HOW JUSTICE CAUGHT UP WITH KILLERS
Aamir Mohammed looks back at some of the most notorious murders in Wales – and how the killers were brought to justice
MURDERER and “sexual predator” Christopher May is currently serving life behind bars with a minimum term of 28 years in prison.
The former butcher, who “callously” dismembered victim Tracey Woodford, will spend the rest of his life on licence if he is ever released.
The trial heard how May, 50, strangled Ms Woodford to death after he invited her back to his flat after they met at the Skinny Dog pub in Pontypridd. May had sex with Ms Woodford, but it is not known whether she was alive or dead at the time.
He then dismembered her body using a saw and other tools and hid her head and torso in a storm drain near Pontypridd RFC. After Ms
Woodford’s family reported her missing to the police officers discovered limbs in a shower cubicle at May’s flat in Rickards Street, Graig.
It took a jury 50 minutes to return a unanimous guilty verdict following May’s trial at Cardiff Crown Court.
SAMMY ALMAHRI
It was around midday on New Year’s Eve 2014 when staff at the Future Inns hotel in Cardiff Bay discovered the body of Nadine Aburas in room 203. It led to one of the most complex operations South Wales Police had ever been involved in.
Almost two years later American millionaire businessman Sammy Almahri was jailed for 17 years for murdering his ex-girlfriend.
Almahri and Nadine met on internet dating site MuslimMatch.com in 2012. Almahri visited Nadine around Christmas time in 2014 but was told to leave the country following a dispute with Nadine’s brother.
However, instead of getting the train back to London and hopping on the next plane from Heathrow to New York Almahri booked himself into the Future Inns hotel in Cardiff Bay.
He called Nadine and asked her to come to the hotel, telling her he had left his passport and phone at her house and he wanted them back.
Before leaving the hotel he approached bar manager Peter Morris and asked for directions to the M4.
At 12.20pm on New Year’s Eve the duty manager entered room 203 and discovered Nadine’s body.
On January 19, 2015, Almahri was found in the town of Iringa in Tanzania, where he had family, and was detained.
A number of preliminary hearings at Cardiff Crown Court, in which Almahri pleaded not guilty to murder. But after the first day of the trial Almahri changed his plea to guilty and he was sentenced on November 3.
JOHN COOPER
Millionaire farmer Richard Thomas, 58, and his sister Helen, 56, were shot at their remote mansion near Milford Haven in 1985.
Three and a half years later, in 1989, Gwenda and Peter Dixon were shot at close range while taking a walk along the Pembrokeshire coastal path near Little Haven.
John Cooper later cycled into Pembroke and Haverfordwest to use their cash card. Witnesses described him as the notorious “wild looking man” whose photofit was widely circulated.
Sammy Almahri
Over more than a quarter of a century Cooper broke into dozens of people’s homes, escaping from his crimes with money and people’s prized possessions via a maze of hedgerows and fields whose fences he cut to give him access.
As well as being behind the horrific double murders which left police baffled for two decades, in 1996, dressed in a sinister black balaclava and holding a loaded shotgun, he held up five terrified teenagers in woods at Milford Haven’s Mount Estate, raping one girl aged 16 and indecently assaulting another aged 15.
Dyfed Powys Police were convinced Cooper was the murderer, and he was jailed for life in May 2011, for the two double murders.
A Swansea Crown Court jury also convicted him for his terrifying actions against the teenagers in Milford Haven, including rape and indecent assault.
He has since been implicated in five other murders. In November, 2012, his appeal was rejected. He will never be freed from jail.
PETER MOORE
”Like a knife through butter.” That was the chilling description given by serial killer Peter Moore when asked how it felt to murder his four victims, according to a book published earlier this year.
It was a reply said to have been given in an interview to police following his arrest in December 1995.
His murdering spree was due to come to an end though after police linked him to the death of his final victim, married father-of-two Tony Davies, who he’d stabbed at a gay cruising area at Pensarn Beach near Abergele.
Moore was arrested on December 22, 1995, and, after initially denying all charges, changed his story in the early hours of Christmas Eve after a search of his home uncovered the murder weapon, traces of all four men’s blood and some of the victims’ belongings hidden in the garden pond.
He was handed four life sentences in November 1996.
DAVID MORRIS
David Morris was handed four life sentences after he brutally bludgeoned three generations of a family to death with a pole in South Wales’ worst mass murder.
First the killer entered his victims’ home, went upstairs and smashed a heavy fibreglass pole repeatedly into the face of 80-year-old invalid grandmother Doris Dawson. When Mandy Power and her daughters arrived home, he killed them in identical, sadistic fashion.
The horrific crime took place in Kelvin Road, Clydach, on Saturday, June 27, 1999. Morris had sexually assaulted and killed Ms Power, 34, before inflicting devastating head injuries on her daughters Katie, 10, and Emily, eight.
He then started several fires around the house to try to cover his tracks.
John Cooper
Peter Moore
When firefighters and the police arrived they found the bodies of the victims laid out in the hall.
A bloodstained gold necklace was found at the scene which Morris eventually admitted was his, although he claimed it was broken and he’d left it in Ms Power’s house after going around there for a coffee.
Morris was eventually charged with the murders, and convicted in 2002. That conviction was later quashed by the Court of Appeal after it found he had not received a fair trial due to a conflict of interest.
The Swansea builder was jailed for life for the second time in 2006 after a prior conviction was quashed.
He has always protested his innocence and there is a campaign to see him eventually freed, but at present he remains in jail.
MATTHEW HARDMAN
Ninety-year-old widow Mabel Leyshon was stabbed to death in November 2001, in Llanfairpwll, Anglesey, by Matthew Hardman.
He mutilated her body before placing pokers at her feet in the shape of a cross His victim’s heart was removed, wrapped in newspaper, and placed in a saucepan on a silver platter next to her body.
Then, late in December when a Crimewatch appeal revealed the ritualistic aspects of the death, the killer was dubbed “The Vampire Murderer”. More than 200 people got in touch with Crimewatch. The name of Mathew Hardman, who had been questioned in October 2001 for asking a foreign exchange student to bite his neck, was mentioned.
Police officers searched his home and found magazines and books about vampires, including Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and several occult internet sites bookmarked on his computer in a bid to find out how to become immortal. They also found a kitchen knife, which bore traces of Mrs Leyshon’s blood.
A court heard how the killer had drunk his victim’s blood in a “macabre ritual”. Hardman was jailed for life in 2002.
CLIVE SHARP
Clive Sharp entered a house in the middle of the night and raped Irish vet Catherine Gowing, 37, in New Brighton, Mold. She was then killed and her body mutilated by cutting it into pieces and disposing of it in and near to the River Dee.
The vet’s disappearance sparked North Wales Police’s largest-ever search operation. Remains were first found on October 31 in a shallow pool in a field in Sealand known locally as the Lum.
Two days later an off-duty Cheshire Police officer walking the banks of the River Dee in Chester found further remains.
Her sadistic killer was later sentenced to a 37-year minimum term after the murder in October 2012.
David Morris
Matthew Hardman