Did police IGNORE vital clue in Suzy Lamplugh murder case?

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A witness who claims to have seen the prime suspect in the Suzy Lamplugh murder case dump a suitcase in a canal three days after her disappearance reported his sighting to police three times but the information was never passed on, a new documentary claims.

Estate agent Suzy, 25, vanished after leaving her Fulham office to meet a client who called himself ‘Mr Kipper’ on July 28, 1986 and was declared dead, presumed murdered in 1994.

The only suspect is John Cannan, 66, who is serving three life sentences at Full Sutton Prison in York after being convicted of the murder of Shirley Banks in Bristol in 1987 and the attempted kidnapping of Julia Holman, as well as the rape of an unnamed woman in Reading in 1986. Prior to this stint behind bars, he served an eight-year jail sentence for rape and theft.

He is believed to have told a former girlfriend that he strangled Suzy and buried her body in concrete, but police were never able to charge him for the crime, and he could be released in 2022. 

Last year it emerged a man reported seeing Cannan dump a trunk into the Grand Union Canal in Brentford, west London at 5am on the Monday after Suzy disappeared. 

In a new two-part Sky documentary, The Suzy Lamplugh Mystery, former detective superintendent Jim Dickie, who was in charge of a re-investigation into the case, reveals the witness, known as Dave, went to Brentford police station three times to report what he saw, but it was never followed up.

Meanwhile a friend of Dave’s called Anne says he was so convinced it was Cannan he’d seen that he took time off work to attend his trial in Exeter, after recognising his face in the newspaper while reading about the murder of Ms Banks.

‘He said, “That is the man I passed that day”… he noticed very much, there was something about his eyes. There was always a starey-ness about his eyes,’ Anne said. 

Dave died in 2008; after watching Mr Dickie on the TV commenting on another search for Suzy’s body, Anne approached him with her friend’s story. 

Mr Dickie said he believes Dave’s account is ‘reasonable’ because it matched Cannan’s pattern of behaviour. He previously observed that Ms Banks’ body was found in a rural location near a main road, while the Grand Union Canal is close to the A4 and M4. 

‘He likes to dump bodies by water,’ he said. ‘Secondly, that early in the morning, you can get a car down there, if you had a trunk in your boot, you could get it out and wheel it down the towpath, so I find it very, very feasible.

‘[Dave] went to the Brentford police station three times, three times. There should be an officers information in the major incident room with the information he gave, and that should have been followed up… someone screwed up.’

Mr Dickie added that had he been made aware of Dave’s statement when he took over the case in 2000, they ‘could have recovered a body’.

‘It wasn’t passed on to the original investigation team, it certainly wasn’t passed on to my team,’ he said. ‘All I will say is, if I was still the senior investigating officer, I would move heaven and earth to see if there is a body in luggage in that area.’ 

In a later scene, Anne reveals she received a phone call from a police officer a couple of months ago telling her they’re ‘not pursuing’ the line of inquiry anymore. 

‘I felt well, perhaps I’ve been dismissed as well,’ she said. 

Ms Lamplugh’s car was found in the evening on the same day she disappeared, parked in a Fulham street a mile from the house, with its handbrake off but with her purse still in the door pocket. Witnesses reported seeing a woman meeting her description arguing with a man outside a property in Shorrolds Road at about 1pm on July 28, 1986.

Cannan had been living at a west London bail hostel, and according to Mr Dickie, he frequently climbed out of the window at night and frequented pubs, clubs and wine bars in the Fulham area.

Six years later, the Metropolitan Police revealed Cannan was its prime suspect in the case – but the Crown Prosecution Service ruled there was insufficient evidence to prosecute. 

Speaking about his impending release, Mirror journalist Rob Chaytor told the Sky documentary he is still in touch with one of his victims, who has a police panic button by her phone.

‘She showed it to me, that’s a direct route to the local nick – it was still thought by the police that Cannan could still get at his previous victims, and I know two of them have direct police protection,’ he said.

Suzy’s brother Richard also speaks, and admits his family have ‘never been able to grieve’ for his sister as a result of her body never being found.

‘You get to the stage where you don’t grieve because you want to stay as positive as possible,’ he said. ‘You feel sad but you don’t want to mourn her loss because you don’t want to betray her, you don’t want to think the worst.’

He added that the thought of Cannan being released from prison is ‘really upsetting’, both for his family and those of his other victims.

‘I think it’s really upsetting for the people he’s raped and murdered before or after Suze as well,’ he said. 

‘I think they should be the ones who should be more upset than me because we haven’t got proof that he’s the man that killed Suze, but the evidence points that way. I don’t really care for the man, I don’t want to meet him, as far as I’m concerned he’s nothing to me.’ 

In a previous Channel 5 documentary, Cannan’s brother blamed him for their father’s death and revealed how the family ‘begged’ him to admit to Suzy’s murder, branding him a ‘power freak’ who doesn’t have a ‘modicum of regret, conscience or compassion’ and will ‘take all his secrets to the grave’.

The estate agent’s disappearance is one of the most puzzling cases of the 20th century. Suzy’s mother Diana Lamplugh died in 2011 after being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 2003, and her father Paul passed away in 2018. Richard and Suzy’s sisters Tamsin and Lizzie still look forward to the day the mystery is solved.  

The Suzy Lamplugh Mystery airs on Sky Crime on March 14 at 9pm and 10pm.