It wasn't an accident: Andrea Bernard and the Janice Nix Case

But first, the important business: Rach's new hair (currently being hated on a strict day-two schedule), Will's ongoing obsession with the Sidcup goose tattoo man, and the small matter of a Netflix documentary sending a flood of brand-new Trevors our way. If you're one of them, welcome. We have cookies, chocolate, and pins we will absolutely never send you.

Then Han takes us back to the summer of 1978, and a five-year-old called Andrea Bernard. She suffered catastrophic burns in the bath at her family home in Thornton Heath, held on for nearly six weeks, and died of an infection the doctors couldn't beat. A coroner recorded the obvious conclusion: a heart-breaking accident. That was the story for 47 years.

This week we unpick how it came undone. How Andrea's older brother carried what he'd heard through the bathroom wall since the age of eight, and finally walked into a Croydon police station decades later to say it out loud. And how the woman who'd been in that house, later celebrated as an author and a former drug dealer turned probation worker, came to stand trial for a death everyone had signed off before some of the detectives were even born.

Please note: this episode discusses the abuse and death of a child, including burns. Look after yourselves.

Transcript

 Ep 05 - Andrea Bernard Hello. Hi. I'm Rachel. I'm Hannah. And this is the Sinister South podcast, a podcast all about the nefarious wrongdoings south of the river. Hey. Hey. Hey, new hair. Hey. Oh, thank you. Hey, content. Thank you. Yes, content, content. Got to love a bit of cap cut, haven't you really? Yes, new hair, new hair, new me. Nope. No? Not from what I've seen today. No, fair. Fair, actually. New hair, same you. Same me. Which I'm pleased about. Well, at least someone is, because I'm not certain that anyone else in my house is. But there we go. No, I have got new hair. I don't have roots anymore. And I've finally gotten rid of most of the box dye that was on it. I am doing that thing that I do, though, which is that it's day two. And so obviously, I hate it. Everything is your version to change. Yeah, everything about it is wrong. It looks greasy, even though it's definitely not. Doesn't look greasy at all. No, but this is happening here. This is just the way that my brain works. So I'll be fine in like 48 hours. Yeah. And I'll be like, have you washed it yourself yet? No, not yet. So that for me, that's always like, regardless of how good the hairdresser is and what they've done. And like, even if it's exactly what I asked for. Yeah, I will want to go home and wash it and dry it myself. Yeah, that's fair. I mean, to be fair, I don't mind them styling it, especially when she styled it. Like, I'm getting better at telling people how I would like it styled once it's been cut and dried, because I used to like, let people do it and they do this sleek mumbob thing, which like, fine, if that's what you're into. It's not me. So I used to absolutely hate that. So now, like, I asked them to do like a bit of a light wave to it and stuff, and I can get on board with that a bit more. She styled it very nicely yesterday. So I wasn't in any rush. It is literally just I do it when I get a new tattoo. I do it when I have new hair. I do it like I'm always the next day. I'm like, that's fucking horrible. I hate this. Everything is horrible. Why have I done this? Yeah. And then like 48 hours later, I won't be bothered and I'll be fine again. So I get the kind of almost the polar opposite is like, I only get 48 hours worth of dopamine from anything new. And then I'm like, must change. What now? But yeah, I do. I must say, though, like my hair, it feels a lot more healthy. Yeah, it's all lovely. And there's no more roots, which is wonderful. So my youngest can stop telling me that I've got you've got some white bits, mum. That's not there anymore. That's all good. Not loving how expensive getting your hair done properly is. Over 300. And then imagine my like, I handed that over, I'd kind of prepared myself for it being that much. Because when I'd booked it in with her about eight weeks ago, she had I said to her, give me a ballpark. Yeah. So I've got something to work with. And she told me between 250 300. I was like, okay, fine. So I'd kind of prepped myself for that. What I hadn't prepped myself for was then when she turned around and said, so I'll see you again in 10 weeks. So we can do the root touch up and we'll do and I'm going, so that's not it. I have to pay more. This has to be done on a regular occasion. Yes, this is not just a permanent fix. No. For 300 quid. I wanted to be permanent. That ain't how hair works, babe. No, I know. That's why you got to get into being able to do it yourself. Well, she says, no one needs to see what my hair looks like right now. Don't look at it. Don't look at it. It's shy. It looks lovely. It's fine. Shut up. But yeah, that was fun. I had to go and be a real life girl and stuff and sit in a hair salon. How long were you there for? Got there at 11, left at about half one, quarter to two. Not too bad, though. No, it wasn't too bad. The thing is, right, I used to go to the hairdressers and get my hair done all the time back when I was a penniless student. Did you? Yeah. So it's like I used to go to there was a particular hairstylist at Rush in Bromley. Oh, yeah. And he I can't remember his name, but he was one of those that used to do like all the. Let me guess. Quirky. Yeah. But like the fashion hairstyles and all of that stuff. So he used to do all the bright colours and he never kind of like looked at the idea of me going, I want red, but I want it red. He understood the brief. He's not there anymore, so they do not understand the brief anymore. And the last time I went to them, I was massively disappointed in what they've done. So I don't go there anymore. But yeah, I used to go. I got at one point he was the guy who gave me my jazzy mullet. I don't know if we remember the black one with the pink fringe. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, yeah. Yeah. I mean, it was I mean, I remember it. It was a look for the time. I can't forget it. But yeah, he did my jazzy mullet. He did my when I had the green fringe and stuff before I put the dreadlocks in. My synth dreads because I was uber cool. So he did those. He was great. But I would love to find like a proper alternative hairdresser that isn't a million miles away. Because there's loads of people on TikTok and Instagram that I follow who do like over the top alternative hair. But they're always in fucking like Glasgow or Manchester. And I'm like, just just have one down the road, please. I suppose London's such an oversaturated market that people just think, fuck it. Yeah. I don't know if anyone. Yeah, I suppose if any of the Trevors know, like not to be surprised how many people will travel for a good hairdresser as well, though. Well, it's true. And they'll have like regular clients that will come from London every 12 weeks. Well, maybe that's what I could do because I do need to go back up to Glasgow soon because I need to book in and get a cat cult tattoo. Yep. Yep. Cold cat. Cat cult. I will show you. They're very knackered. Like I said, absolutely knackered. It's basically a cat doing a seance and I want it. You've shown me millions of times. Don't confuse my blank stare with, oh, she doesn't know what I'm talking about with. No, no, no. She's fully knows what I'm talking about. She's devoid of empathy about this. I mean, it's all right. Will's got it in his head at the moment that he found a tattoo artist on Instagram who is in Sidcup. Oh, wow. And he does, he does other tattoos, but he's well known for doing geese tattoos. As in the band or as in? No, no, no. As in actual goose or multiple geese. She's got an English degree. I know, right? They're very easy to compare. They, he does like these like silly little cartoon geese and he does them for like, it's fear and loathing in Las Vegas. Goose and like all this other stuff. So he does like loads of them. But when I say Will is obsessed with the goose man, right? Fuck me. The amount of tattoos. Have you seen this goose? Have you seen that goose? This is a lovely goose. I want this goose. Okay. Just fucking book yourself in there, mate. Go get a goose. Oh, I kind of want a goose. You can go with him because I don't think there's... Let's get a goose. I'm not sure there's space for a goose. I'm not sure where I'd put it. Oh no, but definitely a cat doing a fucking seance. Yeah, a thousand percent. Yeah, loads of space for that. Couldn't possibly entertain the stupid idea of a goose. I would 100% entertain the idea of a goose. I just don't know where it would fit. You get a goose in a witch's hat. Could get a goose in a witch's hat. Will could get a goose doing like a Warhammer-y kind of situation. No more Warhammer because he got a Warhammer tattoo on Wednesday. What would my goose be doing? What would your goose be doing? We could get Sinister South geese. We could get podcasting geese. Let's send the pins out. But we could, we could just get both of us get a little goose with a microphone and headphones and that can be our Sinister South tattoo. No, it would have to be a pigeon. A pigeon? We need to find a pigeon man. We'll ask Gooseman. Or a woman. Or a fox. Gooseman has said that he will do other animals. He's just well known for his geese. What are pigeons like? Yeah, exactly. I might have to ask him. I'm going to have to think of his name now. I can't just keep calling him Gooseman. I'm going to have to give him a shout out because he is South London as well. So where is Gooseman? Adam Silas is his name. And he is in SIGCUP, I believe. And he does geese mainly. Adam underscore inks is his Instagram handle. And he is, he's very good. And he makes lots of duck puns. Not duck, geese puns. Fucking hell, don't start. Don't start with the ducks. Ducks and geese and pigeons and all the rest of it. Also, just scrolling back through my chat with Will. And it's like, I've messaged him on Thursday when we went out for a drink. And I've put, I'm getting a cab home now as an FYI. And he's put, alright, I'll see you when I'm going to bed. And I've put, I lied. I'm