UK UK - Suzy Lamplugh, 25, Fulham, 28 Jul 1986 #5

[Terryb808]

Thank you for this update. It’s a catch 22 as I never believed she was there but on the other hand it would have been nice to be able to solve it.

IMO Suzy was never going to be found in the cellar of the PoW.
No one in their right mind would leave a body where DV indicates that there was a suspicious mound.

Apart from the possibility that CV (if responsible) put her in his car and buried her elsewhere, the next best place is the railway embankment directly to the rear of the PoW.

Clearly it’s not been disturbed in many years, as the railway is some distance away maintenance staff would have no real need to climb the embankment.

It’s really a catch22, nothing found in the PoW, so no justification to extend a search elsewhere.

 

[lee sumner]

One possible couple are MG and either of two female co-workers at Sturgis. IIRC (I don;t have AS to hand) he made two visits, HR then remembering the first visit and describing it to MG on the second. MG looks a lot like Mr Kipper IMO.

The other complicating factor is there were lots of people seen in SR, but you only hear about the supposed one and only Mr Kipper, not least because he's the best for Cannan. If you take all the sightings, Kipper appears to have been a tall short man in a smart scruffy suit with a pale suntanned face and two noses, one broken and one not.

It's unclear what reliance can be placed on ND's sighting as he was a convicted criminal.

MG would take a male staff member with him to 37 shorrolds rd, not a female. he probably took NH.

 

[Terryb808]

MG would take a male staff member with him to 37 shorrolds rd, not a female. he probably took NH.

We can’t really say for sure that it was MG, and that he’d take a male member of staff.

At the time Suzy had not returned from the Mr Kipper appointment & lunch. So if she was inside 37SR and distressed over something, another female may be of more use.

 

[WestLondoner]

We can’t really say for sure that it was MG, and that he’d take a male member of staff.

At the time Suzy had not returned from the Mr Kipper appointment & lunch. So if she was inside 37SR and distressed over something, another female may be of more use.

Yep. For all anyone knew, she could have been unwittingly pregnant, had a miscarriage and passed out. In such a case, you'd prefer to be found by a woman, I'd think. I am not sure it's ever been bottomed out - in the public domain at any rate - who went to 37SR in what sequence that day. DV thinks it wasn't entered by anyone till the next day.

IMO Suzy was never going to be found in the cellar of the PoW.
No one in their right mind would leave a body where DV indicates that there was a suspicious mound.

Apart from the possibility that CV (if responsible) put her in his car and buried her elsewhere, the next best place is the railway embankment directly to the rear of the PoW.

Clearly it’s not been disturbed in many years, as the railway is some distance away maintenance staff would have no real need to climb the embankment.

It’s really a catch22, nothing found in the PoW, so no justification to extend a search elsewhere.

Indeed. The fact that she's not there now doesn't mean she never was.

In any case DV must know more than he lets on about CV. I cannot see why otherwise he would note that SJL intended to visit that pub and then conclude that she did so and died there, which basically identifies CV as involved. Acquire an old copy of AS' book and you've got his name, and then via 192.com you've got his address. Would he really do that on the basis that SJL probably went to the pub therefore CV killed her??

I still think it's interesting that Steve Wright, serial killer, was living closer to SJL in July 1986 than Cannan was, and possibly knew her from when they both worked on the QE2.

 

[lee sumner]

AFAIK there is no evidence from fingerprints of SJL having been inside 37SR.

If there was a viewing, conceivably the man accompanying her might have contrived not to touch anything, so as to leave no sign of his having been there. But then it would have been SJL who had to touch things to conduct a viewing: the garden gate, the front door, door handles, cupboards, light switches, banisters, and so on.

If traces of this kind were in evidence, then it's pretty much beyond doubt that she did go there. The house had not been on the market so long that she'd have been likely to have been round it before, so the Monday visit looks like the occasion when they were left. But we never hear about her prints having been found. Apparently, the totality of the evidence that she was ever there is 100% HR's sighting.

