UK UK - Suzy Lamplugh, 25, Fulham, 28 Jul 1986 #2

[TimFisher1965]

He’s an ex-Met detective, well versed in conservation of evidence, at the time the PoW landlord was very helpful.
He could have put on protective clothes and found that vital evidence and not contaminated the scene.

possibly but that’s what he said

 

[WestLondoner]

He’s an ex-Met detective, well versed in conservation of evidence, at the time the PoW landlord was very helpful.
He could have put on protective clothes and found that vital evidence and not contaminated the scene.

Well, except that at the time he visited the pub, he said he was writing a book - but he didn't say what sort of book. He's a published writer of thrillers so they probably thought they were helping him write the next one. There'd thus be no sensible reason for him to don a spacesuit and start searching under their floors, so the type of book would have then emerged. If they thought they were helping him to turn their property into another 10 Rillington Place, 25 Cromwell Road or 23 Cranley Gardens, they might have been a lot less helpful.

 

[Terryb808]

Well, except that at the time he visited the pub, he said he was writing a book - but he didn't say what sort of book. He's a published writer of thrillers so they probably thought they were helping him write the next one. There'd thus be no sensible reason for him to don a spacesuit and start searching under their floors, so the type of book would have then emerged. If they thought they were helping him to turn their property into another 10 Rillington Place, 25 Cromwell Road or 23 Cranley Gardens, they might have been a lot less helpful.

Agree, but he could have been a little creative, some authors try out some of the story lines they write.
However, it’s gone now, and it’s going to be difficult to get access again.

 

[TimFisher1965]

He’s an ex-Met detective, well versed in conservation of evidence, at the time the PoW landlord was very helpful.
He could have put on protective clothes and found that vital evidence and not contaminated the scene.

Possibly but that’s what he said I think assumed that the police would follow it up, maybe if he had known what would come next he would have done something different? If I was in that position I would not have thought the police would not look and who saw Covid coming which forced change of owners and access etc.

 

[WestLondoner]

I actually think the reason the police won't search the pub is not because they think DV's wrong, but because they think he's right.

As long as it remains unsearched, JC's their man. It's the fault of those idiots at the CPS that nobody's been charged. Their hypothesis is intact. JC did it.

To hold this line they cannot entertain any other suspect. To do so would be to admit that the original investigation might have been inept and the others since likewise. Imagine the news item:

REPORTER: So why are you searching this pub, Inspector Plod?
PLOD: Well, it was one of two places Miss Lamplugh could have gone. We never searched it at the time.
REPORTER: Why not?
PLOD: Well, the temporary manager who was here on his own that afternoon said she never turned up.
REPORTER: And you just believed him?
PLOD: Yeah.
REPORTER: Why?
PLOD: Because we're suggestible, easily-fooled mugs. And we thought Mr Kipper it.
REPORTER: Did anyone identify SJL at Shorrolds?
PLOD: No.
REPORTER: Who had the keys to Shorrolds?
PLOD: We did.
REPORTER: So why did you think she went there?
PLOD: Because we're suggestible, easily-fooled mugs.
REPORTER: Lord Lucan just walked past behind you.
PLOD: Did he? Where? Quick! Nick him!
REPORTER: I made that up.
PLOD: Oh, that's a shame. But then, I did say we're suggestible, easily-fooled mugs. And we are.
REPORTER: You're not wrong. This is Elvis Presley for Sky News - back to the studio.
PLOD: Are you really Elvis Presley?

 

[Terryb808]

One thing plod do have is an incredible PR machine. Type in “who murdered Suzy Lamplugh” into any search engine and your get JC did it by an enormous percentage.
Ask almost any member of the general public about Suzy Lamplugh and you’ll get Mr Kipper and JC as your top answers.

So DV has an uphill task breaking the concept that the Met have the man responsible and it’s the CPS who won’t prosecute.

This just shows the power of the media.

 

[Konstantin]

One thing plod do have is an incredible PR machine. Type in “who murdered Suzy Lamplugh” into any search engine and your get JC did it by an enormous percentage.
Ask almost any member of the general public about Suzy Lamplugh and you’ll get Mr Kipper and JC as your top answers.

