Will Cornick: a model student who planned murder for three years
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Version 0 of 1. Ann Maguire’s killer was just 15 when he walked up behind the Spanish teacher in a classroom at Corpus Christi Catholic college and stabbed her to death. The court heard Will Cornick had been planning the murder for three years, but neither his teachers nor his parents saw it coming. The weekend before the killing he attended his grandmother’s birthday party and was “polite and apparently happy”, Paul Greaney QC, prosecuting, told Leeds crown court on Monday. His cheerful demeanour was, said the barrister, “one of the many extraordinary features of the case”. Cornick came from a good family. Though separated, his devastated parents, Ian and Michelle, were described by one psychiatrist as “entirely responsible and caring people”. His family life was “marked by love and support”, said Greaney. Sentencing their son to 20 years in prison on Monday, the judge praised both parents for having the courage to sit in the dock with him. A selfie Cornick posted on Facebook some time before the attack showed a boy with straight, shoulder-length brown hair covering his face. By the time he appeared in court a few days after the attack, his hair had been cut into a shaggy urchin crop, and he had bandages on one of his arms: injuries police said were sustained as he struggled with school staff after the attack. When he started at Corpus Christi in year 7 he was a model student. His year head at the time described him as a “delightful pupil who always gave his best and was pleasant, polite and cooperative with 100% attendance”. In the four and a half years he spent at the school there were only five incidents of misbehaviour. He had no criminal record. For reasons which have never become clear, in year 8 Cornick developed an “entirely irrational” hatred for Maguire. Perhaps it was a coincidence, but shortly beforehand he had collapsed on a family holiday in Cornwall and was diagnosed with a life-limiting illness. “This seems to have had a major impact not only on his lifestyle but also on his mood and personality,” said Greaney. Afterwards, his mother noticed a period of self-harm, but it soon seemed to stop. In 2013 he was unhappy to discover that he would not be able to join the army because of his medical issues and began to talk more and more about his dislike for Maguire. At a parents’ evening in November 2013, the boy refused to see Maguire, who had taught him Spanish since 2009. Late on Christmas Eve in 2013 and into the early hours of Christmas Day he sent messages to a friend on Facebook where he talked of “brutally killing” Maguire. He raised the idea of claiming to “hear voices” – something he later told psychiatrists, but which the experts never believed. As Greaney put it: “He was talking of killing Ann Maguire and then setting up a medical defence.” On 24 February this year, just over two months before the killing, he sent a message to a friend on Facebook saying of Maguire: “… the one absolute fucking bitch that deserves more than death more than pain torture and more than anything that we can understand.” A few weeks previously he had been put in “internal isolation” at school after getting in trouble with Maguire: he had failed to do his Spanish homework and as a result, she barred him from going on a school bowling trip. He disobeyed her and went anyway. The boy later told a psychiatrist that he decided four days before the killing, on a Thursday, that he was going to murder Maguire rather than kill himself. He said that on the Friday he really made his mind up “after months of thinking life is pretty fucking shit. I couldn’t see myself passing college and had no hope of doing anything. I tried to apply for the army but they said no.” He has never shown remorse for the killing, telling one doctor that he was proud of what he had done. “I wasn’t in shock, I was happy. I had a sense of pride. I still do. I know it’s uncivilised but I know it’s incredibly instinctual and human. Past generations of life, killing is a natural route of survival. It’s kill or be killed. I did not have a choice. It was kill her or suicide,” he said. While psychiatrists concluded that he was of sound mind when he murdered Maguire, they found some evidence of a personality disorder. One said the boy had an adjustment disorder, writing in a report that he had “a gross lack of empathy for his victim and a degree of callousness rarely seen in clinical practice”. The doctor said the boy “presents a risk of serious harm to the public and that this risk is present for the foreseeable future. The risk is of grave homicidal violence and this could easily involve the use of a weapon. The risk is immediate and unpredictable and could cause serious and lethal injury.” His home life was unremarkable. His parents had separated but records show they stopped living together in Leeds in 2003, when Cornick was four or five. Ever since, he had been living with his mother in a semi-detached house in a quiet cul-de-sac a mile from the school. Neighbours said they were a quiet family, nothing untoward. These days the blinds remain closed all day, a swingball set in the back garden the only sign that a teenager used to live there not long ago. He still saw his father, a council worker who lived in a village outside Leeds with his new partner and their son, Cornick’s half-brother. His family are understandably horrified at what their boy has done, devastated at the pain he has inflicted on Maguire’s loved ones. They have given no interviews and have asked for privacy as they struggle to process all that has happened. Their son has admitted he is a killer, responsible for murdering a woman cherished by generations of pupils before him. |