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Hi, everyone. Welcome back to Binged. Now, before we jump into today's episode, I wanted to talk about something real quick. Some of you might know, but the last couple months for me have been
Pretty rough. I have been going through some things mentally and to be blunt, it has been really, really hard. It got to the point where I ended up kind of having to check out of the podcast for a little bit and it was the worst timing because it was right when we were launching Binged.
That being said, I have really focused on my healing and things have been getting a lot better. But I wanted to be open with you guys about this and just thank you for your patience as now I'm trying to start to figure out what binged is because the last two months I haven't really been able to do that.
I was really excited for this solo show and I wanted it to be everything you guys loved. So thank you for sticking around. Thank you for being patient as I figure out just exactly what I want to do with Binged. And I think I've decided that I want to interject my personality just a little bit more. I think that will just feel right.
So if you've kind of see me start to do that, that is why. And I'm just really, really excited for the future. Okay. That being said, let's now get into the episode. So when we think about some of the most dangerous occupations, what usually comes to mind are policemen, firemen, jobs like roofers, construction workers, drivers and loggers and sex workers.
But we often never consider jobs like retail store employees, convenience store workers, hotel desk clerks, and real estate agents.
A woman working alone at night at a motel registration desk is in a vulnerable position, as is a real estate agent meeting up with a strange man to enter a house alone with him. And when I was researching these episodes, I was especially shocked by the number of female real estate agents who met with violent ends while just doing their jobs. I found at least 20 such cases in a relatively short period of time.
We open this week's episode with one of the most widely known cases involving a real estate agent. And our featured case today is the disappearance of Susie Lamplew in London in 1986.
Now, Susie Lamplew was 25 years old and like many independent and self-reliant young women seemed to be a walking self-contradiction. Depending on how they knew her, some saw her as buttoned up and conservative, a woman who always chose her words carefully and with purpose. And others saw her as outspoken, envelope pushing, and occasionally potty mouthed.
Susie was defiantly and authentically herself. She knew how to be assertive, how to be charming, and how to squeeze the most excitement and adventure out of life. In the mid-80s, she worked as a beauty therapist on a cruise ship, often traveling between England, which was her home, and New York.
And although this was exciting, the work was sporadic and the income wasn't reliable. She found herself still living off of her parents and she wasn't okay with this. So she sought more steady work as a beautician at various hotels in London. And when her grandmother passed on and left her a considerable sum of money, Susie was able to finally mortgage an apartment. By her mid-20s, Susie had developed an outgoing lifestyle. She liked to go out, she liked to socialize,
had exceptional taste in fashion, and she began feeling a need to shift careers into something more lucrative. So she became an estate agent. Now, this is what they call real estate agents in England. They simply just call them estate agents. And in 1986, she was making pretty solid money working for the Sturgis Estate Agency, where colleagues regarded her as a mature and conscientious addition to their team.
July 28th, 1986 was an overcast Monday and Susie dropped into the office around 830 a.m. that morning. She parked her car on a nearby side street and spent the first few hours of her workday going over offers and scheduling viewings.
At 1240 in the afternoon, Susie collected her purse and keys, headed out of the office, and drove away in her car for an appointment. Three hours then passed, and Susie remained gone. Her co-workers began to wonder what may have happened to her as it was not like Susie to remain gone for so long without checking back in.
Over the next several hours, her worried colleagues began calling Susie's friends and her family members, including Paul and Diana Lamplew, her parents. But no one had any idea where she was. Susie's coworkers opened her work diary and found that she had an appointment to show a property at 12:45 that afternoon, the afternoon she went missing, which would have been five minutes after she left the office and was last seen.
They went over to that property, which was just a few minutes away from the office, but there was no sign of her there. At this point, Susie's boss, Mark Gurdon, glanced at her work diary again and noticed that she'd been scheduled to attend a viewing at 6 p.m. He reached out to the prospective buyers and he learned that Susie had never showed up for the viewing, which he knew was out of character for Susie. So that's when it became clear something was wrong, very wrong.
