Disappearance of Suzy Lamplugh

Susannah Jane Lamplugh (/ˈlæmpluː/; born 3 May 1961) was a British estate agent reported missing on 28 July 1986 (aged 25) in Fulham, London, England, United Kingdom. She was officially declared dead, presumed murdered, in 1993. The last clue to Lamplugh's whereabouts was an appointment to show a house in Shorrolds Road to someone she called Mr. Kipper. The case remains unsolved with Lamplugh still missing, and is considered the world's biggest-ever missing person's inquiry.
John Cannan (1954–2024), a convicted criminal responsible for the murder of Shirley Banks in 1987 and many other rapes, abductions and attempted abductions since his release from prison three days before Lamplugh's disappearance, was the only suspect in the murder of Lamplugh. In November 2002, the Crown Prosecution Service concluded that there was insufficient evidence to charge Cannan, but police announced at a press conference their belief that he had murdered Lamplugh.
Cannan claimed to know who killed Lamplugh and that the culprit was also responsible for the murder of Banks. He was known to have appeared uninvited at a house that was for sale in Shorrolds Road in the days before Lamplugh's disappearance, believing that the young female occupant was alone in the house, and acted strangely until the woman's husband appeared, causing Cannan to quickly leave. DNA evidence has also shown that Lamplugh had previously been in a car that Cannan owned at the time of her disappearance.
Suzy Lamplugh was an estate agent working for an agency called Sturgis at 654 Fulham Road, London, who was reported missing after an appointment to show a house in Shorrolds Road, Fulham, to a man calling himself Mr. Kipper. Her office diary recorded the details of the appointment as: "12.45 Mr. Kipper – 37 Shorrolds O/S" (the "O/S" annotation signifies "outside the property"). Three witnesses saw Lamplugh outside 37 Shorrolds Road between 12:45 and 1:00 p.m. A man walking home past the house saw Lamplugh at the gateway of the property at 12:50 p.m., and she seemed to be waiting for someone. Ten minutes later, the owner of the house next door heard someone leaving Number 37 and saw Lamplugh and a man leaving the house and looking back up at it. This sighting was later the basis of an identikit of the unidentified male.
The sighting of the pair standing outside the house was corroborated by another man who was walking past the property at around the same time. He noticed that the man was holding a bottle of champagne with ribbons around it. This sighting was later the basis of another identikit picture made of the man. Witnesses reported that they then saw the pair entering a car. The neighbour thought that the pair had been arguing before entering the car. Witnesses described the man as a white male between 25 and 30, with a dark complexion and with dark hair swept back. He was immaculately dressed in a dark charcoal suit, and was described as a "public schoolboy type". He may have had a broken nose. A man said that he had seen a "couple arguing" between 2:00 and 2:30 p.m. in the area. There was then a sighting of Lamplugh driving her car erratically away from Shorrolds Road, arguing with the man in the car, causing the witness to swerve to avoid a collision. Lamplugh's white Ford Fiesta (registration B396 GAN) was sighted poorly parked outside a garage opposite 123 Stevenage Road, about 1 mile (1.6 km) away, by several witnesses at various points in the afternoon. However, her close friend Barbara Whitfield insisted she had seen Lamplugh driving north up the Fulham Palace Road in her car with a man at around 2:45 p.m. Whitfield waved to Lamplugh as she cycled south down the road, but Lamplugh was talking to her passenger and did not see her. As Whitfield was the only witness that day who actually knew Lamplugh, her sighting was afforded significant weight. A woman living at 139 Stevenage Road also reported possibly seeing Lamplugh with a smartly dressed man wearing a suit by the spot where her car was seen parked.
By 3:30 p.m., Lamplugh's colleagues at the estate agency were becoming concerned that she had not returned. At 4:30, they travelled to 37 Shorrolds Road to see if she was there, but she was not. At 5:30, they called the police to report her missing.
At 10:00 p.m., a police officer found Lamplugh's car parked in the same spot at which it had been sighted that afternoon, which was by another house for sale. The vehicle appeared to have been parked in haste, as the driver's door was open, the handbrake was not enabled and the key was missing. The car was parked poorly and was partly overlapping a garage. Lamplugh's purse was found in the car, but neither her own keys nor the keys to 37 Shorrolds Road were found. The driver's seat was pushed back to a position from which Lamplugh would not have been able to drive the car, indicating that someone else had driven the car.
