THE PEMBROKESHIRE MURDERS

so today's video is going to be another solved true crime case today we're going to be talking about another serial killer case this time from wales i haven't done a welsh serial killer case in a long long time and today we're going to be talking about the bullseye killer who actually earned the name the bullseye killer in a way that you might not really expect bullseye was a british tv game shirt in the late 90s where contestants would play darts against each other for money for prizes and our serial killer that we're going to be talking about today actually went on this tv game show in the middle of his murder spree he'd already killed people then went on national television and was planning to kill more people just a couple of weeks after this was broadcasted to millions and no one watching this man on tv had any idea that he was a murderer and he was planning to kill more people but before we get into that case i would just like to thank our sponsor for making today's video 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before christmas when emergency services were called to a house fire at a very large farmhouse in scoviston park by the time the firefighters arrived it was pretty much a lost cause the whole house was engulfed in flames and although they tried their best they tried to kind of stop this fire and get in safely to rescue people they kind of knew in the back of their minds that if anyone was in there they were probably already dead by the time emergency services arrived the fire took over five hours to extinguish and by that point it was like 4 00 am and there was just kind of the skeletal structure of the house left there was nothing there this three-story country mansion belonged to two siblings 52 year old helen and 58 year old richard thomas it had 600 acres of land and five different farms on the lot and the two of them maintained this these two siblings along with a few other grounds workers helen and richard were known to be a very reclusive family and for that exact reason i don't really have much information on them they didn't have too many friends or associates they didn't go out too much they were just kind of happy in their life on this little farm richard was a little bit more known than his sister helen because he used to go to a lot of farmers markets and he would buy and sell cattle he was kind of the one that controlled the farm in that aspect and he was quite well respected in those circles but helen liked to keep to herself on the farm when the sibling's mother was still alive she used to care for her because she was in very very bad health leading up towards the end of her life and so helen just cared for her mother and then when her mother passed she cared for the house in her spare time she would translate books into braille but other than that other than kind of working on the farm as well she didn't really have many other hobbies she used to go to church quite a bit she had a few friends at church but there was nothing really more to her life that i could tell i don't think either of them richard or helen had a significant other that they were public about anyway we'll get onto that in a second neither of them had any children they weren't married they were just happy in this kind of farm life that they had because this job and this farmhouse and all of this land had been passed down through generations in their family they knew that one day they were going to own this farm own this farm house and that was to be their life ever since they were born they knew that that was where their lives were heading but on december 22nd 1985 police and firefighters found themselves searching through the burned down remains of this huge farmhouse that had been in the thomas family since the 1920s both helen and richard's bodies were found in the fire both of them were dead before firefighters could even get there however they hadn't died in the fire and police figured this out very quickly they'd actually died from gunshot wounds helen's body was found bound and gagged she'd been shot in the head once and so had richard they'd both suffered one gunshot wound to the head so an immediate theory in this case was that perhaps this had been a murder suicide perhaps richard had bound and gagged his sister killed her and then killed himself however when the bodies were taken for an autopsy it was discovered that richard actually had more than just the one gunshot wound that police saw originally he also had one in his abdomen so it was unlikely that this was a murder suicide not only that but he also had an unexplained head injury so it seemed as though he had also been attacked by someone just like helen had and richard's autopsy also showed up that he'd had a sexual encounter with a man probably on that day the next theory and the more widely believed theory is that this was a robbery gone wrong perhaps someone had broken in just planning on robbing the house and then maybe one of the siblings disturbed them and this person that broke in panicked and got rid of witnesses police believe that the house this house in particular was targeted because maybe this this person that was breaking in and trying to rob the house thought that helen was home alone maybe richard came home as the attack was going on or maybe he was there the whole time and this person that was breaking in just had no idea they believed that it was richard that probably disturbed this attacker and so maybe in that moment this person thought it would be the easiest solution to get rid of both witnesses and then get rid of the evidence of their double murder by setting the house alight the fire had been started with diesel as well so whoever set fire to the house wanted to speed up the process they wanted this house to burn down fast but then that also begs the question well where did this attacker this this person that was pulling an armed robbery on the house where did they find this diesel where did they find so much diesel to burn a house was this planned did they plan to bring diesel with them to rob a house and then burn it down i mean this was a farmhouse this was a farm so they probably did have diesel somewhere but it's like did did the armed robber know where to find that diesel and how much they used to burn the house down there's a lot of different theories here was this premeditated if it was did they know who they were killing or did they just set out to kill someone did they just set out to rob someone and then it went wrong so police immediately got to work however as soon as they started they knew that this was going to be such a hard investigation to solve because everything had burned down the whole house had burned down all evidence was burned everything was just ash there was no there was nothing to go off really at all which is you know exactly what the killer wanted that's exactly why they burned the house down with diesel because they knew police wouldn't be able to find them the remaining thomas family put up a reward for anyone that could bring forward any information that led to a conviction however this