On the morning of Monday, July 28th, 1986, 25-year-old Susie Lampluck left
her office to show a house. In her diary, she wrote three simple words, “Mr. Kipper, 37 Shoralds.” She stepped
into the warm London afternoon and was never seen again. For 38 years, investigators searched fields, rivers,
and records. A suspect was later named imprisoned and died in November 2024,
taking his knowledge with him. How does someone vanish in broad daylight in one of the world’s busiest cities and never
be found? Stay with us as we trace the beginning of a story that still refuses
to end. Fulham in the summer of 1986 was a neighborhood in the process of
becoming something it had not always been. For generations, it had been solidly workingass, the kind of place
where families stayed across multiple generations, where the local pub was an institution rather than a choice. where
people knew their neighbors without having been introduced and kept an informal eye on one anothers, lives as a
matter of course. By the mid80s, money was beginning to move through West London in ways it had not before.
Property prices were climbing with a confidence that felt permanent. Young professionals were arriving alongside
the families who had been there for decades, and the streets carried that particular energy of a place caught
between two versions of itself. part ambition, part memory, entirely alive.
The summer that year was warm and long with light. Shor’s road was the kind of Victorian terrace street you could walk
down without a single thought of danger. Narrow pavements, small front gardens
enclosed by low brick walls, cars double parked on both sides of the road, the
occasional neighbor leaning out of a window or crossing the street to speak to someone on the other side. an
entirely ordinary residential street, the kind that existed in hundreds of configurations across London,
indistinguishable from one another in every way that seemed to matter. What most people in Fulham did not think
about very often going about their daily lives in that summer of 1986 was that
Wormwood Scrubs Prison sat less than 2 mi from Fulham Road and that the prison
operated a day release program that placed convicted criminals into the
surrounding community during working hours. These men used the local shops.
They worked in local businesses. They visited the wine bars along the Fulham Road, the pubs in Putney, the cafes
where people stopped for lunch. They sat at tables beside people who had no idea who they were or what they had done.
Most of the time, this was unremarkable. Most of the time, nothing happened. In 1986, a woman who found herself in
trouble at a property showing a client whose behavior shifted from unusual to frightening. A situation that was moving
too fast in the wrong direction had no mobile phone. She had no way to send a silent message to her office. No way to
signal distress without the person beside her knowing she was doing it. Her only option was to find a public pay
phone, which meant being outside and exposed and capable of reaching one, and hoping that whoever had frightened her
remained at a distance while she did. The entire infrastructure of personal safety that most of us now take for
granted simply did not exist. What existed was a woman’s judgment, her instincts, and the presence or absence
of other people in the immediate vicinity. There were no security cameras on residential streets in West London in
1986. The only record of what occurred on a public pavement on a given afternoon was the memory of whoever
happened to be there and happened to look in the right direction at the right moment. This is worth holding in mind as
the story moves forward because the witnesses who were present on Shorald’s Road and Stevenage Road that day would
prove to be the closest thing to a camera that the investigation ever had. And as this case would demonstrate at
considerable cost, witnesses could be dismissed, misread, and set aside for
reasons so procedurally ordinary that their consequences were almost impossible to be angry about in any
directed way. The errors were not made by villains. They were made by tired,
overworked people doing their best within the limits of the systems they had been given. The estate agency world
of that era had its own vulnerabilities that are easier to see in retrospect than they were to see from within.
Sturgis occupied a bright street-facing groundfloor premises on Fulham Road. Susie worked at a desk near the front
window, deliberately positioned there because the office operated on a theory common in that industry that placing an
attractive young woman in a window visible from the pavement would draw in clients who might otherwise walk past.
