Briton Neil Entwistle was living the American dream, much to the envy of his pals back home. The working-class son of a former coalminer, he appeared to have it all: a loving wife and beautiful infant daughter, a five-bedroom colonial-style house in a leafy Massachusetts suburb, a BMW X3 sports utility in the garage and a solid income as a prosperous computer programmer.
A sentimental family website he compiled completed the ideal picture of his new life, portraying a Disney-esque family cocooned in a picket-fence paradise, a young couple blessed with good fortune and domestic bliss. Entwistle appeared to embody the ambitions of every immigrant from humble roots for whom the United States of America had rolled out the welcome mat.
Emails boasted of the kind of comfortable, materialistic life which had eluded him in England: the kid from the gritty pit town of Worksop in Nottinghamshire flourishing in a country where class and background were no bar to success.
However, the reality could not have been further from the cloying image of contentment painted by the desperate husband. By New Year 2006, the twenty-seven-year-old entrepreneur was floundering in $30,000 debt, jobless and relying on his wife Rachel to keep up the payments on their rented home and leased car.
Credit cards had been frozen. Work prospects were zero. The down-payment on the three-month lease on their new home – the couple had been refused a six-month rental period – was made with bank-certified cheques because of his poor credit record.
The land of plenty had proved to be little more than a mirage. He was just another no-hoper adrift amidst the flotsam of financial wreckage.
His long, fruitless days were spent not in worthy enterprise but scouring sleazy websites for willing sex partners behind his wife’s back. A nightmare was unfolding in suburbia – poised to destroy forever the fictional fairytale life.
Entwistle was caught in a web of his own making, spun from the threads of lies and fantasy. Although his wife and daughter were the objects of his lavish affection, Rachel, aged twenty-seven, and his nine-month old daughter Lillian Rose had become little more than millstones around his neck, daily reminders of his abject failure as a spouse and a provider. Secrecy about the source of his money was causing friction between himself and Rachel and they had frequently argued over money.
On Friday, 20 January, while Rachel and Lillian lay entwined upstairs in a four-poster bed, Entwistle ostensibly left on an early-morning errand to a local shopping mall. He was on an errand of sorts – a sinister hour-long journey to the home of Priscilla and Joe Matterazzo, Rachel’s mother and stepfather, at Carver, fifty miles south of Boston, where he stole a .22-calibre long-barrelled Colt revolver from his father-in-law’s reinforced gun cabinet.
On returning to his home at 6 Cubs Path in the upscale community of Hopkinton, which Neil and Rachel had moved into only ten days earlier, the young man regarded by his American relatives as the ‘perfect English gentleman’ crept silently upstairs and entered the master bedroom, his father-in-law’s gun clutched in his hand.
Rachel’s arms were cradled around Lillian as they slept. He shot his wife once through the head at near point-blank range. Seconds later, he fired a second shot into the baby’s stomach, the bullet passing straight through the tiny, defenceless body and lodging in Rachel’s left breast. Then he threw a pillow over Lillian’s face and drew a duvet over their heads to conceal them from view as their blood oozed into the mattress. Rachel’s arm was still stretched across the baby’s chest, as though she was reaching out to protect her from a man who should have been the very last person to have harmed them…
It said everything about his ego that he took this way out. Prosecutors and police to this day still do not fully understand why he didn’t simply pack his bags and walk, never to return. But, rather than accept his new life was a cynical charade, built on a crumbling foundations, Entwistle opted for murder in the most cowardly and heartless manner.
In the immediate aftermath of the killings, Entwistle calmly checked his email messages before driving to the Matterazzos’ home. Using his copy of the front-door key, he entered the empty house and carefully replaced the weapon in his father-in-law’s gun safe.
From there, he drove to Boston’s Logan International Airport; he arrived at 8.14 p.m. and abandoned the rented white BMW in a car park. He frantically attempted a number of withdrawals from two separate ATM machines using different overdrawn credit cards, twice finding them rejected, before collecting $800 – the only credit he had remaining – to buy a one-way ticket to London. He then boarded BA flight 0238 to Heathrow, without any luggage, his only clothes the ones he was wearing.
Entwistle, in the parlance of the police, was ‘in the wind’. On the run from a ghastly crime whose repercussions will be felt on both sides of the Atlantic for many decades to come.