didn't bring any substantial leads they quickly established a timeline of events of the siblings that day that morning helen went to church she was there all morning while richard stayed on the farm and he was speaking with workers they were both accounted for in the morning the two of them had lunch together around 12 30. this was something they did every single day pretty much at the exact same time and then around an hour later around 1 30 p.m richard thomas is seen driving to a nearby town called nearland and that is the last confirmed sighting of richard so from this police began speaking to people in netherland they were kind of campaigning more in neyland because they knew that he was heading there on the day that he was killed and one woman came forward to tell police that she'd actually seen richard thomas in newland a few different times not on the day of his murder but she'd seen him a few different times doing the same thing you can assume that he was probably doing the same thing again on the day of his murder she said that he would drive up in his car and park on her street kind of outside of her house and then a blue land rover would drive up richard would get out of his car get in the blue land rover and they would drive off together i just want to repeat that she didn't actually see him do this on the day of his murder but she'd seen him do this multiple times like at least every week so it's assumed that that was probably what he was doing in maryland he didn't do much else in netherland other than that and this really interested police who who was this blue land rover who was driving it where were they going was this kind of a secret meeting was this a lover was this a relationship that he had that no one really knew about it seemed secretive it seemed like he and this person didn't want anyone to know that they were meeting one of the theories is that this was a secret boyfriend of richards because like i said his autopsy showed that he did have a sexual encounter with another man on the day of his murder so it seemed that perhaps that was his boyfriend and maybe he hadn't told anyone that he had a boyfriend and so that's why this was such a secret meeting notice that i do keep calling this a sexual encounter because i don't believe it was sexual assault from his attacker or his killer the pathologist noted that it was earlier in the day of his murder it wasn't around the time of his murder so i don't think it was related to his murder i think it was just a separate event that happened earlier on in the day so now police are looking for the owner of this blue land rover potentially they're a suspect in this crime or if not they just know what richard thomas was doing that did they kind of have a better idea of his life whoever this blue land rover owner was police wanted to speak with them a while into the investigation police learned that richard thomas often liked to go to the cinema late at night to watch the adult films and he didn't do it alone he was often seen sitting in the theater with a large bearded man and so police are thinking okay could this be the blue land rover owner is this his friend his lover his boyfriend so police were campaigning more in that line of inquiry for for a lot of this case that was kind of what they were focused on because that's the only lead that they had they were campaigning for anyone to come forward about a blue land rover or about a large bearded man that liked to watch the adult films late at night however that kind of line of inquiry quickly dried up there were reports of a bearded man seen close to the farmhouse kind of staring in the direction of the farmhouse on the day of the murder around 7pm however the person that saw this bearded man says that this man was kind of tall and slim which doesn't match the kind of large bearded man from the cinema so maybe it's not the same man but maybe this other bearded man is a person of interest but also there were reports of a blue land rover being seen around the farmhouse again around 7pm that night so was this the same man and was this blue land rover owner the bearded man but like i said these enquiries didn't really lead anywhere it was very hard for police because this did seem like it was a secret relationship between richard and this blue lander of a man so it was unlikely that anyone knew that the two of them were associated it was very unlikely that they were gonna get the blue lander of a man to to bring himself forward if he was keeping this part of his life a secret going back to the timeline of events police know that the two of them helen and richard were both alive at 9 00 pm that night they were both in the house helen took a call from one of her tenants around 9 pm that night so that's how they know that everything was fine in the house and then within an hour of that phone call the murders took place between 9 00 p.m and 10 p.m that night police and pathologists are able to pinpoint exactly when the murder happened so they believed that the murders happened just before 10 p.m and then the fires were set pretty much exactly at 10 pm and then police actually had a witness come forward to say that around 10 past 10 that night so 10 minutes after the fires were set so this would have been around the time that the killer was fleeing the scene this witness saw a blue land rover racing away from the house and the reason this blue land rover stuck in this witnesses mind so much is because they were driving so fast and so reckless that they were on the wrong side of the road they were driving right at this witness but even despite all of these leads this blue land rover seemed like such a key piece of evidence this case quickly went cold there was there was nothing police could do if no one was going to come forward there were no cameras it was very hard for police and this case did quickly go cold and it remained a cold case for about four years afterwards that was until another double murder happened in that general area that caught police's eye again a man and a woman in their 50s a very similar victim profile to richard and helen thomas however this time it was a couple named peter and gwenda dixon 51 year old peter dixon and 52 year old gwenda dixon had been married for 27 years with two children and both these children were adults now the dixons were from oxford however they like to go to pembrokeshire whenever they wanted a holiday they were a very outdoorsy very naturistic couple and this particular area of pembrokeshire had some really nice hiking trails really nice views like i said it was coastal so you could walk up to the top of the cliffs and see the sea down below yeah and they like to stay in a village called little haven they holidayed in this particular village for i think 12 years in a row it was they really liked this area basically and on june 29th of 1989 the couple had been on a two-week holiday and this was their last day they'd been camping at a local campsite and they decided on that morning they were gonna leave their tent to dry because it had been raining and they were gonna go for one last walk along the coastal