She was the face of the business in the most literal sense. If someone wanted to find her, they knew exactly where to
look. She was 25 years old. She had worked as a butician on the QE2 ocean
liner before settling into estate agency work, which meant she was not inexperienced in dealing with strangers
in reading rooms, in managing situations that required both warmth and professionalism simultaneously. She was
good at her job in the way that some people are good at their jobs, not merely competent, but genuinely suited
to it. She was the kind of person who made clients feel immediately comfortable. Her family was close in the
way that some families are without making a production of it. Her father, Paul, was a businessman. Her mother,
Diana, carried beneath her measured exterior a quality of resolve that the years ahead would reveal more fully than
anyone at that point could have anticipated. Susie had a younger sister, Elizabeth. She had a boyfriend, a
27-year-old stock broker, and a male flatmate in her Putney flat, and a group
of friends she saw regularly at the wine bars and pubs along Fulham Road. She was a complete person living a full and
ordinary life. She was 25, and she was good at her work, and she had, in the
ordinary way of 25year-olds. Every reason to expect that the afternoon ahead of her was simply an
afternoon. That Monday morning began exactly as it appeared to begin. It would be the last morning the Lampluke
family spent on the ordinary side of an unbroken world, and neither they nor Susie had any way of knowing it. She had
changed her hair the Friday before. A blonde tint, the kind of quiet, personal decision that gets made on a slow Friday
afternoon, when the week is nearly over, and a small change feels like a reasonable reward. She arrived at the
Sturgeist office on Monday morning, as she always did, settled into her place near the window, and moved through the
morning with the rhythm of someone who knows their work well enough to do it without friction. The property market
that summer was genuinely busy. The office had the energy of a place where the phones ring and people stay late. At
some point before noon, she made the diary entry. The client had a name, or what he had given as a name and a
property to view and a time. 12:45 outside the property keys to be collected from the office beforehand.
She took the keys. She said whatever she said to the people around her as she left nothing apparently that suggested
concern or hesitation. She walked out. Her white Ford Fiesta was parked nearby.
The drive to Shorald’s road was short. She would have parked, checked the address, walked to the front of number
37, and waited. A woman walking home along the road at 12:50 saw Susie standing at the front gateway of the
property alone with the composed patients of someone waiting for a client who was slightly late. The street was
quiet in the way residential streets are quiet at lunchtime on a weekday. There was nothing in the scene that required a
second look. The woman walked on. 10 minutes later, the neighbor from the house immediately next door heard sound
from number 37. A door footsteps people in the front garden. She looked out and
saw two people coming through the gate, Suzy and a man. They were both turning to look back up at the facade of the
house as they left the entirely natural gesture of two people who have just finished viewing a property together and
are giving it one last appraisal. The man was carrying a bottle of champagne decorated with ribbons. He was
immaculately dressed, a dark charcoal suit, dark hair swept neatly back from
his face. He had the groomed, deliberate appearance of a man who had thought very carefully about the impression he made.
The neighbor would later describe him reaching for the phrase that came most naturally as a public school boy type.
She also noticed as they walked toward the car that they appeared to be arguing. A third witness passing at
almost precisely the same moment confirmed the champagne independently. Several witnesses then saw the pair walk
to a car and get into it together. What was said between those two people during the 40 minutes of that viewing, what had
happened inside the empty house, nobody who was present on that street could know. The witnesses saw the outside.
Whatever had shifted the atmosphere between them from professional appointment to visible argument was not
visible from the pavement. By 2:45 that afternoon, Susie appeared one final time
to someone who knew her. Her close friend Barbara Whitfield was cycling south along Fulham Palace Road when she
saw the white Fiesta moving north. Suzie at the wheel, a man in the passenger seat. Barbara lifted her hand in a wave.
Susie was turned toward her passenger talking and did not look over. Barbara cycled on. She was without knowing it
the last person who genuinely knew Susie Lampllo to see her alive. Approximately a mile away, around the same time, a man
finishing his afternoon run emerged from Bishop’s Park onto Stevenage Road. A darkcoled BMW lefthand drive, which he
noticed because left-hand drive vehicles were conspicuous in England, came to an abrupt, unplanned stop in the road ahead
of him. Inside the car, a blonde woman was pressing the horn. Not a brief tap, a sustained, deliberate sound held for
long enough that the jogger stopped and turned to look. The woman’s expression was difficult to read from where he
stood. She looked, he would later say, as though she might be laughing, or she could have been screaming. He could not
tell which. What did not occur to him in that moment, the thought that would arrive much later and stay was that it
was a left-hand drive car, which meant that the woman pressing the horn was sitting on what in England would be the
passenger side. She was not the one in control of the vehicle. He kept running.