Police suggested that a black, left-hand-drive BMW vehicle may have been involved following an eyewitness account of a car of that description seen parked in Shorrolds Road. The man remembered seeing it because many cars in the road had been double parked, causing him some difficulty driving through the road. Another witness corroborated this account and said that he had seen the dark-coloured BMW parked almost outside 37 Shorrolds Road. Witnesses also said that they had seen two white Ford Fiestas parked in Shorrolds Road that day.
A witness emerged some time later with another significant sighting. The witness had offered information after the disappearance, but his account was dismissed at that time because he had described a blond-haired woman, and the police incorrectly assumed that Lamplugh had brown hair when she vanished. The witness was jogging when he saw a car speeding south down Stevenage Road (the same road in which Lamplugh's car was later found abandoned) as he emerged from Bishop's Park into the road at the exit by Fulham F.C.'s Craven Cottage stadium. The car, which he noticed was a dark-coloured left-hand-drive BMW, suddenly stopped further down the road and a woman who matched Lamplugh's appearance was seen struggling with a man inside the car and sounding the horn in an apparent attempt to attract attention. In his description of the incident, the witness stated:
A sighting was also reported witnessing a woman matching Suzy's appearance on the adjacent Langthorne Street.
Lamplugh's boyfriend, a 27-year-old stockbroker, and her male flatmate were both questioned by police, but both had solid alibis with corroborating witnesses. Lamplugh's two-bedroom flat in Putney was searched, but nothing notable or suspicious was found. It was soon suggested in the press that if Mr. Kipper's first name was Dan, the combined would be an anagram of "kidnapper". Lamplugh's office manager revealed that a bunch of red roses had been delivered to the office by a mystery man just days before she had disappeared.
Police released a photo of Lamplugh with dark brown hair, but she had tinted her hair blond on the Friday before she vanished. The initial investigation was conducted without computers, using an old-fashioned card-index system in which all leads were filed on approximately 26,000 cards. Because Lamplugh was only considered a missing person, known criminals in the area were not considered as suspects.
Six months after Lamplugh's disappearance, a man informed police that he had discovered that a BMW that had been left abandoned in a road for some months was registered to a Belgian man known sometimes as Mr. Kiper, and detectives believed that this information was significant. However, the car's owner was located in Belgium and had a confirmed alibi for the day of Lamplugh's disappearance, and his BMW had been in a garage in Belgium on that day. He was swiftly eliminated as a suspect.
One year after Lamplugh's disappearance, detectives noted that the artist's impression of Mr. Kipper strongly resembled John Cannan, a convicted rapist (and later abductor and murderer) who had been residing in a nearby prison hostel outside HM Prison Wormwood Scrubs around the time of Lamplugh's disappearance. In 1980, he had raped and beaten his girlfriend when she tried to leave him, and he raped a shopkeeper at knifepoint in 1981. Cannan had been on day release from the prison in the months preceding Lamplugh's disappearance and held a job in the area as a porter. He was public school-educated and was known for his ability to attract women. In the weeks before Lamplugh disappeared, Cannan had told inmates and workmates that he was frequenting wine bars in Fulham and had met a new "uptown" girlfriend named Susu. Lamplugh had visited some of the wine bars, including one located opposite from her office. Cannan also frequented a pub in Putney that Lamplugh visited on 25 July 1986, the same day on which Cannan was released from prison, three days before Lamplugh's disappearance. Cannan confirmed in 2021 that he had visited the bars and pubs. He often delivered roses to women as a romantic ploy and had told people that he was interested in buying a property in the area.
In June 1987, Lamplugh's mother Diana said that she believed that her daughter was dead.