So DV has an uphill task breaking the concept that the Met have the man responsible and it’s the CPS who won’t prosecute.

This just shows the power of the media.

Yes as DV mentions in the interview that he did with Steven Keogh, there are so many rumours out there that are just based on no evidence. It's hard to put them all to rest. Maybe there needs to be a FAQ with them all listed and explanations for the origins of each and what evidence there is to support each one. For example, one question on that interview was how come so many witnesses placed SJL at Shorrolds Road with a male. The reality was they didn't. There was HR who set the ball rolling but there has not been anything done to work out how HR got involved and how his story developed. From reading the AS book you get the impression that he might well have been led by MG into saying that a man and a woman was there, since MG went round there to see if he could find SJL and that's when HR started to say what he did, then again according to AS by the time MG rang the police that early evening HR had developed his story to say that he saw a woman being bundled into a car or van, which he later retracted. He later admitted he never really saw the woman and he didn't identify her as SJL either.

THe other witnesses who came forward did so later, when the story and the photofit were already in the media, and a reconstruction had been done which would just fix the events of the reconstruction (some of which we know to be false e.g. SJL grabbing the keys from behind MG's desk as he saw her do that--that never happened). As DV says one witness didn't identify the male as looking like the one in the HR drawing and the other just reproduced exactly what the police had said in the reconstruction, which is very odd. That is the man called ND who DV tried to find and had a weird experience around. So really we don't have multiple witnesses placing SJL in Shorrolds and there is really no evidence at all she went there.

That's just one example.

The CPS won't prosecute because it can't bring a case to trial when there is not enough evidence for a conviction, it would be a massive waste of taxpayers money, unfair on the defendant, etc. Unless SJL's remains are found in a location that can be linked to JC then there cannot and will not be a trial with him as defendant.

I do wonder if AL acted how he did in the chat with DV because he has also convinced himself that JC did it and any questioning that didn't go along with that just upset him. It might be that at the time, the significance of SJL losing her diary etc didn't really occur to him so he was happy to sort of go along with it and spackle a bit over some suggestions she might have been out doing stuff with others that he didn't know about. Given that the phone call between him and SJL on the Sunday night was the last time he ever spoke to her, I would imagine he can remember who called who -- he just doesn't want to say. He would have been questioned over that in detail by the police after all. If he and SJL were having issues and initially until he was cleared he was in the picture as a possible suspect--and yes, he was definitively cleared but it did take time to do that--he would not want to say that SJL might have broken up with him as it would give him a motive to be jealous and angry and it would make SJL look bad too. I can see why he would not want to give any picture of SJL other than as a nice, sweet steady girlfriend of his. He clearly cared about her a great deal (I guess more than she did for him...?) That's just life.

Anyway, the JC did it scenario completely circumvents any need to look at SJL's private life, salacious diaries, her seeing other men and going to parties without AL, if JC did it who cares what happened on the Sunday night? Her missing diary is neither here nor there.

It is still odd that AL wants to distance himself from the POW now though. Perhaps he is having suspicions about that place, maybe he thinks SJL hung out there with some other people he didn't know of, how did her diary end up there anyway? if she had lost it on Friday night when out with AL she'd have mentioned it to him over the weekend when she saw him... asked if he could think where she might have lost it. The sequence of events suggest that she had not called the pub asking if they had seen it. So she didn't know where she lost it.

 

[Terryb808]

Yes as DV mentions in the interview that he did with Steven Keogh, there are so many rumours out there that are just based on no evidence. It's hard to put them all to rest. Maybe there needs to be a FAQ with them all listed and explanations for the origins of each and what evidence there is to support each one. For example, one question on that interview was how come so many witnesses placed SJL at Shorrolds Road with a male. The reality was they didn't. There was HR who set the ball rolling but there has not been anything done to work out how HR got involved and how his story developed. From reading the AS book you get the impression that he might well have been led by MG into saying that a man and a woman was there, since MG went round there to see if he could find SJL and that's when HR started to say what he did, then again according to AS by the time MG rang the police that early evening HR had developed his story to say that he saw a woman being bundled into a car or van, which he later retracted. He later admitted he never really saw the woman and he didn't identify her as SJL either.

