As a father of two daughters taking their first steps towards complete independence, Richard Lamplugh is acutely aware of the competing instincts that come with parenting this age group: to keep them safe but also let them go.
He accepts that he has had to fight hard against what he calls ‘helicopter parenting’ his girls, aged 17 and 23.
‘I must admit, when I had my daughters, suddenly the responsibility of caring for someone else, other than my wife really hit me,’ he says. ‘And I love it. I love it very much. But you always worry, although I very much want them to have their own life, a free life.’
But then Richard, more than anyone, has reason to know that the worst can sometimes happen.
Richard was in his late twenties when his younger sister Suzy – or Suze as he calls her – disappeared without a trace on July 28, 1986.
The mystery of what had happened to the beautiful, warm-hearted estate agent captured the public’s imagination, the last clue to her whereabouts an appointment in her diary to show a ‘Mr Kipper’ around a house in Fulham, west London.
While Suzy’s car was found near the property in Shorrolds Road with her keys in the ignition, there was no sign of the 25-year-old.
She was officially declared dead, presumed murdered, seven years later, although deep down her family – who were very close – instinctively knew this within days of her disappearance.
Estate agent Suzy Lamplugh disappeared without a trace in Fulham, west London in 1986
Richard Lamplugh was in his late twenties when his younger sister went missing
As Richard, Suzy’s older brother by nearly two years explains, she would never just leave them.
And while her disappearance almost 40 years ago has now faded in the national consciousness, it resurfaced earlier this month with the death of John Cannan – the man commonly assumed to have murdered Suzy.
He died in prison at the age of 70 while serving a life sentence for killing another woman a year after Suzy went missing, having refused to acknowledge his guilt or help bring the Lamplugh family any closure.
While Suzy’s heartbroken parents Diana, a fitness club manager, and Paul, a solicitor, are no longer alive – Diana died in 2011 aged 75, Paul in 2018 at the age of 87 – his passing now extinguishes almost any hope of closure for Richard and his two sisters, Lizzie and Tamsin.
‘Hard though it is to say out loud, I think we’ve come to the end,’ admits Richard. ‘Unless he has written something or left something somewhere to be found that we don’t have knowledge about, because he is a man who liked to hold on to information, and he saw that as his power. But we don’t know that he has.’
He adds: ‘There’s a lingering hope that maybe he left a hidden message or a note that would give a clue about what happened to Suze.
‘I gather that he was writing books in prison, so maybe someone could read them and have a look at it.’ He pauses: ‘But it won’t be me.’
It means the family are unlikely to ever undertake their dearest wish – one shared by their late parents – which is to scatter Suzy’s ashes at a place of their choosing.
‘We wanted somewhere to do that, a place that we could visit, not the place that he left her,’ Richard says. ‘Now we have to accept that is probably never going to happen.’
So his passing marks the final poignant chapter in Suzy’s story, though the legacy of her shocking disappearance will never go away.
It’s why Richard, 64, a genial school technician who lives in Aberdeen with his wife Christine, requests that his two daughters not be named publicly, as the Lamplugh surname – an unusual one – is already something of a burden to carry.
‘I imagine young people, new friends, or a new boyfriend, Google the name and obviously what they find is about Suze,’ he says.
Her absence is also felt every time Richard and his sisters get together. Not just for her sparkling personality but also for the children and grandchildren that will never exist.
Suzy would be 63 now and probably a mum like her siblings, who have seven children between them: Lizzie, 54, who lives in Rutland with husband Johnny Bingham has three, while London-based Tamsin, 61, has two children by her husband Kenneth Tomlin.
‘The thing that makes me sad….I felt I was quite close to Suze, and the one thing I do miss is that it would have been lovely to know what her family was like,’ Richard says. ‘She’d be a lovely mum. She was quite a mother duck, gentle. She had that warm nature.’
While Suzy’s disappearance was devastating, right from the start her family were determined to be resilient.
Just a few days after her daughter vanished, Diana was already displaying the astonishing fortitude that would carry her through the dark years that followed.
‘She told me and my sisters that something good must come out of this awful situation – and it was awful, truly awful,’ her son Richard recalls.
The mystery of what happened to her captured the public’s imagination
‘She knew then in her heart that Suze wasn’t coming back. It was a mother’s instinct.’
He adds: ‘Suze wouldn’t go for days without contacting us. We were a close family, and it was just two days before mum’s birthday. Not turning up for that, not contacting my parents and finding out what they were doing was just not believable.’
Richard was 26 and working on a fish farm in Hertfordshire when his sister went missing, and remembers his mother telephoning him at home to say she hadn’t returned to work after taking a client to a viewing.
‘Mum and Dad were trying to think positively, but I think they knew even then,’ Richard says. ‘At the same time you’re trying not to panic. You think, maybe she’s lost her memory, something has gone wrong, there’s an explanation.
‘None of them seemed likely but that is what your brain does. We were all just trying to support each other. It was the powerlessness that was awful. You wanted to look for her, but it was like looking for a needle in a haystack.’
The family were also besieged by press from all over the world, as well as being bombarded with messages from clairvoyants claiming they could tell them where Suzy was, among them the self-proclaimed psychic Uri Geller.
‘It’s amazing how many clairvoyants came out. Uri Geller came and bent spoons in front of my Mum and Dad,’ Richard says shaking his head. ‘I suppose we were all clutching at straws.’
