Is Steeltown Murders a true story? Real events BBC series is based on - who was the Saturday Night Strangler

BBC true crime drama Steeltown Murders is based on the shocking decades-long hunt for the killer of three teenage girls in Wales.

The four-part series, starring Philip Glenister, Steffan Rhodri, and Elinor Crawley follows the investigation into the brutal murders at two stages. The initial investigations took place immediately after the murders in 1973, when the cases were treated as two distinct crimes.

The series also follows the re-opening of the investigation in the early 2000s as advances in DNA profiling enabled officers to link the two cases and pin down the killer decades later.

Steeltown Murders explores where police went wrong in their initial investigation and how huge strides in technology meant that they could finally solve the case after nearly 30 years. This is everything you need to know about the brutal true crimes that inspired the BBC series.

Is Steeltown a real place?

The title of the show Steeltown Murders refers to Port Talbot in Wales, where the three killings took place. Port Talbot is known as Steeltown because of the large steelworks which dominates the south east of the town.

The killings were committed in the villages of Llandarcy and Tonmawr, near to Port Talbot, and when the killer was eventually uncovered, it was revealed that he was from the town.

All of the staff at the steelworks were interviewed as part of the police investigations into the killings - at the time around 13,000 people were employed there.

What were the real Steeltown murders?

The murders involved in the investigation occurred in 1973 near Port Talbot. The first victim was Sandra Newton, a 16 year old girl who went missing on Saturday 14 July. She tried to hitchhike home after a night out. Three days after her disappearance her body was found in a ditch near a coal mine. She had been raped and stangled with her own skirt before her body had been dumped. The killer had made no real effort to properly hide the body.

Two more 16 year old girls, Geraldine Hughes and Pauline Floyd, disappeared whilst hitchhiking home after a night out in Swansea on the morning of Saturday 16 September. Their bodies were found in a woodland several miles away - they had both been raped and strangled to death.

At the time these killings were not linked to the murder of Newton, even though the bodies were found about seven miles apart.

The second incident did provoke fear in the community that more killings would follow. The biggest manhunt in Wales’ history was begun, based on information from a key witness who last saw Hughes and Floyd alive. 

The witness had seen the girls leaving Swansea in a white Morris 1100 and identified the driver as a man between 30 and 35 years old with bushy hair and a moustache.

The murder of the first victim was still being treated as a separate investigation, with Newton’s boyfriend as the prime suspect, though he maintained his innocence and no charges were ever brought against him.

Around 35,000 men who fitted this description in some way were interviewed by a team of 150 police officers. Despite the efforts of the police, the crimes would go unsolved for almost three decades.

Who was the Saturday Night Strangler?

The Saturday Night Strangler, so named because the disappearances of the three girls occurred on Saturdays. The killer was not discovered until the early 2000s when DNA investigations brought about a breakthrough in the case.

Using DNA to help solve cold cases, police were able to link semen samples from the clothing of the three girls, proving that they were the victims of the same killer. However, at the killer’s DNA was not on the police database they were not able to trace him directly.

Instead, investigators developed familial DNA tracing - searching on the database for DNA that was a half match with the sample, which could reveal the child of the offender. Through the DNA of a local car thief Paul Kappen, police traced a possible suspect to his father, Joseph Kappen.

Kappen grew up in Port Talbot and was arrested dozens of times over his life for theft, burglary, and assault. His wife Christine, who divorced him in 1980 later claimed that he had been abusive towards her and frequently raped her.

However, Joseph, who had previously been questioned because he fitted the description of the killer and drove the same car that had been identified, had died of lung cancer in 1990. In 2002, with permission from then Home Secretary, David Blunkett, to exhumed Joseph’s grave to conduct DNA testing.

Twenty-nine years after the initial killings, and more than a decade after his death, the tests revealed that Joseph Kappen was the killer of the three girls.