UK UK - Suzy Lamplugh, 25, Fulham, 28 Jul 1986 #7

[Spy Versus Spy]

Really re-ignited my interest in this case. Im just wondering how many of you think JC is likely or v likely to be responsible? If not, why not?

 

[Spy Versus Spy]

For me, it's the How and detail rather than the Who?

 

[WestLondoner]

The publicly-rehearsed facts of this case don’t really get us anywhere, not least because a number of them turn out not to be definite facts at all.

She seems to have left the office at 12.40pm on Monday 28th July, leaving only two clues as to where she was going. One was the desk diary entry noting a viewing with a non-existent person, Mr Kipper, and the other was a phone call to the pub where she had mislaid her diary and cheque book.

She may have gone to 37SR to meet Mr Kipper, but it’s not cut-and-dried that she did so. First, it’s not clear she even took the keys. Colleagues were later able to enter the house to search it, and when the police forensicated it the next day, regardless of how they got in, they found no evidence anyone had been inside. Second, it’s not clear she was seen outside 37SR either. The most-cited witness claimed to have heard people coming out of 37SR, which isn’t possible if she never went in. He later conceded it could have been from 33 that he heard people leaving. The e-fit looks like most 30-year-old men in 1986, and that and the description are markedly different from other witness accounts. Some were so vague as to timing they could have been describing MG’s visit and misremembering the time.

If we accept on an Occam’s Razor basis that she did go, the next difficulty is that several witnesses are adamant her car was at 123SR by 12.40 - meaning she went straight there. If she intended to go to 37SR, she instead went to 123SR when she left the office, i.e. headed in 180 degrees the wrong direction. She there met someone, a mile away from 37SR, then got a lift back to Shorrolds, leaving her car unlocked outside 123SR.

There are several anomalous sightings and non-sightings that afternoon in Stevenage Road. Sightings include the jogger who saw a BMW apparently driven by a woman either screaming or laughing, which may have been an LHD car driven by its male “passenger”. Another was a James Galway lookalike who told a cabbie he’d just seen a right ruck going on. Another is MJ’s sighting of a good looking couple. None of these people ever came forward. Another is a reported strange howl that the witness assumed at the time to be a cat. Non-sightings include the BT workers who never noticed her car being ditched a few feet from them, nor heard any ruck. Another is the non-sighting of her retrieving her car at about 2.30. This has to have happened because she was seen in it then, heading away from 123SR, by someone who actually knew her. This time undermines all the other sightings.

So what actually happened? Well, SJL would IMO not have wasted time going out to a viewing with a quantity so unknown he’d yet to be logged as a potential customer. Until someone had checked out his situation, credibility etc, nobody would know if he was a plausible buyer, so you’d waste no time showing him houses until all that was clear. Ergo, Mr Kipper - the kind of nickname her clique tended to acquire - was a mate, or a private non-Sturgis contact dangling some sort of opportunity. He could have been a sexual partner, actual or contemplated - SJL was four-timing AL the week before she disappeared.

Who this was is conjecture. There were three men’s prisons within 4.5 miles of where she lived and worked, who between them released 1 to 2 rapists per week. So by the end of July, there could have been 30 to 50 released that year, any of whom might have hung around Fulham. She cultivated prosperous men as contacts and some were never tracked down. She was engaged in but had cooled on a business venture with a friend financed by the husband, who went bankrupt 8 days later. She told relatives she had a big deal on and that a man she was in touch with was pressuring her.

Probably SJL was inveigled into meeting someone she knew, we don’t know how, who got her to drive to a place where she could be taken inside an unremarkable house, garage or other building and attacked. She was probably either raped and then murdered so she couldn’t ID or accuse her rapist, or just murdered. I suspect a garage or warehouse, because she could then have been transferred from one car to another and disposed of elsewhere. Or perhaps hidden under a floor, depending on the sort of building (if you take up the ground floor boards of a London house, underneath there is the dirt the house was built on). Her car was abandoned at some point, the sloppy parking suggesting either a hurry, a short stop or someone returning to it to remove evidence.

