Sidney Charles Cooke (born 18 April 1927) is an English convicted child molester and suspected serial killer serving two life sentences.
Cooke was born on 18 April 1927 in Stroud, Gloucestershire, and worked as a farm labourer.
He later was a fairground worker, which made it easy for him to move around the United Kingdom.
As part of his system to lure young boys, Cooke set up a child's version of the high striker amusement.
1970
He was the leader of a paedophile ring suspected of up to twenty child murders of young boys in the 1970s and 1980s.
Cooke and other members of the ring were convicted of three killings in total, although he was only convicted of one himself.
In the 1970s, Cooke and a group of approximately twelve paedophiles began hiring rent boys and abducting young male children off the streets.
The victims were drugged, raped and abused in group orgies.
1971
In November 1985, a group led by Cooke had gang raped 14-year-old Jason Swift (born 1 March 1971) in what the media described as a homosexual orgy.
After Swift's body was found in a shallow grave by a dog walker, an investigation by the Metropolitan Police led to the arrest of Cooke along with three accomplices: Leslie Bailey, Robert Oliver and Steven Barrell.
1979
Cooke's gang have also been the subject of several investigations into possible links to the disappearances of two boys, Martin Allen and Vishal Mehrotra, who were abducted from London in 1979 and 1981 respectively.
1980
By the mid-1980s, the group had acquired a flat on the Kingsmead housing estate in Hackney, east London.
1984
Cooke is suspected by police of killing the three boys with the ring; he was named by gang member Leslie Bailey as the killer of Mark Tildesley in 1984 when Bailey confessed to the murder, and he is also suspected to have been involved in the murder of 6-year-old Barry Lewis which Bailey was also convicted of.
Bailey and other gang members told authorities that Cooke was among those who murdered Mark Tildesley, a seven-year-old boy, in Wokingham, Berkshire on 1 June 1984.
Bailey claimed that Tildesley was lured away from a Wokingham funfair by Cooke on the promise of a 50p bag of sweets.
1985
Lewis had been snatched from the street while playing with friends in Walworth, south London, on 15 September 1985.
1986
His body was found in Essex in April 1986, only four days from the discovery of Swift's body.
1989
On 12 May 1989, Cooke was sentenced at the Old Bailey to nineteen years in Wandsworth Prison for the manslaughter of Swift.
The group were originally charged with murder before all were convicted of manslaughter.
Oliver received a lesser sentence of fifteen years, but was released from prison after eight and changed his name to Karl Curtis.
1990
In 1990, Bailey confessed to police that Cooke's gang had abducted, drugged and raped Lewis before Bailey had been tasked with disposing of the body the next day.
Bailey told police detailed information about the murder which confirmed his testimony as genuine, and led police to the location of Lewis's grave.
As with Tildesley, Bailey implicated Cooke in Lewis's murder.
Although he was the only one convicted in the murders of Lewis and Tildesley, police believed Cooke was the leader of the gang.
While in prison, Cooke reportedly boasted of his ring killing "about fifteen" children to cellmates.
Members of the ring also reportedly made references to killing Lewis, whose murder was at this point still unsolved but of which detectives on the Swift enquiry were already aware.
One prisoner, Ian Gabb, felt so disgusted by the confessions that he volunteered to give information to the authorities.
Police set up Operation Orchid to further investigate murders that could be linked to the ring.
Gabb informed police that a ring member named Lennie Smith had been involved in the group's murders along with Cooke.
Police subsequently put Smith under surveillance, and he was soon arrested for indecent assault on a child in a public toilet.
Gabb also provided detectives with maps he had drawn based on the descriptions of where the ring members claimed they had buried their victims, to which police responded by searching several sites of interest.
1991
In 1991, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) declined to prosecute Cooke for Tildesley's murder as he was already in prison for the manslaughter of Swift.
As Bailey was the only one who confessed to Tildesley's murder, the CPS decided to only formally press charges against him for the killing despite him and other gang members naming Cooke as the perpetrator, as fellow paedophiles are not considered reliable witnesses in a court of law.
Despite this, Bailey's trial was highly unusual in that it explicitly named Cooke and another man, Lennie Smith, as the killers, despite them having not been charged.
Cooke is also suspected of involvement in the murder of another boy, six-year-old Barry Lewis, for which Bailey was convicted in June 1991.
1999
Cooke, a fairground worker, was nicknamed Hissing Sid by colleagues, and was described by The Guardian newspaper in 1999 as "Britain's most notorious paedophile".
Cooke's role in the murder was not fully investigated until 1999, after Cooke's release from prison; by this time, Bailey had been murdered in prison in October 1993.
Cooke has indicated he knows where Tildesley's body is buried but refuses to disclose the exact location.
2013
In July 2013, he was jailed for three years after being found guilty of luring children into his home in Maidstone, Kent.
This was due to the breach of a court order which banned him from having unsupervised contact with children.
