UK UK - Suzy Lamplugh, 25, Fulham, 28 Jul 1986 #6

[Terryb808]

The reservoir walls were concrete according to the link I posted. I assume they drained them one by one and broke up the concrete. It would be difficult (if not impossible) to do that when the reservoirs were full of water.

Agreed, I can’t see them converting the balancing lakes without draining them and finding anything that’s been dumped in the water.
Overall I feel it’s a very unlikely place for Suzy to have ended up.
The photo of Stevenage Road is looking towards Craven Cottage (Fulham FC), so to be 100% sure that the workmen were too far away from SJL’s car, you’d need a photo looking the other way.
It’s hard to tell exactly where this phot was taken.

 

[Interested_But_Confused]

The photo of Stevenage Road is looking towards Craven Cottage (Fulham FC), so to be 100% sure that the workmen were too far away from SJL’s car, you’d need a photo looking the other way.
It’s hard to tell exactly where this phot was taken.

RSBM

Are you referring to the screenshot I posted? It's from the Crimewatch video, and was taken from north of Suzy's car looking south, at about the junction of Stevenage Rd, Langthorne St and Millshott Cl.

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[RichardKimble]

Not that it matters much but when did AS wrote his version? the father and son, were they actually in the road or working on a house in the road, they sound to me more like builders possibly doing drainage/sewage pipe work in a garden,all opinion.

 

[Eastend Eagle]

DBM

 

[Eastend Eagle]

Not that it matters much but when did AS wrote his version? the father and son, were they actually in the road or working on a house in the road, they sound to me more like builders possibly doing drainage/sewage pipe work in a garden,all opinion.

Excellent point.

If they WERE working in the street, which company were Bert and Christopher Carter working for?

 

[Terryb808]

RSBM

Are you referring to the screenshot I posted? It's from the Crimewatch video, and was taken from north of Suzy's car looking south, at about the junction of Stevenage Rd, Langthorne St and Millshott Cl.

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Thanks for this it clarifies things, it looks like the Mahon’s blue Fiesta is in the picture.
If the workmen were working in the road, maybe is was the other end away from the Fulham FC ground.
This would explain why there’s no sign of their activity in the screenshot.
If that was the case they may have been facing Suzy’s car as it was abandoned and this may have been the reason for the hurried way it was left.

 

[WiseOwl]

As far as WJ's sighting of Suzy's car is concerned, i always thought that she had seen it parked where it was but the timings were wrong. However, reading in AS book that it was the owner of the garage (AM) that she went to the bank with at 12.45 that day, it now seems likely that she did see the car parked there at that time. I'm sure that AM would have confirmed that WJ had seen the car parked overlapping the drive to the garage, but whether she had seen it herself is something we don't know.

So it would appear that the staff at Sturgis had got the timing wrong, and Suzy had left the office earlier than the 12.40 that was reported.

Did Suzy drive the car to Stevenage Road and then get into another vehicle? The police seemed to think it was parked in a hurry, suggesting that someone else had driven the car. These are the points mentioned about the parked car in AS book (pages 14 & 15):

1. They thought it was likely the car had been parked in a hurry as it was slightly askew from the pavement, and was overlapping the entrance to the garage by about 18 inches.

2. The handbrake was off.

3. The driver's door was unlocked but the passenger's was locked, suggesting that only one person was in the car when it was parked.

4. The driver's seat was pushed back from its forward position, suggesting someone taller than Suzy was driving.

Nothing was concealed in the car boot, but Suzy's straw hat was on the back shelf, and a purse was found in the map rack of the driver's door. Frustratingly, it doesn't state if the purse was Suzy's usual one or a spare one she kept in the car.

Possibly points 1,2 & 4 could be explained if Suzy was in a hurry, for example parking erratically by the garage, forgetting to put the handbrake on, not bothering to put the driver's seat back in its normal position. But it would seem odd not to lock the driver's door behind her and, if it was her normal purse, to leave it behind in the car.

 

[Salah11]

It’s so frustrating that even the basic facts you have to question.

Definitely a poorly run operation and it’s no wonder it wasn’t solved. It’s very convenient to say we have a suspect and we believe they did it so case closed without any proof.

