“They should be the most innocent members of society, but children can be capable of the most sadistic, premeditated, and brutal murders.”
“They beat him and hit him with a bottle. One of them stabbed Jay straight through the heart.”
“What drives these kids to kill men, women, friends, family? She was determined that her mother had to die. Even their teachers.”
“This was the first occasion upon which a teacher had been killed in class in the course of conducting a lesson.”
“Could they be born evil? It did have a weird, dark sense of humor. He was a little bit different to most of the other kids. He was aggressive, threatening, and dangerous. Or are they victims of their environment? There was a lot of gangs. There was a lot of violence, a lot of drug abusers with exceptional access to real police tapes.”
“The voices were talking to me. You need to make a sacrifice or we’re going to come and get you. You need to do it.”
“And interviews with those closest to the victims and the perpetrators.”
“A red mist had simply descended.”
“We reveal what made them such savage killers.”
“In 2014, police were called to a secondary school in Leeds where they were faced with a shocking scene. There was absolutely nothing to explain why he became so determined to cause her death.”
“A much-loved teacher had been brutally slain in the middle of a lesson.”
“She got up and tried to make her escape, but he followed and persisted with his homicidal attack.”
“The murder sent shockwaves through the country. Even in a world in which we’ve become accustomed sadly to knife crime, and Maguire’s death was particularly shocking.”
“More shocking still, the killer was one of the teacher’s own students, 15-year-old William Cornick, a fact which was to make this case and his murder trial the first of its kind in the UK.”
“There was absolutely nothing about him that would say to you there is someone who is dangerous, let alone someone who is liable to carry out a murder.”
“A seemingly model pupil, Cornick had no history of trouble at home or at school. But what was it that made this 15-year-old suddenly and so violently decide to murder his teacher?”
“You would think you were dealing with very likable young man, yet beneath the surface there was a rage that was hidden.”
“Corpus Christi Catholic College in Leeds is much like any other secondary school.”
“Corpus Christi is a good Catholic school. All my family went there. It’s got a good reputation, had an Ofsted report which showed that it was good in terms of its safety record, and had a very positive ethos with pupil learning and generally very good behavior throughout the school.”
“But on the 28th of April 2014, the school was thrown into turmoil. A teacher lay dying after being savagely attacked in class. It was the only time in British history that a teacher had been stabbed in her own classroom.”
“The victim of this savage and surprise attack was much-loved Spanish teacher Anne Maguire.”
“Miss Maguire was a kind teacher. She was… I loved her.”
“In my eyes, what makes this as tragic a story as you can imagine is that Maguire wasn’t just a teacher; she was a stalwart of a whole school community.”
“Anne had dedicated her entire career spanning over 40 years to Corpus Christi, teaching generations of families from the local area. She was said to be an immensely approachable, warm-hearted teacher who had the pastoral needs of her students at heart.”
“The two things she devoted her lives to was her teaching and her family. She lived in Leeds with her husband, uh, Don, and she had four children, um, her two daughters who uh were natural children, um, but she also adopted her sister’s two sons, I think back in the 1980s, uh when unfortunately her sister died.”
“It would be a total shock to everyone how this hugely well-liked and caring teacher could be murdered, and that one of her own pupils had struck the deadly blows.”
“The actual circumstances of the killing were savage. So to do with GCSE exams imminent, Mrs. Maguire had been leading a regular Spanish revision lesson for a class of 15 and 16-year-olds, with the pupils split across two classrooms. One of these pupils was 15-year-old Will Cornick.”
“During the Spanish lesson, um, he got up from his seat where he’d been working, took out his knife.”
“Cornick then concealed the 21 cm blade in the sleeve of his shirt, going out of one classroom, entering the classroom in which she was teaching.”
“Mrs. Maguire, who was focused on what she was teaching, was caught completely off guard and was totally defenseless. She was bent over a desk helping another student.”
“He approached her from behind and then stabbed her to the back and to the neck on seven occasions.”
“The savagery of this attack and the calmness on the buildup to stabbing Ann Maguire shows his hatred for his teacher.”
“He was totally calm and he wanted to enact the most severe pain he could on Ann Maguire.”
“This shows that this was a personal attack. He wanted to cause pain and nothing was going to stop him.”
“The worst injuries were in her neck, so the injuries were absolutely horrendous.”
“She got up, realized she’d been stabbed, and tried to make her escape, but he followed and persisted with his homicidal attack. Somehow, Anne managed to escape to the safety of another room.”
“Mrs. Gray was dying and she knew that she was in a really bad way.”
