Yes I think this is an excellent line of thinking.I just wanted to talk about this £3,000 for a mo. In the late 80s, 89 I think, a good mate of mine was briefly an estate agent in West London. He described it as a pretty cut throat line of work because essentially you were always at risk of being done over by your colleagues. He had certain buyers who were assigned to him on registration of their interest, and the aim was for it to be his buyer whose bid for a property was accepted. That was what earned commission. His colleagues of course wanted their buyer to be the one the vendor proceeded with, so these estate agents were constantly winding their buyers up to gazump a colleague's buyer even after a sale had been agreed. He had sales targets which were to obtain so many exchanges of contract a quarter, and he got paid when the sales actually completed and money was paid over.
The commission rate charged by the agency was 2.25% and the negotiator whose buyer "won" got 15% of that. This was pretty typical as I recall. It is probably similar today except the agency commission rates vary more. The manager took 10% and the other 75% of what the vendor was charged went to pay the agency's overheads, partners etc. It would be the job of someone like MG to apportion buyers to negotiators, to decide which should be recommended to the vendor as best buyer, and to make sure SJL and her colleagues were hitting their targets.
Assuming SJL was on a similar structure then we can understand what she might have meant when she said she was "expecting" a £3,000 payout. On a normal vanilla house sale, she would be expecting her commission as soon as contracts had been exchanged, and she would actually get paid upon completion.
It's trivial to work out what value of house sale would have earned her £3,000. It would be an £888,888 house, because 2.25% of that is £20,000, and her 15% share of that £20,000 is £3,000. Right away, this tells us that her £3,000 was nothing to do with work. An £889k property then would be a very high end sale, and there is no way SJL, who had been an estate agent barely a year, would have been involved in anything of the kind. She would more likely have been involved with lower end buyers in the £80 to £200k mark, such as Shorrolds. Someone selling a property that valuable would have dealt with experienced senior members of staff, not a 25-year-old. I am handling a £2 million probate sale at the moment and it is being handled entirely by partner level staff.
The fact that nobody at Sturgis mentioned any high end sale at all that she might have been involved in points clearly to this being some private enterprise.
Do we have any inkling what this might have been about?
One possibility I can think of is that she would have had access to Sturgis' list of buyers. Agents were supposed to complete a card for each one setting out what they were looking for, price range, ource of funds, bids made, etc. This would form part of how MG would decide who was a more credible buyer. SJL would have had access to this, so one possibility that occurs to me is whether she was using Sturgis buyers to sell property on the side for people who had not instructed Sturgis? That is, someone says Hey Suze, I have this £200k house to sell but I don't want to pay an agent £5,000 for selling it - can you find me someone to buy it? So SJL says Sure, I know a few and I'd only charge you £3,000 for the introduction.
This is the only way I can see her making a one-off £3,000 whereby she knew it was coming (exchange had happened) but she had not yet had the dosh (payable on completion). At the price level of property she would ordinarily be involved with, she'd make more like £300 per, not £3,000.
She could still have made reasonable money. There were no punitive taxes on property dealing then, so volumes were far higher and she could have been collecting 30 commissions a year - maybe £15,000 on top of her basic, with the prospect of more as she was allowed to work on higher value houses.
The key to understanding this is who she knew and how: business partners, sex partners and of course anyone who was both. The circumstances in which she disappeared, like Claudia Lawrence, point to this happening at the hands of someone she knew and of whom she was not afraid
It was reported in the press at the time, that the police were actually looking at the possibility that SL was handling her own private house sales.
Investigations centered on house sales that were a form of money laundering. With criminals buying property with 'dirty' money, thus gaining 'clean' assets ...
I just get the feeling his interview was to push more book sales before Christmas.
If he genuinely believes she is buried in the pub then he needs to stop wasting time as wittiness’s are getting older and just do a “Go Fund Me” and then push forward with what he knows. But he doesn’t seem to me in any rush to do anything at all and the question is why?!
He is so vague on stuff which doesn’t help anybody. I know he is afraid of being sued but if he generally wants justice then he should push forward and get the ball rolling as he claims the police have told him the case was botched so turn to the media and get them to put pressure on the met.
MOO
From a forensic point of view it’s vital that the burial site is not disturbed, when asked the question “will the media coverage result in the site being disturbed” he said no.
On this basis I don’t believe SJL is in the cellar of the PoW, and where she is can not be easily accessed by the public.
I agree crowd funding is an option and DV did say he would consider this if the police took no action.
Regarding the obstacles the police placed in front of DV regards to what he needed to provide to get them to action his case file.
They are all designed to be things that can’t be overcome, look at the Mets history when it comes to admitting their mistakes, they just don’t.
If the then Home Secretary and an 8 year inquiry (Watch Murder in the Car Park) can’t achieve this, DV has no chance.
