Real mysteries are rare, but there are occasions when ordinary life is violated by an incident which is so bizarre and so unexpected that even when time has passed and all the little fragments of fact have been swept up and fitted together, the truth still defies the most ingenious imagination. And it is invariably the most ordinary of lives which produce the most baffling mysteries.
Peter and Gwenda Dixon lived peacefully in the rural suburbia of Witney in Oxfordshire. They read the Daily Express. They had two grown-up children, Timothy and Julie. They had steady jobs, old friends, Peter liked running, Gwenda played badminton, they drove a red Ford Sierra; they were, as Peter’s brother, Keith, once put it, “everything you’d expect of an everyday English family” and one sunny day, as they were walking on a footpath in Pembrokeshire where they had walked every summer holiday for 15 years, they were shot to death.
Monday (June 29) marks the third anniversary of their murder, three years since Welsh police first started beating the bushes along the footpath that runs over the cliffs of St Bride’s Bay. If Peter and Gwenda Dixon had been seized and murdered in a grimey inner city, the inquiry might have faded sooner, but in South West Wales, murder – particularly unsolved murder – is a most unusual event, and the Dyfed-Powis detectives have gone to extraordinary lengths to find a solution. Their inquiry has now become one of the biggest ever conducted in Britain into a single crime.
They have knocked on every door within ten miles of the murder, traced witnesses all over Britain and Western Europe, taken 6,000 formal statements, broken the record for the most phone calls ever provoked by a BBC Crimewatch programme, followed up every conceivable lead – strange divers in the bay, a cow’s ear in a photograph, signatures in a Church visitors book, a snatch of conversation overheard by a radio ham – and tested theories which began with robbery and which have ended unexpectedly and tantalisingly in a smuggler’s bay, with the Provisional IRA. Yet, in spite of all the clues and all the glimpses of the truth, it remains a mystery.
Peter and Gwenda Dixon were last seen alive on the morning of Thursday June 29 1989, when they zipped up their pea-green canopy tent, locked the red Ford Sierra, and walked away from the camp site at Howelston Farm where they had spent the last ten days, down through the big field where the caravans are parked, past the toilets in the corner and out along Strawberry Hill. Peter, aged 51, was carrying his binoculars and his camera. Gwenda, aged 52, had a little rucksack on her back. A couple of hundred yards along the lane, they veered to the right, climbed a stile and set off along the footpath with the grass fields sloping up to their left and the seagulls swooping over St Bride’s Bay far down to their right.
When they were found by police dogs six days later, on Wednesday July 5, they were lying face-down under a thick umbrella of bushes and hazel trees some twenty feet down the cliff side. Peter’s hands were tied behind his back. Gwenda was naked from the waist down. They had been shot in the chest and head. Their belongings and Gwenda’s clothes had been thrown further down the slope.
The police sent the bodies for post-mortem and tried immediately to identify everyone in the area, in the hope that the killer was still there. The next morning, the pathologist reported that the Dixons had been killed with a shotgun and that they had probably died on the day they disappeared. A zoologist who examined insects which had nested in the bodies confirmed the timing. It was bad news: the killer had a six-day start.
The police combed through the fox gloves and late bluebells on the cliff, abseiling down the rock face, searching, in particular, for the murder weapon. They found none. The killer had taken great care to conceal the bodies, reinforcing the thick undergrowth by jamming broken saplings into the ground and weaving them together with overhanging branches to form a man-made screen. They removed all this handiwork, hoping that it might disclose fibres or particles from the killer’s clothes, some clue about the knife that was used, some special technique in the screen’s construction. There was nothing. They analysed the rope around Peter Dixon’s wrists. It was sail cord, probably from Spain or Portugal and likely to have been washed up on the shore. It led nowhere.
They started knocking on doors, distributing posters, patrolling beaches in an attempt to trace and interview the estimated 400 families who had been holidaying in the area on the day of the murder. They collected half-remembered scraps of names, followed them through Irish ferry tickets, Church visitors books, raffle entrants, gathering more details, which they then dispersed through appeals in regional newspapers and hiking magazines and through other police forces in Britain and the rest of the world. It was a long haul, with the added burden of not knowing who they were looking for.
Blood stains made it clear that the Dixons had been killed where they were found. But what had they been doing down there? It was possible that for some reason they had scrambled down the slope on their own, but unlikely since it was so heavily overgrown. It seemed more probable that they had been confronted on the path and forced down there. Why?
