Neil Entwistle told police he had not even cried “properly” three days after his wife and baby daughter were murdered, a US court has heard.

Entwistle said he was “trance-like” when he found the bodies of his 27-year-old wife Rachel, a former Redditch schoolteacher, and nine-month-old daughter Lillian Rose and the first thing he wanted to do was to kill himself.

He told Middlesex State Trooper Robert Manning that he found the bodies in the master bedroom of their new home in Hopkinton, Massachusetts, on January 20, 2006, after returning home from the shops. He denies their murders.

The 29-year-old former IT worker said he saw their bodies in the bed and covered them up before fleeing to England on a one-way ticket. Mr Manning told the Middlesex County Superior Court in Woburn, Massachusetts, that he spoke to Entwistle for two hours from about 1.30pm on January 23, 2006.

“I haven’t even cried yet, not properly,” Entwistle said.“There weren’t even that many tears. I don’t know what I’m thinking about at the moment. It’s almost because I’m here it doesn’t seem real. It’s almost a void.”

In the two-hour recording, which was played in court, Mr Manning replied: “It is real. It is real. Something happened over here.”
“Looking back on it, I don’t know why I did things the way I did,” Entwistle said.

“My first thought ... I thought ... Once I kind of realised what happened I think in most situations that I would just look and break down, but that’s not what went through my mind.

“The first thing I wanted to do was to do something to myself.”

Asked by Mr Manning why he wanted to kill himself, Entwistle said: “That was my wife and baby in bed.”

Entwistle went on: “I’ve never been in any situation or anything similar like that so I don’t know where that would be so ordered, maybe trance-like.

“All I remember, everything seemed so ordered after that. I pulled the covers over them and the only thing I could think of was the knives we had got downstairs.

“I pulled the big one out and held it towards my chest.

“I think it was just the thought of how much it was going to hurt. I just couldn’t do it.

“I don’t know why I didn’t (call the emergency services).”

Entwistle told the US authorities he then got in his rented BMW X3 car and drove to Carver, Massachusetts, where Rachel’s mother Priscilla and step-father Joseph Matterazzo lived.

“I knew that Joe had guns in the house and I did think that if I went to their house I did think I could load the gun and shoot myself.
“None of it happened erratically.

“I’ve got in my head that I was going there to see them to tell them, but I was going to get the gun.”

But he said he could not get in the house once he arrived.

Speaking about his one-way flight to England and his failure to call the emergency services, Entwistle said: “I don’t know why. I feel like it was wrong. It wasn’t the right thing to do. I got to the point when I just needed to be with someone.

“I feel so bad because it looks like Joe and Priscilla don’t mean anything and that’s just not right.’’