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NANCY GRACE: September 1973, Llandarcy, South Wales,
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in the United Kingdom, a man out walking his dog
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comes across a horrific scene.
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He approached the object, as he
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thought it was, and discovered it
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was the body of a young girl.
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Strangulation that has taken place.
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NANCY GRACE: Officers soon discover a second body.
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She has a serious head wound.
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Both girls had been sexually assaulted.
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They had both been raped, in fact.
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NANCY GRACE: The murder shocked the community with fears
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for young women's safety.
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Don't go out late at night.
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Don't accept lifts.
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A serial killer operating in South Wales in 1973.
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NANCY GRACE: The largest investigation in Welsh history
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launches to find the killer.
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Police officers were drafted in from everywhere.
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Detectives from all over South Wales were brought in.
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We owed a debt, a huge debt, not only to the families,
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but also to our community.
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NANCY GRACE: But the investigation
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faces numerous challenges and eventually goes cold.
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They had no real suspects, a real prime suspect
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from the beginning of the inquiry
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to the end of the inquiry.
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It was an impossible task, really,
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for any team of detectives.
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It was not until the DNA evidence
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came much later that they were able to piece it together.
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That, of course, transformed the entire inquiry.
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NANCY GRACE: This is the story of the Llandarcy murders,
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the investigation that uncovers a serial killer,
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and how familial DNA searching helped solve the crimes
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almost three decades later.
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I'm Nancy Grace.
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This is "Bloodline Detectives."
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[MUSIC PLAYING]
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September 16, 1973, police in Wales
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receive an emergency call.
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PAUL BETHELL: A gentleman walking his dog
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came across what he thought was some sort of model
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or a dummy lying in the copse, just off the Llandarcy motorway
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there.
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He approached the object, as he thought
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it was, and discovered it was the body of a young girl.
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And he immediately reported the matter to the police.
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NANCY GRACE: Officers immediately
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rushed to the location and are horrified by the scene.
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The police attended at the scene.
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One of the officers there decided
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to make a search further afield and travel about another 10,
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15 yards into the copse.
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The constable noted what he thought
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was a pair of white boots sticking
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up in quite a bizarre way, just a few yards from him.
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He went over and looked and saw it was
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the body of another young girl.
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He went back and explained to the sergeant.
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His actual words were, "There's another one
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further down, boss."
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And the constable had to sort of convince the sergeant.
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He said, "No, sergeant, I'm really serious.
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There's another body further down."
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NANCY GRACE: Before long, police and reporters from the locality
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swarmed the crime scene.
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We were interested in-- obviously,
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dramatically interested in what was a terrible scene.
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Because we all knew the nature of the area
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down there to midway between anywhere.
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It would have been dark.
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It would have been secluded.
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And these girls must have been terrified at the time.
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It was a copse alongside a sports field.
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A quarter was set up around the entire copse,
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starting at the main road and up to the groundsman fence.
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The girls were both fully clothed.
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Strangulation that was taking place.
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I think there were some very lengthy ropes
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that were used to kill them.
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DAVID BARCLAY: One of the girls had made an attempt at escaping
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and run off.
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And she'd been hit over the head with a brick
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or something like that.
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And then she'd been strangled there.
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A lot of her possessions were under the legs
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of the other girl, and that girl had been attacked and then
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strangled further in the copse.
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NANCY GRACE: As the investigation gets underway,
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concerned parents are out looking
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for their daughter and her friend, who had not
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returned home the night before.
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The parents noticed police activity
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and approached an officer.
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PHIL REES: They spoke to officers there and said
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that, you know, basically, our daughters
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haven't returned last night.
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They were only 16 years of age, you know?
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They were just kids.
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And then it materialized then, in fact, that they
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were, in fact, their daughters.
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PAUL BETHELL: A member of the family
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was asked to come in to the crime scene tent
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and view the bodies.
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It must be something that lives with that member of the family
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today--
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the worst scene you could ever imagine,
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a complete and absolute nightmare.
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NANCY GRACE: The victims are identified
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as 16-year-old girls Pauline Floyd and Geraldine Hughes.
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Geraldine and Pauline very, very ordinary,
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typical 16-year-old teenagers.
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MARTIN SHIPTON: They were working
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class kids, both, obviously, very loved girls.
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Had left school at a young age, who worked
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hard at the sewing factory.
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Really, it's just ordinary girls in the community.
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PHIL REES: They would save all week from their money.
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Part of the wage was given to their parents.
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The rest were kept for a Saturday night
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out type of thing, for new clothes.
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PAUL BETHELL: They were BFFs, as we would call them today,
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bought the same makeup, had the same group of friends,
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very, very close friends.
