Roger and David Cooper | Confessions of a Serial Killer | S2E05

[Music] i'm professor david wilson as a criminologist i'm often asked what's it like to interview a murderer to answer this question i'm going to take you on a journey into the dark heart of the police interrogation room using cutting edge lip sync technology will bring to life the actual tape confessions of some of the world's most notorious killers i put tape on her mouth help it there so she couldn't breathe and bring you face to face with evil i felt sick looking at him knowing what he did and along with forensic psychologists professor michael brooks i'll analyze their interviews in unparalleled detail her skull gave way a little bit she was there immediately unconscious their wicked words now seen spoken for the very first time will never be forgotten so i didn't suggest to him that we kill her on sunday but i knew that she i knew that she had to be gone [Music] [Music] the killers in today's episode represent what can be described as the banality of evil how ordinary men and women can conspire to commit the most heinous of crimes as part of the rhythm of their everyday lives they were two brothers who made the pact to help the one rid the other of what he believed to be his now burdensome lover in a bid to stop her exposing their two-year affair the brothers spent at least a month plotting to kill 34 year old samina imam buying poisonous metals and identifying a shallow grave to hide a body before carrying out the killing they smothered samina to death by pressing a chloroform soaked tea towel over her mouth and later dumping her body at an allotment owned by one of the brothers where a sign hung on a shared red don't wind me up i'm running out of places to hide the bodies the interviews are fascinating because we get two accounts of the crime from a shared but different perspective but as is always the case when the story is constructed from a lie there will always be deviations and the truth will find its way out and despite the loyalties the brothers had to each other they were always going to be a weaker party someone who would crack under the pressure of the police interviewing room these interviews may not have the showmanship attached to one with a famed serial killer but they do explore the down and dirty end of police work where the interviewing detectives have to extract as much information as they can to build up a picture of the crime who were these murderous brothers who believed that blood was thicker than water david and roger cooper [Music] in january 2015 brothers roger and david cooper were being questioned by the police in the midlands about the disappearance of a beautiful hard-working young woman called samina imam david obviously the purpose for today for speaking to you it's in connection with a missing person inquiry okay a lady by the name of samima imam did you never i've seen the photo yeah look at the photo i've got down there yeah that's a picture the lady that's missing that we're making important okay right have you ever met her familiar i've met twice yeah and did you know a boy that night no i'd never known did you know by any name no no when they showed david cooper a picture of samina he recognized her he didn't know her name and he didn't really know a lot about her but he did recognize her as the woman his brother had been having a relationship with and can you tell me what you know about her um she worked with my brother roger cooper had a relationship with samina at the costco where they both worked he was her manager and she worked on the floor they'd been actually seeing each other for quite a while she was hoping that basically he would free himself from his other relationship and they would move forward together and just have a nice life together i'm right in thinking that you met her on two occasions yeah when was when was the first one i've seen her in the warehouse did you talk to her no what they were doing wasn't on the radar were you aware that he was seeing him before he came to the restroom no so that was was that the first time then he'd ever seen or heard anything about him he might have mentioned he's not the most loyal person there might have been a couple that he talked about he was also having an affair with another woman and he had a long-term partner so she was just one of three when samina came to him and gave him an ultimatum that he needed to leave his other partners and be exclusive to her he was worried that he would lose his job he's got a nice job he likes a nice car and he perceives that she threatens all of that and he's vulnerable to her exposing him basically you know having this affair and so he decided to actually take that ultimate choice and end someone else's life to maintain his own it's it's a disgusting crime i'm joined by professor michael brooks in his long and illustrious career as a prison psychologist michael has sat and listened to many murderers and experienced first hand the mind games they'll play okay michael the murderer of samina imam how typical is this of murder in this country as opposed to those things that we see in dramas i think it's very difficult to categorize any murder as typical there's many reasons why people murder and in this particular case it's it's how does the male respond to the female seemingly to want to expose the affair most killings are actually done by people who know each other there is usually a motive when we talk about serial killers we're getting the the other end of the spectrum we're getting the the plan murders but with the coopers theirs was a planned murder and that's unusual for people to go to that trouble to kill somebody that he was getting rid of as in most situations where you get one person involved in a relationship with another the party that is still alive becomes prime suspect and police very quickly during investigations at costco and with other employees