For me this is an even more elementary reason to doubt the assumption she went there. Even if one accepts she had the keys, she can't have gone inside without leaving traces of this kind. If there are none, then she never went inside 37SR, nor can she have left; in which case HR can't have seen or heard her leaving, either.

I suspect two possible explanations. One, the house was fingerprinted and there was no sign of her, so this is not talked about as too awkward for the Kipper narrative. Two, the house was not fingerprinted because the HR account was accepted as evidence enough that she went there, which is now embarrassing. You'd think someone would have been interested in what other fingerprints could be found inside, in case any were those of Mr Kipper, but there it is.

The issue may be that according to DI Johnstone, while all this was happening re SJL, he was about to stage a 5AM raid on Tuesday on a cement works nearby that yielded 38 arrests and kept him busy for the rest of the week. This was more of a priority than SJL. He and Mike Barley were both recent transfers from uniformed duty and Mike Barley had never run an inciodent room before. As a result, things were probably forgotten and

 

[lee sumner]

we dont always leave fingerprints at every location. i think SLP could have viewed 37 shorrolds rd, and not left her prints behind. she would have been walking room to room not touching anything.

 

[lee sumner]

Motive?:

P.312 Finding Suzy, DV: 'You would need to get a proper motive for the actual incident' 'rather than just there was something SALACIOUS in her diary and she didn't want someone to take it, and therefore she's tried to get it back and there's been an argument and someone killed her'. [DS Ryan}.

'It was a bizarre comment something SALACIOUS in her diary and she didn't want someone to take it'. [DV].

'In all our witness statements, evidential packages and written submissions to the police, we'd never once speculated about the contents of Suzy's personal pocket diary. In fact we'd not found a single witness who remembered ever seeing her with this personal pocket diary'.

AS 'The Suzy Lamplugh Story' P.111:

'It did not take the police long to realise that such an involved personal life could have a bearing on her disappearance. Tracing all Susannah's secret contacts sexual or otherwise, was complex work, and before long the investigating team decided there had been so many men in her life that they would take statements from only a selection of them'.

AS letters, Sunday Times, 28th Oct 1990

'Most of [my] speculation was wrong? Your reporter obviously did not have the access to the MET official report into Lamplugh's disappearance nor to the many signed statements to the police about her. Not 'speculation' but sworn evidence that could be admissible in court'.

P.189 'The Suzy Lamplugh Story'. AS:

'I talked for hours to Paul and Diana Lamplugh, to members of their family, to Susannah's boyfriends, and to family friends and others'. [As well as the detectives on the case] 'I sought out other policemen and women at all levels of the MET and received considerable unofficial cooperation from them too. The detectives had not only carefully talked to everyone connected with the tragedy but literally thousands of others too, and in effect I was able to take advantage of their vast research and knowledge of the case'.

It said Mr Stephen was meticulous in his research for the book, which included substantial written material and taped interviews with members of the family, colleagues and friends of Miss Lamplugh.
The above, published: 24 September, 1988
The Times

The Observer, 1988:

At one particularly harrowing meeting Faber’s lawyer read out the details of Susannah’s life, unknown to her parents, that had been intentionally left out of the book

AS book is excellent. he had access to the case files, which DV does not.

 

[Pinkizzy]

Someone mentioned using Chat gpt to answer a few questions about the Gilgo Beach killer, why don't we use it here?

 

[Terryb808]

we dont always leave fingerprints at every location. i think SLP could have viewed 37 shorrolds rd, and not left her prints behind. she would have been walking room to room not touching anything.

IMO it’s incredibly difficult to go from room to room and not leave a trace. You push doors open, touch handrails as you climb stairs and you need to pull the front door closed.
I’d like to think that if fingerprints where found (and there just had to be some) the police would have checked them against everyone SJL knew at the time (or at least her immediate circle of contacts).
Certainly if JC’s had been there we wouldn’t be discussing it now.

