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.
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.
[5] 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.
[5] 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.
[5] 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.
[6] Two months later in the early hours of Sunday 16 September 1973[10] Geraldine Hughes and Pauline Floyd, both aged 16, hitched a lift home after a Saturday night out at a nightclub in Swansea.
[11][6] 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.
[6][11] 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.
[6] When police turned up at his home to speak to him, they found his Austin was on blocks with its wheels removed, with Kappen claiming that he could not have committed the murders as his car was not roadworthy.
[5] Kappen also claimed to have been at Neath fair on the night of the murders and his wife, Christine Powell, gave him a false alibi, which she later said was common for her to do when police investigated her husband.
[12] Around this time there was media speculation linking serial killer Fred West to the murders as he once worked in Llandarcy, but this was swiftly ruled out by police after the DNA was checked.
[12] 35,000 persons of interest were initially identified for DNA testing, but a psychological profiler was employed to reduce the number to a priority list of 500.
[11][5] Fifty of these were witnesses, relatives of the victims, stepfathers, boyfriends and anyone who had featured prominently in the initial investigation, and the others were known criminal suspects.
[5] Kappen was listed as suspect number 200, and detectives visited what they believed to be his address in Port Talbot in August 2001 but they discovered that he had died of lung cancer in June 1990, although his former wife, Christine Powell, who had divorced him in 1980, still lived there.
[5] Paul's profile showed a distinctive similarity to the killer's, prompting police to make his deceased father, Joseph, known to have been investigated in the original enquiry, the prime suspect.
[6][5] The now-elderly surviving parents of the victims expressed relief that they had finally received a form of closure, with the mother of Hughes stating, "Now we can close the book on that hell forever".
[8] In Mulcahy's case there was no available DNA evidence in 2002 to examine or potentially link to Kappen and thus police were unable to prove or disprove his involvement.