Crimes That Shook Britain Full Episode | Suzy Lamplugh (True Crime TV Series)

few cases have attracted as much intrigue as the mysterious disappearance of the 25 year old estate agent susie lamplu from fulham in london in 1986 decades on and two investigations later we are still left puzzled as to what actually happened to this young woman this is a young lady who disappears from a london street in the middle of a sunny july day and he's never seen again there is no trace of her anywhere and that is quite extraordinary she wouldn't just have disappeared without telling anyone the search for susie quickly escalated into one of the largest investigations in british criminal history i have not experienced a similar case to susie lamblin the inquiry will stick in the minds of every police officer that was originally involved she literally disappeared off the face of the earth it fascinated people in one way but equally it horrified people years later the theories about what happened to susie lamplu are rife making this a crime that shook britain hertfordshire england july the 28th 1986 the brother of susie lamplou received a telephone call that will change his life i was working at a fish farm and i remember when my dad i think phoned me and said that susie has not returned from her and a time when she was showing someone around the house and they were starting to get worried richard's younger sister had worked for sturgis estate agents in fulham london for just over a year it was just before my mum's birthday that and it was just not a sort of thing that she would have done it was really worrying gradually information started to feed back to richard and his family about the circumstances when colleagues looked into her schedule they noticed an entry by susie to show a client around an empty house at 12 45 pm we had a missing estate agent which wasn't all that suspicious until we found out that where she'd gone to uh with uh mr kipper within sturgis estate agent nobody really knew who he was he wasn't a regular customer and it rang bells that night there's an oblique reference i think to mr kipper viewing charles road in the diary none of susie's colleagues knew of the name in her diary or had any details for him well we didn't have any clues at all to be honest mr kipper was somebody nobody had ever heard of it was just a name in a diary for an appointment with susie as the afternoon wore on colleagues grew more concerned for her whereabouts she never returned to sturgis's stages that afternoon and she never went home to a mother's house that afternoon although she did live in a flat of her own um nobody'd seen her since about midday that day you think well she will probably turn up and she didn't she you know you know you didn't know what happened to her you thought well maybe she's had an accident maybe she's lost her memory maybe you know something's gone you know and you do sort of everything goes through your mind about what happens as the police learned more about the circumstances surrounding susie's disappearance they drafted in extra offices and began a meticulous search of the local area that night we stepped up the what would be the normal missing person to a very high risk missing person inquiry we went to susie's flat in putney i went to the front door we do we didn't have a key unfortunately so i had to force the door open with my shoulders there was nothing in the flat that made me suspicious that anything untoward or suspicious that happened in the flat no sign of any struggle or blood or anything untoward although the flat didn't shed any light on her whereabouts the team did receive some disturbing news on our way back to fulham police station we heard that they'd found sues car down in stevenage road which is about a mile and a half away from charles road on further inspection susie's car appeared to have been abandoned the company car she used to ferry clients to view various properties in her role as an estate agent was found unlocked close to bishops park and fulham football ground the car wasn't parked properly the car was parked um overlapping somebody's garage doors were still unlocked there were certain things about the car which suggested that susie wasn't driving that car because of positioning of the seat the car was just left in a road unlocked no keys you know you sort of think she's obviously taking her keys out why didn't she lock it the police would they were trying to be as supportive as possible didn't know what had happened and how to you know respond to it really the car was a worrying factor and residents in fulham were also reporting some other alarming news information was coming through that she'd been seen by locals and had some sort of argument with them with a male outside charles road this raised concerns even further police now had a missing young woman her car abandoned and reports of a possible altercation with a man they rushed to try and find any more clues the people we needed to interview immediately were her closest friends and work colleagues and what came from that then escalated to where she associated her friends where she uh drank ganette she was part of a very close knit group of friends i think diana lamplow called them the putney set we had to interview all those all those guys there's this window if you don't do anything within that window then it gets harder and harder to do as more time passed and with little to go off the police asked for help superintendent carter went public very quickly on this case and the help of the media was massive the public reaction was huge and that's what you want you want the public on board the public can help you greatly and there was great public reaction to this officers leading the hunt have renewed their appeal for witnesses the police put out appeals for help in finding missing people almost on a daily basis in london i still get them on my computer at home from the press bureau of the yard and they're sold very quickly quite often their children or sometimes there's someone in distress but they the police normally find them within 24 48 hours something like that this wasn't that sort of case the police knew by the evening of the first day that she disappeared at them could well be something very seriously wrong by the beginning of august police had over 700 calls from the public about