and friends soon found out that there was a relationship and an affair going on so straight away once that information had been ascertained they were looking directly at roger cooper because they knew that socially and emotionally sam was so involved with him and besotted by him in many ways that this was going to be down to his actions start with it last thing you saw it was around 4pm but i haven't got that specific time so it's around 4 pm i was in my office in the work there are four of us in the room so there's two other people apart from her one of them is another regional manager which is what she has been doing yeah and the other one works for me in the in the store and i was leaving so i gave the regional manager a hug because it was christmas yeah oh yeah push down harry christmas services where's mine then so i went over there and gave her a hug because i'll talk to you later and then i left okay and that was at 4pm roughly with roughly around 4k on the wednesday christmas eve christmas eve the interview between roger cooper and the police is really unusual because at this stage samila is only missing and they don't really know much else and when the police question him roger starts to get really emotional in a way that you wouldn't expect from someone who is only being interviewed as a witness and as someone who is led to believe that samina has just vanished within five minutes i'm sure it's within five minutes she phoned okay she's following you he said just say that so i'll see you something like no i'm not gonna be there she's just trying to persuade me one more time he seems to be crying and and wailing but then he's able to suddenly break into little explanations of what happens and then he goes back into his wailing and moaning i think he's putting on a bit of an act there it was a two-minute conversation if that was a brief one how did how did it leave it don't you sound a little disappointed but i think she still thought i was gonna go so not as angry as or as burked as she probably should have said cool lastly about two minutes um or was that the last time you heard from me that was my textbook now this particular clip is interesting to me because roger cooper is crying throughout this particular sequence in which he's being interviewed about samina's supposed disappearance at this point what are these crocodile tears telling you how should we interpret hit the fact that roger cooper is crying well we know not only from roger cooper but from other instances where partners have murdered that their spouse or their their loved one that actually when it comes to tv or media appearance they put on the pretense of being concerned and become overly emotional and then you get the mismatch between the emotion that they're displaying and the words that they're saying and you don't get that that correlation so the fact that he's being overly emotional might well cause the police are thinking actually this this doesn't marry this this doesn't match up and therefore it arouses suspicions and wanting to inquire further is empathy what we're seeing here is roger cooper crying a vain attempt for him to strike a tragic note so that the detective will want to empathize with his situation well if not empathize at least to have sympathy for him when we look at roger cooper's interview he clearly is acting out the role he thinks he wants to be acting this is a man who is dumping his lover didn't want anything to do with her and yet here he is now showing more grief than you would expect that i find quite well understandable because if you're trying to act grief then people tend to go over the top and do too much grieving and it becomes very clear they're acting it well until they've got a text message here this is a couple of hours later there were seven o'clock i could read it [Music] i'm feeling full stop i'm going to where i am truly cared for what do you think she meant from that text message she'd gone to birmingham see one of her friends it was an assumption got no basis for that at all because i knew that she would want to eventually be london to it's not just the emotion this is somebody who claims you know he's the manager of costco samina works at costco they've got hundreds of employees and he says well you know i didn't really know her that well and then suddenly he goes into quite amount of detail about text messages that he's received so there's a mismatch not just in his emotion but also in relation to the information that he's providing absolutely and so those are the behavioral indicators that interviewers can use um to recognize that somebody may not be telling the truth and you hold on to that and you let them tell the story and then you go back and and follow those things up they also assumed again and this shows his arrogance that samina had not told anybody that they were having an affair and he relied on that when in fact of course she told somebody so again it shows that arrogance um and and also a naivety in terms of just what it takes to plan and commit a murder successfully [Music] as the cooper brothers questioning continued the police began to notice small but significant differences in their stories roger cooper had an emotional and detailed account about when he had last seen samina too detailed too emotional in the eyes of the police david cooper on the other hand was claiming he didn't even know who samina imam really was as the pair were being interviewed other detectives were trolling through their mobile phone histories one phone linked to david cooper revealed messages in code including star wars related phrases such as death star complete and stay on target detectives rightly interpreted these texts as referring to miss imam's abduction and murder recognizing that david cooper was the weaker of the pair detectives started to apply more pressure on him this is a tactic when properly applied can have a great effect especially