Prime suspect for Suzy Lamplugh's murder dies in jail aged 70

The suspected killer of Suzy Lamplugh has gone to his grave without ever revealing what happened to the estate agent who vanished 38 years ago. 

Convicted killer John Cannan was jailed for a minimum of 35 years in 1989 for the rape and murder of Bristol newlywed Shirley Banks.

Scotland Yard in 2002 named the sexual predator as the prime suspect in the 1986 disappearance of 25-year-old Ms Lamplugh, but he was never charged in connection with her death due to lack of evidence after her body was never found.

The case remains one of Britain's most notorious unsolved crimes. 

The Prison Service said the Category A prisoner died today at top security HMP Full Sutton.

'As with all deaths in custody, the Prisons and Probation Ombudsman will investigate,' a spokesperson said. 

Two years ago Cannan ignored the plea's of Suzy's family to reveal what happened after it emerged that he was stricken with cancer and receiving end-of-life palliative care behind bars.

Her brother Richard said at the time: 'I would like Cannan, if he does know, to tell us what happened to Suze. After all these years, I would like him to finally let us know what happened.

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'It would mean a lot to the family.'

Estate agent Ms Lampugh vanished on July 28, 1986, aged 25 after going to show a man around a house in Fulham.

Her white Ford Fiesta was later found outside a property for sale about a mile-and-a-half away.

The doors were unlocked, the handbrake was off and her purse was found in a side door pocket.

The case remains one of Britain's most notorious unsolved crimes and her body has never been found.

The only clue to her disappearance was an appointment she put in her work diary suggesting she was showing the property to a 'Mr Kipper', who has never been traced.

Three days before she vanished Cannan had been released from a hostel at Wormwood Scrubs prison, where he had been serving a six-year sentence for rape.

It later emerged that in prison he was known by other inmates as Kipper because of his habit of taking frequent naps.

Former car salesman Cannan also had access to a BMW car of the type thought to have been driven by 'Mr Kipper' and resembled a photofit of a man seen with Miss Lamplugh outside the Fulham flat on the day she disappeared.

Cannan had always maintained his innocence and insisted in a letter last December that he did not kill Ms Lamplugh. 

He sent a handwritten note via his lawyers to The Mirror stating that he had not been in London but was instead in Birmingham 'treating my mother to a spot of lunch' on the day Ms Lamplugh went missing.

In the rambling letter, he told the newspaper that he wanted to make a number of 'points' given the media spotlight on his case after he was denied parole earlier this year.

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When Cannan was quizzed by murder detectives the former public schoolboy bragged that there are 'one or two things I haven't been caught for'. 

Cannan was out on licence from prison when Ms Lamplugh disappeared. He'd previously been jailed for a total of eight years for raping a pregnant woman in front of her own mother and toddler, plus two robberies. 

In the months leading up to July 1986, he was living at a bail hostel next to Wormwood Scrubs prison in Shepherd's Bush and allowed out on day release to work at a theatrical props company in nearby Acton. He was also able to travel to Bristol at weekends to visit his various lovers.

Away from the hostel, he dressed in sharp suits and posed as a successful businessman when in reality he funded his life via petty theft and chequebook fraud.

His associates at the bail hostel told police he cruised the bars of South-West London, drinking heavily, in search of sex. 

Cannan told them he liked 'Hooray Henry types' — well-dressed, well-educated, well-spoken women in business suits, particularly navy pleated skirts — and bragged of 'one special girlfriend in Fulham'.

Cannan was released from the bail hostel on Friday, July 25, 1986 — just three days before Ms Lampliugh went missing. 

That same evening, she went to the Prince of Wales in Putney — a pub which was also one of Cannan's haunts. Items from her handbag, including a diary, a chequebook and some cards, were later found by staff. 

It was the first of a host of strange incidents leading up to her disappearance that suggest, according to retired police officer Jim Dickie, that Ms Lamplugh was being stalked by Cannan and was 'possibly befriended by her'. 

Someone pretending to be a police officer called the estate agent where she worked claiming to have her chequebook. 

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Red roses also arrived at the office from a mystery admirer. A man fitting Cannan's description was seen looking through the estate agency window on Sunday, July 27.

'Someone was monitoring Suzy's movements and knew where she worked and lived,' Mr Dickie said last July.

Most bizarre of all was that prior to Suzy's meeting with Mr Kipper at a house in Shorrolds Road in Fulham on Monday, a man fitting Cannan's description turned up at another property for sale in the road without an appointment and asked the woman who answered the door if he could look around. 

He was scared away when he realised her husband was at home.

Despite Cannan's comfortable middle-class upbringing as the son of a successful car salesroom-owner in Sutton Coldfield who sent him to private school, he was a complete failure.

Aged 14, he indecently assaulted a woman in a phone box and was placed on probation. He left school early and joined the Merchant Navy before working for his father.

During the late 1970s, a string of rapes occurred in homes for sale with estate agents in the West Midlands, where Cannan was living at the time. He married in 1978 but abandoned his wife and their daughter in 1980.

Back in September 1987, when he was asked by the dating agency what he was looking for in a woman, Cannon replied: 'Well, I think apart from the physical side, again I think someone who's pleasant, who's natural, who's relaxed. Somebody who's calm.' Physically, he said, 'somebody like [actress] Stephanie Beacham'.

A month after recording that video, he killed 29-year-old textile factory manager Shirley Banks. After a failed attempt to abduct businesswoman Julia Holman using a fake gun from a Bristol car park on October 7, the following day he abducted newly-wed Shirley from a shopping centre car park in the same city.

He is thought to have kept her overnight at his rented flat before killing her and dumping her body in a stream in a remote area known as Dead Woman's Ditch in Somerset's Quantock Hills.

While police were still searching for Shirley — and her distinctive orange Mini — Cannan was arrested for another knife-point assault in late October. 

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Police found a tax disc for Shirley's car in the glove compartment of his car, then they found her Mini in the garage at his block of flats. He had repainted it blue and added false plates marked SLP 386S.

Criminologist Berry-Dee says that while Cannan told him the number plate was chosen at random in one of his letters from prison, he believes it's a 'strange subliminal reference' to Suzy Lamplugh with the 386 possibly suggesting 'third victim of 1986'.

Cannan had also been linked to the murder of Sandra Court — a 26-year-old insurance clerk, from Bournemouth, Dorset, who went missing after a night out in May that year, and whose body was found, strangled and dumped, in a stream.

He was ultimately found guilty of Shirley's murder, the attempted abduction the night before and the abduction and rape of a woman in Reading, at Exeter Crown Court in 1989. 

Among the evidence that convicted him was a fingerprint, belonging to Shirley, left on a document in his flat.

Ms Lamplugh's late parents Paul and Diana dedicated their lives to finding her and established the Suzy Lamplugh Trust to improve awareness of personal safety.

Shortly after Cannan was declared as a suspect, Ms Lamplugh's mother Diana suffered a severe stroke and later developed Alzheimer's which meant she tragically lost her memories of the daughter in whose name she spent the latter part of her life campaigning.

She died aged 75 in 2011, but her Paul carried on fighting for justice until his death in 2019.

A year earlier police carried out excavations at Cannan's mother's former home in Sutton Coldfield but nothing was found in 2018.

Last October the Parole Board decided he was too dangerous to release after Cannan continued to insist his innocence and refused to engage in any programmes to address the risk of reoffending.

A risk assessment when Cannan was imprisoned revealed, 'He had held a view that violence was acceptable and he had been preoccupied with sex, believing he had the right to have sex as and when he wanted to.'