The Pembrokeshire murders part 2
Years of John Cooper terrorising the Pembrokeshire coastal community with murder, rape and burglary was ended when police finally got the forensic evidence they needed…
This is the second part of my post on the Cooper case. Part 1 can be found here
Cooper, through ruthless, deviousness and lucky, had evaded detection despite multiple burglaries, robberies, murders and sexual attacks over more than a decade. However, his good fortune was about to expire – at least as far as his burglaries were concerned. A woman called Sheila Clarke was watching the telly in her bungalow in Sardis, near Milford Haven, on a winter night in 1996. This was a few months after the five youngsters had been ambushed by the man in a balaclava. Now, it was Sheila Clarke who was confronted by the balaclava man, brandishing a sawn-off shotgun.
“Money, I want money,” he shouted.
He battered her with the gun’s butt, hitting her head and body. He tied her up. He began searching for jewellery. Sheila was expecting her husband to return home soon. The terrifying possibility of another double murder was averted when Sheila managed to hit the panic button on her home burglar alarm system. The intruder fled. A neighbour tried to intervene, but the gunman threatened him and set off over the fields.
For once, the police got a lucky break. In the hedgerows of surrounding fields they found items dumped by the retreating attacker, including a rope, fleece, balaclava, gloves and a double-barrelled shotgun. A home-invader’s attack kit.
Operation Huntsman was launched to investigate the burglaries, and it closed in on a suspect who would be found to have possessions that had been stolen in a number of past home raids. The suspect was John Cooper. During house-to-house inquiries, he had been obstructive and refused to give a DNA sample. However, two years before, a police dog handler had traced a scent from a burglary at Castle Hill Crescent to a field opposite Cooper’s home in the parish of Jordanston.
The Huntsman team were suspicious of the aggressive Cooper and, after months of further investigation, he was arrested. As he was led in for trial, he shouted to journalists that he had been “fitted up”. The jury did not fall for it, and he was finally given a 16-year sentence in 1998, after being found guilty of 30 burglaries and an armed robbery. At this point, in terms of evidence, Cooper still remained unconnected with the murders of the Thomases and Dixons, and the assault on the five youngsters. Though he had been questioned about the murders, he admitted nothing, and for now the police had no positive leads linking him to the killings.
In 2005 Detective Chief Superintendent Steve Wilkins recommended a forensic review of Pembrokeshire’s unsolved historic cases of 1985 and 1989. Wilkins was born in Liverpool in 1959. The Cooper investigation would become the biggest case of his career. A concern for him and his team at this time was that John Cooper could be released from prison in the near future. If he was the murderer they were seeking, as had been suspected, it was likely that he would kill again. Since Cooper had been in prison, the robberies in the vicinity had ceased. The two double murders had featured elements of Cooper’s mode of offending: shotguns and robbery. Wilkins’ trepidation as Cooper came up for parole was understandable.
Operation Ottawa
Operation Ottawa was launched in January 2006, initially to scrutinise the forensic evidence from the past offences. If a case against Cooper could be mounted, it would likely be based on forensics. What was thought to be a six-month operation ended up lasting six years.
The Ottawa team built a detailed picture of the series of burglaries that had hit the Milford Haven area over more than a decade. In excess of 60 burglaries had been committed with a similar modus operandi, or plan of action. This pattern suggested a single offender who refined his strategy. There were also four robberies, starting in 1985, the year of the attack on the Thomases at Scoveston Park, and culminating in the break-in at Sheila Clarke’s bungalow in 1996. Scoveston Park was the first to involve a gun. The attacks were always on lone women in isolated properties. After Scoveston Park the attacker always used a shotgun.
It was the geography of the burglaries that had originally put Cooper in the frame as a suspect and ended in his imprisonment for them. Wire fences that had been cut, and the direction in which tracker dogs had followed the intruder’s escape routes had revealed that Cooper lived at the epicentre of the crime wave in Jordanston. Officers from Operation Huntsman had arrested him and found 3,800 items of property and evidence in and outside Cooper’s home, such as ropes, jewellery, 500 keys taken from properties, and ammunition. A sawn-off shotgun was among the items.
The evidence gathered from Huntsman now became the focus of Operation Ottawa. Wilkins pulled in the help of a private company, LGC Forensics. Professor Angela Gallop was its director of science and innovation.
The police originally wanted Gallop’s team to restrict themselves to looking for DNA. While DNA traces were found, there was not enough to, as Prof Gallop put it, “get your teeth into”.
