"Life" for Neil Entwistle Means Death in Prison (One Way or Another)

by Michele McPhee

SHIRLEY, MASSACHUSETTS—Within weeks of his arrest, Neil Entwistle suffered a kick to the stomach so swift and brutally hard, the Englishman crumpled to the ground and whimpered. The man who delivered the blow, a fellow inmate, continued to shout “Baby Killer!” as correction officers restrained him.

Correction officers in Massachusetts are now charged with making sure that those kinds of attacks on Entwistle do not become a daily occurrence as he begins his prison sentence. Last week, Entwistle was convicted of killing his 27-year-old wife, Rachel, and his baby daughter, Lillian Rose, 9 months. He was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. The bodies of the infant and her mother were found nestled alongside each other in the family’s rented Massachusetts home on January 20, 2006.

"It’s our intent to protect him as we protect any inmate. We’re not going to treat him special, but we’ll insure that he gets equal protection like every other murderer and rapist,’’ said Steve Kenneway, President of the Massachusetts Correction Officers Federated Union. “We are trained to overlook the crime. Our job is not to judge the inmate. Our job is to keep them safe and protect society from them.

“I won’t, however, speak for the inmate population–which is why he will probably be housed away from them,’’ Kenneway said. “People convicted of crimes against children are very, very difficult to protect from the inmate population.’’

Because of the notorious and high-profile nature of his crime, Entwistle was moved last Friday to the special management unit, a segregated section of the maximum-security prison at Souza-Baranowski, by Massachusetts Department of Correction Officials. He was issued a pair of red scrubs with the letters DOC emblazoned on the back and was brought into the unit with handcuffs and shackles early Friday morning, prison officials said.

A correction officer will be assigned to monitor Entwistle, who has threatened suicide twice since his arrest two and a half years ago, around the clock. The isolation can provoke some inmates to find ways to commit suicide. In 2005, Andrew Armstrong, a convict serving time for a brutal home invasion, was found hung in the very cell where Entwistle was assigned on Friday, prison sources said.

That cell is 7-feet-by-13-feet with a steel toilet and sink; a bed steel-mounted to the wall, just shy of his height. Entwistle was issued state-owned sheets, a pillow, and a blanket. The cell has a metal footlocker; a desk; and stool and one metal shelf hanging on the wall. He will be completely isolated with no contact with the general population at the prison, said Cara Savelli, a spokeswoman for the DOC.

Each of his meals costs Massachusetts taxpayers $1.42 a day and taste like “the worst school cafeteria grub you can think of,’’ said convicted drug dealer Jimmy Connors, who was recently released from the prison and spent time in the special management unit.

“They have to keep him away from everyone. Everyone knows who Neil Entwistle is. He’s the coward who killed his own baby,’’ Connors said of Entwistle. “Baby killers, child molesters, are tortured in there.”

One of those child molesters in fact was murdered in the unit where Entwistle is now. Pedophile Roman Catholic priest Thomas Geoghan, 68, was strangled to death by a fellow inmate in a segregation unit at the prison nicknamed “The Shoe") in 2003. Geoghan’s killer was a homicidal maniac named Joseph Druce who confessed his hatred for child molesters. In a bizarre, macabre security video he was captured re-enacting the priest’s murder.

“I did it to save the kids,’’ Druce told investigators after the slaying, which occurred on August 23, 2003. Roughly 150 children claim they were molested by Geoghan during his 30-year career in six Catholic parishes.

In the video pantomime of the priest’s slaying, the clip starts with Druce standing in a cell naked but for white boxer shorts, his sinewy body scrawled with crude jailhouse tattoos. His pock-marked face is covered with a scraggly brown beard as he talks to himself in a mirror.

He then re-enacts the murder. He jammed the door of Geoghan’s cell with a paperback book so correction officers could not stop him. He punched the priest in the face. The priest fell to his knees at which point Druce (pictured left) bound his hands behind his back with a white T-shirt. Druce pushed the priest to the floor, face down and proceeded to strangle him with a tube-sock tourniquet that he tightened with the priest’s own sneaker.

As the priest slowly suffocated, Druce then climbed onto the steel-mounted bed and jumped on the elderly man’s back, stomping him three times. The video simulation mirrors what prosecutors have described in the slaying. An autopsy showed Geoghan's cause of death to be ligature strangulation and blunt chest trauma; broken ribs and a punctured lung.

It’s a brutal act, and one that prison officials say they do not want to see repeated on Neil Entwistle. The 29-year-old Worksop native will spend the rest of his life behind bars trying to avoid attacks like the one that killed the pedophile priest, which led to accusations that correction officers were complicit in Geoghan’s murder. Several correction officers were suspended from their jobs after Geoghan’s slaying.

Of course, Entwistle is not the only man serving life in a Massachusetts prison for killing his own child. There is an official tax-exempt organization called Lifers Group Inc. in the prison system comprised of a bloody fraternity of the state’s most notorious killers who advocate for convicts' rights and petition lawmakers for special protections. The leader of the group, Kenneth Seguin, is serving life in prison for slitting the throats of his two children before plunging their bodies into a pond. After that gruesome murder, he went home and buried an ax into his wife’s head. Another Lifers Group leader is Gordon Haas, a former department store manager who smothered his wife and two small children to death with plastic bags.

“Neil Entwistle will be among his peers in jail,’’ said a correction officer assigned to the prison. That officer declined to be named. “Guys like this really make us sick, but we are paid to protect them.”

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