In October 1987, 15 months after Lamplugh's disappearance, John Cannan abducted and murdered 29-year-old Shirley Banks from Bristol. He attempted to rape two women in a shop three weeks later after driving to the shop in his black BMW. He had also tried to abduct a woman the night before he had abducted Banks and had been visiting wine bars in Bristol to search for victims. He had held Banks hostage in his flat for 18 hours before killing her and dumping her at a site in the Quantock Hills known as Dead Woman's Ditch. Inside his dark BMW was found an imitation handgun, handcuffs and the tax disc for Banks' car. Soon after Cannan was arrested, Banks' Mini car was found hidden in his garage, with a new, false number plate affixed reading "SLP 386S".
Detectives later noted that the letters SLP could stand for Suzy Lamplugh and the number 86 for 1986, the year in which she vanished. The media began to note the likeness between Cannan and the photofit in the Lamplugh case, and speculated about a link between the Banks and Lamplugh cases. It was also known that Cannan had joined a dating agency in Bristol weeks before he had murdered Banks, providing a false name of John Peterson, and had presented himself in a recorded video as a successful, smartly dressed businessman. The video remains publicly available.
Metropolitan Police detectives travelled to Bristol to interview Cannan about the Lamplugh disappearance. When he was asked by detectives if he understood the significance of the number plate, he replied that it could be seen as a reference to Suzy Lamplugh, whom the detectives had not yet mentioned. However, Cannan claimed that he had chosen the letters for the plate at random. He claimed that he had bought the car from a "Bristol businessman" who was responsible for "the murders of Shirley Banks, Suzy Lamplugh and another girl" and that the man was in a great deal of trouble. Cannan was known for masquerading as a Bristol businessman. When asked if the man was himself, Cannan provided an affirmative response but immediately recanted and ended the interview because he was overcome with emotion.
Cannan was sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of Banks and for several other rapes, abductions and attempted abductions. He was also convicted of the rape of a woman in Reading on the train line between London and Bristol, six weeks after his release from Wormwood Scrubs prison. The sentencing judge told Cannan "you should never again be at liberty outside of prison walls." Further interviews were conducted with Cannan regarding Lamplugh's disappearance in 1988, 1989 and 1990. However, he was not placed on an identity parade.
In 1990, a woman named Gilly Paige, with whom Cannan had been in a relationship after Lamplugh's disappearance, informed police that Cannan had spoken about the Lamplugh case and told her that Lamplugh was buried at Norton Barracks. Another former girlfriend of Cannan, Daphne Sargent, also believed Cannan to be responsible, saying: "As soon as I heard about Suzy, I knew it was John. It had all the hallmarks‍— right down to the champagne."
In the years after Lamplugh's disappearance, police tested the DNA of 800 unidentified bodies and skeletal remains that matched her description. Lamplugh was officially declared dead at her parents' behest, exactly seven years after her 1986 disappearance, on 27 July 1993. She was presumed to have been murdered.
In 1988, journalist Andrew Stephen published a highly controversial book on the Lamplugh case. The book, which was initially supported by the Lamplugh family before they read its draft versions, included several allegations about Lamplugh's sex life and personal life. Stephen suggested that Lamplugh might have been involved in prostitution. The book was widely labelled as salacious and false, and Stephen was accused of victim blaming. In an unprecedented move, the Metropolitan Police responded to the book by defending Lamplugh's personal life and stating "our investigations revealed nothing more than that Suzy was a modern young woman."
A highly critical review of the book in The Times asserted that Stephen had included a large amount of his own speculations on what he called Lamplugh's "quest for sexual fulfilment" because he needed filler material to add to the story. The Lamplugh family brought legal action and forced Stephen to add a disclaimer to the book stating that the family did not recognise or accept his portrayal of Lamplugh.
In the mid-1990s, speculation arose that Michael Sams may have murdered Lamplugh, as he had just been convicted of kidnapping an estate agent named Stephanie Slater in Birmingham. However, police found no evidence for the theory and discounted it, noting that Sams' crimes were likely influenced by the high-profile Lamplugh case. Furthermore, Sams only had one leg, and no witness sightings of the man with whom Lamplugh was seen that day reported him walking with a limp or having only one leg.
In 1999, an internal report by the Metropolitan Police criticised the handling of the original investigation and failure to further investigate John Cannan. A new reinvestigation was launched in the early 2000s with a new team whose detectives were directed to determine whether Cannan could be eliminated as a suspect or implicated in Lamplugh's murder. The reinvestigations established that Cannan could not be eliminated and discovered more evidence that implicated him.