line they planned a full route it was gonna take them up through some woods they were going to go up onto a cliff and look at the sea they were going to come back down you know they'd planned this it was a route that they really liked to take and so before they left they spoke with some other campers on this campsite and just told them where they were going what they were doing and that it was their last day so peter and gwenda set off on this walk around 9 30 a.m and they planned to be back at the campsite for around 12 o'clock midday so that they could pack up their things and leave however peter and gwenda didn't return from this walk a few days later the couple's family particularly their son and daughter were growing more and more concerned that they hadn't heard from their parents they knew that their parents were going on holiday for two weeks and they'd be camping and stuff so maybe the service wasn't very good but they knew that their parents should have been back by now and so they decided to get in contact with the campsite owner to see if maybe they just stayed a little bit longer like i said the dixons had been going to this particular campsite in pembrokeshire for the past like 12 14 16 years i can't remember how long exactly but a very long time they knew the campsite earner very well and so they got in contact with the owner and she said that the dixon's tent and their car was still there however she hadn't actually seen peter or gwenda for a couple of days now this was very concerning to everyone that knew peter and gwenda they weren't the kind of people to just go off and leave and not contact anyone and so following this phone call the campsite owner decided to call the police and report peter and gwenda as missing and when police arrived at the campsite they had a look at the tent they had a look at the car and all of their belongings were still inside nothing inside the tent seemed a miss it wasn't like there was you know damage or blood or anything there was nothing it really did seem as though they'd just gone out on a walk and not returned this disappearance was immediately concerning because yes it was very out of character but also it was unlikely that the couple had just gotten lost because they knew this area so well like i said they'd been going for like 12 14 16 years so one of the first things that police did was try to track the couples credit cards debit cards you know in case they decided to buy a train ticket somewhere pay for a hotel somewhere they'd be able to tell you know and they did find activity on peter dixon's card on the day that they went missing it was used at an atm in the town around 1 30 p.m and whoever had used it had tried to withdraw 37 pounds a very precise and strange value you know most cash machines most atms only dispense like 10s and 20s and fives 37 is such an odd number they don't dispense coins anyway this failed for whoever was trying to get 37 pounds out and so instead they decided to just get 10 pounds out which again is very strange when they wanted 37 pounds you would get 40 out would you not so then that covers the 37 instead of just 10 instead the card was then used again at 4 p.m at a different atm in the same town this time with drawing 100 pounds in cash and the card was then used again a number of times over the next couple of days and so police because they knew exactly what time and what atm this card was used at they could use that to campaign for any witnesses to come forward that might have seen someone withdrawing money from that exact atm at that exact time because that was who was using peter dixon's card and one witness came forward and said that they remembered being there at that time and they agreed to make a police sketch of the man that they saw withdrawing money from that atm and they created this sketch now that doesn't look like peter dixon meanwhile there was still no sign of the dixons they hadn't gotten in contact with anyone they hadn't texted called anyone they hadn't returned to their campsite and all of their things were there their car everything everything they earned or everything that at least taken with them and it was quite concerning considering that they had taken a cliffside route there was always the worry that maybe they'd slipped or fallen or gotten injured and because of that there were a lot of coastal police out in butts and in helicopters trying to kind of examine the area see if there was anyone that needed help however down the side of the cliff there was a lot of foliage a lot of trees and so it was likely that if they had slipped and fallen that they would be covered by trees they would be very hard to see in a helicopter and the worst care scenario became a reality on july 5th when police sniffer dogs alerted to the scent of decomposing a body just off the side of the cliff and so police went to investigate and there they found two dead bodies a male and female later identified as peter and gwenda dixon the two of them seemed to have been shot to death gwenda just once in the face and peter three times in the chest in the back and again in the face at point blank range gwenda's body was found just a few feet from the cliff side so she was actually still up in the kind of woods area and she was partially undressed from the waist down suggesting that some kind of sexual assault had taken place from her attacker and peter's body was found dangling from the cliff's side caught in some trees his hands were tied behind his back and his wallet and wedding ring were gone and it seemed as though these items had been stolen before peter was killed because of course whoever was using his credit card had his pin number they knew how to withdraw money so it's likely that they demanded his pin code from him before they killed him and so that is what this investigation primarily focused on when they were trying to find a suspect is that man that was seen withdrawing money from that atm as part of this search for a suspect over 6 000 people were interviewed so that's people from pembrokeshire people that worked in the area might have seen this person with drawing money people that knew the dixons so even people back in oxford or the holidaymakers or the people that had been to that campsite you know and so many people were interviewed it seemed as though this double murder was a premeditated attack but with random victims it didn't seem as though the dixons were particularly targeted but it seemed as though their attacker their killer had set out that day to kill someone it was unclear what the motive was yes there was a robbery but was that just a byproduct of the killing did this person this murderer set out to kill someone and then just happened to rob them afterwards because they could or did they set out to rob someone and then this went wrong maybe the couple fought back they weren't gonna let this person take their things and so that was when this person killed them it was unclear what exactly happened but i mean the dixons weren't the type to fight back and they were tied up so it seemed as though their killer didn't deem them as a threat