Saturday Night Strangler unmasked 30 years after crimes thanks to victims' knickers

dailystar.co.uk:

serial killer' - least of all 16-year-old factory worker friends Geraldine Hughes and Pauline Floyd.They'd left a nightclub in Swansea, South Wales to hitch a lift home but would never reach their destination.Instead, they were found the next morning raped and strangled in nearby woodland, sparking a massive police manhunt and leaving a community cowering in fear as to when or where the killer might strike again.Around 150 detectives worked flat out on the case but, with no mobile phones, internet or computers, the investigation soon became swamped in a sea of paperwork.

And Britain back then - floundering in a state of emergency, crippled by an energy crisis and restricted to a three-day working week - was hardly rich with the kind of resources required to enable such back-breaking, round-the-clock enquiries.Consequently, come mid-1974, the murder team was quietly wound down and boxes upon boxes of evidence and admin shelved in station storerooms where they were either ruined by damp or nibbled by mice.

It seemed like the culprit, dubbed The Saturday Night Strangler, would never be caught. However, the girls' underwear had been sent to a forensics lab and kept intact.That meant, with the emergence in the late '90s of more sophisticated genetic testing methods, the killer's genetic fingerprint - previously indistinguishable from his victims' - could finally be isolated from the ageing samples.And while his DNA failed to materialise on any existing police databases, it was enough to get the murder investigation - dubbed Operation Magnum - back up and running in 2000.Headed up by detective chief inspector Paul Bethell and two near-retirement age colleagues, the trio undertook the unenviable task of trying to swab thousands.