On 30th November 1985 Jason Swift’s body was discovered by a farm worker in Stapleford Tawney, Essex. It was thought that Jason was probably killed on 14th November 1985 and asphyxia was the cause of death, probably as a result of suffocation. Jason’s family home was in Hackney, but it is said by a former Islington residential worker that Jason was in Conewood Street children’s home tuition unit not long before he was murdered and ISN survivors remember him well. ISN have learnt that it has been said there was an Education file on him in Islington. In the 90s Eileen Fairweather, journalist, heard from two separate sources about Jason being in Conewood Street but wrote that because of missing files Islington Council could not confirm this.
I have never before written that 14-year-old Jason Swift, killed in 1985 by a paedophile gang, is believed to have lived in Islington council’s Conewood Street home.
Two sources claimed this when I investigated Islington’s 12 care homes for The Mail on Sunday’s sister paper, the London Evening Standard, in the early Nineties.
But hundreds of children’s files mysteriously disappeared in Islington and, without documentation, this was not evidence enough.
‘I have known about Jersey paedophiles for 15 years, says award-winning journalist’, Daily Mail 02.03.2008
A timeline of the investigation, named Operation Stranger and Operation Orchid is available here.
Cooke’s sentence was reduced to 16 years on appeal in 1989 and he gained parole in 1998. On January 26th 1999, he was again arrested and charged with committing 18 sex offences between 1972 and 1981. On 17th December 1999 he received two life sentences.
Islington Survivors Network 