Is Steeltown Murders a true story? How serial killer Joseph Kappen was exposed as the Saturday Night Strangler
In 1973, Joseph Kappen killed three young women in Port Talbot, south Wales, but it wasn’t until 2001, and a slew of DNA evidence technological advances, that detectives were able to catch the killer.
Now, the events of Wales’ first documented serial killer have been adapted into a four-episode miniseries, Steeltown Murders, for BBC that debuts 15 May.
The show, which switches between the 1970s and early 2000s, is described as “a portrait of a town dealing with the repercussions of an unsolved case three decades on, and asks if justice can ever truly be found”.
What happened in 1973?
Dubbed the “Saturday Night Strangler”, Joseph Kappen raped and murdered three teenage girls – Sandra Newton on 14 July, and Geraldine Hughes and Pauline Floyd just over two months later on 16 September.
All three were aged 16 and were lured into his vehicle on Saturday nights. He raped them all and then strangled them to death.
At the time, Newton’s death was not linked to Hughes and Floyd’s.
The initial investigations into the deaths lasted about a year before being scaled down in mid-1974, and police faced a number of challenges — notably that police were looking for owners of an Austin 1100, something that more than 10,000 people in the area drove. This included Kappen but when officers spoke to him, the vehicle was on blocks without wheels – Kappen claiming it was not roadworthy – and he was ruled out as a suspect.
However, his car was actually logged by police as being on the road after killing Hughes and Floyd, but technology at the time meant this went unnoticed by detectives.
What happened when the investigation was reopened?
Police reopened the investigation into Hughes and Floyd in the late 1990s after advancements in DNA testing meant the killer’s DNA was isolated from their clothing.
This, however, found no matches with any person arrested or charged since 1995 but the case continued to be investigated (Kappen had died in 1990 from lung cancer).
It wasn’t until 2001 that DNA testing was able to identify Newton’s killer as the same as Hughes’ and Floyd’s. That same year, Kappen was identified after police did a DNA search for matches with possible living descendants of the killer.
He became the prime suspect after police looked at the DNA of his son, Paul, a car thief whose DNA was already on file.
In 2002, Kappen’s body was exhumed and forensic testing proved him to be the murderer.
