Joseph Kappen

Joseph William Kappen (30 October 1941 – 17 June 1990), also known as the Saturday Night Strangler, was a Welsh serial killer who committed the rape and murder of three teenage girls in Llandarcy and Tonmawr, near his home town of Port Talbot, in 1973.

Joseph Kappen was born in 1941 and had six siblings.

His parents' marriage broke up when he was young and he was raised by his stepfather in Port Talbot, a heavily industrial town in Wales dominated by its large steelworks.

Kappen began attracting police attention for petty offences at age 12.

He went on to accumulate over thirty convictions for car theft, petrol theft, burglary and assault, and spent years in and out of prison.

Kappen alternately worked as a lorry or bus driver, and then as a bouncer.

He never stayed in employment for long and was described as a loner.

In 1962 Kappen met his first wife, 17-year-old Christine Powell, and they married in February 1964.

Ten days after their nuptials, Kappen was sent to prison for burglary.

Christine then gave birth to a daughter and then to a son, Paul, after she was raped by Kappen after his release from prison.

Christine later testified that Kappen was physically abusive towards her and would rape her every two weeks.

At one point he fatally strangled the family dog in front of his son while walking it on a nearby beach because it was "too old".

Kappen was known to regularly pursue local teenage girls during the marriage, with his job as a bouncer giving him an opportunity to interact with them.

When working as a bus driver he was known to use his rest breaks to approach teenage girls on the village green at Llandarcy.

In 1964 Kappen attempted to force himself on a 15-year-old schoolgirl in his Sandfields housing estate, but she escaped.

In February 1973 a man resembling Kappen picked up two female hitchhikers and drove them to a nearby isolated road before attempting to rape both of them, but they also managed to escape; the victims did not report the incident as one thought she would get into trouble with her father.

On Saturday 14 July 1973 Sandra Newton, aged 16, went missing after a night out in Briton Ferry.

Three days later her body was found raped and strangled in a rural location some miles away.

Newton had been abducted after trying to hitchhike home after visiting a nightclub that night.

She was strangled with her own skirt and dumped in a ditch near a coal mine in Tonmawr.

Little attempt had been made to hide the body, with it being left at the entrance of a culvert.

Police suspected a local man was responsible due to the detailed knowledge of the area the killer would have needed to be aware of the remote dump site.

Two months later in the early hours of Sunday 16 September 1973 Geraldine Hughes and Pauline Floyd, both aged 16, hitched a lift home after a Saturday night out at a nightclub in Swansea.

The next morning they were found dead, their bodies being found raped and strangled in Llandarcy woodland five miles away.

It appeared that one girl had attempted to escape from her attacker and had made it yards from the road near to where her father worked but had been caught by her attacker and killed.

The murders created a sense of fear in the community over whether the attacker would strike again.

Although they occurred nearby, at the time the murders of Hughes and Floyd were not linked to the similar murder of Newton.

Police soon established that Hughes and Floyd had been seen getting a lift home in a white Austin 1100 on the night of their disappearance.

Police followed up numerous lines of enquiry but, as was the case in police investigations at the time, all intelligence and information was collected on large amounts of paperwork, which complicated the inquiry.

The Port Talbot steelworks employed 13,000 men, all of whom had to be considered as potential suspects.

Both the construction of the nearby M4 motorway and the ongoing Neath fair meant hundreds of itinerant workers had to be considered, as well as the countless strangers these events brought into the area.

Detectives attempted to trace men who owned an Austin 1100 in the area, but it meant that more than 10,000 drivers had to be visited and questioned.

The three-day working week imposed by the British government on everyone across the country, as a result of an energy shortage, further reduced the resources of the enquiry and hampered the investigation.

However, one of the men who was investigated as part of enquiries concerning the Austin 1100 was Kappen, who owned that model of vehicle.

Kappen is also suspected of committing a fourth murder in February 1976.

Kappen's confirmed victims were all 16-year-old girls 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.

Kappen was never arrested for his crimes and died of lung cancer in 1990.

Kappen is notable 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.