I think it's fair to say then that all avenues and alibis were checked to eliminate AL.
Definitely. If the police
had tried to charge someone with this, having not conclusively eliminated AL, the obvious line the defence would take is "it's always the boyfriend; the police never properly eliminated the boyfriend; therefore it
might have been the boyfriend; therefore there's reasonable doubt that it was my client. Your Honour, please throw this case out." Even if the police didn't think for a nanosecond AL had anything to do with it, they'd still have to eliminate him beyond all argument - as they did.
The simpler explanation IMO of the various conflicting, and in some cases unlikely, accounts AL has given is empathy for DL in her loss. DL was comforting herself by managing SJL's posthumous reputation. She thought SJL's name would be besmirched by sensational disclosures about her personal life. She was quite successful in closing this down. All we know is AS' remark that some of the stuff dropped from his book was "News of the World material". It's a while since I read his book, but AS does indicate that at the time she disappeared, SJL was four-timing AL. Maybe the details are what he meant. DL would have regarded SJL not being a virgin when unmarried at 25 as completely disgraceful, so it's not hard to see why they fell out.
I think the police said he had to provide a witness who saw her go to the pub that day before they would act. It looks like his work will go to waste. I reread the Andrew Stephens book, and he points out the discrepancies in the relief landlords account from 1986 to 1987 assuring us its purely a mistake. Maybe he picked up on something ?
This has always struck me as pretty disingenuous by the police because literally from the get-go, they told the world that SJL went to 37SR and met a man there. They were informed of her disappearance at 6pm on Monday, and were going with this narrative by 2pm on Tuesday before they'd taken a single statement from anyone. This pretty much guaranteed that if anyone thought they'd seen her going into the PoW at 1pm they would not have come forward, because according to the police, that definitely wasn't her. It was nonsense to suggest that DV should now find a witness to this 35 years after the fact, when it was their own job to do so in 1986. Even if DV somehow did find such a witness, they'd dismiss it as not credible after so long.
I'm not Terry, but I think the DV/POW stuff is very unlikely.
I also haven't seen anything to suggest the landlord is dodgy.
For the CV/KH theory to stack up, the pub would have had to be closed and empty but for the landlord, who'd have to be a reflexive sex attacker. There's no evidence of this in the book, although DV may have more than he lets on.
At best, the only person saying she never turned up there is CV/KH - which, if he did it, he would say that, wouldn't he? Then again, he'd also say it if it were true, so it doesn't prove a lot. It's also inconceivable that she's under the pub floor because it was relaid in the mid 1990s and nothing was found, and if she had been found, the suspects list would have about one or two names on it.
If CV/KH/ A N Other did it she'd be on the railway embankment behind the pub, not under the floor inside it.
I doubt if JC was the HFSR, but there are some general similarities in MO and appearance. The police don't seem to have done any ID parades with victims, or anything like that.
The point, I guess, is that this attacker left a witness every time he offended, because he didn't kill any victim. It would therefore be trivial to establish whether this could have been Cannan. I suspect this was done and he was eliminated, because the HSFR was e.g. a 6-foot 20-stone Asian or something. But it doesn't support the narrative so it keeps coming up as part of the "case" against Cannan.
Cannan was not the only rapist in the country. In 1986 Birmingham had a population of 1 million which was about 2% of the national population. 4,000 rapists a year were convicted in the 1980s (and always jailed), so about a 80 year from Birmingham, pro-rata. Depending on how long a rapist is active for (10 years? 12 years?), there could easily have been 1,000 active or potential rapists in Birmingham. So with the HSFR case as with SJL, I always ask why it can't have been any of the others who did this sort of thing. If there were 1,000 active rapists in Birmingham who could have been the HSFR, have the other 999 been eliminated? How many rapists had been released from Brixton, Wandsworth and Wormwood Scrubs in the first half of 1986*, and why can't it be any of them, given that the two former prisons were nearer where SJL lived than WS was?
* by my calculation about 1 to 2 a week based on the population in these three prisons, so 50 to 100 by the end of July
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