'Steeltown Murders' Brings the Hunt for the Saturday Night Strangler to Acorn TV

Acorn TV will premiere true crime drama Steeltown Murders this November, a four-part drama about the hunt for the Saturday Night Strangler, and the pioneering use of DNA evidence that helped finally identify a murderer, over a decade after his death.

American audiences may not be terribly familiar with the story of Joseph Kappen, the first documented Welsh serial killer who raped and killed three teenage girls near Port Talbot in 1973. (He's suspected of committing a fourth murder in 1976, but that remains unconfirmed.) He was known as the Saturday Night Stranger because his victims were all lured into his car on Saturday evenings and then driven to rural locations where they were subsequently killed by strangulation. Though Kappen was questioned during the initial investigation, was never arrested for his crimes, and died of lung cancer in 1990.

But that's not the end of this story. Thanks to ever evolving DNA testing technology, a profile of the killer's DNA was isolated on the clothing of two of his victims. These developments lead to a full reopening of the investigation into the murders, and Kappen was ultimately posthumously identified as a serial killer via familiar DNA profiling.