A look back on heartbreak in Hopkinton a decade ago
By Norman Miller/Daily News Staff
Neil Entwistle's parents still cling to the belief that their son is innocent. Prosecutors say the horrific crime was tried fairly. A decade after the slayings in Hopkinton, the bodies of a young mother and her toddler lay buried in Kingston, mourned by family and friends.
Ten years ago on Wednesday, on a quiet cul-de-sac in Hopkinton - the double murder of a young mother and her infant daughter in a bucolic MetroWest town where the last murder had occurred more than a decade before.
Rachel Entwistle, 27, and her daughter Lillian Rose, 9 months, had been living at their 6 Cubs Path home for only about 10 days when Neil Entwistle, Rachel's husband and Lillian's father, shot and killed them, then fled to his native England, igniting public attention both here and abroad.
Headlines told the sordid tale of Neil's debt problems, his online attempts at finding sex outside his marriage and his affinity for scamming eBay users out of money for products they never received. Tracked down at a London train station a few weeks after his flight, Neil was arrested for the murders and flown back to the U.S. to stand trial.
Entwistle denied killing his wife and daughter to investigators and said he had only discovered their bodies. He thought about committing suicide, he said, but then decided to return to England to be with his parents. At his trial in 2008, his attorney, Elliott Weinstein, claimed Rachel had killed the baby and then killed herself; a distraught Neil had attempted to cover it up to protect his wife's integrity.
Despite these claims, in mid-June 2008, a Middlesex Superior Court jury convicted Entwistle of the murders. Judge Diane Kottmyer sentenced him to the mandatory life in prison without the possibility of parole.
He is serving his sentence at Old Colony Correctional Center in Bridgewater, a medium security prison.
SHATTERED DREAMS
At the time of the trial's conclusion, Rachel's mother, Priscilla Matterazzo condemned her son-in-law for his deeds, saying, "Our dreams as a parent and grandparent have been shattered by the shameful, selfish act of one person, Neil Entwistle. For him to have to hide behind the accusation of murder-suicide of this beautiful woman and perfect mother is low and despicable."
But Neil's parents, Clifford and Yvonne Entwistle, say their son was unfairly convicted by a jury influenced by a rabid media that all but convicted their son prior to the trial even starting.
What happened on Jan. 20, 2006, was a murder, but not by their son, they say. It was a murder by Rachel followed by her own suicide, his parents claim, echoing Weinstein's defense strategy.
“What Neil was guilty of in his parents’ eyes was the fact that he protected Rachel’s memory in all of this,” said Clifford and Yvonne Entwistle in a recent email to a Daily News reporter. “When Neil was in the kitchen on that fatal day preparing breakfast, he heard a noise from upstairs that sounded like a gunshot. He rushed upstairs into the bedroom and then our innocent son witnessed something that no one should ever, ever have to see. Lilly had already been shot and Rachel, in front of Neil, fired the second shot, committing suicide.”
Weinstein still believes there was enough doubt – including the fact that Rachel Entwistle had gunshot residue on both sides of her hands – that a jury should have acquitted his client.
“I will always believe that the gunshot residue that was present on her hands, both sides of her hands, was never properly presented to the medical examiner, who did not learn about it until he heard about it during the courtroom during the trial and I’ll always believe the gunshot residue presented a clear question that remains unanswered to how both killings occurred," Weinstein said in a recent interview.
In their email, Neil Entwistle's parents argue that the medical examiner should have been told about the gunshot residue found on Rachel’s hands prior to ruling the death a homicide. They also said the prosecution never did any bullet trajectory tests, which could have proven that Rachel was the real killer.
“In the prosecution’s case, there was no expense spared, but if the tests had been done, this would have gone a long way to prove Rachel did the deed and so they were omitted,” the Entwistles said by email in response to questions from the Daily News.
“What other reason could there be? If someone else other than Rachel had fired the shots, they would have had to climb on the bed to get the angle.”
The media attention also hindered the case, Weinstein said. There were dozens of reporters – local, national and from Europe – who covered the case on a near-daily basis. Cable news hosts such as Nancy Grace featured the case frequently.
“The media attention was unprecedented for a case of local import and clearly prevented us from getting an unbiased jury,” he said.
'THE EVIDENCE LED TO HIM'
However, those involved in the investigation and prosecution of Entwistle say he is being punished for the crime he committed. His family’s belief that Rachel killed her daughter and herself is not supported by the evidence, they say.
“Ultimately, that’s not believable,” said Martha Coakley, who was the Middlesex district attorney at the time of the murders. “For the parents of this young man, it’s impossible for them to believe he did this. Sometimes people create alternate realities and alternate universes for their own purposes.”
Neil Entwistle was thousands of dollars in debt at the time of Rachel and Lillian’s deaths, a fact that no one but he knew. The family leased a BMW SUV and were paying $2,400 a month in rent for the Hopkinton house, which they had furnished with new furniture.
“No one had any idea,” said Coakley recently. “He appeared to have means. The family had no idea. Rachel had no idea. He had no income. He had $30,000 to $40,000 in credit card debt. More and more, the evidence led to him as the perpetrator.”
Authorities say in January 2006 Entwistle went to the Carver house of Joe and Priscilla Matterazzo, Rachel's parents, and took his father-in-law’s handgun. He brought it back to Hopkinton, shot his wife and daughter, returned the gun to the house in Carver and then booked a one-way flight to England, returning home to his parent’s Worksop home in northern England.
Taking that flight – without ever reporting the deaths – made investigators suspicious instantly, Hopkinton Police Sgt. Scott van Raalten said. Van Raalten was one of the lead investigators in the Entwistle case and was one of two officers who discovered Rachel’s and Lillian Rose’s bodies on Jan. 22, 2006.
“When we contacted him in England, he made some statements; some parts of his story didn’t make sense,” said Van Raalten on Tuesday. “He made a statement about how, after he found them, that he ran downstairs and grabbed a knife and was going to kill himself. That didn’t seem realistic. The whole story fell apart.”
Gerry Leone, the Middlesex district attorney at the time of the trial, said the media did not provide much of a distraction.
“In Middlesex County, we’ve had a lot of cases with a lot of press coverage,” said Leone. “We did a good job of handling them. We had the experience. You start with the (Louise) Woodward case, which was the first big media case after O.J. (Simpson), and you move forward from that case.”
Woodward, who worked as a nanny in Newton, was tried and convicted of involuntary manslaughter of the infant in her care in 1997.
DENIED APPEALS
In 2012, Entwistle appealed his conviction to the state Supreme Judicial Court, which denied it. The U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the case, effectively ending any hope he has of ever getting out of prison.
The Entwistles said they hope someday that new evidence will come out to prove their son's innocence. Until then, they still visit their son each year and are “proud” of how he is handling prison life.
They still mourn for Lillian Rose all of these years later.
“We loved them (Rachel and Lillian),” they said. “Lilly was our only granddaughter. To think of Rachel even now hurts. How could she do this? Lilly, each birthday, each Christmas that goes by, we release a white balloon that matches the color of the rose we planted in our garden on her first birthday. And, yes, tears are spilt for her.”