anywhere if their hands are tied behind their back what are they gonna do you know the killer had no reason to shoot them at that point because the killer's life wasn't in danger so were they just killing them to get rid of witnesses or were they just killing them to kill them also what was the reason for them shooting peter dixon three times and gwenda only once was peter putting up a bit of a fight or was the killer just enjoying this a few weeks into the investigation police finally got their first person of interest a local farm laborer in southwest wales named john cooper john cooper was brought to police's attention by a local pawn broker who had bought a wedding ring from john in early july of course the pawn shop owner didn't think too much of it at first because pawn shops are always buying rings different jewelry you know so it wasn't a weird thing to happen however later on when they learned that peter dixon the murder victim had his wedding ring stolen when he was killed this pawn shop owner put two and two together and suspected cooper and so they put his name forward to the police so police called in john cooper to the police station and they just wanted to know about this ring and whose ring it was why he sold it whatever and he said it was his wedding ring he'd recently split from his wife he kind of needed the money and so he just pawned off his wedding ring and there was no way to prove that it wasn't his you know this was a perfectly believable story people do that people do pawn off their wedding rings when something goes wrong they sell their wedding rings for a bit bit of money they did dig into it a little bit further but i mean it's a believable story and police accepted that explanation and they let him go and now they were back to square one again they had no suspects police exhausted every line of inquiry in this case and after 18 months nothing new was happening and so they were forced to declare this case a cold case just like the one that had happened previously bear in mind at this point the two weren't connected i don't think police didn't think it was the same person that killed the thomas siblings as the dixon couple they were over four years apart and the circumstances were different you know one of them was a home invasion in the middle of the night one of them was a chance attack on a nature trail in the morning they were both very different although they had their similarities immediately this wasn't something that connected in police's minds and it seemed as though the bullseye killer was getting away with what they'd done not only were they avoiding police capture completely but they were also fooling police into not connecting the two murders birth double murders had their own featured segments on a uk tv show called crime watch it's not running anymore but they used to talk about like unsolved robberies and assaults and even murders and this sure would broadcast any information that police had any questions that they had for the public and it would help to solve a lot of unsolved cases they opened two separate phone lines for both different cases and they got hundreds of calls for each hundreds of people ringing in thinking they had leads but nothing really led anywhere they remained cold curses in march of 1996 almost seven years after peter and gwenda dixon's murder so this was now over a decade since the first double murder another horrific incident happened in pembrokeshire and pembrokeshire was usually very quiet like i said it was noted as one of the safest places to live in the whole of the uk in the 80s however on this particular day six teenagers were walking through a field when they were confronted by a man dressed in all black wearing a ski mask and carrying a shotgun he began yelling at them to lay on the ground all of them to get on the ground he began firing shots into the air to intimidate them and scare them and it worked all of these six teenagers got on the ground the man then proceeded to sexually assault two of the girls in the group and then demanded the rest of them handed over their possessions any valuables they had any money he robbed them all and then left unfortunately because this man was wearing a ski mask these teenagers couldn't really tell police anything they couldn't give a description because this was in a field there was no cctv so he wasn't seen coming or going there was no car of interest there was very little information to go off of there was the dna of course he sexually assaulted these girls and so they gave over that dna but there was no immediate match and so that was kind of a dead end and this attack on these teenagers was the start of what would become a series of very frequent very violent attacks in pembrokeshire a series of armed robberies home invasions burglaries and this was a very very safe area up until this point and now they were there were more than ever i think there was like 50 or 60 different home invasions and burglaries and stuff in a few years span which is absolutely unheard of for this area and these break-ins were very obviously committed by the same person and each one seemed like a cookie-cutter of the last they were all incredibly similar it was a man in all black ski mask shotgun breaking into mainly women's homes when they knew that they were home alone and this attacker would get away with their crimes every single time because of this ski mask they would wear gloves you know there was no evidence left behind they wouldn't let their victim see their face so that they couldn't describe them to the police and it's absolutely terrifying i can't imagine what it must have felt like to live in pembrokeshire at that time knowing that this person was just out there and there was absolutely nothing that police could do about this there was nothing happening there was no suspect there was nothing going on and it was just a matter of time until it was your house and it seemed as though this attacker was just gonna keep getting away with this because what could trip them up at this point what could give them aware that was until one particular night when a man broke into a local teacher's home and attempted an armed robbery sheila clark was just getting ready for bed one night when a man dressed in all black ski masks shotgun in hand broke into her home and ambushed her he tied her up and then began searching around her home for things that he could steal sheila luckily managed to wriggle her way out of her ties and sounded her house alarm which then called the police it alerted everyone in the area that something was going on and her attacker fled again she didn't see the attacker's face because of course the ski mask and so she couldn't give much information to the police however they decided to search the surrounding area right after the attack and that was when police finally got their first lead on this serial attacker just a few streets away from sheila's home in a bush they found a few discarded items from this attacker there they found a sawn off shotgun some black gloves and a black ski mask now it was unlikely that they were going to be able