Sameena Imam: the “secret” relationship, the Leicester allotment grave, and the evidence that convicted the Cooper brothers

KRIS CALVERT
4 days ago
9 min read

Sameena Imam was a 34‑year‑old regional marketing manager for Costco who lived in Cardiff and worked across several UK warehouses, including Coventry, Bristol, Southampton, and Cardiff. She had been in a two‑year affair with Coventry Costco manager Roger Cooper, who was living with a long‑term partner while also involved with a second colleague, leaving Sameena effectively one of three simultaneous relationships. Roger’s younger brother David Cooper, an ex‑soldier living in Leicester, owned the house and nearby allotment that would become central to the murder and disposal.

The Plot and Christmas Eve killing

By late 2014, Sameena was pressing Roger for a decision, issuing an ultimatum that he leave his long‑term partner and be with her by Christmas or the affair would be exposed. Prosecutors later argued that Roger resolved this not by ending the affair or leaving his partner, but by planning to “take her out of his life” entirely, spending at least a month preparing to kill her with David’s help. The brothers bought chloroform and a strange mix of toxic metals, identified a shallow grave on David’s Leicester allotment, and communicated logistics in text messages using a Star Wars‑style code and phrases like “Death Star complete” and “stay on target.”

On 24 December 2014, Roger arranged for Sameena to meet him, and she travelled expecting a romantic Christmas rendezvous with the man she believed was about to choose her. Instead, Roger drove her to David’s Leicester home, where investigators believe that between about 5:07 pm and 6:26 pm she was overpowered—both brothers were more than 6 ft 5 in tall, while she was 5 ft 2 in—and then killed on a sofa using chloroform, with the prosecution arguing that toxic metals may also have been administered. The brothers then moved to the disposal phase of their plan, transporting her body to the pre‑dug grave on David’s allotment, a site whose shed bore the grim sign: “Don’t wind me up… I’m running out of places to hide the bodies.”

Disposal and the missing‑person inquiry

Sameena’s family in Essex reported her missing when she failed to return home for Christmas, prompting a major police inquiry spanning South Wales, the Midlands, and the East Midlands. Early on, detectives focused on Roger because he was the last known person to have arranged to meet her, and ANPR (automatic number plate recognition) hits showed vehicles linked to the brothers travelling repeatedly between Coventry and Leicester in the days around the disappearance. A bottle of Bellini that Sameena bought in Coventry on Christmas Eve—a detail captured on CCTV and used to track her final movements—was later found in David’s fridge, tying his Leicester address directly into the last leg of her journey.

The search eventually concentrated on David’s allotment after investigators pieced together the movements of the brothers, cell‑site data, and the evidence that a grave‑like depression had been prepared in advance. In January 2015, about two weeks after the killing, police recovered Sameena’s body from a shallow grave on that allotment in Leicester, confirming that this was no disappearance or kidnap, but a carefully planned murder.

Police interviews and confessions

During their interviews, both brothers gave changing accounts that the prosecution later used as evidence of consciousness of guilt. David Cooper initially admitted in a recorded interview that chloroform had been used “to shut her up,” acknowledging his role in incapacitating Sameena, before later attempting to retract that admission and minimize his involvement. Roger Cooper, for his part, first suggested Sameena’s death was an accident and then shifted again, claiming he had merely discovered her body after being asked to move a car, trying to frame himself as a horrified bystander to events engineered by someone else.

Investigators countered those stories with the brothers’ own digital trail: text messages in Star Wars‑coded language that mapped onto known steps in the plot, including an earlier aborted attempt around 11 December when Sameena arrived by taxi at a Solihull hotel, apparently scuppering a plan that depended on her arriving by car. The pattern of messages—references like “You are expected Vader” and celebratory phrases after key movements—helped the jury see the killing as the end point of an ongoing conspiracy rather than a sudden loss of control.

Trial, verdicts, and sentences

Roger and David Cooper were tried together at Birmingham Crown Court in 2015, in a case that ran for around eight weeks and combined digital forensics, toxicology, and more traditional physical evidence from house, car, and allotment. Jurors heard how Roger had been “juggling” three women, how Sameena’s ultimatum threatened to implode his domestic setup and professional position, and how the brothers’ size and military experience (in David’s case) contrasted brutally with Sameena’s vulnerability. The prosecution characterized them as cold and calculating, pointing to the foresight involved in sourcing chloroform and metals, choosing a burial site, and using coded communications.

In October 2015, the jury unanimously convicted both men of Sameena Imam’s murder, rejecting their attempts to recast the killing as accidental or to distance themselves from the physical act. The following day, the judge sentenced Roger Cooper, then 41, and David Cooper, then 39, to life imprisonment with a minimum term of 30 years each, emphasizing the premeditation, the abuse of trust within a romantic relationship, and the callous disposal of Sameena’s body on a family allotment. For UK true‑crime history, the case stands out as a chilling example of an office affair turned lethal, meticulously plotted in the run‑up to Christmas, and cracked open through the combination of digital breadcrumbs and the brothers’ own words on tape.

Sources used for this podcast:

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