SCHOOLBOY Kevin Smith was waiting for a train home late at night on an empty platform when he came face-to-face with one of Britain’s most evil villains.
The then-15-year-old noticed a rat-like figure hidden in the shadows moving slowly towards him on a quiet platform at South Bermondsey Station. Here. Kevin reveals all from his creepy encounter with one of the UK’s most dangerous men.
It’s every parent’s worst nightmare – their child is stalked by a sadistic predator who snatches them off the street in the hours of darkness.
But Sidney Cooke and his paedo gang – nicknamed the Dirty Dozen – did just that, and are estimated to have killed at least 20 young boys over two decades, with 15-year-old Kevin Smith within a whisker of the same unimaginable fate. He faced evil up close and somehow lived to tell the tale.
It was September 1985 in London when the schoolboy noticed someone slouched inside a hut at an otherwise empty South Bermondsey Station. The sinister figure then began to move closer and closer, sending a chill up his spine.
Kevin, who was on his way home to nearby East Dulwich from a snooker hall, had nowhere to go as he prayed for the train to arrive fast – with the rat-faced figure edging closer.
Unbeknown to the teenager at the time, this man was child murderer and paedophile Leslie Bailey, who, following his arrest would gain the nickname Catweazle after the titular dishevelled old wizard from a popular children’s TV show.
Bailey was part of the Dirty Dozen child sex ring, led by Sidney Cooke, who are suspected of killing up to 20 kids in the 1970s and 1980s, including high profile missing boys Jason Swift, 14, Mark Tildesley, seven, and Barry Lewis, six, between June 1984 and November 1985.
Cooke became the oldest UK lag in the UK to have a parole hearing in June this year, aged 98 – though was unsuccessful and remains behind bars.
Bailey was murdered in prison in 1993 – having been jailed with several other gang members four years earlier.
Dad-of-one Kevin, now 54, crossed paths with Bailey around the same time the gang snatched Barry Lewis off the street in nearby Walworth, His body would be found the following summer.
“When I was 15 I looked about 11 or 12 – and the gang were operating in South London at the time,” Kevin told The Sun.
He described how back then the station, near Millwall FC’s former stadium The Old Den, was just one wooden platform, which could be seen from the street, and was lit up by a series of lampposts.
“I was on my own, it was dark, I was just singing to myself and just walking around the lampposts,” recalled Kevin, who only had his snooker cue in a case with him.
“There was never anyone at the ticket office,” he explained. “Back then you could just walk through a turnstile.
“There was no security, there was no CCTV. Basically it was surrounded by brush land, industrial units and you could see the stadium.”
He said: “When I looked up there was a guy in the hut, just staring at me. It creeped me out a bit, so I kept an eye on him.
“I just clocked him and it shocked me because he was staring at me.
“As he left the hut, I moved down the platform a little bit, down to the next lamppost. It continued on and on,” Kevin said.
He said the hut was windowless and painted black, and the lampposts “weren’t super bright” other than when you were directly under one.
He continued: “I walked down to another light pole.”
Then it dawned on him that he’d probably made a fatal mistake, and rather than try to circle back past Bailey, he’d now eventually run out of platform with no escape.
“There used to be five or six (lampposts) that ran down the platform, and I got to the fifth one and I thought ‘S**t, what am I going to do? I’m running out of space, I’m gonna have to try clump him with the cue’.”
Describing Bailey, he said he “looked so dishevelled, like he was rough sleeping – he looked greasy, like a heroin addict”.
Kevin added: “I just thought he could’ve easily put his hand round my neck, hand round the mouth and dragged me into the bushes off the platform.”
He said: “It felt like he enjoyed it, he was creeping up rather than just running over.
“There was no one there. If you’re gonna do it, just run up and grab them.
“Why would you enjoy watching them walking to the end of the platform?”
Luckily for Kevin, the train suddenly approached.
“It came when I got to the fifth pole. I don’t know what would have happened if I got to the sixth,” he said.
“It was a helpless feeling, and I don’t like feeling helpless. I couldn’t have saved myself, he could’ve done what he wanted. I’m not a fighter.”
