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

[tes1984]

If Cannan killed Suzy, as well as Shirley Banks, then he devolved as an offender.
Suzy's killer knows to remove the vehicle from the crime scene. Cannan does the complete opposite with Shirley.
Suzy's killer conceals a body never to be found. Cannan doesn't hide Shirley particularly well.
Some offenders get sloppy over time. Is this the case with Cannan?

 

[Observe_dont_Absorb]

If Cannan killed Suzy, as well as Shirley Banks, then he devolved as an offender.
Suzy's killer knows to remove the vehicle from the crime scene. Cannan does the complete opposite with Shirley.
Suzy's killer conceals a body never to be found. Cannan doesn't hide Shirley particularly well.
Some offenders get sloppy over time. Is this the case with Cannan?

Unlikely IMO

 

[tes1984]

Unlikely IMO

If he's the houses for sale rapist, then he also devolves into a less organised offender for his known rape.

 

[WestLondoner]

If Cannan killed Suzy, as well as Shirley Banks, then he devolved as an offender.
Suzy's killer knows to remove the vehicle from the crime scene. Cannan does the complete opposite with Shirley.
Suzy's killer conceals a body never to be found. Cannan doesn't hide Shirley particularly well.
Some offenders get sloppy over time. Is this the case with Cannan?

Indeed. If Cannan were involved in SJL's disappearance, it makes you wonder if Cannan was working at that time with a smarter accomplice. This accomplice understood the importance of not creating an investigable crime scene by not going inside 37SR; distancing yourself from the car by dumping it quickly; and making sure no body was ever found. When offending with this conjectural accomplice Cannan got away with it, because the accomplice raised his IQ by about 20 or 30 points. But when offending alone, he left a trail of evidence that lit himself up in neon.

The same could be said of the Sandra Court case. She was killed and dumped in water, where she was rapidly found. A car parking ticket puts Cannan's shared car in the area that day. The possessions of hers later found are strewn along a route that points to west London. But he has never been linked with this. Perhaps the same accomplice was in the picture and warned him to get out of the area and take nothing of hers with him. Cannan complied except he forgot about the car park ticket, and got away with it.

Later, murdering Shirley Banks without his accomplice, he keeps her car in his garage, its tax disc in a briefcase and the briefcase in a car that was searched when he used it in the course of committing a rape. This is his native IQ in evidence.

 

[Terryb808]

Indeed. If Cannan were involved in SJL's disappearance, it makes you wonder if Cannan was working at that time with a smarter accomplice. This accomplice understood the importance of not creating an investigable crime scene by not going inside 37SR; distancing yourself from the car by dumping it quickly; and making sure no body was ever found. When offending with this conjectural accomplice Cannan got away with it, because the accomplice raised his IQ by about 20 or 30 points. But when offending alone, he left a trail of evidence that lit himself up in neon.

The same could be said of the Sandra Court case. She was killed and dumped in water, where she was rapidly found. A car parking ticket puts Cannan's shared car in the area that day. The possessions of hers later found are strewn along a route that points to west London. But he has never been linked with this. Perhaps the same accomplice was in the picture and warned him to get out of the area and take nothing of hers with him. Cannan complied except he forgot about the car park ticket, and got away with it.

Later, murdering Shirley Banks without his accomplice, he keeps her car in his garage, its tax disc in a briefcase and the briefcase in a car that was searched when he used it in the course of committing a rape. This is his native IQ in evidence.

IMO Cannan got lucky with Sandra Court, she fits his natural MO and leaving a trail of evidence leading to London.
This also applies to Shirley Banks, it shows just how inept his natural MO is.
By contrast in Suzy’s case there is basically no evidence at all. I find it difficult to believe her perpetrator had an accomplice, nothing has emerged in all these years.
It doesn’t stack up that Cannan had anything to do with Suzy’s disappearance.
So two options stand out:
1. A single perpetrator.
2. Or a well organised criminal gang that needed to ensure she kept quiet about something she shouldn’t have known.

 

[Lady Stoddart-West]

As we know JC had access to the hostel inmate’s car and he was a friend, JC picking up the HP payments on the car when he couldn’t afford to do so, it’s also possible they engaged in petty crime together around May 86. If JC also had access to his local accommodation & garage it’s possible this man unwittingly helped facilitate a much more serious crime. Certainly this man did his best to completely disassociate himself from JC later on.

DNA on Sandra Court, they apparently had hair that potentially belonged to her in sierra. Also a confession letter arrived with stamp & seal on envelope potentially from JC. I would start with SC.