to identify a perpetrator from just these items dna evidence forensics weren't quite there at this point however this piece of evidence did tell police something and that was that the attacker was probably local they were probably living in pembrokeshire because it seemed as though they'd fled the scene on foot in order to discard of these items a few streets away if they lived further away they were probably gonna do this in a car they were probably gonna go to the scene in the car flee in a getaway car however it seemed as though they were fleeing on foot so they lived close by most likely so police focused in on this particular area and began interviewing pretty much every single household that they could in that area particularly ones that had a male occupant specifically a male occupant of around the kind of height and kind of general size of what sheila gave of her attacker and when police came across one house in particular they knew they had their guy inside this house they found two sawn off shotguns a collection of items that seem to have been the stolen items from all of these women's houses in the area and hundreds of keys like house keys a lot of them matching with the burgled homes in the area and the owner of this house was mr john william cooper that same man that was once a person of interest in the peter and gwenda dixon murders after he pawned off his wedding ring that was suspected to be peter's stolen wedding ring the evidence inside cooper's home connected him to 30 different attacks in the area now police suspected him of weimar possibly up to a hundred however just the evidence in his house could connect him to 30. and while police were still kind of suspicious of him when it comes to the murders there was no evidence in his house connecting him to the murders so that was kind of put in a box for now right now they were focusing on all of these home invasions all of these burglaries that they can charge him for now because there's evidence in his home john cooper was given 16 years in prison for all of these attacks that he definitely committed there were keys in his house for these homes there were stolen items in there you know but police knew that this wasn't the end of john cooper's crimes they knew that he was responsible for a lot more and it was just figuring out what he'd done so they were looking at all of these different crimes that he definitely committed that he'd definitely been charged for the ones that put him in prison at this point and they realized that these home invasions these burglaries borrow a lot of similarities to the double murders both double murders he seemed to target single women when they were home alone because there was no in his eyes there was no intimidation he he felt like he could dominate these women there was no one that's gonna challenge him too much and if you remember i said at the beginning police believe that whoever killed the thomas siblings did serve because they believed that helen thomas was home alone and that was why that house was particularly targeted the dixon's murders also had a few similarities to all of the home invasions in the pembrokeshire area not because gwendo was home alone of course they were attacked on a trail in the middle of the day however the similarity here was the sexual assault as well as the money motive whoever had done this had stolen peter dixon's credit card and his wedding ring this attacker seemed to have two motives and that was sex and money so police went back and reopened the cold case files of both of these double murders and by now it had been well over a decade and so they decided to redo a lot of the dna tests because technology forensic technology is always improving perhaps technology in the present day can pick up something that technology back then in the 80s couldn't find however for that exact reason because these evidence these pieces of evidence were so old it was going to take a long time to get these results back and so in the meantime police decided that they were going to conduct a lot of interviews on everyone that knew john cooper his friends his family work friends just his associates people he met at the pub literally anyone that knew john cooper they wanted to get the best idea of who this man was what his life was like what he was like john william cooper was born on september 3rd 1944 in milford haven wales he had a very average childhood he was quite unremarkable in school he wasn't particularly intelligent and he ended up dropping out aged 15 just to go into the world of work he took on various manual labor jobs when he first left school i think he was just trying to find what he liked the best he was a builder he was a carpenter he was an upholster and then he eventually got into farming which is where he stayed he then kind of stuck to being a farm labourer in his early 20s he began seeing a woman named patricia now he'd actually known patricia since they were like 12 years old they met so long ago and now they eventually in their 20s began dating the two of them fell head over heels in love with each other and in 1966 when they were both age 22 they got married following their marriage they had a son named andrew or adrian i think he goes by both names i'm not sure which one he prefers i think i'm just gonna call him andrew in this video um yeah they had a son called andrew and a daughter named teresa and everything was good cooper was a very social man he liked playing darts he went to the pub often he he had quite a big social life in the pub and his friends there would describe him as very social very joyous very larger than life and a lot of the women at the pub even though he had a wife at home he was quite the flirt he was very funny very charismatic to those women but that was all when he was out in public however behind closed doors john cooper was a very different man he was abusive he was aggressive he was violent towards his family and his children his son andrew remembers that he was just nine years old the first time his father got violent with him and then it only got more and more frequent after that he said that cooper would treat him as though he was an adult he was nine years old but cooper would argue with him and discipline him and fight with him physically fight with him as though he was an adult as though this was like just a bar fight that cooper was getting into but this was his nine-year-old son cooper was a big gambler when he was out at the pub and he would put a lot of money into gambling and like i said he really liked playing darts at the pub and he would put a lot of money on that and whenever he would have a particularly bad night he'd lost money or whatever he would end up taking that out on his family on his wife and on his children and his gambling actually went way beyond just darts at the pub like i said he went on a tv game show in an attempt to kind of win money in that way and he would enter a lot of kind of lottery competitions spot the ball is a kind of lottery gambling game where a screenshot is taken from a football match and the actual football is edited out and the way