UK UK - Suzy Lamplugh, 25, Fulham, 28 Jul 1986 #4

[Terryb808]

That would rule out two areas then, so where is this area DV is suspicious of .

From DV’s book the area under the now lowered dining room is accessible via a small opening in the wall.
Again from DV’s book height within this area is about one metre. So you could hide a body and place beer crates in front of the access hole.
I’ve not been in, but the dining room is on the left as you go in through the door on Oxford Road.
If you look at photos of the PoW from Oxford Road, there is another door to the left of the one that goes into the dining room.
This door looks like it goes directly to the area behind the pub between the pub & the railway embankment?
Does anyone know for sure where this door goes?

 

[rls11]

Cellar access is to the side of the pub in Oxford Road. You can see the hatch in the pavement.

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How about an accident? The cellar door was open because of the stocktake, maybe H&S wasn't as hot in 1986 as it is today, SJL fell into the cellar and CV panics...? Takes away the need for a motive...? (I appreciate that most of us would call 999 and report an accident but not everyone behaves the same way!)

 

[WestLondoner]

DV does hypothesise an accident as one possibility. As you note, it would be a weird reaction to hide rather than report an accident. Maybe CV thought there goes my career if someone dies within an hour of his taking over.

I do wonder though whether DV would have identified CV, as he pretty much has, without first looking into what else CV might have been up to - which was something he said he was concerned about. We tend to focus on the inherent unlikeliness of CV killing someone at his pub, but what if everywhere he has lived since, more women have disappeared?

As Terry has pointed out, if you follow the timeline, you do tend to end up at the PoW.

 

[Observe_dont_Absorb]

How about an accident? The cellar door was open because of the stocktake, maybe H&S wasn't as hot in 1986 as it is today, SJL fell into the cellar and CV panics...? Takes away the need for a motive...? (I appreciate that most of us would call 999 and report an accident but not everyone behaves the same way!)

I have often thought this too. That it could be she came to some accident or harm in the pub and instead of doing the right thing the manager did something horrific.

 

[Observe_dont_Absorb]

DV does hypothesise an accident as one possibility. As you note, it would be a weird reaction to hide rather than report an accident. Maybe CV thought there goes my career if someone dies within an hour of his taking over.

I do wonder though whether DV would have identified CV, as he pretty much has, without first looking into what else CV might have been up to - which was something he said he was concerned about. We tend to focus on the inherent unlikeliness of CV killing someone at his pub, but what if everywhere he has lived since, more women have disappeared?

As Terry has pointed out, if you follow the timeline, you do tend to end up at the PoW.

She could have been injured or harmed, say for example fell in the hatch and CV was off doing other stuff and she was incapacitated for ages - bled out maybe? Or by the time she was found was effing and blinding and threatening legal action. There's a million variables to speculate about but to my mind it's always possible SJL may have gone to the PoW and therefore it could be the scene of the crime, it could have been where she died, and she could have been hidden then moved. I don't think it's too 'far out' to speculate that as being one option and it's certainly never been ruled out. JMO

 

[Terryb808]

I do think that given the intense focus that SJL's case got at the time that the police suffered from information overload. It's entirely possible that (like the Yorkshire Ripper case) they did actually interview the perpetrator (or one of them) at the time.
A very subjective and unbiased eye looking at the police files from 1986 might just spot the person, we have a vast amount of knowledge now that just wasn't available then.
Plus, the police were put under immense pressure by DL, this can only have resulted in some corner cutting.

 

[WestLondoner]

The information overload point is a good one.

Michael Bilton's book on the Ripper investigation is very interesting here. One of the lines of inquiry was Rootes Group cars with two specific mismatching tyres. This was because tyre tracks were found at the scene of an attack, which the victim survived and so she was able to describe the inside of the car somewhat. Find the car with those tyres and you've found the Ripper, but there were hundreds of thousands of cars to check. So basically, the scale of the search that this lead gave rise to was simply too large for the resources available. WYP were never going to visit the keeper of every such car before the tyres wore out and were changed anyway.

Something a bit similar happened here. Absent reliable witnesses, the police took the view that the killer was someone SJL knew, which is reasonable because, per AS, nine times out of ten it is. But for want of any more promising line of inquiry, they then set themselves the impossible (IMO) task of identifying everyone SJL knew, and trying to eliminate them. This seems impossible because how can you ever be sure you've identified everyone she knew, and in the time it takes to locate everyone, how do you verify their whereabouts anyway, if it takes you a year to track them all down?

