[slow dramatic music]
It's incredibly claustrophobic, isn't it?
You think someone would have seen something,
wouldn't you?
[David] 39, blue door, 37.
There it is.
Can you remember when the appointment was?
[Emilia] 12:45 with Mr. Kipper.
And then she just disappears.
And we have no idea what happened to her.
[eerie childish music]
[suspenseful music]
Suzy Lamplugh was only 25 years old when she went missing.
She's described as bright and bubbly, funny, ambitious
popular, and hugely adept at her job.
[David] She was in an estate agent.
[Emilia] She was doing well.
She's a professional young woman.
She's living in her own flat.
She's got her own money,
and here suddenly she goes missing off the streets of Fulham
and no one can work out what on earth has happened to her.
And if she could go missing in broad daylight
never to be seen again,
well, what about all the other women?
Are they in danger too?
And then she was declared dead in 1993,
but no one has ever been prosecuted.
And yet it was one of the largest police investigations
of its day.
And it's not for the want of trying by her parents,
Diana and Paul Lamplugh.
Who you had a personal connection to?
Yeah, I shared many a platform with Diana
throughout the '80s and the '90s,
and I remember one particular occasion.
She got all the women in the hall to stand up
and then she made them scream.
And she said, if my Suzy had screamed
maybe she'd be alive today.
Okay, well let's look at the witness statements
that we've got,
and try and piece together
the facts that we know about what happened
on the day Suzy disappeared.
[slow music]
There are literally scores of witness statements
on the day.
Noel Devier, an unemployed barman who says
he sees Suzy outside 37 Shorells Road about 12:50.
[indistinct chatter]
We know that she goes into her estate agent's store
just on the Fulham Road
and that she tries to deal with a flurry of offers
that came in for houses over the weekend.
And they managed to trace all the clients that Suzy had
except Mr. Kipper, who they could find no details of.
We know her car,
this white Ford Fiesta, is found a mile away
from Shorells Road, in Stevenage Road
outside this very garage.
Significantly the driver's seat was pushed back
from its usual forward position.
So further back than probably a woman would have
it to drive.
The car was parked askew from the pavement
and about 18 inches across this garage.
And the handbrake wasn't engaged.
The door to the driver's side was open.
The passenger door was locked.
The hypothesis must be
that the man who abducts her
drives her car to this spot
so that he can transfer her
from this car into a car that he's already got parked
somewhere up the street.
How did he do that?
By using violence or the threat of violence,
or perhaps even charm?
There are witness reports
that someone fitting Suzy's description
was seen possibly arguing with a smartly dressed man
in a black BMW or Mercedes racing off in this area.
We should speak to someone who worked on the case
the day Suzy went missing.
[slow mysterious piano music]
I'm running a bit late.
I'm going to speak to a detective
who was on the case from day one.
Okay.
Speak to you later.
Brings back a lot of emotion, really.
It's a mystery, absolute mystery.
I went to Suzy's flat.
Paul Lamplugh, Suzy's father,
was already at Fulham police station.
So I took him with me.
-Emotions were high. -[Emilia] Yeah.
Because I didn't know what I was going to find in there.
Mr. Lamplugh had to be restrained by my colleague
not to follow me in.
And nothing untoward was found in there.
There was no disturbance.
There was no sign of Suzy.
And there was nothing that would give you any information
about what had happened in any way, any connection?
Nothing at all, absolutely nothing.
It's like a parent's worst nightmare.
Exactly, exactly that.
-We didn't have CCTV. -[Emilia] Yeah.
We didn't have mobile phone intelligence.
Yeah.
We didn't have DNA.
Would we have found Suzy alive immediately
because of technology that we've got today?
I think we would have done.
Every single detective on that team,
they had one aim and that was to find Suzy.
[Emilia] Yeah.
It became sort of, it ran our lives really.
That was your main objective in life.
And even today, there's that feeling
we failed them.
We failed the family.
What would you like to see happen now?
My hope would be purely to find where Suzy lays.
Unfortunately, Mr. and Mrs. Lamplugh are now deceased.
Yeah.
But it still leaves siblings.
They need to put Suzy to rest
in the place where they want to rest her.
[slow mysterious music]
As a case that remains with him all these years later,
he said that there was a sense of failure
that they didn't find Suzy.
He wanted Suzy's body to be found for the family.
And of course to find out who did it.
Okay, I'm on my way to see Richard Lamplugh,
Suzy's brother.
[Emilia] What are you gonna ask him?
