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From Griffith REVIEW Edition 22: MoneySexPower
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Jonathan Raban
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Jonathan Raban's biography and other articles by this writer
As Barack Obama never tires of saying, America is a country where ‘ordinary people can do extraordinary things'. In January 2006, Neil Entwistle, a seemingly ordinary twenty-seven-year-old Englishman with an honours degree from the University of York who had been living in the United States for barely four months, shot dead his American wife, Rachel, and their baby daughter, Lillian, with a long-barrelled Colt .22 revolver borrowed from his father-in-law's gun collection. By the time the bodies were discovered in their house in Hopkinton, Massachusetts, huddled together beneath a rumpled duvet in the brand-new four-poster bed bought by the couple just ten days earlier, Entwistle was home in England, living with his parents in Worksop, as if what had happened in America was a violent dream from which he'd woken to reality in his old back bedroom at 27 Coleridge Road.
For several days, it seemed that he was going to get away with it. The police then had no weapon and no motive. People who knew the Entwistles remembered them as a happy couple, with Neil as the ideal doting father. Their family website, rachelandneil.org, still eerily preserved at web.archive.org, is a Hallmark card-style commercial for wedded bliss, decorated with sepia-toned bridal sprays and full of pictures of the Mediterranean cruise, the weekend trip to Martha's Vineyard, and baby Lillian at every stage of her nine months of life. Its home page is addressed to ‘Dearest family and friends' and is signed ‘Love, the happy family'.
Neil was described as ‘not a suspect', then later as a ‘person of interest'. The case against him wasn't helped by a careless mistake on the part of the police. On the night of Saturday, January 21, some hours after Entwistle's plane had landed at Heathrow, Rachel's mother called the Hopkinton Police Department to say that her daughter hadn't turned up for a lunch date that day, and wasn't answering the phone. Officers made a ‘wellbeing check' of the house at 6 Cubs Path, upstairs and down, but found nothing amiss. The next morning, two of Rachel's friends borrowed a key from a neighbour and made their own search, but it wasn't until 5.30 pm on Sunday that the police, going through the place for a second time, smelled a ‘foul odour' and traced it to what lay beneath the duvet. After the news of the murders broke, American cable stations paraded a chorus of defence attorneys and legal experts who deplored the botched forensics of the crime scene, explained the demanding subtleties of extradition from the United Kingdom, and forecast that Neil Entwistle could well live out the rest of his days in Worksop.
Had he not driven back to his in-laws' house in Carver, Massachusetts and replaced the revolver, he might be in Worksop now. But tests on the Colt, done on February 8, identified it as the murder weapon and connected it with Entwistle. On February 9, three weeks after the killings, he was charged in the United States on two counts of first-degree murder, and arrested by police from Scotland Yard at Royal Oak tube station in London. He waived his right of appeal against extradition and was flown back to Boston in the custody of the US police. After a long-delayed trial, he was sentenced on June 26, 2008 to two concurrent life terms without parole; passing sentence, the judge told him that his crimes ‘defy comprehension'.
Early in the investigation, the local district attorney, Martha Coakley, suggested on national television that Entwistle had probably planned a murder-suicide, but that his courage had failed when it came to pulling the trigger on himself. This possibility was never discussed at the trial (the prosecution avoided it because it might have led the jury to feel some shred of sympathy for Entwistle, while the defence settled, feebly, on an implausible tale of how Rachel had killed herself and her baby while her husband was out shopping). But it remains the nearest thing to a comprehensible explanation of Entwistle's extraordinary behaviour that morning.