CORNYN

Posted by Cathy Gowdy on Wednesday, August 04, 2010 at 04:39:43 :

Marin Journal
Thursday, April 28, 1921
Page 1

Two Sons Killed By Maniac Father

Impelled, he says, by the call of his dead wife to send her children to her, John Cornyn, discharged a few months ago from an insane asylum, last Sunday afternoon shot and killed his two little sons, Andrew, aged 9, and Arthur, 7, after he had taken them from the St. Vincent’s Orphanage on an outing near Chapman Station.

After a sleepless night during most of which he walked the streets, the maniac father surrendered himself to the San Francisco police and confessed his crime.

In the custody of two San Francisco detectives and leading a searching party in charge of Sheriff J. J. Keating and Coroner J. Ray Keaton, Cornyn sought Monday for four hours to locate the place of the tragedy. At four o’clock word was conveyed to the main searching party that the bodies of the two little fellows had been found two miles away by Nicholas Yeager, chief of the State Railroad Police, Northwestern Pacific Railroad Company, George Mahood, superintendent of the Southern Marin branch of the telephone company, and Nathan Mann, manager of the Princess Theatre, of Sausalito.

The bodies of the children were removed Tuesday morning to San Francisco by Coroner Keaton for burial beside their mother.

Cornyn, since his release from the Agnew Asylum has been selling newspapers at the ferry building in San Francisco. A few months ago he was restored to competency in proceedings before Judge Frank Dunne. Securing a Juvenile Court order Saturday for the release of his children from St. Vincent’s Orphanage for one day, Cornyn took the boys with him at 9:20 Sunday morning. Alighting at Corte Madera, he walked back to the poultry farm of Frank Schmitt at Baltimore Park.

After showing the lads through the poultry ranch, the crazed father led the little fellows over the hills to Chapman.

Evincing little concern over his maniacal deed, Cornyn sits in his cell at the county jail here awaiting the disposition that is to be made of his case.

Cornyn has four other children, Ruth a girl of 3 years; Paul, aged 12, Evelyn, 16, and John, aged 20.

Cornyn has been charged with murder in a complaint sworn to e Sheriff Keating.