getting KFC and then a cab. And his response is just the Godfather. I understand. I did not feel clever on Friday morning, having not gone to KFC and gone home. Yeah, I haven't gone to another bar. How was Sky Bar in Eltham? Oh, it was good fun. I mean, we were the only people in there apart from a couple on a date. Oh, good. And we just bullied the barman into put Olivia Dean on. And just chatted shit again, like for longer. Nice. But yeah, I woke up on Friday. Prosecco is the devil. It is. It's not, it's not fun. But then the two other people we were out with, or two of the other people we were out with, said that they both think it might be the Prosecco in the GPO. Oh, really? Not, I don't want a bad mouth of GPO. I love it in there. But even friend of the show, Hannah, other Hannah, said that she's a professional Prosecco drinker, and even she had a headache. Oh, no, that is something. Could be just dodge Prosecco or like, just doesn't. It's not, it's not the greatest vintage. No, fair. It's a bad year. Bad year for the Prosecco. Yeah. I had a lot of fun. Yeah. Nice. Yeah. I had fun too. I'm not mannequin anyway. Yeah. Yeah. That was a, that was an interesting day. That was a long day. Fucking hell, mate. Before I got to you. Yeah, it was a really long, long day. That was arduous. That evening was arduous. So much. And I just don't know that I can do it. No. Before I got to you. The fact that I didn't leave work until almost seven was a bit ridiculous. But there we go. That's boring. It was a very nice night. I enjoyed myself. And we did what we always do when we say, like, when we socialise together, which is completely blank each other and talk to other people. Yeah. And then go, we never go out and talk anymore. It's because we know too much about each other. We do this all the time. Like, what have you got to say to me now? Honestly, can you save it? Because we never have anything to talk about in the beginning of the episodes. But that was also the day when my phone Yeah. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. So, Trevors, for those of you eagle eyed Trevors, you may have noticed that on Thursday just gone. So that will have been the fourth. Yeah. Netflix released a new documentary, and they released it. It was to do with Rachel Nichol and the Robert Napper case, which Hannah expertly covered in season one of Sinister South. And because Netflix released this documentary, what's obviously happened is that people who either don't know the Napper case, because bearing in mind, it was like early 80s, wasn't it? Yeah. It was some time ago. So there may be a lot of people who don't know anything about it. Also, the fact that it was a British case, he's a British serial killer. Like, I don't know that I might be wrong, but I don't know that British serial murderers are usually as famous as American ones. We've got a few, but not as many. Who have we got? We got Jack the Ripper, Peter Sutcliffe, Fred and Rose, Myra and Ian. Yeah. I don't like being on first name terms with them. Hindley and what's his tits? Ian Huntley. Ian Huntley is another dickhead. But we don't have a huge, like, there are many, there are far too many that we've just listed, but I don't think it's like Napper's not one that's kind of up there in the Esher ones. I think a Rachel Nicholl documentary came out and oh my Lord, I get notifications on my phone whenever one of you lovely people goes onto our website. And mainly it's to guilt trip me into actually updating the fucking thing at some point. But I turned it off for a little while by accident and then realised I turned it off and I have another client who uses the same programme. Boring, boring. Turned it back on again. Anyway, when I say my phone did not stop vibrating, ping, ping, ping, it was insane. At one point, friend of the show, Hannah was looking at my phone, looking at photos of my children. And even she was going, what is wrong with your phone? Why does it keep buzzing? It's happening. So no, that's just the 7000 people who've been on our website. Because we come up second on search results. If you search for Rachel Nicholl, Robert Napper. So we've had lots of people, lots of people downloading that episode. We've actually had more people download that episode this week than we had the last episode we did. Bloody hell. I know. Mad, right? No, because now I've got perception issues. Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, God. Oh, no. Well, it's done now. Genie's out of the bottle. But yeah, no, so we've had a stupid amount of people. If any of you have hung about and listened to any more, welcome. Welcome. I would love it if they had. Yeah, it'd be nice. Would be really good, but yeah. I haven't. Have you gone back and listened to it? I listened to the start of it. What do we talk about? I can't remember, but it's a lot shorter. Oh, really? We kind of go like because it's a long case. It's a long case. But I think it's also we're at that point in time where like we're early on in the podcast and we're like, oh, no, no one wants to know about us. So we're just good. We'll quickly talk or just say Sinister South 12,000 times and then we'll get on with it. Exactly. No, we do. We do. That's our way. It's a little bit longer than that. And we don't say Sinister South as much as episode one. But but, you know, it was all right. I did suddenly go shit. I should check that. Yeah, that's all OK. But no, it was fine. But yeah. So if anyone is here newly because of the Rachel Nichol documentary on Netflix, welcome. Although it is quite funny, we were just saying before we start recording, neither of us have seen it. No, we really should watch it. Yeah, I'm sure you should do. I know it's meant to be more from the perspective of her son. Oh, really? And like living his life without her. Oh, it's heartbreaking. Yeah. But apparently it's also meant to be like him and his dad had quite a strange relation or strained relationship, I should say, not estranged, strained, but they've kind of like come together now. So, yeah, I think it's all meant to be more from his perspective. So pretty interesting to watch. Definitely. It's on the list. But yeah, we've had people from all over the world suddenly on our website and looking at that episode, which is, I mean, I know I shouldn't say go away, but don't go away. Come be friends. We have cookies and chocolate and stuff and pins that will never get sent to you. Very quickly, before we go into the case, we've got to do all the nice bits. But before we do that, I just wanted to do a little shout out because I got a very nice little message on Instagram from one of the travellers. I put a story up about and this is the point where I'm going to see if I can still find the blooming thing. I put a story up about the fact that loads of people were on the website and I didn't understand what was happening. It's from Abby J. Hi, Abby. Hi, Abby. And she said in comment to me going, shit, I've got to update the website while there's so many people on it. She commented, it's the best podcast going at the moment, mate. Glad more folks are looking you up. It made me very smiley. I was like, thanks, love. So, yeah, if you want to come and leave some nice little messages for us, then please do that. Also, having been on the website a lot because of all the people, I also found that I missed two messages that we'd had. I screenshotted them to you on Thursday when we were in the pub and I went, oh, shit, I haven't seen these. One of them was from, oh God, I'm going to get it up again now. Hang on. I do like to make a rod for my own back. I've not prepped any of this. One was from a lady called Karen. Karen Price. Hi, Karen. Hi, Karen. She had messaged to say, ask me if we were going to be at Crime Con in Birmingham and I would have loved to have been. But those tickets were more expensive than my house, so we couldn't quite manage it this year. But maybe, hopefully sometime soon. But apparently she's got a lot of new information about the Brian Price and Susan Tetrault murder, which we covered in season three. Apparently more information that's been gathered since the release of the Footsteps of Killers Channel 4 episode. So, Karen, I would love to know more. I'd love to do a bit of an update if you're happy to get back in touch and we can have a bit of a chat. That'd be great. And then the other one was from Ciara and she said that she is a new listener from South East London. Welcome, Ciara. We love a South Londoner. And she said that she wanted to recommend us a case, which I believe you might be looking into. Okay. Well, when I say that, I sent you this and you went, all right, Ciara, I'll add that to the list. But that was about a bottle of Prosecco down, so you may have forgotten. Yeah, I've got no idea what you're talking about. Fair, fair, fair. I'll send it over to you as well. Thanks. So, yeah, so carry on sending us messages and we will eventually read them. At some point in the future, we'll read them. And while we're on all of that, let's do all the nice bits as is our want. So, we are all over the place. But if you would like to do us a favour because you're wonderful, please go and give us a little five star rating over on Spotify or iTunes or Apple Podcasts, wherever it is that you can do that. Go and leave us a five star rating. Leave us a nice positive review, please. It genuinely does help us find more Trevors. And we'd love to have a few more of you in our little club because we quite like it. Indeed. Also, if you want to just go and tell someone else about us, doesn't matter if they don't like true crime, just go and tell them, talk to them about us. That'd be great. Thanks. But if you want to come and add to the website visits, you can. It's over at SinisterSouthPodcast.co.uk. Nope. I'm pretty certain it is. I swear every week I say a different one. The email address is podcast. The website is pod. Okay. Let me, I'm just gonna. Yeah, by all means, check my working. I'm going to. You are correct. I know. Sinister South Pod. Mate, when have you ever known me to be fucking wrong? We've been through this so many times. I won't. We won't have that conversation on mic. It's fine. Um, no. If you want to come and visit the website, it is