A British man accused of murdering his American wife and baby daughter blamed his dead spouse for the killings, as his case went to the jury in the United States yesterday.

Neil Entwistle called no witnesses in his defence at the court outside Boston. His lawyer told the jury that his client’s wife, Rachel, shot their nine-month-old baby, Lillian, and herself - and Mr Entwistle returned the gun to the house of his parents-in-law 60 miles away to protect her honour.

“There is no evidence to support the prosecution’s theory that Rachel did not fire the gun,” Elliot Weinstein said in his summing-up.

Mr Entwistle, 29, an unemployed computer programmer from Worksop, Nottinghamshire, faces life in prison without parole if convicted of shooting dead his wife and child in the four-poster bed at their home outside Boston on January 20, 2006, only four months after moving to America.

Michael Fabbri, the prosecutor, dismissed the suicide theory as a “red herring”. He said: “This was not a suicide.

This was not a stranger homicide. It was unfortunately a homicide committed by a husband against his family.”

The prosecutor argued that Mr Entwistle used a Colt .22 revolver from his father-in-law’s gun box in Carver, Massachusetts, to shoot his wife and child at their home in Hopkinton. He then returned the gun to the home of his parents-in-law and fled to Britain.

“He wants us to believe that he somehow deeply and passionately loved the two of them. He gets a one-way ticket to London with no luggage and doesn’t come back for the funeral. Talk about something that is incomprehensible,” Mr Fabbri said.

The prosecution said that Mr Entwistle, who met his future wife at the boat club at York University, was unhappy in his marriage and had begun trawling the internet for “half-price escorts” and sexual encounters.

The jury heard that he joined a swinger website and advertised to meet “American women of all ages” because they were “much better in bed than the women over the ocean”.

Friends testified that Mr Entwistle faced possible bankruptcy because he had failed to get a job in America, prosecutors said. The court was also told that someone had used his Toshiba laptop in the days before the killings to carry out an internet search for terms such as “knife in neck kill” and “quick suicide methods”.

Jurors were played a tape-recorded two-hour telephone conversation in which Mr Entwistle told an investigator three days after the killings that he thought about killing himself “to be with them” but “did not have the courage”.

He said that he became “trance-like” when he saw the bodies and covered them with bedding because he felt that he was “closing them off”.

Mrs Entwistle was shot in the forehead at point-blank range and Lillian was killed with a bullet through the chest as she lay in her mother’s arms.

“I suggested to you that what happened is that he shoots Rachel,” Mr Fabbri told the court. “He shoots Rachel. He shoots Lillian. The crying and screaming coming out of Lillian I suggest he could not tolerate.”

Mr Weinstein argued that jurors should not draw any negative conclusions from the fact that Mr Entwistle failed to call the 911 emergency number.

“The prosecution wants you to believe there was only one way for Neil to behave and that was call 911, stay cool, calm, collected and rational. That’s not how loving human beings behave . . . think of your own myriad experiences. Think of the ways people react to sudden death,” he said.

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