At home, the victims initially remained undiscovered because of careless police work. When Rachel failed to turn up for a lunch date with her worried mother the following day, Saturday, 21 January, officers carried out a ‘well-being’ search of the property – but did not locate the bodies because they were hidden beneath the bedclothes and overlooked. The TV was on, music was playing in the baby’s bedroom, and everything looked normal.
Two close women friends of Rachel invited to a dinner party at the Entwistle home had also looked around the house after getting a key from a neighbour, but came away empty handed. So concerned had they been for her welfare that they remained parked outside the property all night in case Rachel should turn up.
On the urging of the Matterazzo family, whose fears were growing every hour they could not contact Rachel, detectives returned to undertake another search at 5.30 p.m. on Sunday. By now, the foul odour of decomposition was filling the house, marking it as a scene of death.
In the bedroom, on pulling back the duvet, they exposed a horror show. Tiny Lillian lay on her back in blood-drenched pink polka-dot pyjamas and a white babygro, a bullet hole torn through the middle. Gunshot burns showed the barrel of the Colt had been pressed against the baby’s abdomen. Rachel lay on her left side in the foetal position. Wounds indicated she had died from a shot fired inches from her forehead. Blood had splattered across the pillows and on the wall.
As the case began to unfold in the glare of a frenzied media spotlight, the prime suspect in the double murder was already 3,000 miles away, concocting a bizarre and unbelievable alibi to explain his actions.
On landing at Heathrow, he’d hired a Budget rental car and then embarked on a mysterious, inexplicable 800-mile, thirty-six-hour trip around England trying to collect his thoughts before arriving exhausted and fraught at his parents’ home in Kilton, Worksop, where he holed up for the following two weeks besieged by a battery of reporters and TV cameras.
Where he had travelled during this time remains a mystery. His parents’ home is some 160 miles from the airport.
The fugitive could rely completely on his close-knit and adoring family. To his father Cliff, an ex-miner and local Labour councillor, and doting mother Yvonne, a school dinner lady, their lad Neil’s version of events would never be doubted. He was simply not capable of murder. There must have been a dreadful mistake… there had to be another rational explanation for how their daughter-in-law and grandchild were murdered in such savage fashion.
Neil was being unfairly accused, they concurred, railroaded by a grandstanding US judicial system and a rush-to-judgement police force seeking a scapegoat for the terrible events. In time, he would clear his name.
Within three days of Neil’s panicked flight from the US, the phone rang in Cliff Entwistle’s home. It was the first of two calls made by State Trooper Robert Manning, a member of the murder investigation squad which by now was one hundred per cent confident that Neil was the only suspect in the frame for Rachel and Lillian’s killings.
Neil Entwistle agreed to take Manning’s call, and a subsequent one, knowing they were being tape-recorded. Over a total of two hours, he blurted out an extraordinary story, starting when he got up at 7 a.m. to feed Lillian before leaving to run some errands. On returning from the shopping trip around 11 a.m. and getting no response to his calls, he first checked the baby’s bedroom and then the main bedroom.
‘I walked in, I couldn’t see Lilly, I could only see Rachel on the bed and she just looked asleep,’ he said hesitantly in a flat Northern voice. ‘The covers were partially up. At first there didn’t look anything wrong but why would she have been in bed at that time and where was Lilly?
‘The first thing I noticed was her colour, she was pale, and then as I got closer I could see the blood and that was when I saw Lilly. The top half of her face was out. I pulled the covers back and – ah, ah – that’s when I saw Lilly. Lilly was such a mess. I couldn’t see any blood on Rachel, it was all on Lilly. Her whole nose and mouth were covered, as if they were bubbles. It was obvious they weren’t alive.’
‘I don’t remember seeing the house disturbed,’ he added.
Entwistle claimed he staggered downstairs to the kitchen in a trance-like state, in such anguish he intended taking a kitchen knife from a wooden block to kill himself, but couldn’t go through with it, fearing the pain of dying slowly from stab wounds.
‘Why did you want to kill yourself?’ asked Manning.
Entwistle responded, ‘That was my wife and baby in bed.’
He went on, ‘Looking back on it, I don’t know why I did the things I did. Once I kind of realised what happened I think in most situations I would just look and break down but that’s not what went through my mind.