SinisterSouthPod.co.uk. We are also on email at SinisterSouthPodcast at gmail.com. And then you can find us on Instagram and TikTok. We are under on there as Sinister South Pod and on both platforms. And then we have rach.unhand.sinistersouth. If you want to come and see some of our more personal stuff, like my content with my hair, then there's the Facebook group run by the ever so lovely Lou and the Patreon. And I'm just going to leave. The less said about that, the better. I'm just going to leave that one there. Um, but yeah, so that's all of that. Come and come and say hi to us. Come and tell us about your lives. We want to be friends, please. Okay. Delightful. Should I tell you a story? Is it a horrific one? Oh, yeah. Has it got murder and horribleness in it? Well, yeah. Okay. Well then, yeah, you can. I'll get myself comfortable. So I want to start today in the summer of 1978 in South London, of course, in a neighbourhood called Thornton Heath. Ah, best part of the world. If you don't know it, picture the ordinary edge of a city. Terraced and semi-detached houses, net curtains, a parade of shops, trains rattling through to Croydon one way and Victoria the other. The sort of unremarkable residential streets where, if anything terrible happened behind one of the front doors, the world outside might never really know. The kind of place where a tragedy could be quietly absorbed as just that, a private family tragedy, and life on the street would carry on. And I want to start with a little girl called Andrea. She was five years old. And I think it's important to remember that she was, and this is going to sound a bit mad, but she is a real child. She is not just the name in a case file, because in a story like this, and you'll see why, it's very easy for the child at the centre of it to just turn into a set of facts. Her brother, years later, described her in three words that have stayed with me. He said that she was talkative, brave, and very smart. Five years old and already her own little person. On the 6th of June that year, Andrea was badly hurt at home. She suffered terrible burns, scalds, from a bath, and they covered around 50% of her small body. She was rushed to hospital and then transferred to a specialist burn unit out in West Sussex, where the doctors did everything they could for her. For nearly six weeks, Andrea held on. But burns like that, in a child that young, in 1978, the real danger is infection, and the infection is what they just couldn't beat. And on the 13th of July, Andrea died. It was looked into in the way that these things were then. There was a coroner's inquest, and the conclusion was the one kind of everybody expected, a heartbreaking accident. A little girl, a hot bath, a moment when nobody was watching closely enough. The coroner recorded that she had died from the infection caused by the burns, and ruled the whole thing accidental. And that was that. No police case, no suspect, just a family left to grieve a loss that doesn't really bear thinking about. And for the next 47 years, that was the story. That was what happened to Andrea Bernard. A tragedy, and nothing more. I remember this case. Except that's not where Andrea's story ended. Because just a little while ago, in a court in West London, a jury reached a verdict about that bath, and about that death from 1978. And to understand how that's even possible, how something everyone had signed off as an accident nearly half a century ago, ends up in front of a modern jury, I'm going to have to introduce you to a few more people, and take you a fair way round to get there. This is the one that I did a Sinister Self short on, isn't it? Okay, okay, okay. So stay with me, because the road to that verdict is one of the strangest cases we've covered. Okay. Let's start by filling that house in Thornton Heath, because the people inside it are the whole story. So Andrea lived there with her father, a man named Desmond Bernard, and her older brother, who was eight. Now, I'm going to leave the brother in the background for the moment, but hold on to him, because he is going to matter more than kind of anyone else in this whole story eventually. He also has the exact same name as his father. So what you'll find is that throughout the rest of it, when I've referred to the dad, I have used Bernard, Bernard. And when I used Desmond for the brother. Fine. Okay, makes sense. And then there was one more adult in that home, a young woman in a relationship with Andrea's father. She wasn't the child's mother. She was in effect their stepmother. And that's how she is usually described, though she was strikingly young for the role. At the time, she was still only in her late teens. And she'd come into this kind of ready made family barely more than a child herself. Her name was Janice, and back then she went by Janice Thomas. But the world would later come to know her as Janice Nix. And here's where I have to do something that might feel a bit strange. Because to tell you what comes next, I have to leave Andrea and the home in Thornton Heath for a while. And I have to leave 1978 behind and tell you the life story of Janice instead. I know that's a swerve we usually send to the victim. But trust me, you cannot understand the end of all of this without it. Because Janice Nix went on to live the kind of life most people couldn't invent. In fact, for a while, it was a life that she became genuinely well known for. If you'd met Janice around a few years ago, say around 2021, you'd have met a woman with one of the most remarkable second acts you could imagine. The kind of person who gets invited to speak at events, the kind younger people look up to. And to understand why, you have to go back to where she started. Because it's a very long way down before it's a very long way back up. By her own account, her early life was hard. Her parents had come to England from the Caribbean, part of that generation who had arrived to a country that was often openly hostile to them. She grew up in London and partly in Leicester, in a home that she would later describe as a frightening place to be. And so as a teenager, she ran. And London, for a runaway with nothing, taught her how to survive. Somebody taught her to steal. And as it turned out, she had a real talent for it. She started as a shoplifter and a pickpocket, working the wealthy end of the West End, lifting furs, dipping into handbags. But that was just the beginning. And she didn't stay a shoplifter for long. Over the years that followed, she climbed, if that's even the right word, all the way up the criminal ladder until, by her own telling, she was a serious drug dealer. And I don't mean a street corner kind of operation. I mean, as she described it, a proper one. Cocaine in large quantities. Deals worth tens of thousands of pounds, with connections running out of London into the Midlands, into Wales and eventually across the Atlantic to South America. On the streets of Brixton, she had a name. They called her Mama J. And again, by her own account, she had the trappings to match. She carried a small handgun and drove around South London in a Jeep with white leather seats and the words nasty girl written down the side. Excellent. Now, I want to flag something very clearly here. Like I've said, a lot of this comes from how Janice describes herself and has described her own life. It's in interviews and it's in print. So I do take the gangland glamour with a pinch of salt. That kind of any self-told story. She's written a book, hasn't she? But the bones of it aren't really in dispute. She was a serious repeat offender and the law caught up with her more than once and she went to prison. One of those sentences was for nine years and was for drug supply. All told, across her life, she spent more than 17 years behind bars. And here's kind of the part that made her remarkable, really, or the part that turns this from a crime story into something a bit twistier. Because somewhere inside one of those prison sentences, something in Janice shifted and she decided to climb back out in the opposite direction this time. She started volunteering behind bars, training to support other struggling prisoners. When she got out, she took a job as a clerk in a hospital, which was her first ever kind of honest work. And she got involved with a charity called the St Giles Trust, which helps people leaving the justice system find a way back into useful society. And then she kind of did something that almost seemed poetic. She went to work in and around the probation service, the very system that had spent decades trying to catch her. She ended up working alongside. And by all accounts, she was good at it. By everything public that I read, genuinely good. She worked with very vulnerable women whose lives had looked a lot like hers once had, and she fought to give them a way out. She did win recognition for that work. And this is kind of the part that really lifts it out of the ordinary. She didn't just turn her own life around. In 2016, she was invited into parliament to give evidence to a committee of MPs about the barriers facing ex-offenders trying to find work. Think about that for a second. So from a prison cell to a commons committee room, as an expert voice on rehabilitation. On the same stretch of Brixton, where people once knew her as a dealer, she'd become something else entirely, held up as living proof that a person really can change. And in 2021, as Rachel said, she put the whole thing down in a book. It's a memoir called Breaking Out, and the subtitle tells you exactly how it was sold. Quote, the unbelievable, inspirational, true story of a former class A drug dealer who became a probation worker. Oh, snappy. It was received as exactly that. Reviewed in criminal justice circles as an account of real transformation. Serial offender to probation service worker. People found it moving, honest, unsparing. The real story of a hard life turned to good. She wrote about the runaway years, the stealing, the drugs, the prison cells, the long climb back. And she held her own past up to the light and didn't flinch. Or at least that's how it read. Okay. And if Janice's story ended there, it would be a good one, right? A genuinely uplifting one. A woman