The paper index cards used in the original investigation were computerised, and investigators learned that several estate agents in Fulham had been visited at the time by a man calling himself Mr. Kipper. Detectives believed that this had been Cannan seeking potential victims for abduction and murder. In the late 1970s and into 1980, during the final years of Cannan's troubled marriage to his wife June Vale, there had been a series of mysterious rapes in homes for sale in the West Midlands, where Cannan was living. The unidentified rapist specifically targeted homes on the market for sale by estate agents and became known as the "house for sale rapist".
Twenty women were assaulted and raped in properties in the area, and no one was ever arrested for the crimes. Police suspect that Cannan was responsible for the crimes, which began as his marriage was failing. The rapes stopped in early 1980 when Cannan began a new relationship with a woman named Sharon Major. Detectives would later note that the offences bore all of the hallmarks of Cannan's later crimes and also noted the similarities to the Lamplugh case. Cannan had appeared uninvited at a house that was for sale in Shorrolds Road days before Lamplugh was last seen, believing that the young female occupant was alone in the house. He acted strangely until the woman's husband appeared, causing him to quickly leave.
After new reconstructions were shown on Crimewatch in 2000, including correct pictures of Lamplugh with blond hair, new witnesses emerged. The witnesses included a man who said that he had seen a man resembling Cannan looking into the window of Lamplugh's estate agency on the day on which she had disappeared. Lamplugh had worked at a desk near the window, in part because the office believed that positioning an attractive woman by the window would attract customers. Some witnesses also emerged after police showed Cannan's 1987 dating video who positively identified him as a man whom they had seen in Fulham that day.
During the reinvestigation of the Lamplugh case, a mass of circumstantial evidence was uncovered that pointed to Cannan. It was discovered that Lamplugh had disclosed to relatives shortly before she disappeared that she had a new boyfriend from the Bristol area, where Cannan had moved days after the disappearance and from where his family originated. Lamplugh also told a relative shortly before she vanished that she was concerned about the man and was becoming scared of him. Despite being in prison in the borough of Hammersmith and Fulham before the disappearance, Cannan denied ever having been to Fulham. Police disproved this claim, as Cannan was known to have had worked as a porter in the area at the time while on day release from the open prison. The witness sightings of a dark, left-hand-drive BMW parked near Lamplugh and in which she was seen struggling were afforded added significance when it emerged that Cannan owned such a car at the time, which he had used to commit crimes with a fellow inmate. Cannan did not have an alibi for the days after leaving prison and claims to not recall where he was at the time, despite having an impeccable memory of other events at the time. Cannan's nickname in prison was Mr. Kipper because he wore kipper-style broad ties.
In December 2000, Cannan was arrested on suspicion of Lamplugh's abduction and murder and interviewed at Hammersmith police station. Video footage of parts of the interview were later leaked publicly and are still available for public viewing. In the footage, Cannan says that there are "one or two things I haven't been caught for". Over five days of interviews, Cannan did not provide interviewers with any information that could eliminate him from the inquiry and did not provide an alibi for his movements between 25 and 28 July 1986. In September 2001, Cannan was arrested again and questioned at a London police station, but he again provided no information that could eliminate him from the inquiry.
Investigators believe that Lamplugh placed a mysterious phone call during the afternoon in which she disappeared. Three days before she disappeared, on the same day on which Cannan was released from the open prison nearby, Lamplugh had visited the Prince of Wales pub in Putney, which was also frequented by Cannan. While she was there, the contents of her handbag went missing, and after she left they were found by the landlord of the pub. The landlord telephoned Lamplugh to inform her and she arranged to collect her belongings at 6 p.m. on Monday 28 July, the day on which she disappeared. Several hours after Lamplugh vanished, a woman identifying herself as Sarah phoned the pub saying that she had a message for Lamplugh, and she left her number. A man then phoned the pub claiming to be a policeman and asking if the pub had Lamplugh's diary and chequebook. The police confirmed the man was not a policeman, and it was not known who Sarah was. The landlord said that he gave the paper upon which he had written the phone number to police, although it was later lost.