when detectives keep the person being questioned in the dark about what their alleged accomplices have said the day that similar died she left work around four o'clock investigators know that by looking at the data on her phone she made a call to her family about 4 30 and according to what the analysts found on her phone she traveled up to leicester in the same car that roger had driven to his brothers roger had denied the hill that samina was with him that day and he had said that he had gone to his brothers alone to drop off a christmas present david also backed up his story and said that his brother had arrived alone after we went you just literally got a minute and the door knocked again i thought it was him coming back so i've opened the door because normally i wouldn't open the door i don't like people and um it was this woman who i knew to be an associate of my brothers for reasons i've mentioned before and we'll happily go into it again later in my mind for my own reasons i imagine she was looking for him and i knew that he wanted to go home and i knew that he didn't want her know where he lived she was like where's roger like stepping in the house i was like it was not here he's gone she was like i haven't seen him leave and i was like well i'll call him he's just left and she was like walking through the house michael this is an interesting stage because david cooper has begun to spill the beans about what actually happened and the grubby sordid reality is becoming all too clear i think there are two things that we'll probably discuss further firstly this is a murder that involves two people two brothers and classically we'd call this a fully added a madness shared by two i think i would contend that this was a follow-down it was very deliberate it was very planned there were a number of attempts to take her life so they knew exactly what they were doing if an element of madness occurs it will be because of a crime of passion somebody finding themselves in a situation that they can't cope with and spontaneously reacting in a very violent and hostile way this wasn't it was very planned it was very deliberate and the brothers both knew what they were doing it is surprisingly unusual i would expect to be brothers in a gang or some family dynamics where the brothers get together to kill the father or the mother for financial reasons i don't know many cases where two brothers have conspired to kill the other brothers excelliver very often in the majority of cases if you have co-conspirators there is a feeding of confidence that's the kind of reciprocity and that you grow in confidence because you're sharing this process and you kind of test it out with each other so should we do this should we do that and there's and the kind of the more that grows in a collusive kind of conspiratorial sense the stronger it gets family ties blood ties are very strong no doubt about it and usually we'll do anything we can to protect the people around us who are related to i think they actually gave each other a great deal of support and there was clearly loyalty between them and making that decision to to plan the murder shows a the bond between them but also the mindset that these two men had their superiority their arrogance they actually agreed that this was a sensible course of action of course what you don't know and what you can't predict is how long especially once you get intense pressure from the police how long that tight bond will remain and who is going to crack first so i got to fill this over and after a couple of years she wasn't interested she was moaning i don't recall what she was saying but she was like we've made plans um he's supposed to be seeing me things like this which i i'm just gonna be vague about she wasn't accepting my cup of tea she wasn't accepting anything else so i was like gotta let him get away okay so the other thing that will come out i think in terms of our discussion is the sense that this is a british police interview technique the peace model being used in these police interviews and separating the two brothers is a very good tactic is it not the advantage for the police of interviewing two people separately is that neither of the interviewees knows what the other is saying so they're immediately in a position of some uncertainty they're immediately in a position where they can't control the information that's coming out because there's somebody else who's being interviewed and they might say something that contradicts what they're saying so the advantage is always with the police in those situations and crucially the difference between the peace model and the read technique is that a british detective would not be able to lie in these interviews whereas they would be allowed to lie in north america and in many ways if you're not lying that gives you a much greater strength within the interview process just as offenders sometimes find it difficult to maintain a lie so it can be the same for the for the police so if you're truthful at all times you've got nothing to try and remember what you've said before you've got nothing to correlate your statements against you can just be completely honest [Music] people do not rehearse the entire scenario they stop prematurely leaving themselves vulnerable to detection it's extraordinary how often that happens because it's an imperfect plotting protocol inevitably they will not be able to sustain identical defenses and once they diverge it makes it easier for the interviewers and the investigators to press home the advantage with the weaker of the two each side starts panicking about what the other one said especially if they've had no time to arrange their story they're also thinking about how their lives are unraveling so they have to not only maintain the deception and try and protect themselves from being found out but they're also understandably panicking what that that's going to mean