Warning: Graphic content, readers’ discretion advised. This story contains a recollection of crime and can be triggering to some readers discretion advised.
This is the moment detectives arrested one of Britain’s most profilic serial killers .
But this story started 20 years earlier , on a game show watched by millions across the country TV show bulllseye.
As the contest John cooper talked about his favorite pastimes.scuba diving. No one could know that this charming welshman was a double murderer and just week after this appearance he would kill twice more.
The murders lay unsolved until a crack team of investigators reopened the case , set on uncovering evidence
to prove john cooper was a dangerous multiple murderer.
but detectives found they faced a game playing psychopath,determined to outwit them and a bitter battle began.
exclusive access to hundreds of hours of behind the scenes police footage, it reveals for the first time remarkble gamble police took in this high stakes game of cat and mouse.
It is a bizarre behavior sort of smug arrogance that he thought he’d got away with murderone room , one suspect could police nail their man before time ran out .
pembrookeshire in wales is one of the safest places to live in the country.but in the 1980s two horrific double murders had rocked this community
helene richard
In 1985 reclusive brother and sister , richard and helen thomas were found shot dead in the burned out wreckage of their farm house.
4 years later the killer struck again, this time in broad daylight on the popular welsh coastal path.
51 year old peter Dixon and his 52 year old wife Gwenda were found shot dead in what police describe as an horrific double murder.
but despite a huge manhunt no one was caught for either of these double murders and the trail ran cold.until police reopened the files nearly a decade later .
with years separating the crime and the investigation these cases can be the hardest to crack when a crime scene is long gone, evidence is scaned and memories faded ,these tapes are a unique insight into how the suspect interview becomes critical.
mr and mrs Dixon’s campsite, 1989
After the alarm was raised,the police had found first the couple’s belongings still inside their tent near the coastal path. peter dixon and his wife Gwenda haven’t been seen since thursday.
almost 10 years on detectives went back to the murder site hoping to use their local knowledge to build a new profile of the murderer.
The actually scene of the recovery of the bodies is just in front of us and from them there’s a sheer drop of 200 feet.Gwenda’s body was found just a few feet away from the actual cliff edge , she was partly clothed
peter dixon’s body then was hands tied behind his back and he was partially hanging over the cliff itself.peter was shot three times to the upper chest to his back.
and then the final shot ,he was shot in the head.
hwoever was there waiting in ambush had a very clear view along the coastal path.why would you come here unless had local knowledge of potentially what you were going to find.
convinced the murderer was a local man ,police looked back at other crimes committed int the area hoping they might offer a clue. in this peacful part of Wales one of vicious burglaries caught their eye.
There was a number of quite violent robberies where females had been attacked in their homes . they’ve been subjected to excessive violence force.
and detectives realized there was a crucial and disturbing link between these multiple burgleries.
and the double murders.
The actual Mo method of operating by the offender.
they had attacked a multiple victims
control them with a sort of shotgun
and there was also and atempt to steal as well , if you take out the actual murder side of it, the circumstance those offenses were identical.
The man responsible for tese vicious burglaries was john cooper , who was sent to prison for the crimes
but his sentence had started 9 years after after the last murders. the 53 year old was descibed as self- employed he’s been accused of 16 burglaries and attempted burglaries in the milford haven and rose market pembrokeshire areas
police trolled their evidence archive for anything linked to the burgla john cooper and were astonished by what they found .
there was quite an extensive range and variety of different property which had been stolen from houses.
Keys from people’s house’s
Gloves which were found discarded near to his home.
Jewelry
there was a full range of property there which he had kept which were mementos of his offended.
these sinister souvenirs suggested john cooper
had been hoarding throphies of his crimes
then they had another breakthrough , in the own archives were hours of footage of john cooper being questioned by police after his arrest.
he’s body language show’s no engagement with the officers at that point it’s clear that he’s not going to be talking to them in that interview.
and then sits sideon ,head down,just strike as childlike.Here was a chance to find out more about the violent burglar, who might also be a serial killer.
detectives studied these police tapes ,hoping that they held the key to cracking a murder case that had eluded them for 20 years. this is actaully a treasure trove of information .
yeas it is bizarre behavior , real distraction,sort of and avoidance techniques where he´s sit with his fingers in his ear.cuz it’s about control .
detective then disvoered that while john cooper had been burgling, he’d been a local farm laborer living in the neighborhood with his wife and children.
john william cooper was somebody that had sorto f two personas, he presented to some as this family man ,fiercely loyal,however it was clearly this real sinister man.
this is somebody whos was going through the fields at night,cutting fences,he was lying in weight surveilling the housees before going in .
one partuclar fence he threw a televison at the head of one of them ,kicked the victims ,tied them up and continually started to go back to them and hit them with he butt of the gun.the person actually enjoying what they were doing .
