In many ways, John Cooper’s appearance on the Eighties television show Bullseye was quite unremarkable. There was some convivial chat with the show’s chirpy host Jim Bowen about the joys of scuba diving off the beautiful Pembrokeshire coastline, and then it was down to action.
Cooper, a 45-year-old farm labourer and father-of-two, considered himself something of a dab hand at the dartboard, having honed his skills in the pubs of West Wales.
But it was to be an ignominiously short-lived foray into fame, with Cooper stumbling in the quiz section of the show then, crucially, missing the target when given a chance to redeem himself at the dartboard.
He forced a smile for the camera and walked away, empty-handed. No speedboat. No hostess trolley.
But it would not be the last the public would hear of John Cooper, nor the last time that footage, recorded in May 1989, would be viewed. For, in a quite astonishing twist, it would transpire that Cooper’s unassuming appearance and genial demeanour were the mask of a serial killer; he was the man responsible for a string of crimes so chilling they remain among the most heinous ever recorded in Wales.
John Cooper, left, appears on television show Bullseye in 1989
It would later transpire that Cooper’s genial demeanour was the mask of a serial killer
As he stepped up to the oche, Cooper was already a double murderer, having slaughtered a brother and sister in their remote farmhouse in 1985. Then, just a month
after recording the show, he would go on to gun down a middle-aged couple on a camping holiday.
But it was not until 20 years later in 2009, when a cold case team unearthed that footage of his TV appearance – and matched it against an artist’s impression of a suspect in the second murder – that detectives were able to join the dots and finally identify the man who became known as the Bullseye Killer.
Just how those crimes were solved is an astonishing tale of determination and detective work and is particularly intriguing now, as ITV prepares to launch its rebooted version of Bullseye in a Christmas special tonight.
Back in the Eighties, up to 18 million viewers would tune in to watch the bizarre mix of quiz show and darts contest, under the gaze of comedian-host Bowen with his endless banter, and its animated mascot, Bully.
The contestants were usually a motley bunch. Bowen once quipped that some of them, in the early years, ‘wouldn’t have been able to tell you who came second in the last war’.
So if there was anything strange about Cooper, no one noticed.
His first foray into murder started on this very day in 1985 – two bodies were found in the charred remains of a burnt-out three-storey manor house in Scoveston Park, a sleepy area of rural West Wales, not far from Milford Haven.
Wealthy farmer Richard Thomas, 58, was found with a shotgun wound to his abdomen. His sister Helen, 54, had been bound, gagged and shot in the head.
Theories soon started to circulate: was it an aggrieved local with a grudge? A scorned lover? Had the siblings been targeted because of their wealth?
It was the largest police inquiry this picturesque corner of Pembrokeshire had known, but the hunt for the killer went cold. Then, in June 1989, another crime, just eight miles away, would come to cast a similar shadow.
A married couple, on a camping trip to the coastal enclave of Little Haven, were reported missing.
Marketing manager Peter Dixon, 51, and his wife Gwenda, 52, had holidayed in the area for 15 years but, when they didn’t make it back to their Oxfordshire home to meet their two grown-up children, they raised the alarm.
A police artist composed this sketch of Cooper after the murders of Peter and Gwenda Dixon
Cooper protests his innocence as he is lead into court in 2009
A search was launched and six days later their bodies were found in a wooded spot, not far from a rocky cliff edge. They had both been shot. The killer took Peter’s wedding ring and wallet, using his bank card (with the correct pin) at an ATM, shortly afterwards.
A huge murder inquiry was launched. A witness reported seeing a dishevelled man on a bike at the cashpoint, and a description enabled a police artist to compose a sketch. The ‘wildman’ picture was even shown on Crimewatch, but no leads were forthcoming.
Connie Stevens, 75, a local councillor whose own late father was the county councillor for the area at the time of both crimes, remembers the horror the murders brought to the area.
‘Obviously everybody was shocked. Things like that didn’t happen in our locality,’ she told The Mail on Sunday.
‘I worked in a school near Milford Haven and strangely enough, in our school kitchen, the windows looked out on to Scoveston Manor.’
She added: ‘People felt uneasy and certainly a lot of people felt frightened. The police did a fairly good investigation. They interviewed a lot of people and went house-to-house – they came and questioned me. There was so much speculation as to who could have done it.’
But, as she points out, clues were scarce, and so the killer continued to walk free.
The case would later be documented in the book, The Pembrokeshire Murders, written by retired Detective Chief Superintendent Steve Wilkins, with ITV journalist Jonathan Hill. The story was turned into a powerful drama series starring Luke Evans and Keith Allen, which aired in 2021 and has recently been relaunched on Netflix.
It was in 2006 that advances in forensic science prompted Dyfed-Powys Police to launch a review, led by Wilkins, of what were – by then – two cold cases.
Cooper was already known to police. In 1978 he had scooped £90,000 in a newspaper spot-the-ball competition, a substantial sum back then and enough for him to splash out on luxury holidays to the US with his wife Pat and even buy a smallholding where they could grow crops and breed horses with their two children.
But Cooper had a gambling addiction, and once the winnings were squandered, he turned to crime to fund his habit.
He became a prolific burglar, plundering his neighbours’ houses for jewellery, silverware and anything else he could sell, often stashing it around the Pembrokeshire countryside he knew so well.
