Clifftop Murders

I've been scouring for info on John Cooper, the man who was sentenced yesterday for murdering Peter and Gwenda Dixon on a Pembrokeshire coastal path in 1989, plus two other murders, a rape and dozens of burglaries, because I think I and my wife Tracey (long before we married) had a narrow scrape with him later that summer and on a different stretch of the same path. We've seen loads of pictures and footage of him now, and we both think it was Cooper who accosted us.

We'd already booked ourselves a holiday cottage for a week in late July or early August somewhere near Haverforwest when the Dixon killings had happened, and we joked about how would no doubt get murdered ourselves. People are often  panicky about things happening to them just because something bad happened to someone else in the same place. It borders on superstitiousness. We like to think of ourselves as robust rationalists.

Near the end of our week, we took a long, sunny walk along the coast path (Yesterday I tried to work out where we were, but I just can't remember any more. It was 22 years ago, but I don't think it was the same stretch as where the Dixons were killed). It was a little bit unsettling that hardly anyone else was out walking that day. People had perhaps been put off. But late in the afternoon, we noticed a bloke about half a mile ahead of us, walking generally in the same direction, but occasionally scrambling up into the undergrowth then scrambling back down again. It's hard to say why, but it looked odd, and we talked about him as we walked, trying to work out what he was up to. Whatever he was doing, it was very energetic activity. He also kept stopping and looking back towards us. We were a bit spooked, not least because this “Have You Seen This Man?” identikit picture was to be seen all over West Wales that week.

 I suppose we were gradually catching up with him when he just disappeared. But about 15 minutes later, we rounded a corner on a narrow bit of path right by a steep cliff edge and there he was, right in our way. He was about the same height as me or maybe a tad shorter, about 45, looking like a PE teacher and quite fit. He had quite big shoulders and beardy stubble. I remember thinking his face was a bit like Werner Herzog’s, but with a much lower hairline. I'm a premature baldy, so I notice these things.

A few years later, I might have thought he looked a bit like a younger, fitter version of  Father Stone from Father Ted. 

He was wearing a classic navy (or maybe black) eighties tracksuit with white stripes and a white T-shirt and had a white plastic stopwatch on a bit of string round his neck. He seemed excited and urgently wanted us to know that he had "seen a big fish”. At the time, I thought he had a German accent, and maybe he had, but the accent in that bit of Wales is quite odd, almost Irish. He tried to persuade me to look over the cliff edge. I glanced, but didn't go too near. He told me to move closer to the edge and look straight down. "There, there! Near the rocks! Down there!". I could see waves crashing into the rocks and that there was obviously no big fish, so I decided not to look any more. He tried to insist. He held my elbow for a moment. Tracey and and I were both pretty scared by then. I said as calmly and smoothly as I could that we had to be off, and we turned and walked away, gathering speed. I remember being both relieved and surprised that we were able to get away at all, let alone so easily. The whole encounter must have been no more than 40-60 seconds. We glanced back a couple of times as we walked away, and then the last time we looked back, he was gone.

We alternated walking fast and running for about a mile and a half until we got to a road with a few houses. Just as we got there, a little red car (a Renault?) that had been parked on a dirt road just above the path gunned its engine and shot off, kicking out a plume of grit and dust and roaring off up the road at speed. We saw a phone box and called the police. They took our details, no doubt added them to the list of  hysterical calls from spooked people, and we heard no more.

Out of the blue, over a year later, the police got in touch and arranged to interview us separately in our local London nick. They questioned us for about an hour and took statements, which we signed. We expected that maybe an arrest was imminent. Then we heard nothing until Cooper's trial about 20 years later.

Yesterday I saw video footage of Cooper when he was arrested for burglary in 1998, 9 years after our clifftop encounter, and we both think it's the same bloke, and what’s more, he’s wearing exactly the same clothes: white T-shirt and 80s Adidas-style trackie. He had gone almost completely grey, whereas the man we’d met 9 years earlier had dark brown hair. 

My doubts are:

1. He sounded German to me. I remember thinking that I wouldn’t do my usual thing of trying to impress and surprise German tourists with my fluent German, not only because I didn't want to stay longer than necessary, but because I didn't want to make him have to kill us for knowing too much.

2. His hair colour was darker than in the footage of him in Bullseye (yes, he was a contestant on Bullseye, a month before he murdered the Dixons), where there seems to be a lot of grey.

In Bullseye, he looked more like Noel Edmonds, with a bouffant and 'tache. The man we met had shorter hair, more like in the sketch that was on lampposts all over West Wales at the time and in the video of Cooper's 1998 arrest. Tracey thought he’d had a mullet and pony tail, and I thought it was just short, but he was always facing me, while Tracey got more of a side view.

Nowadays he looks more like Paul O’Grady than Noel Edmonds, so at least you can say he’s a consistently evil-looking bastard.

