London – A 16-year-old boy was jailed for
life on Monday after he admitted murdering a teacher in front of a class
full of pupils at a Catholic school in Leeds earlier this year.
Will Cornick stabbed 61-year-old Ann Maguire seven times at Corpus Christi Catholic College on April 28.
The boy pleaded guilty to murder at Leeds Crown Court where he was sentenced to life and ordered to serve a minimum of 20 years.
Judge Peter Coulson said the teenager
showed a “total and chilling lack of remorse” over the killing and said
the teenager’s pride in what he had done was “truly grotesque”.
The court heard earlier how the Spanish
teacher was sitting at her desk helping a pupil when Cornick, then aged
15, attacked her from behind.
“The defendant approached his teacher and began to stab her in the neck and back,” said prosecutor Paul Greaney QC.
He said the teacher was 5 feet 2 inches
(1.6 metres) tall and of slim build while the teenager was “a full foot
taller and was armed with a large kitchen knife”.
“To describe his attack as cowardly hardly does it justice,” he added.
Greaney said Cornick had told other pupils
earlier that day that he was going to attack Maguire and showed some of
them the knives he had with him.
The prosecutor said he brought a bottle of whisky to school to celebrate afterwards.
The court heard how the teenager left a
room next to where Maguire was teaching, winking at a fellow student
before going to kill her.
He had indicated his intention to murder
the teacher months before in a series of Facebook messages, according to
the prosecution.
“Late on the night of Christmas Eve 2013
and into the early hours of Christmas Day, the defendant exchanged
messages with a friend on Facebook,” Greaney said.
“In
those messages he spoke of ‘brutally killing’ Mrs Maguire and spending
the rest of his life in jail so as not to have to worry about life or
money.”
A psychiatrist’s report cited in court described how Cornick planned the murder.
Greaney,
reading the boy’s comments to the psychiatrist, said: “I decided on
Sunday it was going to be a knife. I thought I was just going to go to
school and wait for her lesson and do it.
“I wanted to get caught. That’s why I did it in school. I wanted to be in jail.”
Maguire, who died from multiple stab wounds, was only months from retirement.
The mother-of-two had taught at the school in the Halton Moor area of Leeds for more than 40 years.
It
was thought to be the first time a teacher had been killed in a school
since the 1996 Dunblane massacre and the first ever fatal stabbing of a
teacher in a British school.
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