And Mark picked up the phone and called police to report Susie missing. Now, police were faced with the uncomfortable task of visiting Susie's panicked parents and interviewing them for details that may help them understand what kind of case, if any, they were looking at.
Neither Susie's mom nor dad could think of anyone who would have wanted to harm Susie or anything in her life, any aspect of her that might shed light on what happened to her. And under no circumstances, they said, would Susie just up and leave. She was a responsible young woman and she was close with her family. So something must have happened to her. The next person that the investigators wish to contact, of course, was Susie's boyfriend, Anthony.
a 27 year old stockbroker named Adam. He'd been mentioned in the missing persons report that Susie's colleagues filed and police were suddenly having a hard time finding him. And if you like me have watched Selling Sunset on Netflix, this just feels like the real estate agent dating the stockbroker. And it's hard not to insert that drama into the picture I'm having for this case, but I'm
Fairly positive that this wasn't what the agency looked like. But in the meantime, while trying to get a hold of Susie's boyfriend, police searched Susie's apartment and found nothing useful. And when they finally caught up with Adam, they took him in for questioning, which ended up lasting well into the night. Adam told detectives that he had spent all afternoon on the day of Susie's disappearance with colleagues and his colleagues ultimately backed him up. So he was immediately eliminated as a suspect.
And so was Susie's male roommate, whose whereabouts throughout the day could also be corroborated by friends and family. But then there was that 12:45 p.m. appointment, the one that Susie recorded in her work diary where she must have been headed before she disappeared. That was the piece of information that would become the most significant clue in her disappearance.
The work diary entry, as you know, was a 12:45 PM appointment with a prospective home buyer who gave the name of Mr. Kipper. Now, Susie was scheduled to show the mysterious Mr. Kipper a three-story terraced property located at 37 Sheralds Road, just half a mile away from the agency. This house was a lead that had only recently come into the agency and it was just a three-minute drive from the office.
And Susie, according to her entry, was supposed to meet Mr. Kipper outside of the property. Now, while police are narrowing this down, they also discover Susie's missing vehicle, her brand new Ford Fiesta that was located later that evening on Stevens Road, which was more than a mile away from the property that she was last supposed to be heading to. So what was her car doing here and who was Mr. Kipper?
Detectives released this information to the media asking for Mr. Kipper to come forward and speak with police about his planned meeting with the missing estate agent. But whoever Mr. Kipper was, he never reached out.
So police began to reach the conclusion that there was actually no Mr. Kipper, that Mr. Kipper was in fact a false name. And perhaps the man who provided it had a twisted sense of humor and some observed at the time that Kipper is spelled like kidnapper with the letters DNA removed.
So in canvassing the area near the house for sale where Susie was last thought to be headed, police connected with three witnesses who actually saw Susie at the property. This is big. This means she made it there. The first was a man who'd been out for a lunchtime stroll. He said he had spotted Susie waiting outside the property at 1250 p.m.
And then the man who lived next door to that property also had seen Susie about 10 minutes later walking out of the house with a man. And then both Susie and the man turned around to take another look at the house before walking back toward the road. It appeared that the two of them then began arguing and that's when the man forced Susie into a car.
That was all this witness saw. But then another witness who happened to be walking past the property at pretty much the same time also saw Susie leaving with a man who was carrying a bottle of champagne with ribbons around it. This man was described as being a white male in his mid to late 20s or early 30s with a dark complexion and dark combed back hair.
The man was also observed arriving at the house in a dark colored BMW. He appeared to be well-dressed, wearing a charcoal suit and looked as though he may have had a broken nose. This is how he's described by eyewitnesses.
So the two eyewitnesses who saw the man Susie was meeting sat down with police and assisted them in creating composite sketches. Then there was another witness who came forward to report that while he was driving on the same road, he saw Susie driving her car recklessly away from the property, fighting with a man who was in her passenger seat. In fact, this eyewitness had to swerve his own car out of the way to miss them.