with possible information and they had a hundred calls from people who believed they'd seen susie lamplu in the on the day that she disappeared or subsequently at the same time it obviously stirred up a certain amount of fear in the public because there were reports that a number of shops in london had sold out women's alarms because people were concerned about a possible attack on them as the media picked up the case and the hunt for susie went national her family tried to search for any answers there's no sort of enemies there were no you know major boyfriends who would do this you know they had nobody to pin it on 1986 the metropolitan police are calling on the public to help with the disappearance of 25 year old estate agent susie lamplu last seen leaving her office to show a client around a property there have been no sightings of her since her car has been found abandoned and residents have reported an argument between a man and a woman but this is all detectives have to go off why was a car in stevenage road why we never know was she kidnapped nah there wasn't a struggle was there you know was she forced into a car that was never seen to be forced into a car was there she went voluntarily to do what i don't know did she go down to a street uh thinking that she was just to be with a man to have a quiet chat and things went wrong from there despite huge public support each lead that is provided reaches a dead end to the frustration of everyone affected they are left only with theories about susie's fate it did dawn on me about sort of like a month or so in that this is it she's there is something that she has disappeared that someone's done something she's someone's taken her because there's so much press coverage we used to have to wash the floor of the shop that we sold fish from and i would put down the newspaper and of course you see my sister's picture in the newspaper i knew someone's like it's just a piece of newspaper but do i leave it down there put it up pick it up or whatever what you do you're wanting to keep your hopes up and you don't go into mourning i didn't get this feel of loss because you want to keep your hopes up you know you think any minute now she'll walk through that door when you were down and mom's you know hi oh i just thought i would have take a holiday but it never happened for the lamplu family the agony of not knowing what happened to susie is channeled into the start of a charity in her name her parents paul and diana felt very passionately that something positive had to come out of susie's disappearance um dalai lampley felt that it couldn't all be negative what had happened and so within weeks of susie's disappearance the land police had set up the first meeting of of the susan employee trust which was really aimed at helping people to live safer more confident lives and to find ways of educating people to take steps to improve their personal safety but without curtailing their freedoms and liberties i was very very proud you know when my mum does something she throws herself into it people say well you should be grieving you should be mourning your loss your your daughter but in in you're getting all this glorification but it wasn't to her she saw it as as something to achieve to to strive to try and stop others getting in the same situation ensues she had some very influential figures behind her and that all helped to keep things ticking along the problem for the police is alongside that public interest is their concern for costing from a small room in the family home susie's parents worked tirelessly to spread the important message of personal safety whilst maintaining the pressure on the authorities to keep up the search for their daughter but as the months went by they find nothing the inquiry went on and on until it was um uh until it was tapered down probably about a year later to be fair the the lamplights themselves were residuals in trying to get people interested especially diana lamplou but it did begin to tail off and in i think it's 1987 the police began to wind the case down they had no no good leads they had nobody they appeared to have no good suspect and they didn't have a motive so given the demands that were on the police in the 80s for example you had an active provisional ira campaign going on in london you had a number of um high-profile robberies um the police force was not as big as it was by as it is now in fact um it was quite likely that they would start to pull the plug on the investigation or rather leave it to sleeping and when that happens the press and the media normally begins to back off as well publicly the inquiry into susie's disappearance continued but behind the investigation her family tried to come to terms with their loss the memorial service we had i think that that point i knew she wasn't coming back life had to move on it was really at that point i i i drew a line and said no she's not coming back and she's been murdered and it's always difficult to say that over the coming years the public interest in susie never waned and her family campaigned hard to keep the young estate agent in everyone's consciousness the charity went from strength to strength but more than a decade after she vanished and with no sightings of her since her parents made a decision the lamplu family went to the high court and got a ruling saying that because there was no trace of susie for 12 years rulings made that they are deceased this decision to have their daughter officially declared dead coincided with a shock move by the metropolitan police it really morphed into a homicide investigation i think after that amount of time with no trace of her financial profile no one knew where she was um you know she didn't come to to lie in any shape or form um you know and it was then a homicide investigation the cold case review looked at susie lampley's case and basically what it looked at were forensic advancements in the interviewing years fourteen years after susie lamplu vanished from the streets of fulham the metropolitan police pushed to solve the mystery once more and i was given the task at the end of 1999 to read through the files and i was appointed senior investigating officer at that time and commenced a brand new reinvestigation in 2000 i do appeal to whoever it is please to to let her go there was a massive media coverage of