McPhee: Neil Entwistle’s new reality
Within weeks of his arrest, Neil Entwistle suffered a kick to the stomach so swift and hard, the Englishman crumpled to the ground and whimpered. The man who delivered the blow — a fellow inmate — continued to shout “Baby Killer!” as 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 life sentence without possibility of parole. Entwistle was convicted of killing his 27-year-old wife, Rachel, and his baby daughter, Lillian Rose, 9 months, this week.
“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. “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 on Friday to the special management unit — a segregated section of the maximum-security prison at Souza-Baranowski. A correction officer will be assigned to monitor Entwistle, who threatened suicide twice since his arrest over 2 years ago. His 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, and 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. Each of his meals costs Massachusetts taxpayers $1.42 a day.
Of course, Entwistle is not the only man serving life in a Massachusetts prison for killing his own child. The Lifers Group Inc., a bloody fraternity of the state’s most notorious killers who advocate for convicts rights and petition lawmakers for special protections, has two kid killers. Kenneth Seguin is serving life in prison for slitting the throats of his two children before plunging their bodies into a pond. He then sunk 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 in their Ipswich home. “Guys like this really make us sick,” one correction officer mused on Friday shortly after Entwistle began his life sentence, “but we are paid to protect them.”
The Michele McPhee Show can be heard on 96.9 FM WTKK weeknights 7 to 10 p.m. and Saturdays 9 a.m. to noon.