The first call was placed well before Lamplugh's disappearance had even been reported, and it may have been Lamplugh making a plea for help or calling under duress. The man identifying as a policeman may have been Cannan. When Shirley Banks had been abducted by Cannan and held hostage in his flat in 1987, she placed a call under duress to her workplace the next morning, stating that she was sick and would not be reporting to work that day. It is believed that she placed the call because Cannan had convinced her that he would release her unharmed. The call was the last message received from her before she was found murdered.
Detectives on the reinvestigation team also believed that Cannan could have been responsible for taking the contents of her handbag in the pub, and stated the events were a clear indicator of stalking.
Based on the evidence, the police began a search for Lamplugh's body. Investigators wanted to dig at Norton Barracks, where Cannan had allegedly told former girlfriend Gilly Paige that the body was buried and which was identified by an anonymous informant in 1999. The area had been significantly redeveloped in the intervening years, however, the Army having left the site in 1979 and investigators were not able to dig in the area because of the houses now standing there.
Detectives considered the possibility that the SLP 386 S number plate that Cannan had attached to Banks' car could be an ordnance survey grid reference, as this would provide a location very close to Dead Woman's Ditch, where Banks was found dumped. Cannan was known to play such tricks with investigators, and it was believed that if his decision to dump Banks' body in Dead Woman's Ditch was intentional, the letters and numbers on the plate could have been as well. As a result, investigators searched the area, but Lamplugh's body was not found.
In December 2000, police searched a brickworks near Norton Barracks that had been mentioned in several of the original witness statements. A year later, another search was conducted in Somerset at a location by a river that Cannan was said to have frequented. However, no remains were found.
The Lamplugh case team concluded that there was significant evidence against Cannan to apply for a prosecution. The Crown Prosecution Service agreed that the police reinvestigation had been excellent and thorough, but ultimately decided after four months of deliberations that there was insufficient evidence to charge Cannan with the murder. The police so strongly felt that Cannan was responsible that they proclaimed such during a press conference in November 2002. They also announced that all other possible suspects had been eliminated and that Cannan was the only suspect. The lead detective in the reinvestigations, Jim Dickie, stated that he was as certain as possible without conducting a formal judicial process that Cannan was responsible.
The investigation was summarised in an ITV Real Crime programme in 2002.
In 2007, a criminologist who had corresponded with Cannan revealed that the police reinvestigations of 2000–2002 had discovered DNA evidence in a car previously owned by Cannan that showed that Lamplugh had been inside the vehicle. The criminologist informed police that Cannan said that he had access to a red Ford Sierra at the time when Lamplugh disappeared, a fact about which police were previously unaware. Detectives attempted to find the car and discovered it in a north London scrapyard, allowing them to conduct DNA analysis upon it.
Although these tests indicated that both Lamplugh and Cannan had been in the car, the Crown Prosecution Service felt that there was insufficient evidence to prove that both had been in the vehicle at the same time, meaning charges could not be brought against Cannan. Although he previously had said he drove the car often, Cannan subsequently changed his story and denied ever having used the vehicle, but the man who had lent it to him confirmed that Cannan had access to the car at the time and said that Cannan may have used it on the day Lamplugh disappeared.
When interviewed about the disappearance of Lamplugh in 1988, Cannan had said that he knew a "Bristol businessman" who was responsible for "the murders of Shirley Banks, Suzy Lamplugh and another girl". Investigators believe that he was talking about himself, as he was convicted of Banks' murder. The other girl that he mentioned is believed to be Sandra Court, a 27-year-old office worker who was abducted and killed in Bournemouth in May 1986. In November 2001, police interviewed Cannan at a police station in York regarding Court's murder. He had been in the prison hostel at Wormwood Scrubs at the time but was allowed to leave the facility at weekends and had access to a red Ford Sierra, the same car that was tested in the Lamplugh case.
A pay-and-display ticket proves that Cannan was in Bournemouth on the day that Court was killed. Court had been dropped off by a taxi driver in Throop, Dorset near her sister's house after a night out, but her sister was not at home. She was last seen walking barefoot, appearing slightly drunk, at around 2:45 a.m. Court's body was found the next day in a water-filled ditch several miles away. When interviewed, Cannan denied having been in Bournemouth on the day in question but was proved to be lying because of the parking tickets discovered by police.