that you win this game is by putting a little cross on the picture where you think the football would be in that picture and if your ex is in the right spot on the pitcher then you win you win the jackpot you win money and john cooper did exactly that in the 1970s he won a lot of money about a decade before the murders he won a car and almost a hundred thousand pounds and he blew it all on drinks on holidays on the pub on gambling a lot on gambling and then he tried to win it all back on gambling and just got even worse in 1989 just two weeks before peter and gwenda dixon were murdered john cooper appeared on the tv game show bullseye where he played darts against other players i'm not sure if he actually made any money from that show i don't know if he won or anything and to all of these people to like the game show host and the other contestants and the public audience watching and even the people at the pub that he played darts with john cooper was such a normal man he was such a nice man as well charismatic funny but behind closed doors none of them knew that he was an abusive monster cooper's son andrew remembers a specific time when he was just 11 years old his father pushed him to the ground pinned him down put a gun to his head and started telling him that no one likes him he's not wanted here you know he'd be better off dead and he was telling him all these things he was shouting horrible things at him and then suddenly cooper goes silent and he begins pulling the trigger back on this gun and his son andrew 11 year old andrew is just sat watching he can't he can't say anything he's terrified neither of them said a word and andrew is just watching his father pulling his finger back on the trigger and cooper is doing it slowly on purpose he knows that andrew is watching his finger and so that's only making him go slower he wants andrew to be terrified in this moment andrew said that when cooper got about halfway to the end he just closed his eyes and he was just peaceful he thought he was about to die he thought that his father was about to murder him and in that moment it was just peace it was just quiet he was just waiting for the end it was like everything around him stopped and then he heard this click and nothing happened the gun was empty cooper had done this for what to terrify his 11 year old son to make his 11 year old son think that his father was about to murder him and then he just kind of got up and walked where and andrew must have been traumatized around that same time cooper also forced his son andrew to watch as he murdered their family dog with a shovel in the garden and then dug it a grave and buried it in their garden i don't know for what reason he did that but again a terrifying example of how violent and aggressive this man is of course his son andrew got out of the family home as soon as he possibly could this was a horrific environment for him to be in and around that time this was when john cooper began breaking into women's homes and robbing people on a frequent basis the reason he started doing that is because after he won all that money on spot the ball he was living this lavish lifestyle he could now afford things that he'd never been able to afford before he could buy whatever he wanted whenever he wanted however that money was quickly running out and he didn't like the fact that he was now gonna have to switch up his lifestyle he was gonna have to go back to having nothing and not being able to treat himself and he didn't like that and so in order to kind of keep up his his finances he began stealing from people and robbing people in order to fund this new lavish lifestyle that he'd created for himself and although that was how these attacks started money was the motive at the beginning it seemed that after 10 15 the motive had switched to power his he wanted to feel power over someone he was enjoying this he did this as a form of entertainment for himself he no longer really needed the money these weren't desperate attacks where he was desperate to get a hundred pounds from a victim you know from stealing different things these were planned out methodical attacks that he would plan for days in advance and for what because he enjoyed them he would go out in the middle of the night and scout out areas and homes and potential victims he would walk through fields and cut holes in wire fences so then when he attacked this house over here he could run through this field go through this fence you know jump this fence at the other side of the field he would plan his routes and the houses that he was gonna rob days in advance and he was very very violent when he would break into these homes and rob these people he would tie his victims up he would hit them kick them he even threw a tv at a woman one time and that brings us back to where we are in the case cooper has been arrested and charged and sentenced for 30 of these attacks and he's currently doing time in prison at this point in the case and police are desperate to try to pin these two different double murders on cooper because they kind of know in their head that cooper is responsible it's just trying to find like a golden nugget piece of evidence they described it as because these murders had happened a very long time ago it was unlikely that they were gonna find evidence and that's why they refer to it as a golden nugget piece of evidence it was going to be so hard to find so police decided to question cooper about the guns that they found in his house thinking that potentially one of them or both of them could have been murder weapons however they were worried that this interview this questioning wasn't gonna go very well in the first interview that john cooper had with police about all of these attacks and these robberies and stuff when they first searched his home and found all this stuff in that first questioning he was so uncooperative he was like a sulking child he was turned away from police he had his body like turn to the wall he wouldn't look at them he wouldn't talk to them he was like a child he was he was silent for most of it and they were worried that he was gonna do that again and so they decided to approach this interview with different tactics they decided to put two particular interviewers in with him that they think could elicit some kind of emotional response so one of the interviewers was a big wide large rugby man who also happened to be a police officer but he was very intimidating he was very large very scary and then the other interviewer that they put in with him was a very soft-spoken very gentle woman because john cooper's attacks seem to be on mainly women he was always trying to assert some kind of dominance over these women and he was very aggressive and so they think that having a woman that kind of mirrors his usual victim profile that could also elicit some kind of emotional response from him so the questioning began and this time cooper was talking they didn't have that same issue that they had the first time however it was very obvious that he was playing mind games with the interviewers and they knew it they knew it they