A teenage boy who stabbed his teacher to death in class was remorseless after the murder, asking the police officer who arrested him what his favourite film was, a court has heard.
William Cornick was 15 when he killed Ann Maguire during a Spanish lesson at Corpus Christi Catholic College in April 2014.
A police officer who attended the scene remembers the teenager asking for ice for his hand, which had been cut in a tussle with Maguire, and giving no response when told he was under arrest for murder.
“Cornick then asked me: ‘What is your favourite movie?’” the officer said in a written statement read to Maguire’s inquest at Wakefield coroner’s court on Thursday.
The boy then asked: “What is your favourite adrenaline sport? Because I love adrenaline sports.”
The officer recalled how Cornick then smiled, “showing no remorse for what he had done”.
Statements from fellow pupils which were read to the court described how Cornick “wanted to kill his family” and wouldn’t care if “his dad died in a car crash”.
The inquest previously heard that Cornick came from a loving family. In a statement read to the jurythis week, his father, Ian Cornick, said they had spent an “exceptionally ordinary” and “unremarkable” weekend together before the murder.
The jury heard he visits his son once a month in prison, where the now 19-year-old is “scared” and “isolated.”
His father said: “He has told me that he very much regrets what he did and is desperate to find a route to get better.”
On Thursday, the court heard how Cornick “resented” Maguire for keeping him behind after class.
One student told the inquest in a statement what happened immediately after the murder when Cornick came back into their classroom.
“It was about 11.50am and everyone was screaming. He told us that he had stabbed her, Mrs Maguire,” the student said.
“We thought he was joking because he had always gone on about: ‘Wouldn’t it be funny if a train came through the window and hit her or a sniper shot her there and then.’
“He would say: ‘Wouldn’t it be funny if she fell out of the windows’ and stuff like that. He said “‘One day I am gonna. I am just gonna kill her.’”
The inquest also heard from one of Maguire’s colleagues, who saw her after she had been stabbed.
A statement from Susan Francis, head of modern foreign languages, was read to the court as medical evidence suggested the trauma of the incident still affected her too much to give live evidence.
She said: “I had gone up to my work room on the modern foreign languages floor. Suddenly there was all this screaming so I flew out into the corridor.
“I saw all these year 11s screaming and being horrified. Ann came out and she was holding the back of her neck, I thought there had been a swarm of wasps at first.
“She kept repeating: ‘He has stabbed me in the neck’. I put her in the office and shut the door and put my foot against it. Will was stood at the other side of the door motionless.”
She added: “I just remember his face having no emotion on it, none at all. It was like a mask on his face, no emotion.
“I opened the door to check and there was a massive knife on the floor outside the room. I could see cuts in her jumper and there was lots of blood coming from her neck.
“She said to me: ‘I can’t breathe, I’m dying, he has stabbed me in the lung, I can’t breathe I am dying’.
“The ambulance people arrived. Their faces looked like they had walked into some Armageddon.”
A paramedic who was at the scene, said Maguire’s wounds were the worst he had ever encountered. Cornick had stabbed her seven times, with one blow slicing her jugular vein and coming out the other side of her throat.
In a read statement to the jury, Craig Sagar said: “In all of my career as a paramedic, the stab wound inflicted on Ann Maguire was the worst I had ever seen. I had certainly never seen one that had pierced from back to front.”
Cornick pleaded guilty to murder and was jailed for a minimum term of 20 years in November 2014.
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