00:00:05
-June 1989, Little Haven,
Pembrokeshire, Wales. Peter and Gwenda Dixon
were enjoying a coastal walk
00:00:13
on the final day
of their summer holiday, but they were shocked dead
at point blank range.
00:00:19
-He killed retired
or middle-aged couples who were just
living out their life. He perpetrated his crimes
in such a way
00:00:28
that he would destroy
a whole family unit. -The man who murdered them
was 44-year-old serial killer
00:00:34
John Cooper. This prolific armed robber
had mercilessly killed them just for their bank card.
00:00:41
-Sometimes he took just
a few hundred pounds, and that being the price
of a life.
00:00:47
-And the murderer loved
the limelight. Just a month
before killing the Dixons, he appeared on the hit
television game show "Bullseye."
00:00:56
-He got away with it for years. He was clever. He was intelligent. He did everything
to avoid capture.
00:01:05
He was truly an evil man. -He brutally slayed four people
in a hit man-style execution,
00:01:13
then cunningly
covered up his tracks. He had 30 burglaries and
an armed robbery to his name.
00:01:19
For that reason, John Cooper is one of the world's
most evil killers. ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ Pembrokeshire, West Wales.
00:01:49
Between 1983 and 1996,
farm laborer John Copper terrorized
the coastal communities
00:01:57
near his home
in Milford Haven. He was a prolific burglar
and armed robber who, for many years,
eluded the police.
00:02:08
Cooper had no qualms about
killing four innocent people to cover up his tracks. -He'd had a terrific impact
on the local community.
00:02:17
At the time, in that particular
section of Wales, this was a very severe event, and all the events took place
within a close proximity.
00:02:28
People were very afraid
to leave their wife or their partner alone
in the house.
00:02:32
It was a climate of fear,
we would call it now. -There was a significant amount
of just pure terror
00:02:40
because people
in rural communities don't feel the closeness of
a police force protecting them.
00:02:45
They often have to
protect themselves, and so they were terrified. -Cooper's need to fund
his gambling
00:02:52
fueled his violent
robberies and burglaries, but there were no holds
barred in his attacks.
00:02:58
Not only did he rob,
he sexually assaulted some of his victims
as a mere afterthought,
00:03:05
including two teenage girls
he held at gunpoint. -These crimes were all a shock
to the local community.
00:03:13
This is not the kind of place
where these things happen. This is not the mean
city streets.
00:03:17
This is somewhere that's
supposed to be rural, tranquil, a sanctuary
from that kind of thing,
00:03:22
especially in a small
close-knit community. I think that this kind of thing, it casts a really long shadow
over these places.
00:03:30
There's rumor.
There's gossip. There's speculation. -But the start, at the outset,
00:03:36
Cooper was simply
a belligerent arrogant bully who was an armed robber
and preyed on women alone.
00:03:45
It was a long time before
all the dots were joined up, and it was revealed
that Cooper
00:03:50
was much more than
simply an armed robber. He was actually a quadruple
murderer,
00:03:55
rapist, and sexual assaulter. -This killer's story begins
on the 3rd of September, 1944.
00:04:03
John William Cooper was born
in Milford Haven, Wales. He was one of seven children.
00:04:11
His father worked as
an agricultural laborer, and soon John Cooper himself would work the fields
as a local farmhand.
00:04:21
-He was part of the postwar
baby boom generation. He left school at 15. He got involved in a range
of different trades,
00:04:28
which wasn't anything
particularly unusual. So he appeared to have
a fairly regular upbringing.
00:04:34
There aren't any really obvious
signs of the trauma, the abuse or the neglect that we see in cases
of serial killers.
00:04:42
-He left home at 15. One of the reasons
why he was able to leave is because he was
a fairly talented guy
00:04:49
around the farm, around -- In a rural environment,
he could do a lot of things, so he could get by, and he was
a very independent person.
00:04:58
Most children wouldn't
leave then because they'd be afraid to. He wasn't afraid
because he was a man.
00:05:02
He could take care of himself. -He was quite well-known
in the local farming community,
00:05:07
you know,
making his way in the world. -Soon the wayward Cooper
settled down to family life.
00:05:13
He married his childhood
sweetheart at the age of 21, and before long,
they welcomed a son
00:05:19
and a daughter into the world. -From the outside,
Cooper did appear to be a regular family guy.
00:05:26
They had two children. So looking in, they looked to be
the ideal nuclear family.
