From Dave Coaches to the veteran detective who revisits a cold case

He’s adored for the iconic role he played for a few weeks more than a decade ago, but Swansea-born star Steffan Rhodri’s career is still on the up and his latest role is very close to his heart and history, as Kathryn Williams reports...

drama set sort of in your own community, if you like, where you’re from. to be so close as that is quite striking.

“When I heard the story, as I say, I have no specific memory of it, but I must have been aware, they must have been around me, adults talking about it, you know what I mean? and even teachers in school, kids’ school, all the kids in school would have heard about it and they would go, ‘Oh, it’s in the woods there’. You know what I mean, there would have been a sense of it?”

Geraldine and Pauline were raped and murdered after a night out in Swansea back in 1973. The resulting search for the culprit, Wales’ very first documented serial killer, ended up becoming one of the longest-running murder hunts in this country’s history.

In the late-1990s, breakthroughs in DNA evidence led to the investigation being reopened, spearheaded by a team of near-retirement-age detectives, including Steffan’s Phil Rees and DCI Paul Bethall, played by Life On Mars’ Philip Glenister.

armed with new forensic technology they’d eventually find themselves being led to the door of a nightclub bouncer from Port talbot called Joseph Kappen.

Unfortunately, Kappen died 12 years previous to the investigation being reopened, but that didn’t stop the team who reopened a seemingly unconnected murder of a Briton Ferry teenager, Sandra, found near the disused tonmawr colliery. They discovered from the swabs taken from her body that the same man was responsible for all three girls’ deaths.

“It really hit home in a very real way,” Steffan, a huge fan of watching detective dramas at home too, continued.

“and when I met Phil, the character I was playing – my ideas of who he was were based on the script, without any particular biography – but when I met him I realised I really knew him. He wasn’t from where I thought, he’s from Brynaman and I knew the Swansea Valley and we spoke Welsh with each other. Marc (Evans) wanted to introduce that a little bit, even though it wasn’t in the script.

“and I ad-libbed that a bit and I felt the moment where that happens really grounds it in its community and makes it clear that these guys are investigating something in their own community and they feel very connected to it and that, years on, it still nags at them.”

Steffan, who’s had roles in huge blockbusters