If you’re ever contemplating appearing on a TV game show, you’re gonna need to be tooled up with your killer 30-second anecdote. These always seemed to fall a bit flat in the game shows of the ’70s and ’80s in which the terrified contestants tended to look like rabbits in the headlights as they stumbled through a quick story which probably seemed hilarious at the time.
And it’s always one of the most awkward elements of a format in which ordinary members of the public are regularly wheeled in and out of every episode. We haven’t got the time or inclination to hear their entire life story. We just want them to get on with the game we tuned in to see. So the host of each show usually asks them to sum up their entire existence in a quick soundbite, be it in the form of a funny story, an unusual experience, or just a little information about what they do for a living or what they like to get up to in their spare time.
This can regularly lead to such dramatic and insightful on-screen revelations as: “I once got mistaken for Rupert The Bear at a crafts fair.” “My wife ran off with the window cleaner but I didn’t pay his last bill so, needless to say, I had the last laugh.” “I once shat myself in the supermarket.” “I have killed before and I will kill again. Soon. Oh, so very soon.”
That last one might sound a bit unrealistic, and of course, nobody has ever said that on a game show, as far as I’m aware. But when Welsh serial killer John Cooper appeared as a contestant on the novelty UK darts-based game show Bullseye in 1989, his typically stiff introduction to the viewers threw up a haunting insight into the rough location of his next double-murder. Unbeknown to the audience, Cooper had killed before – just four years before he stepped in front of the TV cameras clutching a set of darts. And he would kill again – just three weeks after he walked away from the TV studios in defeat.
Spot The Ball, Lose The Plot
It was a different kind of game altogether that may have played a small part in John Cooper’s journey to the dark coastal path: ‘Spot The Ball’.
Born in 1944, Cooper hails from the gorgeous county of Pembrokeshire in Wales, famous for its epic nature trails, stunning coastal scenery, and Folly Farm Adventure Park and Zoo which has emus and giraffes and meerkats and everything.
By the 1970s, Cooper was living in the hamlet of Jordanston with his wife Pat and their two children. The family led a fairly modest life. Cooper mooched around from job to job, enjoying a spell in the building trade, and regularly working as a casual labourer on some of the many farms dotted around the county, including one owned by Florence “Flo” Evans whom we won’t hear of again until right near the very end.
He was working as a welder’s mate in a Gulf oil refinery in 1978 when he struck a gusher of good fortune in a Spot The Ball competition. First launched in 1923, Spot The Ball was a British tradition often run in newspapers in which a photograph of a dramatic scene from a football match is displayed with the actual football airbrushed out of the picture. Readers were invited to pinpoint the exact location of the missing ball with a pen, cut out the photograph, and post their entry back to the newspaper to be in with a chance of scooping the big cash prize jackpot awarded to the person who got the closest.
These were still all the rage in the ’70s and ’80s, with around three million people having a go every week, right up until the 1990s when it became more appealing to just stick a quid on The National Lottery instead with the more enticing potential of becoming a millionaire. I can remember that even my Dad and I used to play along with Spot The Ball every week when I was a very little kid, despite neither of us knowing anything about football. Maybe it was a mistake for my Dad to entrust me with the responsibility of the pen. I was so far out with my wacky suggestions that I was practically in a different photograph altogether.
But John Cooper clearly had a much better grasp of the ball. He managed to pinpoint the exact location during that fateful week’s competition in 1978, and won the jackpot of a new car, along with £94,000 – the equivalent of over £450,000 today. Cooper promptly quit his job as a welder’s mate and went about blowing through his new fortune as quickly as he could manage.
According to later newspaper reports, Cooper was quite generous with his winnings, dishing out £10,000 to his relatives and treating lucky Pat to a luxury holiday in the US. Cooper’s son Andrew paints a very different picture, claiming that Cooper was as tight as an otter’s pocket, and nobody else in the household ever saw a penny of it.
The family certainly moved around Pembrokeshire a lot during this period, but Cooper somehow managed to lose a stack of money on each move. The rest of the fortune appeared to have got pissed away down the pub and the local bookies. A former friend recalls how Cooper often used to fly into a rage down the bookies whenever his chosen horse failed to make it first past the post, which was pretty much every time. He was beginning to earn a new reputation as an unstable and aggressive individual who you were better off avoiding down the pub in case you got caught up in the drama of his uncontrollably violent mood swings.
By the early 1980s, Cooper had lost the lot, and it was back to corned beef sandwiches for tea. But just in case you were beginning to feel a little sympathy for the down-on-his-luck gambler, it’s worth noting that the occasional farm labourer had always been a beast to his own family. Wife Pat lived in constant fear of his mood swings, and it’s believed that she put up with years of mental and physical abuse.
Son Andrew describes him as “a violent, loud, aggressive man” who would bounce young Andrew against the walls for the most minor of transgressions, and who once tried to frighten both the kids into submission by pointing a shotgun in their faces and pulling the trigger. The shotgun wasn’t loaded, but the kids were not made aware of that until after the trigger had been pulled. Even the beloved family pet dog couldn’t escape Cooper’s fury.