It doesn't follow either that she would have left a record of every such person in one or other of her diaries. The person she knew who took her could be someone she knew but was not in regular contact with - someone from the QE2; someone from Face Place; someone she talked to at a party. Any such person would be someone she knew, but who did not feature in her diaries or conversation. So if the abductor is someone she had merely met, rather than properly knew, or if it were someone she did not know - AS' one in ten - then this search was going to suck in a lot of resource and still fail anyway.

 

[WestLondoner]

From DV’s book the area under the now lowered dining room is accessible via a small opening in the wall.
Again from DV’s book height within this area is about one metre. So you could hide a body and place beer crates in front of the access hole.
I’ve not been in, but the dining room is on the left as you go in through the door on Oxford Road.
If you look at photos of the PoW from Oxford Road, there is another door to the left of the one that goes into the dining room.
This door looks like it goes directly to the area behind the pub between the pub & the railway embankment?
Does anyone know for sure where this door goes?

If you Google

"Oxford Road" "Upper Richmond Road" Putney

you get a Google maps result, with the red pindrop pretty much right on the PoW. If you go to Streetview at that point, and move into Oxford Road then face right, you can see the PoW has seven windows onto Oxford Road. From left to right, I'll think of these as windows 1 to 7 for convenience. The pavement hatch for barrel deliveries is under window 6. The cellar, as I understand DV, runs right to left, from windows 3 to 7. The steps down into the cellar are fore and aft as we look at the pavement hatch, I think. The two leftmost windows, 1 and 2, are the dining area, under whose floor DV thinks SJL is. At cellar level, there's a wall between windows 2 and 3, parallel to Upper Richmond Road, which is pierced by the hatch he looked through and saw the mound of rubbish.

The exterior door furthest left opens into a lean-to outbuilding. You can see this best in Google Earth view. It's about half the depth of the dining area, and there's a small yard behind it that takes up the north-east corner of the PoW's plot. I would guess this is the bin store, and that staff can access it from the yard and would take the bins out through the street door.

It's not possible to see what separates the PoW's yard from the embankment. I have to say, though, that as great an undisturbed hiding place as this embankment is, it doesn't look easy to get a body onto it, if it's under that floor to begin with. Unless there is access to that underfloor void from the lean-to store, to get SJL's body onto the embankment you'd have to bring her back out through the hatch; carry her up the cellar steps to the ground floor of the pub; and carry her through the pub and presumably its kitchen to get out into that yard. You've then got to get yourself, SJL and maybe a shovel over the boundary - whatever was there; chain link fence? - and then you're on the embankment. This requires free run of the pub when nobody's around.

It's possible, but a far simpler way if you have a vehicle would be to first move her from the void to the bottom of the beer hatch at about 4 or 5AM. You then go up and park alongside the pavement hatch. You then lift her up through the hatchway and into your vehicle. Quick, almost unobservable, and unremarkable because if anyone sees you it'll look like a beer delivery is expected. You dump her somewhere and by 6AM you're back in bed.

If that is what happened, this is not going to get solved.

 

[RichardKimble]

JC then could still be in the area and have nothing to do with it.

 

[Terryb808]

If you Google

"Oxford Road" "Upper Richmond Road" Putney

you get a Google maps result, with the red pindrop pretty much right on the PoW. If you go to Streetview at that point, and move into Oxford Road then face right, you can see the PoW has seven windows onto Oxford Road. From left to right, I'll think of these as windows 1 to 7 for convenience. The pavement hatch for barrel deliveries is under window 6. The cellar, as I understand DV, runs right to left, from windows 3 to 7. The steps down into the cellar are fore and aft as we look at the pavement hatch, I think. The two leftmost windows, 1 and 2, are the dining area, under whose floor DV thinks SJL is. At cellar level, there's a wall between windows 2 and 3, parallel to Upper Richmond Road, which is pierced by the hatch he looked through and saw the mound of rubbish.

The exterior door furthest left opens into a lean-to outbuilding. You can see this best in Google Earth view. It's about half the depth of the dining area, and there's a small yard behind it that takes up the north-east corner of the PoW's plot. I would guess this is the bin store, and that staff can access it from the yard and would take the bins out through the street door.

It's not possible to see what separates the PoW's yard from the embankment. I have to say, though, that as great an undisturbed hiding place as this embankment is, it doesn't look easy to get a body onto it, if it's under that floor to begin with. Unless there is access to that underfloor void from the lean-to store, to get SJL's body onto the embankment you'd have to bring her back out through the hatch; carry her up the cellar steps to the ground floor of the pub; and carry her through the pub and presumably its kitchen to get out into that yard. You've then got to get yourself, SJL and maybe a shovel over the boundary - whatever was there; chain link fence? - and then you're on the embankment. This requires free run of the pub when nobody's around.