They seemed to have been picked at random. No-one at the camp site had seen them being followed, and the killer could not have been waiting for them on the footpath since they had decided to go walking only on the spur of the moment. So, why had they been picked? Was it a sex attack, as the partial stripping suggested? If it was, it seemed strange to pick a couple in their 50s instead of a young woman on her own, and, more important, there was, according to the pathologist, no physical evidence of any sexual attack at all. Was it a robbery? Peter’s wallet was missing, but it was a strange thief who killed two people and then turned his back on valuables like the binoculars, the camera and both their watches.
In the absence of a motive, there was at least one lead, which promised at first to take them straight to the killer. The lead had emerged just before the Dixon’s bodies were found, during the six days when they were simply missing and police had contacted their bank, the National Westminster, in case they had gone on an impromptu trip which could be traced through their spending.
On the same day that the bodies were found, the bank reported that since their disappearance, Peter Dixon’s credit card had been used four times in cash machines in Pembrokeshire, twice on the afternoon of the Thursday they vanished and then again on the Friday and Saturday – all times when, the police now knew, they were already dead. Whoever used the card knew Peter Dixon’s Personal Identification Number. Since the number was not written down anywhere, it had to have been extracted from him under duress. It followed that the card had not simply been picked up by a passer-by: it was being used by the killer or by someone close to him. The police waited and watched, hoping that the killer would use the card again and, while they waited, they had some luck.
A man in Haverfordwest heard about the operation from a friend in the police, who told him that the card had been used at 7.15 on the Saturday morning at the National Westminster in the town centre. This man realised he had driven past the bank at 7.15 that morning (he was sure of the time, because he had been up all night listening to a radio broadcast of a rugby match in Australia) and he automatically looked at the bank as he drove by because his girlfriend worked there, and he remembered seeing a stranger using the cash machine, and he was such an odd looking character – scruffy and wheeling an old-fashioned black bicycle – that he still had a clear mental image of him.
The police produced an artist’s impression, slipped more money into Peter Dixon’s account and waited, but the card was never used again. They swarmed through every camp site in the area as well as every shop that hired or repaired bicycles, but no-one remembered him. They went public, distributing the artist’s impression through the national press and combing the area for sightings. All they needed was a name, or even an accent.
On the afternoon of the murder, they found he had been hanging around in the middle of Pembroke for three or four hours, so conspicuously that he might have been deliberately attracting attention, but no-one had spoken to him. They asked holiday makers to send in photographs they had taken in Pembroke that day, but no-one had caught him with a camera. They tried to find where he had slept, eaten, shopped. But no-one could help. Did that mean he had been lying low? Perhaps he was on the run. Police checked with the criminal records office in Cardiff, who swept their files but found no-one to fit the description.
Somone reported a similar man with a bike leaving the area some days earlier on a train from Haverfordwest. Detectives patrolled the train, asking if anyone remembered him. Someone told them that a scruffy man with a bike had had a row with the guard because he had been over-charged and he demanded a refund. They checked British Rail records of refunds. They found the name and address of the man who had had the row. It was in Reading. They went to see him, but it was not their suspect, and he had got onto the train in Swansea, not Haverfordwest.
They found a woman in a village near St Bride’s Bay who had seen the suspect on the day before the murder – and he had been with another man, a young chap with fair hair. She had seen them several times walking along the road and then she had seen the fair-haired man alone, as if the suspect had turned off and left him. The most likely turning would have taken the suspect down towards Peter and Gwenda Dixon. The fair-haired man was now a vital lead. He had talked to the killer but was probably nothing to do with the crime, an ideal source. But who was he?
The police went to BBC Crimewatch, appealed for sightings, took a record 380 calls before midnight and nearly 1200 more in the next few days, including one from a lorry driver who thought he had given this man a lift along the M4 to Neath in Wales. He was German, the driver reckoned. They pushed the story in the local press and found a motorist who remembered picking him up from the roundabout near Neath where the lorry had left him. He was indeed German, the motorist said, and he was a teacher from somewhere near Stuttgart. The police contacted all the youth hostels in the area, drew up a shortlist of young male Germans from the Stuttgart area, contacted Interpol, the German Youth Hostel Association, and 50 different media outlets in Germany, and finally traced their man. But he had not met a scruffy stranger on an old-fashioned bike. He knew nothing.
The police wondered whether in the ten days they had spent in Wales, the Dixons had met someone who had turned against them. They developed the roll of film in Peter’s camera and used it to reconstruct their holiday, even blowing up a picture of a Hereford cow so that they could read the number on its ear tag and establish its whereabouts.