I don't want our investigation to be seen
as intrusive in any way.
And so I'd like to find out from him
what he'd like us to discover.
[Emilia] I hope it goes okay.
[slow piano music]
[Richard] She looks very pretty there, doesn't she?
She's beautiful.
That's how I really remember her.
She enjoyed the good times, you know.
And in that time when she, before she disappeared
things were all going well and things seem to be looking up.
And can you remember that time when you suddenly
realized she'd gone missing?
What was that day like?
You don't want to believe that she's,
something's happened to her really bad.
But eventually you sort of think, hmm.
She must, something's really gone wrong here.
Your hopes then die a bit.
But you've still got to try and keep positive.
Were you surprised by the press interest
in Suzy's disappearance?
I was totally surprised.
You know, the amount of press you think,
oh they're bound to... someone's bound to tell you
that they saw her get into a car
or something like this.
And of course, nothing sort of appeared.
So it just goes on and on.
When someone disappears
you don't have a sort of
anywhere to remember as at.
You know, she's somewhere out there
and we don't have anywhere to remember her.
We don't have a grave or didn't have anything like that.
It would be great to have a place
for where we could bury her as such, you know.
I would want her somewhere that we could put her.
So, that's how I feel.
[Emilia] How was Richard?
Well, I'm glad I came to see Richard
because for one thing
it reminds me about why we're doing this.
Of course.
They would like to find Suzy's body
so that they have some place that they controlled
where they could remember their sister.
Of course.
So where did we go from here?
[suspenseful music]
Let's take a look at all the suspects
in Suzy Lamplugh's abduction and murder.
Michael Sams, who is serving a life sentence
for the murder of teenager Julie Dart in 1991.
And the kidnap of Birmingham estate agent Stephanie Slater
in 1992.
Yeah, so obviously it's the mention of Stephanie Slater.
As soon as you say estate agent you get--
Red flags.
That rings alarm bells for people.
Crucially in the 1970's
Sam's had his right leg amputated because he had cancer.
Remember we've got all this witness testimony
that describes Mr. Kipper.
Nobody has ever said that Mr. Kipper
was walking with a limp.
So I think we can rule him out.
Okay.
Steve Wright.
He is serving a life sentence
for the murder of five women in Suffolk.
And he worked on the QE2 with Suzy in the 1980s.
Yeah, you're quite right.
He knew Susie Lamplugh,
who was also working on the ship at the same time.
And indeed even more significantly
at one stage Wright's ex wife claimed
that he was on shore leave
on the day that Suzy went missing.
Now I know that immediately brings him into the frame
but when the police looked at Quenard's records
they were able to establish that in fact
he was working, he was on board ship on that day.
And therefore, I don't think he's a legitimate suspect.
Okay.
There is one other unnamed guy who briefly dated Suzy
after meeting her in a wine bar.
And apparently he lived on Shorells Road.
And so again, we've got a few red flags.
A few alarm bells.
Shorrels Road and he had previously dated Suzy.
But again, when the police looked
at his movements on the day that she disappears
he has an alibi that's water tight.
And so all of that brings us back to the prime suspect
that the met police themselves name,
which is John Cannan.
Let's look at what we know about him.
He's currently in prison
for the abduction and murder of Shirley Banks
who he abducted and killed in October, 1987,
which is how many months after Suzy disappeared?
15 months.
15 months, now
her body isn't found until April 1988
You know what really strikes me
is how similar Suzy and Shirley looked.
Don't you think?
It's like he had a type.
We also know that he was convicted
of robbery and rape in 1981.
He went into a knitwear shop, robbed it at knife point,
and he raped the 37 year old pregnant shop owner
in front of her mother and 17 month old son.
This is a particularly nasty offense, isn't it?
Truly awful.
And he was given an eight year sentence.
He served five,
and then for the last six months
he was sent to a prison release hostel
at Wormword Scrubs,
which is 4.3 miles from where Suzy worked,
and which gave him ample opportunity
to go to wine bars, to chat up women,
which he actually boasted about to his workmates.
And allegedly one of them was called Crocodile Tears
which was opposite Sturges estate agents where Susie worked.
And there are other pieces of circumstantial evidence
that linked Cannan to Suzy's disappearance.
Look at the photo fit of Mr. Kipper.
How that resembles this photograph of John Cannan.
[Emilia] Yeah, they're so similar, aren't they?