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PHIL REES: So they were just [INAUDIBLE] in life,
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and unfortunately, their lives were
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taken away from them in this terrible, terrible event.
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NANCY GRACE: Investigators discovered
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the gruesome details of the girls' murder during autopsy.
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Both girls had been sexually assaulted.
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They'd both been raped, in fact.
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MARTIN SHIPTON: And then subsequently, they
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were able to conclude that they had been told by the killer
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to put their clothes back on.
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There was debris, woodland debris
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on the inside of their clothing, which
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seemed to indicate that they had been brutally attacked and then
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allowed to dress again.
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DAVID BARCLAY: It became obvious that the offender
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had been with them for a considerable period of time.
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And he had frightened them, controlled them
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for a considerable period of time.
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MARTIN SHIPTON: One of the girls' blood
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was found on the back of the other girl's clothes.
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I mean, one can imagine that they were both being
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herded around by the killer.
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They were probably hit in order to make them submissive.
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They were probably struggling.
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And it was after they put their clothes
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back on that they were both strangled
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from behind with this five-foot rope.
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NANCY GRACE: A major investigation
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begins into the brutal rapes and murders of teen girls Pauline
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Floyd and Geraldine Hughes.
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The initial investigation was the largest
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that South Wales police had ever undertaken, really.
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Police officers were drafted in from everywhere.
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Detectives from all over South Wales were brought in.
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MARTIN SHIPTON: I think initially,
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there were as many as 150 detectives
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who were working on the case.
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It was seen as a very big crime indeed.
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And a lot of resource was put into it.
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PHIL REES: And that particular night in September
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was Neath Fair Night, those thousands and thousands
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of people who come to Neath.
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It was the busiest night of the year, really.
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They went to the fair in the afternoon, went home, changed.
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Then they made their way to the top ranked club, which
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was the biggest club in South Wales at the time, people
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who come from everywhere.
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I'm not saying five miles, 10 miles.
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I'm saying 30, 40 miles.
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PAUL BETHELL: I think on the night, if I remember,
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there was something like 1,700 young people
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in the top ranking Swansea.
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The problem was, you could get there by bus,
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but how would you get home at 1 o'clock in the morning?
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NANCY GRACE: Detectives must trace the last movements
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of Pauline and Geraldine.
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PAUL BETHELL: They were actually seen
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walking towards the main road by a relative of Geraldine's.
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And he was the last person to actually see them alive
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and had a brief conversation with them.
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Actually said to them, don't forget,
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straight home, no hitchhiking.
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NANCY GRACE: But detectives believe the girls must
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have gotten into someone's car.
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How else would they end up at the crime scene,
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just off the main highway?
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MARTIN SHIPTON: This was an area which
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it would really need a local person to know
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that such a place was there.
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It wouldn't be somebody who was just passing through
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as a lorry driver and committed a crime
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on an opportunistic whim.
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There really was the sense that it was a local person
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who was involved.
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NANCY GRACE: Who is this mobster that he could overpower,
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batter, and murder two healthy 16-year-old girls
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with apparent ease?
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Next on "Bloodline Detectives," can
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old-fashioned police work find that answer
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and calm a terrified community?
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[MUSIC PLAYING]
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1973, UK police are investigating
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the murders of 16-year-olds, Pauline
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Floyd and Geraldine Hughes.
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The bodies of the girls had been discovered at Llandarcy, Wales.
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Both have been strangled.
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Detectives know they're hunting a ruthless killer.
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But the location of the murder scene
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is making their job very difficult.
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PAUL BETHELL: The logistics of the area
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were the worst it could possibly be
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for an investigating officer.
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At the time, the M4 motorway was partly
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constructed, hundreds of manual workers and engineers,
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et cetera, who were all living in the locality
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and billeted bed sets, flats living in the area.
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So that was the first problem.
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You had a college sited nearby with several thousand students.
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The traveling fair had arrived with all
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the individuals that that brought with it and visitors
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from outside.
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And of course, seven miles down the road,
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you had the city of Swansea, a huge city in itself.
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NANCY GRACE: Detectives began to investigate the theory
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that the girls could have hitchhiked
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to get home on the evening they disappeared.
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They was sewing machinists.
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They worked in a sewing factory, 16-year-olds.
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Wages weren't grand, you know, teenagers on smaller wages.
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So the option was not to take a taxi.
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It was just too darn expensive to take a taxi at that time.
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And at 1 o'clock in the morning, there
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wasn't the option of buses.
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They just weren't there.
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So a lot of young people used to hitch rides in the area
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to get home.
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And I guess that two girls hitching together
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would have considered themselves to be pretty safe.
