Kappen was born in 1941, one of seven, and grew up in Port Talbot. His parents' marriage broke up and he was raised by his stepfather. As the psychological profile predicted, Kappen had come to the attention of the police as a 12-year-old. He had a string of minor offences, more than 30, for robbing gas meters, car thefts, burglary and assault. He spent years in and out of prison. Outside jail he worked as a driver of lorries or buses, as well as a bouncer. He never held down a job for long, preferring to hobble - sign on for social security benefits and work for cash on the side. He smoked cannabis and may have done a bit of dealing, but his real drug of choice was tobacco. He chewed it and smoked 20 Old Holborn roll-ups a day - enough to stain his teeth and, as his probable rape victims noted, make his clothes smell strongly of cigarette smoke. "Kappen was a very deep individual, a loner," says Bethell. "Lots of people knew of him but no one really, really knew him. He'd go to pubs, two or three a night. He was always out. He'd even be on the darts teams, but he never really drank; one or two drinks a night. He never wanted to lose his self-control."
Kappen met his future wife, Christine, when she was 17, on the beachfront at Port Talbot. "It was 1962 and no one had any money in those days," says Christine Powell, now 57. "You'd go into a cafe, get a coffee for sixpence, and hang out. It was September and cold. The first thing that attracted me to him was that he bought me a hot chocolate to warm my hands. It was the first kind thing anyone had ever done for me."
Powell was married to Kappen for 18 years before divorcing him in 1980. When they first met, Kappen, 20, was a catch. He was six foot one and had a dark, Italian complexion with slate-blue eyes. Physically, he was an imposing figure; long before it was ever fashionable, he worked out with dumbbells. And, unlike most of his impoverished contemporaries, he had wheels. "Joe was my first boyfriend. I didn't know about sex, men, women or anything. He was tender and affectionate. He was always obsessed with cars. There were always five cars in bits in the front garden. He was always doing them up."
In summer 1963, Christine got pregnant and the couple married the next February. There was no time for a honeymoon. Ten days later, Joe got sent down for three years for breaking into houses to rob gas meters. Their daughter Deborah was born in April. In August 1965, Kappen was released on day parole to attend his grandfather Joseph's funeral. At the wake, with a warder downstairs, he dragged Christine into an upstairs bedroom and had sex. She got "caught" with Paul. By the time he was released from prison, Kappen was a father of two children he had never met.
The couple moved to the Sandfields estate. But it was not a happy household. "Joe never bonded with the kids, only with Beverley, who came along in 1974," says Christine. "We lived on the social. As a family we did not have two pence to rub together. I could not rely on him for money as he was always in and out of jail. He did stupid things. He'd see some lead, pinch it, and then get sacked. He did not have proper money. If he hobbled he might give me £20, but that was it. He had a car, which was his luxury. Often he'd take money out of my purse."
"I thought it was natural for men to hit women," Christine continues. "I thought all men were violent. He used to rape me every two weeks. It was against my will. I never wanted it. Joe would say, 'Come on, come on', and then he would insist on his conjugal rights."
Noisy rows were frequent and the local cops, when they weren't asking about some unsolved burglary, were always being called out to calm things down. "We never had an argument unless I was drinking," says Christine. "I'd play our one Shirley Bassey record over and over. If he dared tell me to turn it down I'd start. And then he'd hit out." In the 1970s, police didn't interfere in domestic violence. And Christine would never press charges. As the profile predicted, Kappen's hobbies were solo interests: rearing canaries, tropical fish and greyhounds. One of the greyhounds became a family pet. But one day, as he was exercising the dog on the local beach, he decided it was too old. He picked up a wire and strangled the dog in front of his terrified son Paul. He had a vicious temper. In another chilling incident he forced Deborah and Paul, both under 10, to wander the streets searching for fig roll biscuits to replace the ones they had eaten. It was 11 at night and pouring with rain. As with his other victims, Kappen ruled his family by terror.
Following Wheadon's tip, detectives from the murder team visited Kappen on October 13 1973, nearly a month after the murders; but he swiftly passed through the system. In his statement Kappen claimed to have returned from Neath Fair at around 9.30pm on the Saturday and spent the rest of the evening "looking after my canaries until about 10.45pm, when myself and my wife went to bed. I got up the next morning at 10.30am." Christine, sitting on the sofa beside him, had concurred. "I alibied him but I always did whenever the police came knocking. You learned to do it without thinking. 'On such and such a night he was with me, officer.' I couldn't see him doing that. I cannot imagine him doing that to a child. I never saw any signs of an unusual interest in young girls."
In fact, Kappen regularly pursued teenage girls. His job as a bouncer brought him into contact with the younger generation. "It was his thrill to go with younger girls even when he was 43," says Rees. "If he had a girl he paraded her around for show, to show his mates. In bed it was always regular sex, no violence, nothing out of the ordinary."