The other thing to remember
that connects Cannan to Suzy's disappearance
is that when he is actually arrested for the murder
of Shirley Banks,
he was driving a black BMW,
which of course crops up in several
of the witness testimonies
about the day that Suzy disappeared.
No, I'm listening.
Hang on, hang on.
Yeah, we're on our way.
One of my contacts has got us all
of the original police tapes when John Cannan
was interviewed while in prison.
[Emilia] That could give us an insight
into Cannan's character.
[David] Well his character perhaps
but not necessarily the murder.
[Interviewer] We are in the east
at Hammersmith Police Station.
I am interviewing people who are suspected of murder.
Yes, sir.
It's John David Guys Cannan.
[Interviewer] Thank you.
Welcome to my world.
This is what it's like interviewing people
who are suspected of murder
and in his case, already been convicted of murder.
So do you think he's decided
about how he's going to present himself straight away?
Totally, the glasses on his head,
the color turned up,
the John David Guys Cannan, certainly.
You know, he's clearly thought
about who he's going to be in this particular interview.
Does that fit with a man who can take
on the character of Mr. Kipper?
-Totally. -[eerie music]
I don't really see, as he's currently saying,
what else there is to be said.
Mrs. Lamplugh thinks I've done it.
She's accused me of doing it.
I've answered every question you've put to me.
I've invited Mrs. Lamplugh herself up to the prison
to have a quiet word to me.
And I've said I'll go on the lie detector test.
The truth drug or anything you wanna put me on.
[David] What did you pick up?
He has no empathy for her.
He blames her.
Think about it as well as performing a distancing effect.
So he uses her title, Mrs. Lamplugh.
Keeps her one stage removed from him.
And then this whole thing about
he's trying to be helpful
I'll take the truth drug.
I'll go in the lie detector test.
But why does he do that?
Well because it has no evidentiary value.
He knows that kind of evidence
from either the truth drug or the lie detector tests
can't be admissible in an English court.
So it's all just smoke and mirrors?
Smoke and mirrors.
It's obfuscation.
Might've done many things wrong in my life.
Things that, believe me, I'm genuinely sorry for.
And one or two I haven't been caught for.
Can you play that again?
And one or two I haven't been caught for.
One or two things that he hasn't been caught for?
Why does he do that?
Well, in my experience,
the truth often slips out.
Often they prove to be the authentic self
talking about crime.
What happens if he didn't do it?
And he is saying, I didn't do it.
I have no connection to this.
The role of the police in those situations
is to find pieces of evidence,
albeit circumstantial pieces,
that can be cross-referenced
against other verifiable sources.
That's how you progress this kind of interview
into being able to make a charge.
What I don't get is
with everything we know
and everything that the police know
how come Cannan hasn't been charged with the murder of Suzy?
[suspenseful music]
I'm trying as I've always tried for 12 years.
To try and help you.
To try and help persuade you
that it wasn't me.
And I've said I'll go on the lie detector test,
the truth drug, anything you would want it to be.
And then it's not evidentiary.
-[dramatic music] -[phone dialing]
I've managed to get my hands
on an internal police report from 2000.
It's a damning review of the original investigation.
And it says that Cannan wasn't treated as the chief suspect
because the lead officer had fallen out with Suzy's mum
believing she was behind media leaks about the case.
I fixed a meeting with the senior investigating officer
in the second investigation.
Speak to you in a bit, yeah.
Yeah, see you later, bye.
Why was Jim Cannan never treated as a suspect
in the first investigation?
Good question.
I don't know the answer to that
because I never made that decision.
All I can say is certainly when I re-investigated
the Lamplugh case
John Cannan became the only prime suspect.
Why he wasn't interviewed in the first investigation
I don't know.
Why wasn't he put in an ID parade?
I don't know.
Why some of the key witnesses weren't spoken to,
I don't know.
And why basically opportunities were missed?
I don't know.
But I can't get my head around
the thought process behind it.
Certainly there was sufficient evidence back in '86
for Cannan to be treated as a suspect.
Why has Cannan never been charged?
Very good question.
Myself and colleagues submitted a report
to the crown prosecution service in 2003,
but in order for a prosecution to proceed
we needed to convince a judge
that there had been no abuse of process on two counts.
One, he felt that Cannan had been tried
and convicted by the media.
And you can't really argue with that
because there's been massive,
and continues to be massive media coverage of this incident.
And the second was
that the police either had ignored, mislaid,
or did not use clues that they had
in the original investigation in 1986.
In your opinion, did Joan Cannan abduct
and kill Suzy Lamplugh?
