What we lack here to verify these supposed sightings at 37SR is a "control". If the police ask Did anyone see anything suspicious outside 37SR? you get people coming forward saying Yes, I did. If you ask again 14 years later, amazingly you get more, different people all coming forward saying Yes I did and what's more I can apparently now remember the exact date and time of something I had forgotten for 14 years. The more you ask, the more detailed the reports and the more the later ones support or improve on the earlier ones. If the police asked again today no doubt there would be more fresh sightings still, although these days they'd all be sightings of JC.
A control would be for the police to ask if, in connection with this, any witness saw anyone like SJL with a man in the Commercial Road at about 3pm. I suspect you would get a lot of witnesses coming forward likewise. Someone would describe a couple, the woman would look a bit like SJL, and the man would look like MG. 14 years later, there would probably be people who could now remember the couple arguing in a BMW heading towards Docklands.
The difference is that I just totally made that up. SJL never went anywhere near there, but as a control, it would tell you a lot about the reliability of the supposed other sightings at 37SR. For me, the concern about the quality of these is the instability of the accounts (they keep improving), the mutual inconsistency (the forgotten Mr Kipper photofit has him with a broken nose; how can the others not notice that?), and the witnesses' backgrounds (they're all unemployed with time to fill and nothing much going on). They amount to saying that a couple were seen in the street, therefore this was SJL and A N Other, but you could probably find witnesses to that for any street in London on any day. Essentially, I fear all the 37SR sightings originate in the other accounts that put SJL there, starting with the one in her own desk diary.
A good example of how this can happen is the fact that a woman came forward and claimed to have seen SJL and Mr Kipper in Stevenage Road. As the early sighting of B396 GAN there has been pretty much debunked - by the BT workers and latterly by DV - and as it is likely that the killer dumped the car there alone, it is quite possible that this sighting was completely imagined. This one gets little attention, perhaps because like the BW sighting it wrecks the police narrative about an abduction from 37SR; but, unlike the BW sighting, it probably didn't happen.
Re SJL living beyond her means, I'm not sure this is such a mystery: she just got men to pay for her social life. She went out with a lot of men and liked them to be well-heeled so her nights out were probably free. This was a thing in the 80s. I can recall my mates and I discussing with amazement that our new girlfriend had bought a round. I once dated a girl who in six months paid for one drink and half a curry. She was very, very pretty; this happened. SJL had a lodger whose contribution helped with the mortgage. She would have paid for her own clothes and meals at home, but even her car was fully expensed. If she had had substantial "commissions" coming in, there would be some trace of it found, even if in the shape of her mysteriously not withdrawing cash from hole-in-the-wall machines (because she had a wad of notes at home).
The £3,000 "commission", the events at the PoW, and the BW sighting are the real conundrums in all this.