 

[Lady Stoddart-West]

I was looking at some old links re this today and came across this Independent story from 2000. It has been posted here before I am sure.

The hunt for the killer of Suzy Lamplugh has been re-opened after a new witness came forward claiming to have seen the estate agent alive shortly after her abduction 14 years ago, police said yesterday.

Detectives also disclosed for the first time that Ms Lamplugh may have been seized by more than one person.

The new witness is believed to have reported seeing Ms Lamplugh, 25, being driven in her Ford Fiesta car in Fulham, West London, at lunchtime on 28 July 1986 ...

It had previously been assumed that her Ford Fiesta had been driven directly to Stevenage Road and abandoned 80 minutes later. But the new witness evidence suggests the vehicle, registration B396 GAN, may gone by a different route, possibly dropping off the estate agent at an address in West London on the way..."The witness at the time was very focused geographically in terms of the route that Suzy may have taken..."

This is more or less the scenario we've been discussing recently, whereby she is taken somewhere in her own car which is then dumped and two criminals are required.

What is not clear is whether this new witness referred to was Taggart or someone else. Taggart couldn't easily give the police anything of evidential value on Cannan without incriminating himself as having abetted SJL's murder. He certainly couldn't plausibly claim to have actually seen her. I also wonder whether this sighting squares with the location and time of the BW account.

The bit about the car "driven directly to Stevenage Road and abandoned 80 minutes later" is also a bit odd. It's the first time I've heard of any assumption that the car was dumped outside 123SR 80 minutes after she left the office, i.e. at 2pm. The police seem elsewhere to have bought WJ's statement that it was there by 1pm.

I often think with this case that if you had an award for "Least Helpful Witness", all of them would have to share it.

Also, it has been pointed out before that James Galway Man - who hailed a cab near 123SR and mentioned "a right ruck" around the corner - was then driven to North End Road. This road runs between Star Road and Shorrolds, in the sense that they are both turnings off it around 10 minutes' walk apart. Do we know what Taggart looked like? Did he looked like JGM? Was the cabbie's fare Taggart going back to his flat having just got rid of SJL's Fiesta?

Was this not BW’s sighting being rehashed here? It was around 80 mins after SL left office.

 

[Lady Stoddart-West]

NB: also by 2000 we had the swerving white van driver & the LHD BMW jogger witness. The BMW jogger witness said he’d reported this at time to temp pop-up police station in Stevenage Rd. When all the card index system was computerised l wonder if further evidence was found? Including the fact other upmarket estate agents allegedly reporting an applicant called ‘Mr Kipper’.

A taxi driver also later claimed to have dropped a suited & booted JC off clutching property particulars I think.

NB: LHD BMWs much cheaper & there was a dealer nearby in Fulham.

 

[WestLondoner]

Was this not BW’s sighting being rehashed here? It was around 80 mins after SL left office.

I don't think so. It's said to be a "new witness" (yeah sure, 14 years after the fact), and differs from BW in that BW said SJL was driving, whereas this sighting claims she was being driven in her car by someone else. This would fit with the supposition, based on the seat position, that SJL was not driving the car when it was left in Stevenage Road. BW's sighting was also 2 hours after SJL left the office rather than 80 minutes. That said, MB always though the car was driven straight there - although he may have thought this because WJ's account implied that was what happened, and he believed WJ.

 

[WestLondoner]

If JC also had access to his local accommodation & garage it’s possible this man unwittingly helped facilitate a much more serious crime. Certainly this man did his best to completely disassociate himself from JC later on.

One of the reasons Taggart has always seemed of dubious reliability to me is exactly this - that he can't have known anything that incriminated JC that did not incriminate himself worse. If there were evidence that SJL had been in his flat (or garage - did he have one?), the logical assumption is that Taggart had something to do with it, not that JC did. Hence he cannot have given police anything that would point them to any hard evidence. I then start wondering if he had vaguely known JC in the Scrubs, and thought that he could parlay this into some sort of advantage to himself in 1999 / 2000 if he gave the police what appeared to be intelligence on JC's involvement in a high-profile unsolved case.

DNA on Sandra Court, they apparently had hair that potentially belonged to her in sierra. Also a confession letter arrived with stamp & seal on envelope potentially from JC. I would start with SC.

Apparently there was also a more recent anonymous confession, not from JC. I can't think why he'd have written such a letter back then, but then again, he's not the sharpest tool in the shed. This one does look a lot more like him though. The car we know he used was in the area that day, evidenced by a car park ticket; he ditched the body in water, like Shirley Banks; and SC's personal effects were found along the side of a route you'd take back to west London, as though someone had driven back that direction chucking her things out of a car window at intervals.

