UK UK - Suzy Lamplugh, 25, Fulham, 28 Jul 1986 #8

[Hexe]

yes, but it ended her life. to me that is max force.

Not from the standpoint of the forensic medicine. It was the smallest amount of force required to strangle which is not exactly compatible with a man of known penchant for brutality acting in anger. That's my point, I do not attempt to diminish the victim's suffering here.

 

[lee sumner]

Isn't it to do with the damage to the hyoid or similar named bone ?

the larynx i think its called.

 

[lee sumner]

Not from the standpoint of the forensic medicine. It was the smallest amount of force required to strangle which is not exactly compatible with a man of known penchant for brutality acting in anger. That's my point, I do not attempt to diminish the victim's suffering here.

a mystery letter was sent to someone claiming a woman was responsible for killing sandra. could explain min force strangulation.

 

[WestLondoner]

AL was also a founding member of the putney set, so he might still hang around SL because of the putney set. social events, etc.

I'm not sure there was only one "Putney set". In the 1980s Wandsworth and Fulham had a population of about 400,000. Assuming life expectancy of 80, that's 5,000 of any given age, hence 75,000 between the ages of say 19 and 34. Even if SJL's clique were exclusively among the most prosperous 5% of that slice, that's still nearly 4,000 people. I'd be surprised if her so-called Putney set numbered more than 5% of those - 150 to 200 semi-casual acquaintances (realistically, who has time for more?). That is, there could have been 20 such sets who barely overlapped.

In the 1980s at university I was a holiday rep in Austria during the summer holidays. We had a not dissimilar structure - knots of villages in which people of those ages, locals and foreign, worked in hotels, chalets, restaurants, ski schools, tour companies and as package holiday company reps. There was a Zell-am-See-Kaprun-Mittersill set, a Saalbach-Hinterglemm set, a Mayrhofen-Maria Alm set...and so on. All the same demographic but completely detached, until mixed up for the next season.

I am not sure what this says other than that it does not seem impossible for someone legitimately of her own preferred social demographic to enter her life while being wholly unknown to anyone in her subset of Putney sets.

 

[WestLondoner]

Regarding the Prince of Wales and AL there are some interesting snippets in this 2002 channel 5 doc.

At 13 mins a "work colleague" from his time in London, Josie Phillips, says that Cannan went to the Prince of Wales and he said it was a "lively pub and like a pub and wine bar", and he also said "I go there quite regular". Don't know why she would lie.

Nor do I, but it still sounds like bu1154it. The PoW was an OK but unremarkable pub, not a wine bar. It was not a convenient Tube journey from the Scrubs either. I tend to be sceptical of anything remembered years after the fact when Cannan was already in the frame.

A little later from 16 mins 35 secs Adam Leegood - he's mentioned by name - says that on the day Cannan was released, ie the Friday, he met her at her flat, they went for a meal round the corner and afterwards went next door to the PoW and "we think it was there somebody took some things from her bag...a bad end to a good evening."

This is the video in which AL undermines his later claim to DV never to have been there, by saying he went there. This account also doesn't explain how KH found this stuff outside on Sunday night, the night he arrived.

Did Cannan actually claim to his work colleagues while he was on day release that he was dating an "uptown girl called Susu"?

ISTR this has been identified as someone else.

Another ex-girlfriend mentioned champagne.

Noting that Suzy was seen "with a man who was carrying a bottle of champagne festooned with ribbons" for "Daphne Sargent, an ex-girlfriend of Cannon's [sic], this evidence was enough to convince her. "As soon as I heard about Suzy," she told the press, "I knew it was John. It had all the hallmarks - right down to the champagne.""

Although the problem with this account is that nobody else mentioned champagne.

"The police, too, appear to believe that Cannan was Ms Lamplugh's killer. Former detective chief inspector Bryan Saunders said: "Inquiries showed that he went window-shopping for girls. He would spot an attractive girl in an estate agent's or building society and pursue her.""

You have to be quite careful with this kind of claim because many such arose only years after the fact and there is often a lot of strategic misdirection about what was known when. The idea that Cannan was seen staring in the window of Sturgis is one such. Someone came forward with this "sighting" 14 years after the fact IIRC. The obvious challenge is how this "witness" could be sure of the day and date after 14 years. I'd want to ask him what the newspaper headline was that day, and who his team played the day before, to establish that he has reliably perfect recall. If he had no idea then he made this up after watching the TV.

Unfortunately the cops in the original investigation never challenged Cannan's "alibi" according to a report by DCS Barry Webb.

Very unfortunate indeed.

Det Supt Malcolm Hackett fell out with Diana Lamplugh because he believed she was behind media reports linking Cannan to Suzy.

And he wasn't wrong.

His name was first mentioned to Det Supt Hacket as a suspect in June 1987, 11 months after Suzy’s abduction and four months before Shirley’s murder. A detective investigating a rape committed by Cannan in Reading in October 1986 spoke to Det Supt Hackett about him.

This is why the current case is so feeble. It rests on evidence supposedly received only 14 years later, because it has to. "Look, we've shown it's Cannan, but we never had the evidence at the time." In fact, there were pointers to Cannan before he killed SB - but these can't be cited because they testify to plod ineptitude.

"Speaking exclusively to Birmingham Live, from Australia where she now lives, the married mum claimed the assault happened 42 years ago when she was walking towards her family home in Goosemoor Lane, Erdington.

Records show Cannan lived in Ley Hill Road at the time - only a 12 minute drive from where Melanie alleges he assaulted her. In the same year, he was found guilty at Birmingham Crown Court of raping a pregnant woman in front of her son."

What's kind of bizarre is that at the time of jailing Cannan for the haberdashery shop rape the police did not look into other unsolved rapes in the area. Like the HFSR (that wasn't Cannan) they had a witness here able to defend her attacker. Why on earth was he only jailed for one assault when there was at least one other?

The late 1986 / 1987 case that could have been made against Cannan is that his alibi was lies, his movements were unknown, he was one of X recently-released rapists from three local prisons, when put on an ID parade several witnesses might well have picked him out, he was linkable to a recently sold 2nd hand LHD BMW, and his mate the prison cook had a flat and a lockup a short walk from Shorrolds. That lot would have been enough to recall him to prison to do the other 4 years, and once he's back inside there's the chance to interrogate him at leisure and surface a lot more.

This alternative account of what could have been done and why Cannan probably did it is the one you never hear, because if it had happened, then at least one rape and one murder would have been averted.