Kevin got on the train and Bailey slowly slinked back to the hut.
“When I looked back, he was just staring at me,” he said.
“What stood out were his eyes, they were just staring at me with hatred, and he was just staring at me through the window of the train, and he never got on.”
Kevin added: “I don’t think he stumbled upon me, and happened to be there. I think he saw me from the street and walked up. He didn’t get on the train, so what was his purpose to be there?”
A couple of weeks later, the teenager spotted a photofit on the frontpage of the South London Press, which he instantly recognised as the man who’d tried to snatch him.
He believes it was possibly in relation to six-year-old Barry Lewis’ disappearance on September 15 in Walworth – and who Bailey would later admit to killing before burying the child’s body.
“It was the same man I saw at the station – this Catweazle guy,” said Kevin.
“The thing that really gelled it, the artist’s impression got the eyes perfectly right, they got the skinny rodent face and the hair all messed up, and greasy.
“I said to my mum, ‘That’s the guy who was following me down the station.’
“That’s when I explained it for the first time.”
Kevin’s mum then informed Bacon School, where he was a pupil, with other kids regularly using the same station.
“I grew up in quite a loving family, and I’ve never had anyone look at me the way he was looking at me,” he said of Bailey.
“Like he wanted to kill me. He was so angry that I got onto the train. It’s like he looked straight through me.”
The Dirty Dozen would hire rent boys and abduct young male children off the streets, with victims drugged, raped and abused in group orgies, with some victims killed.
Around the time of Kevin’s encounter with Bailey, the gang had acquired a flat on the Kingsmead housing estate in Hackney.
That November, they raped and killed 14-year-old Jason Swift, whose body was later found in a shallow grave, leading to the arrest of ringleader Cooke, as well as Bailey and other accomplices Robert Oliver and Steven Barrell.
Later Bailey turned informant, admitting to his involvement in several murders, including little Barry, and pointed the finger at Cooke as the group’s mastermind.
Bailey and Cooke were also among those involved in the murder of seven-year-old Mark Tildesley, who Cooke lured away from a fairground in Wokingham in June 1984.
A major policing operation would then undercover the scores of likely victims linked to the sex ring.
Kevin said of his encounter: “I just tried to forget about it, and thought there’s no point dwelling on it.
“Sometimes I think to myself the geezer could have strangled me and thrown me in a bush, and no one would have ever found me.”
He added: “I did have nightmares that I was dead in a bush. I haven’t told anyone.
“You think it doesn’t affect you. I replay the scenario in my head, as if the train didn’t come.
“What would have happened if it didn’t come, or was delayed?
“I’ve had dreams where I’m running on the platform and I’m getting nowhere – it’s really weird stuff.”
Kevin said prior to the Bailey encounter he did also recall while coming out of school one lunchtime, him and some of his classmates, all in uniform, were going to a cafe when a blacked out Mercedes began following them slowly down the road as someone took photos.
“There was five of us walking down the backstreet of Old Kent Road during our lunch – it’s weird how things stand out when you’re a kid,” he said.
“There was a black Mercedes, with blacked out windows. When you’re a kid you’d notice a car creeping along the street, it’s not driving, it’s just rolling along.
“It was hanging back, it was our pace of walking. You look back and think what’s he doing?”
Kevin said a back window then rolled down “and a camera came out, and someone was just taking photos of us”.
“You could hear the shutter going ching, ching, ching, just taking photos. And it was aimed at us. It was a side street so not taking any photos of anyone else.
“When you’re a kid you just think what’s he doing? But maybe someone had told them ‘get me pictures to go back and grab one of them’.”
Kevin eventually became a professional snooker player in the early 1990s, and would go onto play in the televised world nine-ball pool championships in July 2000.
He appeared in The Sun at the time, with an article detailing how he’d almost died – cheating death a second time – at Kings Cross Station during a battle with meningitis and septicaemia.
Kevin is dad to a 21-year-old daughter and after five years away from professional pool is eyeing a return.
