Steeltown Murders: The true story behind the harrowing BBC crime drama

New BBC series Steeltown Murders is the latest true crime drama to hit UK TV, telling the story of when the community of Port Talbot was shaken to its core by the murder of three teenage girls: Sandra Newton, Geraldine Hughes and Pauline Floyd.

Newton was killed in the summer of 1973. The 16-year-old had been walking home after a night out with her boyfriend when she disappeared. She was found two days later and she had been raped and strangled to death.

In September that same year, Hughes and Floyd went missing whilst returning home from an evening out together and they had last been seen hitchhiking a lift from an unknown man.

The bodies of the 16-year-old friends were later discovered by South Wales Police — they had been raped, beaten and strangled to death.

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It is the investigation into their deaths that serves as the inspiration for the BBC’s new crime drama which stars Philip Glenister and Steffan Rhodri as DCI Paul Bethell and Phil ‘Bach’ Rees, respectively.

The true story behind Steeltown Murders

The BBC’s new drama is set over two time periods, 1973 and 2002, as it follows the investigation from its initial stages to the breakthrough police had using DNA technology that would see them finally find the culprit three decades after the murders.

In real-life, the case depicted in Steeltown Murders was the first investigation of its kind to use DNA technology to discover who the killer was.

In 1973, Newton, Hughes and Floyd’s murders were two separate investigations. Newton’s boyfriend was a suspect in her killing, but he maintained his innocence throughout the investigation and was never charged.

For Hughes and Floyd’s murders, police questioned 35,000 people to find the culprit who was described as a man aged 30-35 with a moustache and bushy hair.

It was only in the early 2000s that the deaths were connected, when police used innovative DNA technology to extract samples from the two cases and discovered there was a match. It proved that all three women were killed by the same man, and it also categorically proved that Newton’s boyfriend was innocent.

Police then sought to find a match for the DNA sample, but they could not find an exact match on any database. Refusing to give up, investigators decided to try using familial DNA profiling. This technique saw police try and find the culprit by seeing if the unknown man had a child whose DNA had been recorded on the police database.

Investigators found several people who had a 50% match to the DNA they had collected from the murders, and through looking deeper into the family history of those who were a partial match they found one person that potentially fit: Joseph Kappen.

Watch the trailer for Steeltown Murders

Kappen’s son Paul was a car thief whose DNA came up as a 50% match to the evidence from the three murders, but he was only seven at the time of the murders so it was his father who became the prime suspect.

Kappen had been questioned during the initial investigation but he had an alibi from his wife at the time. After reopening the case in the noughties, police decided to get a DNA sample from Kappen to prove if he was the killer or not.

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The issue was that Kappen had died in 1990, and so police chose to exhume his body in order to give a definitive answer about whether or not he was the killer they had been trying to hunt down. It marked the first time that police would exhume a body of a potential suspect.

By doing so, police were able to compare the DNA evidence from the case to a sample from Kappen, and it proved that he was indeed the person who had murdered Newton, Hughes and Floyd, thus giving closure to their families.

Steeltown Murders begins at 9pm on Monday, 15 May on BBC One, with all episodes then available on BBC iPlayer.

This article originally appeared on Yahoo TV UK at https://uk.news.yahoo.com/steeltown-murders-true-story-joseph-kappen-bbc-132057083.html