By 3:30, Suz’s colleagues at Sturgis were monitoring the clock with the specific unease of people who know that
a reliable colleague does not simply fail to return. By 4:30, two of them drove to 37 Shors Road. The property was
locked. There was no one there. No note, no message, no sign that anything had
been left deliberately. The keys to the house had gone with Susie when she left the office. They
called the police at 5:30 in the afternoon. At 10:00 that night, a police officer on patrol found the white Ford
Fiesta parked on Stevenage Road. The driver’s door was unlocked. The handbreak was not engaged. The ignition
key was absent. Sus’s purse sat on the seat undisturbed. The keys to 37
Shorald’s Road were not in the car. Her own keys were not in the car. The driver’s seat had been adjusted, pushed
back significantly to a position from which Suzie, standing 5′ 6 in, could not have reached the foot pedals. Someone
else had driven that car to Stevenage Road and walked away from it without bothering to engage the handbrake or
lock the door. Someone who had been in a hurry or who had not been planning to need the car again. The officer stood
beside the vehicle and looked at what it told him. Then he called it in. 9 hours had passed since Susie had been
seen waiting at the gateway of 37 Shorald’s Road. 9 hours in which somewhere in the streets of Fulham,
something had happened that multiple witnesses had glimpsed from different angles without fully understanding what
they were seeing. The investigation that was about to begin would be one of the largest the Metropolitan Police had
mounted in years. It would also carry within it from its very first days a set of errors so procedurally ordinary and
so ultimately consequential that tracing them would take 15 years and a full reinvestigation to accomplish. The
Metropolitan Police responded to the missing person report with the resources appropriate to a case that in those
first hours was still being assessed rather than classified. Officers began canvasing the surrounding streets
immediately. Suz’s boyfriend was located and interviewed. He had a solid corroborated alibi and was eliminated
within the first hours. Her flatmate was interviewed and eliminated. Her flat in Putney was searched from room to room
and yielded nothing of concern, no evidence of distress, no letters, no diary entries, nothing that the
investigators who went through it could point to as a lead. A public appeal was prepared almost immediately. Suz’s face
was in the newspapers within days of the disappearance. Her office diary entry, Mr. Kipper was released to the public. A
journalist noted and others repeated that if Mr. Kipper’s first name were Dan, the combined name formed an anagram
of the word kidnapper. It was the kind of observation that Phil’s column inches. It contributed nothing to
finding her. What the appeal also released, and what would prove to be the first significant investigative error,
was a photograph. The image police distributed showed Susie with dark brown hair. The problem was direct and simple.
She had lightened her hair to blonde 3 days before she disappeared. Witnesses across Fulham, who had seen a blonde
woman on the 28th of July, were looking at a dark-haired woman in the newspapers and concluding reasonably that the
person they had seen was not the person being searched. Vor, the jogger who had watched a blonde woman pressing the horn
of a left-hand drive BMW on Stevenage Road, gave his account to investigators.
He described a blonde woman. He was told that this was inconsistent with what was known about the victim’s appearance. His
account was recorded on an index card assigned a reference number and placed in a cabinet with the 25,999
other cards that the investigation would accumulate. He did not hear from investigators again for 14 years. It is
worth sitting with that for a moment. a witness who had potentially been present at the last moments of Susie Lamploo’s
freedom, who had heard her pressing the horn of a vehicle she was not driving, who had watched her face at a moment
when she was trying to be heard by someone on the pavement was dismissed from the active investigation because
police had released the wrong photograph. The error was not malicious. It was a consequence of not knowing
about the hair color change compounded by a filing system that could not surface connections between one
witness’s account and anothers without a human being doing the work manually. But its cost in terms of what the
investigation lost in those early weeks was incalculable. The investigation in 1986 had no
computers. Every lead, every tip, every piece of witness testimony was written
on an index card and filed by hand in a system that required human cross referencing to yield connections. 26,000
cards would accumulate over the life of the original investigation, to look at all of them with fresh eyes to find the
pattern visible only when multiple cards were considered simultaneously.
This was not a realistic task for investigators working under pressure and without the tools to make it possible.