A farmer said the Dixons had asked permission to drive across his fields to reach an old airfield where they were due to meet someone. But who? The man in the artist’s impression had been sighted on the airfield. Could they have met? The police knew Peter Dixon was a keen radio ham, with a powerful mobile radio in his car, so they contacted local hams. Most said they had not heard him, but two fishermen said they had heard a well-spoken man from Oxford talking to someone called “Tom” and arranging to meet him. Was “Tom” the man in the artist’s impression? The police contacted 17 different societies and magazines for radio hams, in search of him. But no-one knew him, and the fishermen were none too sure of what they had heard, and it was possible that the farmer had never spoken to the Dixons, that it was a completely different couple who had driven across his fields. The lead disintegrated.
Detectives often say that if you haven’t cracked a murder after six weeks, the chances are that you will never crack it. After four months, Dyfed-Powis police were still working, wondering whether they would ever get a break, when, late in October, they came upon a new and entirely unexpected clue.
Two workmen who were mending a wooden sign on the coastal path found a handful of wires and switches in the soil. They pocketed them and, after thinking about it for a couple of days, took them to the police, who shared their suspicions, dug round the sign and unearthed the components of ten booby-trap car bombs and a collection of timers. It was an IRA arms dump. Detectives checked the bulging Dixon database: at this same spot, someone earlier had found an empty haversack which now turned out to contain plywood particles which were also present on the buried explosives. The haversack had been found on September 24 – two days after the bombing of Deal barracks in Kent. It looked as though the IRA, fearful of police activity, had been hiding evidence.
The police organised a wider search and came across a birdwatcher who told them that he had noticed a patch of freshly dug soil near-by. He guided them to the spot, where they dug and discovered a much bigger buried hoard of five handguns, three rifles, a shotgun, five grenades and forty kilos of high explosive. It was now clear that the area was being used by a mainland IRA unit, probably smuggling arms across the Irish Sea.
Teamed up with the Anti Terrorist Squad from London, they hid and watched the site for eight freezing weeks until one dark night, just before Christmas, two Irishmen, one carrying a pump-action shotgun, approached and started digging. The police sprang their trap, one shot was fired, the two men were arrested. They were charged with conspiracy to cause explosions. But did they also know something about the murder of Peter and Gwenda Dixon?
There were several reasons to doubt it. Would the IRA strip a victim from the waist down? Would the IRA hang around the area of a murder for at least three days using a victim’s credit card? It seemed most unlikely. But then again, if the IRA had executed two unwanted witnesses, they might have tried to lay a false trail, which could have included hanging around the centre of Pembroke in such a conspicuous fashion. And, after all, the signs of both sex and robbery were so weak as to be more consistent with a false trail than with a real crime.
It was at least possible that on June 29, IRA men had been working on the cliffs of St Bride’s Bay, preparing an arms run, and had been disturbed by the Dixons. Perhaps they had been alarmed at Peter Dixon scanning the bay with his binoculars. Detectives reasoned that the beach nearest to the cache would have been deemed unsuitable for landing smuggled arms because it was too shallow and too exposed. There was, however, an ideal bay, deep and sheltered with a little landing stage that was hardly ever used, six miles down the coast, right at the foot of the cliff where the Dixons were murdered.
The theory seemed to fit with a clue which had always puzzled detectives. A group of workmen had reported that on the day of the murder, they had seen a group of frogmen in St Bride’s Bay, diving from a small, yellow fibreglass boat with an outboard motor. The point that worried police was that they found that the bay floor was quite unsuitable for pleasure diving. It was never used by divers, and numerous appeals failed to trace the strange frogmen.
Dyfed-Powis detectives who had been positively vetted followed the trail to Scotland Yard and then to Belfast and Dublin. They found that both IRA men were known to the intelligence collators, that they had applied for phoney papers in September of the previous year, that they had visited the mainland as early as March of the current year, and that during the autumn, they had stayed at a holiday chalet near the arms dumps. But they could not tie down their movements in June. Nor could they link them to the man in the artist’s impression. If he was an associate, the intelligence services were unable to identify him.
Finally, a year later, when the two IRA men had been tried and jailed for 30 years, Dyfed-Powis detectives travelled to Parkhurst Prison on the Isle of Wight and Full Sutton Prison in Yorkshire to ask them directly. The two men refused to help. The arms cache joined the sex attack and the robbery as theories which might be true but could not be proved.
Three years on, the detectives in Dyfed-Powis have still not admitted defeat. The incident room is still manned and they follow up regular calls from other forces who have come across likely suspects. Yesterday (Friday June 26), they held a press conference appealing once more for information about the man in the artist’s impression, his fair-headed friend and the strange divers in the bay. Unless they get answers, the lonely death of Peter and Gwenda Dixon may always be a mystery.
