Steffan Rhodri jumped at the chance to play DC Phil 'Rees' Bach in BBC Two true crime drama Steeltown Murders, a project that stirred vivid memories from his past.
The four-part series tells the story of a Welsh community that was torn apart by the unsolved murders of three teenage women in 1973, only for two detectives to pick the case up again in the early noughties.
DCI Paul Bethell (Philip Glenister) and DC Phil ‘Bach’ Rees (Steffan Rhodri) were both involved in the original investigation and used familial DNA evidence to finally catch Joseph Kappen.
For Steffan Rhodri, whose previous screen credits include Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part One, Gavin & Stacey, Manhunt and upcoming ITV drama The Way, it was a tale he knew all too well from his youth in Llandarcy.
"I was six at the time, but my junior school was about a mile from the woods where Geraldine and Pauline were murdered," he revealed when we spoke to him.
"The school looked at those woods actually. I have no conscious memory, but I have a subconscious feeling of adults talking about the case without really knowing many of the details. I realise now, with hindsight, how much it must have changed the community to have had such a horrific thing go on in what is, you know, usually a very peaceful community."
Steffan and his co-star Phil went for dinner with their real-life counterparts before filming began and got a real sense of how the local community was affected by the deaths of Sandra Newton and best pals Geraldine Hughes and Pauline Floyd, who were murdered while hitching a lift home after a night out in Swansea.
"One of the details they shared that really stuck with me was how the police stopped booking people who were parked on the double-yellow lines outside the nightclubs on Swansea Kingsway," he explains.
"They knew they were all parents who'd come to pick up their children from nightclubs and it would have been insensitive to give them fines. Those simple details of changes in behaviour just shows you the impact of something like this some of our community."
Steeltown Murders is available now on the BBC iPlayer