The connection that would eventually emerge from those cards that multiple estate agents in the Fulham area had
been visited by a man calling himself Mister Kipper in the weeks around the disappearance was invisible in the paper
system. It would only become visible when the cards were eventually transferred to a computer database two
decades later. There was also a classification problem that shaped the investigation’s early trajectory in ways
that were not fully appreciated at the time. Susie had been categorized as a missing person rather than a presumed
crime victim. This was standard procedure given the information available in the first hours. It was
also in retrospect a decision that meant the protocols governing investigation of
known offenders in the area. Protocols that would have triggered a review of men recently released into the community
with relevant criminal histories were not activated. A man who had been living in the Wormwood Scrubs prison hostel
working in the Fulham area on day release with a history of violence against women passed through the
investigation’s first months without being identified as a person of interest. The physical evidence in
itself was suggestive without being conclusive. The abandoned Ford Fiesta
with its displaced driver’s seat, the missing keys, the purse left behind
untouched, the sightings of a dark lefthand drive BMW unusual enough in
England in that era that multiple independent witnesses had noticed and remembered it near the property and
again on Stevenage Road. In the hours that followed, the accounts corroborated
each other across the witness statements, but no registration plate had been recorded by anyone who saw the
vehicle. And in the days before Susie disappeared, someone had delivered red roses to the Sturgis office anonymously.
No one knew who had sent them. The detail was noted and filed. 6 months
after the disappearance, a member of the public came forward with information about a BMW that had been sitting
abandoned in a nearby road. The car, he said, was registered to a Belgian man by the name of Mr. Kyper. Detectives
traveled to Belgium. The man’s alibi was confirmed. His vehicle had been in a Belgian garage on the 28th of July. He
was eliminated. One by one, the early leads ran out. The index cards accumulated. The case, technically open,
began the slow process of going cold. In June of 1987,
nearly a full year after the disappearance, Diana Lamplug told journalists that she believed her
daughter was gone. She said it without performance in the steady considered voice of a woman who had been living
with this knowledge privately for some months and had decided that continuing to say nothing about it served no one.
She had already begun working on what would become the trust. She had already decided, in other words, that whatever
had happened to Susie, she would not allow the absence of an answer to be the only thing it produced. What she could
not know as she gave that interview in the summer of 1987 was that in October of that same year, the person most
likely responsible for Suz’s disappearance was about to commit another crime, entirely one that would
eventually through a series of connections that took years to become fully visible, draw a straight line back
to Fulham Road and to a bottle of champagne tied with ribbons. In October of 1987, 15 months after Susie vanished,
a 29-year-old woman named Shirley Banks was taken from a Bristol street in the evening by a man who had been watching
her. He held her captive for 18 hours. Her body was found at a remote location in the Quanto Hills known locally as
Dead Woman’s Ditch. When police located the man responsible and searched his car, they found handcuffs, an imitation
firearm, the tax disc from Shirley Banks’s own mini, and attached to the mini, which had been hidden in his
garage, a false number plate. The letters were S, L, and P. The numbers were 38, and 6. The man’s name was John
Cannon, and every detective who looked at that plate arrived at the same reading. Susie Lamploo, 86, the year she
had disappeared. Cannon, when asked, said he had chosen the letters at random. Almost no one who heard him say
it believed him. A year earlier, a detective working the Lamploo case had taken out the photo fit, constructed
from the neighbor’s description of the man seen leaving 37 Shorald’s Road and
noticed something that stopped him. The face in the drawing looked strongly like a man he recognized from another
context. John Cannon had been living in the Wormwood Scrubs Prison Hostel in the weeks before Suz’s disappearance,
released on day release and working as a porter in the Fulham area. He was public school educated, articulate,
well-dressed, and known among inmates and workmates for his ability to attract and charm women. He had told fellow
prisoners that he had been frequenting wine bars in Fulham, and had recently met a new girlfriend, a sophisticated
woman from what he called uptown, whom he referred to by the nickname Suzu. He had also been known for years for
delivering roses to women he was pursuing. Cannon had been released from Wormwood Scrubs on the 25th of July
1986, 3 days before Susie disappeared. On the very day of his release, he had visited
a pub in Putney. Susie had been at that same pub that same evening. A note was
made. The note went on a card. The card went into the cabinet. Cananan was not
brought in for questioning. He was not placed on any identity parade. He was convicted of Shirley Banks’s murder in
1989 and sentenced to life imprisonment along with convictions for multiple
other violent offenses against women, including a rape on a train between London and Bristol committed 6 weeks
after his release from Wormwood. Scrubs. DNA evidence in the latter case placed
the probability of another perpetrator at 260 million to one. Metropolitan
Police detectives traveled to Bristol and interviewed Canon about Suz’s disappearance in 1988, again in 1989,
and again in 1990. Each time he provided nothing that eliminated him from inquiry. Each time he was not charged.