NB: also by 2000 we had the swerving white van driver & the LHD BMW jogger witness. The BMW jogger witness said he’d reported this at time to temp pop-up police station in Stevenage Rd. When all the card index system was computerised l wonder if further evidence was found? Including the fact other upmarket estate agents allegedly reporting an applicant called ‘Mr Kipper’.

If so, this would be far more persuasive than what we've heard from the police so far.

There is really no reason to believe witnesses from 14 years later, because such accounts fail the obvious test: how they can be sure when it happened? I can reconstruct, but can't actually remember, things that happened in January 2010, for example. But if these accounts were given in 1986 and only noticed 14 years later, then they became more convincing (and the professional ineptitude is breathtaking).

AS' book makes no mention of any other Kipper sightings, interestingly. From what he says and what the police have indicated, it's as though the only mention of any Mr Kipper they ever came across in the investigation was the scribbled note in the diary. If JC was insinuating himself close to SJL, you do wonder why he was pestering other agents using the same name, though.

DV's book starts by questioning whether there was any visit to 37SR at all and goes on to suggest that there was no Mr Kipper. If there is evidence from 1986 that someone was visiting other agents using that name, then it says there was indeed a Mr Kipper, and hence there probably was a visit.

NB: LHD BMWs much cheaper & there was a dealer nearby in Fulham.

You would think tracking down LHD BMW owners would not take that long. Do we know when the idea of an LHD BMW, as opposed to a BMW more generally, came into the picture?

 

[Lady Stoddart-West]

The older style BMW seen parked in Shorrolds, they went quite a way re; checking ownership, but resources ran out, or similar, & for whatever reason they stopped short. This was arguably more important to eliminate. Reminds me of the Ripper case & tyres, I think they just stopped short of identifying Sutcliffe by abandoning checks.

Did they check with all local agents & eliminate any showing nearby properties in Shorrolds Rd to clients that lunch time? I would imagine so. The woman seen by Doyle etc, & man, description was quite specific. I think DV, etc, all agree HR at least saw a man outside Shorrolds. If he thinks SL never went there, who was he/they & why there?

 

[Terryb808]

The older style BMW seen parked in Shorrolds, they went quite a way re; checking ownership, but resources ran out, or similar, & for whatever reason they stopped short. This was arguably more important to eliminate. Reminds me of the Ripper case & tyres, I think they just stopped short of identifying Sutcliffe by abandoning checks.

Did they check with all local agents & eliminate any showing nearby properties in Shorrolds Rd to clients that lunch time? I would imagine so. The woman seen by Doyle etc, & man, description was quite specific. I think DV, etc, all agree HR at least saw a man outside Shorrolds. If he thinks SL never went there, who was he/they & why there?

On the subject of who was outside 37 SR we have a couple of obvious options.
It was Suzy and she was meeting someone who was not part of her inner circle. Or she’d been secretly keeping her cancelled lunchtime date with PSS & TS if so they’d have met at a pub or restaurant. The same goes if she was meeting long term boyfriend DH.
There’s always the possibility that TS called and pressured her into entering the fake Kipper viewing, so it was PSS & TS outside.
To further this theory, she could have told them she was going to collect her things from the PoW and would pick them up on the way back.
This fits DV’s book, but also raises the possibility that KH did receive phone calls that afternoon, but doesn’t make him innocent.

 

[WestLondoner]

I think DV, etc, all agree HR at least saw a man outside Shorrolds. If he thinks SL never went there, who was he/they & why there?

Probably HR was mistaken about the time and saw MG when he went to 37SR looking for SJL, with a female colleague from the office. DV thinks it was just a random man.

Supposedly HR heard the door shut and then saw the couple outside. If the door shut, then they had been inside. So there would have been fingerprints inside on door handles, light switches etc. I've never heard it said that anything of the kind was found. So the only evidence they went inside was HR saying they came out. How can HR have heard anyone coming out if nobody went in? Could SJL really have conducted a viewing in which neither she nor Mr Kipper touched anything?

If she went there, it was not for a viewing. She perhaps met someone, then went elsewhere.

 

[Lady Stoddart-West]

Did they forensically check inside for fingerprints? DV said odd police apparently never checked Shorrolds at time yet broke door down at her own flat. There will have been fingerprints inside of course.

