Steffan Rhodri, who's best known as Dave Coaches on Gavin & Stacey and plays Bethall's colleague Phil Rees, grew up in the area where the girls were killed and remembers how the fear remained for many years. When people found out I was working on this drama they'd come up to me and say, 'We remember it as a very dark period.' 'My parents live in Wales and one of their neighbours was a junior policewoman on the case. 'Something like this can tear a community apart,' says Philip Glenister, the Life On Mars actor who plays lead detective DCI Paul Bethall. But it was only when the net was widened to take in family members that the killer was identified through a partial match to his grown-up son.

The DNA samples proved that all three girls had been killed by the same man.

New four-part BBC drama Steeltown Murders (Port Talbot is home to the UK's largest steelworks) takes a forensic look at the painstaking process that finally nailed the man who killed friends Pauline Floyd and Geraldine Hughes, whose bodies were discovered in woodland in September 1973, and Sandra Newton, who'd been found murdered two months earlier, in July, near a disused colliery.īefore filming started, Philip (centre), who plays DCI Paul Bethall and Steffan Rhodri, (right) who plays Bethall's coworker Phil Rees, had dinner with their real-life counterparts, who also worked with the scriptwriter. The question was, who was he? There was no one on the growing police DNA database whose profile matched. Then, at the turn of the millennium, science finally caught up specialists were able to retrieve DNA the killer had left on the girls' clothing, and it would be enough to incriminate the perpetrator. The shattered families of the girls, a shaken community and the frustrated officers eventually moved on with their lives, but the murders were not forgotten. More than 150 police officers had chased hundreds of leads on the so-called Saturday Night Strangler – and all had gone nowhere. For nearly 30 years, the cases of three 16-year-old girls raped and murdered on the outskirts of the working-class Welsh town of Port Talbot in 1973 were left open with no suspects charged.

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