When he worked as a driver on local buses, Kappen would use his rest breaks on the village green at Llandarcy to try to chat up girls. "He was a sexual predator," says Bethell. "He always carried a weapon, a knife, and he had the ligature ready at Llandarcy. With him there is always predatory intent combined with arrogance. He was cocky, confident, not afraid to carry out crimes in his own back yard where the risk of being identified was always high."
Even in the first killing, Kappen made little attempt to hide Sandra's body. If he had carried it deeper into the culvert, instead of dumping it at the entrance, her corpse might not have been found for weeks. Kappen's record of assaults on women, all unknown to police at the time, began in the early 1960s. In 1964 he attacked a 15-year-old schoolgirl as they were walking together in the Sandfields estate. As they entered a half-built house, he threw her to the ground and jumped on her. But when the girl screamed he got up and ran away.
And there were other incidents. In February 1973, a man resembling Kappen, in an Austin, picked up two female hitchhikers near Neath. As they neared their drop-off point, he drove past and took them to an isolated road. One girl was in the front and the other in the back seat. The attacker stopped the car and told them, "I know you want it." He then grabbed the girl in the front seat and started pawing her breasts. Her companion reached forward to intervene, but he swung back his fist and punched her in the face. Both girls were screaming and tried to escape, but found the car doors would not open from the inside. Fortunately, the girl in the back had long nails and was able to grab the stub of the door lock and pull it up. The door opened and she pulled open the front passenger door from the outside. Woken by the commotion, the occupants of a nearby house turned on their lights and the attacker fled. The double attempted rape was never reported because one of the girls thought she'd get in trouble with her father, a churchwarden. The attacker was almost certainly Kappen. His next victim, Sandra Newton, would not escape alive.
By May 15 2002, the exhumation team, forensic archaeologists, forensic dentists, scientists, pathologists and policemen, were finally ready. A large, blue tent was erected over Kappen's grave and, as dusk fell, the digging started. It was a ghoulish business. The first coffin to be raised was that of Kappen's stepfather. May 15 had been a fine day, but the weather turned sharply cold and a storm broke. "The heavens opened and thunder and lightning started, the like of which I have never seen," says Bethell. "It was literally at the moment we came across the coffin of Kappen. There was a tremendous sense of foreboding. Is this evil being uncovered? I remember saying to the team, 'He doesn't want to come up.' "
Kappen had died in 1990, after suffering with lung cancer. He was 49. After leaving Christine, he became involved with Sandra Wyatt, a local barmaid. They set up home on the nearby Baglan housing estate. In his 40s, Kappen hardly left the house, according to Wyatt. Cancer struck in 1988 and his body wasted away. At the end he was forced to use a wheelchair.
The coffins, all intact, were taken to a local mortuary and opened. Bethell finally came face to face with his suspect 30 years after the crime. The scientists removed teeth and a femur from the leg, the likeliest sites for DNA to survive. Once extracted, material was sent for DNA analysis. Kappen and his relatives were swiftly reburied.
Three weeks later, the DNA test came back. It was him. The Operation Magnum team had mixed feelings. "To be honest, I was disappointed," says Rees. "It was a let-down. You're not going to pull him in. It wasn't like arresting him and taking him to a court of law."But for Bethell there was a final resolution: "Operation Magnum, the hunt for the offender responsible for the Llandarcy murders, is closed. We are not looking for anyone else."
How did Kappen get away with murder?
There were some oversights. The most glaring was a small but telling inconsistency in Kappen's story. When detectives first turned up at his home, his Austin 1100 was on blocks with the wheels removed, probably because Kappen was trying to switch tyres after newspapers reports that the police had a cast of the killer's tyre track from the Llandarcy murder scene. Kappen told the detectives he had put the car on blocks the day after the murders. However, in police log books of random stop and check operations in the week after the killing, Kappen and his car were logged as being on the road. No one in the police team made the connection. Without computerised cross-referencing, Kappen's lie went unnoticed.
Since 1973, it has become clear that serial killers don't stop until they are caught. "I can't believe that if an offender is impulsive enough to pick up victims in his locality, risking being seen, that he would have any qualms about committing other offences around the country or abroad," says Bethell. "There have to be other rapes or unsolved murders that could be attributed to him." Kappen's picture has been circulated to every police force in Britain, and every six weeks his DNA profile is run against any new cold cases on NDNAD. The hunt for other victims is still going on.
For the now frail parents of the murdered girls, the long manhunt has brought an uneasy peace. "You know there are evils out there," says Jean Hughes, "but you never believe it will touch on you and yours. When it does, it is a lifetime's sentence of ****. Now we can close the book on that **** for ever."