In 1990, a woman named Gilly Page came forward. She had been in a relationship with Canon after Susie disappeared, and
she told investigators something that Canon had said to her during that time. He had told her she said that Susie
Lamplau was buried at Norton barracks near Worcester. Investigators noted this
and added it to the file. Norton barracks had been vacated by the British Army in 1979 and substantially
redeveloped in the years since, with residential housing now covering much of the original site. Excavating it
required more specific information than investigators at that point were able to establish. Another former girlfriend,
Daphne Sergeant, was briefer in her assessment. As soon as I heard about Susie, she said, “I knew it was John. It
had all the hallmarks right down to the champagne. Our community knows what those years look like from the outside.
the gradual fading of public attention. The investigation that stops generating headlines because there is nothing new
to report the case that moves from the front page to the round, inside pages to
a paragraph at the anniversary and then to silence. And we know too what those
years feel like from the inside. For the families who have no choice but to remain exactly where they are, returning
to the same facts, with the same questions, watching the world around them continue its ordinary motion while
their own life remains organized around an event that has no resolution. Every
year that passes adds its particular weight. Every birthday that arrives without celebration. every ordinary
thing that is no longer ordinary because it is threaded through with absence. Paul and Diana Lampla had founded the
Suzie Lampluck Trust in December of 1986, 5 months after the disappearance. While
the investigation was still active and the family was still in any conventional sense waiting. Diana had not waited for
certainty. She had looked at what had happened to her daughter and identified with extraordinary clarity the specific
gap in the world’s protections that had left Suzie exposed. And beneath the practical gaps she had identified the
legal vacuum, a world in which a man could follow. A woman study her movements appear repeatedly in her life,
send her anonymous gifts, and none of it was actionable. None of it was illegal. In 1986, stalking did not exist as a
crime in England and Wales. It barely existed as a concept. Susie had been
afraid in the days before she disappeared. She had told relatives that she had a new friend from the Bristol
area and that something about him was beginning to frighten her. She had not elaborated beyond that. She may not have
had the words. She may not have felt that naming a vague fear would be taken seriously. In 1986, it almost certainly
would not have been. Susie was declared legally deceased on the 27th of July 1993.
exactly 7 years from the date she was last seen at her parents’ request. The declaration was a legal formality. It
changed her official status. It changed nothing about the grief or the questions. Diana made a brief statement
to the press. Then she continued the work she had already been doing for 7 years. Through the late 1990s, police
continued their systematic testing of unidentified remains. 800 of them over
the years matched against Suz’s description. tested and eliminated one by one. Each negative result was in its
quiet way its own ending of a particular kind of hope. The hope that at least the
question of where she was might be answered, even if the answer was one the family dreaded. Then in 1999, an
internal Metropolitan Police report was finalized. It was a document that examined the original investigation with
uncomfortable honesty. The wrong photograph. The missing person classification that had prevented early
scrutiny of known offenders. The dismissed jogger. The paper card system
that had made pattern recognition effectively impossible. 13 years of accumulated procedural errors documented
plainly. A new reinvestigation team was assembled and given a specific directive
to determine whether John Cannon could be eliminated as a suspect or whether the evidence against him could be built
into something sufficient. Two developments in the year 2000 reshaped the case in ways that the original
investigation had been structurally prevented from achieving. The first was a computer. The reinvestigation team
began transferring all 26,000 index cards into a digital database, a task
that was in itself a form of archaeology. As the information was entered, and the system was able to
cross reference it, something appeared that had been entirely invisible in the paper files. Multiple estate agents in
the Fulham area had been visited in the weeks around the time of Suz’s disappearance by a man calling himself
Mr. Kipper. Not one agency, several. A man moving methodically through the
local property market, identifying offices, identifying the women who worked in them, learning their routines,