I honestly believe DV is doing his level best to get the police on side in a diplomatic way, to those of us who want to see a quick result, it’s frustrating.
So we have a Mexican standoff.
The police want witnesses and a motive before they'll abandon their JC theory and search the pub, but that's not going to happen exactly because they ignored it 35 years ago in favour of pursuing the fictitious Mr Kipper.
DV needs the pub searched because he needs to find and forensicate her, because A N Other's DNA will confirm the motive.
Total impasse unless he can crowdfund this.
As for digging up the cellar to see if Suzy’s remains are beneath it, where DV gets the cost of £500k is ridiculous.
The average cost today of digging up concrete from a cellar in the UK is approximately £50 per square metre.
Cost of a skip to remove rubble is around £300.
Then replacing and pouring concrete starts from around £90 per metre sq.
Total cost would be just a few thousand pounds.
how the perpetrator managed to dig the concrete up without anyone hearing him is anyones guess…
they still dug up JC’s mother’s garden not so long ago…so why won’t they did up the cellar in the PoW?
Don’t forget, the investigating officers and Met Police who made these decisions 35 years ago and then again around 20 years ago are either mostly retired now, or dead.
Well, there is. It could be that he intended to not to kidnap but to confront her, eg over money or some other issue (cf the story she told her uncle about someone pressuring her). But she has been vague about when she would be going there. Right away, that afternoon, that evening - not clear. This caller thus needed to know when she was expected there, so that he could be waiting for her.
He's organised the loss and retrieval of her diary, but also her cheque book. This inference is unavoidable given what we know. Only she, the pub, and the bank staff knew where her stuff was. How else can he know the fact and place she's mislaid them, unless he heard it from someone at the pub?
So he intends to ambush her there, and demand she write him a cheque, right there on the spot, for the money he thinks he's owed (someone AS mentions was bankrupted a week later). She can't say she doesn't have the cheque book, because she does. Or rather, the pub does.
Thus nobody intended her harm. What someone wanted was money, she'd been avoiding meeting that someone, so he / they set her up to be surprised at the pub.
As related in DV, no, he doesn't, nor does he have the right opportunity. But if he is an associate of the other man / couple, maybe he lifted the cheque book for them, and / or has agreed to keep her there when she comes for it. CV in real life is not short and dumpy; he's over 6 feet and capable of overpowering SJL. Maybe she is killed when he physically restrains her from leaving: DV's accident hypothesis - panic attack while locked into a cellar, for example.
The key point in this is that nobody ever intended to kill her. At most someone desperate for money, who felt she'd turned him over, wanted to intimidate her into writing a cheque. If harm were intended, no way would the woman have phoned and left a phone number. She'd only do that if she had legitimate intentions ('Then I got a phone call about two o’clock from a woman, saying, “If she comes, tell her you can’t find ’em and give us a ring,” ’ p165)
This account then ties quite a few points together.
Of course there's no conclusive evidence, and some evidence contradicts this, like with every other hypothesis. But if a search of the pub turned up her body, and DNA linking her to CV...well, that's where DV has got to.
- It fits with the account she gave her uncle of a troublesome man.
- It explains why someone might have been desperate enough for money to confront her.
- It fits with the DV theory that she didn't go to Shorrolds.
- It fits with the cabbie sighting of someone who looked like James Galway (CV) one street from Stevenage Road, who said he'd seen a couple 'having a right ruck' - this relocates where harm came to her away from the pub, and to where the car was dumped.
- This happened at maybe 3 or 4 o'clock; late enough for the BT workers not to have seen the car ditched, and late enough for her body to have been hidden first.
- It explains the calls to the pub, some of which were not to/from CV but rather the landlord, his wife, etc.
- The fact of SJL's death would mean murder would be a possibility, with all three knowledgeable parties in the frame as either perps or accessories; so all three would keep it quiet.
- It explains why CV's appalled ex dumped him - she was the fourth person around but not involved; she'd worked out what happened and where SJL really was instead of Shorrolds.
- It explains why CV instantly remembered stuff DV had not raised. You'd remember the day you killed someone all your life.
Well, there is. It could be that he intended to not to kidnap but to confront her, eg over money or some other issue (cf the story she told her uncle about someone pressuring her). But she has been vague about when she would be going there. Right away, that afternoon, that evening - not clear. This caller thus needed to know when she was expected there, so that he could be waiting for her.
He's organised the loss and retrieval of her diary, but also her cheque book. This inference is unavoidable given what we know. Only she, the pub, and the bank staff knew where her stuff was. How else can he know the fact and place she's mislaid them, unless he heard it from someone at the pub?
