Neil Entwistle pictured in 2008 (AP Photo/CJ Gunther, Pool, File), Rachel Entwistle and baby Lillian (Press Association via AP Images)
A British man convicted 15 years ago of murdering his wife and baby daughter at their Massachusetts home is once again pushing for a new trial, this time in a pro se petition complaining about a former holdout juror’s 2008 Dateline interview about how she changed her mind.
Neil Entwistle, now 45 and serving two life sentences without parole in state prison for murdering his 27-year-old wife Rachel Entwistle (née Souza) and their 9-month-old baby Lillian, apparently has not exhausted all of his appellate arguments, despite filing a petition with the U.S. Supreme Court in 2012 only to see that petition flatly rejected at the start of 2013.
On Aug. 23, filed several documents in the Massachusetts’ Supreme Judicial Court for Suffolk County, one of which was a petition for leave to appeal a denial of his motion for a new trial.
In that petition, Entwistle claimed that an “extraneous” crime scene “reenactment experiment” during deliberations, coupled with a juror’s statements in a 2008 post-verdict Dateline interview, are reason enough for a new trial.
Entwistle’s trial ended with jurors rejecting the defense contention that Rachel Entwistle perpetrated a murder-suicide with her father’s gun, taking the life of their 9-month-old baby Lillian and her own at the family’s Hopkinton home.
In reality, jurors ultimately determined, the evidence overwhelmingly showed that Neil Entwistle, a computer engineer, alone was to blame for the “unimaginable and unforgivable” family murders.
The case, which has been the subject of true crime documentaries, widely watched YouTube videos, and at least one book, established that Neil Entwistle shot and killed his wife and daughter and took a one-way flight to London while deep in debt and living a sex-obsessed double life.
Ashley Sousa, one of the last jurors to be convinced that this was not a murder-suicide case, spoke with Dateline after the trial and explained what swayed her.
“Rachel and I were both 5’2″. So if we had the same arm length and I held the gun from my head — from my face — and I shot myself, I would have burn marks all over my face,” Sousa said.
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The remarks came up again as part of Neil Entwistle’s latest attempt at convincing the world his trial was unfair.
Entwistle primarily argued in the typed petition brought and signed only by him that an “extraneous reenactment experiment” that played out during jury deliberations.
“I mean, post-partum depression is real. And as a mother, I can tell you it’s real,” the juror told Dateline. “And I’ve had post-partum, but we actually went through the crime scene in the deliberating room. I mean, we reenacted it and we went through.”
Entwistle asserted that this “extraneous reenactment experiment,” in which the juror compared her height to Rachel Entwistle’s and speculated about having the same arm length, denied him the “right to a decision based on the evidence at trial, governed by the rules of evidence” just to obtain a conviction.
“The jury’s reenactment of the crime scene involved trying different configurations of Rachel and Lillian Entwistle and of Rachel Entwistle’s holding of the gun, information not part of the evidence at trial,” the convicted double murderer argued. “The jury’s reenactment relied on the assumed equal arm length of Rachel Entwistle and a deliberating juror, information not part of the evidence at trial.”
The inmate insisted that the jurors improperly sent him off to prison for life by using the so-called “reenactment experiment ” to “resolve a key issue.”
“Ashley Sousa rendered her guilty verdict against the defendant based on information introduced by and conclusions drawn from the jury’s reenactment experiment of the crime scene,” the petition said.
You can read the petition in full here.
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