WHY DID IT TAKE THEM 15 YEARS?
Police hunting for body of Suzy Lamplugh dig up garden they searched in 2003
‘It would be wonderful to be able to bury Suzy’
SUZY Lamplugh’s family said last night they were desperate to ‘lay her to rest’ as police searched a property they first examined 15 years ago.
A specialist team is digging up a garage floor in the former garden of the mother of prime suspect John Cannan.
They are acting on a tip-off claiming the body of the 25-year-old estate agent could be encased in concrete in a vehicle inspection pit. But detectives faced questions over why it wasn’t checked during a search of the semi-detached property in 2003.
As cold-case investigators hoped they may finally crack one of the country’s most notorious unsolved murders:
Miss Lamplugh’s grieving brother said it would be ‘wonderful’ to finally bury her in a ‘place of our choosing’;
The man who has owned the property for the past 26 years said he believes there is a ‘50-50 chance’ her body could be found;
It was revealed that the garden has been searched by at least two forces on two occasions over the deaths of two women and other crimes linked to Cannan;
The retired Scotland Yard detective responsible for the murder inquiry defended his decision not to dig up the garden 15 years ago.
Miss Lamplugh disappeared in 1986 after showing a man known only as ‘Mr Kipper’ around a house in Fulham, south-west London.
Detectives have always believed this was killer Cannan, who is serving a 35-year prison sentence for a 1987 murder. An inmate serving time with Cannan told police in December 2002 that Miss Lamplugh may have been buried under a patio he laid at his mother’s home. But a lengthy search of the semi-detached house and its rear garden in Sutton Coldfield, near Birmingham, found nothing.
Miss Lamplugh’s brother Richard, 58, said it was a shame his parents will never see justice for their daughter. Her father Paul, who had Parkinson’s disease, died earlier this year. His mother Diana died in 2012.
Richard Lamplugh, a father of two who works as a technician at an Aberdeen school, said he had endured three decades of having his hopes ‘raised and dashed’. He added: ‘It has been a long time and we have had our expectations raised before, but it would be nice if we could finally have some closure.
‘After all these years it would be wonderful to finally be able to bury Suzy in a place of our choosing and not have her under some house.’
Phillip Carey, 52, bought the four-bedroom house from Cannan’s mother Sheila in 1992. The marketing executive said it was searched in 2003 and he was contacted again by coldcase officers several months ago. ‘They’ve pulled [the garage] down and I think they’re going to start digging it up,’ he said.
Retired Detective Superintendent Jim Dickie, who led the Lamplugh inquiry for six years, said: ‘We didn’t dig up the garden because we didn’t have any specific information back then that she may be buried there.’