NEXT STOP HELL; EXCLUSIVE Worst paedophile in Britain dies of AIDS in jail's secret wing.
Sunday Mirror By DAVID HUDSON
2 July 2006
BRITAIN'S most dangerous paedophile, Lenny Smith, has died of AIDS in a secret prison unit - taking to the grave the terrible secret of just how many children he abused and murdered.
The 51-year-old pervert - jailed for 10 years in 1992 for sickening sex attacks on a six-year-old boy - was a member of a sadistic paedophile ring that preyed on children and murdered five boys in the mid-1980s.
He was due to be released on parole seven years ago, but was too afraid to return to society and chose to live instead in a secure unit inside Nottingham Prison. It was there that he died, still showing no remorse.
Though he was closely linked to several horrific sex murders - including those of seven-year-old Mark Tildesley, teenage rent boy Jason Swift, and Barry Lewis, aged just six - Smith was never charged because of a lack of evidence. Mark was killed after being snatched from a fairground and taken to a caravan, where he was gang-raped and tortured. His body has never been found.
Only one of the gang - 39-yearold Leslie Bailey - was convicted of his killing after admitting manslaughter.
But Bailey's lawyer told the court that another man had led Mark from the playground and then Smith had drugged him.
After the gang had taken it in turns to abuse Mark, former rent boy Smith had strangled him in a state of sexual excitement.
But the Crown Prosecution Service decided that Bailey's claims could not be relied on and that his statements were inadmissible.
Smith had always replied: "No comment" when asked about Mark. "That's all he would say, with a very straight face," according to former Det Chf Supt Roger Stoodley, who brought the paedophile ring to justice. "He was very calm and very cunning."
Smith was born in Montgomeryshire, Mid Wales, and first worked as a rent boy in Birmingham and then Oxford before moving to Southend, where he ran other rent boys. He finally settled on the Kingsmead estate in Hackney, East London.
There he teamed up with Robert Oliver, another notorious paedophile. The two men were members of a gang who regularly met up for homosexual orgies after luring young boys to a flat.
"There's gonna be a party," was the coded phrase gang members used to tell one another by phone.
In 1985 Oliver was jailed for 15 years in 1985 for the manslaughter of 14-year old Jason Swift during an orgy. Smith was also arrested for the killing but never charged.