BULLSEYE star Tony Green has died aged 85 – but his career once took an extraordinary turn when he came face to face with a serial killer.
Green, who passed away on Monday following a long battle with Alzheimer’s, commentated on the ITV darts show from 1982 to 1995.
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But it was on a May 1989 episode of the show when a Welshman named John Cooper took to the oche as a contestant.
Skilled with a flechette, he spoke of the beauty of the Welsh coastline, and told presenter Jim Bowen of his love of scuba-diving.
But despite his seemingly ordinary facade, John Cooper was a double murderer who would go on to kill again just weeks later.
Four years prior to filming, Cooper stormed Scoveston Manor in Pembrokeshire and killed siblings Richard and Helen Thomas.
He then burned down the remote three-storey property leaving police to discover the siblings’ charred remains.
Just a month after filming Bullseye, Peter and Gwenda Dixon, holidaying in Pembrokeshire, were due to take their last walk along the coastal path.
They were ambushed by Cooper, carrying a sawn-off shotgun, who tied them up and demanded their bank details.
After stealing £300 from Peter he blasted the couple in the face at point blank range and fled.
Their bodies were found in undergrowth.
Chillingly, Cooper had spoken of the spot where he would kill the Dixons during his appearance on Bullseye.
This hint would prove vital when police re-visited the Dixons’ murders in 2005.
It is not believed Tony Green – the commentator on Bullseye – was involved in the police investigation.
Nearly a decade would pass since Cooper’s TV appearance before he was jailed in 1998 for 14 years for robbery and burglary.
Cooper – who committed thirty robberies and violent assaults and once held a group of teenagers at gun point – was released in 2009.
But it was only thanks to advancements in forensic science that linked his DNA to a shotgun used in his four murders.
He was convicted on May 26, 2011 for the four murders, and sexual assaults and given four life sentences without parole – meaning he will never be released.
Cooper would later earn the grim moniker “The Bullseye Killer”.
Now 79, Cooper may have killed five others in Wales but he has never been convicted.
Read more on the Scottish Sun
The story of how police finally tracked down Cooper, a former farm labourer dubbed the “Bullseye Killer” — was told in an ITV’s The Pembrokeshire Murders drama, which aired in 2021.
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