00:05:32
Cooper presented quite
a respectable veneer to the outside world. -But the married man Cooper
00:05:39
liked to indulge
outside of the family home. -He did quite enjoy
the high life. He liked going out and drinking
and gambling,
00:05:49
and he was gregarious. The people that knew him
socially thought he was a stand-up guy,
00:05:54
but actually he had
a very short fuse. He would lose his temper
very easily. So here's somebody who's
crafting this performance
00:06:02
of self,
which isn't the real him. -He was quite well-known
in the local community,
00:06:08
quite well-liked,
known to have a violent temper, but nevertheless, you know,
one of the boys,
00:06:14
so to speak, in the local pub. -In 1978, at the age of 34, Cooper found work with a
multi-million dollar oil giant
00:06:24
Gulf, working as a welder's mate
at the local refinery. That same year,
Cooper himself struck it rich,
00:06:32
winning a newspaper competition,
Spot the Ball. -He won £90,000,
a fortune in today's terms,
00:06:40
it were probably half
a million pounds, as well as a £4,000
Austin Princess. If he had been
a more temperate man,
00:06:50
he would probably have saved
some of that money. -But after giving £1,000 each
to 10 of his family members,
00:06:58
the generosity seemed
to stop there. Cooper, the gambler, started burning a hole
through his lucky winnings.
00:07:06
-This is a life-changing
amount of money, but he didn't hold onto it
for very long,
00:07:11
I think because he did live
that fast and high lifestyle. He continued to gamble.
He continued to drink.
00:07:17
He invested in fairly misplaced
business ventures, so he was soon parted
from that money.
00:07:23
But once that money was gone,
it didn't get rid of that sense of entitlement,
that sense in which,
00:07:29
"I want to have these things
that I was able to buy before." -There's a hypomanic quality
to it.
00:07:37
He looks to me like he probably
was what some people call a cyclothymic personality,
or a manic-depressive illness,
00:07:44
and in his moments of euphoria,
he gambles. He thinks he can do anything,
and all of a sudden,
00:07:49
he looks down,
and his money is gone. -The seemingly happy-go-lucky
John Cooper was,
00:07:55
in fact, deeply troubled
beneath the surface. His teenage son particularly
bore the brunt of Cooper's rage.
00:08:02
Not only was he subjected
to beatings, at one stage, he even claimed his father
placed a shotgun into his mouth
00:08:10
and threatened to kill him. -He contrived to be a violent
and aggressive man. It drove the son
out of the house.
00:08:18
He couldn't bear his father. -Despite his son escaping
the home at just 16, Cooper had to keep up
the appearance of a happy family
00:08:27
enjoying their newfound wealth
that he'd secretly squandered. -Cooper had developed
this lifestyle
00:08:34
where he was able to buy
whatever he wanted. What didn't disappear
was that sense of entitlement.
00:08:40
So he simply switches to another
way of getting those things. -Now you can't support
that lifestyle
00:08:47
on a farm laborer's wages. The only way you can do it
is by turning to crime and, in his case,
turning to robbery.
00:08:56
-His shotgun was now
put to good use. Armed with ammunition
and a balaclava, in 1983,
00:09:04
Cooper embarked on a string of
burglaries across Pembrokeshire. With an SAS-style survival book,
00:09:12
his greatest weapon was
his knowledge of the countryside he'd learned
as a local farmhand.
00:09:20
-Cooper knew this area
like the back of his hand. This was an area
he was really familiar with.
00:09:26
He would plan his offenses. He would think through
escape routes. He was quite keen
on survival techniques
00:09:33
and that sort of thing, and I think he really did feel
that he was a cut above your standard robber,
your standard burglar.
00:09:40
-He wanted to be prepared
if he saw an opportunity. Remember, we're talking
about an impulsive guy.
00:09:45
An impulsive guy has to have
the instrumentalities of his crime around
at all times.
00:09:51
He hid a lot of the things
that were the paraphernalia for crimes in the hedges
out in the fields.
00:09:57
He imagined the hedges
out in the field to be like
his private storage house. -Not only did Cooper hide
his tools of the trade,
00:10:05
such as shotguns
and balaclavas in the hedges, the proceeds of his crimes
were stored there, too.
00:10:13
-He had a habit of hiding his
ill-gotten gains in hedgerows, as a kind of safekeeping
00:10:19
because he knew
that he was the only person who knew
exactly where he'd put what.
00:10:24
-It seemed
that Cooper's addiction to gambling
had now been satisfied by this new infatuation
with theft,
00:10:32
but before long,
this nonstop crime spree would have untold consequences
for his vulnerable victims.
00:10:40
The out-of-control Cooper
would soon resort to desperate ways of covering up
his offenses -- murder.