So he intends to ambush her there, and demand she write him a cheque, right there on the spot, for the money he thinks he's owed (someone AS mentions was bankrupted a week later). She can't say she doesn't have the cheque book, because she does. Or rather, the pub does.
Thus nobody intended her harm. What someone wanted was money, she'd been avoiding meeting that someone, so he / they set her up to be surprised at the pub.
As related in DV, no, he doesn't, nor does he have the right opportunity. But if he is an associate of the other man / couple, maybe he lifted the cheque book for them, and / or has agreed to keep her there when she comes for it. CV in real life is not short and dumpy; he's over 6 feet and capable of overpowering SJL. Maybe she is killed when he physically restrains her from leaving: DV's accident hypothesis - panic attack while locked into a cellar, for example.
The key point in this is that nobody ever intended to kill her. At most someone desperate for money, who felt she'd turned him over, wanted to intimidate her into writing a cheque. If harm were intended, no way would the woman have phoned and left a phone number. She'd only do that if she had legitimate intentions ('Then I got a phone call about two o’clock from a woman, saying, “If she comes, tell her you can’t find ’em and give us a ring,” ’ p165)
This account then ties quite a few points together.
Of course there's no conclusive evidence, and some evidence contradicts this, like with every other hypothesis. But if a search of the pub turned up her body, and DNA linking her to CV...well, that's where DV has got to.
- It fits with the account she gave her uncle of a troublesome man.
- It explains why someone might have been desperate enough for money to confront her.
- It fits with the DV theory that she didn't go to Shorrolds.
- It fits with the cabbie sighting of someone who looked like James Galway (CV) one street from Stevenage Road, who said he'd seen a couple 'having a right ruck' - this relocates where harm came to her away from the pub, and to where the car was dumped.
- This happened at maybe 3 or 4 o'clock; late enough for the BT workers not to have seen the car ditched, and late enough for her body to have been hidden first.
- It explains the calls to the pub, some of which were not to/from CV but rather the landlord, his wife, etc.
- The fact of SJL's death would mean murder would be a possibility, with all three knowledgeable parties in the frame as either perps or accessories; so all three would keep it quiet.
- It explains why CV's appalled ex dumped him - she was the fourth person around but not involved; she'd worked out what happened and where SJL really was instead of Shorrolds.
- It explains why CV instantly remembered stuff DV had not raised. You'd remember the day you killed someone all your life.
He's not talking about digging a hole in any old floor. He's talking about preservation of evidence, which would mean photographing the whole process, keeping and labelling everything removed, forensicating anything found, storing everything, and so on, all without introducing contamination by the investigators. If it comes to the crunch someone has to be able to produce this in court without the process having compromised what's found.
He didn't. She's in a crawl space under a suspended floor.
Because they would look foolish if she's there when they've been insisting for 20 years JC did it.
If you read the book they're still dying in a ditch defending that theory. If they search the pub, even if they don't find her it will show they think it's at least possible that they checked the whole thing up from day 1. That possibilty's something they just will not admit.
One thing that occurs to me is that if SJL were confronted at the pub by this couple or the man, and he figured she owed him money, he could have made her drive him to his bank....
This would explain the BW sighting where she was seen driving north at 2.45 wit a man in her car. If this was the man who intercepted her at the pub.....
Was Environmental Health called in during the blow fly infestation in 1986 at the PoW? I imagine the smell must have been very strong if there was a decomposing body under a suspended floor - and this is a public house we're talking about.
That's a quite brilliant line of thinking WL! I bet that potential scenario hasn't even crossed DVs mind!
Such a liaison would have seen this man put pressure on SL to drive to her bank.
May SL had little choice, but probably reconciled herself that she'd square things up at Sturgis, upon eventually returning to office.
Of course SL never reached bank. It does put the focus now onto the top of Fulham Palace Road / south of Hammersmith and not far from where her car was eventually found.
Do we know with whom SL banked with? And which branch was nearest / she'd have likely used?
I can’t why anyone would go to such convoluted lengths to ambush Suzy. If she did owe anyone money - and there’s never been a suggestion she did - that person would have known her well. They’d have known her name, her place of work, home address, and telephone numbers. There’s be absolutely no need to lure her into a public place.
I wonder why they haven’t released Suzy’s belongings, albeit just the diary, cheque book and chequebook to her family?
Whatever, what we can deduce from that is there’s absolutely nothing whatsoever in Suzy’s entries that mentions JC in any way whatsoever. If there was, the police would have proof she knew of him.
Well also of course JC wasn't from Bristol anyway, he was from Sutton Coldfield. He moved to Bristol later but the conversation SJL had about a man from Bristol was with a customer at Joan Price's Face Place in 1984 - when he still was banged up.So at least that throws the wild rumour out the water that the man from Bristol who it was rumoured Suzy had once been seeing was not JC.