the lamplain case in 86 and the interunion years and various theories were put forward you know we had the normal what i call mystics water dividers um amateur criminologists and even some criminologists coming up with various theories but it did lack some hard evidence despite this all the information the police had seemed to point the finger at one man john kanam a name that had caught the attention of officers all those years previously but now was back in the frame there was a massive circumstantial evidence that we uncovered in the reinvestigation that pointed to canaan there were a number of other suspects in the case that we eliminated and we basically exhausted every line of inquiry that we could for the first time in 14 years officers had their sights firmly on one person john david gies kanan now 46 years old an imprisoned for other offences he'd been convicted of an abduction and the murder of shirley banks in bristol and the facts were so similar that it it needed to be looked at twenty-nine-year-old shirley banks disappeared in october 1987 from a car park in bristol following a shopping trip she was never seen again her body was discovered in the quantock hills in somerset the following easter john kernan was arrested shortly afterwards coincidentally he wasn't just arrested for that he was arrested for a string of other sexual assaults abductions and rapes and attempted rapes and attempted abductions he'd committed a whole series of those offences of which he was convicted around the time of shirley banks they made links between him and shirley banks because in his flat in a briefcase was a tax disc from shelley banks car they found a fingerprint from shirley banks in his flat as well but that came later so that's how he begins to come into the picture he's got a modus operandi which which looks very similar he has a he's involved in the disciplines of shady banks who were snatched off the street the evening before she was she disappeared he tried to smash another woman so there's a lot of interest in this the media and the lamploose who say hang on a minute come on you know this could well be interesting although canaan had a string of convictions bristol is over 150 miles from fulham what other evidence could connect this known criminal to susie lamplu the lampwoods later said that they had told the police that they thought susie had a boyfriend in the last few weeks before she died who they believed came from the bristol area which is where canon's family lived actually and subsequently the other witnesses came forward saying that they believed she had a boyfriend that he might be from the west country and more disturbing information was to come she told one of her relatives shortly before she disappeared that she was very concerned about the guy that she was going out with and she was getting quite scared of him 25 year old estate agent susie lamplu has not been seen since leaving her office in 1986 to go and meet a client mr kipper fourteen years later police review the case and specifically turn their attention to one man john kanan in prison for the murder of another woman shirley banks a year after susie's disappearance officers quickly began to build up more circumstantial evidence putting him in the frame cannon was interviewed by us twice you might find this strange john cannon was in prison in the borough of hammersmith and fulham yet he denies ever having been to fulham uh he knew where kensington was knew where notting hill was knew a hammersmith was but strangely said he'd never been to fulham incredulous is that my scene that's what he said and that's recorded um we could prove that he had um we know he had work experience uh he was released on a daily basis what is significant he was released from prison the friday before she went missing now okay people say oh what a coincidence i don't believe in too many coincidences not when they all mount up and further circumstantial evidence positioned kanan in the area at the time susie disappeared we did a re-enactment at the time and we identified some new witnesses one being a jogger who said he thought that uh somebody looking like susie and kanan having a argument in the car about the time um it was significant that we believed the vehicle to be a left-hand drive bmw either um very dark-colored either black or navy blue and they drove off at speed we identified a car that canaan had been using in crime with a criminal associate who were both in the prison hostile next world scrubs there's other circumstantial evidence where canaan turned up a house in fulham that was for sale uninvited without an estate agent and the woman let him in although she felt a bit suspicious fortunately her husband was in the house he didn't realize that started behaving strangely and the husband came into the room and he left quickly um you've got the sharol's road episode where you got mr kipper and you know that is definitely there we had a witness that came forward to put ganan looking in the state agent's window the day before susie went missing all this alarming information pieced together gradually began to paint a picture of what might have happened to susie and who could be responsible for her disappearance and another mystery the name in suzy's diary also pointed to kanan after rumors circulated that his nickname in prison was kipper as officers honed in they looked deeper into this violent criminal's background he was born in the middle and so i think to a middle-class family he went to grammar school but at the age of 14 he was convicted of a sex attack he worked as a car salesman and eventually got married and had a child but he was a very erratic character he abandoned his wife and child and took up with a girlfriend and when she when they fell out he attacked her quite brutally he was eventually jailed for eight years for a series of sex attacks and what begins to emerge in his makeup is that he is or was very attractive to women appeared to be very old-fashioned he would it would start to he would chat up a girl and then he would perhaps send a box of chocolates or some flowers and then he would appear with a bottle of champagne it comes over as very smooth very affable appears to be a successful businessman which he certainly wasn't and he appears to have a rather nice romantic streak although there's something in the