00:10:52
-As every indication that
his loss of his money through gambling was the seeds
of his life as a criminal,
00:10:59
he got used to the neighbors thinking of him
as kind of the rich guy. All of a sudden,
he didn't have any money,
00:11:04
and so the crimes
that he goes out to commit, they're burglaries. -With no sign of getting caught
during his 2-year crime spree
00:11:13
around rural Pembrokeshire, Cooper thought he was
on a winning streak. On the night of the 22nd
of December, 1985,
00:11:23
he racked the stakes up
even higher. His next target was barely
a mile from his own doorstep,
00:11:30
Scoveston Manor in Steynton. -Now they are local farmers. They're quite wealthy,
and Cooper is known to them.
00:11:39
So this is quite
a close-knit community. -They're a rich
and reclusive pair, called Richard and Helen Thomas.
00:11:47
They lived in
a three-story farmhouse, set in considerable acres, not more than a mile from
where Cooper actually lived.
00:11:58
Cooper got there, thinking that
Helen would be on her own, burst in, threatened her
with the shotgun.
00:12:07
-But, unbeknownst to Cooper,
Helen's brother, Richard, was close by. -Unexpectedly,
Richard returned.
00:12:17
Almost without thinking, Cooper turns his shotgun
on Richard and kills him. He ties up Helen and shoots her
in the face, killing her.
00:12:33
-The siblings were both shot
at close range in the head, but brother Richard
was also wounded in the stomach.
00:12:42
-A close-range discharge
with a shotgun will almost completely
destroy the head.
00:12:49
If Richard was shot
in the stomach first, he would be well-aware
of what had happened to him.
00:12:55
For Richard, we can only hope
that the shot to the head was first
and that he was dead from that.
00:13:04
I strongly suspect
that the first shot was the one to the abdomen. When it didn't kill him, then
was the fatal shot to the head.
00:13:12
The whole situation must have
been utterly terrifying. -It was dastardly,
brutal crime in pursuit,
00:13:25
of course,
of Cooper's lifestyle, but he then sets fire
to the house, in an effort
to conceal the crime.
00:13:37
-So not only has he invaded
their privacy and their space, not only has he taken
their things,
00:13:42
not only has he taken
their lives, he's decided that he's going to
burn the place to the ground.
00:13:47
Cooper committed these crimes
in his own backyard, and I think this high-risk
offending,
00:13:54
he didn't really care, I think, or didn't really think
very much far ahead. He would see an opportunity,
and he would take it.
00:14:01
He would live very much
in the present moment, not really giving
very much thought
00:14:05
to what was going
to happen afterwards. -It's impulsive because
what he's doing is,
00:14:11
in essence, creating a situation where he either leaves
a witness or a body. If he leaves a body,
he's just elevated himself
00:14:19
into a new kind of criminal, who for whom the resources used
to capture will be incredible,
00:14:24
and if he leaves a witness, there's a substantial
likelihood, in a small community,
he'll be identified.
00:14:31
-But Cooper's bid to conceal
his crime didn't pay off. The fire brigade was called
00:14:36
and soon got the flames
under control. Even though Helen's body
was burnt beyond recognition,
00:14:42
investigators could see this
was no ordinary blaze, but an effort to cover up
a botched burglary.
00:14:50
Soon the Thomas' case became
a full-scale murder inquiry. -The Dyfed-Powys Police,
this kind of investigation
00:14:58
is not one
that comes along very often, and it really was out
of the ordinary. I think this did shake
the community to the core,
00:15:06
and you have to remember
that many of the officers investigating this will have
come from this local community.
00:15:11
So this was something
that was incredibly significant. They did several house-to-house
inquiries,
00:15:17
and when it came to Cooper,
he had a rock solid alibi. His family all agreed
that they were all at home
00:15:25
together on the evening
that these murders occurred. -And the importance of this
is that
00:15:32
this behavior
that people have, in protecting people they like
by giving them alibis,
00:15:37
is an incredible impediment
to the solution of serial crimes because what happens
when people give an alibi
00:15:44
is somebody gets eliminated
from the suspect pool, and what is fascinating
about these cases is,
00:15:51
over the course of my lifetime
as a forensic psychologist, I've seen many, many instances
where this has occurred.
00:15:57
-And I think that, for me,
says a lot about Cooper, this ability that he's got
to coerce his family
00:16:03
to lie about his whereabouts, and that does give us
a sense of the power and control
00:16:08
that he has over all of them. He's not just convincing
one person to lie. He's convincing his whole family
to do it.
00:16:15
-As the dust settles following
the Thomas' murders, life in the quiet harbor town
of Milford Haven
00:16:22
seemed to go back to normality. -And as far as Cooper
was concerned, he'd got away with it.