The decades-long trail for the Saturday Night Strangler that began on a sweaty 1970s disco dance floor ended on a green Welsh hillside and a grassy tomb. In life he escaped the law. But deep into his death Joseph Kappen, father, husband, petty thief, and serial killer, was finally unmasked.
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Kappen met his future wife, Christine, when she was 17, on the beachfront at Port Talbot. "It was 1962 and no one had any money in those days," says Christine Powell, now 57. "You'd go into a cafe, get a coffee for sixpence, and hang out. It was September and cold. The first thing that attracted me to him was that he bought me a hot chocolate to warm my hands. It was the first kind thing anyone had ever done for me."
Powell was married to Kappen for 18 years before divorcing him in 1980. When they first met, Kappen, 20, was a catch. He was six foot one and had a dark, Italian complexion with slate-blue eyes. Physically, he was an imposing figure; long before it was ever fashionable, he worked out with dumbbells. And, unlike most of his impoverished contemporaries, he had wheels. "Joe was my first boyfriend. I didn't know about sex, men, women or anything. He was tender and affectionate. He was always obsessed with cars. There were always five cars in bits in the front garden. He was always doing them up."
In summer 1963, Christine got pregnant and the couple married the next February. There was no time for a honeymoon. Ten days later, Joe got sent down for three years for breaking into houses to rob gas meters. Their daughter Deborah was born in April. In August 1965, Kappen was released on day parole to attend his grandfather Joseph's funeral. At the wake, with a warder downstairs, he dragged Christine into an upstairs bedroom and had sex. She got "caught" with Paul. By the time he was released from prison, Kappen was a father of two children he had never met.
The couple moved to the Sandfields estate. But it was not a happy household. "Joe never bonded with the kids, only with Beverley, who came along in 1974," says Christine. "We lived on the social. As a family we did not have two pence to rub together. I could not rely on him for money as he was always in and out of jail. He did stupid things. He'd see some lead, pinch it, and then get sacked. He did not have proper money. If he hobbled he might give me £20, but that was it. He had a car, which was his luxury. Often he'd take money out of my purse."
"I thought it was natural for men to hit women," Christine continues. "I thought all men were violent. He used to rape me every two weeks. It was against my will. I never wanted it. Joe would say, 'Come on, come on', and then he would insist on his conjugal rights."
Noisy rows were frequent and the local cops, when they weren't asking about some unsolved burglary, were always being called out to calm things down. "We never had an argument unless I was drinking," says Christine. "I'd play our one Shirley Bassey record over and over. If he dared tell me to turn it down I'd start. And then he'd hit out." In the 1970s, police didn't interfere in domestic violence. And Christine would never press charges. As the profile predicted, Kappen's hobbies were solo interests: rearing canaries, tropical fish and greyhounds. One of the greyhounds became a family pet. But one day, as he was exercising the dog on the local beach, he decided it was too old. He picked up a wire and strangled the dog in front of his terrified son Paul. He had a vicious temper. In another chilling incident he forced Deborah and Paul, both under 10, to wander the streets searching for fig roll biscuits to replace the ones they had eaten. It was 11 at night and pouring with rain. As with his other victims, Kappen ruled his family by terror.
Following Wheadon's tip, detectives from the murder team visited Kappen on October 13 1973, nearly a month after the murders; but he swiftly passed through the system. In his statement Kappen claimed to have returned from Neath Fair at around 9.30pm on the Saturday and spent the rest of the evening "looking after my canaries until about 10.45pm, when myself and my wife went to bed. I got up the next morning at 10.30am." Christine, sitting on the sofa beside him, had concurred. "I alibied him but I always did whenever the police came knocking. You learned to do it without thinking. 'On such and such a night he was with me, officer.' I couldn't see him doing that. I cannot imagine him doing that to a child. I never saw any signs of an unusual interest in young girls."
In fact, Kappen regularly pursued teenage girls. His job as a bouncer brought him into contact with the younger generation. "It was his thrill to go with younger girls even when he was 43," says Rees. "If he had a girl he paraded her around for show, to show his mates. In bed it was always regular sex, no violence, nothing out of the ordinary."
When he worked as a driver on local buses, Kappen would use his rest breaks on the village green at Llandarcy to try to chat up girls. "He was a sexual predator," says Bethell. "He always carried a weapon, a knife, and he had the ligature ready at Llandarcy. With him there is always predatory intent combined with arrogance. He was cocky, confident, not afraid to carry out crimes in his own back yard where the risk of being identified was always high."
