The prime suspect in the murder of Suzy Lamplugh has died in prison at the age of 70.
Convicted killer John Cannan was jailed for a minimum of 35 years in 1989 for the rape and murder of Bristol newlywed Shirley Banks.
In 2002, police took the highly unusual step of naming him as the suspected killer of Ms Lamplugh after the CPS ruled there was insufficient evidence to prosecute him.
The Prison Service said the Category A prisoner died on November 6 at HMP Full Sutton.
‘As with all deaths in custody, the Prisons and Probation Ombudsman will investigate,’ a spokesperson said.
Estate agent Ms Lampugh vanished on July 28, 1986, aged 25 after going to show a man around a house in Fulham.
The case remains one of Britain’s most notorious unsolved crimes and her body has never been found.
The only clue to her disappearance was an appointment she put in her work diary suggesting she was showing the property to a ‘Mr Kipper’, who has never been traced.
Three days before she vanished Cannan had been released from a hostel at Wormwood Scrubs prison, where he had been serving a six-year sentence for rape.
It later emerged that in prison he was known by other inmates as Kipper.
Former car salesman Cannan also had access to a BMW car of the type thought to have been driven by ‘Mr Kipper’ and resembled a photofit of a man seen with Miss Lamplugh outside the Fulham flat on the day she disappeared.
Cannan had always maintained his innocence and insisted in a letter last December that he did not kill Ms Lamplugh.
He sent a handwritten note via his lawyers to The Mirror stating that he had not been in London but was instead in Birmingham ‘treating my mother to a spot of lunch’ on the day Ms Lamplugh went missing.
In the rambling letter, he told the newspaper that he wanted to make a number of ‘points’ given the media spotlight on his case after he was denied parole earlier this year.
When Cannan was quizzed by murder detectives the former public schoolboy bragged that there are ‘one or two things I haven’t been caught for’.
Cannan was out on licence from prison when Ms Lamplugh disappeared. He’d previously been jailed for a total of eight years for raping a pregnant woman in front of her own mother and toddler, plus two robberies.
In the months leading up to July 1986, he was living at a bail hostel next to Wormwood Scrubs prison in Shepherd’s Bush and allowed out on day release to work at a theatrical props company in nearby Acton. He was also able to travel to Bristol at weekends to visit his various lovers.
Away from the hostel, he dressed in sharp suits and posed as a successful businessman when in reality he funded his life via petty theft and chequebook fraud.
His associates at the bail hostel told police he cruised the bars of South-West London, drinking heavily, in search of sex.
Cannan told them he liked ‘Hooray Henry types’ — well-dressed, well-educated, well-spoken women in business suits, particularly navy pleated skirts — and bragged of ‘one special girlfriend in Fulham’.
Cannan was released from the bail hostel on Friday, July 25, 1986 — just three days before Ms Lampliugh went missing.
That same evening, she went to the Prince of Wales in Putney — a pub which was also one of Cannan’s haunts. Items from her handbag, including a diary, a chequebook and some cards, were later found by staff.
It was the first of a host of strange incidents leading up to her disappearance that suggest, according to retired police officer Jim Dickie, that Ms Lamplugh was being stalked by Cannan and was ‘possibly befriended by her’.
Someone pretending to be a police officer called the estate agent where she worked claiming to have her chequebook.
Red roses also arrived at the office from a mystery admirer. A man fitting Cannan’s description was seen looking through the estate agency window on Sunday, July 27.
‘Someone was monitoring Suzy’s movements and knew where she worked and lived,’ Mr Dickie said last July.
Most bizarre of all was that prior to Suzy’s meeting with Mr Kipper at a house in Shorrolds Road in Fulham on Monday, a man fitting Cannan’s description turned up at another property for sale in the road without an appointment and asked the woman who answered the door if he could look around.
He was scared away when he realised her husband was at home.
Ms Lamplugh’s late parents Paul and Diana dedicated their lives to finding her and established the Suzy Lamplugh Trust to improve awareness of personal safety.
Cannan was found guilty of the brutal murder of Shirley Banks, who he killed in 1987.
The newlywed’s body was not found until the following year at Dead Woman’s Ditch in the Quantock Hills, Somerset.
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