At long last the Parole Board gets tough and rejects freedom bids by three killers including the child murderer Sidney Cooke

I am pleased to report that the Parole Board is at last getting really tough on freedom bids from murderers.

In the last week three killers have had their parole attempts rejected. Great news.

Killer No. 1 is the disgusting Sidney Cooke. He is 92 and has been eligible for release since 2004.

He was jailed for a minimum  of five years for abusing two brothers which he started when they were just 13 and continued for five years.

Prior to that he had served nine years for killing 14-year-old Jason Swift. He was also thought to be linked with the unsolved murder of Mark Tildesley who disappeared from a funfair in Wokingham, Berks, and also being involved in the kidnap and murder of six-year-old Barry Lewis.

Cooke has applied for parole 10 times but once again it has been decided that he remains a risk to society plus he has refused to identify all the youngsters he had abused.  Further, they said he should not be transferred to an open prison. Exellent.

He can reapply in two years but with a bit of luck he will be dead by then.

Cooke’s story is a shocker. He would travel the country preying on vulnerable youngsters setting up Test Your Strength machines in funfairs and using them as an opportunity to lure boys before drugging them and then subjecting them to brutal sexual assaults.
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Two other killers have also had their parole applications rejected this week.

Glynn Razzell is serving life for the murder of his estranged wife, mother-of-four Linda Razzell who disappeared on her way to Swindon College, Wilts, in March 2002.

Razzell, 61, denied her killing but was found guilty by a jury. No trace of her body was ever found.

And that is what kept him in prison. Under the new Helen’s Law the refusal to say where the body is means the killer can be refused their freedom. An excellent addition to the Parole Board armoury.

Another killer, David Harker, faced the same issue when he applied for parole. He received a life sentence on the grounds of diminished responsibility after admitting the manslaughter of Julie Paterson who vanished from her home in Darlington in 1998.

Parts of her dismembered body were found in a bin liner hidden in a garden hedge but the rest of her remains have never been recovered.

As with Cooke they can both reapply for parole in a couple of years.

I much prefer how tough the parole people are getting. Frankly I would do away with parole in its entirety for the most serious offences like murder and terrorism.

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