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Wouldn't have been concerned about security or any danger,
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but of course, as things turned out,
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they were tragically wrong.
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GILBERT JOHN: The area they would
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have to go through, [INAUDIBLE],, was
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a very dark area at the time.
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And so coming home, they would have to face
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up to getting into that area.
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And it wasn't an area you'd hang around.
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So they would have been quite brave to be there.
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But they would have had little choice
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in where they picked up a lift because that was the way home.
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NANCY GRACE: Investigators then get
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their first clue as to who may have
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picked the girls up that night.
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There was a witness in a car who
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had seen an Austin 1100 turn up at a bus
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stop where these girls were hitchhiking.
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And as he looked into his rearmirror,
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he saw the two girls get into the vehicle.
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He then proceeded towards the lights in Midland Crossing.
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He stopped at the red light, and the light-colored vehicle
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pulled up alongside him.
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Unfortunately, the motorist's vision
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was obscured by the girls because both of them
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apparently got in the front seat.
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He identified the driver as being
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male with dark, bushy hair.
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As the lights changed, the vehicle
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then drove off in the general direction of Nease.
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Then a quarter past 1:00 in the morning, three people traveling
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on the road between Llandarcy and Nease
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saw a light-colored vehicle parked in a layby some 30,
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40 yards from where the young girls were murdered.
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The mystery was, who was driving that car,
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trying to find out who could have been the killer.
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Simple as that, really.
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MARTIN SHIPTON: So what they had to do
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was to try to track down everyone who was driving
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this particular white Austin 1100
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and try to eliminate them from the inquiries.
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Now the thing is that at the time,
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this happened to be one of the most popular models of cars.
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An extremely common vehicle.
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You wouldn't get a more common vehicle.
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PHIL REES: We had to stop any light-colored vehicles,
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obtain the names of the drivers, the registration
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number of the vehicle, description
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of the person driving.
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You can imagine the manpower it took one to find the vehicles,
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speak to the people, obtain witness statements.
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They took tapings from the seats of the vehicles.
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All this information was going into the incident room.
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There was 30,000 index cards there.
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An index card was a person of interest.
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There was 11,500 owners of white 1100.
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There was 15,000 statements.
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And you have to remember, no computers--
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all done manually as it were.
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It totally swamped the room.
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And the investigation was finding it very, very difficult
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to go in any other direction because all
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the resources were put into that particular line of inquiry.
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NANCY GRACE: While detectives desperately
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try to track down a killer, fear and panic
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are rising in the community.
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One murder is shocking in itself, but for there
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to be two girls killed in this way set off a lot of alarm
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in the community.
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The deaths of Geraldine and Pauline
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changed the complexities of how young
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girls who go out on a Saturday night.
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Up till then, if you didn't have a lift home
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or if there wasn't a bus, you would find a lift home.
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From that night onwards, that stopped.
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They actually put warning posters out.
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There was one with an 1100 motor vehicle on the front,
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emphasizing the dangers of hitchhiking
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and that it led to murder and to avoid it if possible.
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It was obviously a lesson of the dangers
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of hitchhiking, which I think, today, still stands.
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NANCY GRACE: With the killer still on the loose,
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police make every effort to keep the community at ease.
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PAUL BETHELL: The area was, more or less, flooded, if you like,
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with uniformed officers patrolling the streets,
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knock on doors, you know, speaking to local shopkeepers.
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To just show that there were people around to protect
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those late at night, although the warning was
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there from the police--
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don't go out late at night.
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Don't accept lifts.
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NANCY GRACE: But despite the best efforts of police,
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the immense workload and the lack of any solid leads
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means the case is reaching a dead end.
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GILBERT JOHN: The search among the travelers at the Nease
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Fair, the search among the workers on the motorway,
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the search among other people who'd been at the top
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ranked that night, sift it down, bring
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it down to the local people who might have been involved.
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It was an impossible task, really,
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for any team of detectives.
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PHIL REES: And at the end of the day,
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they had no real suspects, a real prime suspect
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from the beginning of the inquiry
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to the end of the inquiry.
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What they had was the white 1100.
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GILBERT JOHN: They just simply had
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reached the point where there was nothing else could be done.
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They could see no avenue to take it further.
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Like most unsolved crimes, it just seemed to drift.
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And it was not until the DNA evidence
00:17:39
came much later that they were able to piece it together.
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That, of course, transformed the entire inquiry.
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NANCY GRACE: Despite the best efforts of police
00:17:49
and amid the anguish of the victims' families and friends,
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unsolved cases like this one often drift off the radar
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and go cold.
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Next, a new breed of investigators,
00:18:03
the bloodline detectives use new forensic weapons
00:18:06
to try and catch a killer.
