A British man who appeared to have a perfect marriage was found guilty yesterday of shooting dead his American wife and baby girl months after moving across the Atlantic.

A jury in Woburn, outside Boston, deliberated for two days before convicting Neil Entwistle, 29, an unemployed computer programmer from Worksop, Nottinghamshire, of the murders of his wife, Rachel, and their nine-month-old daughter, Lillian.

Entwistle shook his head as the verdict was read, while his father, Clifford, a Bassetlaw district councillor, and his mother, Yvonne, a school dinner lady, watched with pursed lips from the front row of the public gallery. He will be sentenced today to a mandatory life sentence without parole for two charges of first-degree murder.

Joseph Flaherty, a spokesman for Rachel’s mother, Priscilla Matterazzo, and stepfather, Joseph, said that the jury had spoken for the victims. “We may never know why this happened, but we do know Rachel and Lillian Rose loved and trusted Neil Entwistle,” Mr Flaherty said.

“Neil Entwistle’s actions on January 20, 2006, betrayed that love and trust. Neil Entwistle will now live with his evil deeds for the rest of his natural life only to be judged again.”

But Entwistle’s mother, speaking outside the courtroom, cast her son as the victim. “We know that our son Neil is innocent and we are devastated to learn that the evidence points to Rachel murdering our grandchild and then committing suicide,” she said.

“I knew Rachel was depressed. Our son will now go to jail for loving, honouring and protecting his wife’s memory.”

The verdict came after a 12-day trial at which Entwistle did not testify and called no witnesses, but claimed through his lawyer that his wife had killed her baby and herself.

The Entwistles met at the rowing club at the University of York while he was studying electronic engineering with business management and she was studying English literature on a year abroad from her Roman Catholic college near Boston. They married and posted photographs of a seemingly idyllic Mediterranean honeymoon cruise on a website, www.rachelandneil.com.

To stay in England, she took a teaching job at St Augustine’s Catholic High School in Redditch, Worcestershire, where she was nicknamed “Enty”. But after Lillian was born they decided to move to be close to her family. The prosecution argued that Entwistle reached a “tipping point” after the couple moved to America.

Evidence revealed that Entwistle joined an internet sex-swinger site before joining his wife and Lillian in the Boston area. After moving to America, he advertised on the Adult Friend Finder site to meet “American women of all ages” to confirm they were “much better in bed than the women over the ocean”. On January 4, 2006, he sent an e-mail to a woman on the site saying: “I am currently in a relationship but I would like a bit more fun in the bedroom.”

The prosecution presented evidence that Entwistle used a .22-calibre Colt 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 house of his in-laws and fled to Britain, dumping the couple’s leased BMW at Logan airport, in Boston.

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