And then Susie's close friend, Barbara Whitfield, saw Susie later in the afternoon at around 2.45 p.m., driving her car north on that same road. She waved to Susie, but Susie was busy talking to a man who was in her passenger seat.
And yet another witness along Stevens Road, where Susie's Ford Fiesta was eventually discovered, saw a woman resembling Susie with a well-dressed man close to where the car was found. And the car, when it was found, appeared to have been parked chaotically as though the driver was in a hurry. The car was parked half in front of someone's garage with the door open and the handle break off.
Susie's purse was left inside the car, but the car keys as well as the keys to that property that she had shown were missing. And whoever the driver was, it was someone taller than Susie because the seat had been pushed back further than Susie would have adjusted. One witness who talked to police reported having seen a black BMW double parked along the road, which corroborated the neighbor's account of having seen the man Susie was with at the property shown up in the same kind of vehicle.
Another witness reported seeing not just one Ford Fiesta parked along the road that day, but two. A man who was out jogging that afternoon also saw a black BMW speeding south with a man driving and a woman in the passenger seat struggling with him, hanging on the horn for a long time as though she was trying to get the attention of a passerby. At first, the jogging witness thought the woman was laughing, but when he returned to this memory in his mind, he realized, well, maybe she actually was screaming.
And this woman fit the description of Susie. Okay, you guys, let me guess. Your medicine cabinet is crammed with stuff that doesn't work. You still aren't sleeping. You still hurt and you're still stressed out.
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Let's get back into the episode. And one thing all these black BMW eyewitness sightings also had in common was that it was a left-hand drive like the cars in America. Only this was England where most of the cars on the road are right-hand drives. So this definitely stood out to witnesses.
Now, in talking to Susie's coworkers, police found out that just a few days before her disappearance, a bouquet of red roses was delivered to her office by quote, "a secret admirer." Police found this especially interesting considering that the man she'd last been seen with was observed by witnesses to have been holding a bottle of champagne with a ribbon around it. Could Susie's abductor have actually been a secret admirer who flew into a murderous rage when things didn't go in the direction that he'd hoped?
Police wouldn't know because months passed. And I'm sure this is one of the most common lines in true crime stories. Her case began to grow cold. But then in January of 1987, there was a new lead, one that seemed pretty promising. A man came into the police station to report a BMW that had been abandoned on a nearby roadside for months. And the car was registered to a Belgian diamond dealer named David Kipper.
which this Kipper is spelled K-I-P-E-R, which is very similar to Susie Lamplew's mysterious Mr. Kipper. They pulled his records and found that David Kipper was about 30 years old, had dark hair, a dark complexion, and closely resembled the man eyewitnesses said they had last seen with Susie. The BMW was impounded and processed by the forensics team while the detectives tracked down David Kipper and traveled to Belgium to interview him.
However, once they talked to him, they realized that their most promising lead in this cold case was a dead end. David Kipper had an airtight alibi for the day of Susie's disappearance.
Around this time, a new senior detective was assigned to supervise the Susie Lampleux case. That man was Detective Superintendent Martin Hackett. Now, Hackett was looking at the composites in the Lampleux case and began noticing a resemblance to a convicted rapist who, after his release, had re-offended raping a woman at knife point while wearing a mask just three months after Susie's disappearance.
And this man's name was John Cannon, a charming, handsome 33-year-old man whose criminal history dated back to 1968 when he was just 14 years old and sexually assaulted a woman in a telephone booth. In 1980, he assaulted his girlfriend after arriving at the house with a bottle of wine. Again, this is eerie shades here of the man with the champagne bottle that was last seen with Susie.