positioning himself within their professional lives as a potential client. Investigators who had studied
John Canon’s behavioral history, recognized the methodology without hesitation. In the late 1970s, during
the deteriorating final years of his first marriage, a series of attacks had taken place in the West Midlands. Women
assaulted in properties listed for sale by estate agents. The offender never identified. The crimes attributed
informally to someone the press had called the house for sale rapist. 20
women over several years. No arrest. The attacks had stopped in 1980 when Canon
entered a new relationship. The behavioral pattern estate agents empty properties, lone professional women,
patient and methodical predatory targeting had been running through his history for nearly a decade before Susie
walked out to her appointment. The second development was a BBC Crime Watch broadcast. The reinvestigation team
worked with the program on a careful reconstruction of the events of July 28th, 1986. For the first time in any
major public communication about the case, the photographs used showed Susie as she had actually appeared that day
with blonde hair. The reconstruction aired. The phones began to ring in a way
they had not rung before. A man came forward who said he had seen someone matching Canon’s description, standing
outside the window of the Sturgeis office on the morning Susie disappeared, looking in at the woman seated near the
glass. He had noticed because the man had stood there for long enough that it seemed purposeful rather than
incidental. Other witnesses shown Canon’s 1987 dating agency video recorded when he joined a Bristol agency
under the false name John Peterson, presenting himself on camera as a successful, immaculately dressed
businessman identified him as a man they had seen in Fulham that day. And a jogger received a phone call from
investigators. The man who had watched a blonde woman pressing the horn of a left-hand drive BMW on Stevenage Road 14
years earlier was told for the first time that his account had been correct, that the woman he had described was
exactly who the investigation had been looking for all along. The reinvestigation also confirmed something
that gave the pattern a new and disturbing dimension. Cannon had appeared uninvited at a house for sale
on Shorald’s Road, the same street as number 37, in the days before Suz’s disappearance. He had behaved strangely,
lingering without apparent purpose until the female occupant’s husband appeared unexpectedly, and Canon left abruptly,
and there was the matter of what had happened at the Prince of Wales pub in Putney. On the evening of July 25th, the
evening Canon was released from prison. The evening Susie had also visited the pub. During that visit, the contents of
Suz’s handbag had gone missing. After she left, the landlord found them and telephoned her to arrange collection.
She arranged to come by at 6:00 in the evening on Monday the 28th, the day she disappeared. Investigators believed the
bag had been deliberately interfered with to obtain her address and the details of her routine. It was in
retrospect the behavior of someone in the process of gathering information for a purpose already decided. Cannon was
arrested in December of 2000 and interviewed at Hammersmith Police Station over 5 days.
Portions of the interview footage were later leaked and remain publicly viewable. In it, Canon says with the
casual confidence of a man who has briefly miscalculated what should and should not be said, that there are one
or two things I haven’t been caught for. He provides no alibi for his movements between the 25th and 28th of July, 1986.
He says he cannot remember where he was. His memory on every other detail of the same period investigators observed was
precise. He was arrested again in September of 2001 and again provided
nothing that eliminated him. In 2007, a criminologist corresponding with Canon
from prison passed information to investigators that they had not previously held that Canon had access in
the summer of 1986 to a red Ford Sierra A second vehicle that had never been
part of the route. Investigation. Police searched for the car. They found
it in a North London scrapyard. Forensic analysis placed both Susie Lamplug and
John Cannon inside that vehicle. The Crown Prosecution Service reviewed the findings. Their conclusion was legally
precise in a way that was to everyone involved in the investigation almost unbearable. Both individuals had been in
the car. The evidence could not prove they had been there simultaneously.
Without that proof, a prosecution could not proceed. Canon, who had previously spoken freely about his use of the Ford
Sierra, changed his account completely and denied ever having driven it. The man who had lent him the car confirmed
that Canon had had full access to it and could have used it on the 28th of July.