It's possible, but a far simpler way if you have a vehicle would be to first move her from the void to the bottom of the beer hatch at about 4 or 5AM. You then go up and park alongside the pavement hatch. You then lift her up through the hatchway and into your vehicle. Quick, almost unobservable, and unremarkable because if anyone sees you it'll look like a beer delivery is expected. You dump her somewhere and by 6AM you're back in bed.

If that is what happened, this is not going to get solved.

This is very logical and unfortunately possible; it certainly saves the hassle of getting a car to this area from the Mossops side at the rear. When I say unfortunate, I mean because if this did happen SJL could literally be anywhere.
SJL was by all accounts petite, and if you as a pub landlord are expected to shift beer barrels and crates about, you're not going to be a weakling.
As long as you package what you intend to move to make carrying it easier, then I can't see moving SJL in that way would be a problem.
There's less danger of being seen (even at 4am) using the embankment, it's very overgrown and would have been in 1986, So IMO no digging required. Move as far away from the PoW as possible, cover things up and let nature do the rest.

 

[WestLondoner]

Yep, it's still possible she's on the embankment. I would expect actually that whatever fence separates the back of the pub from the embankment would be pretty robust. If you're Network Rail, you aren't going to let the adjoining property owners decide what security is enough. You're probably going to put up your own boundary fence as well as anything the houses, businesses etc have put up. If you use Google Streetview and go a few yards down Oxford Road, you can see where anti-climb spikes have been put in place along the parapet of that wall. There may not have been anything like that there in '86, but getting over that back fence, if anyone had to, has probably never been that straightforward. There could be two fences, maybe of different heights, and maybe a foot or more apart.

To know what's there, you'd need to get a train out of Putney that uses the southmost line, and maybe film the embankment as you pass it.

Of course if you're getting over a fence / fences from that bit of yard, it's not the worst place. You're not overlooked on one side, because it's road, so you'd have a good chance of being unobserved. You can probably use a ladder to help you.

But thinking about the beer barrel point - how big are these barrels, could you fit a body in one, and does the brewery keep track of how many you've had delivered? If they bring you three barrels, are they going to expect to be taking three away also? I guess you could put a body in a beer barrel, the barrel in a van, and either drop the barrel off a bridge into deep water, or drop just the body into water and take the barrel back to the pub. The brewery would then helpfully remove all forensic traces for you.

 

[Cherwell]

I still don't think she went to the pub that lunchtime. It was literally round the corner from her home and she could easily have gone after work when it was open for the whole evening after 6 pm.

If it was so urgent that she retrieve her belongings, I don't see why she would have needed permission to go there at lunchtime. I understand that she had been refused permission to take time off for her mother's birthday lunch, but that was a special occasion and sounds like it would have been an extended lunch break.

Hadn't Suzy originally arranged to meet PSS for lunch that Monday? So a lunch break hadn't been ruled out, and there was no reason to make up a false appointment to cover for going to the PoW on a genuine personal errand.

 

[Terryb808]

Yep, it's still possible she's on the embankment. I would expect actually that whatever fence separates the back of the pub from the embankment would be pretty robust. If you're Network Rail, you aren't going to let the adjoining property owners decide what security is enough. You're probably going to put up your own boundary fence as well as anything the houses, businesses etc have put up. If you use Google Streetview and go a few yards down Oxford Road, you can see where anti-climb spikes have been put in place along the parapet of that wall. There may not have been anything like that there in '86, but getting over that back fence, if anyone had to, has probably never been that straightforward. There could be two fences, maybe of different heights, and maybe a foot or more apart.

To know what's there, you'd need to get a train out of Putney that uses the southmost line, and maybe film the embankment as you pass it.

Of course if you're getting over a fence / fences from that bit of yard, it's not the worst place. You're not overlooked on one side, because it's road, so you'd have a good chance of being unobserved. You can probably use a ladder to help you.

But thinking about the beer barrel point - how big are these barrels, could you fit a body in one, and does the brewery keep track of how many you've had delivered? If they bring you three barrels, are they going to expect to be taking three away also? I guess you could put a body in a beer barrel, the barrel in a van, and either drop the barrel off a bridge into deep water, or drop just the body into water and take the barrel back to the pub. The brewery would then helpfully remove all forensic traces for you.

Good points, @Cluesleuth highlighted that the Putney Historical Society might be able to help confirm what it was like back in 1986, I'm going to look them up. If you're determined and creative enough getting over the fence would not be an issue, on the other hand if he'd done this before it's not the sort of place to use for deposition. If you've got a car, then somewhere unrelated would be better.
Pity we have no idea what he looked like in 1986.