Dectives believed cooper’s violent crimes and his controlling behavior in cudody could could match the profile of the murderer. butthey needed more profs.
In the cold case files they found a wanted poster of a man who had used one of the victims’s cash point cards, just hours after they were murdered.police now needed to know , if the pystery man could possibly be john cooper.
It was quite important that we tried to get an image of him of hoe he was around the time certainly of Dixon’s murder so police could then compare it with the artist’s comptression.
the detective had an extraordinary find , in 1989 the same year of thedouble murders their susoect had been a contestant on the popular game show Bullseye.
just three weeks after this episode was filmed peter and Gwenda Dixon were shot dead on the coastal path.
police managed to freeze john cooper in exactly the same position as artist impression and for the police it was like a tracing.,the way he was standing, his build ,the hair , the scraggky hair, the sort of shoulder length, the unkempt look and mustache
18 months into the cold case investigation of two brutal btutal murders and police were struggling, their prime suspect john cooper was in prison for violent robbery but coming to the end of his 16 year sentence.
Police needed to act fast and nail cooper before he was released, so they devised an audacious plan. it was a very daunting task,the police needed to get him talking, they needed to try and elicit from him something that the police could go back and say” why did he say that ?”
in a bold move that would make or break the investigation, the team was given just 4 days to interview , the man they suspected was a psychopath and a serial killer. they needed a watertight strategy.
this is a person without having to say very much just through his physical presence or just his look can intimidate people, so the police needed to make sure they had people who would not be br intimidated.
cooper had refused to speak when questioned before, so detectives studied the police tapes the’y gouinf , trying yo find the key to make him talk.
police alsoc re-examined the burglaries that cooper had commited, trying to find anything in common between them and the unsolved murders,
two of those they interviewed was john and marie who lived less then a mile from cooper
Now as he was brought from prison for questioning about murder police planed to use cooper’s targeting of women against him.
part of the reason to se a female police officer was most of his ecxessive violence had been against females.and wanted to see what his reaction would be.it would either be a master stroke or a disaster stroke.
he was very well-built ,still look an athletic 60 -year old briming with confidence .
It had taken six months of study and strategic planning , now the whole investigation on this first meeting.
they were faced with the man who they believed had murdered four times ,but would he answer any of their questions.
The police strategy was to play to cooper’s ego and make him feel at ease. so the questioning at first was more of a conversation.
as the interviews went on and he sort of relaxed into that really and probably at that point got a sense of he probably could take th investigators where he wanted to and they might not quite get him
and there was a sort of perhaps sense of sort of smug arrogance that would come from him then that he thought he’d got away with murder .
Now they had him talking the police needed cooper to reveal information about the crimes they suspected he´d committed. but they soon realized he had his own strategy of denial and distraction.
it a sort of cat ,mouse ,suppose in an interview.because everything investigators hasked him he´s having to think ahead as to why are we asking that and where are they coming from..
He’s trying to guess where the investigation are and trying to stay ine step ahead of the investigators.whatever’s presented with him he will adapt and he will deal with that situation as it arises .
He’s denying that he’s responsible for murder, as the interviews progressed investigators more and more convinced that he is. that this is somebody who’s capable of committing these hhorrendous violent offences. the detectives were determined to catch cooper in his lies.
over 4 days ,they painstakingly picked thorugh the evidence.
Crucially they needed to link him to a gun found, near his home after his arrest for burglary.
the police were convinced it was his ,but when asked, cooper feigned ignorance.