who had done real harm in the world and then spent her second life trying to undo it. Yeah. Hold that thought, because we're going to come back to that book. But there's something else that we kind of need to talk about first. Okay. So it's the first of a couple of side quests. Okay. And this is how a death like this, like Andrea's, gets treated like an accident. Right. Because I think a lot of you listening will be asking the same question I did. How does a five year old child end up with burns over half of her body and everyone just accepts it was an accident? Yeah. And honestly, from where we sit now, that question feels obvious. It should feel obvious. A child that young, a bath, adults in the house, injuries that severe. Today that combination would trigger a whole chain of safeguarding questions almost straight away. Yeah. Who was supervising her? Did the explanation actually fit the injuries? Had anyone seen any signs before of anything else? Were there other children in the house who needed to be spoken to separately and safely? But 1978 was not today's child protection landscape. No. And I don't say that to excuse anything, because the result here was catastrophic. I say it because it does help to explain how a death like Andrea's could be put in the wrong box so quickly. So the modern safeguarding system in Britain didn't arrive fully formed. It was, it was and some might say still is being built. And grimly, it's, it was slash is often built in response to children dying. Yeah. Just five years before Andrea in 1973, a seven-year-old called Maria Colwell was killed after being returned to a violent home, despite repeated warnings. Her death caused national outrage, led to a public enquiry, and changed how agencies were expected to talk to each other when a child might be at risk. Right. The Children's Act of 1975 followed, putting more weight onto the welfare of the child. But law and culture don't change overnight. A system can exist on paper long before it works properly in real homes with real children. And in 1978, the reflex to look hard inside a family home, to challenge an adult's account, to treat a child's injury as a possible crime rather than a terrible mishap, that reflex simply wasn't what it is now. So when the adults around Andrea offered a version of events that sounded like a dreadful domestic accident, the story moved through the system and it hardened. It became official. A hot bath, a child alone, a tragic mistake. And once a story becomes official, it can be very hard to dislodge, especially when the only other person who really knows what happened is an eight- year-old boy who has been told exactly what will happen to him if he ever speaks. And that's the first uncomfortable thing about this case. Not just that Andrea died, but that once her death had been handed the word accident, that one word did an enormous amount of work. So with that in mind, let's go back to the house because the systems around Andrea matter, but the people inside that house matter more. So that brings me back to the boy. The eight-year-old I asked you to hold on to. It's time to bring him forward because everything turns on him. His name is Desmond. And like I said, I should have put this bit up front, but he has the exact same name as his father. So I will refer to the boy as Desmond and I'll call the dad Bernard. In the summer of 1978, Desmond was eight years old and he was in the house on the day Andrea was hurt. His bedroom was directly next door to the bathroom. And for 44 years, Desmond told exactly the same story as everyone else had. That it was an accident, that his little sister had been bathing and something had gone horribly wrong. He told it as a child. He told it as a teenager. He grew up, he moved away and he built a whole life across the Atlantic in America. Relationships, ordinary days, decades of them. And he carried that story the entire way. And then in September of 2022, Desmond, by now a grown man in his fifties, walked into a police station in Croydon and told the officers that he had something to say that he'd been holding on to since he was eight years old. He told them that his sister's death had not been an accident. And he told them what he had actually heard that day through the wall between his bedroom and the bathroom. He said Andrea had been in trouble that day. She'd been told to stay at home and clean. And she'd actually slipped out away to try and find him. And when she came back, Janice was furious. There was shouting, there was hitting, and then he heard the bath being run. He had gone straight to his bedroom, the one right next door to the bathroom. And this is what he told the court. He heard, quote, I could hear Janice shouting, get in the bath. And I could hear Andrea saying the bath is too hot, mummy. I could hear Janice shouting and shouting. And then I heard screaming and splashing. He described his five-year-old sister screaming the same two words over and over. It's hot. It's hot. And Janice just still shouting at her to get in. And then he said the screaming suddenly stopped. And Janice's voice changed. And she called him into the bathroom. And that is where he found Andrea. He said she was limp. And in his words, and it's a detail that just makes me feel sick. Quote, I could see skin falling off of her. No, no, no, no, nope. So why did that little boy tell everyone it was an accident? Why did he carry the real version of it for 44 years? Because, he told the court, Janice made him a deal. She told him to say it was an accident, and that she promised that if he did, she would never beat him or hurt him again. And he explained very plainly why an eight-year-old would take a bargain like that. He said he lied because, in his words, he, quote, didn't feel protected, and he just wanted it to stop. And you need to understand what he wanted to stop, because it did come out. And it is a horror all of its own. Desmond described being beaten with a belt, being burned with cigarettes, being bitten, being made to eat cat food. And in a written statement he read after the court case, he described exactly how the abuse stayed hidden. He said, quote, when Andrea and I lived with Janice and Dad, we were in constant fear when we were alone with her, because she wouldn't abuse us in front of my father, my mother, my grandmother, or any friends. It happened in the gaps where no other adult could see. And that's its own quiet, awful detail, because it tells you that this wasn't someone losing control. It was someone who knew exactly when not to lose control. Yeah, exactly. Oh, that's so sinister. So picture that bargain from where Desmond was standing. He's eight, his sister is dying, and the person offering to make the pain stop is one of the adults with power over his entire world, and the one he's the most frightened of. That's not a choice, not in the way we usually mean the word. It's a survival strategy. Of course he took it. Of course he did. So I've got a bit of another side quest here into kind of the child who kept the secret. Because whenever a case turns on someone coming forward decades later, there's a very predictable question that follows. It isn't always asked kindly, but it does get asked. Why did he wait so long? Why now? And I think the honest answer is that he didn't wait. He survived. And those are two completely different things, because it's one of the most misunderstood things of this case. I think it's worth sitting with for a moment. So we'll start with the obvious thing. Desmond was eight. Eight years old. At that age, an adult isn't just bigger than you. An adult is the person who defines reality. If a grown-up tells you what happened, that becomes what happened. If a grown-up tells you that you'll be hurt, if you talk, you believe them completely, because you have no reason not to. And if the grown-up saying it is the same person who has already been burning you with cigarettes and beating you with a belt, the silence stops being anything like a choice. It becomes the thing that keeps you alive. And this isn't just me being sympathetic on Desmond's behalf. This is what the research consistently shows about how children disclose abuse, or rather how they don't. The reviews that bodies like the Independent Enquiry into Child Sexual Abuse have pulled together find that a great many people who are abused as children never tell anyone during childhood. Not one person, realistically. I mean, that's a bit of a sweeping statement, but you know what I mean. Some take until their 40s, their 50s, their 60s. Some take it until, well some, it takes until a parent or the abuser dies. Some go to their graves without ever saying it aloud. And when researchers ask why, the same reasons come up again and again. Fear, shame, feeling somehow responsible, not having the words for it as a child, loyalty even to the person hurting them, and the terror of not being believed. The simple crushing weight of how much it would cost them to say it out loud. Disclosure, when it does come, is often not one dramatic confession, either. It tends to come in pieces over years. It's a hint dropped and then taken back. A half-truth told to one trusted person. A fragment that comes out and then goes quiet again for another decade. So the idea that a real victim would naturally come forward straight away, and that waiting somehow looks suspicious, is almost exactly backwards. Delayed disclosure isn't the red flag. In cases like this, it's closer to the norm. And there's something even heavier sitting underneath Desmond's silence, specifically, because he didn't only witness something, he was made part of it. He was handed a script as a terrified child, told to say the word accident, and promised the beatings would stop if he did. So for 44 years, every time he kept the secret, he was also keeping a promise he'd been forced to make at eight years old. So kind of think about what that does to a person. He didn't just carry grief for his sister, he carried the guilt of having said the lie over and over to coroners and family and anyone else, when he was too young to understand that he was being made complicit in covering up her death. So when Desmond finally walked into that police station in 2022, he wasn't