Eventually, after many months, the detectives lost patience with her scientists and threatened to give the case to another forensic provider. Prof Gallop responded to detective criticism in something of a showdown meeting with them in Fishguard, where Operation Ottawa was based in an empty suite of rooms belonging to the Port Office. She told officers her team had put in something of a straitjacket with the police insistence that the scientists only look for DNA evidence.
She recalled, “And he [Wilkins] rather reluctantly agreed, and he said, ‘All right, you can look for textile fibres, whatever it is you want to look for.’”
Evidence mounts against Cooper
The scientists started scrutinising old gloves that Cooper had hidden in hedgerows near his home. When people come into contact with each other, it is likely that clothing fibres will be exchanged. This was the kind of evidence Prof Gallop’s team were looking for.
She said, “Almost immediately we started finding matching fibres, particularly with one marvellous tatty old glove, whose exhibit number was BB109. BB109 was something special, but we found fibres to link the Dixons with this glove that was found in the hedgerows.
“That started a whole series of fibre findings, which ended up with a myriad of fibres that connected the Dixons with the stuff in the hedgerow, and also provided connections with the sexual assaults at Milford Haven and even the body of Richard Thomas in Scoveston, which was extraordinary.”
Then came a major breakthrough. The irony was that while examining fibres they found traces of blood, which meant potential DNA evidence they had failed to find earlier.
Prof Gallop said, “We were interested in a pair of shorts that had been recovered from his [Cooper’s] old house some years beforehand [during Operation Huntsman]. We didn’t have an awful lot of clothing from him to look at. But this pair of shorts interested us, and we were looking for textile fibres on them, which we found. We were looking on this sticky tape strip, which is how we recover surface debris like textile fibres from things like clothing. And we saw a tiny flake or two of what looked like blood. We tested it – I mean, it’s microscopic – and it did indeed appear to be blood. And we DNA-profiled that and that looked like it matched Peter Dixon.
“I remember ringing Steve Wilkins,” Prof Gallop said. “I got him on the phone and he was driving, and I said , ‘I think you’d better pull in, because I’ve got some news for you.’”
When she told him the news, Wilkins simply said, “Angela, I love you.”
After three years of meticulous hard work, here was a forensic hit. The scientists moved on to the shotgun. Found near Cooper’s home in a hedge, it was connected to him by a screw discovered in his house that fitted it. Prof Gallop’s team noticed that the barrel had been painted black and that the paint was flaking.
Under that paint, blood was found, which had obviously got on there before the barrels had been painted black. When those blood samples were profiled they provided another DNA match with Peter Dixon.
Prof Gallop’s team found other DNA fragments on the shorts, amounting to quite a lot of evidence indicating that it was John Cooper who had been wearing the shorts.
The gloves, the shotgun, even the shavings from Cooper’s shed floor, were all providing traces linking him to the murders. But there were still further questions about the shorts. The laboratory team noticed that the hem had been taken up and whoever stitched it had done a professional job. It was also known that Cooper’s wife had worked as a seamstress. They unpicked the hem, and a small stain was found inside. The DNA of this sample was tested and it was found to belong to Julie, daughter of the Dixons. While this at first was thought to be unhelpful to the case against Cooper, it was then remembered that the contents of the Dixons’ rucksack had been thrown around the crime scene near the coastal path. This suggested Cooper may have got blood on himself firing five times at the Dixons, and helped himself to a fresh pair of shorts, which had previously been in contact with Julie.
It was the forensic work that made the lawyers really pay attention to the possibilities of getting a conviction. Gerard Elias QC was the barrister brought in to assess the evidence for the Crown Prosecution Service. He was a big man, quietly spoken but confident, distinguished-looking with a wealth of silver-grey hair. He found that what initially looked like a decent circumstantial case was transformed by the forensic work. In addition to the shorts and shotgun forensic evidence, traces of foliage and fibres from Cooper’s gloves further linked him to the murder of the Dixons as well as the Milford Haven attack on the teenagers.
The case against Cooper included his proximity to the crimes – his home was within an easy distance of Scoveston and the coastal walk. He was known to walk and cycle around the area, and he had been convicted for burgling properties throughout.
Cooper’s hubris betrays him
And there was a witness. This is where Cooper’s hubris in appearing on Bullseye finally betrayed him (see part 1). The police had the “wild man” identikit description given by the witness passing the Haverfordwest cashpoint. Ottawa’s officers needed to confirm what Cooper looked like back in 1989 around the time of the coastal path murders. During their inquiries they had heard about his Bullseye appearance, which had been recorded a few weeks before the coastal path attack. After a lot of digging and some luck, ITV had located the recording from 20 years before. One still angle of Cooper on the show bore a striking similarity to the “wild man” with collar-length hair, moustache and shorts.
