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