Some thought kids had just overindulged on sweets. The full story shocked the country
21:28, 29 Jan 2026Updated 07:54, 30 Jan 2026
Jon Ruben had admitted to a string of offences
A trusted veterinary surgeon and church volunteer drugged and sexually abused vulnerable children at a charity summer camp in the Leicestershire countryside. This is how his crimes finally came to light.
Dylan Hayward, the reporter who first broke the story of Ruben’s arrest, looks back on the investigation
Stathern Lodge sits in rolling Leicestershire countryside near Melton – the kind of peaceful setting where nothing bad is supposed to happen.
For 27 years, it hosted summer camps for vulnerable children, giving them experiences they’d never otherwise have. Jon Ruben ran those camps. In July 2025, his crimes were finally exposed.
The first indication that something was seriously wrong came through a tip on a Monday morning in late July. A local resident had witnessed scenes that didn’t make sense.
“We had an incident last night in Plungar,” the email began. “One ambulance at 6pm, which turned into six ambulances and two police cars by 7pm.
“Lots of cars turned up with people shouting things at the police like ‘I’m going to eff you up, give me my kid.'”
The children fell ill while attending a summer camp at Stathern Lodge(Image: Jacob King/PA Wire )
The tone was confused, almost apologetic.
“The gossip is that it was a group of children from a Christian retreat having a meal at the Anchor, and something illegal was smuggled in by the children and taken. The police isolated the children and wouldn’t let the parents access them.”
It ended with a request: “Keep my name out of it, but I think there’s an interesting story there…”
Shortly before 7am on 31 July, a police major incident portal confirmed suspicions.
Leicestershire Live broke the story of Ruben’s arrest that morning. By afternoon, I was standing at a cordon on a quiet country lane watching news crews from across the country arrive, all of us trying to piece together what had really happened.
None of us knew yet what the investigation would uncover.
The man behind the camps
Jon Ruben had spent decades building the perfect cover.
After working as a veterinary surgeon running a practice with four branches in Nottingham, he requalified as an early years teacher in 1995.
He became a trustee of the Stathern Children’s Holiday Fund – a charity providing subsidised holidays for disadvantaged children – and was active in youth work at St Peter’s Church in Ruddington, Nottinghamshire, where he sat on the Parochial Church Council.
In 2015, he was nominated for a Nottingham Post community award.
“We like to give children good things to do,” he told reporters at the time. A former volunteer described him as someone who “works hard for the benefit of so many young people.”
His Facebook profile reinforced this image. Just months before his arrest, in February, he posted proudly about the Holiday Fund raising £1,492.85 through online shopping schemes.
“Thanks to supporters like me,” the post read, encouraging others to “raise free donations when you shop online at over 8,000 retailers.” In December, he’d promoted Christmas shopping for the same cause, complete with bright yellow graphics.
A general view of St Peter’s Church in Ruddington(Image: Joseph Raynor/ Nottingham Post)
Birthday thank-yous each March. Posts supporting UNICEF. Links to petition campaigns. On the surface, exactly what you’d expect from someone devoted to helping children.
But scroll deeper into his timeline, and a different picture emerges.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Ruben’s Facebook became a stream of conspiracy theories and government mistrust.
He railed against mask mandates and lockdown measures, at a time when most others were following them, when the impact of Covid was unknown.
“When Scotland gets independence, can England join them?” he asked sarcastically in January 2021.
By November 2020, he was explaining how businesses should defy lockdown rules: “If I was a jeweller or a shoe shop or any other ‘non-essential’ business, I would stay open – have a notice on my door that items in the window are available for ‘click & collect’.”
Here was the real Jon Ruben, someone who distrusted authority, believed he knew better than experts at that time, and felt rules didn’t apply to him.
Of course, many questioned the rules at the time, but it gives us an insight into where his thoughts on society lay.
Parents trusted him with their children. The church put him in positions of responsibility. The charity relied on him to organise camps.
For 27 years, that trust gave him access to disadvantaged children from Nottingham – children he selected through his church youth clubs, Sunday schools and evening classes.
The weekend it unravelled
The timeline of that July weekend exposes a series of failures.
Friday, 25 July: Leicestershire Police receive their first call about concerns at Stathern Lodge near Melton. Officers do not attend.
Saturday, 26 July: A second call is made. Again, no response.
Sunday, 27 July, 6pm: One ambulance arrives at the quiet country lane.
By 7pm, six ambulances and two police cars line the scene. One child is completely unconscious. Others are vomiting, drowsy, and unable to speak properly. Parents arriving to collect their children are met with police cordons preventing access.
“I’m going to eff you up, give me my kid,” one parent shouted at officers, according to witnesses. Their children were behind those cordons, and nobody would tell them why.
It had taken three calls before the police finally attended. The delay in response is now under investigation by the Independent Office for Police Conduct.
When the officers arrived, they called for backup. East Midlands Ambulance Service sent multiple crews. An air ambulance landed. One child was rushed to hospital; four more were taken as a precaution.
Local rumours spread quickly through that Sunday night. Some thought children at the Christian camp had smuggled in drugs. Others speculated the kids were copying their “partying parents” – a theory that gained traction because it seemed to explain the chaos without implicating the trusted adults running the camp.
The truth was far more sinister.
Looking back
A local resident who witnessed the chaotic scenes that Sunday evening spoke to LeicestershireLive about what he saw. The man, who asked not to be named, was returning home from gymnastics when the quiet village was suddenly filled with emergency vehicles.
“We came back, and there were police cars everywhere,” he recalled. “It’s a small village – four or five police cars. There were parents shouting at the police, saying, ‘Let me see my f***ing kids.’ I were like, ‘What? What kids?’ I thought it might be a kids’ party at the village hall or something.”
