On tape, Entwistle gives chilling account

Tells of finding bodies on bed

WOBURN - "No. No. I couldn't do that. Why would I do that?"

With those words, spoken in a thick British accent in 2006, Neil Entwistle told State Police in an interview that he had nothing to do with the grisly shooting deaths of his wife and baby daughter.

A tape of the rambling, chilling interview, conducted on Jan. 23, 2006, the day after 27-year-old Rachel and 9-month-old Lillian Rose were found dead in bed by police, was played before a rapt courtroom yesterday and gave the public the first comments heard from Entwistle on the slayings. He is charged with both deaths.

State Police Trooper Robert L. Manning, now a sergeant, told Entwistle at the time that he was not accusing him of the crime, but had to "rule out all of the possibilities."

"I'm not saying you did it," said Manning, the prosecution's final witness in the case. "I'm asking you if a situation took place that was out of character between you and your wife."

"No," Entwistle said, speaking from his parents' home in England, where he had flown the day after the killings. "It is just a normal, it is just a normal day."

What Entwistle went on to describe was anything but normal. He told Manning that on the morning of Jan. 20 he arrived at his family's rented home in Hopkinton at about 11 a.m. and found Lilly dead and covered in blood, next to the body of his wife of 29 months.

"I walked in," he continued. "I called out to them. There was no reply. I couldn't hear the shower. I thought they were in the bathrooms.

"I just got a few things together downstairs. I went upstairs just to see where they were, and that's when I found them. . . . My first thing was to, I just, I looked. . . . It was obvious that I had to get out of the house."

Before he left, he said he covered the bodies with a white sheet.

"Why?" Manning asked.

"I don't know," he answered. "It felt like I was closing them off."

Entwistle then went downstairs, he said, drew a knife from the kitchen block, and held it toward himself.

"I just wanted to end it. . . . I pulled the wide one out and kind of held it toward me and I just couldn't do it," he said. "I knew it was going to hurt."

He said he then drove to Carver, where his in-laws lived, looking for a gun to shoot himself, but maintained he could not get into the house because the house keys on his set of car keys were missing.

Manning struggled to understand. "You didn't call anybody. You didn't grab a neighbor and you didn't call 911?" Manning asked in the taped interview. "You don't know if they were even still slightly breathing or anything like that?"

Initially Entwistle said he did not have a cellphone, but later said, "I don't know why I did things the way I did."

Prosecutors charge that Entwistle, now 29, shot his baby point-blank in the chest and his wife of just three years in the head because he was overwhelmed with financial problems and sexually dissatisfied in his marriage.

In a follow-up conversation the next day, Manning questioned Entwistle about the couple's sex life. Entwistle told the officer he had had sex with his wife for the last time on that Wednesday, two days before he said he discovered the bodies, but could not have left his DNA on her.

Testimony in the case has shown that sperm cells with Entwistle's DNA profile were found on Rachel's body two days after she was killed.

Entwistle is on trial in Middlesex Superior Court. The conversation, which was taped with his permission, was played yesterday as the prosecution presented Manning as its last witness on the 11th day of testimony.

Questioning of Manning will continue Monday.

As the lengthy interview was played in court, a dozen friends and relatives of Rachel and Lilly, who have occupied the first two rows of the courtroom daily since the beginning of the trial, leaned forward to hear every word. Rachel's stepfather, Joseph Matterazzo, and some relatives, at times looked over at Entwistle, who maintained a stoic demeanor. Many of the jurors looked at him when the audiotape was finished.

In describing the night he discovered the bodies, Entwistle told Manning that he realized he wanted to be with people. He went to Logan International Airport and stayed for a while in the parking garage. He left to drive around some more, and finally hopped a plane to Heathrow Airport in London the next morning.

He said he did not know what had happened to his family and told Manning that he had yet to cry about it.

"I've been trying to work out what happened," Entwistle said in the taped interview. "It seems so clear cut; it just doesn't make sense."

Asked how he felt about leaving the country, Entwistle said, "I just feel now like it wasn't the right thing to do, was it?"