00:16:28
Police officers drew a blank. Cooper had provided an alibi. There was no other
obvious solution,
00:16:34
and so gradually
the investigation tailed off. -As the talk of the town
turned away from the Thomas',
00:16:43
2 years after their murder, John Cooper's wife was injured
in a riding accident.
00:16:49
So the couple moved
several miles inland to the quiet village
of Jordanston. -If you have put yourself
in Cooper's position,
00:16:58
he would have thought, "Well,
I've got away with two murders. I'm home free.
I can do whatever I want.
00:17:04
Nobody knows I've got any kind
of track record as a murderer." -But instead of laying low
as a killer
00:17:09
and keeping a low profile,
2 years later, in May 1989, Cooper couldn't resist another
flutter on national television.
00:17:19
-Cooper's arrogance knew
very little by way of bounds. His appetite for celebrity,
in the end,
00:17:26
led him to appear on an ITV
game show called "Bullseye," which involved playing darts
and answering questions.
00:17:35
He appeared almost 4 years
after the Thomas' were killed. -It's got that element
of gambling to it.
00:17:42
It's got that element
of hedonism, and to be on "Bullseye" in the 1980s
was a really big deal,
00:17:48
and it was something that
would have stoked Cooper's ego quite significantly. -First of all, it's very rare
for serial killers
00:17:57
to voluntarily appear on TV or in any media
for a very simple reason. They tend to be socially
unskillful and shy.
00:18:07
It's a foreign environment
to them, but the fact of the matter
is Cooper is not a typical killer at all.
00:18:13
He's not reclusive. He's not quiet.
He's not socially unskillful. He, in fact, is socially
skillful,
00:18:20
gregarious, had lots of friends,
had lots of enemies, also. He was fun.
He was playful.
00:18:27
He was impulsive. Maybe he was manic-depressive. He liked attention, and his,
you know, his lust
00:18:34
for a bit of attention and maybe another opportunity
to make some money like he did gambling caused him
to seize the opportunity.
00:18:45
-I think it's quite revealing
about Cooper's character. He is very much a narcissist.
00:18:49
He likes people to look at him, and he's going to have millions
of people looking at him
00:18:54
when he's on this game show. So this very much does fall
into that hedonistic, that egoistic kind
of personality that he has.
00:19:03
-Despite his time
in the spotlight, John Cooper was beaten
by his opponent. He walked away empty-handed.
00:19:12
Now he would go back to what
he knew best -- armed robbery. A month after appearing
on nationwide TV,
00:19:20
he would strike once again, and once again
it would lead to murder. -Cooper was very much
a gambler,
00:19:29
and he was always trying to get
that lifestyle back that the big win
allowed him to have,
00:19:35
and whether that was burglary, whether that was appearing
on game shows, he was going to grasp
at anything that would give him
00:19:42
access to that lifestyle
to which he felt entitled, at those things
he felt he deserved.
00:19:47
-Just a month after his TV
appearance, Cooper was stalking
the Pembrokeshire countryside,
00:19:54
looking for his next victims. -He was stealing money
from innocent people to remain the man who had
won Spot The Ball,
00:20:04
to lavish his money in pubs, to appear to be Jack the lad,
to sustain his arrogance.
00:20:12
There was nothing that Cooper would not do to maintain
his position in the community.
00:20:17
He was content only
if he was famous, if he had a local swagger. -29th of June, 1989,
it was the final day of Peter
00:20:30
and Gwenda Dixon's
summer holiday. They were getting away
from it all in the peaceful town
of Little Haven,
00:20:38
but their haven by the coast
was to be anything but safe. -Peter and Gwenda Dixon
were holiday-making
00:20:46
at a campsite
near the coastal path. They'd come there
from Oxfordshire. They went there regularly.
00:20:50
It was one of their
favorite haunts. He had been in the RAF,
and she'd been a secretary.
00:20:54
They were in their early 50s. -They decided to go for a walk. They wanted to let
the tent dry off.
00:20:59
So they decided to go
for a stroll, and, unfortunately,
they were accosted by Cooper
00:21:05
when they went out on that walk. -Masked in balaclava
and threatening them with his trademark
double-barrel shotgun,
00:21:15
Cooper demanded Peter
and Gwenda's valuables. -Now Cooper demanded
Peter's bank card.
00:21:21
He demanded the PIN number, and he also demanded
his wedding ring. -Perhaps Peter and Gwenda hoped
that this was merely a robbery.
00:21:31
Sadly for the Dixons,
it certainly wasn't. -When we try to imagine
the final moments
00:21:37
of Peter and Gwenda Dixon, this would have been
absolutely terrifying because they've had
this individual
00:21:42
who's demanded
their valuables from them. They probably think,
"This is going to be over soon.
00:21:47
He's going to go.