just reporting a crime. He was reopening the worst day of his life on purpose as a grown man. He was choosing to invite police, lawyers, expert witnesses, journalists, a jury, and eventually all of us into a room in his memory that he has spent his entire life keeping shut. That is not the act of someone who flippantly waited. This is the act of someone who finally, after nearly half a century, found he was strong enough. And he told the court why he did it in the simplest possible terms. He said that he could no longer carry on dealing with it. He wanted to place the burden, in his words, where it should go. It was never his to carry. So no, Desmond's silence was never the weak point in the story. In a lot of ways, it was part of the evidence of what that house had done to him. And when he finally put the secret down, it didn't just reopen Andrea's case. It became the case. So now to bring the two halves of this story together, because this is the moment they collide. When Desmond came forward, he wasn't only challenging the original accident ruling from 1978, he was challenging the entire version of Janice Nix that the world had been invited to meet and believe. On the one side, you've got a celebrated woman in her 60s, award-winning in her field, a published author, someone who spent years helping people rebuild their lives. And on the other side, you've got a man in his 50s who has finally, after 44 years, said the thing out loud. And sitting between them now are detectives from the Metropolitan Police cold case team, holding a brother's account of a death that on paper had been closed since before some of them were born. And eventually, all of that leads to an arrivals hall at Heathrow Airport, and a moment that was captured on a police officer's body worn camera. A woman in her 60s is approached by a police officer, and the officer is calm, almost warm even. She says in effect, Hi Janice, I don't know whether you recognise me, we met a couple of years ago. She asks very politely for Janice's passport and her phone, just so that she can't make any calls, she explains. That's it. And then in that same, even, almost slightly apologetic tone, she says it, that Janice is under arrest for the manslaughter of Andrea Bernard on the 13th of July 1978. And not only for Andrea's death, but also for the years of cruelty towards Desmond. 47 years, that is how long it took for someone to say that sentence to her. She was charged and in the months that followed, she was released on bail under strict conditions, including handing over her passports and staying away from international travel hubs. She denied all of it, the manslaughter and the cruelty. And so it was going to be a jury, not a coroner this time, who decided what had really happened in that bathroom. Now an arrest is one thing, proving a manslaughter from 1978 to a jury beyond reasonable doubt, that is something else entirely. And honestly, this part of the case is its own small miracle. Because the odds against it were enormous. And it's such a good example of how this work actually gets done, that I think it deserves a little side quest of it. So let's get into it. So cold case archaeology. Because I think television has slightly ruined us on cold cases. We tend to imagine them being solved by one big dramatic thing. A fingerprint finally matched, a DNA hit, a box in a basement with a signed confession in it. Lovely for episode structure. Not usually how reality behaves. So think about what 47 years does to a case. Almost everyone who was there is dead. The pathologist who examined Andrea, dead. The coroner who ran the original inquest, dead. The neighbours who might have remembered something, gone or impossible to trace. And the paperwork was nearly all destroyed over the decades. The original medical records relating to Andrea's death, simply gone. On paper, the whole thing was a nightmare. So the job became less like a detective drama and more like archaeology. The cold case team digging through thousands of documents across council archives and old hospital records, looking for anything that had survived. And most of it, by the sounds of it, left nowhere. That's the part the dramas leave out, right? It's because nothing, there's nothing glamorous about following a paper trail into a filing system and finding nothing at all. No, exactly. And I can imagine if it was classed as an accident start, they wouldn't necessarily keep the records in the same way as they would have done if it was an open case. But then they did find the thing that mattered. The first real piece of the puzzle. A 16 page coroner's report from 1978 that had somehow survived. And that report was priceless because it had preserved two things that technically should have been lost forever. One was a detailed description of Andrea's injuries and her treatment plan. And the other, quite a crucial one, was a statement Janice herself had given back in 1978, in the days right after Andrea died. Her own account, in her own words, frozen in time. And that led to the second piece, because here's the clever part. When detectives questioned Janice in 2022, they didn't tell her that they'd found the old statement. They simply asked her to tell them what had gone on that day. And the story she gave them in 2022 did not match the story that she had given in 1978. Back then, she'd said that she'd been out in the back garden, that Andrea had gone upstairs to bathe alone, and that the little girl had come back outside afterwards, fully dressed, complaining her legs were itching, before she then collapsed. Right. But in 2022, she told a completely different version. That she'd heard Andrea screaming. She'd run inside and found her in the bath trying to climb out and lifted her straight from the water. Right. Two stories, decades apart, and they could not both be true. Yeah, or neither could be true. She also claimed at one point that the coroner had blamed a faulty boiler that overheated the bath water. But crucially, there was no such finding anywhere in the surviving coroner's reports. Right. There's simply no record of that at all. Yeah. So now the team had more than a brother's memory. They had the old story and the new story side by side in Janice's own words, and they didn't fit together. But to take that to a jury, they needed one more thing. They needed the science. And the science in this case is so important. And honestly, so chilling. Okay. That it gets a side quest too. There we go. So what a burn can tell you. Because a burn isn't just an injury. It can be a kind of map. It's not a perfect one, and never something you'd read on its own, but a map nonetheless. Where the burns are, how deep they go, whether there are splash marks running down from somewhere, up from somewhere, whether the edges are tied line clean or ragged, whether the pattern looks like a child who slipped, or reached up and pulled something down, or fell, or climbed in and shot straight back out, or a child who couldn't get away. And in cases involving children, this is exactly what doctors and safeguarding specialists are trained to look at. Not the injury itself, but whether the injury actually fits the story being told about how it happened. Right, okay. And to understand the argument that eventually went to Andrea's jury, you have to understand a little bit about heat and time, because the numbers here are genuinely shocking. So we think of hot water as one vague thing, right? It isn't. The difference of just a few degrees completely changes how fast it destroys skin. The guidance that burn specialists use lays it out starkly. Water around 50 degrees Celsius takes a couple of minutes to cause a serious full thickness burn in an adult. Turn it up to 55 degrees, and you're talking maybe 10 seconds. Fucking hell. At 60 degrees, it's only a second or two. And every one of those numbers is for adult skin. Right. A small child's skin is much thinner, much more delicate, and it burns in the fraction of the time. By some estimates, a child can be injured in around a quarter of the time it takes an adult to be injured. So sit with that, with what that actually means in a bathroom, right? Properly, safely set domestic hot water in this country is supposed to come out of the tap at around 48 degrees or below, precisely because at that temperature, you have several minutes before it does serious harm. Right. The water Andrea was put into was hot enough to cause to cause full thickness burns across half her body. We are not talking about water that was a little bit too warm. No, we are talking about water that on the expert's own figures could destroy a child's skin in seconds. Disgusting. And there's another distinction the specialists draw that matters enormously here. There's obviously a very big difference between a splash or a spill and an immersion. If hot liquid splashes onto you, it runs off, it cools and you can wipe it away. So those burns tend to be shallower and more scattered with drip marks. An immersion is obviously different. An immersion is when part of the body is held in the hot water, so the heat just keeps going deeper and deeper for as long as the contact lasts. Immersion burns are some of the deepest and most severe that there can be. And Andrea's injuries were immersion injuries. The prosecution's burns expert pointed out something about the human body that you already know, even if you've never thought about it. The body protects itself faster than the mind can think. If you put your hand under a tap that's scalding hot, you don't calmly hold it there and consider your options. You rip it away. It's a reflex. It happens before you've decided anything. A small child lowered into scalding water does exactly the same thing. The expert's evidence was that a child in water that hot would instinctively try to stand up and climb straight back out. Not sit, not stay, get out immediately. Screaming. The way Desmond described. Yeah. So here is the question that the burns left hanging nearly 50 years later. If Andrea's every instinct would have hulled her up and got her out of the water in the first seconds, then how did she end up with such deep immersion burns across half of her body? You don't get those injuries from a child who jumped