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Forensic Tales discusses topics that some listeners may find disturbing. The contents of this episode may not be suitable for everyone. Listener discretion is advised. It's been almost four decades since real estate agent Susie Lamplew left her office to meet with a potential buyer named Mr. Kipper and was never seen again. The 25-year-old simply vanished on July 28, 1986, and her body has never been found, leaving many unanswered questions.
Is it too late for even forensic science to try and solve? This is Forensic Tales, episode number 224, The Disappearance of Susie Lamplew. ♪
Welcome to Forensic Tales. I'm your host, Courtney Fretwell-Ariola.
Forensic Tales is a weekly true crime podcast covering real, spine-tingling stories with a forensic science twist. Some cases have been solved with forensic science, while others have turned cold. Every remarkable story sends us a chilling reminder that not all stories have happy endings. As a one-woman show, your support helps me find new compelling cases and
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In July 1986, 25-year-old Susie Lamplew worked as a real estate agent for Sturgis & Sons, a firm in London, England. It seemed like the perfect job for a smart young woman like Susie. That's because in the summer of 1986, London's housing market was booming, with house prices rising by almost 20%. And by all accounts, Susie was considered an excellent and reliable employee of the agency.
and was an up-and-coming star in real estate. She even wrote in her diary about how happy she was when the agency hired her, saying, quote, they hired me on the spot. But all of that was about to suddenly change, and Susie's story would soon haunt the UK for decades to come. Around 12.40 p.m. on July 28, 1986, Susie left the office at 654 Fulham Road in London.
taking her house and car keys, a purse with 15 pounds, and credit cards. The plan was to meet up with a potential buyer and show him a house in West London. The client called himself Mr. Kipper. About 10 minutes after leaving the office, Susie was seen waiting outside the empty property at 37 Sheralds Road, which had only been on the market for about a week.
The house was in a good upscale neighborhood, and Susie knew it wouldn't be on the market very long with the market doing so well. So she wasn't surprised when she got a request to see the house so quickly. The showing between Susie and this Mr. Kipper guy was supposed to happen at 1 p.m. Then after Susie was done at the property, she was going to head back to the office. It was supposed to be just another day in the life of a real estate agent.
Most property showings took about an hour, 90 minutes tops. So when Susie hadn't returned to the office by 3.30 p.m. that afternoon, her co-workers started to worry about her. There was no reason for it to take so long, and the property was only a few-minute drive away. By 4.30, a few of the co-workers decided to drive to Sherald's Road, where the house was, to see if she was still there. But when they got there, no one was there.
If Susie already met up with the client at the house, she would have been back at the office by now. But she wasn't, so that's when they drove back to the office and reported her missing to the police by 645. When the call first came in about the missing 25-year-old real estate agent, the police took it seriously.
There was no reason to suspect someone as reliable and responsible as Susie would just go off on her own somewhere without telling anyone. It just wasn't something she would do. She never skipped out after a meeting with a potential buyer in all the time she'd ever worked for the company. Plus, there was always a concern about a female real estate agent meeting up with a potential buyer by themselves.
Of course, being a real estate agent in itself isn't considered a dangerous job, but still, you can't ignore the fact that you're meeting up with perfect strangers. Anything could happen at one of these showings. So almost instantly, the police started looking for her and tried to figure out where she could have gone. Inside Susie's notebook at the office, they found what they assumed to be the last note she made before she left the office.
and it provided them with their first big clue in the case. The note read, 1245 Mr. Kipper, 37 Sheralds, O slash S, with the O slash S referring to the real estate term of outside of the property. But that was it. There was no phone number for this so-called Mr. Kipper, and no first name to go along with it. He was simply Mr. Kipper.
Within just a few hours, the police learned that several people had seen Susie that afternoon. At least three people saw her standing outside the property she was supposed to be showing between 1245 and 1. One of them was a man who said he was walking home when he noticed a woman standing in front of the building and it looked like she was waiting for someone.