Moo

 

[Terryb808]

Just a quick point on the drivers seat position, Suzy, JC (Sturgis) & JC (Prime Suspect) are all within approximately 2 inches in height.
So none of them would really have needed to move the drivers seat. By contrast other people known to Suzy were much taller AL & TS spring to mind (the later being well over 6 ft IIRC), not that any of them had anything to do with her disappearance.
I’m of the opinion that a perpetrator drove the car to Stevenage Road and not Suzy.
If you believe WJ, then Suzy never went to either Stevenage or Shorrolds Road. So had to have been taken when she got to her car in Whittingstall Road.

 

[WestLondoner]

The parking of the car is consistent IMO with someone pulling into the kerb behind another car that the driver was expecting to be there. This is either because it was SJL meeting someone and she just jumps out to say Hi or whatever, expecting to be out of the car for 15 seconds - hence no handbrake, not parked properly, purse inside, etc. Or it was someone getting rid of her car by driving it to where his own car had been left. He switches cars p.d.q. and drives off, and ten hours later, it's found as left.

Of the two the latter seems likelier, because if she met someone who said Let's go on to X in my car, she'd surely have said OK, let me just park mine properly and lock it; or, OK, I'll follow you; or whatever. For her car to be left like that upon her meeting someone there surely says she was abducted then and there.

Terry makes a good point as usual re the seat position. You have to wonder if anyone ever checked that someone of Cannan's height could or would have driven it with the seat positioned thus. In 1980s Fords (I drove many), you moved the seat by lifting a bar under the front-middle of the seat and then pushing back with your feet. I do hope someone checked that seat adjustment bar for fingerprints in 1986.

Re the guys working in the road, I thought, from AS perhaps, that they were BT guys working in one of those red and white striped workmen's tents. They'd have set this up either over a manhole in the road through which they accessed the phone wiring, or next to one of those green roadside junction boxes. As has been observed above, they are sort of anti-witnesses. They'd have seen little from inside a tent, but their noticing or hearing nothing out of the ordinary does rather suggest nothing happened.

AS wrote this down in 1988, before Cannan came into the picture. One of the reasons he's valuable is exactly because his early account is not completely shot through with the later DL / MPS determination to fit this one round Cannan. Cannan could well have done this, but there's a lot about his involvement that's not explained, and he sure wasn't the only rapist who'd been released recently.

 

[WestLondoner]

View attachment 506109

I was going to say "Look how white that light blue Fiesta looks" but then it occurred to me that WJ walked past the car with AM, the car's actual owner. If it was her car all along and not SJL's she'd surely have cleared this up very easily later. Her light blue Fiesta should not have been around anyway, as her husband later arrived back from work in it. If he got back at 5 it must have been gone for the day by 8 or 9am.

 

[Interested_But_Confused]

I think the lack of specificity on the basic facts is more a consequence of the time period when this happened, rather than something that can be wholly blamed on the quality of the investigation. There wasn't CCTV everywhere the way there is now, nor were there computers and smartphones with synchronised time. Everything relied on clocks and watches which may have been running a few minutes slow or fast, and on the recollections of people who would know the rough time of day but not necessarily the exact minute or hour.

Other than knowing Suzy left work at around lunchtime, and her car was found on Stevenage Road at just after 10:00PM, nothing else about her movements can be 100% confirmed because no trace of her has ever been found.

I do wonder how the investigation would have gone if Suzy's mother hadn't been Monday-morning quarterbacking the entire time, but it's now almost 40 years too late to do anything about that. What's done is done.

From the moment I began looking into Suzy's case, I felt it must have been Suzy's car parked on Stevenage Road all afternoon. The detail about how it was parked is so specific, and IMO that detail is repeated too many times to be a coincidence. The chances of more than one car being parked in the same peculiar manner, and looking so similar as to be mistaken for one another, seems fairly small.

WJ seemed to be very sure of the 12:45 timing, and now we know why thanks to the information about AM. The chance that the 12:45 timing was off by more than a few minutes is unlikely. Maybe 12:40 at the earliest.

Some accounts cite Suzy leaving Sturgis at 12:40, but others just say some time between 12:30 and 12:40. If she left work at 12:40 and the car was first seen outside 123SR at 12:40, that appears to be impossible. But if she left work at 12:36 and the car was seen on Stevenage at 12:43, that's plausible. The timings are so tight that mere minutes really do matter.