The CPS did not change its position. In November of 2002, the Metropolitan
Police held a press conference and took the unusual step of naming John Cannon publicly as the prime and only suspect
in the disappearance and presumed murder of Susie Lamplo. Every other possible suspect had been investigated and
eliminated. The reinvestigation team had built what it believed was a case sufficient for prosecution. The Crown
Prosecution Service had disagreed. And so, investigators stood before cameras and said plainly what the evidence had
persuaded them was true. Jim Dicki, the senior investigating officer who had led the reinvestigation from 2000 through
2006, put his understanding on record in terms that left nothing ambiguous. He
believed Canon had been watching Susie for weeks before the appointment, that he had approached her, presented himself
as a client or a new acquaintance, and worked his way into her professional orbit before she understood who she was
dealing with, that she had been afraid, as her relatives confirmed, and that by the time the fear had taken clear shape,
she was already in a situation she could not easily step out of. “I think that Susie got into a row with Canon on the
day,” Dicki said. He abducted her from the car or made her get into the vehicle he had at the time. There then ensued
probably quite a heated row where he basically drove off abducting her. Where he went from there is a matter of
conjecture. He added that he was as certain as was possible without a formal judicial process that Canon was
responsible for her disappearance and death. That is as close to a verdict as this case ever reached. It is worth
sitting with that sentence. Not a verdict in a courtroom with evidence tested and a jury deliberating and a
judge delivering sentence, but a senior police officer standing in front of cameras and saying with as much
certainty as his position allowed him to express that he knew what had happened and could not prove it in the place
where proof mattered most. The searches for Suz’s remains became over the years
their own long and unresolved chapter within a story that was already long and unresolved. Police dug at a brick works
near Norton barracks in December of 2000, acting on the original tip from Gilly Page. Nothing. A Somerset
Riverbank associated with Canon was searched in 2001. Nothing. Investigators
considered whether the false number plate SLP 386S might function as an ordinance survey
grid reference, which would have placed a location near Dead Woman’s Ditch in the Quant Hills. They searched that
area. Nothing. In 2010, a field off the B4084 between Persure and Drake’s
Brotten was worked through systematically. In October of 2018, police arrived at the Sutton Coldfield
House where Cananan’s mother had lived, dismantled the garage, removed the concrete floor, and searched the garden.
In November, they announced no evidence had been found. Archaeologists assisted
with a land search in Persure in July of 2019. Nothing. In August of 2019, a new
account reached investigators. A witness who said they had seen a man resembling Canon pushing a suitcase into the Grand
Union Canal on the afternoon of July 28th, 1986.
That section of canal had been searched in 2014 for an unrelated inquiry.
Investigators searched it again. Nothing. From prison, Canon held his silence with a consistency that those
who had studied him recognized as entirely characteristic. He told a solicitor at one point that he might
reveal the location of Suz’s remains when his mother passed away. She did. He
said nothing. His brother gave a public statement describing what had happened when their sister went directly to Canon
and asked him to give the family this one thing. He had refused. His brother
described him without apparent hesitation as a man without a modicum of regret, conscience, or compassion. A
power freak who would take his secrets to his grave because holding them was the last form of control available to a
man who would never otherwise be free. Criminologist Christopher Berede, who had exchanged hundreds of letters with
Canon, agreed. The location of the body was not something that could be bargained or reasoned out of him. There
was no guilt pressing for release. There was only the calculation of a man who had decided what he would and would not
give and who found a particular satisfaction in the keeping. Canon’s parole bid was considered and denied in
2023. On the 6th of November 2024, he passed away in full Sutton prison, aged
70, having spent 35 of those years incarcerated. He left behind no
confession, no location, no final accounting of any kind. Our community knows what it means when the law says we
know but we cannot prove. It is one of the most difficult spaces in justice.
The gap between moral certainty and legal standard between what investigators understand and what a
courtroom can hear and test and rule upon. The Lamplug family spent nearly four decades in that gap. It is not the
kind of space that has a comfortable name, and it deserves to be described honestly rather than softened into
something easier to absorb. What Paul and Diana Lampllo did with those decades is a story that runs parallel to the
investigation and in some ways outlasts it in significance. Diana founded the
Susie Lamplug Trust in December of 1986, 5 months after Susie vanished while the
case was still active. She had looked at what had happened and identified with the precision that sometimes arrives
through grief exactly what needed to change. She began with loan worker safety, the protocols for professionals
who meet clients alone, the check-in systems, the client verification procedures that now govern real estate,
health care, and social work across the United Kingdom. She moved from there to the legal structure that surrounded all
of it. The trust’s advocacy through the 1990s contributed directly to the Protection from Harassment Act of 1997,
the first British legislation to create criminal offenses for stalking and harassment. For the first time, a woman
who was being followed watched and targeted in the specific and methodical way that Susie had been targeted in the
weeks before her disappearance, could go to the police and point to a law, could report what was happening, and be told
that it had a name, that it was illegal, and that the person doing it could be stopped. In 1986, none of that existed.