When the dog became lame through old age, Cooper decided against taking it to the vets for humane euthanization, figuring that it would work out cheaper to just take the dog outside and pummel it to death with his fists for over half an hour. This was not a man who deserved any sympathy.
But the problem was that he’d now had a taste of the high life and had enjoyed all the trappings of a reassuringly plump bank account, even if it was largely confined to drinking and gambling. Cooper wasn’t prepared to let that go. And if nobody else was going to hand him another stack of money on a plate just for spotting a ball, he decided he was just going to have to take it for himself.
The Pembrokeshire Crime Wave
Between 1983 and 1997, Cooper was working again as a casual farm labourer, but his main source of income was from the spoils of his new career as a burglar. During this period, the usually quiet and idyllic villages of Pembrokeshire witnessed an extraordinary spike in often violent burglaries from a mysterious individual in a balaclava, armed with a shotgun which was sometimes used to beat the victims around the head if they didn’t play ball as quickly as Cooper would like.
Cooper would return to the family home late at night with expensive jewellery and coins and other valuable items, and stash them away in a locked room of the house without offering a word of explanation as to where he’d been all night. Pat and the children must surely have had their suspicions that Cooper was the new one-man crime wave spreading terror across Pembrokeshire, but they would also have been too terrified of the repercussions if they dared breathe a word to anyone else.
The police never managed to pin anything at all on Cooper for fifteen years. But the uneasy suspicions of the family must have boiled over into downright horror when they were pressured into providing false alibis to the police after the dark events that unfolded in Pembrokeshire on the night of 22nd December 1985.
The Thomas Manor Murders
58-year-old Richard Thomas was a millionaire farmer who lived with his 54-year-old sister Helen in their luxurious manor house in the village of Scoveston in Milton Haven, Pembrokeshire, just over a mile from the troubled Cooper home in Jordanston.
Three nights before Christmas in 1985, their charred bodies were discovered in the ashes of the first floor of the manor house. Richard had been shot in the stomach whilst Helen had been shot in the back of the head and showed signs of being bound and gagged.
The police initially suspected a murder-suicide which had perhaps been ignited by a dispute over money. It was proposed that Richard may have tied up his sister during an extended altercation and eventually shot her before turning the gun on himself. The fire may have been some kind of accidental consequence of these events. After all, it seems unlikely that Richard would have felt the need to burn down his own house in a bid to destroy the evidence of his own suicide.
But when the investigations uncovered traces of paraffin liberally sprinkled about all over the place, it became clear that the fire was very much the intentional act of a third party trying to cover his muddy tracks. That third party was of course John Cooper.
Cooper had bound and gagged the siblings in an outbuilding before shooting them. He then moved the body of Richard Thomas to the stairs inside the manor, covered the whole of the first floor in paraffin, and set the scene ablaze before making his swift departure from the scene with a few stolen items of negligible value.
Cooper was actually known to the Thomas siblings as he had carried out a bit of work on their farm over the years. Cooper had also sold hay to Richard in the past, and they had often squabbled over the hefty price that Cooper was demanding. It’s believed that Cooper may have targeted the Thomas manor out of some kind of envy of the wealth and success of the siblings, or a personal dislike of Richard, or perhaps just because he figured that he was bound to make a half-decent haul from the millionaire manor.
It’s also believed that Helen Thomas was home alone when Cooper broke into the manor, and his original intention may have been to carry out one of his signature violent burglaries by slipping on a balaclava and waving around a shotgun whilst helping himself to the riches of the manor. The situation may have spiralled out of control when Richard unexpectedly arrived home and put up a strong fight against the masked intruder.
As any potential evidence disappeared in the flames, the police didn’t have much to go on. Cooper was actually interviewed by the police as part of a wide hunt for potential witnesses in the local area, but his family made it clear that Cooper had been home all night and knew nothing of what had happened to the Thomas family.
The case went cold for decades, and Cooper was free to carry on with his violent burglaries in Pembrokeshire undetected. But in 1989, he hit upon a new idea for trying to grab a bit of free money which didn’t involve breaking into the homes of innocent people and threatening them with a shotgun. He applied to become a contestant on Bullseye.
Super. Smashing. Great.
I’ve talked about Bullseye before on another of Simon’s channels, but I feel I should explain this distinctly British phenomenon to the Casual Criminalist audience. Bullseye was a rough-and-ready TV game show which was a curious combination of throwing darts and general knowledge quizzing, clocking up 356 episodes during its original run between 1981 and 1995, and drawing in 20 million viewers at its peak.
Unlike most game shows, there was a refreshing working class vibe to the whole thing. It wouldn’t have been much good introducing new contestants by asking them what they did for a living, as many of the contestants would be chronically unemployed or striking miners who were reeling from the effects of Margaret Thatcher closing down the entire North of Britain.
And unlike most game shows hosted by a super-slick and slightly greasy presenter, Bullseye was fronted by the warm and likeable but largely hapless Jim Bowen – a former teacher and grotty club comedian – who managed to awkwardly fumble through each of the 356 episodes as if he had never really been told what he was meant to be doing. Whenever he was lost for words, he would simply respond to every new development in the game with his accidental catchphrase: “Super. Smashing. Great.”