 

[Cherwell]

MG would take a male staff member with him to 37 shorrolds rd, not a female.

I don't know why you would assume that. If you think he would avoid being alone with a female in case of accusations of "inappropriate" behaviour, that's a very 21st century attitude. Nobody in the 1980s gave a fig about that.

 

[Salah11]

I would love a tv show on this like on Netflix as if you can pinpoint where she went first then can get a broader picture.


At the moment all you can say for definitely is she left work that afternoon.

 

[lee sumner]

We don't really know where or when she lost her chequebook. The complete and total incuriosity about this from everyone - the police, documentary makers, workmates, family - persisted until DV came along.

All we really know is that her chequebook and diary turned up at the pub by Monday 28/7. Someone at the pub rang the bank named on the chequebook. The bank had SJL's office number handy. They rang her and told her where the cheque book was. She rang the pub to arrange to collect it.

Those seem to be the facts. Then there's the conjecture.

Conjecturally, she seems to have rung the pub twice. The obvious time to go fetch it was after work, but a viewing request came in for 6pm, meaning she'd need to rearrange this collection if that had been what was agreed. In theory she could have just shown up late, but you can't be sure that someone you're speaking to at 11 in the morning is still going to be there at work at 7 that night or whenever.

We do not know when she lost her stuff at the PoW. In a TV documentary in the late 80s / early 90s, AL claims they went to the pub on Friday and a lovely evening was marred by the loss of her diary. More recently, he has said they never went to the PoW ever, and were in fact at Mossop's, a fairly smart restaurant next door, and it was Sunday. So at least one of those accounts is misremembered, and leaves us wondering about the movements through time and space of SJL's stuff between Friday and Sunday, or between the pub and the restaurant. CV and the landlord are adamant the diary etc were found on Sunday night.

Complicating this is that AL had clearly been chucked while he was on holiday, and that weekend was when he found out. So we don't know whether either of his accounts is to be believed.

DV's hypothesis about the PoW has legs because none of this was checked at the time.

We should remember that DL was so bat54it crazy she tried to get the libel laws changed to protect the reputation of a dead person. What she found out about SJL after her disappearance persuaded DL that her daughter had been - by her own religious lights, I emphasise, and absolutely nobody else's - a right slapper. She had uncomplicatedly slept with various boyfriends - perhaps three or four, perhaps 103 or 104. Either way she was harming nobody. But DL needed this not to be true, or at least not known, and in fact keeping this quiet was more important to her than finding her daughter's killer. Even though AL had been binned the week before, she therefore enlisted him in the charade of presenting SJL as what DL's generation would have called "a good girl", with one nice steady bloke. AL, maybe out of sympathy for a grief-stricken and bereaved woman, just played along. The police shouldn't have done so, and DL's involvement was disastrous for the prospects of success.

I struggle with the idea of Cannan as some sort of Zelig figure of crime. Supposedly he was an oily lounge lizard who liked to hang around wine bars, but at the same time, he was prepared to drive six miles from the Scrubs hostel to drink in a grotty, old men's pub like the PoW. Really? He was also apparently able to change his appearance - he could go from looking 25 to looking 45, from having a broken nose to not having one, from being pale to being suntanned. He could change a red Sierra into a black BMW. Again, really?

The plod's case against JC appears to rely on snitch accounts years after the fact. What is bizarre is that it occurred to nobody at the time to wonder what sex criminals had recently been released. Had they done so, they might have got to these witnesses sooner, and in time for the snitching to produce hard evidence. To be fair, we also don't know what else DV knows about the PoW that he's not sharing. What he presents in his book is not a case, just a missed line of inquiry from 37 years ago (this week).

For my money SJL is under a house, or maybe a garage floor, somewhere in west London. The movements of the car also strongly suggest to me that two people were involved.

yes, i think SLP ended things with AL when he got back from holiday, then she goes missing days later. it must have been weird for AL.

 

[lee sumner]

Excellent summary of AS’s book and his methodology. Some have been critical of him in the past which (IMO) is grossly unfair.

