[4][clarification needed] To publicise Tildesley's disappearance, a national poster campaign was launched, with one displayed in every police station in the country.

In 1990 as part of this investigation, it emerged that on the night he disappeared, Tildesley had been abducted, drugged, tortured, raped and murdered by a London-based paedophile gang led by Sidney Cooke.

[8] The Frank Ayers Fun Fair, which came to Carnival Field off Wellington Road in Wokingham four times a year,[9] had arrived during that holiday week.

He only received 30p in pocket money every week, so he supplemented his allowance by returning trolleys from a Tesco location in Denmark Street back to where they belonged, thus collecting their customers' abandoned 10p deposits.

[5] Wokingham town centre's 29 streets, which consisted of 960 shops, businesses, and houses, had to be covered by officers on a door-to-door basis.

[5] On the weekend of 9–10 June 1984, fifteen policemen and two tracker dogs teamed up with 100 British Army soldiers from the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers training battalion in Arborfield Garrison to search the south side of Wokingham from Barkham Road through to Amen Corner, which proved unproductive.

[3] The day after the first Crimewatch UK broadcast, the police shot their first video reconstruction using a local seven-year-old boy dressed in clothes similar to those worn by Tildesley.

[3] Two days before the first anniversary of Tildesley's disappearance, and with the Frank Ayers Fun Fair returning to Wokingham, a second police reconstruction was filmed.

The footage was aired at 9:25 pm on 13 June 1985 on Crimewatch UK; over 1,000 people called in with information, one of the highest volumes in the programme's history.

[5] On 7 June 1984, the day of the first Crimewatch UK appeal, two anonymous calls came in to say that they suspected a specific fairground worker was responsible for Tildesley's disappearance.

One of Cooke's colleagues had alerted detectives at the Tildesley incident office about his suspicious behaviour towards young boys in the past.

[8] In April 1987, the press released a story about a possible link regarding attempted abductions of young children over the past six months in the Wokingham area.

[17] As part of this operation, in December 1990, they interviewed convicted paedophile Leslie Bailey, who had already been charged with two other murders, that of 14-year-old Jason Swift and six-year-old Barry Lewis, both of which occurred after Tildesley's disappearance.

[6][7] At this point Bailey, who suffered from a mild learning disability, confessed that Cooke's paedophile gang, whom the police had nicknamed the "Dirty Dozen", had abducted, drugged, tortured, raped and murdered Tildesley on the night he disappeared.

[6][7] On the night of Tildesley's disappearance, Bailey had been asked by another member of the gang, his lover Lennie Smith, to drive him from Hackney to Wokingham, as there would be a party in a caravan owned by Cooke located near the fairground.

They then met a fourth man, a relative of Bailey's known as "Odd Bod" at Cooke's caravan, located on a field called The Moors on Evendons Lane, between Finchampstead and Barkham.

[11] The police received a Judge's Commendation for pursuing an honourable and sustained investigation which led to the eventual solving of the Tildesley case.

However, in 2015, following media and political pressure, the police re-opened the investigation into the 1981 murder of seven-year-old Vishal Mehrotra near East Putney tube station in London.

[22] In 2015, Stoodley expressed concern about a "cover up" by the Metropolitan Police over the Tildesley case, maintaining that there was sufficient evidence to prosecute Cooke over the killing.

[23] Cooke has never admitted playing any role in Tildesley's murder, despite a key ring identical to the one owned by the boy being found in his repossessed Jaguar XJ in 1985, a year after the disappearance.

[6][7][24] No charges were therefore brought against him as the CPS felt that Bailey's confession was insufficient evidence for Smith's case to result in a successful conviction.

[5] However, as "Odd Bod" had the mental age of an eight-year-old, he could not have his name disclosed or be charged, put on trial or sentenced in connection with the killing.

[5] Equally unusual was Bailey's instructions to his defence barrister to seek the maximum sentence possible, saying that he was 'surprised and disappointed' that Cooke and Smith were not in the dock with him.

[4][clarification needed][38] In 2019 the victim's family made a last-ditch plea begging Cooke, who is in his nineties, to reveal the whereabouts of Tildesley's body.

[39] Tildesley's parents kept his bedroom exactly how it was the day he went missing until his mother moved to nearby Langley Common Road in Barkham (further away than Evendons Lane), shortly after his father's death in 2005.