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[MUSIC PLAYING]
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By mid 1974, the investigation into the murders
00:18:22
of 16-year-olds Pauline Floyd and Geraldine Hughes
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has gone cold.
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Despite extraordinary efforts, police
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failed to find the man who killed
00:18:33
the girls on a September night in 1973
00:18:37
in Llandarcy Wales in the UK.
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MARTIN SHIPTON: In the community,
00:18:43
there was a great deal of anger.
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There was a great deal of worry and anxiety about the fact
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that somebody in their community not
00:18:52
far away, as they were convinced,
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was responsible for this.
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PAUL BETHELL: People start looking at each other.
00:19:01
They start finger pointing.
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Everyone is sort of looking over their shoulder
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at everyone else.
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The man sitting next to you on the bus--
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did he attack [INAUDIBLE]?
00:19:09
All these sort of strange things,
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of course, that causes a lot of issues, a lot of problems,
00:19:14
a lot of animosities, and a lot of difficulties
00:19:16
within families.
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NANCY GRACE: But as the years pass, advances in DNA
00:19:23
are changing the scene for investigators around the world.
00:19:28
Throughout this time, the forensic material
00:19:30
in the Llandarcy murders is tested over and over
00:19:35
in the hopes of solving the case.
00:19:38
My first involvement was back in 1990 when
00:19:42
DNA had first been introduced.
00:19:45
And we were looking at certain cold cases.
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And this case from 1973, the two girls,
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was put forward as a possible case
00:19:53
because South Wales police had stored all their old casework.
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And unfortunately, the DNA method at the time in 1990
00:20:02
wasn't sufficiently sensitive to work with that type
00:20:04
of cold case material.
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1991 produced the first phases of DNA amplification analysis.
00:20:12
The method wasn't sensitive enough
00:20:15
for this particular important case,
00:20:18
the double murder of two girls.
00:20:20
So we still held on to that material.
00:20:23
1995, DNA amplification reached a new level called SGM.
00:20:30
Now we did run a sample, but we didn't get a result.
00:20:33
So we held on again until the introduction
00:20:36
of DNA LCN, Low Copy Number.
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NANCY GRACE: This new advance in 1998
00:20:43
is sensitive enough to retrieve all DNA
00:20:46
samples from the 1973 evidence.
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COLIN DARK: We knew we would get mixed
00:20:51
profiles because we had the girls' DNA
00:20:54
mixed in with the semen DNA.
00:20:56
The technique was so sensitive, it would pick up everything.
00:20:59
So from 1998 to 2000, we were working
00:21:03
on getting the girls' DNA profiles so we
00:21:06
could interpret the mixtures.
00:21:09
In 2000, we achieved that.
00:21:12
And we were able, then, to obtain
00:21:14
a DNA profile that we could use to search
00:21:17
the national DNA database.
00:21:19
NANCY GRACE: Detectives now have a DNA sample for the killer,
00:21:22
but no match in the UK National DNA database.
00:21:27
With this new evidence on January 27, 2000,
00:21:31
27 years after the murders of Pauline Floyd and Geraldine
00:21:35
Hughes, the bloodline detectives reopened the case,
00:21:39
code name Operation Magnum.
00:21:43
They asked National Crime Faculty,
00:21:44
where I was then the head of evidence,
00:21:47
to organize a review meeting.
00:21:49
And we organized that meeting, which
00:21:51
included another pathologist, psychological profilers,
00:21:56
crime analysts, and myself, as part
00:21:59
of the physical evidence team.
00:22:00
And the purpose was simply to look
00:22:02
at everything to do with the two deaths, the two girls.
00:22:07
However, we also at that meeting asked
00:22:10
about other local criminality.
00:22:12
It's a standard thing to ask about.
00:22:14
At that time, they said, oh, there
00:22:15
was another girl that was found, but she'd
00:22:17
been murdered by her boyfriend.
00:22:19
NANCY GRACE: The girl's name is Sandra Newton.
00:22:23
Sandra Newton was a girl who disappeared
00:22:25
about three months before the the two girls were murdered.
00:22:30
PHIL REES: She was found murdered in [INAUDIBLE]
00:22:33
in the small village of [INAUDIBLE],, which is about
00:22:36
five miles north of Neath.
00:22:39
She'd been raped and she'd been strangled by the--
00:22:42
by her own skirt.
00:22:43
Sandra Newton was also 16 years of age.
00:22:47
She had also been at a nightclub.
00:22:49
There was also the common factor of [INAUDIBLE] 1100,
00:22:52
which was seen, in the description of one
00:22:55
of the witnesses, going like the clappers
00:22:57
in the vicinity of where the body was discovered.