The contesting teams would be made up of pairs, one of whom was the darts player whilst the other was the quizzer. In one of the early rounds, the darts players would compete to throw the highest score on the board which would be converted into money if their counterpart quizzer could then answer the subsequent general knowledge question thrown in their direction.
Towards the end of the show, the pair who had earned the most money would be invited to face the glory of Bully’s Prize Board in which they could win a range of truly fabulous prizes if their darts hit all the right places. I say truly fabulous prizes. In reality, the prizes up for grabs were often comically terrible and became the stuff of TV legend.
The lucky contestants could walk away with a teasmaid, a charming carriage clock, a Corby trouser press, an alarm clock for every room, a knitting machine, a Lazy Suzy, a mink coat for the ladies, a range of garden tools lobbed into a wheelbarrow, or a cuddly pink hippo. As Jim Bowen himself later noted in 2016: “Game shows today are too high-tech with £1 million prizes. The nice thing about us was they were excited if they won a toaster.”
As the show hurtled towards its thrilling endgame, the pair of contestants would be given an opportunity to gamble all these truly fabulous prizes in the final darts challenge. If they lost, they’d lose everything. Even the stylish matching luggage and the set of matching gold pens. But if they won, they’d keep the prizes and also grab the Special Mystery Star Prize hiding behind a screen on the studio set.
These star prizes would often be equally baffling. For example, I’m not sure how a fitted kitchen could be adequately divided between the two teammates. And I’m not sure how much use a speedboat would be to a couple of working-class contestants who probably lived in a council housing estate or a tower block.
In a strangely cruel twist, the dividing screen would still slide up if the contestants lost the final challenge, as Jim Bowen invited them to “Take a look at what you could have won.” The end credits would roll whilst the contestants stood around with gritted teeth as Jim pointed out the awesomeness of the Star Prize that nobody was taking home that day. Super. Smashing. Great.
Jim Bowen once described Bullseye as “The second-best darts-based game show on television,” even though there were never any other darts-based game shows on television. Yet despite the shambolic nature of the show, there was something quite warm-hearted and genuine about the whole thing, and there were many memorable moments thrown up during the 15-year run. For example, one contestant in a wheelchair was on the verge of winning the Mystery Star Prize when the producer suddenly started screaming in Jim’s ear to play for time as they needed to switch the prizes hiding behind the screen. The producer had suddenly decided that the leather three-piece suite might not be the most appropriate prize to give to a wheelchair user. The prizes were switched, the game resumed, and the contestant successfully threw the winning darts. As the audience erupted in applause, Jim Bowen excitedly exclaimed: “Congratulations! You’ve won…a skiing holiday!”
The Contestant Who Came To Kill
An episode of Bullseye broadcast in 1989 would prove to be memorable for very different reasons. John Cooper had walked into the studio with his eye on the Mystery Star Prize.
The episode would have seemed quite unremarkable when it was originally broadcast. The scruffy curly-mopped Cooper appeared as quiet and awkward as any other contestant when he and his teammate were introduced by Jim Bowen. Cooper was the quizzer whilst his mate would be throwing the darts. And they didn’t make a very good fist of things.
They were initially knocked out in an early round when Cooper failed to answer as many questions correctly as one of his female quizzer opponents. It was later noted that Cooper would have hated the thought of losing to a woman, with one psychologist even suggesting that the anger and perceived public humiliation may even have been a contributing factor to Cooper’s later murderous actions.
However, Cooper and his teammate were unexpectedly thrown a lifeline at the climax of the show. Whenever the winning contestants had battled their way past Bully’s Prize Board, the option to take the gamble for the Mystery Star Prize in the final challenge wasn’t always taken up. Some of these contestants really didn’t want to risk losing their vacuum cleaners or novelty Mickey Mouse clocks.
They were happy to tell Jim that they’d had a lovely time, but they’d rather let somebody else have a go. At this point, the next best-performing contestants were wheeled back out onto the studio floor to see if they’d like to take the gamble instead. This pair were more likely to take up the gamble as they would only risk losing the modest amount of cash they’d racked up during the course of the show.
And that’s exactly what happened in this 1989 episode. Even though we’d thought we’d seen the back of Cooper and his buddy, they were invited back onto the floor and accepted the final gamble. It has to be said that the final darts challenge didn’t seem entirely fair.
Whilst the majority of each episode was intended to show off the complementing skills of both a darts player and a quizzer, the final challenge was all about the darts. The simple concept behind the final challenge was to try and hit a score of 101 or above in six darts, but three of those darts were thrown by the non-darts-playing quizzer of the team who was often made to look a fool by missing the dartboard completely on all three attempts.
Cooper and his partner didn’t come even remotely close. They were destined to walk home completely empty-handed. Jim Bowen closed the show with the usual taunt of showing them what they could have won, as the end credits rolled over the quietly livid face of Cooper. The exact nature of this Mystery Star Prize appears to have been wiped from the archives of television history, along with the majority of the episode in question, but I’m going to go out on a limb and guess it was another speedboat.