in terms of their lives their relationships their liberty all of that is going on at the same time so it's extraordinarily stressful the pressure of the interview room and the burden of guilt would prove too much for david cooper after hours of questioning he finally reveals how samina imam's life was ended it's an appalling description of a young woman's death the delivery is almost robotic the detail matter of fact cooper is describing the murder of an innocent young woman as though he's reading from a laundry list the extraordinary being made banal and inconsequential murder reduced to the commonplace [Music] this lady i didn't know her name um she died on my sofa okay so my brother been around and i've already made a statement to that effect and hopefully that statement is true except anything that might implicate myself so we can go back to that i collect lots of different odds and pieces in my house you'll find lots of things and they found lots of things and none of it makes sense to lots of people but to me it's interesting and so in my kitchen i've got an ammo box a military ammo tin which is i think it's normal and in that i had them a lot because i've seen it on telly and i thought it was okay i thought i'll just shut her up because my walls are paper thin don't want a scene and i want to give roger a few minutes i got the chlorophyll i put it over a tea towel my sofa is right next to the doorway i just went in and put it across her face thinking that it came out and um i kind of put it on her face sat on a lap arms went up and i grabbed her arms and i forced him down and i was like just a couple of breaths a number of themes interest me from the clip the chloroform for one did that strike you as almost a a kind of memory of school days well certainly are films that you saw in the 50s and 60s of how to kill somebody well i'm remembering biology lessons from my own school where you know the effects of chloroform on small animals was the the point it did seem to again reveal very little about how well they had thought this through how well they had planned things well these are two unsophisticated individuals in terms of criminal behavior so they were just working out how best to kill somebody and dispose of the body but in very sort of elementary ways what i find interesting is the fact they had chloroform it's not a chemical that you normally expect to find in home find it in laboratories you find it in factories but you wouldn't expect to find it in someone's kitchen so did he borrow it from work did he get it off the internet but either way it gives the intention there was some intent to kill or at least harbor the use of chloroform in any type of murderous situation is rare and she was taken back to her house a property in leicester where she was suffocated but use of chloroform [Music] you can imagine the discomfort that the poor lady must have been feeling because she was burned badly around the mouth because the chloroform of the the acids in it and the chemicals in it aren't good for human skin and of course she died as a result of that david eventually confessed that he had killed samina and this was really unusual and really shocking to the police because they had been focusing on roger they believed that he had much more motive he had much more of an opportunity to kill her than his brother did david cooper i find his behavior extremely odd this total lack of an emotions and he was very factual very boringly spoken he could have been talking about a cricket match or something like that there was no sense of any remorse no sense of anxiety not even any rationalizing his behavior or disassociating it was simply i did this x y and z end of story again something that strikes me about the koopa brothers one was six foot five one was six foot seven samina imam was only five foot four there's a huge disparity in terms of their size their bulk why would the koopas get themselves into a position that they thought that the best way of handling the complexity of their lives in relation to her was to kill her i think roger cooper was the primary driver and he managed to convince his brother to come along and assist him so the question is why did david go along with that i think you see evidence of david being the weaker brother if sort of psychologically um speaking in terms of the fact that he was the one that broke down interview he was the one that told the story let's listen to the next clip and then let's work out what happens to her after the chloroform has been placed over her mouth we've both picked up i think that he's claiming he didn't intend to kill her that's one of those things we describe as a technique of neutralization that was from from david that may not have been roger's intention so let's hear what happens to her after she's been chloroformed in the flat in leicester the chlorophyll it was freezing cold on my hand it was like burning that doesn't happen on tv it was all wrong it's all wrong i knew it was wrong straight away i didn't know as it sounds i did think that it would just buy me some time because i don't know how long they stay unconscious for she didn't wake up and i i tried you know i mean i felt the pulse i didn't clean the sofa i didn't do anything to hide anything i just covered my tracks get caught i get caught well a lot going on here that's worth unpacking the first for me are the what criminologists would call techniques of neutralization when the offender the perpetrator wants to downplay what he or she might have done in this case it was a terrible accident that they didn't set out to murder samina that simply isn't true well that may have been the case for david we we don't know perhaps roger had um persuaded him to come along and david hadn't worked through the consequences of what the action was going to be whereas roger had [Music] what happened thereafter is quite unique in as which is these two brothers