The conjecture is that this person was JC. The “evidence” the police give for this is completely laughable, and consists of hearsay, coached statements 14 years after the fact, and assertions of their own opinion presented as fact. The CPS looked at the police case and concluded there was no evidence JC and SJL had ever met. A better circumstantial case against JC is possible, but presenting the best circumstantial case publicly would involve the police admitting that they missed leads, clues and obvious lines of inquiry in 1986. Had they been followed, and if it was JC, these would have led them to him in 1986 and hence saved the life of SB 2 years later. So the reason the police's public case against Cannan is so feeble is that the more damningly comprehensive one is simply too embarrassing to make.

Given the complexity and compartmentalization of her life, it didn't have to be JC. It could have been some other business contact who did this, or it could have been any other of the locally-released rapists. All of these are conjectural killers who may not exist, so on an Occam’s Razor basis, you tend to give it to Cannan because he did. But even here, although he does actually exist, evidence he met her does not. And as plausible as the circumstantial case against him sounds, nobody ever tried to see if any similarly plausible case could be made against any similar local offender. So while it fits Cannan, it’s not clear who else it fits too.

 

[Konstantin]

Fantastic summary!

I'd also add that SJL seemed to have been meeting someone she knew in some capacity, so if it was Cannan, the suggestion is that she had some sort of relationship with him, but he was only released from prison three days before she went missing. To have a relationship with her -- and she cultivated wealthy men -- he would have needed to have somewhere to conduct the relationship, at the least a posh hotel plus some sort of evidence of who he was. E.g. how did SJL contact him, to arrange meetups?

 

[WestLondoner]

Yes, the actual mechanics of how this worked, what Spy Versus Spy above called the how and the detail, are pretty puzzling. Taking, confining and killing her would have required a "lair", and we know his mate JT the hostel chef had one nearby. This was a council block that had garages at the back, located half a mile north of 37SR. There were more flats in the block than garages, and I don't think we know if the one JT had was one of those with a garage. But if it did, presumably he just gets her to drive there on some pretext, then attacks her inside.

This does not, however, fit with the jogger or the James "Galway" sightings that suggest she was in his car and already being attacked in Stevenage Road.

It also does not explain the issue you note, of how exactly he got up close to her to start with, presumably over the weeks when he was on day release. If the MO was to pose as a businessman and dangle some inviting proposal under her nose, he'd need to carry that off. He'd need a contact address and a phone number to give out, at minimum, to look plausible. If he gave a phoney number he'd be exposed if ever she rang him. Even if he was able to rent these from one of these serviced-office firms, which he may have been, no trace of the number or address used has ever come up in the police searches of the names in SJL's diary. So somehow, he managed to contact her at work to book "37 Shorrolds O/S 12.45" with neither her employer or even SJL herself having recorded any details about who he was.

Another curious feature is that after his Sutton Coldfield rape, a photofit of the attacker was circulated and Cannan was named and reported to police within a week. You have to wonder why absolutely nobody likewise came forward in 1986 to say that the artist's impression was Cannan. One reason might be that it doesn't look much like him.

 

[Cherwell]

Really re-ignited my interest in this case. Im just wondering how many of you think JC is likely or v likely to be responsible? If not, why not?

I am not persuaded that it was Cannan. He is someone who later gained notoriety, so he is widely known about. But just think how many other people were around and who may have had dealings with Suzy - people we have never heard of. West Londoner sums it up well, especially in the final paragraph:

Given the complexity and compartmentalization of her life, it didn't have to be JC. It could have been some other business contact who did this, or it could have been any other of the locally-released rapists. All of these are conjectural killers who may not exist, so on an Occam’s Razor basis, you tend to give it to Cannan because he did. But even here, although he does actually exist, evidence he met her does not. And as plausible as the circumstantial case against him sounds, nobody ever tried to see if any similarly plausible case could be made against any similar local offender. So while it fits Cannan, it’s not clear who else it fits too.

And this.