The publication of his book cost him dearly. DL was openly critical (wrongly IMO) of AS.
I have a copy and it goes as far as was legally possible at the time, he clearly had more (like DV may) than is in the book.

What is evident is that John Cannan was not on the police radar at the time, if he was it would have made it into the book.

At the time Suzy disappeared we also have apparently operating in the Fulham area The Richmond Rapist, he abducted a victim in Fulham just one week before Suzy disappeared.

Unless the police files are released we’ll never know who the suspects were back in 86.

Sadly the answers to what happened to Suzy are not in any of the many books published so far.

There are possible leads still to be followed up today, but after 37 years the police won’t spend time, resource and money without something solid being presented in the

AFAIK there is no evidence from fingerprints of SJL having been inside 37SR.

If there was a viewing, conceivably the man accompanying her might have contrived not to touch anything, so as to leave no sign of his having been there. But then it would have been SJL who had to touch things to conduct a viewing: the garden gate, the front door, door handles, cupboards, light switches, banisters, and so on.

If traces of this kind were in evidence, then it's pretty much beyond doubt that she did go there. The house had not been on the market so long that she'd have been likely to have been round it before, so the Monday visit looks like the occasion when they were left. But we never hear about her prints having been found. Apparently, the totality of the evidence that she was ever there is 100% HR's sighting.

For me this is an even more elementary reason to doubt the assumption she went there. Even if one accepts she had the keys, she can't have gone inside without leaving traces of this kind. If there are none, then she never went inside 37SR, nor can she have left; in which case HR can't have seen or heard her leaving, either.

I suspect two possible explanations. One, the house was fingerprinted and there was no sign of her, so this is not talked about as too awkward for the Kipper narrative. Two, the house was not fingerprinted because the HR account was accepted as evidence enough that she went there, which is now embarrassing. You'd think someone would have been interested in what other fingerprints could be found inside, in case any were those of Mr Kipper, but there it is.

The issue may be that according to DI Johnstone, while all this was happening re SJL, he was about to stage a 5AM raid on Tuesday on a cement works nearby that yielded 38 arrests and kept him busy for the rest of the week. This was more of a priority than SJL. He and Mike Barley were both recent transfers from uniformed duty and Mike Barley had never run an inciodent room before. As a result, things were probably forgotten and mistakes made.

i would say number 2 is probably what happened. shorrolds was not fingerprinted because HR account was accepted as evidence like you said.

 

[lee sumner]

So here's my hypothesis as to what happened.

SJL slept with others while she was with AL, including while he was on holiday. When he got back, instead of the expected ecstatic reunion sex he was looking forward to on the Friday, she blanked him. He did not see her on Friday, nor on the Saturday (when she possibly copped off with someone else), nor on Sunday when she went to the coast (he followed) and back (he followed) without him. This is not how you conduct yourself towards your sole bloke whom you've not seen for 2 weeks. He got the firm elbow on Sunday evening at the PoW, after she had pointedly ignored him all weekend.

Her anxiety to get the diary back was because if the pub somehow had it, it meant AL did not, as it contained stuff she did not need him to know. The items were lost there on the Sunday, not Friday, otherwise it could not have been CV who found it.

AL's self-contradictory accounts of the last weekend (telling a TV doc he and SJL went to the PoW on Friday, telling DV he'd never been there) were to save face; to suggest that he and SJL were still a thing (a recent split would be troublesome to explain to LE given she had just disappeared); and fortuitously, to support the impression of SJL that also happened to suit DL.

On Monday SJL initially arranged to go to the PoW after work. Then a 6pm second-viewing request came in. This was more important, so she rang the pub back and postponed the pickup to just "later". CV's recollections a year later of calls to the pub that afternoon are misrecollections of various conversations he had the following day.

When she left the office, she did not go to 37SR. No trace of her (e.g. her fingerprints) has been confirmed to have been found there. If she went inside with her killer, he could perhaps have avoided touching anything, but someone had to open doors and touch handles and switches. There's no sign she did.

