Forty years ago today Suzy Lamplugh, a 25-year-old estate agent, left her office in Fulham. Colleagues believed she was meeting a client named ‘Mr Kipper’. Despite decades of police investigations, her body has never been found. Indeed, according to Mike Barley, a former police officer who spent many years trying to find Suzy’s body, and her killer, all we know for certain now is the same three things we knew on the evening of her disappearance.

I spoke with Mike, who has written a book: Suzy Lamplugh: The Inside Story of Britain’s Most Notorious Missing Person Investigation. He explained to me that the only things we know for sure are that Suzy left her office around 12:40 p.m. on Monday 28 July 1986, her car was found on Stevenage Road at 10:01 p.m., and she has not been seen since. Perhaps this is part of what made the case so capture public attention: Suzy disappeared from a busy, affluent part of London in the middle of a summer’s day, and was never seen again.

Mike and his colleagues did identify a prime suspect – a man named John Cannan who was a serial rapist, serial abductor, and a murderer – but were never quite able to secure enough evidence to prosecute him. This failure clearly haunts Mike, who said to me that it had ‘gnawed away’ at him ‘over the years’. Indeed, when he finally came to retire from the police his ‘first thought was what’s going to happen to Suzy’s case’, and ‘every year, without exception, on the 28 July’, he takes ‘a moment to stop and think about Suzy – she would be 65 now – she should have had a family, probably grandkids, and yet we see this photograph of her, and she’s still 25.’

He thinks things might be different now. ‘Nowadays the police have access to mobile phones, device tracking, the automatic numberplate recognition system, CCTV everywhere, so if the same thing happened today, I’m not saying the police would solve it because people do go missing, but they have more resources to try and solve’ crimes like this.

What I think particularly haunts Mike is how close they came to solving the crime and catching Suzy’s killer.

John Cannan was born in 1954 in Sutton Coldfield. During his life, he committed multiple horrendous crimes against women, and was only punished for some of them. He almost certainly murdered both Suzy Lamplugh and another woman, Sandra Court.

At the age of 14, Cannan sexually assaulted a woman in a phone box. He was only required to be supervised by probation. On New Year’s Eve 1980, Canaan raped his ex-girlfriend, and later told her that he meant to kill her. In February 1981, Cannan robbed a petrol station, threatening the two women who worked there with a knife.

In March of that year, Cannan robbed a knitwear store in Sutton Coldfield. He took the woman working there hostage, along with her 17-month-old son and her 70-year old mother, and then raped the woman in front of the other hostages. In June 1981, having pleaded guilty, Cannan was sentenced to a total of eight years in prison for the crimes. He served five, finishing his sentence at Wormwood Scrubs in London. While there he told other prisoners that he was a ‘Bristol businessman’. In early 1986, Cannan was allowed day-release while in a hostel attached to Wormwood Scrubs, and was fully released on 25 July 1986, just three days before Suzy went missing.

What is proven is that he then abducted and raped a woman in Reading in October 1986, attempted to kidnap Julia Holman in Bristol on 7 October 1987 and then kidnapped Shirley Banks in Bristol the following night. He subsequently raped and murdered her. In a peculiar detail, Cannan kept Shirley’s car, but changed the numberplate from HWL 507N to SLP 386S.

Finally, in April 1989, Cannan was found guilty of all those offences and sentenced to life.

There was also a great deal of evidence tying Cannan to Suzy’s disappearance. Mike was and is certain that Cannan murdered her. In August 1990, once Cannan’s appeals were exhausted, Mike and a colleague interviewed him under caution in HMP Wakefield. Prior to the interview, seeking to build a picture of the man, Mike showed a video dating advert Cannan had made to a psychiatrist. The man told Mike that Cannan was someone who ‘can dispose of a human life with as much emotion as you and I throw away a toffee wrapper’.

Mike told me that on that day he thought about ‘Suzy and what happened to her. That she didn’t deserve this’. When Cannan entered the interview room and sat down, ‘there were no niceties. We didn’t want to give him the chance [to build a personal connection]’. They started the tape and began an interview which ‘went on all day’.

Mike remains haunted by the case that he never truly solved

Mike maintained eye contact throughout. He asked Cannan about the car: ‘Did you choose those letters in particular?’ Cannan said he did.

‘Do you understand the significance of those three letters?’

‘Yes I do. Suzy Lamplugh.’

‘Why did you choose those letters in that particular order?’

‘Let me tell you about that car, that car belonged to a Bristol businessman…’

Based on Cannan’s claims while a prisoner at Wormwood Scrubs, he was convinced that Cannan was talking about himself.

So he asked him ‘Is that man you, John?’

And Cannan said ‘Yes.’ and Mike says that for ‘that briefest moment in time, John Cannan was telling the truth’, but then he ‘physically backed off’ and said ‘No, no, no.’

It wasn’t enough to prosecute. Soon Cannan’s solicitor asked for a break. Afterwards the killer and rapist gave nothing away. John Cannan died in HMP Full Sutton in November 2024.

Mike remains haunted by the case that he never truly solved. To have come so close to proving John Cannan’s guilt, and to have failed at the last, is a very hard thing.

I find myself wondering whether the case would be as high-profile today, or whether it would fade into the weekly litany of horrors. Also, I’m struck by Cannan’s escalation – as with most such sexual offenders, his crimes became progressively more awful. Had he not been released in 1986, after his conviction for raping a woman in front of her mother and child, then Suzy Lamplugh, Sandra Court and Shirley Banks would still be alive. The woman he raped in Reading would have been spared that ordeal, as would Julia Holman have been spared the attempted kidnapping.

This is the real, human cost of the early releases planned for September. Sexual offenders, many of whom are very dangerous and will offend and escalate given the opportunity, are due to be released early. That will mean more victims. The government needs to think very carefully about what it does.