‘The first thing I wanted to do was do something to myself. I pondered on that and then got into the car to drive towards Carver.’ His plan, he said, was to get hold of Joe’s gun and commit suicide but, having got lost en route, he eventually found the house unoccupied and was unable to gain entry.
‘I’m not sure what was going through my mind at that point. I needed to stop somewhere and get things clear in my head. I ended up at Logan airport. I wanted to let the emotions out but nothing would come out.’
Midway through the conversation, Entwistle made a startling admission, telling the disbelieving officer, ‘I haven’t even cried yet. Not properly. I shed a few tears. There are little presents here from Lillian [Rachel would write notes on the presents for her], crystals people can hang in their windows and she wrote a little note: “When you see these sparkle, think of me”… I watch them hang on the conservatory door here and I start to cry… but there are no tears.
‘I don’t know what I’m thinking at the moment. It’s almost because I am here, it doesn’t seem real. It’s almost a void.’
At this point, the police officer interjected abruptly, ‘It’s real, OK? Something happened over here. I can tell you, I have a hard time understanding why you didn’t call 911. Was there any situation at the house that could have caused you to immediately call police saying you wanted to kill yourself? I’m not saying you did anything. I’m trying to rule out possibilities of what could have taken place.’
‘No, no,’ Entwistle stuttered, his voice pitched higher. ‘I wouldn’t do that. Why would I do that?’
‘There could be a billion reasons, maybe no reason,’ responded the officer bluntly.
Entwistle asked the investigator whether he believed Rachel and Lillian had suffered. Told the deaths had been quick, Entwistle commented that it was ‘almost like peace of mind’ to hear that because the state of Lillian’s body had suggested to him her death had been more prolonged.
Rachel’s sixty-one-year-old stepfather Joe also made frantic trans-Atlantic calls to Entwistle to try to get at the truth of what happened at 6 Cubs Path, pleading for candour. He described his son-in-law as ‘shaken, nervous, whimpering’ on the phone – and how he seemed to implicate himself in the murders.
‘He asked me if Rachel and Lillian could be buried together because he said “that’s the way I left them… I mean, that’s the way I found them”,’ recalled Joe.
It became obvious, too, that Entwistle had given a conflicting version of events to his parents. In a conversation between his father and Joe, Cliff said of his son, ‘He had gone out twenty minutes on Friday morning… came back to the house… found his wife and daughter in the bedroom… called the police.’
A call the police never got.
At the same time, damning evidence had begun to emerge from Entwistle’s computer at the couple’s Hopkinton home, contradicting the public face of his happy marriage to Rachel. A sordid secret life of deceit was unearthed in records stored on his Toshiba laptop. In the days before the murder, he’d used a swingers’ website to contact local women for casual sex, seemingly having become bored with his unexciting marital sex life.
His profile on the adultfriendfinder.com site (motto: join today and make love tonight) boasted: ‘I am an Englishman just moved over to the US. I am looking for 1 on 1 discreet relationships with American ladies and always aim to make all experiences ones to remember. I am looking to meet American women of all ages. I need to confirm what friends have told me that you are much better in bed than women over the ocean.’
Accompanying his overheated sex-search ad was a graphic photo showing him lying naked on an outside sun lounger, his penis fully erect.
He had also contacted prostitute agencies with names like Eye Candy Entertainment, Exotic Express, Blonde Beauties, Half Price Escorts and Escort Express and had printed out maps of their locations.
Entwistle not only trawled the darker recesses of the internet for quickie sex. Death and murder had also been weighing on his mind. Three days before Rachel and Lillian were slain, Entwistle performed Google information searches for ‘knife in neck’, ‘kill’ and ‘quick suicide method’. One document he downloaded traced the major arteries in the human body with the narrative: ‘So you may be thinking why go for the aorta, why not the heart? Because this is not the movies and it’s hard to stab through a human ribcage.
‘If you ever get a clear shot of the torso you’d best to stab ’em in it just below the ribcage.’
It had taken just seven years for Entwistle to degenerate from courteous and caring lover to a twisted husband plotting with sociopathic coolness to dispose of his wife and baby.
Rachel Souza and Neil Entwistle had fallen deeply in love in 1999 while undergraduates at York University in England, where she was a visiting junior student from a Massachusetts college and he was studying for a masters degree in electronic engineering.