Rewinding back to the very beginning of the Bullseye episode, John Cooper had to go through the usual ritual of encapsulating his entire existence in less than 30 seconds. His employment status probably seemed a bit too murky to explore, so Jim instead went with the safer option of asking Cooper what he liked to get up to in his spare time. Here’s the brief exchange in full:
JIM BOWEN: “You’ve got an unusual hobby John, haven’t you?” JOHN COOPER: “Oh yes, the scuba diving.” JIM BOWEN: “Apparently, it’s the place to do it down there in Pembrokeshire, isn’t it?” JOHN COOPER: “We’ve got the coastline, we’ve got the deep water, the mountains, all sorts of things.”
It’s not quite on the same level as Jack The Ripper appearing on a 19th century game show to explain that he enjoyed dark alleyways and unsolicited surgical procedures, but John Cooper had perhaps given a small clue as to the coastal backdrop of his next horrific act which would take place just three weeks after the cameras had stopped rolling.
The Coastal Path Murders
Detective Chief Superintendent Don Evans of the Dyfed Powys Police Force had been one of the principal investigators into the double murder case of Richard and Helen Thomas in 1985. Four years later in June 1989, his team were to investigate another local double murder when the son of Peter and Gwenda Dixon reported that his parents were missing.
51-year-old marketing manager Peter and 52-year-old social services secretary Gwenda lived in Oxfordshire but had been reaching the end of a week’s holiday in the village of Little Haven in Pembrokeshire from which they would tragically never return. Six days after they were reported missing, DCS Don Evans and his team made a gruesome discovery in the bracken and bushes of a secluded spot hidden away from the main coastal path: The bodies of Peter and Gwenda Dixon with mutilated faces which revealed that they had both been repeatedly shot in the face. Peter had been tied up, whilst his wife Gwenda was partially undressed. The officers who made the discovery were utterly traumatised by the barbaric scene.
John Cooper in his signature balaclava had ambushed the middle-aged couple with a sawn-off shotgun as they were making what was intended to be their final walk of the holiday along the clifftop coastal path. Cooper had forced them down to the bottom of a steep gully where he tied up Peter and demanded that he hand over his cash, his bank card, and his PIN number. He then partially undressed and sexually assaulted Gwenda before firing a total of five shots into their faces at point-blank range, with three of those shots surely being fired after the couple had already died. After concealing their bodies, Cooper made off with the bank card, the PIN, Peter’s 22-carat wedding ring, and Gwenda’s khaki shorts.
He took to wearing the khaki shorts himself – perhaps as some deeply disturbing trophy – even though they were clearly women’s shorts and they were far too long for him. In fact, he was wearing the shorts on the very same day that the bodies were discovered. Cooper had decided to spend that particular day in town, withdrawing £350 from Peter’s bank account with the stolen card, and selling the stolen wedding ring to a local jeweller for just £25.
The police initially suspected an IRA connection as the bodies had been found fairly close to the recent discovery of an IRA arms dump. It was speculated that Peter and Gwenda may have unwittingly witnessed the dumping of the weapons and had subsequently been permanently silenced.
But it was later concluded that the graphic scene bore too many similarities to the 1985 double murder. Within the space of four years and within just a few miles of each other, two usually sleepy villages in Pembrokeshire had witnessed two horrific double murders which had involved shooting the victims at point-blank range. They were almost certainly carried out by the same individual.
The murders of Peter and Gwenda Dixon sparked an enormous manhunt. A televised appeal for information on the BBC show Crimewatch generated more than 1,700 calls. An artist’s impression of the likely suspect was drawn up and presented to the public after a witness claimed to have spotted a scruffy curly-mopped man in overlong women’s khaki shorts loitering suspiciously around an ATM on the day the bodies were discovered. But the identity of the killer remained elusive and Cooper continued his campaign of terror throughout the 1990s.
Violence Escalates
Although most of Cooper’s actions up to this point appeared to prioritise theft of valuable items, one distressing incident in March 1996 revealed how he wasn’t averse to using violent threats on youngsters purely for sexual gratification.
Five teenagers aged between 15 and 16 were wandering through the fields close to Mount Estate School in Milford Haven, presumably with little of value on their persons. They were suddenly approached by a man in a balaclava who was brandishing a sawn-off shotgun. John Cooper demanded the teenagers lie flat on the ground and keep quiet, as he raped a 16-year-old girl and indecently assaulted a 15-year-old girl. He then fired the shotgun into the air before leaving the scene.
This time, the police concluded from the outset that they were still searching for the same man. The incident again bore a long string of similarities with the two double murder cases, including the location, the shotgun, and the cold, calculating violence.
The good news is that John Cooper would be arrested and sent to prison just two years later in 1998. The bad news is that he wouldn’t be convicted or even charged with any of his most appalling crimes involving murder and rape.