Then about 10 minutes later, the owner of the house next door said he heard someone leaving number 37 and saw Susie and some man standing together outside. He said it looked like they were admiring the building from the outside, just like you would expect to see a real estate agent standing there with a potential buyer. But the sightings of Susie didn't end there. What the neighbor saw was supported by another man who was walking down the street at the exact same time.
Like the neighbor, he told the police he saw Susie standing there with another guy. But this witness was able to provide a little more detail. According to him, the man was holding a bottle of champagne with a ribbon tied around the top of it. It was like something you would do if you just decided to buy a home, and the bottle of champagne was a housewarming gift. Susie and the unknown man were also seen by several witnesses getting into a car together.
One of the neighbors reported that they saw the two were arguing when they got into the car, but couldn't say for sure. It just looked like they were upset at one another. Most of the witnesses described the man as white, between 25 and 30 years old. He had a dark complexion and wore his hair slicked back. He was dressed head to toe in a dark gray suit and overall just appeared to be a well-dressed and well-kept man.
He looked exactly like someone who could afford a home in that part of West London. So there was no reason to suspect that this guy was anyone but this Mr. Kipper guy. The tips about Susie getting into a car with this man seemed weird to both the police and her family. Why would she get into a car with one of her clients? The plan was to show the property and then head back to the office for the rest of the afternoon.
She didn't mention anything about going anywhere after that with this Mr. Kipper guy. And why would they look like they're fighting? Plus, who was this guy? About three hours after Susie was reported missing, her white Ford Fiesta car was found about one mile away from the house around 10 p.m. Witnesses called the tip into the police after they spotted the car parked almost haphazardly.
between two parking spots in a garage right across the street. It almost looked like whoever parked it did it so quickly that they could just dump it and get away. Now when the police got to the car, there was practically nothing there. There weren't any signs that someone had broken into it. The driver's side door was left unlocked and her purse was left inside the glove compartment, but her keys were missing.
But what stood out the most was how the driver's seat was positioned. According to the police, the driver's seat had been pushed so far back that only someone really tall could have driven it. Someone who had to be much taller than Susie because otherwise she wouldn't have been able to reach the pedals or the steering wheel. So it was pretty obvious based on the seat's position that someone other than Susie was the last person to have driven her car.
The discovery of Susie's abandoned car only heightened the intensity for the search for her. By that point, she'd been missing for hours. Dozens of witnesses saw her getting into a car with an unknown man. Her car was found abandoned with her purse still inside but her keys missing. Even the keys to the property that she was supposed to show that afternoon were missing. And it was obvious someone had driven and abandoned it there.
None of this made it seem like Susie just simply wandered off somewhere alone without telling anyone. By the following day, July 29th, Susie was still missing. Even Scotland Yard commented on the case, saying, quote,
After she was last seen showing that property to someone named Mr. Kipper, 25-year-old Susie Lamplew was never seen alive again. One of the first people to be considered as a possible suspect was Susie's boyfriend, a 27-year-old who worked as a stockbroker. Just like in any other missing person case, the boyfriend or the people closest to the victim are always questioned first.
But the boyfriend had an airtight alibi, and the police couldn't find anything suggesting he had anything to do with it. Next was Susie's male roommate. He was also questioned by the police and considered a possible suspect early on, but was eventually ruled out. The police searched Susie and her roommate's entire two-bedroom apartment up and down, looking for any clues, but nothing turned up.
Besides Susie's white Ford Fiesta, witnesses recalled seeing another car near the property that she was showing. According to at least two witnesses, a black left-handed BMW was also seen in the area. One witness said he remembered seeing it because a lot of the cars on the road had been double parked, which made it difficult for him to drive down the street. And one of those cars was the black BMW.
This was also supported by another witness who had told the police that he had also seen a dark-colored, left-handed BMW parked right outside the property at the same time that Susie was there. So this all suggested that maybe Mr. Kipper drove a dark-colored or black BMW, and that was his car parked out in front of the house.
Early on, one of the biggest tips was from a witness who said he was jogging when he saw a car speeding down Stephen Age Road the day Susie disappeared. This was the same road where her car was eventually found abandoned later that night. He said he saw the speeding car just as he jogged past Bishop's Park. Like the other witnesses, he described the car as being a dark-colored, maybe black BMW. But it wasn't just that.