By 1997, it did. In 2012, stronger stalking provisions were added,
providing prosecutors with more specific tools for the most serious cases. The
same year, the trust launched the National Stalking Helpline, the only dedicated stalking support line in the
United Kingdom, which has since supported tens of thousands of people who needed to be told that what was
happening to them was real, that their fear was valid, and that help existed.
In 1992, Diana received an OBBE for the trust’s work. In that same year, her
younger daughter, Elizabeth, survived an attempted abduction by a man named Anthony Burgu, who was subsequently
convicted. The family had lost one daughter to violence and nearly lost a second and Diana continued working. Paul
received his OBBE in 2005. Diana passed away in August of 2011 at
75 years old. Paul passed away in June of 2018 at 87. Neither of them ever
learned where Suzie was. Neither of them received the specific closure that a trial might have provided. What they
received instead was the knowledge that the work they had built in her name had changed. The legal landscape of the
country had given voice to a category of harm that the law had not previously recognized and had quietly across. 35
years of operation made a difference to lives that would never be publicly counted or tallied. That is not justice.
But it is not nothing. And in the particular economy of grief, where nothing can restore what was taken and
no verdict can fully account for what was lost, it may be the most significant thing that was produced by what happened
on Shorald’s road. The disappearance of Susie Lampplug remains in the formal records of the Metropolitan Police, an
unsolved homicide. No one has ever stood in a dock and been held accountable for what happened to her. Her remains have
not been found. The prime suspect passed away in November of 2024 without a word
of confession, and with him went the last possibility of any kind of formal reckoning. But a story does not need a
verdict to have things to teach, and this one has lessons that are, if anything, more useful for not being
abstract. Predators do not announce themselves. They work within the ordinary rhythms of a place in the wine
bars and the estate agencies and the offices with windows facing the street. They are often by external measures
charming. They send roses. They present themselves as the kind of person you would want to meet. They appear at the
right places with the consistency that in retrospect can be recognized as deliberate. But that in the moment feels
like coincidence. The behaviors that preceded what happened to Suzie. The watching, the appearing. The handbag
interfered with the anonymous flowers the property viewed on her street. The woman telling her relatives she was
growing quietly afraid were not small things. They were a pattern. And in
1986, there was no structure for responding to a pattern like that. Today, there is. And it exists in large
measure because of what Diana and Paul Lamplug decided to do with the worst years of their lives. For those who work
alone or have people in their lives who do, lone worker check-in systems exist
for a reason. And the habit of telling someone where you are going and when to expect a message confirming you are
safely away is a small investment with a return that cannot be calculated in.
Advance client verification before a solo professional meeting is now standard in many industries and should
be advocated for in anywhere it is not. and instinct. The quiet, difficult to
name sense that something is wrong before there is specific evidence that it is, is worth paying attention to and
worth naming aloud, even when naming it feels excessive. The National Stalking Helpline in the United Kingdom is free,
confidential, and available to anyone concerned about their own situation or someone else’s. It exists because a
family refused to allow the silence of one man to be the final word on what happened to their daughter. We began
this story on an ordinary Monday morning. A young woman in a blazer, a diary entry, a door swinging shut behind
her on a warm July day. We ended here in the present with everything that was built in the decades that followed.
Susie Lamplug never came home. The man who almost certainly took her spent 35
years in a prison cell and chose silence to the very end because withholding was the last control available to him and
control had always been the core of who he was. But silence only protects those who depend on it. And truth shapes the
world even when it cannot speak in a courtroom in laws passed and helplines answered in workers who come home safely
because their employers have a lone working policy. in the quiet ongoing presence of a foundation that carries
her name into a future she never reached. If this story has stayed with you, carry the lesson forward. Notice
the things that feel wrong. Say them aloud to someone who can hear them. Because the world that was built in
Susie Lamplug’s name is one that sees the danger more clearly than the world she left. And every life made safer
within it is the only answer this story was ever given the chance to offer.