So, as she never went inside 37SR, the woman exiting it via the front door whom HR saw cannot have been her. That identification, and the other "sightings" of her there, originated entirely with the police, or with people coached via TV to echo the police account. HR actually saw SF and MG, who went in and out some hours later, using the keys that SJL did not take. Although he never claimed he had seen SJL, HR's grossly misleading account provided him with years of excitement and attention, provided it kept changing according to what he was being asked to confirm. So the good-looking late-20s Mr Kipper he first described became a podgy 44-year-old Belgian diamond dealer when HR was later shown a photo of one. The sketch of "Mr Kipper" is most likely just a generic 80s yuppie estate agent, such as her boss.

Instead, she went elsewhere by arrangement, with someone she knew (i.e. the BW sighting in FPR is quite likely correct). She was led inside a nearby property - perhaps on the pretence that a sale instruction might be up for grabs - where she was attacked and at some point killed.

The property was one of which the killer had free run - a rented house or ground-floor flat, perhaps abutting waste ground; maybe a house the killer had bought and was converting into flats. The killer next ditched her car at about 4pm; the sightings of her car outside 123SR before then are all spurious. He then went back to that property. She may still have been alive at this point. She is probably under a floor or a patio somewhere in west London; Ladbroke Grove, Shepherds Bush - somewhere like that. If you take up the floorboards of a house built 100 years or more ago, you will find a space under the floor, and then the dirt it was built on, a couple of feet below. Some such houses have hatches let into the floor so you can inspect water pipes etc underneath without taking up the floor.

The property passed soon after into others' hands, its condition unremarkable. The current occupants know nothing.

The initial police inquiry failed because it focused on identifying everyone SJL knew who was in Fulham that afternoon. This did not work for three simple reasons. One, they did not remotely identify everyone she knew, due to how she compartmentalised her acquaintances. Two, she herself wasn't in Fulham that afternoon. Three, they had asserted - in advance of knowing the facts - that she went to Shorrolds. Consequently, anyone who might have thought they had seen her anywhere else would have been put off reporting this, because it couldn't have been her.

The second inquiry failed because its ToR were to implicate or exonerate Cannan, to which end JD solicited sightings by the public of Cannan, fourteen years ex post. Its approach was to repeat the previous investigation, with Cannan lobbed in as a suspect. Once it reached the same conclusion about everyone in Fulham as the first investigation, and having prompted a lot of spurious coached "sightings" of Cannan, that only left Cannan, so QED; he must have done it. This, of course, fails the Ronald McDonald test (but is consistent with contemporary police procedure, e.g. Rachel Nickell, Jill Dando). Cannan had nothing to do with it, which is why zero evidence against him has ever emerged.

I have no idea who the killer was. It was someone she knew well enough to go off with alone, who had access to empty property she would enter without demur, who needed to kill her, and who he knew in advance he was going to do so and planned accordingly. The motive for killing her could be her knowledge of some sort of property fraud; his jealousy of not being the only man she was sleeping with; rage at the money she'd cost him by welshing on a deal (if there's a TS connection); or simply a need to avoid prosecution after raping her.

Purely MOO but aligns with or explains pretty well all the known facts...

if SLP dumped AL that weekkend, she would not be concerned about him knowing what was in her diary.

 

[lee sumner]

Yes the car is the head scratcher because they are risking being seen with the car while dumping it.

So that would indicate that wherever Suzy went with the car was a clue to who did this imo

Because if it was as simple as she went to Shorrolds road and showed a property and then got kidnapped why risk taking her car and ditching it because it was known she was going there.

i believe he intended to ditch the car there all along. it was facing the large yellow sturgis for sale sign directly across the road. this was part of his plan. almost like playing some kind of mind game.

 

[lee sumner]

On JC as a master criminal, in the Shirley Banks case:
1. He left her car tax disc in his own car.
2. Then the actual car in his own garage.
3. Her handbag in the bins at the rear of his flat.
4. Finger print inside his flat.