THe other witnesses who came forward did so later, when the story and the photofit were already in the media, and a reconstruction had been done which would just fix the events of the reconstruction (some of which we know to be false e.g. SJL grabbing the keys from behind MG's desk as he saw her do that--that never happened). As DV says one witness didn't identify the male as looking like the one in the HR drawing and the other just reproduced exactly what the police had said in the reconstruction, which is very odd. That is the man called ND who DV tried to find and had a weird experience around. So really we don't have multiple witnesses placing SJL in Shorrolds and there is really no evidence at all she went there.

That's just one example.

The CPS won't prosecute because it can't bring a case to trial when there is not enough evidence for a conviction, it would be a massive waste of taxpayers money, unfair on the defendant, etc. Unless SJL's remains are found in a location that can be linked to JC then there cannot and will not be a trial with him as defendant.

I do wonder if AL acted how he did in the chat with DV because he has also convinced himself that JC did it and any questioning that didn't go along with that just upset him. It might be that at the time, the significance of SJL losing her diary etc didn't really occur to him so he was happy to sort of go along with it and spackle a bit over some suggestions she might have been out doing stuff with others that he didn't know about. Given that the phone call between him and SJL on the Sunday night was the last time he ever spoke to her, I would imagine he can remember who called who -- he just doesn't want to say. He would have been questioned over that in detail by the police after all. If he and SJL were having issues and initially until he was cleared he was in the picture as a possible suspect--and yes, he was definitively cleared but it did take time to do that--he would not want to say that SJL might have broken up with him as it would give him a motive to be jealous and angry and it would make SJL look bad too. I can see why he would not want to give any picture of SJL other than as a nice, sweet steady girlfriend of his. He clearly cared about her a great deal (I guess more than she did for him...?) That's just life.

Anyway, the JC did it scenario completely circumvents any need to look at SJL's private life, salacious diaries, her seeing other men and going to parties without AL, if JC did it who cares what happened on the Sunday night? Her missing diary is neither here nor there.

It is still odd that AL wants to distance himself from the POW now though. Perhaps he is having suspicions about that place, maybe he thinks SJL hung out there with some other people he didn't know of, how did her diary end up there anyway? if she had lost it on Friday night when out with AL she'd have mentioned it to him over the weekend when she saw him... asked if he could think where she might have lost it. The sequence of events suggest that she had not called the pub asking if they had seen it. So she didn't know where she lost it.

Excellent summary, your last conclusions as to why the Met didn’t look at why and how SJL lost her things and why she might have been very keen to get them back just makes the met look very unprofessional.
Throughout my career I would never have worked like this.
I learned quickly to question everything and take nothing for granted. If you don’t it will always come back and bite you.

 

[Konstantin]

Excellent summary, your last conclusions as to why the Met didn’t look at why and how SJL lost her things and why she might have been very keen to get them back just makes the met look very unprofessional.
Throughout my career I would never have worked like this.
I learned quickly to question everything and take nothing for granted. If you don’t it will always come back and bite you.

Yes, exactly.

I mean, I can see why the investigation went down the route it did because in some ways it was a bit misled by witnesses from the start. We have HR saying he saw a woman being bundled into a van (we have no info on when exactly he retracted that), which is probably, let's face it, why the police actually acted as fast as they did because as CV pointed out, SJL was an adult when she went missing, out of character or not. And this was the 80s when missing persons cases weren't taken that seriously at first. We also had the Sturgis staff not realizing that the keys they must have given the police were the only set, ergo it would have been very odd for SJL to go to a house viewing that day and not take them. Which lumped with the lack of any files on Mr Kipper in the system, the fact that he didn't seem to have a first name, and no one had heard of him-- that should have been something MG picked up on and mentioned to the police right away, who should really have had multiple hypotheses as to what had happened and where she might have gone that lunchtime. And really the name Kipper should have been a clue as to it being fake. SJL didn't even try to cover up that well it was fake.