Even in the first killing, Kappen made little attempt to hide Sandra's body. If he had carried it deeper into the culvert, instead of dumping it at the entrance, her corpse might not have been found for weeks. Kappen's record of assaults on women, all unknown to police at the time, began in the early 1960s. In 1964 he attacked a 15-year-old schoolgirl as they were walking together in the Sandfields estate. As they entered a half-built house, he threw her to the ground and jumped on her. But when the girl screamed he got up and ran away.
And there were other incidents. In February 1973, a man resembling Kappen, in an Austin, picked up two female hitchhikers near Neath. As they neared their drop-off point, he drove past and took them to an isolated road. One girl was in the front and the other in the back seat. The attacker stopped the car and told them, "I know you want it." He then grabbed the girl in the front seat and started pawing her breasts. Her companion reached forward to intervene, but he swung back his fist and punched her in the face. Both girls were screaming and tried to escape, but found the car doors would not open from the inside. Fortunately, the girl in the back had long nails and was able to grab the stub of the door lock and pull it up. The door opened and she pulled open the front passenger door from the outside. Woken by the commotion, the occupants of a nearby house turned on their lights and the attacker fled. The double attempted rape was never reported because one of the girls thought she'd get in trouble with her father, a churchwarden. The attacker was almost certainly Kappen. His next victim, Sandra Newton, would not escape alive.
By May 15 2002, the exhumation team, forensic archaeologists, forensic dentists, scientists, pathologists and policemen, were finally ready. A large, blue tent was erected over Kappen's grave and, as dusk fell, the digging started. It was a ghoulish business. The first coffin to be raised was that of Kappen's stepfather. May 15 had been a fine day, but the weather turned sharply cold and a storm broke. "The heavens opened and thunder and lightning started, the like of which I have never seen," says Bethell. "It was literally at the moment we came across the coffin of Kappen. There was a tremendous sense of foreboding. Is this evil being uncovered? I remember saying to the team, 'He doesn't want to come up.' "
Kappen had died in 1990, after suffering with lung cancer. He was 49. After leaving Christine, he became involved with Sandra Wyatt, a local barmaid. They set up home on the nearby Baglan housing estate. In his 40s, Kappen hardly left the house, according to Wyatt. Cancer struck in 1988 and his body wasted away. At the end he was forced to use a wheelchair.
The coffins, all intact, were taken to a local mortuary and opened. Bethell finally came face to face with his suspect 30 years after the crime. The scientists removed teeth and a femur from the leg, the likeliest sites for DNA to survive. Once extracted, material was sent for DNA analysis. Kappen and his relatives were swiftly reburied.
Three weeks later, the DNA test came back. It was him. The Operation Magnum team had mixed feelings. "To be honest, I was disappointed," says Rees. "It was a let-down. You're not going to pull him in. It wasn't like arresting him and taking him to a court of law."But for Bethell there was a final resolution: "Operation Magnum, the hunt for the offender responsible for the Llandarcy murders, is closed. We are not looking for anyone else."
How did Kappen get away with murder?
There were some oversights. The most glaring was a small but telling inconsistency in Kappen's story. When detectives first turned up at his home, his Austin 1100 was on blocks with the wheels removed, probably because Kappen was trying to switch tyres after newspapers reports that the police had a cast of the killer's tyre track from the Llandarcy murder scene. Kappen told the detectives he had put the car on blocks the day after the murders. However, in police log books of random stop and check operations in the week after the killing, Kappen and his car were logged as being on the road. No one in the police team made the connection. Without computerised cross-referencing, Kappen's lie went unnoticed.
Since 1973, it has become clear that serial killers don't stop until they are caught. "I can't believe that if an offender is impulsive enough to pick up victims in his locality, risking being seen, that he would have any qualms about committing other offences around the country or abroad," says Bethell. "There have to be other rapes or unsolved murders that could be attributed to him." Kappen's picture has been circulated to every police force in Britain, and every six weeks his DNA profile is run against any new cold cases on NDNAD. The hunt for other victims is still going on.
For the now frail parents of the murdered girls, the long manhunt has brought an uneasy peace. "You know there are evils out there," says Jean Hughes, "but you never believe it will touch on you and yours. When it does, it is a lifetime's sentence of ****. Now we can close the book on that **** for ever."
The decades-long trail for the Saturday Night Strangler that began on a sweaty 1970s disco dance floor ended on a green Welsh hillside and a grassy tomb. In life he escaped the law. But deep into his death Joseph Kappen, father, husband, petty thief, and serial killer, was finally unmasked.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2003/jan/18/weekend.kevintoolis
https://uk.yahoo.com/style/fans-pick-frustrating-detail-episode-075540532.html
https://uk.yahoo.com/style/steeltown-murders-actor-philip-glenister-160000484.html
https://www.radiotimes.com/tv/drama/steeltown-murders-true-story/
This seems to be the full episode rather than a trailer.
The Steeltown Murders: Hunting a Serial Killer