Geraldine Hughes and Pauline Ford, friends of sixteen, lived in the country at Briton Ferry and, in order to save some money, treated themselves to a celebratory evening in Swansea at the Top Rank ballroom. To get home that Saturday night in September 1973, they had chosen the only cost-effective option: hitchhiking. The next morning, on the road that runs through the Llandarcy bush, someone noticed a body lying on the side of the road. It was Geraldine. A little further away is Pauline’s body. Someone had strangled her after abusing both of them. The news stunned the community: a double murder of two helpless teenagers, committed in a small world where everyone knew everyone.
No computers and too many suspects
More than a hundred agents were assigned to the case, but fifty years ago we were still working with Sherlock Holmes’ tools: testimony and intuition. At one point in the investigation, an entire wall of police headquarters was filled with clues and news about “Saturday Night’s Strangler,” as he was readily dubbed in the press. One testimony was given special consideration: a boy had seen the two young women get into a white Austin 1100: a British version of the Fiat Uno, as around ten thousand owners of the same vehicle were identified within a reasonable radius for investigation. Between gossip and hearsay, a tremendous amount of material emerged, but without a computer, nobody was able to compare dates and names. It could have been anyone, as long as he was a man and lived in the area. But not even this last caveat necessarily applied, as a highway construction site ran through these parts during those months and the company that got the job provided a list of hundreds of foreign workers. Thirteen thousand people were employed on the steel industry island of Port Talbot alone.
– A sign warns women of the deadly danger of taking rides from The Missed Connection
The suitcase rotted along with boxes of notes and reports, poorly stored in a cellar at Sandfields station. By chance or foresight, an investigator – this is not a pseudonym, his real name is Colin Dark – arranged the boxes in which the few finds from the crime scene were kept from the basement and placed them in the forensic laboratory. At the time, no one thought to connect the tragic end of the two friends with the murder of Sandra Newton. She is also 16 years old and also lives in a small town not far from Briton Ferry. Sandra was last seen alive on July 14, 1973 (coincidentally a Saturday). He asked for a ride into town. They found her dead in a ditch, strangled with the skirt she was wearing. 25 years later, South Wales Police looked back on the bloody events of the summer of 1973. A mixed DNA was isolated from the clothing of the two friends Geraldine and Pauline, which separated that of the girls from the male part, identifying a partial genetic code. Using the same technique, they found traces of the same person on the clothing of the first victim, Sandra.
– The two victims of 73: Geraldine Hughes and Pauline Ford Two male profiles from the recovered DNA
In her case, there were two male profiles, but one was attributed to her boyfriend at the time. The police had half a biological identity card, but also a quarter of a century in which anything could have happened. Even that the shrike was dead. To prevent time from consuming remaining chances at truth-finding, the pool compared the DNA available in the national database to the sample taken from the exhibits. No way. Meanwhile, a forensic psychologist created a profile of the killer: a man in his 20s and 30s, a local man, a difficult childhood, small precedents for minor crimes. Out of a potential list of thirty thousand or more names, a hundred remained. A sufficient number to request a saliva test, which produced no result. Lost for lost, the investigative team made one last attempt: Instead of looking for a perfect match, they queried the database for partial matches. From possible relatives of the murderer.
Partly coincidences
From DNA files located a certain distance from Swansea, about a hundred people found they had only a limited match with the killer. One of them was called Paul Kappen. In 1973, he was in the second grade and had decided to become a serial car thief as an adult. His father, Joseph Kappen, a former truck driver and bouncer, was a bad person. In his early twenties, at the time of the Welsh tragedies, he had been abandoned by his father and raised by a stepfather in Port Talbot. At the age of twelve, the police already knew a lot about him because he stole everything: scooters, cars, gasoline. As he grew up, he raised the bar: robberies and assaults. He was married to a girl who had just come of age and ended up in prison while his wife was about to give birth to their first child, Beverly. No one knew, but Kappen raped his wife and according to his testimony, Paul was born of one of those domestic abuses. When the police showed up at Ms. Christine’s house, they already knew.
– The exhumation of Joseph Kappen’s body (Photo Getty Images) His wife’s false alibi
Leafing through the reports, they had gathered testimonies from two girls from Pontardave and Neath who were attacked by an unknown man at night in the 1970s. Fortunately, the man had spared her: one of them said that after the rape, the attacker told her that “he would smoke a cigarette while I decide whether or not to kill you”. The police had questioned Kappen as part of the investigation into the murders at the time: he had denied any responsibility. His wife had given him a false alibi. Yes, he had a white Austin 1100, but no one had looked at it. The surviving victims said the attacker wore a mustache and smoked. Like caps. Who always had a cigarette in his mouth: He suffered from lung cancer and died in 1990 at the age of 49. After receiving the family’s DNA samples one summer’s day in 2002, a team slipped through the avenues of Goytre Cemetery, near Port Talbot, to exhume the remains of Joseph Kappen. It rained. At some point, after several attempts to hang the coffin, delayed by this impossible climate, as if a devil were hovering over the hole, an employee confided to a colleague: “It seems he’s doing it on purpose, not to get caught “Just like when he was alive: he was the strangler on Saturday evening.
© ALL RIGHTS RESERVED