He was writing throughout the inte interviews, making notes.why is he writing that, there’s something significant about that , what is it about this gun that’s unnerving him?
and he asked about which hedge did you find the gun in ,” an odd question for him to ask. police think he’s given himself thinking time to be honest.
so what was he worried about ?
which detectives only can asume , that with the advances and forensic technology if the police still had that gun. then investigators could do further work with it .
for the detectives that was a real key moment” why are your worried about that gun” there was a clear moment of realization is the the detectives had probably identified the murder weapon.
but as cooper had denied owning the gun detectives needed to find a way to link him to the weapon .
the gun had been examined in the forensics lab when it was found , but nothing connected it to cooper or to the murders.
the forensics fear was” what have we missed?” forensics know that firearm was maximized at the lab
10 years had passed since it was last tested with the latest forensics could police now prove that this was cooper’s murder weapon.
cooper ,was no fool,he´d go gloved up ,he´d go masked up, there were no fingerprints. there was no DNA evidence. so basically , forensics looking for that golden nugget something that will give them concrete evidence to identify the offender, forensics looking for that” needle in a haystack “
john cooper ‘s sentence for burglary was nearly over, soon he would be returning to his wife Pat and their children and police were powerless to stop him.
pat is very uncomfortable with that but clearly she has absolutely no choice. and detectives are aware that he is telling her that he “can’t wait to carry on the loving relationship”
the clock is ticking for the detectives that moment in time because he shown no remorse ,he has not accepted anything that he’s done,
so the detectives anticipating ,there’s a chance that he would offend again and if he offends again, he would kill again.
detectives team are members of the same community all of them live within a very close proximity to john cooper.
Jonh cooper was released from prison . just two months later detective ,steve wilkins received a phone call from the control room .the inspector said they just had a call from john cooper,his wife’s dead ,we think he’s murdered her.
the police tapes show that that even after hours of interview detectives had failed to nail the man they suspected of four murders and now his wife was dead .
pat cooper john cooper
His verbal statement was he went to meet with his wife that, they had a pleasant evening together and that they went to bed and that he in the night he heard a gasping and tried to revive her and she was dead.
it is a quite a believable account,detectives problem was they had somebody who they was quite happpy had already murdered four people. detectives always felt that pat had a story to tell.
john cooper and his seamstress wife pat had been together since they were 18 . she stayed with him througout his prsion sentence ,but police knew she’d been dreadigng his release.
the pathologist was quite clear that her heart was he described as the size of a fotball ,she died of natural circumsstances.
cooper was back in the community he´d once terrorized, police was convinced h e was a serial killer but they still had no proof and now no grounds to question him again.
detective steve wilkins felt a bit uncomfortable about the result they weren’t getting back.
In despair lead detective wilkins called in the head of forensics Angela Gallop
forensic now had to decide what to test with these new fiber methods, faced with thousands of items they chose clothing that was similar to a description of what the murder might have been wearing.
a pair of shorts were sent for an analysis and it was the breakthrough they ‘ve been searching for.they were looking for textile fiber links on this item and noticed a tiny fragment of what looked like blood, they did some DNA profiling.
a blood flake from the shorts in cooper’s home
that matches peter Dixons
it was one in one billion chance which is the highest actual discriminating value can get. that was the missing link . the Golden Nugget
police got now the blood of the victim on a pair of shorts found in john cooper’s house.
shorts which were identical to shorts worn by the offender and the artist impression. put the picture of the shorts with the words .
The speck of blood on the shorts was from the murder victim , it was the damning evidence police so desperately needed.
and 3 years after the cold case reopened john cooper was arrested for murer.
Now detectives had 24 hours to question and charge cooper. if he admitted owning the shorts he would be linked to the victims and conviction for murder would me much more likely.
main objective for particular interview around the shorts was for john cooper to accept those shorts were his.
police were talking aboit boots and socks it was the shorts police really wanted and it was almost a sort of highfive under the table moment without showing hom the significance of what he just said.
witholding the discovery of the victims’s blood on the shorts,police had led cooper into a trap, he now said the the shorts were his .
but as he was insisting they were different from the artist´s impression he led them to a breakthrough.
he’s mocking the police almost in saying ” don’t be silly now , these are are different shorts ,these are short shorts , they´re long shorts .
and police can clearly see his face where he was quite sort of smug saying ” ah no, but they´re short shorts.
the more john cooper tried to explain the difference in the artist’s impression and the shorts that he was accepting were his the more it became clear that there was perhaps more to this.
police knew that cooper’s wife was a seamstress
the next obvious step is is to unpick the hem,they recovered DNA material which matched mr and mrs Dixon’s daughter.
as there was no link between cooper and the murdered couple’s daughter the DNA find proof that the shorts originally bellonged to the Dixons. But were taken by cooper as a trophy after he´d murdered peter and Gwenda.