00:23:03
NANCY GRACE: At the time of the investigation,
00:23:05
all eyes on the married man that Sandra was involved with.
00:23:10
He admitted that he'd been with her on the Saturday night.
00:23:13
That he'd had a drink, that they came out.
00:23:16
They had sex outside.
00:23:18
Then there was a-- they had a bit of a tiff.
00:23:20
He walked one way home, and she walked the other way home.
00:23:24
And that he maintains that's the last time he saw her.
00:23:28
So the emphasis was on him.
00:23:32
NANCY GRACE: With new DNA capabilities in 2000,
00:23:35
detectives decide to reopen the cold case of Sandra Newton.
00:23:40
During Operation Magnum, myself and my colleague,
00:23:43
[INAUDIBLE],, had the opportunity then
00:23:46
to go and see the ex-boyfriend.
00:23:48
NANCY GRACE: A DNA swab is taken and compared
00:23:51
against evidence taken from Sandra Newton's
00:23:53
crime scene back in 1973.
00:23:57
So we had to generate Sandra's profile,
00:24:00
which we were able to do.
00:24:02
We also had the boyfriend's sample.
00:24:04
He had provided to volunteer a swab.
00:24:07
So we had his DNA.
00:24:08
And then to our great surprise and the big bombshell
00:24:12
for Operation Magnum is that we had another person's semen,
00:24:17
and I knew because I was so familiar with the Llandarcy
00:24:19
crime scene that it was the killer for the Llandarcy girls.
00:24:27
It was heart stopping, I would say,
00:24:29
to realize that we had a link between these two very,
00:24:33
very vicious murders.
00:24:36
PAUL BETHELL: That was the first time in almost 28,
00:24:38
30 years that we knew that, A, it
00:24:40
was one killer and, B, that it was the same man in relation
00:24:45
to all three girls.
00:24:46
This opened up a serial killer operating in South Wales
00:24:51
in 1973.
00:24:54
PAUL BETHELL: The murder of three little girls,
00:24:56
we owed a debt, a huge debt, not only to the families, which
00:25:00
were the foremost thoughts in our mind,
00:25:03
but also to our community.
00:25:05
To the public, we owe a debt.
00:25:07
We've got this information that can take us to the killer.
00:25:11
What excuse could we use not to pursue that?
00:25:14
NANCY GRACE: Operation Magnum begins
00:25:16
a swab campaign in the hunt for the Llandarcy killer.
00:25:21
The 1973 investigation generated something like 35,000
00:25:26
names to work through.
00:25:28
So Operation Magnum was designed to whittle
00:25:32
down the numbers to a manageable size to begin with.
00:25:35
So the police generated 500 top priority names
00:25:39
that they wanted to analyze.
00:25:42
So these individuals would then be approached to give
00:25:45
a voluntary mouth swab for DNA.
00:25:48
The result would be directly compared to the Magnum
00:25:53
crime stain profile.
00:25:55
NANCY GRACE: But once again, the investigation hits a dead end.
00:26:00
There is no hit on the national database,
00:26:02
so he hasn't been DNA sampled.
00:26:05
It doesn't necessarily mean that he hasn't committed any crimes,
00:26:09
but his sample hasn't been put on.
00:26:11
He might have been in prison.
00:26:12
He might have died.
00:26:13
He might have gone abroad.
00:26:16
So how can we identify this person?
00:26:19
In this case, he had one very peculiar
00:26:22
allele, a very rare allele.
00:26:24
That's the bit of the DNA profile.
00:26:27
And it was decided by Colin Dark that he would
00:26:31
look for people with that strange allele
00:26:34
who were on the database.
00:26:36
NANCY GRACE: What was, at that time,
00:26:38
a new forensic weapon will narrow down the results
00:26:42
in the UK national database.
00:26:45
But as we'll see next, that's only the beginning
00:26:48
for the bloodline detectives.
00:26:54
[MUSIC PLAYING]
00:27:00
The year 2000, 27 years after the brutal murders
00:27:06
of two innocent teen girls across the Atlantic Ocean
00:27:10
in Wales, the bloodline detectives are
00:27:12
bringing the case back to life.
00:27:15
Their forensic DNA weapons, new at that time,
00:27:19
are starting to pay off.
00:27:22
About 80 odd percent of killers
00:27:24
live within about a three, four-mile
00:27:26
radius of murder scenes.
00:27:28
On that basis, why don't we [INAUDIBLE]
00:27:32
and see how many people living within the locality
00:27:35
of the murder scenes carry those two unusual alleles?
00:27:39
It brought back a list of 13 people.
