Steeltown Murders is the latest dramatisation of a grisly true story on BBC One. And it’s one of the most shocking yet – not least because the killer was never punished.
Like Sherwood before it, the TV show is set in two timelines – 1973 when the murders occurred, and the early 2000s when new advancements in forensics enabled the police force to find the killer.
Steeltown Murders centres on the hunt to catch the killer of three young women in the Port Talbot area. It shows the remarkable story of how – in the first case of its kind – the mystery was solved almost 30 years later using pioneering DNA evidence.
Here’s everything you need to know about the true story behind Steeltown Murders on BBC One.
Is Steeltown Murders a true story?
Steeltown Murders is a four-part drama series based on the real life Llandarcy murders. Set in Port Talbot, South Wales, the story charts the devastating impact of three unsolved murders on a close-knit community over a 30-year period.
As the drama unfolds, viewers will follow two vividly different timelines – 1973 when the murders occurred – and 2002 when DNA yielded the tantalising possibility the killer might finally be brought to justice.
Writer Ed Whitmore, who penned Manhunt on ITV, explains that “ultimately the focus is less on the murders themselves and more on their tragic aftermath – the bereaved families stoically toiling on without justice; the suspects whose lives and marriages have been blighted by suspicion; the detectives tasked with catching the killer serving out their careers in the shadow of failure.”
It took 30 years for police to finally name the serial killer at the heart of the Llandarcy murders.
What are the Llandarcy murders?
In 1973, the dead bodies of two 16-year-old girls were found dumped in Llandarcy woodland in South Wales. Tragically, friends Geraldine Hughes and Pauline Floyd had been raped and strangled on their way home from a disco.
The friends had been dancing at the Top Rank disco, little knowing that they were being watched. To get home to the neighbouring villages of Llandarcy and Skewen – seven miles away – they did what everyone did in those days… They hitchhiked.
Witnesses saw the teenagers getting into a white Austin 1100 on the night they went missing. But, Geraldine and Pauline never made it home.
The next morning, a pensioner walking in a wooded copse near Llandarcy found Pauline’s body lying face down with her boots beside her. Someone had tied a five foot rope around her neck several times and strangled her. Her clothing was heavily bloodstained, and she had been battered about the head.
Geraldine’s body was discovered 50 yards away, also with a head wound. She had been strangled with a five foot rope from behind. Postmortem examinations revealed that the girls – both virgins – had been raped.
Meanwhile, Sandra Newton – also 16 – went missing three months prior. Hitchhiker Sandra was found strangled, her body dumped close to a local disused colliery. Like Geraldine and Pauline, Sandra had been raped and choked to death with the hem of her own skirt.
At first, police suspect Sandra’s married boyfriend John Dilwyn Morgan, but he was not the killer.
Who killed Geraldine Hughes, Pauline Floyd and Sandra Newton?
Nightclub bouncer Joseph Kappen murdered Geraldine Hughes, Pauline Floyd, Sandra Newton.
However, it took police 30 years to discover he was the culprit. By that time, Joseph was dead. Joseph Kappen was never arrested for his crimes, and he died of lung cancer in 1990.
He is known for being the first person ever to be posthumously identified as a serial killer via familial DNA profiling. He was also the first documented serial killer in Welsh history.
Steeltown Murders true story: Who was killer Joseph Kappen?
Joseph Kappen was born on 30 October 1941, and raised in Port Talbot. His parents’ marriage broke up when he was young and he was raised by his stepfather. He was one of seven siblings.
Police became aware of Joseph Kappen from as young as 12, when he started committing petty offences like car theft, petrol theft, burglary and assault. He spent years in and out of prison, and worked as a lorry driver, bus driver, and bouncer.
Joseph Kappen married Christine Powell, 17, in February 1964. He was sent to jail for burglary 10 days after the wedding. Christine then gave birth to a daughter. She later had a son, Paul, who she claimed she conceived after being raped by her husband after his release from prison. She eventually divorced him in 1980.
Christine testified that Joseph Kappen was physically abusive towards her and would rape her every two weeks. He fatally strangled the family dog in front of his son.