He's going to walk away," and he could have walked away,
but he didn't.
00:21:52
-Instead, he tied their hands
behind their backs, then shot Gwenda twice,
and Peter three times,
00:21:59
killing them
both almost instantly. -He chose to murder them,
to execute them in cold blood.
00:22:07
He did not need to do this. I mean, all murders
are unnecessary, but I think when you look at the
circumstances of this one,
00:22:13
completely unnecessary. He's literally just getting
rid of witnesses. -His second pair of victims
very similar modus operandi,
00:22:23
both shot at close range
with a shotgun. A shot to the head is
instantaneously fatal
00:22:29
with a shotgun. They would not feel pain
from those injuries, but again, if you have two victims,
the first one is shot.
00:22:41
The second is going to be aware
of what has happened, and there would be
unimaginable fear, terror,
00:22:49
in that person's mind. -And in a sadistic twist,
for this attack, Cooper sexually assaulted
Gwenda Dixon,
00:22:58
leaving her body naked
from the waist down. -It wasn't enough for him
to rob this couple.
00:23:06
He feels entitled to take
whatever he wants, whether it's their possessions,
their lives and their dignity.
00:23:13
-We don't know the exact nature
of the sexual assault because she's ultimately killed,
00:23:17
but this suggests
that he's just -- Impulse is out of control. There's no opportunity
that presents itself to him
00:23:24
that he doesn't take. -Cooper's SAS-style survival
techniques then came to hand.
00:23:31
He dragged his victims' bodies
well away from the coastal path, covered them with hazel twigs,
00:23:37
then replanted bracken over them
with the roots in tact, to prevent their discovery.
00:23:43
Cooper then searched
Peter's rucksack, swapped his bloody trousers with
a spare pair of shorts he found,
00:23:48
belonging to his victims, then headed to a bank
in Pembroke. -Cooper used Peter Dixon's
bank card to withdraw somewhere
00:23:56
in the region of £300
over the next few days. Now this is a relatively
small amount of money,
00:24:03
and if you think this is
the price of Peter Dixon's life, this is absolutely horrendous.
00:24:09
-Not only that,
but Cooper had cashed in on one of Peter Dixon's most prized
and sentimental possessions.
00:24:16
-Cooper went on
to sell the wedding ring that he had stolen
from Peter Dixon, and he sold it for around
about £20, £25.
00:24:24
This was a really small
amount of money. That tells us how parasitic
this individual is.
00:24:31
-Meanwhile, the Dixons' son
was getting worried, as his parents had failed
to come home.
00:24:36
So he called the police. Peter and Gwenda Dixon's bodies were discovered 6 days
after their disappearance,
00:24:43
when a walker spotted a swarm of
flies coming from the bracken. The murders shocked the seaside
town of Little Haven,
00:24:52
but with Cooper careful
to cover his tracks, the killer's identity
was a complete mystery.
00:24:59
-So a massive police
investigation is underway. Over 6,000 people
are interviewed, and again,
00:25:07
Cooper comes
onto the police radar. His family, again,
give him an alibi. "He was with us on the day
that this happened."
00:25:15
-Cooper, by this point,
must have believed, in his own mind,
that he was invulnerable,
00:25:22
that he could do whatever
he wanted, whenever he wanted, in the way that he wanted
and get away with it.
00:25:28
After 18 months,
the investigation of Peter and Gwenda Dixon's murders
were scaled down.
00:25:37
It was a tragedy, but there was
no convincing evidence to point the finger at Cooper.
00:25:43
-This goes unsolved for years
and years and years, and detectives even looked
into the possibility
00:25:48
of IRA involvement because there was
a weapons dump found nearby. So this is unsolved.
00:25:55
There's no justice. -Once again, John Cooper
wasn't brought to book. Nothing seemed to stand
in his way as a career burglar
00:26:05
and armed robber. -Throughout the '80s
and into the middle '90s, Cooper continued.
00:26:12
His habit of burglary or armed
robbery is well-established. -Out of control, Cooper seemed
to be on a lucky streak.
00:26:22
Whatever risks he took,
he seemed to get away with, and he seemed untouchable. The sadistic side
of the serial killer
00:26:31
wasn't just attracted
to easy cash. On the 6th of March, 1996,
he spotted a group of teenagers
00:26:39
walking through fields
next to a Milford Haven school. -Cooper emerges from
the undergrowth,
00:26:47
brandishing his shotgun. He takes one of the girls,
who is 16, aside and rapes her.
00:26:57
He then sexually assaults
the 15-year-old girl. -All five teenagers were forced to lie face down
during the ordeal.