Cooper collected things as a part of his offfending, he collected souvenirs. here is an individual flaunting things in fronf of people and n ot being picked up for it. thinking he could get away with not just the murders but wearing the clothing of the murder victims .
police now move to challenge cooper with this new damning evidence.
when he was confronted with the forensic evidence on the shorts even then he sort of started distance himself.
But even the detectives were shocked by quite how far cooper would go once cornered by the truth.
john cooper“My son use to take my clothes ,whenever he wanted it and that would be more of a worry for a father . he would take whatever he wanted, whatever he needed”
police suggesting there’s something suspsicious about his behavior, police call him on that and say are you saying you´re son’s committed these offenses.he say’s , i’m not saying that , but clearly that’s what he’s suggesting .his explanations far -fetched and becoming somewhat ludicrous really.
john cooper;” andrew cooper believes that everything in this planet is his if he wants it
The way his referen his son was always in his full name , adrian cooper, that comes across as very distant and cold which police think is the relationship that they had.
john cooper : ” i shouted a lot due to the behavior of my son,i never ever hit him in my life despite what he says.”
But detectives had already spoken to cooper’s son adrian who’d revealed a lifetime of terror at the hands of his violent and deceitful father.
2007
Andrew cooper:“when i was nine ,was the first time that my father got violent with me. he wouldn’t treat me like a child , he would come at me , frothing at the mouths. his eyes would be bulging.he’d expand himself he clench his fits and he would lay into me like i was made of rubber ,he purposely bounced me off door frames and just throw me around like i was a doll “
his son was grew up terrified of him,john cooper had killed their own family dog, dug up a pit and beat the dog to death with a showel. there was glimplses from adrian coming through of the sort of the character that he knew his father to be and that fear that would have gone on in that household over the years then.
john cooper had led forensics to uncover evidence linking him to brutal killings he thought he’d got away with.
But now as he was challenged with all evidence.
he was arrogantly protesting his innocence.
what strike police is , everything is put to john cooper , there is always somebody else blame , there’s always somebody else who’s a lier , there’s always somebody else who´s the criminal but everything detectives colleage has put to john cooper it all comes back to him.
john cooper :” oh yeas , put them all on to john cooper ,that’s good and proper , forgett about adrew cooper,forget about them all.its ‘only john cooper, your making things try to fit to john cooper and it’s bloody annoying , you try make things fit, you choose you all and your colleagues and them in there choose not to believe it , to look elswhere.
no matter how he he’d managed to control himself at that moment police saw a glimpse of the real john cooper.
john cooper : ” cuz , it all lies ,i´m fucking being called liar , i’m trying to help you people”
The interviews were over but forensic was stil at work re-examining a gun in hope of finally nailing the murder weapon.
in the botton of the bag that the guns was in forensics noticed some flakes of black paint because the barrels had been painted black.
and some of this was flaking off. catching the light in certain way that they had a redish tinge to them, ofcourse anything read to a forensic scientist is usually very interesting if you look for blood.so forensic wickly tested it and of course they discovered that it was indeed blood.
In each case both from paint flakes and from the stain on the gun barrels themselves ,forensics got a DNA match with peter Dixon.
the blood that forensics found proved that the gun was the murder weapon.
and a new forensics technique proved fibers found on one of coopers gloves
came from a sock worn by by the murder victim richard Thomas., police now had the missing link of a puzzle unsolved for more than 20 years.
we know about john cooper that he’s a game player , his a risk taker but he also someone who likes to think he’s one step ahead of the police, but in the case of the forensics he gave himself away.
he thought he was untouchable ,but his arrogance was his downfall by painting the morals he’s protected the forensic evidence from that crime scene for the police and forensics. there was no get out of jail card on that.
24 years after the murder of brother and sister richard and helen Thomas.
20 years after the murder of husband and wife peter and Gwenda Dixon. the skillful combination of forensic investigation and interrogation meant that the cold case ,which had haunted a community could be closed.
john cooper finally faced trial for murder.
In june 2011 john cooper was found guilty of four murders. forensic fibres also linked him to an unsovled rape ,and an unsolved sexual assault, of two teenagers
He is one of the few prisoners in the UK serving a life term without parole.