And given that they KNEW her last phone call was to the PoW -- AS claims she spoke to KF "the landlords wife"--and they knew she had lost a diary and they recovered it and had knowledge of its contents, and that SJL did keep rather racy diaries--they should have at least considered she might have popped to grab her stuff from there that lunchtime. It puts a very different perspective on things. I assume they wanted a reconstruction and for that, you have to have a definite scenario. So they set in stone that she went to Shorrolds when she really might not have.

As DV points out in his book, no Shorrolds, no Mr Kipper.

 

[WestLondoner]

The interesting thing is that the police and DV agree SJL went somewhere and came to harm. They differ about where.

 

[Konstantin]

The interesting thing is that the police and DV agree SJL went somewhere and came to harm. They differ about where.

Well, unless they have some spectacular and very compelling evidence to point to JC -- and we can be pretty certain they don't, since if they did the CPS would have accepted it-- then I don't see what they have to lose by having a review and looking at alternative possibilities/hypotheses to the "she went to Shorrolds where Mr Kipper abducted her in broad daylight, took her somewhere then abandoned her car and disappeared himself, by nightfall". There is zero evidence to suggest that the Mr Kipper in Shorrolds road hypothesis holds water.

My guess is that HR's story was prompted by MG visiting SR to look for SJL, he later that day seemed to elaborate on that to say that he thought he recalled the woman being bundled into a car. Apart from that there are no real witnesses, apart from people who came forward rather later after the police had put a reconstruction out there (that was factually incorrect in places) that would have prompted people to recall stuff that was poisoned by the reconstruction. I walked down several streets today and I can't remember much about people I passed as I was not taking much notice.

So what is the issue with exploring alternative, credible theories for where she might have gone? CV didn't say SJL told him 6pm, he said she told him "later". He's the last known person to speak to her--by his own admission--and he spoke to her about a very personal, emotional, and sensitive item i.e. her personal diary.

 

[Crusader21]

It appears Detective Chief Inspector, Rebecca Reeves is the senior investigating officer with the SL file on her desk in 2022.

I sometimes think that her hands my well be tied ....

Yes she can put out statements looking for information as reported here - Police determined to get justice for Suzy Lamplugh 35 years after disappearance

But just wondering, is there a 'No Further Action To Be Taken' stamp on the file, coming from further up the chain of command?

Have the Met internally realised their own failings in the case, and as a face saving / let sleeping dogs lie ploy, decided that is it better to allow dust to gather on this file?

 

[WestLondoner]

I don't see what they have to lose by having a review and looking at alternative possibilities

Face.

The police never solved the case. But for the last 22 years, they have been saying they did solve it, that it was JC, and it's only because of those bureaucrats at the CPS that JC hasn't been prosecuted.

What the police have that we do not is the file that DV sent them on the case. It seems highly likely that this makes them look like utter amateurs. Therefore they can't admit that anything in it could be right.

DV's dossier, as opposed to his book, probably starts by asking where SJL might have been going. It then perhaps notes that the list of places is known and quite short: 37SR, Stevenage Road, her home, or the PoW. OK, and all those places were searched at the time, right? Er, wrong, notes the dossier. The PoW was never searched. Why not? Well, let's see why not...what did the staff at the PoW tell us at the time? Er, so this bloke who looked a bit like James Galway said SJL never turned up. So that's all right then.

Well, pfffffffft, if someone there killed her, they would say that. So we don't just swallow that, do we?

Oh. Wait....we did.

I reckon DV's dossier simply points out that an obvious place never was searched, and patently should have been. He doesn't even need to get into debunking the Kipper theory to be right about this. This was an obvious and appalling procedural omission.

All the Kipper-Schmipper, 37SR etc is largely beside the point. Circumstantially it's pretty obvious she did not go there. But if the pub is searched and she's still there, that's how we'll know for sure. We don't get there by proving what happened to the keys. That's just yet another detail the police should have grasped in July 1986.