The Botched Burglary
In 1997, John Cooper’s 15-year run of violent burglaries in the Pembrokeshire area was finally sent into retirement when he uncharacteristically panicked over a botched job.
Cooper had broken into the home of an elderly lady who lived alone in the village of Sardis. Quite incredibly, even though the victim had been tied up and beaten, this brave woman still somehow managed to escape from Cooper and raise the alarm. Cooper fled the scene, ditching his balaclava, gloves, and shotgun in a nearby hedgerow. These were swiftly found by the police and immediately linked to Cooper who had been spotted near the location.
This time, even fake alibis from wife Pat and the children weren’t going to get Cooper off the hook.
Hundreds of stolen items were seized from Cooper’s house, linking him to a long chain of burglaries over the previous 15 years, and also including one or two items which would go on to be of much greater significance in years to come.
In 1998, Cooper was found guilty of no less than 30 counts of burglary and a violent assault, leading to a prison sentence of 16 years. But by the time he was released in 2009 after serving eleven years, John Cooper had still got away with murder.
Operation Ottawa
A few years before his release, Operation Ottawa had been formed in 2006. This was an investigation into outstanding unsolved serious crime in the Pembrokeshire area, led by DCI Steve Wilkins who had returned home to Wales after a lengthy stint at Scotland Yard, to take up his new position as Deputy Head of Dyfed Powys Police CID.
The scope of Operation Ottawa naturally included the two unsolved double murders – by this time known nationally as The Pembrokeshire Murders or The Coastal Path Murders – and the lesser-publicized rape and sexual assault of two teenage girls in Milton Haven, all still believed to have been carried out by the same individual.
The hope was that recent advances in DNA forensic science might lead to a breakthrough that would have been impossible to uncover first time around. The Operation Ottawa team spent a couple of years painstakingly re-examining literally thousands of exhibits that had been picked up from the crime scenes, along with the hoard of stuff that was picked up from Cooper’s home following his arrest for burglary.
Here’s the thing: By this time, DCI Steve Wilkins and his team were already pretty convinced that John Cooper was the serial killer and rapist. It was a bit of a no-brainer, really. This man went on a violent crime spree for fifteen years, and these unsolved cases all shared similar elements including the violence, the thefts, the balaclava, the geographical area, and the sawn-off shotgun.
But Operation Ottawa was still coming up short in terms of compelling evidence that would secure a conviction. And DCI Wilkins was becoming increasingly concerned that unless they nailed Cooper quickly, he would soon be free to strike again. He revealed: “If it was Cooper – who we knew was a gambler – we feared he’d soon be back into that cycle of offending. If he was the killer, he would kill again. People who kill like he did, execution-style, they enjoy it.”
The original plan was to keep the new operation secret from the public, and more specifically from the still incarcerated John Cooper himself, to avoid giving the likes of wife Pat any time to form strong new alibis on his whereabouts during the murders. DCI Wilkins felt that it would prove beneficial if Cooper still believed that he wasn’t under fresh suspicion. This plan was very nearly scuppered when it was discovered that ITV journalist Jonathan Hill had his own independent plans to produce a new TV investigation into the double murders which would link Cooper to the cases.
Operation Ottawa and Jonathan Hill struck a deal. Hill would drop his TV investigation in return for exclusive coverage of the operation when the radio silence was finally broken. This might seem a little dickish of Jonathan Hill.
He’s kind of saying that he won’t purposefully wreck Operation Ottawa’s painstaking two-year operation, but only on the condition that they promise to give him the exclusive story for ITV. Yet having Jonathan Hill onside ultimately proved to be a fortuitous move…
The Bullseye Breakthrough
One of the biggest headaches faced by DCI Wilkins and his team is that one of the clues picked up during the original appeals didn’t really fit with the suspect they had in mind. That artist’s sketch drawn up in 1989 depicted a scruffy curly-mopped guy in overlong women’s khaki shorts who was witnessed loitering suspiciously around a cash machine on the day that the bodies of Peter and Gwenda Dixon were discovered.
The problem is that it didn’t look much like the John Cooper caught by the police in the 1990s who had sharpened up his image since then. At the very least, he’d had a decent haircut and taken a bath or two.
What the police really needed was a visible insight into how Cooper looked in 1985 and 1989, but Cooper had made this task difficult by attempting to destroy every photograph of himself that ever existed during this period. This might have been considered a shrewd move on Cooper’s part, were it not for the fact that he’d also been careless enough to appear on a massively popular television game show in 1989.
DCI Wilkins claims that the operation had always known about Cooper’s appearance on Bullseye, but it was a random chat with a local pub landlord which confirmed that Cooper’s appearance on the game show coincided closely with the double murder of the Dixons. And it was journalist Jonathan Hill who managed to track down and retrieve the exact episode from the ITV vaults, enabling Operation Ottawa to finally get a good glimpse of how Cooper looked in 1989, back when he was getting beaten on television by a girl.