If he’s responsible for Sandra Court, he left a car park ticket in his borrowed car. Then a trail of her belongings on his way back to London.

Then there’s the silly reg number SLP386S, IMO this doesn’t refer to Suzy at all. More like a poor attempt at a grid reference to Dead Women’s Ditch.

Is this really the master criminal that made SJL disappear so completely.

I don’t think so.

there was also a mystery letter sent to SIO on sandra court case claiming her death was an accident. would JC have sent this.

 

[lee sumner]

The main reasons I think SJL never went to 37SR are that her presence there was entirely the police's assumption, "Mr Kipper" being JC was also the police's assumption, neither was validated by any eyewitness or via ID parade, and that there is no public domain confirmation that her fingerprints were found inside 37SR. If she never went inside 37SR, then HR can't have seen her coming out of 37SR, which means the entire sighting is bogus. DV's discovery that the police probably had the keys all along (so she didn't) is just the icing on the cake.

If SJL did not go to any of the likely places, then we're left with an abduction from somewhere else. Being approached by someone she knew as she is standing by her car would fit. The car would need to be somewhere unobserved. Presumably while one abductor deals with her, another gets rid of her car, otherwise the inevitable search will focus on what happened to her on the very short walk from office to car. Moving the car to a completely random spot elsewhere deals with this.

The question then arises of who she was involved with who'd want to do such a thing...?

what about the paperwork, the house details for 37 shorrolds rd. DV never even mentions the paperwork SLP took with her. i believe she took the keys and details. what about the review team that was brought in 1 yr into the investigation. there job was to see if anything of importance has been missed. if the keys to shorrolds rd were still in office they would have noticed straight away, and probably fired the whole investigation team. they would have been a laughing stock to miss something so important like the keys and details.

 

[Terryb808]

there was also a mystery letter sent to SIO on sandra court case claiming her death was an accident. would JC have sent this.

If I recall correctly the letter was penned by a right handed person using their left hand.

I personally can’t see JC doing this, he clearly has no empathy with his victims, and this goes against what appear to come naturally to JC.

Again if I’m remembering this correctly an article in the press said that someone else had owned up the the Sandra Court murder.

It’s all very confusing because where she was dumped has JC’s MO all over it.
On other very distant possibility is that JC had an accomplice and it was that person who penned the note.
Just a few ideas on the subject.

 

[Terryb808]

what about the paperwork, the house details for 37 shorrolds rd. DV never even mentions the paperwork SLP took with her. i believe she took the keys and details. what about the review team that was brought in 1 yr into the investigation. there job was to see if anything of importance has been missed. if the keys to shorrolds rd were still in office they would have noticed straight away, and probably fired the whole investigation team. they would have been a laughing stock to miss something so important like the keys and details.

Maybe that’s why it didn’t come to light?

 

[lee sumner]

We are in the position of knowing what happened and the media coverage that followed.
However, if you look at this from the perpetrator viewpoint, how is he to envisage that this amount of attention would follow.
On the 28th July 1986 Suzy Lamplugh was just an estate agent employed by Sturgis.
People go missing all the time, but don’t get this level of attention.
IMO based on what we know, two people, one blonde and a male were waiting for Suzy at 37 Shorrolds Road.
They are the couple that the various witnesses saw, not Suzy, she never got as far as Shorrolds Road.
The only facts we have in this case is that Suzy left the Sturgis office at lunchtime and was never seen again.
As the office did not have a clock we can’t even be sure exactly what time she left.
Her car being found in Stevenage Road at 10.03pm is the only other factual evidence.
Again IMO the way this vital piece of evidence was treated is criminal, it should have been preserved.
Any narrative we look at needs to be based on these two facts, as they are the only concrete things we know for sure.

re, white fiesta. what about the mileage on the car. could they not check to see how far suzy could have gone, or see how many miles her car went on the 28th july.