background you won't like certainly if you're a woman but what was it about kanan that drove him to such violence one of the things about john conan he doesn't like rejection there is a pattern with former girlfriends where he when he feels rejected by them he resorts to violence one former girlfriend in particular would provide jim dickie and his team with some very specific information there was an episode where she made some comments about canaan where they had a conversation in the car near norton barracks in um west midlands where he said something to the effect and i'm paraphrasing it um who knows susie could be there this is the first time somebody had directly quoted kanan mentioning susie in any way and needed further investigation that's why norton barracks had quite significant meaning in a way but unfortunately over the intervening probably 15 16 years we looked at we did scope and exercise in that area but it was hugely developed was completely different from what it was at the time and the advice we were given at the time was you just wouldn't succeed because you'd have to dig up houses in the foundations and hugely expensive whether this comment from canaan was legitimate or a hollow statement we may never know he plays mind games conan does things for a reason either to throw people off the scene to impose his walter mitty thought process on other people another potential clue that has always kept officers guessing is a registration plate canaan fitted to shirley banks his vehicle the year after susie disappeared slp 386s you could interpret that as suzy lamplu uh 86 you're being 86. what the rest of the figures mean who knows and the last bit who knows what that means either there is also an interpretation that could be a reference on a map because the reference does correspond or very close to the area norton barracks in somerset and it's the sort of thing canaan would do he would throw in a sweetener to either draw you off completely or to give you a big clue and see if you were clever enough almost like a a crossword clue with all this information pointing to canaan officers took the decision to launch a search for susie's body the metropolitan police relaunched the investigation into susie lamplu's disappearance after her family took the decision to have a legally declared deceased and with a fresh look at the case one man became their prime suspect john kanan after receiving particular information detectives decided not to search a military base but turned their attention to a site in somerset there's a search in the contocs where shirley banks's body had been disposed of that's hugely significant when you look at canaan's uh profiling the fact that he disposed of shirley banks's body in that region i i felt and other officers agreed with me that it was worth exploring because as a child he used to go on holiday in that in that region and obviously knew the area quite well i wouldn't say it's wild but it's just farmland and forest we didn't find anything but it gave us an insight into canaan's thought process around this although they were no closer to finding susie officers were determined to keep looking we did another search subsequent to that i think about a year later again in somerset in the somerset levels close to one of the rivers and we searched there because we had some intelligence that can then frequented the area and it might be a possible burial site for susie we also employed raf to overfly of certain regions and take photographs and we're able to analyze those photographs to say what might be good sights to dig because of the impression we also had the royal marines helped us hand on heart i can't say we didn't do things because the obstacles were too high yet despite an enormous amount of collaboration between the services nothing was found at this location either whilst the police were keen to draw some conclusion with the searches this wasn't important for everyone maybe he was just getting the person who had killed her that was as far as i'm certain i wasn't interested to find your body i know i'm i'd rather leave for sleeping dogs like i just keep her memory i'm more interested in in the future and was trying to save other people from having the again the same thing happened to her suzy's body may not have been located but with the mounting circumstantial evidence jim dickey interviewed the man he felt was responsible from memory canaan did not come up with an alibi now that might have been deliberate the thing is if you give an alibi uh you give the police an opportunity to prove or disprove it which is what we would have done if you haven't got an alibi there's nothing to prove or disprove with kanan giving nothing away and no hard evidence categorically pinning the crime to him the new investigation concluded well cannon has never been charged he's arrested but he's never been charged it's all circumstantial no clear link prosecutor agreed we'd done a very thorough reinvestigation could not see that we there was anything we could do further of this outcome the police made an unprecedented announcement i was quite surprised by the fact the police were so upfront about john conan normally what happens is if the police do suspect somebody i very strongly suspect uh somebody is responsible they may well guide the press by saying privately that they believe this may well be the the culprit but in this instance in 2002 they were very upfront about it i'm happy in my own mind that john canan is the man who probably abducted sexually abused a rape susie and murdered her uh we said so at a press conference when the results were made which is unusual in the extreme john kanan has been interviewed twice by police in connection with susie's murder since his arrest whilst the new investigation didn't lead to an official conviction it did bring some possible answers for those close to susie and in the years since she has vanished the trust set up by her parents continues to grow it's been part of my mum and dad's still my dad's life he he's not so much involved in it now but uh he still has a bit of a role and um and friends as well and my brother-in-law and her friends and family are also in trustees as well so it's it's nice to see that uh everyone's sort of involved my mom gave her rest of her life for it there's been a number of achievements over the