On May 28, 1989, John William Cooper appeared as a contestant on the British game show Bullseye, three years after murdering two people with a shotgun in Wales. “You’ve got an unusual hobby, John, haven’t you?” host Jim Bowen asked him at one point. “Oh yes, the scuba diving,” Cooper replied, adding that the coastline in Pembrokeshire (his hometown) was a good place to pursue his favorite pastime. What nobody knew then, however, was that the very place he described during that exchange would be where his next victims would lose their lives.
One month later, Cooper shot and killed Peter and Gwenda Dixon on the Pembrokeshire Coast Path. He also made off with Peter’s credit card, which he was seen using within hours of the murders. An artist’s impression of what Cooper looked like ended up on wanted posters that were hung all over town, but the case remained unsolved for decades. That is, until the police, who grew to suspect Cooper as time went on, discovered that he’d been on Bullseye.
A Serial Killer Appeared on a Game Show, and the Footage Helped Police Catch Him Decades Later
“Watching the Bullseye sequence through, Jonathan [Hill, ITV presenter] then stopped the tape at the moment when Cooper adopted a similar pose [to the man in the police sketch],” retired chief superintendent Steve Wilkins recalled in 2013. “The images were then put side by side with the help of a graphic artist who pasted the still images next to one another on the screen,” he continued. “In my 30 years service I had seen many artist’s impressions and photo-fit efforts, but I had never seen as close a match as this.”
Thanks to his Bullseye appearance and advances in forensic science, Cooper was convicted of the two double murders and sentenced to life in prison on May 26, 2011. In addition to that, he was found guilty of raping and sexually assaulting two teenage girls in 1996. At the trial, Justice John Griffith Williams called Cooper “a very dangerous man” and “highly predatory.” He went on to say, “The murders were of such evil wickedness that the mandatory sentence of life will mean just that.”
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