He also remembered that after the car suddenly stopped in front of him, he saw a woman matching Susie's appearance struggling with a man inside the car. She was even honking the car's horn like she was trying to get someone's attention. This is exactly what the witness said about what he saw. Quote,
I came out of the park to be met by a BMW which tore across the road and came to a halt with somebody with their hand on the hooter, pressing it for a very long time. As I stood there, I saw a blonde young lady. She looked as though she was laughing, or she could have been screaming. What worried me was how could she drive with all of that going on?
but it never occurred to me that it was a left-hand drive car, end quote. But unfortunately, the police entirely brushed off this tip and never did anything with it. That's because this particular witness described the woman as having blonde hair, and the police mistakenly thought that Susie had brown hair. They didn't know that just one week before she went missing, she colored her hair blonde.
And by the time they realized this very important mistake, it was too late and nothing was done with the tip. It also didn't help that the initial investigation was done without computers like we have today. So all the London police had at the time was an old fashioned card index system in which all of the leads were filed on approximately 26,000 index cards.
And because Susie was still considered a quote-unquote missing person, known criminals in the area weren't considered suspects. Another strange tip came from Susie's manager at the real estate agency. According to her manager, Susie received a dozen red roses just one week before disappearing. The roses showed up at the office and no one knew where they came from or who sent them.
So did the roses have anything to do with her disappearance, or was it just some strange coincidence? For the next six months, the London police poured over every tip and continued to search for her. And it was around that time that they thought they received their most promising tip yet. A man had called the police, saying that he discovered an abandoned dark-colored BMW that had been parked on his street for weeks.
And the car was supposedly registered to a Belgian man who sometimes went by the nickname Mr. Kipper. This couldn't be any type of coincidence. So at first, this tip was huge. The car matched the description of all the other witnesses, same color, same brand, same everything. And the registered owner apparently had a nickname, Mr. Kipper, the same name as the man that Susie was meeting up with that day.
What are the odds of that? Well, as it turned out, once the police tracked down the owner in Belgium, they discovered he had a solid alibi on the day that Susie disappeared. His BMW had been in a garage in Belgium that day, so it was almost impossible for him to have anything to do with it. So yes, as strange as it sounds, it was just some coincidence and had nothing to do with Susie's disappearance.
Susie's disappearance became one of the UK's most troubling crimes. It just didn't make any sense. How could a young real estate agent just vanish off the face of the earth with practically zero clues? And who was this Mr. Kipper guy she allegedly met up with that day? During the first 12 months of the investigation, Susie's parents received hundreds, if not thousands, of letters of support.
People who didn't even know Susie wrote in to express their concerns and sympathy. The media throughout London was also very interested in the case. It was a story that just naturally attracted front page news. But no matter how much attention the case caught, the police never got any closer to figuring out what happened.
Throughout the search, the police tested the DNA of over 800 unidentified bodies and skeletal remains that matched her description, but none of them were Susie. And by 1994, eight years after she disappeared, she was officially declared dead. Even without a body, suspect, or explanation for what happened to her or Mr. Kipper that day, the police had exhausted their search.
It was no longer a missing person case, but now considered a homicide. Even worse, a cold case homicide. There have always been a lot of theories over the years about who this Mr. Kipper person could be. If we could just figure out who Kipper is, then we would probably know what happened to Susie. Some people thought that if you added DNA to the word Kipper, you got kidnapper.
Others thought the name Kipper might have had something to do with the infamous Jack the Ripper because of how it rhymes. But all just creative theories. One of Susie's former co-workers, Steve Wright, was once investigated by the police as having something to do with it. Wright and Susie had worked together on the ocean liner Queen Elizabeth II back in 1982.
She worked as a beautician, and he worked as a steward. In February 2008, he was arrested and convicted of murdering five prostitutes in 2006, and he became known as the Suffolk Strangler. Before this arrest, his only criminal record was theft, which is how his DNA was identified in connection to the five murders. It was said that during that time, he had a really bad gambling addiction and was severely depressed.
