The issue with the Brunt podcast is that as is now typical it goes straight from SJL to JC without passing Go. There is never any attempt to go back to 1986 and relook at the case from scratch. The police themselves, when they reluctantly reinvestigated in 1999-2000, didn't do so either. They took the previously list of people considered, added Cannan, re-eliminated the first lot again and were left with Cannan; QED.
The only person to do this properly since 1986 has been DV. I don't count whack jobs like CMcGH, who deployed his microwave repair skills and love of ferrets to deduce that Mr Kipper was Fred West's brother John because John West = tinned fish and kippers are fish. So DV deserves some credit for going back and questioning everything. Where many of us depart from DV is that in effect, once he had arrived at his own view, he went on to commit in its support many of the same offences against logic that he exposes in the SJL investigation.
They and he were all trained by the Met, so maybe we should not be too surprised by this. But in no particular order he fails to acknowledge the BW sighting, the wealthy yet imminently bankrupt couple, the remarkable personal life of SJL, the unknown person putting pressure on her over a property deal, and - most obviously - the impossibility of his own suggested solution. He does not show the PoW was all but empty, he does not show why anyone would kill her there, he does not show why anyone would cover up an accident, he does not ask himself whether the blowfly infestation he thinks significant might actually be common around pubs and their huge bins, and he doesn't explain how the pub managed to lower the floor in the 1990s without anyone noticing a body underneath.
Probably there is no solution, but this case is no different to any other true crime case in that regard, so I don't see there's anything especially discreditable in being interested in it, or even writing books about it.
What the SJL case does have as an unusual feature is an astonishingly p155p00r original investigation. This lays it wide open to alternative lines of thought; hence these threads. The publicly-made police case against Cannan is based largely on complete and prejuducial tosh compiled 14 years after the fact, and smacks of a fit-up as a result. There is a much better case against Cannan, based on an informant's information in 1999. But you never hear this made because it's clear from it that Cannan could have been arrested within a few weeks had the police been up to their job.
So although the case has probably been solved, the enduring fascination here is that it doesn't feel like it has. That's because we're not hearing the real case, because it's so embarrassing.