Another curious feature is that after his Sutton Coldfield rape, a photofit of the attacker was circulated and Cannan was named and reported to police within a week. You have to wonder why absolutely nobody likewise came forward in 1986 to say that the artist's impression was Cannan. One reason might be that it doesn't look much like him.

And nobody seems to have reported seeing JC and SL together, even after his photo stared out from a hundred newspaper pages.

 

[WestLondoner]

The speed with which he was ID'ed in 1981 (for the rape he had just done the time for in mid-86), despite very little publicity, sits really oddly with the total failure of anyone to come forward in 1986. Even after huge publicity, and the release of the name Kipper, not one acquaintance ID'ed him and said that's Cannan, the bloke we called Kipper.

IMO, that's because the artist's impression looks very little like him and nobody actually called him Kipper.

 

[Konstantin]

I am not persuaded that it was Cannan. He is someone who later gained notoriety, so he is widely known about. But just think how many other people were around and who may have had dealings with Suzy - people we have never heard of.

I am not persuaded it was Cannan either. We don't know everything the Met claim to have got on him - although we know that it was all circumstantial, not enough to convince the CPS to go to trial, and that they could not prove that Cannan ever crossed paths with SJL.

My biggest reservations about him are:
1. Cannan was a very sloppy criminal with terrible impulse control. That was why he got caught - not because of clever detective work. The body of SB the victim he was convicted of killing was not concealed, just left in the open in water. He didn't meticulously plan his crimes, and left a mess behind him - e.g., SB's car and his ridiculous story about it, her tax disc left in his car when he committed other crimes, her print left in his flat. Yet SJL has never been found, not just that but no trace of her has been found, nothing connecting her to him at all. So for me, Cannan creating a plan to lure SJL away and abduct her without a trace does not fit the pattern of his other crimes. You have to do a lot of work to think up how that might have happened.

2. It does look like SJL went to meet someone she knew and was abducted. But there is no evidence she knew Cannan. SJL's disappearance was a very highly publicized case, there was a photofit of Mr Kipper in every paper, everyone knew what he and SJL looked like, yet as you say no one came forward to say they saw Cannan or a man looking like him out with her in London in the weeks before.

3. Cannan was living in a bail hostel in the weeks leading up to the abduction, he had no premises to take her - no flat, no offices - unless he managed to pay for fancy hotels and had a story about why he did not have a business card with a number etc. His acquaintance JT lived in a council flat, hardly SJL's idea of a romantic location. She had rich boyfriends in Chelsea.

4. The report of the "Bristol businessman" SJL was possibly seeing came from a client of hers more than a year before she went missing, when Cannan was in prison. The idea that Cannan, a recently released rapist, would use his prison nickname in an abduction plan is stupid and there's no evidence it even was his nickname.

5. SJL was very secretive, had lots going on in her life. A property deal, a business she was planning. She crossed paths with lots of men, most likely many the police didn't know about. She wanted to move up in the world. Cannan would have had to be pretty convincing that he was a wealthy businessman, especially to a savvy young London estate agent who regularly socialized with wealthy businessmen.

Again no slur on her, but SJL was involved with several men, some we know about and probably some we don't. She was secretive, and in some ways therefore devious because she hid parts of her life from people in other parts of her life - compartmentalized stuff (not a slur on her character). That fits with her making a fake appointment and being convincing about it.

I do think she went to meet someone she knew that day but it could have been one of the several other men she was involved with, who had the means (a premises, a nice car, and a real prior relationship with her whether business, sexual and/or romantic) to abduct her to a location from which she would never be found. I think that Mr Kipper was a fake name she came up with herself, possibly on the fly. Probably the Shorrolds viewing was a cover for the meeting, whether she went there or not is debatable. The Met didn't trace all her contacts.

 

[WestLondoner]

It's been astutely pointed out by female posters to these threads that she probably wasn't off to any sort of romantic encounter, because she didn't take her handbag. If she was off to meet someone she fancied, she'd have taken a hairbrush. Meaning she'd have needed her bag - the one she left at her desk.