Like the police, prosecutor Gerard Elias was struck by Cooper’s recklessness in appearing on television in front of millions of viewers. “An extraordinary performance, in my view, for a man who was at that stage committing the sort of crimes that he was, let alone the murders that were to come. And, of course, he had already killed the Thomases, unbeknownst then to anybody.”
Having served 10 years of his 16-year sentence for burglary and robbery, Cooper was paroled and returned home in December 2008. As if the horror of this man’s life had no end of harrowing twists already, there then occurred yet another unexpected death. On the very first day of John Cooper’s return to the family home, Pat Cooper, his wife, had had an evening meal with him, gone to bed and died. The post-mortem revealed she had three heart conditions that could have caused her death. As Det Ch Supt Wilkins said later, “My personal view, not in any medical books, is that Pat Cooper gave up and could not face living with this man again.” She clearly dreaded the possibility of returning to the life of physical and mental abuse she had suffered with Cooper.
It was less than a month after the forensic breakthroughs in April 2009 that Cooper was arrested for the two double murders and assault on the five teenagers on 13 May. Gerard Elias appeared for the prosecution in Cooper’s trial, which finally began at Swansea Crown Court on 21 March 2011. Elias would later describe the accused’s effect on the courtroom: “I think he came across as cold and calculating. He was a man who from time to time would shout out to correct a witness or to correct a proposition that maybe I was making to the jury. He wanted to give the impression that it was all rubbish and we shouldn’t be listened to at all.
“Then he gave evidence himself. He sought to build up a picture here that he was a family man living a normal life, present at the wedding of his daughter, where he’d given her away and so on.” But later under cross-examination, Cooper would be forced to admit several times that he was a liar.
“The stares that he would give,” Elias continued, “the stares he gave me when I was cross-examining him were there for the jury to see. I don’t think it did him any good. It was a man who I think didn’t believe that he could be stopped, that he could be convicted – but ultimately, of course, he was.”
Evidence at trial
The mountain of painstaking police and forensic work was distilled by the prosecution to demonstrate to the jury how Cooper carried out his crimes. Their case was that Cooper had gained access to Scoveston Park in the belief that Helen Thomas was alone. He tied her up and left her in an upstairs bedroom, when Richard Thomas returned home in his car. Richard was attacked and killed in an outbuilding and dragged into the main house. Cooper had done labouring work at Scoveston Park years before, so was almost certainly known to the Thomases. Helen may even had recognised his voice if he had been wearing a mask. Cooper had then used an accelerant, probably diesel, found on the property, to set ablaze the main building containing the bodies.
Regarding the Dixons, the prosecution said that Cooper, armed with a shotgun, had confronted the couple during their walk. He took them to a secluded spot around 15 yards from the path, where he forced Peter Dixon to give him his PIN number and sexually assaulted Gwenda. He killed the couple with multiple shotgun blasts and searched their belongings. He then covered the bodies with foliage and branches.
Investigators had also uncovered a fibre link between the rape and indecent assault during the Milford Haven attack and the gloves Cooper threw away fleeing from the Sardis burglary on Sheila Clarke’s bungalow.
On 26 May, Cooper was sentenced to life imprisonment. He was 66 years old.
Outside Swansea Crown Court, the victims’ families paid tribute to their lost loved ones. Richard and Helen Thomas’s family said they were devastated by the murders and had been plagued for years over why the Thomases had been attacked. The brother and sister had been much loved by their extended family, who had “missed out on their involvement and kindness”.
Julie Ann Pratley, Gwenda and Peter Dixon’s daughter, said her parents were irreplaceable and “had wisdom, humour and were compassionate”.
Chief Superintendent Steve Wilkins said Cooper was a “very dangerous and evil man”.
He stole to support his gambling addiction. He was also a psychopath, sadistic in his desire to control and terrorise those around him.
Two chilling facts about Cooper remain. First, we may never know the full extent of his crimes.
Second, after his arrest in May 2009 for the double murders and the attack on the teenagers, police searched Cooper’s car. In the boot they found rope and a pair of woollen gloves. Officers also discovered that he had ordered an Ordnance Survey Map of South Pembrokeshire. It would appear John Cooper had been planning a new wave of horror across the estuary.
I originally covered this case in Murder by the Sea