00:27:06
-He's wearing a balaclava,
and he's got a shotgun. You can just imagine
how terrifying
00:27:11
this sight must have been. It's the stuff of nightmares. This is going to be an
absolutely horrendous experience
00:27:17
for these young people, but I think for Cooper,
it's a real ego boost for him. He's able to control
five young people,
00:27:25
and I think he actually
feels quite good about himself after this. -Cooper had one more act
of bravado
00:27:32
to strike fear in his victims. -As he leaves,
he shoots the shotgun in the air to terrify them.
00:27:42
Now that was untypical Cooper. This was in daylight. It was a very
extraordinary attack.
00:27:51
Quite what must have come
over him is open to speculation. He had been getting away,
literally, with murder.
00:28:01
He'd got away
with a great many robberies. All of a sudden, he attacks a
group of teenagers in the open.
00:28:08
-So something is happening
over time to Cooper, and I suspect the intensity
and the wildness of his impulses
00:28:17
are getting greater
and greater and greater. The chances that he would get
caught doing something
00:28:22
like that are astronomical,
an absolutely crazy thing to do, suggesting that,
at the core of him,
00:28:29
is a person who's just
all impulse and no control. -Now is that further proof that he really was convinced
that he was invulnerable?
00:28:38
I would say it was. I would say that that was
further evidence that Cooper believed that
he could do whatever he wanted,
00:28:44
whenever he wanted,
to whomever he wanted. -The teenagers reported
their ordeal,
00:28:50
but again, police drew a blank. Later that year, though, gambler Cooper's winning streak
would finally come to an end.
00:28:59
-He attacks a schoolteacher
in her house in Sardis, in Pembrokeshire. He ties her up, but she is
a very determined woman,
00:29:10
and she escapes,
frightening Cooper off. -During her escape,
the savvy victim triggered a panic alarm.
00:29:20
-He legs it. He runs for it, dumping various things
in hedgerows along the way. In his escape, he dumps a
sawn-off shotgun in a hedgerow.
00:29:32
It was a shotgun that was,
in the end, going to lead to his arrest
for robbery. -Not only did Cooper abandon
his weapon,
00:29:42
he also discarded his balaclava. -After Cooper burgles
the house, it all starts
to unravel for him,
00:29:50
and the police find
their way to him. He comes onto their radar because they're
suspicious of him
00:29:56
and his involvement in this, and when the police
do finally catch up with him, I think they are quite surprised
at the magnitude
00:30:05
of the things that they find. In his home, there are many
items of stolen property.
00:30:10
In the cesspit on his property,
there are over 500 house keys. So this is somebody who really
has made a profession,
00:30:20
made a vocation,
of terrorizing other people. -Cooper was arrested and
finally put under lock and key,
00:30:28
but as police dug deeper
into his criminal activity, they'd soon find this was
no ordinary armed robber,
00:30:35
but a quadruple killer. 54-year-old
serial killer John Cooper was languishing in jail,
00:30:43
on remand for a string of 30
burglaries and an armed robbery. On the 10th of December,
Cooper was finally convicted.
00:30:57
-The police find
a lot of forensic evidence pointing to Cooper
as an armed robber,
00:31:02
and he is sentenced to 16 years. -It was when he was in prison
serving his sentence
00:31:10
that he first comes
onto the radar of the police, suspected of involvement
in the four murders
00:31:14
and the attack on the teenagers. -In February 2006, over 7 years
after Cooper's conviction,
00:31:22
police launched
Operation Ottawa, a cold case review linking the unsolved murders
of the Dixons and the Thomas'
00:31:30
and the sex attack
on the Milford Haven teenagers. The common thread
running through them
00:31:35
was the use of a shotgun. During Cooper's time in jail, similar offenses had fallen
by 90%,
00:31:42
so the finger of suspicion
firmly pointed in his direction. -The police decide to go back
over all the evidence
00:31:50
to do with the Dixons and to see whether there is
anything that could possibly connect Cooper
to that killing.
00:32:00
It was perfectly obvious
to them that Cooper had to be
a prime suspect, probably the prime suspect.
00:32:07
-Although they had
their suspect, there was nothing concrete
linking Cooper to the crimes.
00:32:13
So Dyfed-Powys Police turned
to forensic scientist Angela Gallop and her team
for help.
00:32:20
They looked first at the case
of Peter and Gwenda Dixon. With the advances
in DNA techniques
00:32:26
since their attack in 1989,
this could bear the most fruit. -I think first of all we'd had
a conversation, a briefing,
00:32:35
from the police officers
involved, and we went to look
at the scene, so that we got an idea
of what would have gone on,
00:32:44
and that's always
extremely helpful, even if it's sometime
after the event. In this case, and I think
to keep costs down,
00:32:51
the police said to us, "We only want you
to look for DNA," and there was some things
that we could prioritize.