who had planned this this wasn't something that was just a fleeting moment let's have a quick telephone call and discuss it these two brothers then concocted this whole loose where they manipulated the crime scene if you like they moved her car to coventry so everything was in place and it looked like samba just naturally disappeared i thought like no one knows she's here right so that's easy so um i went for a bag the keys were there and i was like mike move the car back to coventry and no one will know strangely there's a side point which has been talked about a lot but um my brother would hide a car for me and we'd had a van for me to move house we both moved at the same time but when i drop it off i left it um parked on the residential street near to wherever brother works whatever works in costco the rest of my story is about moving the car you guys pretty much already know because i panicked because i couldn't leave it in coventry because it was too close to roger so um driving her car back to coventry i've done a lot of driving and i'll use different routes every time scrolled it on the motorway i've got police attention i can tell you more details like and it was just a complete nightmare and i understand it for a few days they drove around with the body and they would eventually take mina's car and place it in the luton airport so it looked as though she had vanished of her own accord meanwhile they were trying to find a way in which to dispose of the body with the police denied an admission to samina's murder the case must go to court during the cooper's trials excerpts of the police interviews were played the jury was unanimous in their verdict life imprisonment judge patrick thomas qc told the siblings you work together hand in glove in planning and carrying out the murder of a joyful and bubbly young woman brutally betrayed by a man she loved and his brother of all the cases in this series this appears on the surface to be the most straight forward but as i believe the police interviews reveal the callous and calculating nature of the brothers and their cruel means of murder mark them out as extremely dangerous men who afford no value to anyone else's lives apart from their own so i'll go back home i've got this thing to hide sorry i'm not going to refer to it [Applause] during that interview he was very crude and he was very callous about the way he spoke about samina and that made police a little bit suspicious at my house there's a sleeping bag covered without a sleeping bag well i put it in my sleeping bag david cooper's police interview showed a total lack of respect of the victim he talked about i had to dispose of the thing and he talks about taking the thing in the car and then on trying to dispose of a body in a vegetable patch and things like this no sense of guilt no sense of remorse or anything else at all very cold very uh unemotional so another guy and he's got a vet i rang him from a disposable sim card did we catch that so somebody came on christmas day yeah christmas they took it away from me so he rang from a disposable sim card yeah i don't know what happened next um i think it's buried in woodland he doesn't tell the police where the body is he starts to make up stories about a man called ben who took the body off to the woods and i cannot understand why he went from full admission to telling lies again i think it's thorny ground here the courts tend to um turn a blind eye to stories that have been told to the police um it's sometimes never even brought out in court and um it's not an offense to lie to police it wasn't in his interest to do it whether he was he wasn't shielding his brother it was just uh perhaps it's part of his fantasy makeup i'm not from leicester i don't know leicester which is why i've been driving around a lot basically but um i think he said something about swift and woods but i've never heard of swiping woods i don't know where it is you have to think of the time wasted he gave the name of a wood which could have involved the use of 20 officers on over so how many days searching an area where the guy knew she never was laid out swiftly swiftland i don't even know right so this idea about how to dispose of the body it's one of the things when working with murderers when talking with murderers there's always this issue about what do you do with the body after you've killed and it shows their own sophistication in that they hadn't worked that out beforehand and therefore driving around with her in the car in the boot of the car is another example of how they hadn't thought this through and probably in a sense of some panic trying to think through actually how best do we now sort of get ourselves out of the situation that we find find ourselves in we hadn't realized it was going to be like this the rest of my story is about moving the car what they don't realize of course is that all of this is caught on traffic cameras and the police are able to put all of his movements together and they can see what he's been doing they're able to confront him with that and eventually david then tries to say he'd killed samina by accident which of course doesn't really wash at all but at the same time it's another example of david trying to cover for his brother the one inexplicable uh aspect of the whole case is why does david take so much responsibility for this crime for a woman he'd met perhaps a couple of times he must have had an extraordinary bond with his brother or perhaps his brother had a hold over him [Music] what they then did was wrap the body up and take it to an allotment in leicester where it was buried in in the grounds [Applause] [Music] these two brothers roger and david they're very very overbearing personalities and they were big overwhelmingly big which is why they've worked so well together david who seems to have done most of the dirty work for his brother rather inexplicably buries the body on his