Joseph Kappen now and evil crimes of Steeltown Murders' Saturday Night Strangler
A new four-part BBC drama tells the story of how serial killer Joseph Kappen got away with the chilling murders of three teenage girls in Port Talbot for almost three decades.
Steeltown Murders, which launches tonight at 9pm, follows the killings of Sandra Newton and friends Geraldine Hughes and Pauline Floyd - who were all strangled to death after trying to hitchhike their way home from nights out.
The murders sent shockwaves around the nearby towns of Swansea, with young women too afraid to leave home at night.
But despite the biggest murder hunt the country had seen, the killer remained at large for years.
It wasn't until new pioneering DNA evidence almost 30 years later, in the first case of its kind, that the mystery was solved, with Kappen identified as the killer.
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So what happened to the dad-of-three? Here is the real story of the Steeltown Murders...
Murder victim Geraldine Hughes (Mirrorpix)
...and Pauline Floyd (Mirrorpix)In July 1973, Sandra Newton, 16, had been out with her boyfriend in the town of Briton Ferry.
But she disappeared on her five-mile walk home and was found dead two days later, with her body stuffed into a culvert.
The young woman had been hit over the head and strangled with her own skirt.
Just two months later, friends Geraldine Hughes and Pauline Floyd, both aged 16, were also found dead after hitchhiking home from a party in Swansea.
Their bodies were discovered in woodland in Llandarcy - just seven miles from where Sandra's body was discovered.
The girls had been beaten, raped, and also strangled to death.
Witnesses saw the girls getting into a Morris 1100 that was being driven by a man who was described to be between 30 to 35-years-old, with a moustache and bushy hair.
There was a team of around 150 officers questioning around 35,000 people who fitted the loose description of the person last seen with the two best friends.
Kappen was even questioned by police at the time, but had an alibi from his wife.
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Kappen had a fake alibi when the murders took place (BBC/Severn Screen/Tom Jackson)He'd also said his car, the exact model the witnesses saw, had broken down on the night of the murders.
It wasn't until 2000 that the separate cases were linked when South Wales Police began to reopen cold cases with a new crime-solving tool using DNA matching.
There were semen stains on Geraldine and Pauline's clothing that matched the same man, but the man in question wasn't on the new DNA database.
A year into the newly established Operation Magnum inquiry, it was then discovered that tests ran on Sandra's underwear showed DNA present from the unknown male also - this pieced together that the same man was responsible for the three murders.
Scientists ended up with a printout of several thousand DNA profiles to see if there were any children of the offender in the database.
"This was a ground breaking technique, the first time it's ever been done in the UK and possibly the world - and from there, the new investigative tool now known as familial DNA was developed," Dr Dark, whose team worked through the DNA database, told the BBC.
Gareth John Bale as DC Geraint Bale, Philip Glenister as DCI Paul Bethell and Steffan Rhodri as Phil Bach Rees (TomJackson)They came up with a shortlist of 500 men where they then looked for the previous description, if they owned that particular car model, and previous convictions of sexual assault.
Paul Kappen, who was on the database after committing car theft offences in and around the area, stood out.
Although he was just seven at the time of the crimes, therefore was immediately ruled out.
But for his father, it was another story.
Detectives had known the dad to be a 'thug', with a history of domestic violence and had been to prison on a number of occasions.
Despite previously providing an alibi, thanks to his son's DNA proving he was a 50 per cent match of the killer's DNA, Joseph became prime suspect.
However, when they went to take a swab from Joe, a former nightclub bouncer and part-time bus driver, at his address, they found he had already passed away.
He died of lung cancer 11 years earlier in 1990, at the age of 48.
Scientists were still determined to give closure to the victims' families and swabbed Kappen's ex-wife and daughter, which made up two-thirds of the profile.
Extraordinarily, the Home Secretary then gave the green light to exhume his body in 2002.
After almost three decades, a DNA examination proved that Kappen was the killer of all three girls.
Steeltown Murders starts tonight on BBC One at 9pm.
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