When the Ford Sierra was discovered at the north London scrapyard during the Lamplugh reinvestigations of the early 2000s, two hairs were found inside that matched Court's DNA. However, the DNA evidence was not strong enough to bring a prosecution against Cannan for her murder.
In 1982, Lamplugh had worked as a beautician on the ocean liner Queen Elizabeth 2. At the same time, Steve Wright, who was convicted in February 2008 of the murder of five women in Ipswich, was working as a steward on the QE2. In 2008, the Metropolitan Police investigated whether Wright was connected with Lamplugh's disappearance, but this was not a strong line of enquiry and a senior police officer described the link as "speculative". Police investigated Wright's QE2 work records and found that he was working on the ship on the day that Lamplugh disappeared, meaning that he could not have been responsible for her abduction and murder.
In August 2010, police began searching a field off the B4084 between Pershore and Drakes Broughton, about three miles from the former Norton Barracks in Worcestershire where detectives had wanted to search in 2000. Investigators also returned to Norton Barracks and subjected it to a limited search, but Lamplugh's remains were not found.
In December 2002, one of Cannan's fellow prisoners told police that Cannan had said that he had buried Lamplugh under the patio of his mother's house in Sutton Coldfield in the West Midlands. In late October 2018, police searched the house. They dismantled the garage and began removing its concrete floor whilst also searching the back garden. On 12 November 2018, police announced that the search had yielded no evidence.
In July 2019, a police search of land in Pershore, with the assistance of archaeologists, produced no relevant evidence. In August 2019, the Specialist Investigation Team was informed of the sighting of a man resembling Cannan dumping a suitcase in the Grand Union Canal on the day of Lamplugh's disappearance. However, this section of the canal was previously searched in September 2014 for an unrelated inquiry. The canal sighting was covered in the documentaries The Vanishing of Suzy Lamplugh and In the Footsteps of Killers.
Cannan remained the prime (and only) suspect in the case, and he falsely claimed that the Metropolitan Police had eliminated him as a suspect. He protested his innocence not only of involvement in Lamplugh's disappearance but of nearly all other crimes for which he had been convicted, including those that were proven with DNA links and fingerprint evidence. This included the rape of the woman in Reading for which forensic evidence showed the chances of the perpetrator being anyone other than Cannan were 260 million to one.
While in prison, Cannan told a solicitor that he might well "reveal all" about Lamplugh when his mother died.
However, in 2020, his brother revealed that his sister had already unsuccessfully begged him to reveal the location of Lamplugh's body, and the brother had insisted that he will "take his secrets to the grave" because he "doesn't have a modicum of regret, conscience or compassion" and is "a power freak". Criminologist Christopher Berry-Dee, who exchanged hundreds of letters with Cannan while writing a book on him, has also said that Cannan will not reveal where he deposited the body, as Cannan is a "control freak". Fellow criminologist David Wilson has agreed and said that Cannan will not confess because he is a psychopath.
Cannan was eligible for parole in 2022. His first parole hearing was scheduled for March 2023, but was postponed until October of that year. His parole bid was denied and he remained in prison. Cannan died in HM Prison Full Sutton on 6 November 2024.
The Suzy Lamplugh Trust is a charitable foundation established in December 1986 by Lamplugh's parents, Paul and Diana Lamplugh. The mission of the trust is to raise awareness of personal safety through training and various projects, to help people avoid aggression and to offer counselling and support to relatives and friends of missing people. The trust runs the UK's National Stalking Helpline.
Paul and Diana Lamplugh were appointed to OBE in 1992 and 2005, respectively, for their charitable work with the Suzy Lamplugh Trust. Diana Lamplugh died in August 2011 at the age of 75, and Paul Lamplugh died at the age of 87 in June 2018. Rachel Griffin, CEO of the trust since 2012, died of cancer in August 2019.
Lamplugh and her family were members of the congregation at All Saints Church, East Sheen, in the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames. She is commemorated there in a stained-glass window that was installed in 1996.
Lamplugh's disappearance has been the subject of a number of documentaries:
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