World's Most Evil Killers - Season 3, Episode 19 - John Cooper - Full Episode | Forensic Files

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

Serial killer John Cooper, known as The Bullseye Killer, killed four people between 1983 and 1996. He was given four life sentences.

An in-depth look at the lives and crimes of some of the world's most evil killers, including Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy, Richard Ramirez, Cary Stayner, Leonard Lake, Dorothea Puente and more.

Brief Summary

John Cooper, a serial killer, murdered four people and evaded capture for years until forensic evidence linked him to the crimes.

Key points

The Shocking Crimes of John Cooper. John Cooper, a seemingly ordinary man, committed heinous murders in Pembrokeshire.
Cooper's Arrogance on TV. Just a month before the Dixons' murder, Cooper appeared on a game show, showcasing his narcissism.
The Terror in Little Haven. The murders of Peter and Gwenda Dixon shocked the peaceful community of Little Haven.
The Shocking Discovery. The bodies of Peter and Gwenda Dixon were found six days after their disappearance.
The Unraveling of Cooper. Cooper's criminal activities catch up with him after years of evasion.
The Forensic Breakthrough. DNA evidence links Cooper to the murders, leading to his eventual conviction.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

He was truly an evil man.

Describing John Cooper's character.

1:05WatchAug 3, 2021

Tension

85/ 100High tension

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