John Cannan

That month Scotland Yard held a press conference at which, in a rare move, officers named Cannan as the man they believed murdered Lamplugh.

[4] Cannan later claimed that the sexual abuse left him struggling with feelings of humiliation and shame, which in turn led him to express much anger and resentment.

By 1980, he had slipped into alcoholism and spent much of his time frequenting bars and nightclubs in order to avoid going home to his family after work.

[13] Starting from the late 1970s up until 1980, during the final years of Cannan's troubled marriage, a series of mysterious and brutal rapes occurred in homes for sale in the West Midlands, where he was living at that time.

[18] Cannan left his wife in 1980 for Major, whom he attacked when she tried to leave him,[6] turning up at her house on New Year's Eve with a bottle of wine and, unbeknownst to her, a gun.

[10] In March that year, during a robbery at a ladies' knitwear shop, Cannan raped shop assistant Jean Bradford[16] at knifepoint after threatening to stab her 17-month-old baby, who was in a back room; Bradford's mother arrived during the attack, only to be tied up by Cannan and made to watch the attack.

[24] Only ten weeks after his release from prison,[10] Cannan raped a woman at knifepoint in Reading in October 1986, an attack he was linked to by DNA from semen.

[28] Berry and Odell maintain that his video-dating advert was not shown to other daters due to concerns surrounding his odd behaviour.

[27] The following month in October 1987, Cannan tried to abduct 30-year-old Bristol businesswoman Julia Holman from a car park at around 6:50 pm at gunpoint, but she fought him off and later identified him as her attacker.

Her husband searched for her in bars when she failed to return home, as they had agreed to meet for a drink; when he rang her work the next morning, he was told she had just phoned in sick with an upset stomach 15 minutes earlier.

[11][26] Police believe that Banks was held overnight in Cannan's flat and that he then persuaded her to phone in sick to her work, after pretending he was going to release her.

The police had first planned to link the attempted abduction of Holman the previous night on a Crimewatch reconstruction in November, before Cannan's further crimes led to his arrest.

[26] Cannan, then living at Foye House, Leigh Woods, Bristol,[30] was arrested on 29 October 1987 in Leamington Spa for an assault at knife-point on an assistant at a Regent Street dress shop.

News media immediately linked Banks' disappearance to that of Lamplugh, publishing Cannan's prior criminal record.

[26][34] Banks' naked, moss-covered decomposed body was found in a stream on 3 April 1988, six months after her disappearance, around 48 miles (77 km) from Bristol at a site named "Dead Woman's Ditch," which is part of an Iron Age camp at Dowsborough in the Quantock Hills.

After ten hours of deliberation on 28 April 1989, the jury found Cannan guilty of all charges: the abduction and murder of Banks, the rape and buggery of a Reading woman, and the attempted kidnap at gunpoint of Holman.

[44] When interviewed, Cannan denied having ever been to Bournemouth on the day in question, but was shown to have lied because of the pay and display parking ticket.

[50] His solicitor complained about a lack of presumption of innocence and that the prison service had withheld letters Cannan had tried to send to national newspapers regarding the allegations.

[51] In November 2002, Mark Dennis, a senior Treasury counsel, decided that there was insufficient evidence to charge Cannan over Ms Lamplugh's death.

[47] In July 1993, The Independent argued that the judge's sentencing statement, that Cannan should remain in prison for the rest of his natural life, removed any incentive for him to confess post-conviction.

[53] In November 2002, the police said that Cannan should have been a suspect much earlier in the investigation: they should have checked for recently released sex offenders, and they should have followed up information given by her parents about a man from Bristol.

[35][46] In 2000, a new investigating team, led by Jim Dickie, computerised the card index of the case and found that several estate agents in Fulham had been visited by a Mr Kipper.

[6] Cannan allegedly told an astrologer who visited him in jail that "a Bristol businessman" murdered Lamplugh and "I know who killed Shirley, Suzy, and another girl.

"[58] Cannan's ex-girlfriend Gilly Paige told police as early as 1990[59] that he had said Lamplugh's body was buried at Norton Barracks, although she later retracted the assertion.

[65] In August 2010, they searched a field 3 miles (4.8 km) from the site in Worcestershire after a witness remembered seeing a mound of earth there in 1986 when he was a teenager.

[68] In November 2002 Scotland Yard held a press conference at which, in a rare move, officers named Cannan as the man they believed murdered Lamplugh.

[74] In July 1989, Cannan failed to persuade the High Court to stop the BBC broadcasting a Crimewatch UK documentary on the investigation into the murder of Banks.

[75] A case he took to the High Court in January 2003, claiming that his right to "free and unimpeded" legal advice was being restricted, failed.

[31] He appealed for his 35-year minimum tariff to be reduced, but Mr Justice Coulson ruled against this in June 2008 because his crimes involved "a significant degree of planning and premeditation" and there were "no real mitigating factors at all".

"[77][78][79] At a coroner's inquest, opened on 15 November 2024, it was stated that Cannan's death was from natural causes, specifically a ruptured abdominal aortic aneurysm.