Susannah Jane Lamplugh (/ˈlæmpluː/; born 3 May 1961)[2] was a British estate agent reported missing on 28 July 1986 (aged 25) in Fulham, London, England, United Kingdom.

In November 2002, the Crown Prosecution Service concluded that there was insufficient evidence to charge Cannan, but police announced at a press conference their belief that he had murdered Lamplugh.

[9] Lamplugh's white Ford Fiesta (registration B396 GAN) was sighted poorly parked outside a garage opposite 123 Stevenage Road, about 1 mile (1.6 km) away, by several witnesses at various points in the afternoon.

[7] A woman living at 139 Stevenage Road also reported possibly seeing Lamplugh with a smartly dressed man wearing a suit by the spot where her car was seen parked.

[13] Police suggested that a black, left-hand-drive BMW vehicle may have been involved following an eyewitness account of a car of that description seen parked in Shorrolds Road.

[6][9][15][13] The witness had offered information after the disappearance, but his account was dismissed at that time because he had described a blond-haired woman, and the police incorrectly assumed that Lamplugh had brown hair when she vanished.

[9][6] In his description of the incident, the witness stated: 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.

In the weeks before Lamplugh disappeared, Cannan had told inmates and workmates that he was frequenting wine bars in Fulham and had met a new "uptown" girlfriend named Susu.

[15][9] He had held Banks hostage in his flat for 18 hours before killing her and dumping her at a site in the Quantock Hills known as Dead Woman's Ditch.

[13] Soon after Cannan was arrested, Banks' Mini car was found hidden in his garage, with a new, false number plate affixed reading "SLP 386S".

[6][26] It was also known that Cannan had joined a dating agency in Bristol weeks before he had murdered Banks, providing a false name of John Peterson, and had presented himself in a recorded video as a successful, smartly dressed businessman.

[6][27] He claimed that he had bought the car from a "Bristol businessman" who was responsible for "the murders of Shirley Banks, Suzy Lamplugh and another girl" and that the man was in a great deal of trouble.

[6][26] He was also convicted of the rape of a woman in Reading on the train line between London and Bristol, six weeks after his release from Wormwood Scrubs prison.

[34][36] In an unprecedented move, the Metropolitan Police responded to the book by defending Lamplugh's personal life and stating "our investigations revealed nothing more than that Suzy was a modern young woman.

"[35] A highly critical review of the book in The Times asserted that Stephen had included a large amount of his own speculations on what he called Lamplugh's "quest for sexual fulfilment" because he needed filler material to add to the story.

[34][36] In the mid-1990s, speculation arose that Michael Sams may have murdered Lamplugh, as he had just been convicted of kidnapping an estate agent named Stephanie Slater in Birmingham.

[38][39][19] However, police found no evidence for the theory and discounted it, noting that Sams' crimes were likely influenced by the high-profile Lamplugh case.

[13] A new reinvestigation was launched in the early 2000s with a new team whose detectives were directed to determine whether Cannan could be eliminated as a suspect or implicated in Lamplugh's murder.

[15] The witness sightings of a dark, left-hand-drive BMW parked near Lamplugh and in which she was seen struggling were afforded added significance when it emerged that Cannan owned such a car at the time, which he had used to commit crimes with a fellow inmate.

[49][9] When Shirley Banks had been abducted by Cannan and held hostage in his flat in 1987, she placed a call under duress to her workplace the next morning, stating that she was sick and would not be reporting to work that day.

[50] Detectives on the reinvestigation team also believed that Cannan could have been responsible for taking the contents of her handbag in the pub, and stated the events were a clear indicator of stalking.

[15] Investigators wanted to dig at Norton Barracks, where Cannan had allegedly told former girlfriend Gilly Paige that the body was buried and which was identified by an anonymous informant in 1999.

[6] Cannan was known to play such tricks with investigators, and it was believed that if his decision to dump Banks' body in Dead Woman's Ditch was intentional, the letters and numbers on the plate could have been as well.

Suzy certainly fitted the profile of what John Cannan sought, in that she was blonde, attractive, worked at an estate agent, a very presentable young lady who came from a good family.

[6] The Crown Prosecution Service agreed that the police reinvestigation had been excellent and thorough, but ultimately decided after four months of deliberations[53] that there was insufficient evidence to charge Cannan with the murder.

[55] The lead detective in the reinvestigations, Jim Dickie, stated that he was as certain as possible without conducting a formal judicial process that Cannan was responsible.

[59] He had been in the prison hostel at Wormwood Scrubs at the time but was allowed to leave the facility at weekends and had access to a red Ford Sierra, the same car that was tested in the Lamplugh case.

[60] When the Ford Sierra was discovered at the north London scrapyard during the Lamplugh reinvestigations of the early 2000s, two hairs were found inside that matched Court's DNA.

[72] In August 2019, the Specialist Investigation Team was informed of the sighting of a man resembling Cannan dumping a suitcase in the Grand Union Canal on the day of Lamplugh's disappearance.

[27] He protested his innocence not only of involvement in Lamplugh's disappearance but of nearly all other crimes for which he had been convicted, including those that were proven with DNA links and fingerprint evidence.