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. 

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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........

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