00:27:43
About fourth or fifth down was a young man
00:27:45
by the name of Paul Kappen, K-A-P-P-E-N,
00:27:49
which was an unusual name.
00:27:51
Now this is where the element of luck comes in.
00:27:53
And any detective will tell you on any investigation
00:27:56
we always hope for some sort of element of luck.
00:28:00
Had the name been Evans or Thomas or Williams
00:28:04
in South Wales, yes, we'd have got there undoubtedly,
00:28:07
but it would have taken us an awful lot longer.
00:28:10
But Kappen, extremely unusual.
00:28:13
NANCY GRACE: Paul Kappen's last name strikes a chord
00:28:16
with Detective Philip Rees, who worked
00:28:18
on the original investigation in 1973.
00:28:22
PHIL REES: I immediately remembered Joseph Kappen.
00:28:26
He was the son of Joseph Kappen.
00:28:27
He was somebody actually in the inquiry, been taking
00:28:30
statements from his family.
00:28:33
Big breakthrough.
00:28:35
NANCY GRACE: Detectives now feel they
00:28:36
are closer than ever to solving the 27-year-old murder case.
00:28:42
We focus our efforts, went back into the old case papers,
00:28:46
and spent quite a bit of time really
00:28:48
looking for Joseph Kappen.
00:28:50
Who was he?
00:28:50
What was he all about?
00:28:51
You know, where did he figure in the investigation?
00:28:55
He had that car.
00:28:58
He had been out and about that night.
00:29:01
He fitted the profile exactly.
00:29:03
And in some ways, there had been mistakes
00:29:05
in the original investigation which had not identified him.
00:29:10
Going back to the no computers scenario,
00:29:14
you have hundreds, if not thousands, of documents.
00:29:17
And you have one man, literally one man-- it was a man--
00:29:21
reading them and trying to cross-reference.
00:29:24
And obviously, things are going to be missed.
00:29:27
You can't possibly read and assimilate
00:29:29
all that information.
00:29:31
It just can't be done.
00:29:34
But we were able to now extract the information, the statement,
00:29:37
the form recording the visit to his home, the form in relation
00:29:40
to his car.
00:29:41
We were able to find all those and build a picture of him
00:29:45
as an individual.
00:29:46
NANCY GRACE: Investigators know they're on the right track,
00:29:49
but they need a DNA test to prove it.
00:29:53
So we then did a reverse paternity.
00:29:57
So we had Paul's profile, we had the sister's profile,
00:30:00
and we had the mother's profile.
00:30:02
Which would eliminate the section of the DNA profile
00:30:05
which was not related to Joseph Kappen.
00:30:08
When they sent that away and the evidence came back
00:30:10
from the laboratories that it was the man whose DNA profile
00:30:14
had been found in the undergarments
00:30:17
of the girls who had been killed,
00:30:19
suddenly they knew they had their man.
00:30:23
NANCY GRACE: So who is Joseph William Kappen?
00:30:26
PAUL BETHELL: Physically, he was a huge man.
00:30:28
He was about 6 foot, 6 foot 2.
00:30:30
We knew that he was extremely violent.
00:30:32
We discovered that he worked as a bouncer,
00:30:34
that he would quite easily assault males,
00:30:36
that often police officers would see young men walking, holding
00:30:39
their chins or bleeding from the nose
00:30:41
where they'd received a blow.
00:30:43
From what we gathered, he was a man who
00:30:45
had been guilty of minor crimes beforehand,
00:30:49
a man who's known to be cruel.
00:30:52
It all indicated a man who might have been absolutely ruthless
00:30:55
in his attack on the girls.
00:30:58
COLIN DARK: He would go out at night to commit burglaries.
00:31:01
He would tell his wife to watch the television.
00:31:05
But when he came in from whatever he'd been doing,
00:31:08
he would then get her to tell him
00:31:10
what was on so that if the police asked him, he would say,
00:31:13
no, I was at home watching television with my wife,
00:31:16
and this is what I was watching.
00:31:18
His ex-wife and the two older children
00:31:20
were not surprised at all.
00:31:23
They described him as a very evil individual.
00:31:27
It was very sad and tragic, really.
00:31:29
And what they said was that as a father, I mean,
00:31:33
they went through horrendous times.
00:31:35
There was one occasion when he took Paul out
00:31:37
for a walk, his son, on the beach,
00:31:41
and they took with them-- he had the family Greyhound.
00:31:43
Now this was a Greyhound that had gotten too old, too
00:31:46
ancient to run, to race.
00:31:47
So they kept it as a family pet.
00:31:49
And at some point on the journey along the beach,
00:31:52
he stopped and said, oh, watch this.