“They were still there at like 11pm,” he said. “I didn’t know what had happened. Some of the locals had talked to some of the parents standing around, and they said, ‘The police took our kids away. They weren’t giving them back.'”
At the time, wild theories circulated through the village. “The gossip was that the kids had smuggled something in – drink or drugs,” the resident explained.
“I thought the parents were being out of order because the police were trying to find out what happened. But looking back now, knowing what we know, you understand why they were so desperate to get to their children.”
The resident had seen groups from Stathern Lodge before. “If you walk the dog down the canal, you walk by it. You sometimes see the kids, sometimes hear them running around. Just normal, happy kids, you know?”
Now, reflecting on what was really happening at those camps, his perspective has changed completely. “If somebody said, ‘Does your child fancy a Christian summer camp?’ – I probably wasn’t keen in the first place, but I certainly wouldn’t be keen now.”
The impact extends beyond summer camps. “Now, if somebody said, ‘Does your child fancy going on a residential trip?’ – there’s a lot of inherent danger there, I think, now,” he said. “Where you leave your child in care, you should be in a position to assume the best in people, but things like that make you assume the worst.”
The evidence
Inside Stathern Lodge, police made a disturbing discovery. Officers found a suitcase in Ruben’s possession containing hypodermic needles, vaseline, baby oil, sex toys and sweets. Three of those sweets had been injected with sedatives but had not yet been used.
The alarm had been raised by someone who knew him well – his own stepson, James Stephen Zakarian, who reported concerns about sedation. Without that family member’s courage, it’s unclear how much longer Ruben’s crimes would have continued. Within days, Ruben was arrested and charged.
The courtroom
When Ruben entered the courtroom that Saturday, he looked directly at me before scanning left across the journalists and then to the bench.
He looked defeated – not surprised or curious about where he was, but resigned. The 76-year-old wore a grey jumper over a pinkish top that hung out at the bottom, appearing older and more diminished than in his Facebook photos.
Asked to confirm his details, he sounded breathless, mumbling slightly at first. When asked whether he intended to plead guilty, not guilty, or give no indication, he replied quietly: “No indication.”
The chair shouted at him: “SIT DOWN.”
This brief appearance was just the beginning. Through the summer and autumn, as police continued their investigation, the full horror of what had been happening at the camps would gradually emerge.
Medical tests on the children from July revealed drugs in their systems.
Two boys showed injuries consistent with sexual assault. Police searched Ruben’s electronic devices and found child abuse images and videos, some involving boys as young as six. He had been acquiring prescription drugs, including Temazepam, illegally.
The ‘sweet game’
By November, when Ruben appeared at Leicester Crown Court to enter his pleas, prosecutors had built a comprehensive picture of his crimes. Mary Prior KC stood to outline the case against him.
“The defendant, for 27 years, has run a holiday camp for underprivileged, socially deprived children,” she told the court. “He has been the leader of that, using his job as a teacher and role as a senior member of the church to run youth clubs, evening classes and Sunday schools from where he selected which children would attend the summer camp.”
The method was chillingly simple. After putting boys to bed in their pyjamas, Ruben would enter their rooms with sweets he had injected with tranquillisers – commonly known as “liquid Xanax.”
“For many years, he played what he called the sweet game with the children,” Mrs Prior said.
The boys were told they had to chew and eat the sweets as quickly as possible. It seemed like fun, like something special their camp leader was doing just for them.
“The purpose of drugging them was to sexually abuse the ones he picked and ensure that the others were asleep so they wouldn’t witness it.”
The following morning, the boys found it difficult to wake up. Their speech was slurred. They were violently sick. “They were all really very unwell,” Mrs Prior told the court. “One of them couldn’t be roused at all.”
Medical evidence showed two boys with injuries consistent with sexual assault. Tests confirmed drugs in all their systems. Mrs Prior’s voice was measured but clear: “The consequences could have been damage to the heart and death.”
Perhaps most troubling was what prosecutors revealed next. “There’s a long history of children feeling sick at the camp at Stathern Lodge,” Mrs Prior said.
An online review posted before Ruben’s arrest mentioned someone becoming unwell at the site. The prosecutor’s statement suggested a pattern stretching back over time – children falling ill at camps, parents being told it was nothing serious.
Ruben’s reputation – the respected vet, the devoted youth worker, the man raising money for disadvantaged children – had been more believable than sick children with gaps in their memory.
Ruben pleaded guilty to 17 charges: sexual assault on a child under 13, assault by penetration of a child under 13, eight charges of cruelty to persons under 16, three charges of making indecent photographs of children, and drug offences, including illegally acquiring Temazepam.
Temporary Detective Chief Inspector Holden described it as “a horrific, complex and emotional investigation involving multiple young, innocent, vulnerable victims.”
Standing at that cordon back in July, watching news crews film their pieces and police guard their scene, none of us could have imagined the full scope of what we were reporting.
One weekend. Six ambulances. One unconscious child. That was what it took to finally expose Jon Ruben.
National media descended on Stathern, Leicestershire a short time after LeicestershireLive broke the news.(Image: PA Wire/PA Images)
Police began interviewing former campers following Ruben’s arrest. Many are now adults who remembered waking up unable to speak, violently sick, with no memory of the night before.
For years, they’d been told it was just part of being away at camp – too many sweets, over-excitement, nothing sinister.
Ruben will be sentenced on February 6.
Anyone with any further information should call Leicestershire Police on 101, quoting crime reference 24*651848. Alternatively, report information on the force’s website.
If you are a victim of child abuse, or worried for the safety or wellbeing of a child, there is support out there. If you suspect someone is in immediate danger, call 999 now.