But after showing up, apparently Cannon began strangling her during sex and threatening to kill her, warning that he'd brought a gun with him. She'd actually managed to fight him off and was taken to the hospital. The next year, Cannon then went on a crime spree. He robbed a gas station with a knife. He robbed a lingerie shop and he raped a woman after tying up her mother and threatening to stab her baby. So this Mr. Cannon's criminal history is not good. He spent five years in prison, five years of an eight-year sentence for these crimes and
and had just been released on July 25th, 1986. This is just three days before Susie's disappearance. And now this new detective can't help but see the resemblance between the eyewitness sketches in Susie's case and Mr. Cannon, who had been released three days before she disappeared.
So throughout the year leading up to his release, he had been held in an open prison, which meant that he could actually leave the grounds on day release. According to his fellow inmates and coworkers around this time, Cannon would boast about how easily he was able to pick up women and
and that he'd been going to wine bars in the area where Susie was last seen. He said also that he met a girl he called an uptown girl named Susu, and some of the bars he named included one that was located right across the street from Susie's office.
And these were also bars that Susie was known to frequent. Inmates also said that Cannon was known to deliver roses to women he liked as a means of wooing them. Remember, Susie had received a bundle of roses delivered to her office by an unknown sender only a few days before she went missing.
Cannon also told people he was looking to buy property in the same area where Susie had her showing that day. So it's very clear that he's a deviant sexual predator of the most dangerous kind.
Now, by the time Cannon had first appeared on the Lamplew investigation's radar, Diane Lamplew accepted that her daughter was likely dead and would never be seen again. And as police are trying to piece all of this together in Susie's investigation, we're going to stop there and actually jump to another disappearance, the disappearance of a woman named Shirley Banks.
It was the night of October 8th, 1987. A 29-year-old newlywed named Shirley Banks left her home to go shopping and never returned. Her husband spent all night looking for her, and when he called her place of work the next morning, he was told she had called in sick just 15 minutes earlier. Now, he was puzzled because she wasn't at home. Her car wasn't even there. And so she had to have been calling from somewhere else.
He had no idea what to make of this, but their relationship had no issues and she'd have had no reason to just leave or stay out all night and not return home. He knew something wasn't right and when she still hadn't come home by mid-afternoon, he contacted the police.
At first, the fact that Shirley had called in sick to work made police think she'd disappeared voluntarily. But this was ruled out after talking to her coworkers and friends. Police quickly realized this was uncharacteristic behavior for Shirley. They began focusing on her husband as a suspect, but he had an alibi and was eliminated. And then there was a report that came in from an incident that occurred the night before Shirley disappeared.
A 30-year-old professional named Julia Holman was approached by a man who attempted to abduct her from a parking lot at gunpoint, but she managed to fight off her attacker and run away. Police believed this may have then been connected to Shirley Banks' disappearance the next day, given the circumstances and where it occurred, in Bristol.
Meanwhile, the search for Shirley Banks was intensive. 150 police officers from five different police forces collectively spent nearly 150,000 man hours on the case. And the disappearance was publicized on television, but no trace of Shirley turned up.
And then two days before Halloween, a man named John Cannon pulled a knife on a dress shop assistant and was stopped only when he was interrupted and chased by two witnesses who happened to be passing by. He ran away and they called police who caught up with him nearby, finding him with a knife and a bloody hand. They located his black BMW nearby and inside they found a rope and a fake gun.
They impounded the car and searched it more thoroughly. That's when they located materials that tied John Cannon to Shirley Banks, our second girl who went missing. The evidence was inside a briefcase in his glove compartment. This must have been a really big glove compartment because I don't know how you fit a briefcase in a glove compartment.
I digress. They find items from Shirley Banks' car in his glove compartment, and her missing car was found inside a garage at his apartment complex.
It had been repainted from its original color, orange, to blue. And Shirley's license plate had been removed and replaced with a phony plate, whose license number was SLP386S. But if you're confused, let me straighten this out for you. At this point, it looks like to police that John Cannon definitely probably killed missing Shirley Banks.
