COUPLE’S KILLER
Police have yet to catch person who shot pensioners following son-in-law’s wrongful conviction for their murder
I T WAS 25 years ago that a family from Llanharry was ripped apart.
On a quiet Monday morning on July 26, 1993, Megan and Harry Tooze’s only daughter, Cheryl, picked up the phone to her parents’ neighbour. Farmer Owen Hopkins had called to say the couple were missing.
The door to their remote farmhouse, Ty ar y Waun Farm, was unlocked and there was a halfprepared lunch in the kitchen.
Neighbours had heard the sound of shots coming from the area of their home at 1.30pm that day and a relative who tried to contact the couple by telephone at around 3pm could get no reply. The police were called.
They found the bodies of 64-yearold greengrocer Harry and 67-yearold Megan in the early hours of Tuesday morning.
They had been covered in a carpet and stowed in a cowshed under bales of hay. Both victims had been shot in the head with a 12-bore shotgun. The motive, police claimed, was money.
The discovery shocked locals in the area, now fearful a serial killer was on the loose.
At the time, this was a community that had only seen one reported break-in over the past 60 years.
Police began to investigate the horrific murder.
They revealed the pair were last seen at Llanharry Post Office collecting their pensions. Despite hundreds of phone calls made to police with people offering information, the killing remained a mystery.
But months later, there was a major development.
Cheryl’s boyfriend Jonathan Jones, with whom she had been living in Orpington in Kent, was arrested.
Police released a statement saying they were not looking for anyone else in connection with the killings.
During his trial at Newport Crown Court, the jury heard how a fingerprint on a china cup led to his arrest by police.
The prosecution claimed he wanted access to the couple’s £150,000 inheritance as Cheryl was an only child.
But his defence said the fingerprints could have got there after Jonathan went to the farm to help police.
Jonathan was, however, found guilty, and jailed for life in 1995.
But in a strange twist of events, the judge who sentenced him wrote a letter to the Home Secretary saying he had “significant doubt” about the conviction.
In a copy which was sent to Jones’ barrister, Mr Justice Rougier said he was surprised the jury convicted Jones for the murders, and that if Jones was guilty he was exceptionally cunning.
It gave Jonathan Jones, who was now married to Cheryl with a baby son, fresh hope for freedom. A year later, his conviction was quashed by the Court of Appeal.
Speaking after the announcement, he told the South Wales Echo: “The performance of South Wales Police has been pretty lamentable thus far.”
But he still felt police could catch the killer.
“There are many lines of inquiry that are still outstanding and have not yet been investigated yet.”
In November 1995, Cheryl gave an interview to the Western Mail about how she broke down in tears after she found out her parents had been killed – and then her partner found guilty of their murder.
“That night I cried hysterically,” she said.
“I have had to be quite strong. Part of me came to the surface I hadn’t seen before. I have surprised myself.
“My confidence comes from knowing Jonathan is innocent. I know what I am doing is right.”
Speaking about her parents, she said: “I have terrible nightmares about my parents. We were very close.
“I was an only child growing up in the country so it was really the three of us for a lot of the time.
“As time is going by their deaths are becoming more and more real. I am having to accept they are gone.”
Mr Jones was released from prison in April 1996.
Since then, a steady stream of police officers have been assigned to the case, so far with no luck.
In 2001, a reinvestigation launched.
And in 2003, the team who cracked the Lynette White murder mystery were called in to investigate.
They hoped to use advanced scientific techniques in the hope of finding new DNA evidence. was
But in 2008, it seemed the murder hunt was at an end.
A day before the 15th anniversary of the horrific execution-style shootings, police admitted their reinvestigation had reached a dead end. All officers had been pulled off the case.
Back then, Detective Inspector Gareth Heatley, who looked after the Tooze case files in an administrative role, said: “South Wales Police can confirm that the team investigating the murder of Harry and Megan Tooze has been scaled down.
“However, it is important to stress that the inquiry has not been closed.
“We have kept the family of Harry and Megan Tooze fully updated on these developments and realise they are deeply disappointed the case remains unsolved.
“In light of the current situation, it is important that the force now turns its attention to other unsolved crimes in South Wales, which may benefit from extra resources.”
Jonathan Jones said he was “disappointed” the inquiry had been scaled down.
Cheryl added: “I am tired and drained. I can’t concentrate on anything else. We have a lot of unanswered questions about what evidence the police do have and what they have done with it.
“If the killer, or killers, were caught, it certainly would bring closure to all of us and it would make the world of difference.”
Then in 2011, police were set to look at the case again after the quadruple murder conviction of John Cooper.
Cooper, of Letterston, near Fishguard, was sentenced to four life sentences after being found guilty of killing farmer Richard Thomas, 58, and his sister, Helen, 56, in 1985 and of shooting Oxford couple Peter and Gwenda Dixon in 1989.
Police were investigating whether three other killings in West Wales and those of the Tooze family are linked to Cooper.
Olive Hampton, the 88-year-old sister of Harry Tooze, said the family were still tortured by what happened to her brother and sister-in-law.
The pensioner, from Ystrad Rhondda, said she thinks about the pair constantly and finds the reemergence of the case difficult to deal with.
She praised her niece and the couple’s daughter, now Cheryl Jones, for her part in searching for the truth.
“Cheryl has fought so hard to find the murderer. She has kept in touch with the police and hasn’t given them a bit of peace,” she said.
“Her parents would be so proud of her.”
But in July 2013, 20 years after the horrific murder, there was still no new development.
Jonathan’s father, Graham, told Wales on Sunday the ordeal had affected Cheryl massively.
“At the time, there was so much stress on Cheryl, she finds it hard to talk about it,” he said.
“It’s affected her health and made her an invalid for life.”
Graham said it was the stress she was under that caused Cheryl to suffer a rare condition during her pregnancy that saw the cartilage between the bones in her body waste away, leaving her “literally a bag of bones”.
After the birth of her son, that cartilage recovered but not throughout her body, and she now has difficulty walking without support.
The rare condition also meant Cheryl partially lost her hearing, meaning she now has to rely on a hearing aid.
And she is not the only member of the family who has been affected.
Graham, who helped the couple in their campaign for justice, said Jonathan – who never received any compensation for his year in jail – had “never got over” his incarceration.
He said: “I brought the children up to believe that the police were reliable and he has found out different, and that has shaken the base of his upbringing to some extent.
“He hasn’t said so, but I can feel it. He tends to question the beliefs that I have from time to time, which he wouldn’t have done before.”
Graham said the “sense of total disbelief that this could happen in this country” is still with the family, over two decades on.
He said: “We have always called for this to be investigated by an outside force because there are too many questions, too many mistakes made by South Wales Police.”
He added: “Jonathan and Harry were like father and son. Harry and Megan both thought the world of Jonathan and he did of them.”
The case remains one of Wales’ most notorious unsolved murders.
A spokesman for South Wales Police said: “All historic murder cases, often referred to in the media as ‘cold cases’, are allocated to the Specialist Crime Review Unit and remain under active consideration and will be subject of re-investigation as and when new information is received or when there are advances in forensic science.
“Each case is reviewed periodically. If information comes in from the public or other forces we act on it.
“South Wales Police has had considerable success with cold case reviews, being one of the first forces in the country to set up a review team in 1999 to conduct cold case reviews.
“For the past 14 years South Wales Police has hosted the annual National Review Officers Conference and been instrumental in producing and delivering national review officer training and writing the national review guidance for UK and European police colleagues.”