straight back out. No. You only get them if the child was kept in the water. Oh, I don't like this. And that was the prosecution's case in a single brutal sentence. The reason Andrea stayed in that bath was not that she chose to. It was that she was held there. And that's the moment the medical evidence stops being background, becomes the thing the whole case turns on. The bath wasn't just kind of what led to Andrea's death. On the prosecution's case, the bath was how she was Yeah, 100%. And before we get into the courtroom, there is one more small detail in all of this that's easy to skate past as well. But I think it does tell you something about how serious Andrea's injuries were. It's about where they sent her. So because that specialist burns unit and that she was transferred to wasn't just any old hospital, right? It was an East Grinstead in West Sussex. It's the Queen Victoria Hospital. And that name carries real weight in the history of British medicine. East Grinstead is where, during the Second World War, a surgeon called Archibald McIndoe did his pioneering work rebuilding the faces and the hands of horrifically burned RAF and Allied aircrew. His patients formed a club, the famous guinea pig club, because they knew they were the test cases for techniques that nobody had tried before. That hospital is one of the birthplaces of modern burns and reconstructive surgery. And no, don't worry, we're not doing a full wartime plastic surgery detour. Tempting. But you all know by now I love a side alley, especially one with a plaque on it. Yes, yes, yes. But the point is simple. And it's this. You do not send a five-year-old all the way out of London to one of the most specialised burn units in the country for something minor. No. The bare fact of that transfer tells you on its own, before you hear a single word of expert evidence, that what happened to Andrea was catastrophic. Yeah, bless her. Because severe burns aren't only damage to the skin. Your skin is one of the body's main defences against the whole outside world. It holds your fluids in and it keeps infection out. So when a large area of it is destroyed, especially on a small child, the danger doesn't stop when the water is turned off. The body struggles with fluid loss, with shock, with regulating its own temperature, with pain. And then comes the threat that ultimately took Andrea's life, which was infection. A massive open burn is in effect a massive open door. And that's kind of one of the coolest parts of this whole timeline. Andrea didn't die that day. She survived the bath. She survived the journey and the immediate injury. And she was being cared for by some of the best burns doctors in the country. For nearly six weeks, they fought for her. Which means for nearly six weeks, her family lived in that unbearable space between hope and dread. Watching, waiting, daring to believe that she might pull through. And then the infection did what the burns alone hadn't managed. So whenever you see this case summed up in a headline as a hot bath, hold on to that. That phrase makes it sound almost domestic, small, almost ordinary. What actually happened to Andrea was severe enough to take a twist, Grinstead, and severe enough that even there, even after six weeks of intense treatment, she could not recover. I'm sorry. When you were saying about the fact that she hung on, in my head, I thought you'd said at the start that she'd hung on for six days. And when you said weeks, I think you did say weeks at the start. I think I must be trying to do... You are trying to derail me this case. I am. No, no, no. But I think I must have just been like wishful thinking that you'd actually said days. Because six days with third degree burns is, I can only imagine, horrific enough. Six weeks is... Yeah. Sixth of June to the 13th of July. You did. It was just, as I said, I think it must have been my brain trying to... Make it better. Make it better than it is. Fucking hell. Yeah. It's horrible. It's really not fun. So yeah, that, in the end, is kind of how this whole case was rebuilt. It was not with one magic clue or one confession. I keep using the word confession. I don't mean it because that sounds like he's got something to confess. You know what I mean, though? Revelation. Revelation. But it's built in layers that are stacked one on top of another, right? So there is Desmond's account and the reason for his original lie, the surviving coroner's report, Janice's own contradictory statements decades apart, the boiler claim that wasn't in the record, the modern pathology, the burns experts, and underneath all of it, the wider history of cruelty in that house. That is how you build a manslaughter case out of a bath that everyone had agreed to call an accident for nearly half a century. And in May 2026, all of it went in front of a jury. So we are now in, I never know how to pronounce this, Isleworth? Isleworth? Isleworth? Somewhere. Crown Court in West London. It's West London. I don't need to know. And the heart of the trial was Desmond, obviously, and standing up in his 50s and telling a room full of strangers under oath, the thing that he'd hidden since he was a young boy. He gave that evidence in tears. He laid out the bargain, the belt, the cigarette burns, the cat food, and he repeated one more time what he'd heard through that wall. The prosecution also called another person who had lived in that house back then, who backed up the picture of Janice regularly beating the children. And the jury heard about her later criminal record too. So it's worth being fair about what Janice's defence actually was, because the jury had a real decision to make. So she denied causing Andrea's death and she denied abusing Desmond. And she argued that his account of that afternoon was simply wrong. The memory of a frightened child decades old. But she did concede one significant thing. She admitted that her original 1978 story, the one where Andrea bathed alone, had not been true. She told the jury that she had given that false account to the coroner because she was, in her words, quote, in a panic over having failed to supervise Andrea in the bath appropriately. Her position now was that her real failing had only ever been negligence. That she'd been a careless teenager who should have been watching a small child and wasn't. In her own words to the jury, quote, I realised I had done something I shouldn't have done. I should have been with Andrea. And, quote, I was young and I was clearly not thinking. On hindsight now, I see my negligence as a teenager. End quote. I think it's a bit more than negligence. I'm sorry, you don't get a bath that gets to be that hot and then you just don't, like, the bathroom steams up. So that was the question the jury was left holding. On one side, a tragic accident made worse by a careless young woman who then panicked and lied. On the other, a child deliberately forced into scalding water and held there. Not necessarily an intention to kill, but an unlawful and dangerous act that caused a death. She wanted to hurt her, 100%. It was the jury's job to decide which one they were really looking at, right? They decided it was the second one. They found Janice Nix guilty of the manslaughter of Andrea Bernard and guilty of child cruelty against Desmond. In the dock, she shook her head and she wept. 47 years, 10 months and 13 days after a five-year-old died from injuries from a bath that everyone had agreed to call an accident. So one quick thing, because I know some of you were asking, why manslaughter and not murder? So it comes down to intent. For a murder conviction, as we've been through before here, Trevor's known now, you generally have to prove the person meant to kill or cause really serious harm. This kind of manslaughter doesn't require that. The prosecution only had to show that Janice did something unlawful and dangerous and it directly caused Andrea's death and that any reasonable person would have known it carried risk of harm. They didn't have to prove that she set out to kill, only that she did something dangerous and it had killed her. That's the line between the two charges and that's why this one falls where it does. So another bit of a side quest here is kind of redemption and the art of leaving things out. So now, finally, I kind of wanted to come back to Janice's book because there's a layer to this case that I find genuinely fucking shit. It's Janice's public second life, right? This redemption. And I want to be careful and fair here because the easy version of this story is the wrong one. If this was simply the tale of a woman who did something monstrous and then spent the rest of her life being obviously monstrous, it would actually be easier to tell. No, not better, obviously, but just simpler. We'd know where to file her. But that's not what happened because as far as anyone can tell, a lot of the good in Janice's second act was real. The women she mentored were real women. The lives that she may genuinely have made better were real. The work she did with the St. Giles Trust and around the probation service was real work. The recognition was real. When she sat in front of a committee of MPs in 2016 and spoke about the barriers facing people coming out of prison, she wasn't lying. She knew exactly what she was talking about. We don't have to pretend that none of that happened in order to say that something catastrophic was missing from the story that she was telling about herself. And to see what was missing, you kind of have to look at what that book actually was, right? Breaking Out wasn't marketed as a thriller or a crime caper. It was sold and reviewed as an act of honesty. The brave, unflinching, unsparing confession of a woman who had done terrible things and was finally owning all of them. That was the whole appeal. That was the brand. Here is a person who hid from nothing, who held her worst self up to the light so that others might learn from it. She wrote about the shoplifting and the drug dealing. She wrote about carrying a gun. She wrote about prison, about violence, about the things she'd done to survive. She even wrote about the exact years we've been talking about, the mid-70s, the late 70s, when she was living in that house, helping