Bringing an American-style fizz and energy into the campus, she busied herself with many extracurricular activities, offering to cox the rowing fours and eights. On the team was Entwistle, noted as a strong, vital oarsman, although seemingly shy and socially withdrawn. Romance blossomed between them as she crouched in the stern screaming the sweating, flailing York team – the Blades – across the finishing line on the River Ouse. Healthy, outdoors activity; simple, student fun.
Petite Rachel remained blinded by love to the more disturbing aspects of his character. When they married in August 2003, her family had been persuaded she’d found a sturdy and dependable English gentleman, a ‘knight in armour’.
At first they remained in England following his graduation from university, settling in the Worcestershire town of Droitwich on a bland housing estate so he could take a short-lived job with the government’s defence and armaments contractor Qinetiq. Rachel, meanwhile, found a post teaching English and drama at a girls’ Catholic secondary school.
In a posting on the Friends Reunited website shortly before his wedding, comprehensive schoolboy Entwistle proclaimed: ‘Got an M.Eng (Hons) in Electronic Engineering with Business Management from York. Rowed through my degree – proud to be that white rose. Showed those public-school wankers how to do it properly. Making bombs and other stuff for a living – would tell you more but I’d have to kill you.
‘Getting married to the most amazing woman in the world this summer: Rachel. She’s from the good ol’ US. We met through rowing. She was my cox, I her stroke!’
Their daughter Lillian Rose was born on 9 April 2005. By now homesick for her family, Rachel got Neil’s agreement that they would relocate to Massachusetts. She exhorted him to fulfil his cramped ambitions, having told her mother that Entwistle would ‘never amount to anything in England because of his accent – he was obviously a coalminer’s son from a working-class background’.
Priscilla and Joe warmly offered them lodgings at their home in the township of Carver until the young couple got on their feet. It was also a chance for the grandparents to willingly babysit Lillian any time Rachel and Neil wanted a night out.
It was while living with the Matterazzos for four months that Entwistle had his first experience with guns. Joe would take him to a local shooting club. There he first handled the .22-calibre pistol keen sportsman Joe would normally keep locked in the gun safe.
Training sessions resulted in Entwistle becoming a more than accomplished shot. He learned how to fire accurately, both hands gripped around the handle, breathing steady and controlled, knees slightly bent.
Inside the Old Colony Sportsmen’s club, protected by reinforced glasses and sound-deadening ear muffs, he experienced the power of being absolutely in control. Outside, the world was one of crushing disillusionment, a stale marriage beset with money problems, continued unemployment and thwarted dreams, but here he was in charge.
Back home after a beer in a nearby saloon, he watched Joe carefully replace the guns in the safe. He knew exactly where the key was kept for the arsenal. The .22 Colt was light, easy to use and deadly – at short range.
His murder weapon of choice was in easy reach. Entwistle knew the Matterazzos’ daily movements, when they would be at home or out. And when he and Rachel moved away and took a $2,700-a-month rental on the Hopkinton house, he kept his in-laws’ house keys.
By the time he took that fateful early-morning drive to Carver in his leased $500-a-month BMW, Entwistle was in deep trouble with creditors. Little income was filtering into Entwistle’s accounts and his financial situation was worsening. As well as registering his own name on the websites and that of his wife, he also used the alias Mark Smith. The Hopkinton house had become a pressure cooker ready to explode.
With police suspicions already focusing directly on Neil Entwistle, following his bizarre behaviour in the immediate aftermath of the murders, they were doubly reinforced when he failed to return for the funerals of Rachel and Lillian at St Peter’s in Plymouth, Massachusetts – a mere seven weeks after the baby was baptised in the font of the same church. Murder investigators were convinced he was deliberately evading arrest by keeping out of the country.
The only acknowledgement from the Entwistle family of the heart-breaking 1 February ceremony were three floral tributes purchased over the phone by the suspect everyone by now held responsible for the slaughter. The first request was for an orange rose and a lily tied with a single ribbon. The second order of flowers came with a card that read, almost as an afterthought, ‘My Orange Rose and My Lilly, for always xxx.’
Another $100 arrangement of white and pink lilies and roses was paid for by credit card, with the message: ‘To Rachel and our precious grand-daughter if tears could build a stairway and memories a lane we would walk right up to heaven and bring you home again. Love always, Yvonne Grandma, Cliff, Granddad, uncy Russie, kisses.’
Neil’s name was never featured. Neither was the word Daddy.