This makes the police look appalling, so to deflect it, they need to reiterate that the Kipper story is true, and they need to defend the failure to search the PoW as justified and correct. Both of these lines of attack are, I suggest, in plain view. The police are still doubling down on searching places related to JC, and they're insisting that they don't need to search the pub because there was no motive; because DV needs to prove there was something salacious in the diary; because there are no witnesses; and so on. They're doing what you'd expect; they're dying in a ditch defending their hopeless case.

DL was successful at getting the police to do whatever she wanted done - fatally for the inquiry - but the surviving family now are content to leave this with the police. I think the only way this gets resolved is through political intervention by the mayor or Home Secretary.

 

[Crusader21]

This may be an interesting angle to look at the case ....

You've murdered SL, her body is secretley hidden in the vacinity. What do you do next?

This is what you then watch on the main news just 48 hours later (skip to 2.30)

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Police divers are in the Thames, there's that artists impression, the hunt is on for 'Mr Kipper' who lured SL away from Shorrolds Rd following the house viewing that she attended.

You realize that focus is firmly elsewhere, you've time. You do nothing?

 

[Crusader21]

Just 2 days in to the case, it's interesting to note too that it was reported that police said that there was 'a disappointing response from the public'?!

Was that because SL just was not at Shorrolds Rd. No SL, no fiesta, no struggle, raised voices etc?

Also that she wasn't present at Stevenage Rd? Her car simply abandoned with the driver just exiting and quietly walking away?

 

[WestLondoner]

there's that artists impression

According to the AS book, when the "reconstruction" was aired, there were a number of calls from the public pointing out that the artist's impression looked a lot like MG. The police just laughed, apparently, and dismissed all these as simply mistaken suggestions that MG must have done it. They failed to consider that the man HR had described outside the house might in fact be MG.

It's thus interesting that this impression was out so quickly, because it means that when the "reconstruction" was broadcast, the face was already well embedded. As a result, when MG is seen in it, a lot of people obviously sat bolt upright and went "That's Mr Kipper! That's him!"

You realize that focus is firmly elsewhere, you've time. You do nothing?

This has always been the interesting thing about CV's changed account. In July 1986 all he knew was that the police were looking for SJL. In 1987 he knew they were looking for an abductor called Mr Kipper. If he had anything to do with her disappearance but had not been able to relocate her body, she's still under that floor and she incriminates him. So he now knows, by the time he's reinterviewed, that he needs to muddy the waters as to how she got there.

So he introduces the idea of other people looking for her that day, one of them obviously Mr Kipper, who was on her tail; and he says he said this all along. He needs to get that assertion into the evidence trail, so that one day, if anyone ever searches the pub, right from the start there has been this story of others intercepting her there - if the police buy his 1987 story that he told them this in 1986 and they forgot to follow it up.

police said that there was 'a disappointing response from the public'?!

Was that because SL just was not at Shorrolds Rd. No SL, no fiesta, no struggle, raised voices etc?

Yes, I think so. Nobody saw the thing that didn't happen, so they had to film a reconstruction of what was supposed to have happened so people could come forward and say they saw it. A number of evidently bored people - an unemployed barman, an unemployed cellarman - duly obliged.

Shorrolds is a narrow road with parked cars on both sides leaving only enough space down the middle for one car. So double parking would block the road. I wonder if anyone thought about this at the time. Unless she got lucky SJL would have probably had to park a few houses away, yet nobody seems to have seen the Fiesta in Shorrolds, or seen her walking from it to 37SR. Nobody saw MG's XR3 there either, even though it was definitely there. What all these missing details have in common is they weren't touched on in the reconstruction, and therefore nobody came forward with corroboration.

 

[Terryb808]

It appears Detective Chief Inspector, Rebecca Reeves is the senior investigating officer with the SL file on her desk in 2022.

I sometimes think that her hands my well be tied ....

Yes she can put out statements looking for information as reported here - Police determined to get justice for Suzy Lamplugh 35 years after disappearance

But just wondering, is there a 'No Further Action To Be Taken' stamp on the file, coming from further up the chain of command?