00:31:54
And he had wire, which he wrapped around the dog's neck,
00:31:58
and strangled the dog in front of the little boy,
00:32:01
in front of Paul, which it's quite staggering when
00:32:05
you think of it, the cruelty and the why, what are the reasons.
00:32:12
MARTIN SHIPTON: It emerged that he was a man who
00:32:14
was a serious domestic abuser.
00:32:16
And in fact, he used to rape his wife.
00:32:19
Almost imagined at the time when the police
00:32:21
came knocking at the door, asking the question,
00:32:24
where were you at this particular time?
00:32:26
He says, I was at home, and the wife
00:32:31
wouldn't have dared do anything other than to go along with him
00:32:35
and provide him with his alibi.
00:32:37
We managed to trace quite a number of females, women who
00:32:41
were young girls at the time in the 1970s,
00:32:44
who, in fact, had been attacked by him sexually and physically.
00:32:48
NANCY GRACE: Two women in particular come forward
00:32:50
to the Operation Magnum team and give details of a night in 1973
00:32:57
when a man who resembles Kappen gave them a lift home.
00:33:00
One of them was sitting in the back of the vehicle.
00:33:02
He turned and punched the girl sitting
00:33:05
in the front of the vehicle to the side of the face
00:33:07
for no reason whatsoever.
00:33:08
Nothing said-- just punched her to the side of the face
00:33:11
and then began to tear at her.
00:33:13
The girl in the back panicked, obviously,
00:33:15
and tried to get out of the back of the vehicle
00:33:17
and realized that the handles had been taken off the back
00:33:20
of the doors of the vehicle.
00:33:22
She couldn't get out of the back door.
00:33:24
She started to scream.
00:33:25
They both started to scream, kick, fight.
00:33:28
And what happened was a light came on about 100 yards away,
00:33:32
and it was a farmhouse.
00:33:34
He panicked, opened the door, the front door,
00:33:37
and kicked the one girl out, literally
00:33:39
kicked her out of the car.
00:33:40
The girl claimed the second girl climbed
00:33:42
over the back seat of the car and fell out of the vehicle.
00:33:45
And the vehicle drove off at speed,
00:33:47
leaving with the door flying open,
00:33:49
leaving the two girls on the floor.
00:33:51
And they ran to the farmhouse and reported it.
00:33:54
But that never went anywhere, that investigation,
00:33:57
because nothing was known.
00:33:58
Now, from the description of the driver,
00:34:01
from the description of the vehicle,
00:34:02
from the description of the attack, there's no doubt
00:34:05
in our minds-- and the timing--
00:34:07
there's no question they are probably two
00:34:09
of the luckiest girls alive.
00:34:10
There's no question of that.
00:34:12
Because we are quite satisfied that was Joseph Kappen.
00:34:17
NANCY GRACE: But no one will ever
00:34:18
have the satisfaction of seeing Joseph Kappen in court.
00:34:23
He died in 1990 from lung cancer.
00:34:26
He was somebody who was able to get away with this.
00:34:30
And he was even able to get away with it after he died.
00:34:33
He fitted everything so perfectly
00:34:36
and had never been caught.
00:34:39
The fact that we never had this man in the dock and the trial
00:34:42
was never held, so the questions were never put to the man
00:34:46
who could have answered them.
00:34:47
Quite simply, we'll never know exactly what happened,
00:34:49
just surmise, really, what could have led up to the deaths.
00:35:03
But we know from the key witness that the girls
00:35:05
got into the vehicle around about the 20 past 1:00
00:35:07
in the morning period.
00:35:10
To Llandarcy, to the location where
00:35:12
the vehicle was later seen, you're only
00:35:15
talking two or three miles.
00:35:17
So that would have taken a matter of four to five minutes
00:35:20
to get there.
00:35:24
And then of course, he's dragged them physically, obviously,
00:35:27
or threatened them, what we believe
00:35:29
is threaten them with this Bowie knife
00:35:31
into the copse, where the attack then takes place.
00:35:35
GILBERT JOHN: Just know that there was-- it must
00:35:37
have been a terrible scene.
00:35:38
You can imagine.
00:35:40
You know, dark woodland, girls being chased or pursued
00:35:44
through that woodland, perhaps being assaulted fairly early
00:35:47
on by a man who, according to earlier reports,
00:35:50
had attacked other girls.
00:35:54
And then we have the situation where Pauline was found
00:35:58
and Geraldine was found 40, 50 yards away.
00:36:03
For them, there would have been no chance to escape.
00:36:08
And he was obviously giving them the impression that they were
00:36:13
going to be released maybe because he told them
00:36:16
to put their clothes on again.
00:36:17
At that point, they must have thought
00:36:19
this is the end of the ordeal.