Rather less sentimentally, Entwistle faxed the coroner’s office relinquishing all burial arrangements to Rachel’s immediate family, as well as contacting the lawyer representing the owners of his rented home saying he had no interest in either taking repossession or retrieving any of the contents. It seemed, if he had his way, he was never coming back.
Priscilla and Joe Matterazzo supported each other as they walked behind the coffin, surrounded by family and friends, three hundred mourners sharing their grief. The casket containing both bodies was draped in a white cloth, to symbolise the mother and daughter’s dignity, and embroidered with brown and green leaves.
Bitter tears flowed, combined with mounting rage at the fugitive and his hollow tributes. The minister conducting the funeral mass, the Rev William McKenzie, summed up the feelings boiling to the surface as he intoned, ‘There is evil among us. Hold dear the memories of Rachel and Lillian.’
Two male family friends softly sang a lullaby after Rachel’s friends recalled a woman who was an inspirational teacher and deeply devoted and caring mother.
A week after the victims were laid to rest, the first moves were launched to return Entwistle to face justice. An international arrest warrant was issued by the local district attorney’s office. He had officially become a wanted man.
Officials at the US embassy in London passed on the warrant to Scotland Yard when it was learned he had suddenly left his parents’ home ‘to take the pressure off them’ and taken a train to London, to meet up with two old university pals, hedge fund manager Benjamin Pryor and music producer Dashiel Munding, both former members of the York Blades rowing club.
Over meals out and drinks in Munding’s Notting Hill flat, where he was bedding down, nervous Entwistle poured out his troubles to his concerned friends. They discussed ways of trying to help him. On one occasion, in a bid to cheer him up, they watched a film together, Fun with Dick and Jane.
‘He was not himself,’ recalled Benjamin of his friend’s final hours of freedom. ‘He was very upset. He was playing with his wedding band. He was not the happy-go-lucky guy he had been in the past. He said his financial situation was perilous and that he had taken out a very large mortgage and bought a car and was thinking of filing for bankruptcy here and in the US.
‘He was no longer working and everything on a financial level had come apart.’
In a conversation with Pryor, he told how he had returned home to find his wife and child dead and was so devastated he got a knife to commit suicide before driving to his inlaws’ Carver home to kill himself with a gun.
When he found the house empty, Entwistle said he went to look for the Matterazzo family to tell them what had happened and, after breaking the news to the mother, called the state police.
But Entwistle recounted a different version of events to Dashiel Munding, who was told that, after finding the bodies, Entwistle headed straight for the Matterazzo home to ‘ensure the guns were secure and nothing was wrong and nothing was missing’. Priscilla, Entwistle asserted, was the first he told about Rachel and Lillian’s deaths before alerting the police.
Explaining to Dashiel why he fled the country, he said he felt ‘isolated in his grief and wanted to get away from the Matterazzos to be with his own family… he wanted support from them’.
Two murders, and four – or maybe more – different accounts to his friends, his parents, the police. Each lie growing with the telling. Entwistle was being sucked down into a quicksand of lies, half-truths, evasions. He could not face the ultimate, terrible truth – that he himself had pulled the trigger on his own flesh and blood.
After a few days, Dashiel Munding persuaded his old student pal it would probably be best for him to return to his family in Nottingham and they said their farewells. He accompanied him to Ladbroke Grove tube station only to be contacted minutes later by a Scotland Yard detective, who said he wanted to speak to Entwistle. Munding returned to the station platform where he tried to persuade Entwistle to give himself up.
Ashen-faced, heart racing with fear, the fugitive demanded to know whether there was any way of getting off the platform before dashing on to an underground train to escape his pursuers. But police, knowing he might try to make a run for it, boarded the train a few stops down the line at Royal Oak station and he was arrested.
On 15 February 2006, handcuffed to an officer, Entwistle waived his right to fight extradition proceedings and was flown back to New England to await trial for first-degree murder at Middlesex Superior Court in Woburn, Massachusetts.
By the time Entwistle appeared for trial in June 2008 to plead not guilty to double homicide, the prosecution team of district attorneys led by state Attorney General Martha Coakley had compiled a devastating dossier irrefutably pointing to Entwistle’s guilt.