00:32:58
Things like, for example,
the rope with which Peter Dixon's hands
had been tied behind his back,
00:33:03
and where the branches
that had been broken and then bent over their bodies. They would have
had to be handled,
00:33:09
and so there were definitely
some places where we could start
to look for DNA. -But trying to find a DNA
profile of the Dixons' killer
00:33:17
at first led investigators
down a dead end. -We just hoped
we'd find something, but because the bodies hadn't
been discovered for about a week
00:33:26
and because the weather
had been very hot at the time, it meant that quite a lot
of decomposition had happened.
00:33:32
So that gave us
a bit of a problem, and so we'd got one or two parts
of profiles, difficult profiles.
00:33:39
There were mixtures,
you know, weak. We just thought, "This is going
to be really quite difficult,"
00:33:45
and we hadn't got anything
obvious that was shouting at us, at that point. -By August 2008, the hunt
for DNA had proved fruitless.
00:33:53
With Cooper's imminent release
on parole from his burglary and armed robbery sentence,
the man leading the inquiry,
00:34:01
Detective Chief Superintendent
Steve Wilkins, was getting extremely worried. -After about 18 months,
we hadn't really come up
00:34:09
with something that you could
get hold of and say, "Well, this looks
like evidence."
00:34:13
About that point, I got a telephone call
from Steve Wilkins, and he said, basically,
"You're absolutely useless.
00:34:21
You've had this case
for 18 months, and you haven't found anything, and I'm thinking
of taking it off you
00:34:26
and giving it to another
forensic science laboratory." I remember going down
to Fishguard to meet with Steve,
00:34:33
and it was and remains
and always will be the most unpleasant meeting
I've ever had,
00:34:38
and I completely
understand why. I mean, they've got this chap
who they suspected
00:34:43
might be responsible
for these terrible crimes, who's about to be released
from prison,
00:34:48
and they were extremely
concerned about it, and I said, "Look, I think if you can just
let us start with textile fibers
00:34:54
because there's been a lot
of contact one way or another, between whoever has done it
and the victims.
00:35:00
So let's start with that, and then perhaps
we can build on that." -By switching tack from DNA
to looking for textile fibers
00:35:08
that could link
the various crimes, soon Angela's team came up
with some interesting results.
00:35:15
-It was amazing. Almost immediately, we started
finding textile fibers, and the first ones we found
were these blue acrylic fibers.
00:35:27
We started with
Peter Dixon's belt. We started with surface debris
that had been recovered
00:35:31
from his and Gwenda's body, and almost immediately
we started finding a connection
00:35:36
between those and then
a connection between a glove that had been left in hedgerows.
00:35:43
This was a really big moment
because now we were starting to believe
that there was something.
00:35:49
-The glove left in the hedgerow
was identified as one of Cooper's that
he'd discarded near to his home.
00:35:56
Not only was this now forensically linked
to the Dixons, another of the glove's fibers
was later found in debris
00:36:03
from one of the teenage
sex attack victims, but it was a pair of shorts
found in Cooper's bedroom drawer
00:36:10
that would be the real turning
point for the investigation, as another member
of the forensics team,
00:36:16
Philip Avenell, remembers. -The strategy initially was
to look at the debris that had been collected
from the surface of these shorts
00:36:23
during their
initial examinations. That led us to identify
a blood flake that was within this debris
00:36:30
that was collected
from the surface of the shorts, and that blood flake then led on
to the first DNA match.
00:36:37
That blood came back
matching Peter Dixon. -This was the conclusive
DNA evidence
00:36:42
that Angela and her team
were looking for. She broke the news to senior
investigating officer
00:36:48
DCS Steve Wilkins. -I gave Steve a ring
on his mobile, and he answered it,
and it turned out
00:36:54
he was driving his car, and I didn't want to tell him
while he was driving because I knew
that this would be huge for him,
00:37:00
and so I said,
"Well, you know, you pull in," and when he pulled in, I said,
"Well, you know,
00:37:03
I wanted you to pull in
because actually, we may have found
your golden nugget of objective
physical forensic evidence."
00:37:10
It was the breakthrough, and it was a key part
of the evidence, at the end of the day.
00:37:15
-The team discovered
this tiny flake had come from a patch of blood
ingrained in the shorts,
00:37:21
that the naked eye couldn't see. -The blood would had to have
been wet when it was
deposited on his shorts.
00:37:27
So we know that those shorts
were in the proximity or had been around at the time
which Peter Dixon has bled.
