Glasgow Courier. — 1853-03-03 (Glasgow, Strathclyde, Scotland)

HORRIBLE MURDER BY STARVATION.  An almost unprecedented amount of excitement and alarm has been created at North Common, a hamlet of Gloucestershire, situated about six mile, from the city of Bristol, in consequence of the arrest of an agricultural labourer, named John Cornish, and Eliza, his wife, upon a charge of having murdered Mark Cornish, a boy of about 11 years of age, the son of the former, and stepson of the lastnamed prisoner. The murder was alleged to have been committed by the most horrible of all means— slow starvation; and the condition of the corpse, when seen after death, was in every way confirmatory of the suspicions entertained. When weighed by Mr. Superintendent Box, of the Gloucestershire county police, its weight was found to be only 27 lbs.—the ordinary weight of a full grown infant of from eighteen months to two years old. From the information which the police have been enabled to gather since the unhappy boy's death, it would appear that his maltreatment by his parents had been for many months a matter of perfect notoriety in the neighbourhood; that it had been made known to the board of guardians and the relieving officer; that the case had been actually three or four times visited by the last-named functionary; and that another child of the same father, aged 14 years, had been reduced to pretty nearly as wretched a condition The two ill used children were the offspring of a first wife of the prisoner John Cornish, who died some eight years ago, shortly after her confinement with an infant since dead. At the time of his first wife's death, Cornish worked at a farm, where his present wife Eliza was also living; and during his then wife's illness, she was sent by her mistress to help to wait on her. About a month after Mrs. Cornish'ademise her husband and the prisoner got married. He has had three children by her, and suspicion was first directed towards them by the fact that, while his first-born children exhibited all the evidence of starvation and neglect, the fruits of his second marriage were healthy and fat. The deceased boy and his sister have been found by the neighbours picking pigs' victuals from vessels, or potatoe pickings from midens, or crusts of bread and other cast off-food, wherever they could find it, and eating of it greedily. On one occasion he was found in a pigstye, covered over with straw, in which he had been lying for twenty hours, with no other food with him but a few raw potatoes. At other times he has been found in a carpenter's out-house, coiled up in the shavings, or at a disused coke oven in the neighbourhood, seeking warmth by burying himself among the ashes, and he has also been discovered almost frozen at other and more exposed situations. The neighbours, who have been in the habit of going occasionally to his father's house, have noticed that, while the second family have partaken of the parents' food, the other children have sat in a distant part of the room; and cries as if of suffering have also been heard issuing from the boy. Notwithstanding the decaying state of the deceased, no medical aid had ever been sought for him by his parents, and up to the time of his being found on Thursday morning by his sister to be in a dying state, he was not seen by any surgeon. An inquest was held at the Hollybush Inn by Mr. Ball, coroner for another district of the county. A great number of witnesses were called, all the material part of whose testimony supported the narrative above given. The jury, after some deliberation, returned a verdict of wilful murder against John and Eliza Cornish,' who were straightway cotqmitted to Gloucester county jail, to await their trial for that crime.