allotment he's then tasked with moving her car as she does several times it was here that investigators excavated the ground and found her remains michael i'm totally intrigued that the body ends up in david's allotment and i'm intrigued by that because of the sign on the allotment door i noted down what it said it said don't wind me up i'm running out of places to hide the bodies he's obviously had that science on his shed for a number of days or weeks or years and perhaps it was just remembers that thinking well actually well what do you do with what do we do with the body well how about using the shed i always get to this position though where i think there's no such thing as coincidences and i i really worry about the sign if the sign is um coincidental or if the sign is revealing a desperate desire by david to draw attention to the fact that what he's done is wrong and a body is actually buried there so it depends when he put the sign up was it before or was it after the murder [Music] a friend of david's came forward after he had been arrested and told the police that before his arrest he had given her a set of keys and one of these keys was to his allotment and police were really eager to go and have a look around because they had not been able to find anything that tied the brothers into the murder it was all circumstantial evidence for the time being and when they went to the allotment they noticed that there was a sheet of tarpool in that had leaves all in the center there was no debris around the edges it looked as if it had been lifted from the ground and so when they investigated they found a mound of soil that looked fresh and it had footprints in it and it wasn't until it was excavated over a number of days that they found mina's body this was an incredibly botched i mean the body was extremely easy to find and just barely concealed it was very poorly thought well i don't know how they thought through it at all again this is a case where all of their attention seems to have been on the successful commission of the act rather than the consequences in terms of avoiding arrest and conviction [Music] for you when you think about the cooper brothers what would be your summary what would be your conclusion about them simply that um roger made the decision that he didn't want one of his lovers to expose the relationship that his way of solving that was to kill her and that he persuaded his brother to come along and insist and so the person that's dominant within this relationship is roger despite how he presents himself um to the police in interview and the person who's subservient in their relationship is indeed his brother david it's a painful story because she didn't deserve that obviously i mean who does but she she's a lovely person she's she's not an enemy of rogers she's hoping to have a happy life with him and yet he he comes up with this grubby miserable stupid plot to kill her and then they get caught very quickly and it's all been for nothing and all that's left is all the heartache and misery for her family it was all about him and and maintaining his lifestyle protecting his credibility for what it was and that shows in the in the execution of the crime and the lack of thought around looking at it from other people's perspectives the fact that he didn't even consider whether anyone else knew again just demonstrates to me that this is a man who is used to treating women terribly not valuing them objectifying them and using them for his own means so michael the murder of samina imam is that murder the grubby reality of murder in this country it's certainly tragic and there are a number of different categories of murder of reasons for murder and one of those is to dispose of a partner who is likely to embarrass you and for me what comes across strongly in terms of the pattern of murder in this country is just how often it is that men kill women this is about misogyny this is about the reality in this country even today that two women are weak will die at the hands of their partners or ex-partners and we know that men commit the majority of crimes offences in this country they commit the majority of murders they commit the majority of violent offences and they commit the majority of assaults within relationships in the end david and roger cooper refused to tell the truth about how samina died and by that fact continue to display no remorse for her death their guile and planning mass by a desperate display to be ordinary is all too evident in their interviews with the police and the recordings act as a sober reminder the evil lurks within the most ordinary of men who when they lose control of their lies and their lives can be driven to the most heinous of all human acts the murder of an innocent woman it worries me that i believe they are examples of a surprisingly large group of men who are of similar ilk and that they are adulterous and lying and they have relatively elastic or underdeveloped consciences they're promiscuous they're opportunistic and their primary drive is self-gratification and i suspect that there isn't a great distance between them and circumstantially a number of others but what separated them was at some point they decided that killing was better than confessing or letting his wife know that he had been unfaithful and there's the rub i don't understand how they could reason that that was the better course [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: True Crime Central

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Keywords: #EvilUnmasked, 72 hours, Discovery, Episodes, Free, Full, ID, Latest, Minds, Off The Fence Films, Off The Fence TV, Online, Season, TV, TVF series, UK, Watch, William, documentaries, documentary, justice by any means, snapped, Roger and David Cooper, Confessions of a Serial Killer

Id: GqUgHrFPhMI

Length: 45min 54sec (2754 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 21 2022