His crimes escalated to murder – interspersed with that appearance on Bullseye, which he’d hoped would be an easy earner.
Seven years and two double murders later, in 1996, another two violent incidents shattered the peaceful community once again.
Gwenda killed by Cooper on the Pembrokeshire Coastal Path in June 1989
The first involved five teenagers attacked at gunpoint. One of the girls was raped in a field near to the scene of the slaughter of Richard and Helen Thomas.
The second was an armed robbery in which a lone woman was tied up at gunpoint. The culprit fled the scene after an alarm was activated, but in doing so abandoned items of clothing and a double-barrelled sawn-off shotgun in the hedgerows.
This time police had forensic evidence, and it wasn’t long before Cooper was arrested. A police search of his home unearthed more than 500 keys taken from burgled properties and hidden in a cesspit, along with a shotgun.
Cooper was convicted of the robbery, and a string of burglaries, and received a 16-year sentence in 1998. But the evidence linking him to the two double murders and the attacks on the children would only come to light after a cold-case review was launched eight years later. Steve Wilkins and his team turned their focus on Cooper, who was still in prison but would be eligible for parole shortly.
The forensic evidence against him was mounting, but it was still not enough to charge him. Identification was also still an issue; so much time had elapsed that an ID parade was of little use. What was needed was photographic evidence of what Cooper looked like when the Dixons were murdered and the artist’s sketch drawn up.
In Bullseye, police hit the jackpot: it was well-known in the area that he’d been on the show, and as Wilkins wrote in his book: ‘We had amassed many images of Cooper over the years in various guises and with numerous hairstyles. What we didn’t have was a picture of him at the time of the Dixons’ murder. If footage still existed of his appearance on Bullseye, this could be hugely significant.’
Hill hunted for the tape, unearthing a copy in the ITV archives.
The two watched, aghast, as the decades-old footage of Cooper describing his love for the Pembrokeshire coastline and his passion for scuba diving came on to the screen. As Wilkins revealed: ‘You could hardly make it up. There was Cooper, just a month before the killings, revealing on national television knowledge of the area where the Dixons would be murdered.’
It was Jonathan Hill who froze a frame of the TV footage and placed it next to the ageing sketch.
Speaking to The Mail on Sunday, Wilkins said the moment he saw the images, side by side, was truly remarkable. ‘I’d never seen anything like it, in 33 years with the police,’ he said.
However, the detective still needed his ‘golden nugget’ of evidence, not least because Cooper, by now, had been released from custody. In a remarkable twist, on the very night he came out of prison and moved back in with his long-suffering wife Pat, she died. Cooper himself dialled 999 to report her death, inevitably prompting immediate suspicion. But as Wilkins would go on to note, she had a history of heart problems and ‘I just think she gave up’.
Pat would, however, be at least in part responsible for giving the police their next breakthrough. A pair of Cooper’s shorts were recovered in a search of his home and it transpired they had been shortened by his wife: in doing so, she had unwittingly sealed damning forensic evidence inside the hem. And not just a tiny bit of evidence. The shorts became a veritable treasure trove.
First there was a speck of blood, found to be Peter Dixon’s.
Peter was also murdered while the couple holidayed in Wales
‘I asked them then to unpick the hem of the shorts, because it looked like it was home stitching and his wife was a seamstress,’ says Wilkins. When the hem was unpicked, it revealed fibres that linked Cooper to the rape and attack on the five children. ‘Very importantly’ they also found another DNA match – to the Dixons’ daughter, who had been in Cyprus at the time her parents were killed.
Wilkins is convinced they were Gwenda Dixon’s shorts, which had at some point been borrowed by her daughter, and which Cooper had snatched from her bag after the killing because the scene was so bloody.
More extraordinary, fibres were later identified in the pocket of the shorts matching a sock worn by first victim, Richard Thomas, the only piece of clothing that survived the fire that destroyed his farmhouse.
How did it get into the pocket, when Thomas was killed four years before Cooper even stole the shorts from the Dixons? Police deduced that Cooper had worn gloves at the scene of the Thomas murder.
He must then, years later, have slipped them into the pockets of the shorts he had taken from Gwenda, transferring evidence.
‘Suddenly, we had a pair of shorts that link him to four murders, five attempted robberies, one rape and an indecent assault,’ says the detective. ‘And it just carried on like that.’ They had their man.
In court, in 2011, Cooper’s son Andrew, who had left home aged 16, gave evidence for the prosecution. Chillingly, he told the court how his father kept his belongings in a locked room. Once, he said, he went in when his father was not there and found what ‘looked like other people’s possessions’ in a metal cupboard.
Those included photographs of people he did not know, trinkets, and burned jewellery and coins – trophies that Cooper had kept from his crimes.
Cooper was jailed for life in May 2011 for the two double murders; he was also convicted of holding the five teenagers at gunpoint, raping a 16-year-old girl and indecently assaulting another, aged 15.
Maintaining his innocence until the end, he shouted at the judge as he was sentenced.
He claimed on the stand that the truth would ‘all come out on the internet’, yet his attempt at an appeal was rejected a year later, and his name has since been linked to a series of other crimes. Now aged 80, John Cooper, the Bullseye Killer, will never be released.
