Who are Sandra and Beth Andersen, the daughters who drowned their mom in a bathtub?

Warning: The following article contains mentions of explicit themes and murder. Please read with caution.

In 2003, Linda Andersen of Ontario, Canada, was found dead in her bathtub. Andersen, whose name has not been revealed in the press, had a troubled private life, and at first, her death was ruled an accident. Shortly after, however, Linda’s two daughters, called Sandra and Beth Andersen in the media, confessed to the crime.

Early on, investigators believed Linda was intoxicated when she died. Linda, a single mother, had known alcohol use issues, and lived with depression. Linda’s daughters, Sandra and Beth, reported their mother unresponsive in the tub, and a subsequent autopsy concluded she drowned.

There was nothing otherwise out of the ordinary in the home, and for a while, it seemed as if Sandra and Beth committed the perfect matricide. According to the sister’s alibi, they were with friends when Linda died, and their mother was already drunk when they left, the sisters said.

A confession

For months after Linda Andersen died, it seemed an open-and-shut case. But around a year later, a friend of Sandra and Beth Andersen reported to the authorities the two teenage girls admitted they did it. Still lacking proof, Ontario police asked the boy to wear a wire to try and get them to confess on tape. In that taped confession, Sandra and Beth said they gave their mother Tylenol 3 before they forcibly drowned her. Some speculate the murder was planned to collect on a life insurance payout, the Toronto Star reported.

Once arrested, Sandra and Beth were tried as juveniles in Canada and given a 10-year sentence. According to Global News, they have since been released and are no longer under community supervision. If they had been tried as adults, Sandra and Beth could have spent the rest of their lives in prison.

A history of abuse

In 2020, Sandra Andersen, then 34, talked with Global News about her childhood. According to Sandra, both girls lived with physical and sexual abuse at home, directed toward them and their mother by their mother’s boyfriend. Sandra also believed their mom’s drinking threatened her life anyway. She remembered thinking, “She’s never going to stop drinking. She’s going to die from this. I should just kill her because it was like torture being trapped there” (via Global News).

The story of Sandra and Beth Andersen, known collectively as the “Bathtub Girls,” was told in the 2014 film Perfect Sisters, and the murder of Linda Andersen was covered in the 2008 book The Class Project: How to Kill a Mother. As adults, both sisters have gone on to have careers. Under the Canadian Youth Criminal Justice Act, the two girls’ identities are still concealed. Abigail Breslin and Georgia Henley, who play the sisters in Perfect Sisters, are pictured above.