By 2008, he had attempted suicide at least twice, according to his brother. Now, when it came to Susie's case, Steve Wright's ex-wife told the media that her ex-husband had shore leave at the time of the disappearance, so he wasn't on the ship and he wouldn't have an alibi. Even more than that, she told the media that she was sure that Wright had used the word kipper as slang for face.
But the police haven't really ever considered this tip and they don't think that Steve Wright had anything to do with it. Even in 2021, when he was charged with yet another murder of a young woman from 1999, Wright has never been arrested in connection to Susie's case. But without question, the biggest suspect considered over the years has been convicted murderer and rapist John Cannon.
Between 1989 and 1990, John Cannon was repeatedly questioned and interviewed by the police about Susie's disappearance. And in December 2000, he was even arrested for it, but was never formally charged with anything. Here's why he popped up on the police's radar. Six years before Susie's murder, John Cannon was arrested for beating and raping his former girlfriend after she threatened to break up with him.
He was also accused and sent to prison for raping another woman at knife point a year later in 1981. But in the months leading up to Susie's disappearance, Cannon was on day release from prison and living in a prison hostel not far from the property that Susie was showing that day. According to the police, in the weeks before Susie's disappearance,
Cannon told his fellow inmates that he would often go to wine bars in the Fulham area and had met a woman he called Susu. One wine bar he frequently visited was right across the street from Susie's real estate office. He was also known to send roses to women he was interested in as a ploy to get them to go out with him.
A strange coincidence, considering, according to her manager, Susie received a mysterious delivery of one dozen red roses about one week before she went missing. In October 1987, 15 months after Susie's disappearance, John Cannon abducted and murdered 29-year-old Shirley Banks from Bristol, a city in southwest England.
Cannon allegedly held Shirley Banks hostage in his apartment for 18 hours before killing her and dumping her body in a place known as Dead Woman's Ditch. Inside his dark-colored BMW, the police found an imitation gun, handcuffs, and the tack disc for Shirley Banks' car. In an even stranger twist, not long after Cannon was arrested for killing Shirley Banks,
Her car was found inside his garage with a new fake license plate that read SLP 386S. Now here's where the suspicion about John Cannon only got worse. Many people wondered if the fake license plate SLP 386S had something to do with Susie. And that's why Cannon chose that particular plate.
Here's how the theory goes. The letters SLP might actually stand for Susie Lamplew, and the numbers 86 resemble the year that she disappeared, 1986. As soon as this connection between Susie and John Cannon was made, the police went to interview him, but he denied having anything to do with it and said the license plate was just a random thing he came up with.
It didn't have any connection to Susie's name or the year she went missing. At one point, he even claimed he bought the car from a, quote, Bristol businessman who was responsible for murdering Shirley Banks, Susie, and another girl. Now, Cannon was ultimately sentenced to life in prison for Shirley Banks' murder and for several other rapes, abductions, and attempted abductions in the area.
However, despite being questioned many times over the years about Susie's case, he was never charged with anything. A fresh investigation into Susie's case was launched in the early 2000s, and their biggest task was to officially rule John Cannon in or out. Even years later, he remained at the top of the suspect list. So, maybe a new set of eyes on the case could help.
The new investigation uncovered a lot, but the one thing it didn't do was answer any definitive questions about John Cannon. Instead, it only seemed to raise the level of suspicion. As part of the new investigation, the police were able to computerize all the paper tips and leads they received back in 1986.
And this process led to the discovery that Susie wasn't the only real estate agent in the area meeting up with a Mr. Kipper. According to the new computerized leads, several other real estate agents had reported to the police that a man who called himself Mr. Kipper asked to meet and see different properties up for sale.
So the police wondered if John Cannon may have used the alias Mr. Kipper to meet up with these female agents and decide which one of them he wanted to become his next victim. That's not everything. Between the late 1970s into the early 1980s, there was a series of rapes that happened in and around the area where Cannon was living at the time with his then wife, June Vail.
According to police reports from back then, the unidentified rapist specifically targeted homes on the market for sale by real estate agents and became known as the house for sale rapist. During this time, at least 20 women were assaulted. So maybe this really was John Cannon's M.O. Something else that was uncovered during this new investigation was a strange phone call on the day that Susie disappeared.