Whoever made that point previously made a bl00dy good one, IMHO. Cannan's appeal was supposed to be his charm and looks, but they clearly made no impression on her. If he was succeeding in attracting her attention, and she was responding, she would clearly have paid attention to her appearance ahead of the meeting. Instead she just went with a purse, i.e. it looks like some errand.

 

[Cherwell]

TBH that seems odd to me as I never go anywhere without my handbag. She took her purse and she would have had the car keys if not the property keys as well, so the bag would have been a convenient way to carry them. I would expect her to carry a pen as well.

 

[WiseOwl]

TBH that seems odd to me as I never go anywhere without my handbag. She took her purse and she would have had the car keys if not the property keys as well, so the bag would have been a convenient way to carry them. I would expect her to carry a pen as well.

This supports the theory that Suzy had intended to be away from the office for only a short period of time, possibly just going to the viewing at Shorrolds Road.

DV of course suggests that she was heading to the pub to collect her missing items.

 

[WestLondoner]

DV's theory is a good shout in that he recognised she had expressly arranged to go somewhere other than Shorrolds, and given she maybe didn't take the keys, maybe that's where she went. The trouble with it is that he doesn't then set out a persuasive account of what might then have happened at the pub or why.

Wherever she went, it occurs to me that she smoked yet also didn't even take her cigarettes. How long could she last without one? Again, you tend to think only a short period of time. No hairbrush because she doesn't have to care what she looks like, no cigarettes because she'll be back soon.

 

[Cherwell]

If she was going to the pub to collect her diary (I've forgotten what else there was) that's even more items to carry, so more reason to take her handbag. Much easier if you can put everything in the bag.

That said, I don't know what type of bag she had. Was it a practical kind of bag, or more of a fashion item that didn't hold much?

 

[WiseOwl]

If she was going to the pub to collect her diary (I've forgotten what else there was) that's even more items to carry, so more reason to take her handbag. Much easier if you can put everything in the bag.

That said, I don't know what type of bag she had. Was it a practical kind of bag, or more of a fashion item that didn't hold much?

In the 1986 Crimewatch reconstruction at 19.54, the actress playing Suzy picks up a small black handbag and takes out her purse, then leaves the handbag on her chair.

Whether this is an accurate replica of Suzy's handbag or what she did with it i do not know.

Interestingly, it shows Suzy leaving the office with paperwork, presumably the details of 37SR. However, it does not show her picking up any keys from behind MG's desk.

An oversight maybe?

 

[Konstantin]

If she was going to the pub to collect her diary (I've forgotten what else there was) that's even more items to carry, so more reason to take her handbag. Much easier if you can put everything in the bag.

That said, I don't know what type of bag she had. Was it a practical kind of bag, or more of a fashion item that didn't hold much?

Her chequebook and a postcard (presumably all items that might have fallen out of her bag together).

One assumes that whatever bag they fell out of - perhaps when it was knocked off the picnic table outside the pub, where it was found, was likely her current handbag. So it fit these items into it.

It's actually a really good point that she'd want to take her bag if she had been going to pick up items - because otherwise she also ran the risk of coming back holding them and having her cover story blown. People in her office were well aware she'd mislaid these items and had taken calls about them. They'd be onto her in a flash if she walked back in with them!

I very much doubt the pub was her destination. She either went to Shorrolds briefly, if you believe the sightings there are credible, or straight to Stevenage Road.

Why take her purse at all? Probably she intended to pick up a sandwich from nearby the office.

 

[WiseOwl]

Her chequebook and a postcard (presumably all items that might have fallen out of her bag together).

One assumes that whatever bag they fell out of - perhaps when it was knocked off the picnic table outside the pub, where it was found, was likely her current handbag. So it fit these items into it.

It's actually a really good point that she'd want to take her bag if she had been going to pick up items - because otherwise she also ran the risk of coming back holding them and having her cover story blown. People in her office were well aware she'd mislaid these items and had taken calls about them. They'd be onto her in a flash if she walked back in with them!

I very much doubt the pub was her destination. She either went to Shorrolds briefly, if you believe the sightings there are credible, or straight to Stevenage Road.

Why take her purse at all? Probably she intended to pick up a sandwich from nearby the office.