In my opinion John Cannan is the only
and he's the prime suspect
for the abduction and murder of Suzy Lamplugh.
Jim said that Cannan wasn't treated as a suspect
in the original investigation.
That the police didn't caution him
before they interviewed him in custody,
that he wasn't put in ID parades,
that they didn't follow up on key witnesses,
and they didn't check his alibi.
Oh, this sounds really muddled and confused, doesn't it?
The CPS said that they weren't going to take him to trial
because of lack of evidence.
Proper process wasn't followed.
And they felt
that he did experience trial by media already.
Trial by media.
That's what he's going to accuse us of doing as well, I bet.
Exactly.
Can he ever be tried for it?
And another thing Jim suggested speaking
to a couple of people
who had come to him with some new evidence recently.
But he was cautious and said
that they might not want to be identified
if we spoke to them.
Well I'm always interested in new information.
[Emilia] He was suggesting we write to John Cannan
and ask him for a meeting.
I am, that's exactly what I'm asking.
Why would we do that?
Well, by asking for a meeting,
we can put to him those pieces of circumstantial evidence
that connect him to the story of Suzy Lamplugh
and ask for an explanation.
But is that right to be giving him a voice
given what he's done?
Well, I suppose if I was the family of a murder victim
I'd say it wasn't.
Right
But my life is about investigations.
And I know that the only way that I can ever
progress an investigation is by talking to that person.
So we could ask him what he remembers
about his experience of life in London at the time,
the social scene and Fulham maybe,
where we know that he would hang out
Perhaps he encountered Suzy by accident.
Could get us closer to the truth.
Yeah, I'm after a favour,
about a Cat A.
Yep, okay.
C-A-N-N-A-N.
Okay, thanks.
[suspenseful music]
We've had a response from John Cannan.
We can't see him, but he's written to us.
[David] I'm on my way.
Thank you for your letter.
The problem as I see it is this.
I was not involved in any way in the disappearance
of Miss Lamplugh.
So I really don't know what I can tell you.
So we wanted to give him a voice.
We wanted to get him to address himself
to some of the circumstantial evidence,
but he says I never met Lamplugh
One of the things that we asked him about
was the Fulham social scene
where he might have acidentally met Suzy Lamplugh.
Yeah he says, "Cannot tell you what the social scene
in London was like, as I was only there for six months
and was in a low paid job
earning around 300 pounds per week.
I lived in a hostel
and didn't enjoy a large circle of friends.
What pubs or eating places I occasionally frequented
were principally local."
That completely divorces him from the Fulham social scene
of the 1980s, doesn't it?
I'm not a yuppie, is what he's saying in this passage.
But look at one of these passages.
"I drove a smart, black BMW 316.
I had beautiful clothes and in those days girls galore."
That is a completely polar opposite description
to how he said that he was living
and what his life was like in previous correspondence.
This description seems to connect him
and there a lot of similarities
between what's being described here
and the MO of Mr. Kipper.
But of course in this passage
he's also lying to us.
"I did not need to abduct women," exclamation mark.
But he was convicted of abducting and murdering
Shirley Banks, so
a complete lie.
We're trying to give him a voice,
and having done so I think I would now like us
to move on back into the criminology.
I'd like us to think about
the abduction and murder of Shirley Banks
and how her body was disposed of by Cannan
after he had killed her to see if that
might be the key to unlocking what happened
to Suzy Lamplugh in 1986.
[mysterious music]
It's eerie, isn't it?
Standing here where John Cannan disposed
of Shirley Banks's body.
She was lying face down in the ditch.
Her skull had been fractured.
She was naked and she could only be identified
by the jewelry that she was wearing.
It just can't be a coincidence, can it,
that he disposed of her and in a place called
Dead Woman's Ditch.
Well, as far as I'm concerned,
there's no coincidence
when we're dealing with murder.
He's chosen the site very deliberately.
He's playing a game.
And what does that tell us about him?
He likes to think of himself as one step ahead.
Catch me if you can is really what he's saying.
So he's playing games with the police?
Yeah, absolutely.
We've seen him interviewed by the police.
We saw what he was like
when he was in an interview situation.
Effectively he was like an upstanding member of the public.
When we know he wasn't.
And he even said
that there were crimes that he hadn't been caught for yet.
Which crimes was he alluding to?
I think there's quite a lot
we can tell about Cannan
from what he does to Shirley Banks.
We know that he abducted her on the 7th of October 1987.