weren't falling for these mind games but he wasn't giving too much up he knew just the right amount of information to give police where he wasn't incriminating himself but he also wasn't seeming too suspicious like he was giving them just as much as he needed to he was always one step ahead of them he was thinking whenever he would get a question from them about something in his head he'd be like okay why do they want to know this is it because they've found this particular item and so he would answer it in a way that didn't incriminate himself he was always thinking two steps ahead of it the officers he was even taking notes in his police interview which i think is really interesting i'm so annoyed that i couldn't find out what notes he was taking but police remember watching him take these notes and thinking okay sir there's something significant about what he's just said or what we've just said he denied earning or ever having seen these shotguns that they were showing him that they found in his house and especially for the one that they found in the hedge when sheila clark was attacked and they went and they found the shotgun the the ski mask the gloves he actually asked the interviewers what which hedge they found the gun in just out of interest just out of curiosity which is so strange it's quite an odd question to ask for no reason police think that his tactic there was that he was trying to seem engaged in the questioning but he didn't really know what to ask but he wanted to seem like he was talking and he was you know cooperating they think it was just him buying thinking time you know that was such a pointless question he didn't need to know where it was found he knew where it was found because he knew where he ditched it they think it was at that exact moment that cooper realized that police had done him you know they'd found the gun and he knew that nowadays as this was going on they had better you know forensic testing abilities and i think in that moment he was he was worried i think this was the first time they ever saw fear in john cooper because he knew that if they found that gun and if they connected it to him and they dna tested it it would come back that it was his and his dna was on it and that's exactly what police were trying to do they had sent this gun off for dna testing forensic testing but like i said cooper or whoever this attacker was seemed to wear gloves every single time they used the gun or every single time they did an attack so the testing on this gun was gonna have to take a long long time they were gonna have to be so thorough with it because the likelihood was that they weren't gonna find any dna evidence they were just hoping that they were gonna eventually the interview process came to an end and there was only a certain amount of time that police had to interview cooper because he couldn't officially be arrested for these two double murders because there was no evidence so they were granted like three or four days to interview him and it was coming to the end of that and police knew it was a race against time until cooper was freed from jail for all of his attacks and they couldn't let him go back out in the public they knew that he was still a danger he was still you know as long as he was out on the streets he would be attacking people he would be robbing people he would be sexually assaulting people perhaps killing people again in january of 2009 john cooper was released from prison and shortly after that his wife patricia passed away now immediately as soon as police heard that john was now out of prison and his wife was dead they thought is this suspicious is this one of his kills they were very concerned that this had happened again so soon after he was released and so they brought him in to the police station to question him he said that he'd woken up in the middle of the night and patricia was gasping for air her breath was so strained and he tried to kind of revive her and give her some kind of cpr but he was unsuccessful and so he called for an ambulance but it was too late and patricia passed away and so police made sure to get her body properly autopsied not just taken to a mog they wanted to 100 make sure that this was not foul player this was not suspicious from john cooper the pathologist that did this autopsy confirmed that there was no foul play her heart i believe she had some heart issues heart condition and her heart had actually swollen to the size of a football and that was her cause of death they didn't believe that john cooper did anything to kill his wife but that doesn't mean that he didn't kill those other four people and still police were trying to find evidence to put him down for this because they really believed that he'd done all four of those and was capable of doing more if they didn't hurry up and get him locked up so after their very unsuccessful interview police knew that they weren't going to get a confession from cooper and so they had to come at this from another angle they decided to go back and look at the police sketch that was made from the day of peter and gwenda's murders when that man was seen getting money out of the atm around the same time that peter dixon's card was used and the witness made a sketch of this man and now they had a suspect now they had john cooper so they could compare this police sketch with john cooper so police decided to go back and re-watch that episode of bullseye that john cooper featured on that tv game shirt because this tv episode was recorded just two weeks before peter and gwenda dixon were murdered and so if it was john cooper that murdered them this was the best representation that police had of what he looked like at the time of the murders and so they managed to get a screenshot of this episode where john is kind of facing away from the camera he looks like he's in the same position as this sketch was drawn and when they compared these two images that screenshot and the police sketch it was almost spot on the curly hair the formation of the hair the wideness of the shoulders everything but of course that wasn't enough and so police decided to go to john cooper's house and look through his wardrobe look through all of his clothes and see if they can find any items that are similar to the ones in the police sketch so that they can kind of work out what he must have been wearing when he murdered peter and gwenda and in his home they found a pair of like beige cargo shorts and they sent them off to be forensically tested because they were very similar to the ones in the police sketch and the results of this test came back a lot quicker than expected because pathologists found a match to peter dixon's blood on these shots that were in john cooper's home and with that police rushed to cooper's home and arrested him on suspicion of the murders in may of 2009 10 years over 10 years after they off happened kicked off they're in around the corner he's kicked off i'm not a murderer i'm not a murderer i am not a murderer they brought him back to the police station and now all police had to do was get john cooper to admit that those shorts were