 

[RichardKimble]

Yep, it's still possible she's on the embankment. I would expect actually that whatever fence separates the back of the pub from the embankment would be pretty robust. If you're Network Rail, you aren't going to let the adjoining property owners decide what security is enough. You're probably going to put up your own boundary fence as well as anything the houses, businesses etc have put up. If you use Google Streetview and go a few yards down Oxford Road, you can see where anti-climb spikes have been put in place along the parapet of that wall. There may not have been anything like that there in '86, but getting over that back fence, if anyone had to, has probably never been that straightforward. There could be two fences, maybe of different heights, and maybe a foot or more apart.

To know what's there, you'd need to get a train out of Putney that uses the southmost line, and maybe film the embankment as you pass it.

Of course if you're getting over a fence / fences from that bit of yard, it's not the worst place. You're not overlooked on one side, because it's road, so you'd have a good chance of being unobserved. You can probably use a ladder to help you.

But thinking about the beer barrel point - how big are these barrels, could you fit a body in one, and does the brewery keep track of how many you've had delivered? If they bring you three barrels, are they going to expect to be taking three away also? I guess you could put a body in a beer barrel, the barrel in a van, and either drop the barrel off a bridge into deep water, or drop just the body into water and take the barrel back to the pub. The brewery would then helpfully remove all forensic traces for you.

Ref the beer barrel, they used to be called a Tun, that was the big wooden ones, around 200 gallons worth, I guess the choice was either a pint of best or mild. No doubt over the years they became smaller not sure they'd be still around in 86.But wheelie bin size would do it ?

 

[Observe_dont_Absorb]

I think a barrel or 'keg', the sort delivered to a pub, would be difficult to use, as it would need to be somewhat dismantled and I suspect they're designed not to come apart. The ones delivered to pubs when I worked there were large metal kegs. The huge big wooden barrels that one sees on adverts or in the movies are the ones that are used inside the brewery for distilling. A pub manager would need to be strong enough to move the beer barrels / kegs around tho as that's a vital part of the job. I guess if there was a young woman dead in your cellar, the first thing you'd want to do is cover her body quickly by any means necessary with whatever is to hand - rags? dust sheet? bin liners? rubble sacks? and hide her somewhere no-one's going to look in the immediate future. Then you can take time to think about what to do. A bar manager up all night worrying about his stock or getting up early to sort out the cellar and have a tidy up or move things around would not attract attention.

 

[Cluesleuth]

I do think that given the intense focus that SJL's case got at the time that the police suffered from information overload. It's entirely possible that (like the Yorkshire Ripper case) they did actually interview the perpetrator (or one of them) at the time.

AS Book Page 184
The man arrested elsewhere was questioned by detectives about Susannah, but was not charged in connection with the case. No evidence was found to link him with her and the police had no alternative but to eliminate him from the case. Neither was any clue obtained as to the whereabouts of Susannah.

 

[Pinkizzy]

I guess they asked him about Shorrolds Rd before releasing him. Maybe he was her lover or something

 

[Whitehall 1212]

I guess they asked him about Shorrolds Rd before releasing him. Maybe he was her lover or something

He was an unrelated male arrested in a different part of the country for other offences. No link between him and SJL or offences relating to her was identified.

AS p.183

 

[WestLondoner]

Presumably this was JC.

 

[Cluesleuth]

Presumably this was JC.

No it wasnt JC AS book was published in 1988
JC wasnt questioned by police regarding the disappearance of Suzy Lamplugh in 1989 and 1990. He wrote a letter to the local paper, Sutton News, in August 1991 denying any part in her disappearance.

SJL went missing on the 28th July 1986 two days later on the 30th July her disappearance made front page news in the Sun Newspaper within that article it says
Scotland Yard were 'greatly concerned' for the vivacious and popular girl. and they alerted detectives hunting the Railway Killer, who has murdered two other blondes and a teenage schoolgirl.

July 1985 three women were raped on the same night in the Hendon and Hampstead area. Duffy and Mulcahy was pulled in for questioning but later released. JD was arrested after a domestic violence incident in Aug 1985 but again later released.
Sept 1985 a woman was attacked in Barnett JD fitted the description of the attacker and was put on id parade the victim failed to pick him out.
DM was also questioned and released
Dec 1985 Alison Day - raped and killed
Apr 1986 Maartje Tambozer - raped and killed
May 1986 JD arrested near North Weald Station for carrying a knife
May 1986 Ann Locke - raped and killed
Nov 1986 JD arrested for stalking a woman in a Park

Literature found in Duffys home after his arrest contained methods of how to incapacitate silence and kill, they also stressed the importance of escape routes.
He also took keys from his victims as souvenirs

Could the arrest of a man elsewhere refer to JD?
He did bear a resmeblence to the man said to look like James Galway who hailed a taxi near the Finlay st junction.
JMO