And because his name had just barely started popping up in Susie's case, he becomes an even stronger suspect in her disappearance. Two women who disappeared and he's tied to both of them.
He was immediately arrested and while being questioned, he claimed he bought Shirley's vehicle at an auction. He claimed he'd gotten the car from a businessman in Bristol who was responsible for the murders of Susie Lampleux, Shirley Banks, and another girl. So he tells police he bought Shirley's car from a man who killed Shirley, Susie, and another girl.
Detectives knew that John Cannon himself sometimes pretended to be a successful Bristol businessman. The inmates had told them this. In fact, Cannon presented himself as such in a video that was made for a video dating service, which he signed up for around the time that Shirley Banks disappeared. Now, do you have any ambition for the future, or do you feel that you've achieved your ambition for the future? I've achieved them. Basic, financially, I've achieved them.
I'm just looking now. I'm in a sedimentary period where financially and career-wise I've achieved what I've wanted to achieve. I'm just now looking for what's the next thing to achieve.
So detectives interviewing Cannon asked if quote, the successful Bristol businessman who he bought the car from was in fact himself. They're like, okay, Mr. John, are you actually the successful businessman who killed those three girls? And he's like, yes.
which essentially was a murder confession. But then he quickly retracted his statement and ended the interview in a state of distress. He was then charged with assault for the attack on Julia Holman with charges pending for Shirley Banks disappearance. Julia Holman was the woman who was attacked that led police to John and she's brought in for a police lineup and she immediately identifies John Cannon as the man who attempted to abduct her.
Searching Cannon's property, investigators found a pickup ticket for dry cleaners and learned that he dropped off a raincoat with red stains after Shirley Banks went missing. He had told the shop that the red stains were from red mud due to having sex in a public park. But forensic examination proved these stains to be blood stains, and the blood type and blood enzyme type were consistent with those of missing Shirley Banks.
When police ran fingerprint analysis on items taken from his apartment, there was a fingerprint found on a document from his apartment that matched Shirley Banks' left thumb. So Cannon was then charged with kidnapping and murder, but repeatedly maintained that he didn't know Shirley Banks, didn't know where she was, and that she was never inside his apartment.
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On Easter Sunday, 1988, this is about six months after his arrest, a naked decomposed body was found in a stream near the Downsboro Hill Fort at a location known as the Dead Woman's Ditch. This body was identified as that of Shirley Banks.
After a three-week trial, Cannon was found guilty in both the Shirley Banks murder, the attempted kidnapping of Julia Holman, and the knife point rape in reading from 1986, to which he was connected by DNA. He was sentenced to spend the rest of his life in prison. Now, by this time, John Cannon's potential connection to Susie Lampleux had already been well-known and publicized. Remember how Shirley Banks phoned her workplace the morning after she disappeared to call in sick?
It was believed that Cannon allowed her to make the call and made her think he was going to let her go, but eventually killed her later that day. Here's the thing. Something similar, it turns out, actually happened after Susie's disappearance. A few days before she went missing, Susie had been at a pub called the Prince of Wales, which incidentally was also frequently visited by John Cannon. And while she was there, she lost some items that were in her handbag, including her checkbook and her diary.
The next day, the owner of the pub phoned the number on the diary and got Susie on the phone, and she arranged to stop by and pick up her stuff the following Monday.
But that was the Monday she disappeared, so she never made it in. But then, that same Monday, a few hours after Susie was last seen, the Prince of Wales pub received a phone call from a woman who said her name was Sarah and that she had a message for Susie Lampleux. She provided a phone number and then hung up. A little later, the pub received another phone call, this time from a man claiming he was a policeman, asking if they had Susie Lampleux's diary and checkbook.
It was later determined that this man was not in fact a policeman and that Sarah may have been Susie herself calling under duress at Cannon's direction, similar to Shirley Banks the following year. Unfortunately, the piece of paper on which the pub owner wrote the telephone number that Sarah provided was lost.