years one of the most significant ones has been to really pioneer personal safety for loan workers we go into workplaces every day of the week training people on how to take steps to improve their personal safety and we really focus on people who are working on their own and particularly people who are doing things like house visits i find it incredibly humbling that the family were able to divert their energies into a cause for good which to this day still does good work protecting um lone people traveling anywhere in the world really we also over the years have campaigned for a number of improvements to personal safety and from more of a sort of policy point of view so it was the trust that really spearheaded the campaign to bring in licensing for minicabs and the trust really was the driving force behind the 1998 act to license private hire vehicles since 2010 we've run the national stalking helpline and this year we celebrated having supported 10 000 victims of stalking in the last four years many theories over susie's fate have been explored over the years one of which stalking plays a large part mine form theory is that uh susie was stalked by john cannon he'd probably spoken to her might even have taken her on a date uh susie certainly affected the profile of what john kennedy saw in as much that she was blonde attractive worked as an estate agent um very presentable young lady came from good family uh little doubt that conan stalked her little doubt that canaan viewed properties with her that he observed that through the window of the estate agents which probably drew him to go in and seek to view properties i think that susie got into a row with canaan on the day he abducted her from the car or made her get into the vehicle he had at the time they then ensued probably quite a very heated rail where he basically drove off uh abducting her where he went from there is a matter of conjecture she would have probably just sought him as a normal person buyer and just went from there and probably she was a goner when she just entered the house or the car or whatever i was so pleased that the trust is actually doing a lot more with stalking because it is something that i think that scissors probably was stored and whilst the trust gathers momentum and changes people's lives the case to find susie remains open the inquiry's still there it's not been closed and it never will be closed uh until probably susie's body's found and can ends either convicted or is eliminated in 2010 officials decided to revisit norton barracks after some fresh information in the hope a conclusion would finally be met but this search drew a blank officials are hopeful that the technology available today could help solve the mystery many of which were not around in the the 1980s of technology then for example cctv cameras mobile phone cell analysis tracing the computer system of homes forensic ability of dna all that today is available not necessarily back in 1986 well we didn't have cell site analysis and cctv in them days if we'd have had cctv in itself we the the inquiry would have been uh far in advance john kanan remains the number one suspect for abducting and murdering susie lamplu he continues to deny his involvement but has made cryptic remarks in the past he said to the solicitor in a throwaway remark i may well uh tell all when my mother dies uh the fact that we had the comment means probably it was made or overheard uh whether canaan supports that or not who knows i have come across people like canaan who i believe is a psychopath uh clear and simple um there is a difference between psychopaths and what i call career criminals strangely enough can then falls in both those uh categories a because he's abducted serial sex offender and murdered female victims uh also he's had a career in criminality involving armed robbery credit card frauds check fraud uh petty crime um which strange enough he'll admit to but when it comes to the serial sex offending abductions kidnaps murders he's in complete denial he's got a full life tariff which means that he has to serve until he's 65 or longer before he's considered for parole and my view is if he ever was released he would still be a danger to the female population of this country i haven't really grieved susan way i've we've had memorials and you know i always remember turning around to the memorial service and thinking officers might walk down the aisle of course she never did and uh but uh yeah so grieving's the wrong word it's mourning her loss i suppose it's it's in terms of she's not there but we have no body we have no grave we have nothing to tangibly uh fix on i do think that it's quite possible that sometime in the future that susie lampley's body will be found somebody walking a dog the dog might find something in undergrowth a body there are forensic tests which can now be carried out there are lots of work that can be done on identifying bodies and it may well be that she does turn up i think that so many people looked at her and thought well that could be me that could be my daughter she was just someone who who i think was very very easy for people to relate to um and it was such a shocking thing that happened to her i also think that diana lampley was an incredibly powerful uh voice at the time of susie's disappearance and indeed afterwards um and and i think you know it's it's very much down to it's very much down to diana's passion and ability to really get her message across um that the susie lamprey trust is still around today i don't know what it is and i can't put my finger on it there's something about sue's lamplow inquiry that all of us wanted to get there sooner rather than later it's unfortunately even today we haven't found her and i hope to god that one day we do i don't think of her often as such obviously we have her birthday and we always uh we used to do lots of abs and friends when we had a get together she was a very bubbly and very happy i am not one for dwelling on the home nice memories you

Channel: Crimes That Shook Britain

Views: 939,424

Keywords: Crimes That Shook Britain, Britain, Crime, Murder, Killer, UK, Crimes, Officers, True Crime, Cineflix, Foxtel, C&I, Documentary, TV, Series, Full Episodes, Episode, Police

Id: p6o4f9Yfx_E

Length: 42min 27sec (2547 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 19 2016