Teacher killer told friends he also wanted to knife his victim’s pregnant colleague
A BOY of 15 who murdered his Spanish teacher bragged to friends that he also planned to stab one of her pregnant colleagues, an inquest heard yesterday.
Staff were astonished that pupils failed to report Will Cornick’s plan after hearing that before he killed Ann Maguire, he had shown friends the 13in knife he intended to attack her with.
Cornick told them he had studied the human body to learn how to kill quickly and gave graphic details of how he would stab three teachers shortly before he attacked 61-yearold Mrs Maguire in a classroom full of pupils.
In the three hours before the killing he revealed his plans to ten pupils and showed ‘three or four’ the knife, yet none spoke up.
During an English lesson, Cornick told a classmate that after killing mother-of-two Mrs Maguire he would stab teacher Sinead Miley ‘in the stomach because she was pregnant and wanted to kill the baby instead of her’.
He said he would then stab head of year Andrew Kellett in the throat because he ‘wanted to get caught and go to prison’.
Another pupil said Cornick showed him the knife, smiled as he pulled a bottle of Jack Daniel’s whiskey from his rucksack, and said: ‘It’s like a party.’
It was only when police arrived after the killing at Corpus Christi Catholic College in Leeds that one boy approached art design teacher Emma Conway and told her how Cornick had shown off his knife earlier and threatened to ‘get us if we said anything’.
The teacher said the boy looked ‘terrified’ as she led him to officers to make a statement.
Asked why none of the pupils raised the alarm when Cornick had boasted that morning of his plan, she said: ‘I don’t know why not one of them wouldn’t, apart from the worry and fear they too were in danger.’
She said Cornick was in her class for three years and she had ‘no sense and no idea’ of the planned attack.
Miss Conway told Wakefield Coroner’s Court: ‘It still haunts me and shocks me that he would do something so horrific. For him to be so incomprehensibly violent terrifies me.’ Cornick was a ‘very quiet’ and ‘awkward teenage boy’ who would ‘ hide under his hair’ rather than speak in class, she told the inquest.
‘I would never have thought someone seemingly so polite and quiet and well mannered could dream up anything so horrendous,’ she added.
She told how a month before the murder, Cornick confessed to falling over and grazing his arm while drunk. She reported this to a colleague in charge of child protection, who said the situation was ‘being dealt with’.
Teacher Marie Coleman said the failure of other pupils to report Cornick to staff earlier that morning was
‘unfathomable’. Asked whether the school could have handled Cornick more effectively before the killing, his form tutor, Mike Pound, said: ‘If everybody had put their heads together we might have found he was a bit more volatile than individually we saw him as.’ Mrs Maguire died after being stabbed eight times by Cornick in her classroom on April 28, 2014.
He had an irrational hatred of the popular teacher, and wrote on Facebook about wanting her dead, saying he’d murder her for £10. The teenager pleaded guilty to murder in November 2014 and was sentenced to life in prison with a minimum tariff of 20 years. The inquest continues.