They even managed to pick out a frame of the episode which depicted Cooper in the exact same stance depicted in the witness sketch. And it was a breathtaking moment. As DCI Wilkins later observed in his 2021 book The Pembrokeshire Murders: “You could hardly make it up. For the first time we could see Cooper as he would have looked at the time of the Dixons’ murder. In my 30 years service, I had seen many artist’s impressions and photo-fit efforts, but I had never seen as close a match as this. It was like a tracing.”
Thanks partly to Jim Bowen and a slightly tacky game show with comical prizes, it was now indisputably clear to DCI Wilkins that John Cooper was The Pembrokeshire Killer. Super. Smashing. Great.
But we’re still only talking about a witness sketch. This wouldn’t be enough to keep Cooper behind bars. And there was no further evidence to prevent the release of John Cooper from prison in late 2008. On the very night that Cooper returned to his family home, his wife Pat died.
Now, I know what you’re thinking, and I don’t blame you. The police suspected exactly the same thing at first. DCI Wilkins received a disturbing phone call from the police control room at 3am: “Hello, boss. John Cooper has phoned 999. I think he has murdered his wife.”
But in fact, it was concluded that Pat Cooper had died of natural causes. After living in terror of her abusive husband for so long, it’s speculated that Pat couldn’t cope with the prospect of that very same terror returning home after an 11-year break from the abuse. As DCI Wilkins puts it: “This man was an absolute beast and suddenly he was back in the house. She had massive heart conditions, but I think the poor lady just gave up.”
However, whilst Pat may have been a reluctant fake alibi for most of her married life, it might have given her some comfort to know that, almost two decades earlier, she had quite unwittingly provided evidence that would eventually come to light and help secure the downfall of John Cooper.
The Forensic Evidence
By April 2009, results were starting to come in from forensics which finally pointed the finger squarely at Cooper. The shotgun found during the aftermath of Cooper’s final botched burglary was in fact the very same shotgun that had been used in the double murders, but it had not been possible to make that connection back in the 1990s. Following the Dixon murder, Cooper had painted the shotgun black in the belief that this would wipe away any potentially incriminating evidence. But when the forensics team scraped away this lick of black paint, they discovered that Cooper had in fact sealed in the blood of Peter Dixon.
Fresh discoveries of Cooper’s disturbing ‘trophies’ had also begun to emerge, including a sock belonging to Richard Thomas which was found squirrelled away in a hedgerow close to Cooper’s home.
But it was those overlong women’s khaki shorts taken from victim Gwenda Dixon which would ensure that Operation Ottawa finally hits its target.
Got The Bastard
When John Cooper was arrested again in May 2009, the police found gloves, a map, and rope in the boot of his car which perhaps suggests that he was either planning a nippy climbing expedition, or he was wasting no time in preparing to resume his former career.
During a four-day interview, an increasingly agitated Cooper began clutching at straws in-between moments of exploding with anger and lying on the floor in a foetal position. In a touching family moment, he even began to imply that his son Andrew must be the guilty party, as young Andrew often borrowed his shotgun and his women’s khaki shorts.
Cooper did go on to make a fair point about those khaki shorts. The ones depicted in the witness sketch were clearly too long, whereas the only pair of khaki shorts owned by Cooper were significantly shorter. This was true. The shorts had been seized by the police during Cooper’s original arrest for burglary in 1997 and were still in storage. As far as shorts go, they were pretty short.
But as the police interview was unfolding, a dramatic new slice of evidence was uncovered in the forensic tests which proved that this pair of women’s shorts didn’t originally belong to John Cooper. In fact, they didn’t even belong to victim Gwenda Dixon, either. She had only borrowed them.
Cooper’s late wife Pat had clearly observed that her husband’s mysterious new pair of women’s shorts were far too long for him. As Pat was something of a seamstress, she had taken it upon herself to shorten the length herself. But in doing so, she had sealed crucial DNA evidence into the seams.
When the forensics team unpicked the hem, they discovered a tiny speck of blood belonging to Peter Dixon. They also came across the DNA of the couple’s daughter locked into the seam. Gwenda had borrowed the shorts from her daughter to wear on her Pembrokeshire holiday. But the daughter had never been anywhere near Pembrokeshire herself.
In deploying her tailoring skills on that pair of shorts, Pat had led the police to a piece of evidence which would finally see her abusive husband face justice. And DCI Wilkins couldn’t hide his elation. He said: “It was a real emotional moment. I put the picture of the shorts up, with the words ‘Got the bastard!’”
Trial and Conviction
John Cooper was charged with the murders of Richard and Helen Thomas, the murders of Peter and Gwenda Dixon, and the rape and sexual assault of two teenagers. Cooper was brought to trial at Swansea Crown Court in March 2011, where the witnesses included the two teenage girls and Cooper’s own son Andrew who explained how his father often left the house very late at night with a shotgun concealed under his coat. Andrew also informed the court of his father’s secret stash of stolen trophies which were kept hidden in the family home, including expensive items of jewellery and photographs of his victims.
By this point, Cooper was old enough to start playing the role of the frail elderly figure who was facing a miscarriage of justice. But he continued to put up a pretty lame and desperate defence. He told the court that the shotgun had actually belonged to a random bloke called Terry who had passed the gun to Cooper with the words: “Do me a favour, throw it off the Cleddau bridge!” Cooper had allegedly been on the way to the bridge when he spotted a police car heading in his direction, and so he quickly buried the gun in a duck run instead.