Detectives who examined the case files later on believed that Cannon may have been stalking Susie and that he himself may have taken the items from her handbag. But despite all of these compelling circumstantial and speculative factors implicating Cannon, he denied that he had anything to do with Susie Lampleux's disappearance. And without any real evidence linking him to her, the case went cold while Cannon sat behind bars for his other crimes.
He would be interviewed several times over the years following his sentencing, but he never admitted anything. But women who had dated him began coming forward to share their belief that Cannon killed Susie Lampleux. One girlfriend claimed he told her that Susie was buried at Norton Barracks, which he pointed out as they were driving past at one time.
Police eventually wanted to search for Susie's body at this location, but it had been so extensively developed by the time they began organizing the search, they were unable to complete it.
Another girlfriend said that she suspected John as soon as the disappearance hit the press because of the champagne bottle with ribbons on it. It sounded so specifically like John to her. After this, in the late 90s and early 2000s, police weren't giving up hope on finding Susie. They searched additional locations for her body and nothing turned up. In 2002, a forensic team processed one of the cars John Cannon had owned around the time of Susie Lampleux's disappearance.
It was a Ford Fiesta, much like Susie's car. And inside, they found DNA they matched to Susie Lampleux. In the same car, they also found two hairs that were matched by DNA to a murdered woman named Sandra Court, who had been strangled and dumped in May of 1986. But to
But despite all of this evidence, the Crown Prosecution Service felt that it wasn't sufficient enough to file charges. They argued that the DNA only showed that Suzy Lamplugh had been inside of John Cannon's car at some point, but not that he killed her. They couldn't determine exactly when she had been in the car.
the police obviously disagreed with this conclusion and held a press conference that year announcing that john cannon was the killer of susie lamplew they believed canon stalked her possibly even took her on a date saw perhaps multiple properties got into an argument with her on the day she disappeared probably because he wanted sex and she wasn't interested he then abducted and killed her
They also believe that Cannon was responsible for a series of rapes in the late 1970s, which ended in 1980, around the time Cannon had ended his dysfunctional marriage and began a new relationship with that girlfriend that he eventually tried to kill. Now, in that series of rape attacks, the assailant became known in the press as the house for sale rapist because he specifically preyed on estate agents at houses that were for sale, sexually assaulting at least 20 women.
Though it should be noted that this attacker in those cases was described as being between 35 and 40 years old and John Cannon was only in his mid-20s at the time. Again, it's just speculation that maybe it was him.
And also, though the attacks seemed to stop around the time that Cannon began a new relationship, they also ended after the composite sketch was published to the public. Cannon has continued to maintain his innocence, though he also has suggested he may reveal the location of Susie Lamplew's body once his mother dies to spare her any further heartache, which means that he's confirming he did it.
Cannon's mother was still alive at 96 years old as of 2018, the same year her patio was dug up in another unsuccessful effort to locate Susie's body. And though there's been no report of her death, Cannon's mother would be over 100 years old if she's still alive today, and Cannon's brother and sister have indicated that Cannon has told them he will never reveal the location of Susie's body.
So we may never know. And John Cannon is currently terminally ill and receiving end of life care in prison. So he may well take his secrets to his grave. Now,
Now, if you're a woman working in real estate, your company probably already has safety precautions in place. But this story illustrates the danger and risk associated with entering an enclosed private space like a house alone with a strange male, regardless of who he might say he is. Realtors are generally discouraged from showing houses alone, and many real estate firms now require that clients first check in at the office and provide personal identification documents.
In fact, some realty firms have entire handbooks on safety and prevention. I think it's safe to say that real estate offices in North America have always been a bit more safety conscious than the average workplace. But what about retail and hospitality and the many other industries where, for instance, employees often work alone in understaffed workplaces in the late hours of the night?
On next week's episode, we'll take a look at cases from serial murders to disappearances where vulnerable minimum wage employees were targeted by opportunistic predators. I'll see you then, bingers.