At least, back then, in an era before mobile phones and social media, any armchair detectives largely kept their opinions to themselves.
‘I think social media would have made things very hard,’ he says. ‘Perhaps we might have tried to use it to our own ends, but I think Mum would have been absolutely devastated by all the speculation and theorising.’
In any case, a year passed with lead after lead going nowhere.
Then, in October 1987, a Bristol-based former public schoolboy called John Cannan was arrested in conjunction with the murder of factory manager and newlywed Shirley Banks – like Suzy an attractive 20-something blonde – for which he was later convicted and sentenced to life in prison.
Cannan had a history of rape, abductions and attempted abductions against women dating back to the age of 14. At the time of Suzy’s disappearance he was on day-release at a bail hostel in Fulham close to where she worked and socialised, having been released from prison after serving seven years for rape.
Chillingly, his nickname at the hostel was Kipper.
In 2002 John Cannan was named as prime suspect in the disappearance
Diana remembered her daughter being pestered by an unwanted suitor with links to Bristol who was sending her bouquets, while a photofit compiled from a witness who had seen Lamplugh and an unidentified man leaving Shorrolds Road, looked uncannily like Cannan.
Such compelling details led Diana and Paul to ask police to look into Cannan as a possible suspect, but an official review subsequently found that the lead detective at the time, Det Supt Malcolm Hackett, refused to properly consider him, believing there was a media bias against Cannan perpetuated by Diana.
The review suggested that this ‘prejudiced his view of Cannan to such an extent he failed to properly interview him, put him in ID line-ups or check his alibi for the day Suzy vanished.’
Despite this damning verdict, Richard refuses to indulge in finger pointing today, although he acknowledges that opportunities were missed.
‘Unfortunately, we can’t turn the clock back, much as we would love to be able to do that,’ he says. ‘I do feel if the police had been a bit more diligent in their jobs and taken our views more seriously, they might have been able to find her.’
It would be 2002 before Cannan was finally named as prime suspect by police following a cold case review and reinvestigation which uncovered other compelling new circumstantial evidence, including new witness accounts placing Cannan in Fulham on the day Suzy disappeared and the discovery that he had owned a dark, left hand drive BMW similar to one in which witnesses had seen someone resembling Lamplugh struggling to escape.
A file was presented to the CPS who, to the Lamplughs’ collective distress, refused to press charges.
‘It was so sad,’ says Richard, shaking his head. ‘I wish they had been able to. Perhaps it would be easier nowadays, with advances in DNA.’
Certainly, police and criminologists remain convinced that Cannan was the perpetrator, among them Jim Dickie, who oversaw the cold case review and who, in a 2015 interview, emphasised he had ‘little doubt’ that Suzy was stalked and killed by Cannan.
‘I think that Suzy got into a row with Cannan on the day he abducted her from the car, or made her get into the vehicle he had at the time,’ Dickie said. ‘There then ensued probably a very heated row where he basically drove off abducting her. Where he went from there is a matter of conjecture.’
Diana also went to her grave believing Cannan to be responsible.
Over the years the Lamplugh family have carried their grief in their own ways
‘Very much so,’ Richard says emphatically. ‘But to never have a conviction, that was hard.’
Over the years the Lamplugh family have carried their grief in their own ways.
‘Lizzie, who’s a lot younger than we are, was a teenager when she died, whereas Tam and I were in our twenties, and had a longer life with her, so I think we reacted slightly differently,’ he says.
‘Ultimately though you have to let go a little bit, you can’t spend every day mired in grief. Well, that’s what I feel, and that’s what mum and dad tried to do. Mum was very involved with the trust.’
The Suzy Lamplugh Trust was Diana’s ‘something good’, a charity established in her daughter’s name to improve awareness of personal safety, for which she and Paul both received OBEs in 1992. It remains a potent campaigning force to this day.
‘I wish we didn’t need it,’ Richard says ruefully. ‘That our work is done, but of course that’s never going to happen. I feel so sad when we hear someone has been abducted or killed, or whatever, particularly when it’s a young woman. I want women, my daughters, to be empowered, to do what they want to do without worrying.’
It was perhaps with his daughters – and those of others – in mind that, when Cannan applied for parole in 2022, Richard was vociferous in his belief that he should never see the light of day.
‘I did quite a lot trying to keep him in, not for my sake, because of course he hadn’t been convicted of anything in relation to us, but for the Banks family and for what he did to all the other women. He did not deserve to come out.’
Cannan’s application was rejected in November 2023, and Richard learned of his death last week in a WhatsApp message from Tamsin, who had been informed by the prison service.
‘I did know that he was terminally ill – that’s what we were told about two years ago, but he seemed to survive and carry on, so in that sense it did come as a bit of a surprise,’ Richard admits. ‘And as far as I’m concerned, it’s a case of good riddance.’
And so the family will continue to do what they have always done whenever they get together – which they do as often as commitments allow.
‘We did have a get together in the summer and in February,’ Richard says. ‘And when we get together, we always think about absent friends, and obviously Suze is a big part of that.’
At the same time, he is keen to emphasise that the Lamplughs have managed to build good and fulfilling lives, despite the terrible tragedy that tore apart the fabric of their family.
‘We’re happy,’ he says. ‘But it’s just sad that we haven’t got any closure. It’s the thing we all hoped for.’