00:36:21
But no, he got his five-foot rope, ready to finish them off.
00:36:29
NANCY GRACE: Since Joseph Kappen is dead, he cannot be tested
00:36:33
for a DNA match, or can he?
00:36:36
Next, the bloodline detectives make history
00:36:40
with a new DNA technique that might match
00:36:43
a dead man to a vicious crime.
00:36:50
[MUSIC PLAYING]
00:36:55
South Wales, the UK, 2002.
00:36:58
For the first time in 29 years, police
00:37:02
believe they've identified the killer of three girls,
00:37:06
raped and murdered in Wales in the UK back in the early 1970s.
00:37:12
Despite a massive investigation at the time in the murders
00:37:16
of Sandra Newton, Geraldine Hughes, and Pauline Floyd,
00:37:20
it's taken extraordinary developments in familial DNA
00:37:25
to identify Joseph Kappen, the man investigators
00:37:29
believed to be the killer.
00:37:31
There is, however, one more significant problem--
00:37:36
Joseph Kappen is dead.
00:37:39
DAVID BARCLAY: A paternity test is useful,
00:37:42
but it's a second generation.
00:37:44
You're working out what the profile of Joseph Kappen
00:37:47
would have been.
00:37:49
To get certainty, you really need to get his DNA profile.
00:37:54
NANCY GRACE: For the first time in UK history,
00:37:57
detectives received permission to exhume a body as part
00:38:01
of a murder investigation.
00:38:03
On May 17, 2002, the exhumation of Kappen's body
00:38:08
takes place in Port Talbot, Wales.
00:38:12
Which led me to a graveyard, watching policemen digging
00:38:16
up dead people.
00:38:19
Not a pleasant task just being there,
00:38:20
so goodness knows what it was like for the policemen
00:38:23
themselves.
00:38:26
And there was a tent, and we could
00:38:28
see activity through and around the actual tent.
00:38:34
And we knew that there was this rather
00:38:36
gruesome recovery of a body.
00:38:41
COLIN DARK: And just as we were about to lift out
00:38:45
Joseph William Kappen's coffin, there
00:38:48
was a huge clap of thunder.
00:38:50
The heavens opened, and down came the rain,
00:38:53
hitting the tent, making all sorts of noises.
00:38:56
And it sent the hairs on the back of my neck
00:38:59
up at that time.
00:39:01
We now know why.
00:39:02
We were exposing evil.
00:39:07
He was dressed in his best suit, remarkably well
00:39:11
preserved, because he was still effectively in a plastic
00:39:16
shroud.
00:39:17
We got a full profile, and it matched
00:39:19
against the three girls, Pauline, Geraldine, and Sandra.
00:39:28
NANCY GRACE: Kappen manages to carry out these crimes
00:39:30
and go undetected for the rest of his life.
00:39:34
PHIL REES: There was a lot of unanswered questions
00:39:37
even after the detection of the crime,
00:39:39
and I suppose a lot of unanswered questions
00:39:42
for the family as well.
00:39:43
They wanted to know a lot of things,
00:39:45
but we couldn't give them that information.
00:39:48
PAUL BETHELL: If your daughter is raped or murdered
00:39:50
or killed, whatever, how can that ever be put right?
00:39:54
There was no feeling of elation at all.
00:39:56
In fact, it was just this horrendous feeling of sadness.
00:40:01
And it was almost as if, quite bizarrely, the black cloud
00:40:04
that we'd lifted over the community
00:40:07
had settled on us as a team.
00:40:09
We never celebrated the fact that we'd
00:40:12
made this incredible discovery, this cutting edge technology
00:40:16
that is now used worldwide to find rapists and killers,
00:40:20
familial DNA searching.
00:40:22
PHIL REES: Operation Magnum was a big operation.
00:40:26
We had loads of detectives.
00:40:28
And in fact, there was three of us.
00:40:30
I know I'm quite proud that I was part of that team,
00:40:32
and I think we did a good job.
00:40:35
NANCY GRACE: Decades after his death, Joseph Kappen, his body
00:40:39
exhumed, is finally pinned as the killer
00:40:43
of Geraldine Hughes, Pauline Floyd, and Sandra Newton.
00:40:48
With these cases now closed, the families of these teen girls
00:40:53
can try and move forward.
00:40:56
This notorious serial killer of Wales, dubbed the Saturday
00:41:00
Night Strangler, is one of the first cases ever solved
00:41:05
using familial DNA searching.
00:41:08
This is now a signature method of a new breed
00:41:11
of investigators.
00:41:13
I'm Nancy Grace.
00:41:14
Thank you for joining me and the bloodline detectives.
00:41:18
[MUSIC PLAYING]
