A woman has gone on trial accused of murdering the baby boy she and her husband were planning to adopt.
Leiland-James Corkill was 13 months old and in the care of Laura Castle and her husband, Scott, when he died at their home in Barrow-in-Furness, Cumbria.
The couple deny mistreating Leiland-James from 21 August 2020, the day he moved in with them, until he was taken to hospital with head injuries on 6 January 2021. He died the next day.
A jury at Preston crown court were read text messages between the couple, apparently regretting the adoption a month after his arrival. “He’s an absolute moaning winge bag and I totally regret doin this. I‘m goin to lose my mind,” Laura, 38, messaged Scott, on 23 September.
She added: “I need to stop smacking him cos if I start I’ll not stop at one point and it’s not getting us anywhere and then I feel bad.”
Scott, 34, replied to call the 13-month old “a dick baby”.
Scott, who worked at BAE Systems in Barrow, denies causing or allowing Leiland-James’s death. Laura has pleaded guilty to manslaughter but denies murder.
She said the little boy fell from the sofa. But a pathologist concluded that Leiland-James had suffered a non-accidental, traumatic head injury, which could have occurred by someone shaking him forcefully.
Opening the case on Thursday, the prosecution barrister, Michael Brady, QC, said Leiland-James was a “robust and resilient child” who had been taken into care at his birth on 21 December 2019.
He initially lived with foster carers until the Castles were approved as potential adopters, with Leiland-James formally “handed over” to the couple on 22 August for a trial period.
Laura subsequently told a social worker that she did not love Leiland-James, the jury heard. She said she was struggling to bond with him and that she and her husband felt as though they were “babysitting” him.
But unbeknown to social services, the court heard, she was assaulting the little boy within five weeks of his arrival. “I’ve just absolutely leathered him, I can[’t] take this any more, he’s gonna have to go,” Laura told Scott in a text on 24 September.
Scott replied to say: “Your not an abusive parent baby. Not at all. Don’t say that. I think he’s a little too fucked up for us to handle xc.
“Let’s just call it quits. I don’t want you to have a mental break down. Your more important to me than him.”
A month before Leiland-James died, Cumbria county council’s adoption panel agreed not to recommend an adoption “given the issues with attachment”, Brady told the court. The couple were told they would not be able permanently to adopt Leiland-James “until further therapeutic work had been done”.
The night before Leiland-James died, Scott sent a text to Laura suggesting the little boy might benefit from “a good hard smack”.
Brady told the jury: “It is the crown’s case that set against a background of frustration, born out of highly stressful domestic circumstances, including financial difficulties and an inability to bond with Leiland-James, Laura Castle’s frustration with Leiland-James turned to hostility, as evidenced by her physical abuse of him culminating in his murder.”
The case continues.
