Murder of Cecil Cornock - Henleaze 1946 Cecil Cornock liked to dress in women’s clothing and ask his wife Ann to beat him with a cane. It was after one such session that Cecil was found dead in his bath, with a rubber duck.!!?
Murder in Henleaze 1946 - Guilty or not Guilty ?
Strange Practices
Cecil Cornock liked to dress in women’s clothing and ask his wife Ann to beat him with a cane. It was after one such session that Cecil was found dead in his bath. Ann claimed that he had drowned and his head injuries occurred while he was being pulled out of the bath. The evidence was against her, and at the trial her counsel realised he had one of the most challenging cases of his career.
On December 10, 1946 Ann Cornock was charged with the murder of her husband Cecil, who had been found drowned in a bath at the couple's home in sleepy Henleaze.
DS Carter, who was investigating the crime, had also discovered some torn-up incriminating love letters between Ann and her young disabled 'friend' Gilbert Bedford, who had been visiting the house in Wellington Hill West on the day of Cecil Cornock's death. While awaiting trial in Cardiff Jail it was revealed that Ann was two months pregnant. But who was the father? No one was saying. The case opened on March 4, 1947 before Mr Justice Croom-Johnson with the defence barrister Mr Caswell knowing that this would be a most difficult case.
His client, however, remained calm and collected. 'Poker-faced' he was later to recall. When the so called 'love letters' were shown in court, however, Caswell spotted that they were unfolded, with no indication that they had been put in a pocket or envelope. He suggested that, having been written as a kind of joke between the couple, they were then immediately torn-up and thrown away. Then, when Bedford was in the witness box - which he had managed to hobble up to with the help of two sticks - he denied that he and the accused had ever had a sexual relationship. Indeed, he told the court, he was still a virgin.
His earnestness plus his disability seemed to carry weight with the jury. Questioned further, he said that it was at his request that Ann had told police that he had arrived at the house late in the evening rather than the truth, which was that he had been there all day. He had felt awkward about that, he said, and didn't want his family to know. Then Caswell was able to show that the wooden boat, found in the bathroom, which the prosecution said had been used to beat Cecil Cornock about the head before he drowned, had never been used like that.
Amazingly, no forensic tests were ever done on the toy. A star defence witness, Dr Charles Gibson, an experienced police surgeon, was then called. He said that, in his opinion, marks which had been found on the dead man's wrists could have been formed BEFORE he took his bath, perhaps from some masochistic practices earlier in the evening. Gibson also thought that marks found on Cornock's head were entirely consistent with his wife's explanations that they had happened whilst she and Bedford were trying to drag the body from the bath and into the bedroom. The one thing that Gibson didn't explain was how the rope had got wet, although Ann had told police that it had fallen into the bath.
Again, amazingly, not even simple forensic tests were done on the rope. Then Ann Cornock herself was called into the witness box. In a calm, clear and convincing voice she informed the jury that her husband often fell asleep in the bath and that he suffered from black outs. This was new evidence, not revealed before and for which there was no medical proof. Questioned about the long delay - almost two hours - in calling an ambulance, or indeed any extra help at all, she said that she had been so confused and distressed by her husband's death that she hadn't really thought about it until later. But she had, said the prosecution, found time to clean the bath, change out of some wet clothes and drink a cup of tea.
Despite all his hard work, worried defence counsel Caswell was of the opinion that the forthright manner in which Ann Cornock gave her somewhat contradictory evidence could sway the jury against her. Surely they would see her as a hard-hearted, callous woman with no feelings except for her 'friend' Mr Bedford? Under cross-examination she admitted that she didn't love her husband but they had been on friendly terms. Although she had told police that she had not had normal sexual relations with him for many years, she said that they had intercourse two weeks before he died and that, at the time she had made her statement to the police, she was not aware that she was pregnant.
Questioned by the prosecution about the taking of her husband's pulse to see if he was still alive - and given the fact that she had once had basic medical training as a nurse - Ann gave an amazing reply saying that she didn't know an awful lot about it. Although she had never done it before, she had also attempted to give him artificial respiration. She said that she had lifted her husband's head out of the water and then called for help, a story which conflicted with Bedford's, who had said that when he arrived in the bathroom the man's head was submerged. She had not thought about asking Bedford to go and get help or to phone for a doctor or an ambulance, although there was a telephone kiosk not far from the house.
Ann made light of the subject of the 'love letters', saying that they were written as part of a 'game' between the couple. She thought that Bedford was jealous because she was still in love with her husband, a story which was plainly at loggerheads with the evidence she had just given, saying she did not have any feelings for him. In a final throw, as things seemed to be going badly for the defence, Casswell told the court that Ann Cornock's written evidence seemed contradictory because of her upset, exhaustion and because it was given in the early hours of the morning.
He also drew the jury's attention to the conflicting medical evidence. In his summing up Mr Croom-Johnson told the jury that the case was either murder or not, with no room for a manslaughter verdict. The jury were gone for just more than an hour when they returned and stunned the court with a verdict of not guilty - a great victory for Casswell who feared to the last that he had lost the case. Ann Cornock left the court room as cooly as she had walked in.
The next day, Gilbert Bedford went to the register office to arrange his marriage to the pregnant Ann. She immediately withdrew it, claiming that she had no interest in Bedford whatsoever. Returning to Bath, where she had herself been born, she gave birth to a daughter. No more was ever heard from her, or her 'friend' Bedford, who died some years ago. So, no one will ever know what really happened in Wellington Hill West that Sunday night so long ago.
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