Missing Date: 10/01/1993
Age: 49 at disappearance, would be 78
Location: Mitcham
Bernadette Cooper, from Monoghan, Ireland, made a phone call from a pub in Tooting before going missing. She owned an Irish pub in Spain, which she had to close in 1992 due to the Spanish recession. After that, she returned to the UK to gather funds. Her last phone before disappearing was to the Irish Bar Owners Association in Malaga where she allegedly said: “I’ve got the money”. There is limited information on her disappearance timeline since due to some familial issues, her family decided to let Bernadette “cool down and planned to speak to her when she had settled back in Spain”, according to Locate International. A year after, Bernadette’s sisters flew to Spain but were unable to find any trace of her. They realised someone took over her bar and that “all of her belongings were gathering dust stored away at the bar.” Her own nephew, Leon Moore, started his own investigation into her disappearance almost 30 years later. Her family received several tips regarding sightings of her in the first few years after they started their search. Her nephew said: “The family thought she must’ve taken a U-turn and chosen a different kind of life. We started to get phone calls stating she was working at such and such a place.” But he said that while they “chased down all of those, night after night staking out places and waiting for her to turn up,” she never did. He now thinks “there was a different aspect to those calls.” He suspects ties to organised crime. HB