The Murders of Jason Swift (1985) and Barry Lewis (1991)

Описание: In November 1985, a group led by Cooke had each paid £5 to gang-rape 14-year-old Jason Swift in what the media described as a homosexual orgy. After his 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. Cooke was sentenced at the Old Bailey to 19 years in Wandsworth Prison on 12 May 1989 for the manslaughter of Swift.

Barry Lewis age six was abducted in June 1991. Bailey was also convicted of the murder of Barry, six, who was abducted before being sexually abused by up to eight men.
In the 1970s, Cooke and a group of paedophiles began hiring rent boys and taking young boys off the streets, who were then drugged, raped and abused in group orgies.

By the mid-1980s, the group had acquired a flat on the Kingsmead estate in Hackney, East London.
Following an investigation by the Channel 4 documentary programme Dispatches on 29 October 1998 Thames Valley Police began the reinvestigation of a series of rape and other serious sexual offences against young boys.

On 26 January 1999, Cooke was arrested by Thames Valley Police. Three days later he was charged at Reading police station with committing 18 sex offences which occurred between 1972 and 1981 in Battersea and Stockwell in south London; Twyford, Berks; Canterbury, Kent; Washington, Tyne and Wear and Hatfield, Berkhamsted and Tring in Hertfordshire. He was moved back to prison on remand.

These included repeated abuse and assault of two brothers and the rape of a young woman.

At his trial at Manchester Crown Court on 5 October 1999, Cooke pleaded guilty to sexually abusing the two brothers on ten occasions in 1972 and 1973.

Police have uncovered a link between the ’Shoebury Sex Ring’ and the paedophile gang which killed schoolboy Jason Swift in the 1980s. A witness alerted police to the link without even realising it.

Sex crime officers in Rayleigh concluded months of interviews with the man, who was contacted after police found his name on a 1990 list of boys linked to the Shoebury ring.
The man’s allegations are corroborated on many key details by a stack of paperwork from a 1989/90 investigation into the ring, the contents of which have never been placed in the public domain.

During his interviews, the man told officers that one of the Shoebury ringleaders often referred to a mystery man called ’Lennie Smith’.

He told officers how Brian Tanner – who was convicted in 1990 of running the Shoebury ring – would threaten boys if they argued or tried to escape, saying words to the effect of, “If you keep this up, I’ll take you to Lennie Smith.”

Unbeknownst to the witness, Smith was one of the paedophile gang known as the Dirty Dozen, whose members raped and killed three children – Jason Swift, Mark Tildesley and Barry Lewis.
Smith was linked to all three killings but never prosecuted because in each case all the witnesses against him were fellow paedophiles, deemed unreliable by the CPS.

But he was convicted of other serious child sex offences. He died in prison in 2006.

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