Steeltown Murders: The real story of the 'Saturday Night Strangler' and how it took 30 years to unmask him

In the early hours of Sunday, September 17, 1973, the bodies of Pauline Floyd and Geraldine Hughes were discovered in woodland in south Wales. The 16-year-old friends, who worked together in a factory, had gone missing as they hitched a lift home from a night out at the the Top Rank nightclub in Swansea.

They had been raped and strangled before being dumped at the remote rural location. Their deaths sparked a huge manhunt and left a community terrified the killer might strike again.

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It would soon become clear that the same killer had struck two months earlier in a very similar attack. Sandra Newton, also 16, had been found murdered and her body dumped near a disused colliery.

The teen had also been hitchiking and was raped and choked to death with her own skirt before being left in a culvert under a road. All three girls had been lured into a car on a Saturday evening, leading the killer to be dubbed the 'Saturday Night Strangler'.

But it would take nearly three decades of painstaking police work for the murderer to be revealed. And now, the true story of how the killer was eventually discovered has been turned into a major BBC drama, Steeltown Murders, starring Keith Allen and Philip Glenister.

Set in both 1973 and the early 2000s, the four-part series tells how, in the first case of its kind, the mystery was solved using pioneering DNA evidence. So what was the real story of the Steeltown Murders and how was the identity of Wales' first serial killer discovered?

As the murder probe was launched more than 150 police officers chased hundreds of leads and questioned around 35,000 people who fitted a loose description of the man last seen with Pauline