Game show appearance convinced police that thief was HOW TV’S BULLSEYE HELPED COPS NAIL SHOTGUN MURDERER
T WO days before Christmas in 1985 the charred remains of a body were recovered from the smouldering rubble of a three-storey manor house near Milford Haven.
And, had the strong smell of paraffin or diesel still lingering in the morning air not been enough to tip police off to a crime having been committed, further grisly clues would soon confirm their worst suspicions.
Shotgun pellets were found in the wall of the first-floor bedroom in which the body was found, while what appeared to be a blindfold or gag, having survived destruction by the flames, lay nearby.
Helen Thomas, 54, had been bound and shot, alongside her millionaire farmer brother Richard, whose body had already been found sporting a point-blank entry wound to the stomach.
Those double murders at Scoveston Manor cast a shadow over what had been a sleepy part of rural West Wales, a pall which would darken considerably on June 29, 1989, when middle-aged Oxfordshire holidaymakers Peter and Gwenda Dixon were brutally executed on the Pembrokeshire coastal path, near Little Haven.
What officers would later discover is that the weapon used on the Dixons was the same Belgian-made 12-bore shotgun that had belonged to Richard Thomas – the barrels of which the killer had turned on him and his sister four years previously. They were after the same man. But who would have thought to consider oil rig worker-turned-farm hand John Cooper as someone worthy of scrutiny?
Barely a decade earlier, he’d won himself £90,000 and a new car worth four grand via a newspaper spot-theball competition.
To anyone else, that would have been a life-changing amount – after all, the windfall was a vast sum back then – roughly the equivalent of £400,000 in today’s money.
For a while, life was good – Cooper used the cash to gift members of his family, take his wife Pat on luxury holidays to the US and even buy a smallholding so the pair could grow crops and breed horses.
But a gambling addiction saw the wealth squandered, and soon any air of respectability he might have had in the community – Cooper was a member of the Milford Haven Sea Angling Club and acting as an official at regional darts tournaments – became a mere mask to hide a far more sinister truth.
By night the dad of two would stalk his neighbours’ homes, carrying out a prolific 1990s campaign of burglaries – using the hedgerow, through which he’d creep, inching ever closer to his targets, to hide his cache of stolen goods afterwards.
Earrings, necklaces and silverware were all stashed around the Pembrokeshire countryside, while curry powder was scattered in his wake in an attempt to deter any police dogs, brought in to help investigate the break-ins, from following his trail.
A masked Cooper even held up a ellery and other stolen items – so Gwenda Dixon and had been kept by terrified teacher at gunpoint at her many, in fact, that the cache had to Cooper as a bizarre “trophy”, after home in nearby Sardis, but when she be laid out on trestle tables at Withyhaving sexually assaulted and killed wriggled free of theher.ropeshe’dusedbushAirfieldsothattheycouldbe to truss her up, she set off a panic identified by their rightful owners. However, as none of the burglary alarm and he fled. In addition, Cooper’s son Adrian victims interviewed as part of Opera
Nevertheless, he was arrested in told investigators that he’d always tion Huntsman were believed to have 1998 after Dyfed-Powys Police’s wondered why the dozens of picture been injured or had their blood spilt, Operation Huntsman inquiry into frames in his father’s back room all they were not forensically examined the multiple home invasions in the contained photos of “people he did at the time – no connection to the area finally caught up with him. not recognise.” Thomas/Dixon murders being
Police found hundreds of house Also recovered in the raid was the apparent. keys hidden around Cooper’s then shotgun and a pair of blood-stained Cooper was therefore jailed for 16 home in Jordanston, along with jew- shorts which had belonged to years for a spate of some 30 burgla- ries and the Sardis robbery alone.
He appealed unsuccessfully against conviction and always protested his innocence.
Advances in forensic examination would point to him once again, though, with eventual, more detailed DNA tests on the shorts revealing traces of Peter and Gwenda’s genetic make-up.
Among other damning discoveries, specks of Peter Dixon’s blood – with a probability match of one in a billion – were also found under black paint on the barrels of the now sawn-