And we know that she called into work
on the 8th of October and said that she was ill.
So he's kept her for a whole night alive.
Yeah, he likes to be with his victim.
And can you imagine what it must have been like
for Shirley Banks that day?
That time that she's spending with Cannan,
because all that time she would be
hoping and praying that she would be able to return
to her husband.
All the time Cannan would have been enjoying
every single moment that he had power and control
over her.
Criminologists would say that he was processed focused,
not act focus.
And what does that mean?
That he's enjoying the sense of being with a victim
he's then going to kill.
So he enjoys it?
He enjoys it.
If he was act focused and he was simply interested
in the kill,
he'd kill and move on.
That's not what floats his boat, criminologically.
He likes to be with his victim.
And you know, we're not hypothesizing here.
This is definitive.
This is what we know John Cannan is capable of doing.
And you know what?
Could he have been capable
of doing something similar with Suzy Lamplugh?
[eerie music]
[David] Dead Woman's Ditch has got me thinking.
We need to use geo profiling.
My friend works with the police,
and she uses locations of crimes
to predict where an offender might live
and helps the police narrow
down the pool of suspects.
But for us, maybe she could use the science
of geo profiling
to help predict--
Where the murderer could have disposed of Suzy's body.
That's what I'm hoping for.
[slow piano music]
So what does the sign say?
Geographic profiling involves the reconstruction
and interpretation of an offender's mental map.
There's two components to that process.
One is an objective analysis
that's based on a statistical analysis of the point pattern
that an offender leaves.
And then the second part of that
is a more subjective analysis
looking at the underlying environment,
interpreting that as the way,
perhaps very much the way an offender would
when he was trying to make decisions
about where to offend next
or where to dispose of the body.
In terms of Suzy, how have you gone about
trying to think about Cannan's mental map
and the spaces and areas he's comfortable with?
What you'll see here is this is the results
of the geographic profile overlaid on the map.
To interpret this
we look at the colors.
This red area is the highest probability
that an offender has a base here, okay.
And then from there
these colors represent decreasing, likelihoods.
So Sam, we've got a group of offenses
in the Birmingham area.
A group of offenses in the London area.
And again, offenses in the Bristol area.
Yeah, what I'm focusing on
are those locations that were relevant
at the time of Suzy's disappearance.
My starting point is Cannan's home base,
Sutton Coldfield.
We know he had been released
from his bail hostel a few days earlier
and may have actually moved back to this address.
And that's where his mother lived.
-Is that right? -That's where
his mother lived, exactly.
The London home base is his pre-release hostel
when he was released from Wormwood Scrubs.
That places him in the vicinity of where Suzy disappeared.
[suspenseful music]
So I can already see
you've got the M4 really highlighted.
Why the M4?
We know that his mental map is biased
towards the west country.
The M4 leads to Bristol.
And also you can get onto the M40
from the M4 that leads up to Birmingham.
This is the ordinance survey map of the area.
So you see, we've got the M4 coming in here.
This will get him out of London.
And then he would start to be able to
identify suitable locations.
The area that you've highlighted
as I can see is the first where we've got a green space
and some river canal network.
We know looking at his past behavior
that he savored water in the locations that he used.
For me, it was about looking
along this route for the first suitable location
that fell within our red high probability area
that fit that suitability.
We can never put an X on a map
and say that's where you need to start digging.
However, the area I think is of interest is this area here.
See, it has the River Brent running through it
as well as the M4 dissecting it.
It's very accessible.
So bringing a car in here
you can get really quite close to the park.
It's fascinating.
It's like a geographical post-mortem.
Is there anything else we can find out?
[David] So this is the area we should concentrate in?
Absolutely.
That is where I suggest we really focus our attention.
[phone buzzing]
-[Emilia] Sorry. -[David] Okay.
Yes, the people you were telling me about, yeah?
That was Jim Dickey, the detective who said
that there might be some people with new information
and he's just said that they will talk to us,
and they want to meet in Brentford
which is actually within the geo profiling hotspot.
[slow suspenseful music]
The two people with new information are willing to talk,
but they don't want to be identified.
Okay, Mills, I've got the train and the cars on my right
I'm passing a storage unit which I don't know
if that existed in 1986.
Am I in slightly the right area?
Where would you like me to go?
David, if you, the way you're walking, keep going forward
and you'll see a big bridge.
Keep going.
Can I ask you while David is walking the path,
would you mind telling me about Dave and how you know Dave?
