UK UK - Suzy Lamplugh, 25, Fulham, 28 Jul 1986 #6

[su5ie]

These are just the pages in AS book that mention the property deal and the business deal

 

[su5ie]

It seems even LE at the start suspected it was to do with the property deal

 

[WestLondoner]

In the AS book .it talks about her parents wondering what to do with her flat it was not selling previous to her disappearance. And after a couple of months the parents cleared the flat of suzy's belongings it mentions the sale of the flat was to be 74000 and this only covered the banks .
AFAIK it does not state if this was including interest gathered over the months suzy was missing

It could very well be just bank interest. Mortgage rates at the beginning of 1986 were about 12%, and back then, you did not have the flexibility you have now to switch to a better rate. If we go with my guess above that SJL's mortgage was about £55,000, then after two years' payments at 12% she would still have owed over £54,000 on the mortgage.

The monthly payments at 12% would have been £579, so if as seems likely these stopped after July, after six or seven months the missed payments would have added up to about £4,000. That is, she would have owed more than than she originally borrowed. 12% mortgage rates were brutal like that.

For my own interest, I worked out what her monthly income would have looked like if she were on £16,000 (good money for a 25-year-old in 1986). Her mortgage would have been tax-deductible and her personal allowance would have been £2,335, so at 29% basic rate and the then NI structure, she'd have had just over £3,000 a year stopped, leaving her just under £1,100 a month. Deduct the mortgage of £580 and that left her under £500 a month to live on. Out of that, she'd have had to find utilities, rates, service charges etc, before paying for food, clothing etc.

The expensed car must thus have been pretty valuable to her, as must the lodger's contribution.

I think the Sturgis sign was a rendezvous point and a car phone could have been used to say the person had arrived

It's possible but car phones were very expensive and very erratic in 1986, plus they left a trail as they still do.

She was also depending on the alleged 3000 commission

The £3,000 was almost certainly just her normal sales commission. Agents typically then charged 2% of the sale price and the individual EAs got 15% of the 2%. For SJL to be due £3,000, all she needed to have done was sell about a million quid of property, which is to say about six 37SRs or so. Sturgis would get £20,000 and she'd get 15% of that.

To put it another way, we don't need to posit a mysterious non-Sturgis deal as the only possible source of this £3,000.

 

[Konstantin]

For my own interest, I worked out what her monthly income would have looked like if she were on £16,000 (good money for a 25-year-old in 1986). Her mortgage would have been tax-deductible and her personal allowance would have been £2,335, so at 29% basic rate and the then NI structure, she'd have had just over £3,000 a year stopped, leaving her just under £1,100 a month. Deduct the mortgage of £580 and that left her under £500 a month to live on. Out of that, she'd have had to find utilities, rates, service charges etc, before paying for food, clothing etc.

This is possibly why the police thought that she might have been getting extra income by "tomming it" because they thought her lifestyle did not match her income. But her parents believed that she was merely very good at managing her money (and there was no evidence of her being an escort, which is a bit of an extreme and sexist conclusion).

It's very likely that as an attractive young woman, SJL had a lot of men willing to take her out. Some were probably wealthy. If she had relationships with them, that's her business and not escorting. I can see why her mother would not have liked any of that, and wanted to cling to the idea that SJL was in a steady monogamous relationship with her nice boyfriend, AL.

 

[WestLondoner]

Indeed. Realistically her fixed outgoings - water, gas, electricity, phone, rates, flat service charges, life / home contents insurance (the former often a condition of a mortgage) - were going to eat quite some way into her < £500. I don't remember what I paid for gas and electricity in the 80s, but do I remember the phone was £30 a month and my rates were £45. When mortgage rates went up to 15% in 1989, my disposable income after all the above, plus food, car costs and commuting to work, fell to 0.67% of the gross. That is, I was on £24,000 a year and after unavoidable costs I had £160 to spend - £13 a month.

One way of making ends meet would be to four-time your boyfriend. At any given time you'd have one or two with whom it was early days who could be induced to pay for everything, and one or two who'd settled in and were starting to think you ought to go dutch now with them and then. The latter would be eased out in favour of replacements who were more like the former. This process could be continuous.

Making this work would require scrupulous compartmentalisation of your life and a steady throughput of new suitors.

 

[Konstantin]

One way of making ends meet would be to four-time your boyfriend. At any given time you'd have one or two with whom it was early days who could be induced to pay for everything, and one or two who'd settled in and were starting to think you ought to go dutch now with them and then. The latter would be eased out in favour of replacements who were more like the former. This process could be continuous.

SJL asked her mother, according to the unreliable narrator DL, whether she should marry for love or money. It was on her mind. She had a busy social life. I imagine her pocket diary was crucial to remembering all those numbers, dates, etc. And a jealous suitor who wanted to know where he stood with her might well want a look at it. Whether that was anything to do with her abduction is obviously just speculation.

 

[Cherwell]

This is possibly why the police thought that she might have been getting extra income by "tomming it" because they thought her lifestyle did not match her income.

Possibly because of her previous employment as a beautician and masseuse. They probably thought she had a sideline in massage with happy endings or more.

 

[su5ie]

SJL asked her mother, according to the unreliable narrator DL, whether she should marry for love or money. It was on her mind. She had a busy social life. I imagine her pocket diary was crucial to remembering all those numbers, dates, etc. And a jealous suitor who wanted to know where he stood with her might well want a look at it. Whether that was anything to do with her abduction is obviously just speculation.

DL certainly came across as believing suzy should marry for status and money considering her judgment and actions taken in leiu of any boyfriend that didn't meet her standards such as her great plan of sending suzy to America to off load a boyfriend deemed not good enough .it shows you the lengths she was willing to go it didn't matter that the boyfriend was good to suzy only that he be seen as good enough for a certain cohort of society

I would love to know what was taken out of AS book . What I wouldn't do to get my hands on the original drafts . (Evil laugh)

 

[WestLondoner]

If I had to guess, it would be about the four-timing and / or married men. As Martin Clunes' character Gary once memorably put it in Men Behaving Badly, "If God had meant blokes to be faithful to one bird, He wouldn't have invented other birds".

 

[su5ie]

If I had to guess, it would be about the four-timing and / or married men. As Martin Clunes' character Gary once memorably put it in Men Behaving Badly, "If God had meant blokes to be faithful to one bird, He wouldn't have invented other birds".

I remember this episode such laughs that programme gave me .

 

[Konstantin]

If I had to guess, it would be about the four-timing and / or married men. As Martin Clunes' character Gary once memorably put it in Men Behaving Badly, "If God had meant blokes to be faithful to one bird, He wouldn't have invented other birds".

Maybe that is what DL objected to AS writing about, so he didn't.