What should have been a night of fun and frivolity at a Wokingham fun fair in 1984 ended in unthinkable tragedy when 7-year-old Mark Tildesley disappeared without a trace. With school having broken up for the half term holiday, Mark was desperate to pay a visit to the Frank Ayers Fun Fair, which visited town just 4 times a year. After raising money for his ticket by collecting the 10p trolley deposits from his local supermarket, he set off to the fair on the evening of June 1st, promising his mother to return by 7:30 pm. When his curfew came and went, Mark’s parents set off to look for him, finding only his cherished Raleigh bicycle chained near the entrance of the fair.
Despite extensive investigations by police, years passed with no clue as to Mark’s whereabouts. But in 1989, Operation Orchid was launched when a hand drawn paper map outlining the site of Mark’s disappearance was found in the possession of convicted paedophile and child murderer Leslie "Catweazle" Bailey. Bailey revealed that Mark had been drugged, tortured, raped and murdered by a gang known by police as the ‘Dirty Dozen’, led by Sidney ‘Hissing Sid’ Cooke. The pair, along with Bailey’s boyfriend, forced Mark into a car before meeting up with another man at Cooke’s nearby caravan. In an event they sickeningly referred to as ‘Mark’s party’, they plied the little boy with muscle relaxant and repeatedly gang-raped him until he was dead.
As there was no physical evidence against Cooke, no charges could be made, though he was already serving 19 years for the manslaughter of 16-year-old Jason Swift. After being paroled for a brief period in 1999, Cooke was sentenced to 2 life sentences for unrelated sexual offences. Now aged 90, he is incarcerated at Wakefield Prison, and has never revealed the location of Mark’s remains.
Bailey was also serving time for the murder of Jason Swift when he was handed 2 life sentences in 1992. He was strangled to death by two fellow inmates of Whitemoor Prison just one year later. His boyfriend, like Cooke, was never charged for Mark’s murder due to insufficient evidence, and died of AIDs in prison in 2006. The fourth man, whose name was never revealed to the public, had the mental capacity of an 8-year-old, and for that reason no charges were ever made against him.
Mark’s parents, John and Lavinia, died in 2005 and 2011 respectively, having never had the chance to lay their little boy to rest.