Doesn’t quite ring true to me, though.
“Here mate, do me a favour, throw this shotgun off the Cleddau bridge!” “No worries, mate! Just give me five minutes to finish off this pork pie, and I’ll get right on it. Do you need any dead bodies moving whilst I’m at it?”
The jury weren’t convinced by this line of defence, either. Following an eight-week trial, John Cooper was found guilty of all charges and sentenced to a whole life order. He angrily tried to interrupt the summing up of Mr Justice John Griffith Williams by shouting: “This is utter rubbish! That jury’s been on the internet. I don’t blame them! Evidence has been kept from that jury!”
After warning Cooper to wind his neck in, Mr Justice John Griffith concluded: “You are a very dangerous man and a significant risk. You are very predatory and, were it not for advances in DNA techniques, may well have continued to evade capture. Only you know the full facts and circumstances of the four murders. Much will never be known because you have constantly refused to stand up to your responsibilities.
No doubt you will continue to deny what you have done and not show any remorse. The murders were of such evil wickedness that the mandatory sentence of life will mean just that.”
Cooper was dragged out of the court, screaming that the truth will one day all come out.
Unanswered Questions
A big part of the reason why I chose to cover the case of John Cooper is because I can remember bumping into a British writer during an accidental business trip to the Philippines who was convinced that John Cooper was innocent.
I sat down with this guy as we both enjoyed a traditional English fry-up on the outskirts of Manila, and our conversation just happened to turn to the topic of Bullseye. By a remarkable coincidence, this guy claimed to be writing a book which would prove the innocence of The Bullseye Killer.
Around twelve years later, I’ve seen no sign of the completed book. And the only other suggestions I can find relating to Cooper’s innocence relate to the fact that the seized items of evidence were in police custody for a long time and may have been tampered with. It seems that some Cooper supporters believe that the police purposefully contaminated the evidence with blood from the victims and the DNA of a woman who had never even visited Pembrokeshire in a bid to secure the conviction of a man with a long and terrible history of violent crime in the local area.
Not many people seem to agree, though. And Cooper’s application for an appeal was thrown out of court in 2012.
It’s been suggested that we should instead be focusing on the other Pembrokeshire deaths from the same period which were never satisfactorily resolved. For example, you may remember the name Florence “Flo” Evans from the beginning of the video. She was a local farmer who occasionally threw a bit of casual work in Cooper’s way during the 1980s.
In February 1989, 77-year-old Flo was found dead in the bathtub in her home in Jordanston, just across the fields from Cooper’s house. She was fully clothed and still wearing her slippers. The coroner concluded that it was an accidental death, and that Flo must have banged her head before falling into the bathtub and drowning.
But Flo’s family never bought that explanation. The bath had only been half-filled and was drawn with only cold water. The front door had been left wide open. Flo always turned off her television via the plug socket but it had been turned off with the dial. Her purse was missing from the house. Flo’s great-niece later told the press: “We knew it was suspicious. The police at the time said there was no foul play, but I remember after her post-mortem, an officer telling us, ‘There’s more to this’.”
The really disturbing thing is that John Cooper actually brought up Flo’s name in his defence. He had been trying to explain how his fingerprints came to be found on victim Richard Thomas’s car door. Cooper claimed that he had been doing a few odd jobs on Flo’s farm when Richard arrived in his car to collect something. Cooper had helped Richard put whatever it was into the car, and got his fingerprints all over the door.
But could Cooper have been deliberately taunting the police by bringing up the mysterious death of Flo Evans? DCI Steve Wilkins believes that Flo’s house is slap bang in the middle of Cooper’s criminal geographical footprint, and admits that the death troubles him greatly but he is unable to prove the exact circumstances.
Much earlier in December 1976, another double death had sent shockwaves over Pembrokeshire, this time in the village of Llangolman in the Preseli Hills. The bodies of 73-year-old Griff Thomas and his 70-year-old sister Patti were found by the local postman in their remote farmhouse. Griff’s charred body was so badly burned that only his feet could be identified, whilst Patti was slumped over the parlour table, having been bludgeoned to death.
The police initially launched a murder investigation but it was later concluded that the grisly deaths were probably the result of a murder-suicide. It was speculated that Griff and Patti had been arguing over money. Griff had murdered his sister with a blunt instrument before committing suicide by setting himself on fire. If all of this sounds alarmingly familiar, it’s because it sounds suspiciously identical to the initial conclusions drawn over the deaths of Richard and Helen Thomas nine years later in 1985.
Friends and neighbours of Griff and Patti claim that the couple were peaceful and deeply religious, and not the type to argue over money. It’s also worth noting that a bureau in the house had been broken into, and a cash box had been emptied.