“Cornick meanwhile discarded the knife and calmly returned to his desk where he was apprehended by other teaching staff.”
“Will Cornick, as we know, went and sat back in his chair. One of the teachers eventually took him down into the reception area to wait for the police.”
“News of what happened quickly spread around the school, including the lesson Zach Capitano was in.”
“From my English class, I could see the front yard of the school and an ambulance response car turned up, and then a police car turned up, and then a, the big police van with the armor turned up.”
“And I asked the teacher what was happening.”
“The teacher said, ‘Oh, I don’t know, nothing.'”
“And then one of our other teachers came through and said that our lesson will be extended because there’d been an incident with the teacher.”
“I said to my teacher, I said, ‘I bet it’s Will Corn.'”
“She looked at me in shock as if to wonder how I knew.”
“While police detained Cornick, paramedics tried desperately to save Anne Maguire’s life.”
“Ann Maguire was given emergency treatment, taken to hospital, but unfortunately I don’t think there was very much they could do. The injuries were absolutely terrible. I think the first paramedic on the scene said that they were some of the worst stab injuries that they had ever seen.”
“But what was it that made this 15-year-old suddenly and so violently decide to murder and could it have been prevented?”
“15-year-old Will Cornick had become the first pupil in the UK to murder a teacher while in school when he viciously attacked his Spanish teacher Anne Maguire with a knife, stabbing her seven times in the neck and back. This was the first occasion upon which a teacher had been attacked and killed in school and indeed in class in the course of conducting a lesson.”
“Following the murder, attention immediately turned to why the teenager had carried out the…”
“The biggest question that still remains unclear is why William Cornick had such an irrational hatred of Anne Maguire, which led him to viciously attack and kill her.”
“I’m not sure that we’ve entirely understood why he’s become, um, so angry and homicidal about this particular teacher. We, we’ve got some of the background factors, but I don’t think I’ve really, or or any of us have really understood this as yet.”
“As a psychologist, I can try and understand what led a young person to take a life, but the actual physical act of carrying a knife, walking across a classroom in front of a whole class of students and plunging a knife into another person, taking the life of another person—that is something that everybody struggles to understand. And it’s even harder to understand that when it’s a child.”
“The only person that will be able to give those answers, and hopefully one day he will, is Will Cornick.”
“Perhaps the biggest clue to explain the murder is in the assessment of the doctors who saw Cornick afterwards.”
“I have assessed, um, hundreds of people who’ve committed homicide, um, and occasionally there are people who are as callous, um, but I’ve never come across it in someone as, as young as this.”
“I had no doubt that Will understood exactly what he had done. He knew that he had killed Maguire. He had no difficulty with comprehension, but his difficulty was with feeling any empathy, um, about the fact that he’d killed her. Uh, and by that I mean that he couldn’t understand or process why anybody would be upset about the fact that she was dead.”
“That measure of control and knowledge of the impact on others, I think says something about his personality. It says something about the excitement that he was going to get from the offense, um, but also something about his callousness and lack of empathy. And in fact, he’s boastful about this, and again to me, that suggests something very abnormal about the way his personality has developed, um, and I thought these were, um, psychopathic traits.”
“Is Will Cornick a psychopath?”
“Well, he’s too young. Is his behavior showing traits of psychopathy? Yes.”
“Psychopaths can’t be diagnosed until they’re over 18, but given the psychopathic traits he’s already shown, it’s likely William Cornick will spend significantly longer in jail than the minimum 20 years he was sentenced to.”
“The question of whether Will Cornick will ever be rehabilitated so that he can be released remains to be seen, but there are some challenges for him ahead. Not only does he have a personality disorder or adjustment disorder with psychopathic traits, but he was also adept at convincing people in authority that he presented no harm, and that was one of the features that resulted in John Kent concluding that he was a particularly dangerous individual.”
“Despite William Cornick’s horrific crime, in the aftermath, there was one enduring feature: the resilience and spirit shown by pupils of Corpus Christi College.”
“I don’t think Will could have done anything worse. He did it right, he did it two months before his exams. It was just a mess after that. The whole top floor was closed off from lessons. We had to have lessons in the cafeteria and the main school hall, and then we all had to go and sit as exams.”
“But we did get the best results to date. Everyone said either we did it for Miss Maguire, or Miss Maguire was watching over us. We all knew what a hard task we had, and I think that’s why everyone put the extra effort in, ’cause we’d miss—we had missed out on a lot of lessons and things like that. So I think everyone put extra effort in with the revision, and that’s why we did so well.”