Have the Met internally realised their own failings in the case, and as a face saving / let sleeping dogs lie ploy, decided that is it better to allow dust to gather on this file?

Yes, RR is the one that said to press cameras that the Met would leave no stone unturned.
Seems this applies only to stones that might include JC did it.

 

[Terryb808]

Face.

The police never solved the case. But for the last 22 years, they have been saying they did solve it, that it was JC, and it's only because of those bureaucrats at the CPS that JC hasn't been prosecuted.

What the police have that we do not is the file that DV sent them on the case. It seems highly likely that this makes them look like utter amateurs. Therefore they can't admit that anything in it could be right.

DV's dossier, as opposed to his book, probably starts by asking where SJL might have been going. It then perhaps notes that the list of places is known and quite short: 37SR, Stevenage Road, her home, or the PoW. OK, and all those places were searched at the time, right? Er, wrong, notes the dossier. The PoW was never searched. Why not? Well, let's see why not...what did the staff at the PoW tell us at the time? Er, so this bloke who looked a bit like James Galway said SJL never turned up. So that's all right then.

Well, pfffffffft, if someone there killed her, they would say that. So we don't just swallow that, do we?

Oh. Wait....we did.

I reckon DV's dossier simply points out that an obvious place never was searched, and patently should have been. He doesn't even need to get into debunking the Kipper theory to be right about this. This was an obvious and appalling procedural omission.

All the Kipper-Schmipper, 37SR etc is largely beside the point. Circumstantially it's pretty obvious she did not go there. But if the pub is searched and she's still there, that's how we'll know for sure. We don't get there by proving what happened to the keys. That's just yet another detail the police should have grasped in July 1986.

This makes the police look appalling, so to deflect it, they need to reiterate that the Kipper story is true, and they need to defend the failure to search the PoW as justified and correct. Both of these lines of attack are, I suggest, in plain view. The police are still doubling down on searching places related to JC, and they're insisting that they don't need to search the pub because there was no motive; because DV needs to prove there was something salacious in the diary; because there are no witnesses; and so on. They're doing what you'd expect; they're dying in a ditch defending their hopeless case.

DL was successful at getting the police to do whatever she wanted done - fatally for the inquiry - but the surviving family now are content to leave this with the police. I think the only way this gets resolved is through political intervention by the mayor or Home Secretary.

While I agree, the then Home Secretary Mrs May instigated an inquiry into the 1987 murder in the pub car park. The PI who died was investigating police corruption.
The inquired took 8 years to complete and concluded the the Met were institutionally corrupt.
It seems even after this the Met carry on as normal, if this didn’t result in action, sadly I can’t see the government or the London mayor successfully getting the Met to admit they got it wrong.
Incidentally the report concluded that the Met had a culture of covering up their mistakes.
Sound familiar?

 

[Konstantin]

Shorrolds is a narrow road with parked cars on both sides leaving only enough space down the middle for one car. So double parking would block the road. I wonder if anyone thought about this at the time.

Exactly. And to be honest, a car blocking the road would have attracted more notice--because it would have blocked someone's way--than a woman and a man on a London street in broad daylight, who would not have attracted special attention unless they were in some way standing out e.g. by loudly arguing, the woman crying, etc. If SJL had double parked, she would have had to cut the viewing very short or she'd have been blocking the road for other cars, which would have caused a bit of a kerfuffle, would it not? Or she'd have had to park somewhere else and walk. But the witnesses all claim they saw her standing outside 37SR... like in the reconstruction. Coincidental that two witnesses happened to walk past in what could only have been a very short space of time for SJL to be waiting outside the property? Yet no one reported trying to drive down SR and getting stuck behind a double parked Fiesta...

 

[Konstantin]

Do we know how the police found out so quickly that SJL's diary and chequebook were at the PoW? They seem to have gone around there the day after she went missing to collect them from CV and they did take a statement from him that same day (they followed this up a year later and he claimed he had told the two officers who came to collect the stuff about the mysterious phone calls and that he had given them the paper with Sarah's number on it).

I am curious how they found out so fast about this.