Girl, 5, said 'this is too hot mummy' as 'killer forced her into scalding bath'

A five-year-old girl cried "this is too hot, mummy" before being forced into a tub of scalding water that killed her, a court has heard. Janice Nix, 67, is accused of manslaughter by putting Andrea Bernard in a hot bath as a form of punishment when they lived in Thornton Heath, south London, in 1978. The little girl's death was treated as an accident until her older brother, Desmond Bernard, went to police in 2022, Isleworth Crown Court heard. Giving evidence on Thursday, Mr Bernard, now 56, said Nix regularly beat the children, even for not folding their clothes "to her standards". Jurors heard that on June 6, 1978, Nix was "furious" after Andrea ignored instructions not to leave the house and to help clean instead. Mr Bernard told the court he heard shouting after the bath was run. He said: "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 'get in the bath, get in the bath' and then I heard screaming and splashing. "Then I heard the screaming stopped and I could hear Janice calling Andrea to 'wake up, wake up'." Mr Bernard said that earlier in the day when they were walking home from school his sister had told him that she was in trouble and wanted to go to their grandmother's house. He said: "I said no, I wasn’t sure how we would get there because we would have to take the bus and because I wasn’t in trouble I wasn’t concerned enough." When they arrived home, Nix shouted at Andrea in an "extremely loud" voice before beating her and running the bath, the court heard. Asked by prosecutor Kerry Broome how Nix sounded after the bath incident, he replied: "She sounded scared." Mr Bernard said he then entered the bathroom and saw Nix cradling Andrea, who was "limp" and wrapped in a towel. He added: "I could see skin falling off her." Asked whether Nix said anything, Mr Bernard replied: "She asked me to say it was an accident… and to say that we were in the garden when it happened and that she would never beat me again." Asked what he did, he said: "I lied, I told everyone that story." Asked why, Mr Bernard replied: "Because I didn’t feel protected, I just wanted it to stop." He told jurors he lived in "constant fear" of Nix’s beatings and did not tell anyone because he feared being "punished more". Mr Bernard said the account he gave to the coroner at Andrea’s inquest was "just a story" fed to him by Nix. Nix - who was called Janice Thomas at the time and in her late teenage years - had been in a relationship with the children’s father, also named Desmond Bernard, and was in effect their stepmother, the court heard. Mr Bernard recalled that when he and Andrea first met Nix, they were “very rude” to her, telling her she “wasn’t our mother”. He said Andrea also hit her with a small tennis racket. Asked why, he replied: “I guess we were confused about the situation and here’s this person that we don’t even know in our house.” Mr Bernard said the next day Nix beat both children by “slapping” them after their father had left the house. He added: “It was hard, harder than I had ever felt before.” Asked what Nix told them, he replied: "That she wasn’t going to stand for that, and there was nothing we could do, and if we were to tell our dad we would get it worse." Speaking about why he decided to tell others about his sister's death, Mr Bernard said: "I couldn’t carry on dealing with it, so that’s what I did." He added: "To place this burden where it should go." Nix, of Clapham, south London, denies manslaughter and cruelty to Mr Bernard between October 1975 and June 1978. The trial continues.