Three days before she went missing, and the same exact day that John Cannon was released from the open prison nearby, Susie went to the Prince of Wales pub, a pub that Cannon was also known to go to and pick up women. But while at the pub, she lost some of the items from inside her purse, including her wallet. Well, the next day, the pub manager called Susie and said that they found her wallet,
and they agreed that Susie would come by the pub on Monday, July 28th, around 6 o'clock to pick it up. This was the same day that she went missing. But a few hours before she went missing, a woman who called herself Sarah called the pub saying that she had a message for Susie and even left a callback number.
After that, another man called the pub saying that he was a police officer and wanted to know if Susie's checkbook was there. But there were two problems here. The police later found out that the man wasn't actually a cop and they don't know who this Sarah lady was either. Now here's what the police think about these two strange phone calls.
Number one, they think the first phone call, the one who said her name was Sarah, might have actually been Susie trying to call for help. Maybe she used the alias Sarah because she had already been kidnapped and was just trying to get some help. And then number two, the guy who said he was a policeman looking for Susie's checkbook. Well, the police now suspect that person might have been John Cannon.
And here's why the police now think that. When John Cannon abducted and killed Shirley Banks, she placed a phone call under duress to her job, saying that she was basically sick and she wasn't going to be in the office that day. The police believed she placed that phone call because Cannon had somehow convinced her that if she did, he would eventually let her go unharmed.
But of course, that didn't happen. And that was the last phone call that Shirley Banks made before she was found murdered. So tying all of this back to Susie, the police now suspect Cannon might have been responsible for Susie's wallet going missing at the pub that night, like he had already been stalking her. Then the phone call from this Sarah lady the day that Susie did go missing and the day she was supposed to pick up her wallet
was just Cannon making her do it. But again, all of these are just theories. After this new investigation wrapped up, John Cannon was arrested for Susie's presumed murder in 2002. That's not how this story ends. Cannon adamantly denied any involvement in Susie's kidnapping and said that he had no idea what happened to her.
He might have shared a similar MO with the other rape and kidnapping cases, but he denied responsibility. The police even went to Cannon's mother's house and dug up part of her backyard looking for any remains linked to Susie, but they didn't find anything. And without any sufficient forensic evidence or even a body, all the charges were dropped against John Cannon in connection to Susie.
So now let's talk about where the case stands today. Well, the first thing, Susie's remains have yet to be found. And of course, the exact circumstances surrounding her disappearance are still unknown. Although she's officially been declared dead, her family and the police are still seeking answers. Number two, the police still have no idea who this Mr. Kipper guy was.
And it's unclear whether John Cannon really is this guy or not. Finally, number three, will we ever know what happened to Susie? And can forensic science help? Well, according to the police, the answer might be yes. Several news articles have reported that an unknown fingerprint was found inside Susie's abandoned car.
The print was located on the car's rearview window and didn't match Susie. So the police wonder if the print could have been left behind by Mr. Kipper or her presumed kidnapper. And now, technology may be able to extract a profile after failing to do so over two decades ago. Although no results on the fingerprints have been made public yet, this seems to be our biggest hope in figuring out what happened to Susie.
and if they haven't been tested yet using new forensic technology, we will just have to wait and see. Or, at least until her remains can be found. But this fingerprint may be the key to solving everything. As of today, Susie's case remains unsolved. We don't know what happened to her, and we need to find out who that Mr. Kipper guy was.
We also need to find out how little or how much John Cannon might have been involved. Since 1986, both of Susie's parents have passed away, not knowing what happened to their daughter. And the man that many people believe is responsible is still in prison on unrelated criminal charges. It's unclear whether he will ever be officially charged in Susie's case or if her remains will ever be found.
And until that fingerprint can be tested for DNA, we might never know what happened to Susie Lamplew. To share your thoughts on the story, be sure to follow the show on Instagram and Facebook. To find out what I think about the case, sign up to become a patron at patreon.com slash forensic tales. After each episode, I release a bonus episode where I share my personal thoughts and opinions.
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