It could be argued that this was too early to involve Cooper as he didn’t appear on the criminal radar until 1985. But John Cooper was 40 years old when he murdered Richard and Helen Thomas. And forensic psychologist Dr Clive Sims believes it highly unlikely that a man would suddenly evolve into a brutally violent murderer at such a relatively late age.
Dr Clive Sims has publicly questioned the verdicts reached over the death of Griff and Patti Thomas, and called for a fresh investigation. He told BBC Wales in 2011: “It simply does not make sense. There are enough similarities between the crimes to suggest that Cooper may at least be a suspect in this case.”
What Could Have Been Won
What we do know for sure is that John Cooper used his incredibly detailed knowledge of the local area to carry out a long series of brutal burglaries, two double-murders, and a rape and sexual assault of a minor, motivated by greed, envy, and gratification.
It’s believed by professional psychological profilers that Cooper’s compulsion for gambling led to the loss of his original fortune which he felt equally compelled to recoup by any means necessary.
In the words of DCI Steve Wilkins: “He is the most dangerous human being that I’ve ever come into contact with. This was about excessive violence – and for him, taking somebody’s life in order to take property off them is totally justifiable. I think what he hated was happiness. He hated people being happy and he was constantly watching people’s lives. They had shape and reason and that would drive him mad.”
Maybe things would have turned out differently if he’d never won that Spot The Ball competition and developed a taste for wealth. Maybe things would have turned out differently if Jim Bowen had just let him win a damn speedboat.
Now in his late ’70s, John Cooper will never be a free man. And as he lives out his remaining days within prison, he’ll have plenty of time to ponder over some of the life decisions he made, and consider what he could have won.
Key Takeaways
- Welsh serial killer John Cooper appeared on the 1989 game show Bullseye, mentioning scuba diving near Pembrokeshire’s coastline just weeks before murdering a couple on a coastal path.
- Cooper won £94,000 in a 1978 Spot The Ball competition, squandered it on gambling and drinking, then turned to violent burglary and murder to recoup his lost wealth.
- Operation Ottawa investigators retrieved the Bullseye episode from ITV archives, finding Cooper’s appearance matched a 1989 witness sketch almost exactly, confirming him as the prime suspect.
- Forensic analysis of khaki shorts stolen from victim Gwenda Dixon revealed Peter Dixon’s blood and the couple’s daughter’s DNA sealed inside by Cooper’s wife Pat’s tailoring work.
- Cooper was convicted in 2011 of two double murders, rape, and sexual assault, receiving a whole life order after advances in DNA technology finally secured evidence against him.
Dana Ortiz covers prosecutorial mechanics, evidentiary procedure, and how investigations unwind decades after the original case file went cold.
Frequently Asked Questions
What game show did John Cooper appear on in 1989?
John Cooper appeared on the UK darts-based game show Bullseye in 1989.
What was John Cooper’s hobby that he mentioned on Bullseye?
On Bullseye, John Cooper mentioned that his unusual hobby was scuba diving, and he described Pembrokeshire as having ‘the coastline, we’ve got the deep water, the mountains, all sorts of things.‘
How soon after appearing on Bullseye did John Cooper commit his next murders?
John Cooper committed his next double murder just three weeks after appearing on Bullseye.
How much did John Cooper win in the 1978 Spot The Ball competition?
John Cooper won a new car and £94,000 in the 1978 Spot The Ball competition, which is equivalent to over £450,000 today.
Who were the victims of John Cooper’s 1985 double murder?
The victims of John Cooper’s 1985 double murder were 58-year-old Richard Thomas and his 54-year-old sister Helen Thomas, who were killed in their manor house in Scoveston, Milton Haven, Pembrokeshire.
Who were the victims of John Cooper’s 1989 double murder?
The victims of John Cooper’s 1989 double murder were 51-year-old Peter Dixon and 52-year-old Gwenda Dixon, a couple from Oxfordshire who were on holiday in Little Haven, Pembrokeshire.
What crucial evidence was found in the hem of Gwenda Dixon’s khaki shorts?
When forensic teams unpicked the hem of the khaki shorts, they discovered a tiny speck of blood belonging to Peter Dixon and the DNA of the couple’s daughter, which had been sealed in when Pat Cooper shortened the shorts.
What was Operation Ottawa and when was it formed?
Operation Ottawa was an investigation into outstanding unsolved serious crime in the Pembrokeshire area, formed in 2006 and led by DCI Steve Wilkins. It focused on the two unsolved double murders and the rape and sexual assault of two teenage girls.
How did the Bullseye footage help Operation Ottawa?
The Bullseye footage, retrieved from ITV archives by journalist Jonathan Hill, showed how John Cooper looked in 1989. A frame depicting Cooper in the same stance as the 1989 witness sketch provided a close match that DCI Wilkins described as ‘like a tracing,’ helping to confirm Cooper as the suspect.
What was John Cooper’s sentence after his 2011 trial?
Following an eight-week trial at Swansea Crown Court in March 2011, John Cooper was found guilty of all charges and sentenced to a whole life order.
Sources
- Original Casual Criminalist video: Darts of Death: The Bullseye Serial Killer
- Hero image source by IAEA Imagebank / openverse, by.