I too don't believe that Suzy headed to the pub that lunchtime, i really think she would have taken her handbag to collect her lost items.

In DV's book, KH mentions speaking to Suzy on the phone, and she said she would be along to collect the items later. I think she intended to do the viewing at 6pm, then pick up her things from the pub on the way home.

I also agree that she probably took her purse to buy some lunch after the viewing at Shorrolds Road.

 

[Ljh21]

I'm sure this was just a loose expression. The pub opened at 6 pm, so it would have been understood that she needed to come after 6 pm. There was no need to come at any specific time, just during opening hours. It was on her way home, literally around the corner from her flat.

What about this thought: slp386s
Remembering the body found in dead womans ditch, so maybe a liking for names and places.
So938655 a long shot but having the s as a 5 it turns out this is a grid reference not far from his local area and guess what “body brook” is located very near by

 

[Ljh21]

Her chequebook and a postcard (presumably all items that might have fallen out of her bag together).

One assumes that whatever bag they fell out of - perhaps when it was knocked off the picnic table outside the pub, where it was found, was likely her current handbag. So it fit these items into it.

It's actually a really good point that she'd want to take her bag if she had been going to pick up items - because otherwise she also ran the risk of coming back holding them and having her cover story blown. People in her office were well aware she'd mislaid these items and had taken calls about them. They'd be onto her in a flash if she walked back in with them!

I very much doubt the pub was her destination. She either went to Shorrolds briefly, if you believe the sightings there are credible, or straight to Stevenage Road.

Why take her purse at all? Probably she intended to pick up a sandwich from nearby the office.

What i would like to know is the fact of who received the items from the pub

 

[Ljh21]

The temporary landlord and his partner had done twelve weeks' training at the PoW with MH, the permanent landlord, earlier that year. They were brought back to fill in expressly because, as he told DV,

‘When I was on holiday, I always insisted that the people I’d trained at my pub do my relief work. Those were the ones that ran my pub when I wasn’t there. Because they knew how I ran it. They knew the customers, the staff...'

So while KH had only just arrived back, it is not correct that he hardly knew the pub. Having lived in the area for three recent months he knew it quite well. SJL was likely a regular, so KH may have known her by sight if not name from his previous stint there.

I say 'likely' a regular because the PoW was en route to her parents' house and was the nearest pub. According to NB, the landlord before MH, it had been refurbished in late 1984. So when SJL arrived in the area, it would still have been quite spruce. AL initially claimed her stuff was lost there on the Friday night, while later claiming never to have been there at all, so this says she did at least occasionally go. MH on the other hand did not recognise her as a regular.

It is hence possible but not proven that KH had met SJL before 28/7.

This is not enough to hang an accusation on. The main issue is why did they get the stocktake done by 12 if they didn't intend to open normally at lunchtime; and if they were open, when exactly was KH's opportunity to kill and hide her? Even if the pub was empty of punters it wasn't completely empty - even when shut, pubs never are. There is food being prepared, areas to clean, and so on - all this happens while closed.

There are some really odd things about the pub aspect of this but it's a big reach to make it a crime scene.

The pub theory is probably the closest as seeing a man and a woman driving fast in the fiesta could have been them after the event

 

[Ljh21]

The publicly-rehearsed facts of this case don’t really get us anywhere, not least because a number of them turn out not to be definite facts at all.

She seems to have left the office at 12.40pm on Monday 28th July, leaving only two clues as to where she was going. One was the desk diary entry noting a viewing with a non-existent person, Mr Kipper, and the other was a phone call to the pub where she had mislaid her diary and cheque book.

She may have gone to 37SR to meet Mr Kipper, but it’s not cut-and-dried that she did so. First, it’s not clear she even took the keys. Colleagues were later able to enter the house to search it, and when the police forensicated it the next day, regardless of how they got in, they found no evidence anyone had been inside. Second, it’s not clear she was seen outside 37SR either. The most-cited witness claimed to have heard people coming out of 37SR, which isn’t possible if she never went in. He later conceded it could have been from 33 that he heard people leaving. The e-fit looks like most 30-year-old men in 1986, and that and the description are markedly different from other witness accounts. Some were so vague as to timing they could have been describing MG’s visit and misremembering the time.