his because if he admitted that those shots were his and they had peter dixon's blood on them then of course he's the killer there's absolutely no other explanation as to why peter dixon's blood would be on those shots bear in mind he doesn't know that the blood has been found on the shots so that's one thing that police were keeping to themselves for now because of course if they told him he was going to deny that the shots were his so in this questioning john cooper says well yeah if the shots are in my house then of course they're mine but he also said to police i don't know how you can compare those shorts and the shots in the police sketch because the shots in the police sketch are a lot longer than these shots that you found in my house these are short shorts and the ones in the police sketch are long shots and cooper was very firm in that statement he was repeating it over and over again about this length difference in the shorts so much so that police were thinking okay like why have you mentioned this for five times there's something there's something weird here something's going on here you're too defensive about this and police knew that john cooper's wife patricia before she passed she worked as a seamstress she had sewing machines she would alter and modify people's clothing and so they thought well what if john cooper committed the murder in these long shots and then got his wife to shorten them just in case something like this ever came up so the shorts were sent back to the lab and pathologists were told to try to unpick the hem on the bottom of the shorts to see if they were originally longer than this and it turns out that they were they were taken up by like quite a bit these were originally quite long shots before they were altered so the shots had been altered which is suspicious enough in itself however that wasn't even the big kicker of evidence here pathologists also found a dna sample in the hem of these shorts that belonged to peter and gwenda dixon's daughter now we know for a fact that john cooper has never been in direct contact with peter and gwenda dixon's daughter so how did that dna sample get there could it have been that these weren't john cooper's shorts to begin with it's very evident in his previous crimes that he liked to steal things take things from his victims he stole keys from all these women's houses he stole their items is it possible that he stole these shorts from peter dixon's rucksack and wore them after murdering him that would be the ultimate trophy for a psychopath like john cooper to wear his murder victim's clothing so police confronted john cooper about this about these being his shots and unbelievably john cooper tried to pin this on his son andrew he said well oh andrew always wears my things without asking maybe he'd won these shots committed this murder got the blood on the shots and then the sharks came back home that's that's how that happened it must have been his son he is trying to pin this murder on his own son and he's getting really aggressive about it now he is shouting at police he's really angry at them for focusing on him so much and not on other possibilities meanwhile finally the dna tests were coming back on all of these pieces of evidence including the gun that police believe could have been used to kill the dixons and what was interesting about this gun was that it was found to have been painted black it had paint all over the barrel all of the handle and it was starting to flake away and it seemed that the reason for this the reason that the gun had been painted was because it was covered in peter dixon's blood his blood was all over this gun that was found in john cooper's home that it seemed that he tried to get rid of the blood staining and that was all police needed that was the golden nugget piece of evidence that they'd been waiting for but before police made an arrest they wanted to check over all of this dna evidence and stuff and compare it to anything they had left from the first double murder now this was a long time ago there was a lot of time between that murder and them now trying to pin this on john cooper and like i said a lot of the evidence at that first double murder scene was now ash it was burnt to the ground so there wasn't much that they could test however they tested the clothing that was found on the victims to clothing and different fibers and dna and stuff that they took from john cooper and all of his items and almost unbelievably 25 years after the murder happened some fibers were found on one of john cooper's gloves that came from richard thomas's socks and that then connected john cooper to richard thomas and his sister's murders a fiber from one of john cooper's gloves was also found in the underwear of one of those teenage girls that he sexually assaulted in that group of six and so that pinned him on that as well and there are a bunch of other unsolved assaults and attacks sexual assaults that hadn't been solved this whole time that were now solved because they now had cooper's dna they had all of his fibers finally in may of 2011 john cooper was charged with all four murders plus the attack on the six teenagers he faced a long trial and was eventually found guilty of all of his crimes and he was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole he since tried to appeal this conviction however he was unsuccessful and it's unlikely that he'll ever get out of prison he will most likely die behind bars and that is all i have on this case thank you so so much for watching if you enjoyed it please leave a thumbs up down below because that really helps me out thanks again to function of beauty for sponsoring this video i love function of beauty i know a lot of you guys do too so if you want to try them out make sure you're using my link down below in the description for 20 off of your first order huge thank you to all of my channel members for helping me decide the cases that i cover especially my tier 2 members whose names are all on screen right now if you want to become a channel member you can just click the join button on a desktop or there'll be a link in the description of this video but yeah thank you so so much for watching this video if you want to subscribe there'll be a link right here if you want to subscribe to my second channel there'll be a link here and if you want to watch another video from me there'll be a playlist on screen right now bye

Channel: Eleanor Neale

Views: 1,185,298

Rating: 4.9364033 out of 5

Keywords: eleanor, neale, eleanor neale, eleanor neale true crime, mystery, unsolved, unsolved mystery, true crime, solved, documentary, killer, murder, serial killer, buzzfeed, buzzfeed unsolved, podcast, true crime podcast, bbc, itv, netflix, storytime, forensic files, 2020, crime watch daily, dateline, interview, news, creepypasta, horror, the bullseye killer, bullseye, john cooper, cooper, john, peter, gwenda, dixon, wales, south wales, born to kill, real stories, cold case files, show, episodes, full episode

Id: Dv1oFqsHLw4

Length: 63min 47sec (3827 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 14 2020