April 2006
Woman (42) jailed for having sex with schoolboy (14)
A woman from Borehamwood was jailed for more than two years last week for having sex with a teenage boy in her home.
Angela Cooklin, 42 of Darrington Road, was sentenced at St Albans Crown Court on Friday after being found guilty of two offences of having sex with a 14-year-old boy.
It happened on Saturday, June 12, 2004 the night after she had taken him to watch a televised eviction from the Big Brother House at Elstree Film and Television Studios in Shenley Road, Borehamwood.
The jury heard how the boy, who can not be identified for legal reasons, had drunk five Bacardi Breezers and had to go upstairs to a bedroom to lie down.
Giving evidence, the boy said: “We were kissing and then she put her hand down my trousers. I think she said once or twice I love you.
“I knew it was wrong. She said she knew it was wrong but she couldn’t help the way she felt about me.
“She rolled on top of me and took her trousers off.”
They continued to kiss and she performed a sex act on him, before they had sex.
Cooklin told the boy she knew it was wrong but could not help herself.
Two days later the boy’s mother discovered what had been going on when she found a series of explicit text messages on his mobile phone.
In one Cooklin said: “You are lovely. I love you. I am home now. Bed not changed.”
In another, she told the teenager: “I want to be laying naked in bed with you now because I don’t want there to be anything between us, not even clothes.”
The boy’s mother told the jury that she checked the text messages after the boy seemed out of sorts.
She said: “I asked him if he had sex with her and he said yes. I asked him if he had used precautions and he said no, and said she couldn’t get pregnant.
“Then he broke down and cried in a ball on the sofa.”
Cooklin, who has been married twice, went to secretarial college after her O levels and had worked as a dental nurse.
At the time she seduced the boy, she was working at Barnet’s Toy Shop in Notting Hill, London, which she told the jury was owned and run by her mother.
She denied any sexual activity had taken place and said the boy had an infatuation’ with her.
Sentencing her to 26 months in prison, Judge Findlay Baker QC called her a determined liar’.
He said: “You decided you wanted him. You couldn’t control your desires and very deliberately set him up.
“If the end is bitter for you, you only have yourself to blame.”
