WEEPING STEPFATHER CONFESSES TO BLUDGEON DEATH OF STEPSON
In a dramatic development in the District Court trial of Richard Macklin for the murder of his stepson Dorsey Corcoran, Macklin broke down under the stern cross-examination of County Attorney Bradley Whitsun and admitted he had beaten the four-year-old boy to death with a recoilless hammer, which he then buried at the far end of his wife’s vegetable garden before taking the boy to Derry Home Hospital’s emergency room.
The courtroom was stunned and silent as the sobbing Macklin, who had previously admitted beating both of his stepsons “occasionally, if they had it coming, for their own good,” poured out his story.
“I don’t know what came over me. I saw he was climbing on the damn ladder again and I grabbed the hammer from the bench where it was laying and I just started to use it on him. I didn’t mean to kill him. With God as my witness I never meant to kill him.”
“Did he say anything to you before he passed out?” Whitson asked.
“He said, ‘Stop daddy, I’m sorry, I love you,'” Macklin replied.
“Did you stop?”
“Eventually,” Macklin said. He then began to weep in such a hysterical manner that Judge Erhardt Moulton declared the court in recess.
—It, Stephen King