Piece by piece, prosecutor Michael Fabbri tore apart the tapestry of lies woven by the defendant, outlining the following glaring, damning discrepancies in his version of events:
Throughout the proceedings, Neil Entwistle displayed an icy calm and aloofness, his face an impassive mask. Only on a couple of occasions did he appear to show emotion, when videotape was played showing the bodies at the crime scene and when Lillian’s blood-stained pyjamas were held up for examination.
Observers found his demeanour unsettling, even spooky. The most powerful emotional testimony from witnesses appeared to leave him unmoved.
He left it to his defence attorney Elliot Weinstein to present his final account of what he claimed really happened, an outlandish, gruesome scenario which left the Matterazzo family sickened and outraged.
It was troubled Rachel, suffering from post-natal depression, who was responsible for the murder-suicide, the lawyer surmised. She had placed baby Lilly on her breast before shooting her and then put the gun to her own head and fired, claimed Mr Weinstein.
Having returned from his early-morning trip to fetch coffee, Entwistle discovered the bodies. Determined to ‘preserve and protect her memory’ by concealing her responsibility for the dreadful crime, he returned the gun to the Matterazzos’ home in a cover-up aimed at making police believe that she had not died at her own hands but by those of an intruder.
He did it for her, to spare her shame and eternal dishonour.
‘Everything Neil did after finding Rachel and Lilly in that bedroom he did because he loved them,’ Weinstein told the astonished courtroom. ‘He could not call the police because he could not tell them what Rachel did. He would not tell them. He would not tarnish Rachel’s memory. He drove to Carver and returned the .22-calibre. He could not tell Joseph and Priscilla what he had done. His purpose was to protect Rachel’s memory, to protect her honour.
‘Neil committed to not betraying Rachel’s memories. He could not do that to Rachel.’
Explaining why Entwistle took refuge across the ocean with his parents, Weinstein said, ‘Neil was distraught and devastated and needed to go home. His actions were those of a loving husband rather than those of someone who was thinking rationally, clearly and concisely.’
The very fact that he took off without a suitcase was further proof he hadn’t planned the murders. ‘He would not have been so totally unprepared to fly to London. Neil’s explanation that he needed to be home with his parents makes sense,’ the attorney concluded.
What motive did he have for killing his beloved wife and child? ‘Why would he do that?’ demanded Weinstein, pacing in front of the jury. ‘Because he went to internet sex sites? How many millions of people visit those sites each day? There’s no motive to kill the woman who by everyone’s account he shared a joyful, loving relationship with. Why would he do that?’
As for the Google searches of websites dealing with suicide, it was Rachel, he argued, who had sought that information before embarking on killing Lillian and herself.
Prosecutor Fabbri was quick to counter the murder-suicide theory, asking, ‘Why would Rachel commit suicide? She had her home, she had her car, she had her family and she thought she had a loving husband.’ Pointing directly at Entwistle, Mr Fabbri declared, ‘There’s only one man responsible for those murders and that man is sitting right there. He pulled that trigger twice.’
Entwistle killed them, he concluded, to hide his sordid life of financial and sexual deceit.
The jury of six men and six women took thirteen hours to reject Entwistle’s vile slurs and convict him of two counts of first-degree murder. As they delivered their verdicts, his mouth fell open and he shook his head from side to side in disbelief.
Before Entwistle was sentenced, Priscilla and Joe Matterazzo were allowed to address the court with their victim impact statements. They ferociously condemned the killer for tarnishing Rachel’s character in a bid to save his own miserable skin. Priscilla said,
Our dreams as a parent and a grandparent have been shattered by the shameful, selfish act of one person, Neil Entwistle. For him to have tried to hide behind an accusation of murder-suicide of this beautiful woman and perfect mother is low and despicable.
Joe and I, our families and Rachel’s friends, students here and in England were sentenced without the luxury of a trial by jury and now must go on with the eternity of emptiness.
Suffering does not begin to describe what we have been enduring without our beloved Rachel and Lillian, who gave our lives such purpose and meaning. I have lost two generations of my family. I would ask the court to impose two consecutive life sentences in the United States, acknowledging the lives of both Rachel and Lillian.
Joe kept his vilification of Entwistle short and blunt. ‘Neil, you have been judged today by a jury of your peers on earth,’ he told the man to whom he had entrusted his stepdaughter’s life, only to see it so cruelly snatched away. ‘But one day you will face the ultimate judgement of your horrific deeds and betrayals.’
