They should have performed the correct procedures and they failed to do so. Cook himself says the case was handled badly.
It did not matter what they thought at the time, they should have followed the correct procedures.
What they thought is a lame excuse.
They SHOULD have said/NOT said this/done that/NOT done that. The bottom line is what they did/didn't do/say is 30 years past and can't be rerun/undone.
We keep being told, with TOTAL conviction, by those who have never even met him, that Jeremy would NEVER do/say this/that or the other. Now I see that Colin said Sheila would NEVER allow the boys to have toy guns, ergo it's IMPOSSIBLE that they would have played with them..................IMO, this is all RUBBISH!!!! NEVER is a huge, expansively exaggerating term which can't be 100% applied to ANYONE.
Colin didn't live with Sheila. He probably had little concept of how difficult she found mothering at times and would therefore have had little knowledge of how she may lower previously held standards in order to keep the boys happy. Also, it MAY be that it was Colin who was the pacifist and MAY have been he who wouldn't allow the boys to play with toy guns, Sheila being as compliant with some of his wishes as she appears to have been with some of June's.
NONE of us know who Sheila and Jeremy really were -it's looking likely that they didn't have much idea, either- so they have become the people we WANT them to be and at times they seem little more than puppets dancing to the string we pull.