30 Facts About Joseph Kappen

Joseph Kappen's confirmed victims were all 16-year-old girls whom he lured into his car on Saturday evenings in Briton Ferry and Swansea, respectively.

Joseph Kappen was never arrested for his crimes and died of lung cancer in 1990.

Joseph Kappen is notable for being the first person to be posthumously identified as a serial killer via familial DNA profiling.

Joseph Kappen was the first documented serial killer in Welsh history.

Joseph Kappen was born in 1941 and had six siblings.

Joseph Kappen began attracting police attention for petty offences at age 12.

Joseph Kappen went on to accumulate over thirty convictions for car theft, petrol theft, burglary and assault, and spent years in and out of prison.

Joseph Kappen alternately worked as a lorry or bus driver, and then as a bouncer.

Joseph Kappen never stayed in employment for long and was described as a loner.

In 1962, Joseph Kappen met his first wife, 17-year-old Christine Powell, and they married in February 1964.

Ten days after their nuptials, Joseph Kappen was sent to prison for burglary.

Joseph 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.

In 1964, Joseph Kappen attempted to force himself on a 15-year-old schoolgirl in his Sandfields housing estate but she escaped.

Joseph Kappen was strangled with her own skirt and dumped in a ditch near a coal mine in Tonmawr.

However, one of the men who was investigated as part of enquiries concerning the Austin 1100 was Joseph Kappen, who owned that model of vehicle.

When police turned up at his home to speak to him, they found his Austin was on blocks with its wheels removed, with Joseph Kappen claiming that he could not have committed the murders as his car was not roadworthy.

However, in the days after the killings, Joseph Kappen's car was logged as being on the road by police carrying out stop and check operations.

Joseph Kappen 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.

Ultimately, therefore, Joseph Kappen was not pursued further as a suspect at the time.

Joseph 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.

Paul's profile showed a distinctive similarity to the killer's, prompting police to make his deceased father, Joseph Kappen, known to have been investigated in the original enquiry, the prime suspect.

Forensic testing on Joseph Kappen's remains subsequently established a perfect match to the murderer's sample, finally proving beyond doubt that Joseph Kappen was responsible for the murders.

The Joseph Kappen investigation was the first in the world to use familial DNA tracing in order to posthumously identify a serial killer, and to solve a previously unsolved murder with familial DNA.

Joseph Kappen is considered the first documented serial killer in Welsh history.

Mulcahy was similarly strangled after a Saturday night out, being found dead the following morning on wasteland very close to the Sandfields estate, where "Saturday Night Strangler" Joseph Kappen was living at the time.

Witness testimony points to Joseph Kappen having abducted her in a manner similar to the 1973 murders.

However, forensic expert Dr Colin Dark told a BBC programme about the unsolved case in 2020 that there would now be opportunities to look for DNA if the police examined the existing material, pointing out that Joseph Kappen had a very rare element of DNA that would allow him to be implicated or eliminated from the case possibly even with only a partial DNA profile from the remaining physical evidence, which the police had still kept.

Joseph Kappen observed that police still had tapings from Mulcahy's body and clothing at the time taken to search for fibres, and these could now be examined for DNA if the police chose to.

Police reexamined the 1973 disappearance of nine-year-old Christine Markham from Scunthorpe, after learning that Joseph Kappen had worked as a lorry driver in Scunthorpe and had lived in lodgings in the Humberside area soon after the girl vanished.

The Joseph Kappen case has been featured in a number of television programmes:.