The police have said he is a devious and manipulative man, so it could be that he deliberately scared us to misdirect the police. The police, we discovered later, had been looking for a German student, and in fact went to Stuttgart to interview a several men from a group who had been in West Wales on a hostelling holiday. It might explain why he didn’t just rape, rob and shoot us. Or maybe we were just lucky and he didn't get enough of a chance.

I'm still mystified. But his face is dead right, his behaviour was difficult to account for innocently, and that track suit seems to be a clincher.

Some things I'd like to know from the police that they could tell me, but don't know if I'm allowed to ask. Where did our police statements fit in with the overall enquiry? Did Cooper have a red car at the time? Was his hair short and dark in late July/Early August 1989? Is it possibly to ask for copies of our statements? Our memories were a lot fresher then.

I know this may read like a hysterical attempt to be part of a Big Drama, but if you think you might accidentally have walked on thin ice over a deep lake, maybe you'd feel the need to tell someone too.


R

No Pressure

Richard Curtis has written a short film for an eco-movement called 10:10. Its aim is to encourage us to come up with little ways to shrink our carbon footprints by 10%. I was sent a link to it by my best friend. He's in it, he did it for free and he was great. He added a note that it was controversial, so I was braced for a frisson and was sort of looking forward to seeing it.

If you haven’t seen it, here’s the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSTLDel-G9k If you can't find it, here's a breakdown of how it works:

The film starts in a secondary school classroom. A cute, hippy-dippy teacher – the cuddly, ditzy librarian type that’s demonstrably Curtis’s – is asking her class to think about various ways they and their families could reduce their carbon footprints by 10%, thus saving the planet. One of the kids says she's going to start cycling to school, and the teacher congratulates her. Wrapping up, and as an apparent afterthought, she asks her class for a show of hands to see who's keen to participate. All but two of the class put their hands up. Those two look sheepish and embarrassed. The teacher singles them out with a passive-aggressive “Oh well, that’s your choice” sort of dismissal.

At this point you can hear the distant rumble of a punchline. I was assuming this would be the time when all the accumulated goody-two-shoes smugness was going to get punctured. After all, we've been hearing this kind of Blue Peter appeal to use trains more and fly less etc. for years, and it obviously hasn't worked. This time maybe Britain’s top comedy writer (No, I’m not bitter) was going to wake us up and say something to make us act more radically. I was hoping and half expecting the teacher to ask them why they didn’t want to take part, and then that would be the moment when they'd turn the whole thing on its head by explaining why.

I like stories that affirm the bravery of sitting on your hands when all about you are waving theirs and I genuinely thought the build-up of mutual congratulation and sanctimoniousness around these two kids was a subtle set-up for something devastating and funny. I should have realised that Curtis's set-up wasn't a caricature of smugness, it was just plain smugness.

Instead of getting the searing volte-face I was hoping for, we get this: the teacher presses a button and blows the two dissidents up, spattering their screaming classmates with young human mincemeat. I'm assuming, perhaps unfairly, that the controversy has been about the violence and gore, but that's not my objection at all. I can find fictional human explosions hilarious.

My problem with it is that it's lazy and disappointing. I couldn’t help wishing those two kids had had a chance to speak, and that we'd suddenly find ourselves taking their side. I'd been seeing them as victims of some insidious Jean Brody-style bullying, and I wanted them to have the last laugh.

My fantasy is this: one of the refuseniks explains that he doesn’t have to play this silly little game because he’s poor. His parents can't stop driving him to school because they haven't got a car and he can't stop flying abroad for holidays because they don't have holidays. I wanted the other one to say that as an only child, her family is already at least twice as green as any other’s in the class no matter how much loft insulation their dads install in their 4 bedroom houses. I wanted one to say that by being too poor to pay a big heating bill, cutting it by 10% might actually have direct personal appeal, but sadly their tiny flat is already freezing, so it’s not an option.

I also fantasised that one of the kids would poke through the fourth wall and tell the shy-looking writer standing behind the cameras that while people with colossal wealth-induced carbon footprints can have a lovely time offsetting their air miles, riding their shiny mountain bikes around their leafy suburbs, knocking 10% of their petrol consumption by regularly checking their tyre pressures and even donating their spare time and talent for good green causes, they are still the villains in the story of what is happening to Planet Earth.

But for exercising their right to remain silent, our two potential heroes were dead before the end of Act 1. Never mind. I thought that as the film progressed, something surprising might unfold to put everything right. The next scene is in a company building where with numbing inevitability, a minority of the office workers get ka-boomed for not enthusing about the boss's 10:10 speech. Lastly we’re at a football training pitch with some Spurs players (real ones, the sort that have 5 luxury cars and 3 homes each) where my mate Phil (Sorry, Phil), detonates David Ginola for not taking enough interest in low-energy floodlights or forcing the fans to turn up on buses - Boom! It’s as if the comedy Rule of Three meant having the Englishman, Irishman and Scotsman saying exactly the same as each other three times over. It’s like a Lou and Andy Highlights Special from the last series of Little Britain.