Did police give identifying all who had been in that road a measure of priority? So many houses/flats for sale there at that time. Were other estate agents interviewed, others will have been showing property at similar times.

HR, I believe, heard a bang such as a door closing. A car door, double parked, possible too. AS said HR originally claimed she might have been/was bundled into a van.

 

[Lady Stoddart-West]

A witness at time (NB: AS) claimed a woman was waiting with particulars & keys outside I believe. Sturgis keys were more apparent than most as fob oversized & yellow. He said her hair very fair. She smiled at him & appeared to be waiting for someone. One witness could be fairly specific on time. A big campaign to source all who were in road on that day, most will have been locals, may have helped. Poss police did this. Crimewatch could have done this & attacked from this angle.Suggests must have been SL if all else eliminated.

 

[WestLondoner]

DV's take on this was that she never went to 37SR. He bases this on the idea that she very probably did not take the keys (there would have been one set and they were still in the office when the house was later entered). He attributes the diary entry to the fact that the house was a new instruction, hence in the forefront of her mind, and the name "Kipper" to the fact that she had a mate in that road called Herring. He does not additionally mention, as he might have done, the absence of evidence of her ever having been inside. If her or Cannan's prints had been found in that house we would for sure know all about it.

The "corroborating" sightings outside are a problem for DV, which he addresses by suggesting that they added nothing and came from people who'd been watching TV. AS is clear that there were conflicts in the detail and timings of the corroborating sightings - one supposed witness wasn't sure when he saw a blonde between 12 and 4pm, for example. Others saw a man with short hair in a scruffy suit with a broken nose. Some mention champagne, others don't.

Of course, DV has to get rid of the 37SR visit if his own hypothesis is to stand. He could be half-right, though. She could genuinely have gone to that property, but like he says without the keys or any intention to go inside, in order to meet someone there. I speculated above that this person could be someone who arrived there on foot and blagged an onward lift from her. This scenario would solve the inevitable and very risky problems arising from there being two cars at 37SR. If they left in his, then at some point her car has to be retrieved and disposed of or it will point unerringly to what must have happened and where. If they left in hers, then his car has to be retrieved from 37SR - a locale that could by then be getting quite hot. If they left in two cars, then wherever they next went, all the same problems play out elsewhere.

The above notion makes it possible for BW's sighting to be accurate, and for the alleged jogger / BMW sighting to be accurate as well - although I only buy that one if it was a genuine sighting from 1986, and not something thought up 14 years later. BW then saw SJL driving her abductor around - who's given her some old pony about where he needs to be dropped to retrieve his own car.

The arrival-on-foot scenario would require someone with access to a space nearby to which SJL could be taken and harmed out of sight, ideally a garage. If she were never seen entering, then she could be killed inside, and her body removed and disposed of at leisure. For this task a Sierra, with its hatch back, large boot and low loading sill, would be a more useful vehicle than a 3-Series BMW. If the garage were physically separate, it would enable the garage's owner or official tenant to deny knowledge of what went on there.

 

[benowens]

Why is it excepted by virtually everyone that Suzy is dead when other cases where the missing person is just as obviously dead (Claudia Lawrence, Lee Boxell etc) still have speculation about the missing person still being alive?

 

[tes1984]

Why is it excepted by virtually everyone that Suzy is dead when other cases where the missing person is just as obviously dead (Claudia Lawrence, Lee Boxell etc) still have speculation about the missing person still being alive?

Suzy was one of the most publicised missing people of the 80s and 90s. Even now her picture is in the papers on a regular basis.

Someone would have recognised her by now. Same with Claudia and Lee.

All three cases have far, far more to suggest murder, rather than disappearance.

 

[benowens]

Suzy was one of the most publicised missing people of the 80s and 90s. Even now her picture is in the papers on a regular basis.

Someone would have recognised her by now. Same with Claudia and Lee.

All three cases have far, far more to suggest murder, rather than disappearance.

But I see people speculating positive outcomes in the Claudia and Lee cases regardless of the odds. Suzy's disappearance is usually referred to as a murder when referenced in news articles, and this was even before the whole Cannan thing.

 

[benowens]

Suzy was one of the most publicised missing people of the 80s and 90s. Even now her picture is in the papers on a regular basis.

Someone would have recognised her by now. Same with Claudia and Lee.

All three cases have far, far more to suggest murder, rather than disappearance.

Also I would argue that Madeleine McCann is really the only missing person case that everyone in the country knows about. Of course some are more high profile than others, but most cases, even ones that were big at the time like Suzy have been long forgotten about.