THE STORY SO FAR
When ambulancemen and police answered a 999 call in the early hours of the morning in December 1946, they got a lot more than they bargained for – a husband dead in suspicious circumstances, an oddly calm widow, and strange tales from the bedroom.
THE CASE
It was a dark, cold night on 8 December 1946, when a woman urgently called for an ambulance at 2am.
It raced to a suburban house in Henleaze, Bristol, where Rosina Ann Cornock, 34 – known as Ann – answered the door.
She’d found her husband Cecil Cornock, 34, lying unconscious, underwater, in the bath at 11pm.
Desperate, she and a visiting friend Gilbert Bedford, 24, had dragged Cecil out, and she’d attempted artificial respiration.
It was too late. Cecil was dead.
But ambulancemen were suspicious. If Ann had found him at 11pm, why wait three hours to call for help? Also, Cecil had gashes to his head, bruises across his body and rope marks on his wrists.
A pipe above the bath had been snapped too.
The police were called.
Ann knitted as she explained that she and Gilbert had been downstairs while Cecil bathed, but when she’d checked on him…
‘I found him with his head under the water,’ she said.
They’d hauled Cecil into the bedroom and tried artificial respiration. But it tired her out, so Gilbert had made them both a soothing cup of tea. Then Ann decided to clean the bath and change her outfit before calling 999. Police were suspicious of the pair.
Had they killed Cecil?
Ann and Gilbert were questioned separately. Ann explained she’d married Cecil in 1933, and had a son. But Cecil was cold and mean, and regularly worked away from home. Then, four months before, Ann had met Gilbert, 24, at a funeral.
Like her, he was lonely – dubbed ‘the cripple’, as he’d walked with two sticks since a childhood accident. So they’d become friends, and that night, Gilbert had arrived just before Cecil went for his bath.
Gilbert told a different story…
That he and Ann often kissed and cuddled. And that for two months, he’d secretly lived there whenever Cecil worked away.
He also said he’d arrived after Cecil was in the bath.
Very suspicious.
Cool and unruffled, Ann denied cheating. But she told a story that left police speechless.
‘Cecil was a sexual pervert,’ she said. ‘He used to walk around the house naked.’
He’d dress up as a woman, demand that Ann tie him up and whip him with a bamboo cane. She was so horrified, they hadn’t had sex in years.
But was it true? Or had Ann invented an incredible cover-up for Cecil’s marks and bruises?
Gilbert confirmed Ann’s tale. He said she’d confided in him, and he’d hidden under the stairs to watch the pair.
‘I heard the swishing of a stick,’ he said. Then he’d seen Cecil in a woman’s dress, tied to the boiler and gagged with a hanky.
Gilbert told police he’d felt disgusted, watching Ann ‘whacking Cecil across the back with a short stick’.
Now Ann handed police three pieces of rope and explained that, on Cecil’s request, she’d tied his hands as he lay in the bath.
But 45 minutes later, she’d found him underwater.
Gilbert backed up her story. ‘His head was twisted against the side of the bath, and his nose was underwater,’ he said.
‘After a struggle, we managed to lift him out. His hands were behind his back, tied with a piece of long rope. She cut the rope with a pair of scissors. She told me people just would not understand a man being so mad. I told her she had better put the rope out of the way.’
The pair also said they’d snapped the pipe and bashed Cecil against the floor and door as they hauled him to the bedroom.
But the postmortem proved Cecil had suffered the bruising, and five gashes to his head – which matched the shape of a toy wooden boat in the bathroom – before he’d drowned.
Then police found love letters between Gilbert and Ann.
My darling, neither of us could find any real happiness without each other,
Gilbert had written.
Ann replied:
There is only one thing I am living for – the day when I can say you are mine. I shall always be disturbed in mind until then.
Disturbed enough to kill?
Ann was arrested on suspicion of murder.
Days later, astonishing news from Cardiff Prison’s doctor. Ann was two months pregnant. Odd, if she hadn’t slept with Cecil for years.
Yet now, Ann remembered they’d had sex recently.
Police weren’t convinced.
In March 1947, at Bristol Magistrates Court, five-months pregnant Ann denied murder.
Prosecutors said she was desperate to be with Gilbert, and Cecil was the ‘barrier to her dreams’.
So she’d beaten him unconscious with the boat, tied him up and drowned him. Then, backed up by Gilbert, she’d blamed Cecil’s secret desires.
‘The love and passion between these two has produced this result,’ the prosecutor said.
Ann insisted the love letters to Gilbert were just a game. ‘He’s nothing to me,’ she said.
A doctor also said Cecil’s injuries could have come from previous S&M play.
Now, Ann claimed her husband often had blackouts and fell asleep in the bath. And she said it was because she’d been so ‘confused and distressed’ that she’d given up resuscitating Cecil to drink tea, change and clean the bath before calling an ambulance…
So, was Ann an unlucky innocent? Or a cheat who’d kill and lie to be with her lover?
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