Sidney Cooke
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Sidney Cooke (also known as Hissing Sid) (born 18 April 1927) is a convicted paedophile and murderer who is serving two life sentences for a string of rapes and sexual abuse against boys.
Along with three accomplices, Cooke was imprisoned in 1989 for manslaughter in the 1985 death of a 14-year-old boy, one of many the four men had brutalized, sexually tortured, and prostituted over a number of years. He was sentenced to 19 years in prison, but was paroled in 1998 after convincing an appeals court that one of his accomplices was the ringleader of the paedophile ring. That same accomplice had told authorities that Cooke had murdered a 7-year-old boy in June 1984, but his role in the death was not investigated until years later.
A year after he was paroled, Cooke was arrested again for sexually abusing two brothers over several months in 1972-73, a crime which, among many others, had come to public attention after they were reported on in the Channel 4 documentary Dispatches. At trial, Cooke admitted committing a number of sexual offenses against children (while denying certain others) and blamed the sexual abuse he said he himself had suffered as a child. Cooke, now approaching 80, was sentenced to life imprisonment and the trial judge recommended that he should serve at least five years before parole could be considered.
