Sidney Cooke
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Sidney Cooke (also known as Cookie and Hissing Sid) (born 18 April 1927) is an evil 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 Jason Swift, a fourteen 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 called Mark Tildesley, in Wokingham, Berkshire in June 1984, but his role in the death was not investigated until years later. The boy's body has never been found. Mark disappeared while visiting a funfair in Wokingham on the evening of Friday 1 June 1984. It was believed he was lured away from the fair by Cooke, who had manned a test your strength machine, on the promise of a 50p bag of sweets. His bicycle was found chained to railings nearby. Three of the gang, Cooke, Lennie Smith and Leslie Bailey were put to trial in 1991 over Mark's murder but only Bailey was charged as they all blamed each other. He was subsequently murdered himself in prison by two fellow inmates in 1993. The CPS sadly declined to prosecute Cooke for Mark Tildesley's murder as he was already in prison for Jason Swift's murder.
In 1999, 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.
