The serial killer caught out by an old episode of BULLSEYE
THE PEMBROKESHIRE MURDERS Monday-Wednesday, ITV, 9pm
It is one of the jewels of the British Isles, a haven of breathtaking beauty blessed with enviable beaches and magical coves. But in the final decades of the 20th Century, the Welsh county of Pembrokeshire was also the location for a string of horrific crimes that lay unsolved for years.
In 1985, a wealthy farmer and his sister were murdered in execution-style shootings, their bodies found in the smouldering remains of their house after it had been set ablaze. Four years later, a middle-aged couple who had been out walking on the area’s coastal path while on holiday were robbed and shot dead. Then in 1996, a group of teenagers out one night was attacked by a balaclava-clad gunman who raped one girl and sexually assaulted another.
These were the coldest of cases for a further decade: until a reopened investigation used painstaking detective work and forensic technology to track down the monster responsible for this litany of horror.
Now the story of the investigation that lasted for years before achieving justice has been adapted into an enthralling real-life drama from the producers of Line Of Duty. Luke Evans (inset right, with Alexandria Riley) stars as Steve Wilkins, the cool-headed and straight-backed detective superintendent who, as senior investigating officer, led his team in the hunt for the killer from 2006. As they trawled through the files, one name came up again and again: that of John Cooper (played by Keith Allen, main picture), a local ‘super-burglar’ with a nasty reputation for violence who had been jailed for dozens of offences but always denied being a killer.
Uncovering the proof took an endless search of thousands of items to pick out the few bits of indisputable evidence, and in a bizarre twist, an old episode of the game show Bullseye proved crucial to putting away Cooper (pictured, inset top left, with Bullseye host Jim Bowen in 1989).
Climaxing in an interview-room showdown that would win the admiration of Line Of Duty’s AC-12 team, this solidly crafted series, showing over three consecutive nights, is an object lesson in how peerless policing can make riveting TV. It’s also anchored by Allen’s unsettlingly convincing depiction of an irredeemably evil man, but one who also had the cunning almost to get away with his appalling crimes. Then, in the documentary The Pembrokeshire Murders: Catching The Game Show Killer (Thursday, ITV, 9pm), the real-life Wilkins recalls how he and his colleagues managed to snare ‘the most dangerous person that I’ve ever come into contact with’, in between archive footage telling the full story of the investigation.