bernard said. ‘I said no.’

He wept as he added: ‘I wasn’t sure how we would get there, because we would have to get the bus.

‘Because I was not in trouble, I was not concerned enough.

‘As soon as we got through that door, Janice started shouting, beating Andrea… she was furious.’

He said he went up to his room and sat on his bed opposite the bathroom.

‘I could hear her shouting and slapping, and Andrea, of course, screaming and crying.

‘Next thing I remember is the bath was running… I could hear footsteps back and forth.’

‘I could hear shouting from the bathroom. I could hear Janice shouting, “Get in the bath.”

‘And I could hear Andrea saying, “The bath is too hot, mummy.”

‘Then I heard screaming and splashing.’

He said this lasted a ‘couple of minutes’, after which he said: ‘Then I heard the screaming stopping. I could hear Janice telling Andrea to wake up.

‘She was holding Andrea in a towel, and Andrea was limp. She was by the bathtub, she was cradling her.

‘Her eyes were closed, sort of fluttering.’

Desmond wept as he was asked to describe Andrea’s body, saying: ‘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 Janice seemed ‘panicked’, adding: ‘She asked me to say it was an accident, to say that we were in the garden when it happened, and that she would never beat me again.

‘I lied, I told everyone that story.’

Asked why he did so, Desmond said: ‘I didn’t feel protected, I just wanted it to stop, and that was the only way I thought I could stop it.’

Just days before the incident, he said he and his sister were forced into a freezing cold bath as punishment.

Weeping, he said: ‘I don’t know what we did.

‘I don’t know what we had done but we were shivering in that bath and she knew it was cold, because we told her it was cold.’

The court has heard Nix would regularly beat the children and had been abusive from within two days of meeting Mr Bernard and his sister.

Describing their first encounter with Nix, then known as Janice Thomas, he said: ‘We were very rude. We kept on saying that she wasn’t our mother.

‘I remember Andrea hit her with a small tennis racket… I think we were children, we could be naughty and we were at times.’

Asked by the prosecutor Kerry Broome why they reacted in such a way, he said: ‘Well, I guess my mother and father just split up.

‘We were confused about the situation, and there is this person who we don’t know in the house that we lived in before.’

He told the jury Nix ‘did nothing at the time’ while his father only told them off verbally.

But he said once his father had left the house on the following day, Nix ‘started beating us, just hitting us, for the most part.’

He said: ‘We were running, trying to get away, and she just caught us and beat us to tell us not to do that again.

‘It was harder than I ever felt… I had been slapped before by my mother, this was much harder.’

He said he and Andrea were both slapped in the ‘legs, bottom, [and] arms’, adding: ‘They were not light blows.’

Asked if they did anything, he said: ‘No, we just cried. There was nothing we could do.

‘She told us she was not going to stand for that and there was nothing we could do, and if we were to tell our dad, we could get it worse.’

Jurors were told the beating would later escalate to involve beating with a belt buckle, cigarette burns on hands, biting on the finger, and, in one instance, being forced to eat cat food.

Asked what kind of things would trigger such punishment, Desmond said: ‘I was not tidy, us eating or drinking things we shouldn’t be, not calling her mummy, it was a lot.’

He said the beatings were ‘fairly frequent’ and added: ‘Andrea was beaten a lot, [but] I don’t think it was as much as I had been.’

Nix denies manslaughter and child cruelty to Desmond.

The trial continues.