00:37:35
-The forensics team
were now on a roll. They then turn their attention
to one of John Cooper's guns
00:37:41
that had been found abandoned
in the hedge during the failed armed burglary
of a local schoolteacher.
00:37:48
-The barrels had been painted
with black paint, a lot of which had chipped off. So we knew that it wasn't
a manufacturer's application,
00:37:55
and it posed the question, "What if that firearm had
been painted or covered up after the event had taken place,
perhaps to disguise
00:38:04
it or to alter it
or just to do something to it after the murders
had been carried out?"
00:38:10
-And so we scraped away
some of this black paint until we found some blood actually sitting on
the metal surface of the gun,
00:38:17
and we took that and, again,
profiled it, and it again gave us
Peter Dixon's profile.
00:38:22
-By now, the evidence was
stacking up against Cooper, but it was his starring
1989 appearance on "Bullseye"
00:38:30
that was the final nail
in the coffin for the killer. Police had heard about Cooper's
fondness for the limelight,
00:38:36
and in February 2009,
a copy of the episode that he appeared on was traced
back to ITV's archive in Leeds.
00:38:45
They compared it
to a sketch of a suspect seen using
Peter Dixon's bank card, wearing similar shorts to the
ones found in Cooper's home.
00:38:55
-When they looked at the video
and then compared that video to the artist's impression
of the man who might
00:39:04
have attacked the Dixons,
the two were almost identical. I think the superintendent said
it was as
00:39:09
if you could trace
one over the other. It was almost a perfect match. So now we begin to have the net
closing around Cooper.
00:39:20
-Now Cooper was back out
on the streets, having served 10 years
of his 16-year sentence
00:39:25
for armed robbery and burglary, but time was running out
for the killer. -More and more details
being heaped on top
00:39:35
of what the police
are coming to believe is an absolutely air-tight case
against Cooper.
00:39:40
In May, barely months
after he's got out of jail, Cooper is re-arrested. -The police even film the
moment they pounced on Cooper,
00:39:49
as he went to collect
his morning paper, satisfied they'd put this
dangerous killer back in prison.
00:39:57
-He continues to deny
everything, but the forensic evidence is beginning
to become overwhelming.
00:40:05
-During questioning, Cooper admitted
owning the shorts that had the key evidence
against him --
00:40:11
Peter Dixon's blood. Further forensic tests
on the clothing had thrown up something
even more interesting.
00:40:21
-The hem had actually
been taken up. So they took the hem down, and they found another
piece of DNA evidence.
00:40:28
Now this DNA belonged to the daughter
of Peter and Gwenda Dixon. So this proved fairly
conclusively
00:40:35
that these shorts belonged
to Peter Dixon. -Police believed these were
stolen from Peter's rucksack
00:40:42
just before Cooper
fled the murder scene. Cooper was finally
brought to Swansea Crown Court
00:40:50
on the 22nd of March, 2011
to face justice. As well as the expert
witnesses lined up
00:40:57
to prove
the case against him, his own son
also took to the stand, unmasking the dark violent side
of the lovable rogue.
00:41:07
He revealed his habitual
nighttime walks, stalking the local Pembrokeshire
countryside armed and dangerous.
00:41:16
-He denied everything,
"Not guilty, not guilty, not guilty," and for weeks sustained
precisely that stance,
00:41:23
but that did not
convince the jury. The forensic evidence
proved decisive, as did the "Bullseye" videotape.
00:41:34
-When Cooper returned for
sentencing on the 26th of May, he continued
to protest his innocence.
00:41:42
-You will judge me
after the trial, not before. -Judge John Griffith Williams
gave him
00:41:49
four life sentences
and told him, "The murders were
of such evil wickedness that the mandatory sentence
of life will mean just that."
00:42:00
For Angela Gallop and her team,
it had been a triumph for their painstaking
forensics work.
00:42:07
-It was a really
satisfying case, and I think he's
an extremely dangerous man. I think he's just one of the
most dangerous criminals
00:42:15
that I've come across in my time
doing forensic science. -He was incredibly parasitic.
00:42:21
He would just take
what he wanted from people, and he had absolutely
no qualms about killing them.
00:42:27
These murders were
absolutely unnecessary. -A vain braggart who wanted nothing more than to swagger
his way through life,
00:42:37
pretending he was rich,
at other people's expense. We are very lucky
that he returned to jail
00:42:43
with a whole life term. He would almost certainly
have killed again. -He terrorized the countryside,
00:42:50
robbing lone women
in their homes and threatening them
with their lives. He sexually assaulted
and raped young girls
00:42:58
who accidentally crossed
into his path. He killed four people
in cold blood for just a few hundred pounds.
00:43:05
This makes John Cooper one of the world's
most evil killers. ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