1. This Sunday marks the 33rd anniversary of Suzy Lamplugh's disappearance; the beginning of a nightmare for her family & friends. Paul & Diana Lamplugh sadly passed away never knowing what happened to their daughter after she left her estate agency offices on 28th July 1986.
2. People don’t just disappear.
So, in 2016, I began studying the flaws in the police investigations over the past three decades, to understand the repeated failures in why Suzy's body has never been found and why no one has ever been prosecuted for her disappearance and murder
3. I went back to the very start. I've traced dozens and dozens of original witnesses, some of whom police have never tracked down; some as far away as New Zealand and the USA. I’ve travelled thousands of miles to understand what went wrong from the very outset.
4. My goals were (a) locate Suzy's remains so she could finally be laid to rest; (b) locate enough evidence to successfully prosecute Suzy's killer. Following a 3-yr, self-funded investigation, I now know the answers to Suzy’s disappearance & how these have been missed by police
5. The police narrative that Suzy met a client, the infamous 'Mr Kipper', at a house viewing and was abducted by him is completely wrong. My investigation shows Suzy didn’t have the keys to conduct this viewing in the first place, and could not have entered the premises.
6. My investigation has found that the police’s star witness, from whom the now infamous 'Mr Kipper' artist’s impression came, never identified Suzy as being with this man at all. It was police assumption alone. This means the infamous artist’s impression is utterly worthless.
7. Moreover, the police have missed or ignored the anomalies in the timelines leading up to Suzy’s disappearance and in the period afterwards. Analysing these timelines and understanding them in detail has been crucial in cracking the mystery of how and why Suzy went missing.
8. I provided very specific information to the Metropolitan Police over a month ago - a formal written statement & items of evidence. Despite repeated communication with the Special Casework Investigation Team, I see no evidence of action in a prompt and timely manner. Why?
9. Sadly the answer to this is why the case has remained unsolved for so long. The Met Police is a fine organisation. I’m proud to have been part of it during my policing career. But in terms of all the Suzy Lamplugh investigations, there have been repeated mistakes throughout.
10. Despite being told by Treasury Counsel through the CPS that there was insufficient evidence to prosecute a man named John Cannan for Suzy’s murder, the Met still went on to name him very publically at a 2002 press conference as the ‘only suspect’ in Suzy’s disappearance.
11. This unprecedented ‘overcommitment’ may have been well meaning at the time, but it has since spawned an ingrained institutional prejudice against Cannan, whereby there is no longer room for any alternative narrative or alternative suspect in their case.
12. These institutional prejudices aren’t unusual, especially not in larger cases where evidence is ‘cherry picked’ by investigators to suit preferred narratives and anything else is either excluded or ignored.
13. Add ‘trial by tabloid’ to this mix, which we have repeatedly seen in Suzy’s case, and the focus of police investigations narrows, and investigators develop a serious bias problem.
The very specific information I have provided to the police is not about John Cannan.
14.Operation Edzell, the investigation into the 1992 murder of Rachel Nickell, personifies this institutional prejudice in action. The police became completely fixated on Colin Stagg as the sole suspect, spending £3 million in their attempts to obtain enough evidence against him.
15. At Colin Stagg’s 1994 trial for the murder, the judge ordered the jury to acquit him, much to the dismay of the police. The police closed Operation Edzell and put out a statement saying that they were not looking for anyone else in relation to Rachel Nickell’s murder.
16. Despite his acquittal, Stagg lived under a cloud of suspicion for years with the innuendo that he was guilty. The police, after all, were not looking for anyone else. Barry George currently lives under the same cloud, despite his acquittal for Jill Dando’s murder.
17. In 2008, thanks to the assistance of DNA evidence, Robert Napper was convicted of Rachel Nickell’s murder. Colin Stagg was paid £700,000 compensation. Robert Napper had raped and murdered others while the police had been pursuing Colin Stagg for Nickell’s murder.
18. John Cannan has been convicted of other crimes and is rightly serving out his sentence for them. However, despite a clear lack of evidence against him and all the time these accusations are levelled at him, Suzy’s real killer remains at large - and I fear, free to kill again.
19. With John Cannan very publicly named and fingered by both the police and media as the ‘only suspect’ in Suzy’s case, subsequent generations of police investigators now hunt fruitlessly for evidence to prove it, and the mistakes in Operation Edzell are being repeated.
20. Since being castigated by the IPCC in 2010 for Operation Edzell, I perhaps naïvely believed that whatever evidence I found, wherever that pointed, the police would be happy to act upon it, promptly.
21. Alas, I had not imagined the extent of the institutional prejudice against Cannan. The police have closed their minds to any other possibility, which has led to their relentless pursuit of him for three decades.
This prejudice now stands in the way of resolving Suzy's case
22. In the last 10 months alone, the Met Police has wasted hundreds of thousands of pounds on a dig in Sutton Coldfield and in Worcs, in a relentless pursuit of evidence against Cannan. My research suggests that the intelligence underpinning these digs is highly questionable.
23. As the 33rd anniversary of Suzy's disappearance approaches, I implore the Met Police to act on the evidence I provided.
I remain committed to working with the police, but cannot, and will not, be silent about the evidence forever.
Suzy and her family deserve better.
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