to raise two young children, with the children's names and their names changed in the text. And in that brave, honest account of that precise period of her life with those two children, there's one thing that she never mentions. She never mentions that one of those children died. There's not a chapter, there's not a paragraph, there's not a sentence, not a line. A five-year-old girl who lived in that home, who called her mummy, who was scolded in that bath and fought and fought for her life and lost, completely absent from the story of that exact time in Janice's life. Yeah, really honest. And I keep turning that over because the absence of it is so total that it can't be an accident of memory, right? You don't simply forget that. So you're left with a choice she made, a decision at the point of writing a book about her own honesty, to leave Andrea out of it. To tell the world the unvarnished truth about the drugs and the guns and the prison cells, the parts that, if anything, made the redemption arc dramatic and more sellable. And to quietly close the door on the one part that wasn't survivable as a story, the death of a child in her care. And that's what makes this more than just a lie of omission in a memoir. Because think about that, what that confession is supposed to be. We extend an enormous amount of grace to people who own their worst. It's the foundation of kind of every idea we have about rehabilitation, right? About second chances, about the possibility that a person is more than the worst thing they ever did. And I believe in that. I really do. We've been through it many times. Society needs to believe that people can change or the entire justice system is just warehousing. But this case shows you the shadow side of that beautiful idea, right? Because confession can be performed. You can disclose a great deal, more than enough to look brave and broken and honest and healed, precisely so that nobody goes looking for the thing you didn't disclose. You can use the truth as a kind of cover for the one lie that matters. And that's what happened here. A jury's verdict suggests it might be. Then what Janice built wasn't really redemption at all. Redemption, if the word means anything, has to involve facing the worst of what you've done, not curating it. What she built was something that looked like redemption from the outside, a version with the unbearable part edited out. And there's a word for telling a carefully selected version of your own story to make people feel a certain way about you. And it isn't confession. It's closer to branding. Because that, in the end, is what the verdict really did. It didn't just correct a coroner's ruling from 1978. It corrected the authorised story of Janice Nix, the one in that book, the one that the world had been invited to applaud. And it put the truth back in the one place it had been missing from for nearly 50 years. So as I'm recording this with you all, Janice Nix is in custody waiting to be sentenced. There's no date set yet, so this story isn't quite finished, and we'll obviously come back to it when it is. But I don't want to leave you thinking about Janice, because she's had a lot of this story already. There's the nickname, the memoir, the second act, the headlines, and the whole point of what happened in that courtroom was to put the focus back where it should have always been. So let me leave you with the two people who actually matter here. There's Desmond, who carried his sister's truth from the age of eight, who was taught to lie before he was even old enough to understand what lying really was, and who then, as a grown man, chose to walk back into the worst day of his life and say it all out loud, knowing everything it would cost him. The detective on the case called it courage, and I don't think there's a better word for it. In his statement after the verdict, he said he had come forward to lift a burden, quote, which was not mine to carry. And after 44 years, he finally got to put that burden down. And Andrea, who would be in her 50s now, who might have had a family of her own, children, grandchildren, an ordinary, noisy, complicated life, the talkative, brave, very smart little girl her brother never stopped thinking about. Instead, she got five years and then nearly half a century in which the world had quietly agreed that nothing wrong had happened to her at all. And maybe that's the thing this case is really about. It's not the drug deals or the memoirs or the strange double lives. It's just this, that the truth matters even when it arrives obscenely, unforgivably late. Andrea was five years old. She was not a household accident. She was not a footnote in somebody else's redemption arc. She was a child and she finally has the truth told about her life. Bloody hell. Oh, thank you very much for that. You're welcome. I've got a lot of feelings. I thought you might. I've got a lot of feelings. I think the first one is that straight away the ages have upset me. Just because that's how old my children are. We've all got it, darling. I don't like it. No, thank you very much for all the research into that. That can't have been easy. I remember doing this as a Sinister South short. If anyone wants to see those, I used to do them every Friday and I haven't done one in months. But they are little reels on Instagram and on TikTok. So you can go and have a look at those. But I did cover this one when it first came out that it was being investigated again after 47 years. And that was the bit that kind of baffled my brain was just like, how is this come up now? So to actually hear the horrors of it in full detail. I knew what the premise of it was. I didn't expect it to be as horrible as that. I went back and forth on leaving the... I wanted to be factual and I wanted to give you the picture, but I didn't want to be gratuitous. Yeah, I don't think you were. I think it was necessary. I think I probably should have done a better trigger warning at the top. We can do a trigger warning. We'll re-record a trigger warning. We had to do that last time I did a child one as well. Yeah, we'll do a trigger warning at the end and put it in. Um, no, it's just... Burns are one of those things that happen to people that I am just... I think I've said it on the podcast before, like I am absolutely petrified of fire. The idea of fire and burning, I can't, I can't get my head around. At least with fire, you might pass out from smoke inhalation first. Potentially, yes. Hot water scares me. Well, I don't, I don't like any of it really. No, no. Between the two, I'd rather... Actually, I'd rather have that one. No, I understand what you're saying. I've had it since I was little. Do you remember 999 with Michael Burke? Yeah. And I remember watching one about, it was an accident, about someone that got in a bath and like basically burnt their fucking feet off because they'd done hot water and then cold water on top rather than a mix of tap or anything. And so the first bit where they put their feet in was fine. And then in the film, bang. And every time I run a bath, even though I've got mix of taps and I do it, every time I run a bath, I think of Michael Burke. Fair. I mean, thinking of... That's my own personal time. Now back to the case. Thinking, thinking of Michael Burke. The other thing I was going to say is that like, yeah, so the idea of fire, the idea of burns absolutely terrify me. And it's partly because of a personal story where an uncle of mine was really badly burnt when he was a long distance lorry driver. And this is the man that we used to say had nine lives until he didn't. But he was a long distance lorry driver. He was there with his son. He'd happened to take my cousin with him on the road for this particular trip. And something happened with the van and he went to go and fix it. He was covered in fuel and there was a spark. We don't know where the spark came from, but there was a spark. He was set on fire. And like, my cousin was on 999. Really? There was an episode where they covered it. I think it was. I think it was 999. It must have been 999. But he was also on like, you know, they used to do that Pride of Britain. He got one of them as well because he saved my my uncle. That's amazing. Yeah. This is also the man who managed to impale himself on a tree stump. So, like, there's many lives, the nine lives of my uncle. The real thing. Anyway, bless him. He's no longer with us. The nine lives caught up with him. But anyway. If anyone deserves to rest peacefully, then. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. There we go. You've done enough, my friend. Miss you, Den. Anyway, so that has always scared me because growing up and knowing that story and like, you know, and my uncle. I don't know that I ever saw his burns. When I think when it had happened, he had this massive big bushy beard. So anything that may have been visible at the time, like, wasn't I didn't see it because he had this massive beard. And then as he got older, I don't know that I ever saw it anyway. Like that whole idea of fire and burning has kind of been in my psyche for many, many years. And but the interesting thing is that like, I associate burns with fire. And one of the things that I, I love not the best time to say it, but I absolutely adore a hot bath. Yeah, it's my favourite thing to do when I am stressed out. I get into a bath and Will would joke that I have baths that are hotter than the sun. I think a lot of women have warmer baths than men. So I don't actually think it's that hot. But it was really interesting when I had the girls, because the moment that there's hot water that goes into that bath, if it's something that I'm running for them, you can absolutely bet your bottom dollar that I am like, no, we'll just put more cold. The poor thing shivering in this ice bath, just like this is fine. We're wellness. We're wellness. Exactly. But it is because I'm, I know how I like my baths. So but I also then think that potentially like I don't necessarily realise when they're too hot for the kids. Yeah, so I'd rather it be freezing cold. Because that's not gonna hurt you. Like we just give you a wash and then I'll give you a hug and it'll be fine. Like, you know, I would rather that than risk