In a painful, at times heart-rending attempt to force Entwistle to confront the scale of his crime, Rachel’s brother Jerome Souza described how the family faced a bereft future:
Each and every day we have to live with the heartache Neil’s betrayals brought to our family. We were always raised to know that family comes first. But now, when the family comes to visit, we can only recount what Rachel did and speculate on what Lilly might have done. We can telly Lilly’s cousins what happened to her… but we cannot tell them why.
All my cousins, brothers, sisters, will have to explain to their children why there’s a new picture in front of their frame at Grammy and Papa’s every year, but why Rachel and Lillian’s never change. The next generation will have to lose their innocence early when their parents can no longer put off their enquiries about Rachel and Lillian.
The harshest words for Entwistle were handed down by the judge, Diane Kottmyer, when she sentenced him to spend the rest of his life behind bars with no chance of parole.
‘These crimes were incomprehensible,’ she said. ‘They defy comprehension because they involve the planned and deliberate murders of the defendant’s wife and nine-month-old child in violation of the bonds that we recognise as central to our identity as human beings, those of husband and wife and parent and child.
‘What is all too clear and easily comprehended is the magnitude of the loss and the pain suffered by Rachel and Lillian Entwistle’s extended family.
‘The sentence for first-degree murder is fixed by law. It is life without the possibility of parole.’
Mindful of Entwistle’s plan to sell his story to a newspaper, Judge Kottmyer added a rider to the sentence, ruling he should not profit from his crime from any media outlet. As he was led away to start his full-life jail term, Entwistle mouthed, ‘I’ll be all right,’ to his loyal parents, who had sat throughout the proceedings together with his brother Russell, sometimes weeping as grisly evidence from the crime scene was exhibited.
However overwhelming the evidence of guilt had been against their son, Yvonne and Cliff Entwistle to the end never gave up proclaiming his innocence.
Outside the courtroom, his mother compounded the misery earlier heaped on the Matterazzo family by maintaining the theory Rachel executed her own nine-month-old baby.
‘We know that our son Neil is innocent and we are devastated to learn that the evidence points to Rachel murdering our grandchild and then committing suicide.
‘I know Rachel was depressed. Our son will now go to jail for loving, honouring and protecting his wife’s memory,’ she told the throng of TV crews.
Many months later, back in their Worksop home, Yvonne and Cliff Entwistle were still refusing to accept the verdict. To the contrary, they focused on Rachel’s post-natal depression, suggesting that during the previous Christmas festivities she was ‘subdued, not her bubbly self’.
Cliff Entwistle said, ‘The gunshot residue on Rachel’s hands could have suggested she fired the gun. And she was found with her left arm – she was left handed – flung out. We loved Rachel dearly, she was little Lilly’s mam, but in the grip of postnatal depression, she could have fired those shots. What torments us is that we believe one hundred per cent in Neil’s innocence. When we saw him after the guilty verdict he looked at me and said, “Dad, how could this have happened to me? I didn’t do it.” I know he was telling the truth. I know my son.’
The Entwistles maintain regular contact with heir son as he faces a lifetime confined in the deep snake-pit of an American jailhouse, a place from where he will only escape in a coffin. They write letters and occasionally make the long trip to the maximum-security jail where Neil is held. The double killer pleaded with his parents for photographs of Rachel and Lillian and asked that his ashes be scattered on their grave when he dies.
That will never happen as long as the Matterazzo family remain guardians of her memory. His vilified name, though, has been erased.
The pink granite headstone which marks the grave where Rachel is buried with Lillian in the same casket carries only her maiden name, Souza, above a memorial which reads: ‘God cries with us and with every tear is another I love you.’ A plot has been reserved alongside for Priscilla and Joe, with their birth dates already engraved on the marker.
Such deliberate snubbing of the Entwistle name leaves a bitter taste with Lillian’s English grandparents. ‘Lilly was christened an Entwistle, it was her birthright and they took it away from her,’ said a sobbing Yvonne, adding her own epitaph to a story of two families once united in joy and now split forever.
Rachel’s name, ironically, did mark the place where her deceiving husband her husband first started his lifelong sentence, the maximum-security Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center.
After receiving death threats from other inmates, however, he was transferred in December last year for his own security to the medium-security Old Colony prison, to be forever caged behind razor-wire fences.