Neil Entwistle Gets Life for Murdering Wife & Baby
Rejecting calls by surviving family members for two consecutive life sentences, a Massachusetts judge today sentenced Neil Entwistle to two concurrent life terms for the first-degree murders of his 27-year-old wife and 9-month-old daughter in 2006, saying that there is no possibility of parole under state law.
Middlesex Superior Court Judge Diane Kottmeyer “also sentenced Entwistle to probation for the other two convictions of possession of a firearm and possession of ammunition on the condition that he not ‘profit in any way from the sale of his story either by way of book or otherwise,’ ” reports the Boston Herald.
His case will automatically be appealed to the state’s Supreme Judicial Court, and Entwistle’s defense lawyers indicated they plan to challenge “unlawful entries” made by police into the family’s home in Hopkinton after the murders, apparently referring to well-being checks authorities made when requested to do so by friends and family, the newspaper writes.
“They also claim the jury were biased by the intense media coverage of the case,” reports the Guardian.
As discussed in an earlier ABAJournal.com post, the defense contended at trial that Rachel Entwistle had shot her baby to death and then turned the gun on herself, and this claim elicited criticism from her family members at the sentencing today.
The jury, however, apparently agreed with the prosecution’s theory that, as the Herald puts it, “Entwistle was swimming in debt and unhappy with his sex life when he murdered his family. Entwistle stole his father-in-law’s .22 caliber Colt from his Carver home and used it to shoot his wife and child and then returned it to his father-in-law’s home.”
Additional coverage:
Boston Globe: “Defendant’s lawyers given ‘as bad a hand as you can get’ “
People (2006): “Cops: The Husband Did It”