If we accept on an Occam’s Razor basis that she did go, the next difficulty is that several witnesses are adamant her car was at 123SR by 12.40 - meaning she went straight there. If she intended to go to 37SR, she instead went to 123SR when she left the office, i.e. headed in 180 degrees the wrong direction. She there met someone, a mile away from 37SR, then got a lift back to Shorrolds, leaving her car unlocked outside 123SR.

There are several anomalous sightings and non-sightings that afternoon in Stevenage Road. Sightings include the jogger who saw a BMW apparently driven by a woman either screaming or laughing, which may have been an LHD car driven by its male “passenger”. Another was a James Galway lookalike who told a cabbie he’d just seen a right ruck going on. Another is MJ’s sighting of a good looking couple. None of these people ever came forward. Another is a reported strange howl that the witness assumed at the time to be a cat. Non-sightings include the BT workers who never noticed her car being ditched a few feet from them, nor heard any ruck. Another is the non-sighting of her retrieving her car at about 2.30. This has to have happened because she was seen in it then, heading away from 123SR, by someone who actually knew her. This time undermines all the other sightings.

So what actually happened? Well, SJL would IMO not have wasted time going out to a viewing with a quantity so unknown he’d yet to be logged as a potential customer. Until someone had checked out his situation, credibility etc, nobody would know if he was a plausible buyer, so you’d waste no time showing him houses until all that was clear. Ergo, Mr Kipper - the kind of nickname her clique tended to acquire - was a mate, or a private non-Sturgis contact dangling some sort of opportunity. He could have been a sexual partner, actual or contemplated - SJL was four-timing AL the week before she disappeared.

Who this was is conjecture. There were three men’s prisons within 4.5 miles of where she lived and worked, who between them released 1 to 2 rapists per week. So by the end of July, there could have been 30 to 50 released that year, any of whom might have hung around Fulham. She cultivated prosperous men as contacts and some were never tracked down. She was engaged in but had cooled on a business venture with a friend financed by the husband, who went bankrupt 8 days later. She told relatives she had a big deal on and that a man she was in touch with was pressuring her.

Probably SJL was inveigled into meeting someone she knew, we don’t know how, who got her to drive to a place where she could be taken inside an unremarkable house, garage or other building and attacked. She was probably either raped and then murdered so she couldn’t ID or accuse her rapist, or just murdered. I suspect a garage or warehouse, because she could then have been transferred from one car to another and disposed of elsewhere. Or perhaps hidden under a floor, depending on the sort of building (if you take up the ground floor boards of a London house, underneath there is the dirt the house was built on). Her car was abandoned at some point, the sloppy parking suggesting either a hurry, a short stop or someone returning to it to remove evidence.

The conjecture is that this person was JC. The “evidence” the police give for this is completely laughable, and consists of hearsay, coached statements 14 years after the fact, and assertions of their own opinion presented as fact. The CPS looked at the police case and concluded there was no evidence JC and SJL had ever met. A better circumstantial case against JC is possible, but presenting the best circumstantial case publicly would involve the police admitting that they missed leads, clues and obvious lines of inquiry in 1986. Had they been followed, and if it was JC, these would have led them to him in 1986 and hence saved the life of SB 2 years later. So the reason the police's public case against Cannan is so feeble is that the more damningly comprehensive one is simply too embarrassing to make.

Given the complexity and compartmentalization of her life, it didn't have to be JC. It could have been some other business contact who did this, or it could have been any other of the locally-released rapists. All of these are conjectural killers who may not exist, so on an Occam’s Razor basis, you tend to give it to Cannan because he did. But even here, although he does actually exist, evidence he met her does not. And as plausible as the circumstantial case against him sounds, nobody ever tried to see if any similarly plausible case could be made against any similar local offender. So while it fits Cannan, it’s not clear who else it fits too.

I think it fits david fuller who would have been to the locality and was in the locality that year and had murdered 2 others in 1987