Devastatingly, Joseph went on to commit much worse crimes. His confirmed victims were all 16-year-old females whom he lured into his car on Saturday evenings in Briton Ferry and Swansea respectively.
All three were driven to rural locations where they were subsequently raped, then killed by strangulation.
Why did it take so long to catch killer Joseph Kappen?
For decades, the murders of Geraldine Hughes, Pauline Floyd and Sandra Newton remained unsolved. Less than a year after the murders, the police trail had gone cold.
A huge police murder team, with more than 150 detectives, was swiftly assembled, becoming the biggest murder inquiry in Welsh history.
Despite hundreds of officers being involved in the investigation that saw thousands of men interviewed and hundreds of cars examined for evidence, the case went cold.
This was a time when there were no computers. Instead, the murder team relied on a complex manual card index system and a wall-sized white board.
The only lead was the white Austin 1100, but there were more than 11,000 white Austin 1100s at that time. Each owner was visited, asked for a statement, and their alibi verified.
By mid-1974, the murder inquiry had run out of leads, and the killer was still on the loose. Nearly 30 years later – in 2003 – a small team of detectives were tasked with opening the cold case and finding the killer.
Led by DCI Paul Bethell, the team went to unprecedented lengths and used ground-breaking techniques to finally crack the case.
Speaking now, retired Bethell says: “This case would go down in global criminal history for the revolutionary methods used by the South Wales Police. It was a massive moment for us as investigators. We now had a golden opportunity to search for the killer of these girls.”
Steeltown Murders true story: Why did police reopen the case?
Thirty years after the three murders, police were finally able to find the culprit. A breakthrough in DNA fingerprinting helped detectives finally find the killer.
Unsolved murders are never officially closed. When the Llandarcy murder inquiry was wound down, all of the boxes and boxes of statements, and much of the girls’ clothing, was shipped to Sandfields police station in Port Talbot.
It lay there for nearly 30 years. While some of the boxes of statements got damaged, the most valuable forensic material, the girls’ underwear, was retained in dry storerooms at the Home Office’s forensic science labs in Chepstow.
In 1998, a new Low Copy Number DNA test was developed that could utilise just a tiny speck of DNA material. The girls’ clothing, and swabs, were sent to a specialist research lab in Birmingham for testing.
After two years’ work, the scientists could get a partial profile of the killer’s DNA from Geraldine. Although the Saturday Night Strangler wasn’t on the police database, the reinvestigation of the Llandarcy murders was officially opened in January 2000, 27 years after the killings.
How did police discover Joseph Kappen was the killer?
Eventually, the cold case team planned to swab 500 possible suspects with a link to the case. The detectives also used another new technique – psychological profiling.
Suspect number 200 was a night club bouncer and petty thief from Port Talbot called Joseph Kappen. He’d initially been quizzed at the time of the deaths but somehow slid under the radar – despite driving the same model of car spotted on the night in question.
When detectives knocked on his door, his ex-wife Christine told them Joseph Kappen had died of lung cancer 12 years previously.
The police were subsequently able to pinpoint Joseph Kappen as the killer, when they tested his son, a known thief called Paul Kappen.
On Christmas Eve 2001, two years after the cold case was reopened, DI Bethell applied to Home Secretary David Blunkett to exhume Paul Kappen’s dad, Joseph. Six months later, DNA taken from the body’s femur and teeth proved a full match.
Joseph Kappen was the serial killer responsible for the deaths of Geraldine Hughes, Pauline Floyd and Sandra Newton.
Why was Joseph Kappen called the Saturday Night Strangler?
Police named Joseph Kappen the Saturday Night Strangler as he only seemed to kill on Saturday nights.
He killed all three victims by strangling them.
Police also suspect that Joseph Kappen committed numerous other unsolved rapes, and he remains a suspect in the unsolved murder of Maureen Mulcahy, aged 23, in February 1976.
Steeltown Murders starts on Monday, May 15, 2023 at 9pm on BBC One. All episodes will be available on BBC iPlayer.
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