A web of lies, scams and a fictional story about a Mossad hit overseas are at
the center of a murder indictment police and prosecutors plan to present on
Monday against Shimon Cooper.
Prosecutors say the 51-yearold Cooper was a
serial con man who seduced and married his third wife, Jenny Cooper, before
murdering her in August 2009. Police are also still probing if Cooper
orchestrated the death of his first wife, Orit Coopershmidt, who also died in
very similar circumstances in January 1994. He is also believed to have tried to
kill his second wife using the same methods.
In late October, police
arrested Cooper on suspicion of orchestrating the murder of two of his ex-wives.
Anesthesiologist Dr. Mariah Zakotsky, an accomplice and alleged lover of
Cooper’s, was also arrested, and is suspected of providing Cooper with
tranquilizers which he used to kill his ex-wife.
On Sunday, the court
lifted the gag order on the investigation, allowing the publication of details
of a case that appears to more closely resemble a movie script than a murder
indictment.
Cooper had long told his ex-wife, Jenny, that he worked in a
top secret capacity for the Israeli security establishment, as a cover for the
times he’d disappear for days at a time. According to police, during the
investigation Zakotsky admitted that Cooper pulled the same ruse with her, and
that she supplied him with tranquilizers after he told her he needed them to
carry out an assassination for the Mossad in an undisclosed location outside
Israel.
Cmdr. Bentzi Sao of the central Israel branch of the special
“YAMAR” investigative unit said Sunday that the investigation against Cooper “is
one of the more complicated that police have dealt with recently, dealing with
events that took place years ago and were closed by investigators.”
Sao
denied that the case was reopened due to pressure from Jenny Cooper’s
family.
In March 2010, Cooper was the subject of a 30-minute segment on
the investigative news program Uvda, which detailed the mysterious circumstances
which lead to the deaths of Cooper’s ex-wives.
The program appeared to
infer that Cooper murdered his two ex-wives in order to inherit their property,
and in both cases wove the same web of lies about his classified work with the
Israel security establishment and portrayed both wives as suffering from severe
depression up until their sudden deaths.