Neil Entwistle

Neil Entwistle (born 18 September 1978) is an English man convicted of murdering his American wife, Rachel, and their infant daughter, Lillian, on 20 January 2006, in Hopkinton, Massachusetts, United States.

He was sentenced to life imprisonment without parole and is incarcerated at Old Colony Correctional Center in Bridgewater, Massachusetts.

Neil Entwistle was born near Nottingham and attended the University of York, receiving a master's degree in electronic engineering.

He grew up in Worksop with his parents, Clifford and Yvonne, and his younger brother Russell.

Entwistle's home was working class; his father was a coal miner and his mother was a cook at a school canteen.

While at university, Entwistle met Rachel Souza, an American who was studying abroad.

They married on 23 August 2003, in Plymouth.

The couple moved to Worcestershire, where their daughter Lillian was born on 9 April 2005.

Entwistle worked in computing and his wife as a teacher of English, Drama and Theatre Studies at St. Augustine's Catholic High School in Redditch.

After migrating to the US, the couple stayed with Rachel's mother and stepfather, Joseph and Priscilla Matterazzo, in Carver, Massachusetts, before finding a house of their own in Hopkinton, located 26 miles (42 kilometers) west of Boston.

Contrary to outward appearances, Entwistle had been unemployed since September 2005 and was indebted at the time of the murders.

Though he claimed an income of $10,000 per month from an "offshore account" set up by his previous employer in the UK, Entwistle had no such income or account.

He was also more than $30,000 in credit card debt and was under investigation by eBay for numerous fraudulent transactions.

Authorities suspected a financial motivation for the murders.

On the evening of 21 January, the day after the murders are believed to have been committed, police officers visited the Entwistles' home after Rachel's friend reported her missing.

Though the police conducted a cursory inspection of the house, they failed to notice Rachel's and Lillian's bodies, obscured under a pile of bedding in the master bedroom.

A second and more thorough search the following evening discovered their bodies.

On 23 January, a Massachusetts State Police trooper called Entwistle at his parents' home in Worksop.

The call lasted two hours and was recorded.

Entwistle told the trooper that, on the morning of the murders, he had left his Hopkinton home at around 9:00 a.m. (EST) to run an errand and that his wife and daughter had both been alive and well, in the bed in the couple's master bedroom.

He claimed that when he returned, at around 11:00 a.m., he found both had been shot dead, and had no idea who had killed them.

Entwistle covered their bodies with a blanket and did not alert authorities.

Entwistle claimed that he was so distraught upon seeing the corpses of his wife and daughter that he decided to kill himself.

However, because he was unable to bring himself to end his life with a knife, he drove the family car to the Materazzos' house to get a .22LR caliber revolver.

Finding the house locked, he told police that he decided to fly home to England to see his parents.

Police subsequently named Entwistle as a person of interest in the investigation, and later issued an international arrest warrant.

The bodies of 27-year-old Rachel and 9-month-old Lillian were found on 22 January 2006 in the master bedroom of the family's rented home, where they had been living for ten days.

Autopsy results showed that Rachel died of a gunshot wound to the head and Lillian of a gunshot wound to the torso.

The bullet that passed through Lillian also pierced Rachel's left breast.

The bullets were so small that the one in Rachel's head went undetected until the autopsy.

Hours after the deaths of his wife and daughter, Entwistle purchased a one-way ticket to London at about 5:00 a.m. (EST) on 21 January and boarded a British Airways flight that departed Boston at 8:15 a.m. His speedy departure from the crime scene was not the only reason he raised suspicion: Entwistle's DNA was found on the handle of the same .22 handgun owned by his father-in-law, Joseph Matterazzo, that he told authorities he had only used once, months earlier, while practising at Matterazzo's shooting club.

DNA matching that of his wife was found on the gun's muzzle.

A set of keys to Materazzo's house were found in the car Entwistle left at Boston's Logan International Airport.

A search of Entwistle's computer revealed that days before the murders, he had viewed a website that described "how to kill people" and searched for escort services.

On 9 February 2006, Entwistle was arrested on a London Underground train at Royal Oak station following a detailed search of his parents' house.

After an initial request that he not be sent back to the US, he later agreed to be extradited.

Middlesex County district attorney Martha Coakley (who had successfully prosecuted British au pair Louise Woodward in 1997) told a press conference after Entwistle's arrest: "On Thursday night [19 January 2006], Rachel was alive and had spoken with family members.

At some time on Friday morning, Neil Entwistle — with a firearm we believe he had secured at sometime before that from father-in-law Joseph Materazzo - shot Rachel Entwistle in the head and then proceeded to shoot baby Lillian, who was lying on the bed next to her mother.

We believe possibly this was intended to be a murder-suicide, but we cannot confirm that.

Obviously the murder was effected, but the suicide was not.