Although the car was seemingly parked in a hurry, and not very carefully, do we know how fastidious Suzy usually was about such things? In 1986, even locking a car door might not be something every person would do. Knowing Suzy's usual habits is so important to the question of the car's condition when it was found. If she regularly parked sloppily and left the car in a bit of a mess, it would no longer be noteworthy.

I previously explained that in old Fiestas it was necessary to move the front seats to easily reach the back seats. So the position of the driver's seat isn't necessarily indicative of a bigger person having driven the car--the explanation might be as simple as Suzy sliding the seat back so that she could reach to place her large sunhat in the back window.

The schoolboy throws a spanner in the works, but his account and even his existence are very vague. AS merely writes that "One schoolboy even claimed to have seen [the car] around midday." But precisely what time is "around" midday? Could 12:45 be considered "around" midday?

I don't think the car's presence on Stevenage Road precludes Suzy being at Shorrolds Road. Not if there was another person, with another car, waiting for her on Stevenage Road. I think we can all agree that in most of the proposed scenarios another vehicle would have to be involved.

 

[Interested_But_Confused]

I was going to say "Look how white that light blue Fiesta looks" but then it occurred to me that WJ walked past the car with AM, the car's actual owner. If it was her car all along and not SJL's she'd surely have cleared this up very easily later. Her light blue Fiesta should not have been around anyway, as her husband later arrived back from work in it. If he got back at 5 it must have been gone for the day by 8 or 9am.

Agreed about the colour. There was a discussion a few pages back about how pale the Mahon's car was, and how it could have looked white in certain light conditions.

The Mahon's car was used later in the Crimewatch reconstruction, so if I had to guess, it probably just happened to be parked on the road when they recorded that piece of footage. It probably wasn't there on the day Suzy disappeared because, as you say, AM's husband arrived back from work in it.

 

[Eastend Eagle]

Just a quick point on the drivers seat position, Suzy, JC (Sturgis) & JC (Prime Suspect) are all within approximately 2 inches in height.
So none of them would really have needed to move the drivers seat. By contrast other people known to Suzy were much taller AL & TS spring to mind (the later being well over 6 ft IIRC), not that any of them had anything to do with her disappearance.
I’m of the opinion that a perpetrator drove the car to Stevenage Road and not Suzy.
If you believe WJ, then Suzy never went to either Stevenage or Shorrolds Road. So had to have been taken when she got to her car in Whittingstall Road.

...or she was abducted from another road near to Sturgis...

JMO

 

[WiseOwl]

...or she was abducted from another road near to Sturgis...

JMO

If not Whittingstall Road, then where?

 

[WiseOwl]

What has always surprised me about Suzy's car is if someone other than Suzy had left it there then why Stevenage Road? It seemed to be at the time (and probably still is) a busy residential street with plenty of people about so why would anyone choose to dump it there, especially in the middle of the day? Why not in one of the quieter side streets like nearby Eternit Walk or Millshot Close?

If it was left in Stevenage Road by someone other than Suzy that day then i think they were extremely lucky not to have been seen.

 

[Pinkizzy]

A football ground is on Stevenage Road, that is probably why it was parked along there. moo

 

[Eastend Eagle]

If not Whittingstall Road, then where?

Rostrevor Mews which apparently was just a service road for the properties of 656-674 Fulham Road including the Crocodile Tears wine bar back in 1986.

MOO

 

[Eastend Eagle]

What has always surprised me about Suzy's car is if someone other than Suzy had left it there then why Stevenage Road? It seemed to be at the time (and probably still is) a busy residential street with plenty of people about so why would anyone choose to dump it there, especially in the middle of the day? Why not in one of the quieter side streets like nearby Eternit Walk or Millshot Close?

If it was left in Stevenage Road by someone other than Suzy that day then i think they were extremely lucky not to have been seen.

Perhaps it was due to the nature of the people who lived near that spot at the time?...

MOO

 

[WiseOwl]

A football ground is on Stevenage Road, that is probably why it was parked along there. moo

So a Fulham supporter! Maybe they were a fan of Fulham FC and were familiar with Stevenage Road!