So what was Curtis trying to say? It starts out looking as if it's a satire on the nasty sort of stunt Saddam Hussein liked to pull on dissenting members of his cabinet, but it turns out it's totally on Saddam's side! It's a plain, unironic advert for eco-fascism.

Is Curtis saying that anyone who doesn’t demonstrate enthusiasm for 10:10’s own particular solution to global warming deserves to be blown up? But what if you think that badgering school kids, office drones and pampered footballers to switch off their 48" widescreen tellies at the mains isn’t going to save the planet? Blow me up if you like, but I think that to save ourselves from catastrophic global warming, we'll need to establish first how big the average human being’s carbon footprint should be, then, armed with that knowledge, try to make sure none of us exceeds it. It would be obvious that you don't have to listen to any sanctimonious green messages from anyone who does exceed it.

So how many cars, homes or air miles is Richard Curtis personally responsible for? I know it seems unfair to ask. I know he’s doing all this hard work for free and out of the goodness of his heart, but I don’t buy into the idea that by leaning on the rest of us to do our bit, he’s already done his. That doesn’t exempt him. Quite the opposite, it means he should aim all the more to be a role model. But I bet you my left nut that his carbon footprint is bigger than mine and most likely yours put together.

I know it’s almost impossible to attribute precise amounts of carbon dioxide to an individual, and a lot of CO2 is created on our collective behalves without our instigation or consent. I don’t know if the Curtis family home is covered in solar panels and heat exchangers or if the Curtis kids (if there are any) are all trained to switch the lights off when they leave the room.

But we can know roughly how green he is, because I think I’ve hit on a practical and reliable way to measure every individual’s carbon footprint. All you have to do is work out how wealthy they are. It’s only a theory, and you might say it’s driven by the politics of envy, but I think there might be something in it.

Mr Curtis is highly successful in show business, which makes him above-averagely wealthy. According to my ecowealth theory, this puts hundreds of tons of CO2 on his conscience. According to my ecowealth theory, the only way to be green is to be poor, and that having lots of dosh makes you a prime gas-guzzler no matter how green your conscience is or how judiciously eco-friendly your consumer choices are. There is almost no way you can wriggle out of it if you have a pile of money. "Aha!" you say. "What about my lovely eco-home?" The problem with rich people going green is that the money they spend so eco-wisely is suddenly no longer theirs to control. You can’t dictate to your builders, plumbers, architects and cleaners whether they spend it on cheap Ryanair flights or locally grown organic carrots. And where did this wealth come from in the first place? Every modern economy is built on abundant, practically free energy available to anyone who can lay their hands on a big drill and enough weapons to guard it. Even if your wealth has come from writing immensely popular sitcoms and films, it came to you from the coal, oil and gas that made the industrial revolution possible. Without it, there would be no technological miracles like television or the extra leisure time, warm homes and security enjoyed by the masses to watch it.

Here in the West, the masses have been preached at by their economic betters for 2,000 years, but the new wealthy ecological evangelists are even more starkly hypocritical than the Christian ones. Celebrity green campaigners, like the traditional Christians, seem to think that being a good person doesn’t count for anything. What counts is to be seen making a difference with their evangelical zeal. But this zeal is palpably not enough to save the planet, nor is it even necessarily relevant. The poor can be as ignorant about the environment as they like, because every single one of them is involuntarily greener than the greenest rich person. But the poor won’t inherit the kingdom of eco-heaven unless there’s one to inherit, and that can only happen if we agree on a carbon emissions ceiling for every individual on earth and we all promise to stay below it.

But to make it happen, we're going to have to elect governments who can enforce it. One potentially brilliant way to decrease carbon dioxide emissions might be to restrict the amount of fossil fuel national governments and corporations are dragging out of the ground. This is because once it's out, it’s sold to the highest bidder and converted into CO2 as quickly as possible. So far we haven’t done very well at limiting CO2 emissions, despite our best efforts, but we stand a much better chance of controlling the availability of the fossil fuel that makes it. If we leave it to individual consumers to use restraint, all that happens is that the price goes down and poorer consumers in poorer countries can afford to buy it instead. They urgently want what we’ve been enjoying for the last couple of centuries, so they’ll be delighted to be given the chance.

If there’s less carbon available to burn, less will be burnt. We’ll all be poorer, but we’ll have to take comfort in the thought that being poorer makes us greener. And if we’re all about as poor as each other, we needn’t starve or envy each other or arm ourselves to the teeth to protect our excess piles of money, and maybe we’ll all be happier for it.

If we can get to that stage, the world might be a fairer and above all cooler place to live in. But if we still find ourselves needing to punish the greedy bastards who spoil it for everyone else, let's gang up on them and stab their smug faces with sharpened eco-friendly sticks… just for a laugh.