putting too much hot water in because I know that I like a hot bath. So therefore it could be and they are younger with more delicate skin and all the rest of it. So that's it's just the idea that you could hold a child in when they're screaming is also no. One of the things and I don't know that you will know the answer to this. But one of the interesting questions that kind of cropped up to me when you were talking was when the trial was talking about whether or not it was just that she was negligent, or that she'd been held in the water. Like, were there any did she have any burns? Not that there was any fine. Well, not that I found any documented evidence of Yeah. And I think the way that they knew, I kind of left this out a bit. So like trigger warning, but like, the way they knew that she'd been held is like, it was like, the 50% of her body is her lower half of right, fine, fine. So they actually sat in, like held in a seated right position. Yeah, so potentially held by the shoulders. Yeah. Oh, I just, but it would have been too hot for her to for Janice to put her hands in. Yeah. But I also wonder if there was a potentially, as you were saying before, like, if you spill something on you, you get the splashes. Yeah. I wonder if potentially, because she was older, if any of the hot water from Andrea struggling in the water potentially, like it would have been smaller drops of water. So the burns might not have been anywhere near as bad. And she's slightly older. So you know, but I just, I, I cannot fathom the idea of, I can't, I can't understand people who hurt children, I cannot get my head around. And I'm glad I can't understand it. Yes, thank God. But like, even as a mom of a five year old, very rambunctious little girl who causes me no grief. I understand how stressful it can be looking after kids, I can understand how fraught you can get. I understand the level of like, anger, you can find yourself coming close to. But I would never, no normal person would and I get that. But the where does that come from? That you think, I know, this is what I'm going to do as a punishment. I think and they was trying to like, pull it out of the story as well as like, she was already being very abusive. So like, Andrea wasn't allowed to go to wasn't meant to go to school that day, like, but she had to stay at home and clean. She was five. Fucking hell, like she had slipped out to try and find her brother because she didn't want to be alone at home with Janice. And it's just like the beatings. I mean, I was careful about how I said it because there's a lot of documented evidence about Desmond's or from Desmond's account of the abuse he suffered at her hands. I'm assuming it was both the belts with the cigarettes with biting, biting, like with making the meat count food, like all of that, like horrible, horrible abuse. I just it's and I understand that she was a teenager. So like some reports have her I mean, 18, 19. Right. I understand she's a teenager. I understand that I did all of us do stupid things when we're looking back. I don't know what I thought I was doing there. But there's a big difference between putting synthetic dreadlocks in your hair and doing ridiculous things. I think most of us looking back about not erroneous behaviour when we were that age, it's very self inflicted. Yeah, exactly. It's like it's not I'm going to put my cigarette out on someone's skin. But also what gets me and I'm assuming we don't know from Desmond senior because he is no longer here. One, why the fuck you with an 18, 19 year old? But we'll put that aside for a second. Because, you know, let's let's look at the we'll ignore the lesser of the two evils that we're discussing. How what I'd be really interested in knowing is like, if the kids are saying or if Desmond junior is saying that it was all done in the times when no one was watching, it was all done behind closed doors, like how fucking sneaky. And it's exactly as you've said, it's not someone who's just got a loss of control. And it's just like, you are purposefully like that. And there is so much terror that comes with that. The idea that this snake like, yeah, you're a young girl, but you know fully well how to behave when to behave like to get to be able to do what you want to do your own disgraceful sordid agenda. And I get that she must have had like, you know, from her own again, is she a reliable narrator? But from her own background and her own childhood, like I can understand that there is possibly a learnt behaviour. I don't know to what level her home life was. It just is that it wasn't nice. And I wasn't about to buy the book. But like, you know, regardless, and I know that, you know, there is this thing of in some respects, not all before I say this, but like, you know, abused people, hurt people, hurt people. Yeah, they hurt people. In some cases, not all cases. But like, would an 18 year old come up with that sort of stuff on her own? Is she reenacting what she saw as parenting? Like, I mean, it doesn't excuse it at all. But it's just, where does that come from? How do you get that level of sadism? Such a young and it is it's what she did is sadistic. And I'm with you. I don't know that any sort of redemption can save her from that. Like, yes, she did. It's just a really interesting juxtaposition between like, this woman who had professed to, like I said, put the worst parts of her up to the light to be examined. Yeah. And like, built a career out of this narrative of, you know, don't be like me. Let me help you not be like me. I'm not like me anymore. And that can one just miss a great swathe of fucking, you know, like, to be cynical about it, it would have fucking helped her case if in her book, she'd mentioned it being an accident. Yeah, 100%. 100%. Like to miss it out entirely, speaks to something more dangerous to me. Yeah, 100%. She doesn't want people to know she doesn't want it being looked into again. Or she doesn't think about it. No, she doesn't. Oh, 100%. It didn't matter to her. It's like that case of that woman in America. I don't know her name. I don't know. I've ever known her name. I've just read it on articles on the internet. But the woman who wrote a book to help her children overcome the death of their father. And it was all about grief. And she's published this book about grief and managing grief in kids. And then it came out that she killed him. Oh, wow. No, I haven't read it. Oh, I'll find you. I'll put a link on the show notes as well for it. But it's like that. It's I don't know, there's just that you're right, hiding it and keeping it out entirely. It's either that she doesn't think about it at all, which to be fair, I don't know that she would have done. Or she's persuaded herself over so many years that it was an accident. She's believing her own lies. Or it's that she doesn't want people digging around asking questions again. And I wonder, just because of the timings. So her book came out in 2021. And then Desmond goes to the police in 2022. Do we think there's some? There was some. There was some writing around it that was like, maybe it pissed him off. Yeah. But there's also it kind of coincides with his father's death. I see. So potentially, it's that person has gone. They can't be hurt by this information. Or like, I don't know, there wasn't a lot out there. And maybe it will come out. Yeah. I'm assuming that now, you know, there will be like, once she's sentenced, there'll be restrictions lifted on reporting stuff. And like, Desmond will be able to have, if he wants it, have more freedom to talk about it publicly. But I don't know if it was like a protecting his dad thing. Or if it was like, that person can't hurt me now that they've died. So therefore, I can tell the truth now. I don't know. I mean, to me, there was nothing that particularly pointed to the fact that the dad was abusive or anything like that, unless I just couldn't. Yeah, which potentially could be true, allegedly. But I do wonder if the fact that you've got Desmond Jr. saying that like, she would inflict this abuse on him, at least him that we know of, assuming Andrea as well, when it was out of sight, does make me think that potentially, the dad didn't know about it. Or if he did have an inkling, I don't know that he knew how much was happening. I would be interested to find out how long their relationship lasted after Andrea. That's what again, it was all a bit murky, because Desmond does move to America and starts a new life and all of this. Junior? Yeah. So yeah, it wasn't clear that there was much of a relationship. But again, we don't know. Yeah. But I just think it'd be interesting to know whether Senior and Janice, how long they stayed together after Andrea's death. And whether... I mean, she was just in that prison. Yeah. But that's the thing. I wonder if it was like, after it happened, that's the end of it. He can't look past it. It's his daughter's death. Even if he believed that it was an accident. Can't really get over that level of negligence. I mean, even like, much more established relationships would suffer and crumble under that kind of pressure. Let alone with a teenager. Yeah. And we don't know how old he was. And a troublesome teenager. Yeah, exactly. He was older. Well, to have an eight and a five-year-old, he must have been, well, I don't know, but in the 70s. Potentially. Anyway. Oh, dear me. Well, that was another episode full of horror and fear. And I thank you for it because it is what we do here. But also, I hope everyone's right. Yeah. Sorry, guys. Not a nice story. I'd say I would do a fun one. But it's a bloody true crime podcast. So we won't. There shan't be a fun one. We've done the Jolly Jumpers and we've done the Millennium Dome Diamond Heist. I don't know any others that we can do that are fun. But we'll see. We'll see. Okay, cool. Well, I think that's all we've got time for, really. It is. Thank you again for all your hard work. You're very welcome. I appreciate you. And Trevor's, we've done all the nice bits. So come and chat to us. You know where we are. We'll see you next week. See you next week, guys. Look after yourselves and each other. I love it when you go with Jerry Springer. I know. Right, Trev's. Love you. Love you. Goodbye. Bye.