We used to child mind together in the same area.
And we were all neighbors and really all got on very well.
Will you tell us what Dave saw that morning in 1986?
Yes, Dave was on his way to work
and he would leave very early in the morning,
about five o'clock.
As he was walking down a tow path
he saw a man coming towards him
carrying quite a heavy load on wheels.
As he passed him, Dave heard a splash,
-[water splashing] -he looked around
and saw the man running with nothing in his hand.
So after his day's work, Dave went to the police station
to report what he'd seen.
[Emilia] And they were quite dismissive?
Dismissive with him.
It wasn't until 1989,
it was going to be a trial for the Shirley Banks murder,
that he saw a picture in the Evening Standard
of the man that was gonna stand for trial
and said, "That looks like the man."
Because he wanted to be absolutely sure,
he said to his wife, " I'm going down to the trial
and Exeter crown court."
He actually saw John Cannan being sentenced
and taken down from the dock.
And he came back and said, "That is definitely
the man that I saw on the canal path that morning."
After he came back from Exeter, he went to the police again
and told them this
and came back so frustrated, because again he said,
"They're not listening to me.
I don't think they believe me."
That must've been devastating for him.
He had no reason to not tell the truth.
When we spoke to Sylvia, his wife, she'd say,
"I'm fed up with him talking about it
because he's driving me mad with it.
That's all he's talking about."
It haunted him for the rest of his life.
[eerie music]
I can see a bridge.
I can see a bridge through the trees.
Is this it?
Yes, that's the bridge.
That's the bridge, David,
it should be near a bend.
It's about where you are, David.
There's evidence of steps there
which would all be built up by now.
Yeah.
[Emilia] That's where we think that he dropped the bag.
That's were Dave thought he dropped the bag.
-[slow piano music] -[birds chirping]
[David] Were these women believable?
Totally credible.
As I believe was Dave, and Jim Dickie thinks so too.
So if we accept the story that Dave tells
-as being accurate. -Yeah.
He sees somebody who identifies
as John Cannan carrying a suitcase
that he deposits in the water.
Is that the story?
Yes, and they didn't do anything about it.
He went to the police about three times apparently.
Well, I suppose all of this proves something
I've always said about cold cases.
You make them hot again if you
shake the tree proverbially
and something falls from the branches.
New witnesses come forward, new evidence emerges,
forensic techniques develop that you can test
against old exhibits that you've collected.
If Cannan was that person that Dave saw
that's credible and has to be taken seriously.
It affected the whole of Dave's life, apparently.
That's how much he believed that the person that he saw
on that tow path was John Cannan.
The bit that's still confusing to me
is that the canal is only four foot deep.
I'm not so sure what we can interpret
about a suitcase and four feet of water.
Would it be found?
Wouldn't it be found?
Could it have sunk into the mud?
I don't know.
I mean I think we're going to have to ask
a forensic pathologist
and surely you know some forensic pathologists
we could phone?
I've got a phone full of them.
Hang on.
Let me see.
[phone ringing]
Hi, it's Emelia.
I need your help.
Yes, potentially.
A body in water.
Pretty much for three decades.
In Brentford, London
by the Grand Union canal.
How usual is it
for someone to dispose of a body in a river or canal?
It happens.
You don't have to dig a hole.
You don't have to spend hours, you know
digging a grave somewhere, finding somewhere,
you know where the rivers are.
You just throw it into the river.
Water covers over it.
When you say water covers over it
does that mean that also
that a lot of the forensic evidence
that might be gathered gets destroyed?
If we're talking about sort of in there
it'll sink down to the bottom.
There's not much oxygen around.
You start to get what's it, suppolification
or adepacy formation
where basically the body turns to soap.
Body fat becomes very hard.
So a body could stay in the water for years, you know,
and if it's not dredged or anything,
eventually it will break down
and then you'll get just the bones.
The skull, pelvis, femurs,
the number of vertebra.
They, they tend to stay around.
Smaller bones get sort of washed downstream.
If you've got muddy, salty water
not much oxygen,
you could have a few big bones there
lasting 30, 40 years.
I mean, we occasionally get bodies
coming out of the Thames from Tudor times.
Well, let's talk about that.
If there were human remains in the canal,
how will that help the police
identify who the victim has been?
If you've got the skull and you've got the teeth
you can get DNA out of the teeth, particularly.
And then you've got a match against relatives.
You can identify someone
by scouring through all the old dental records.
If you know who the person is,
relatives perhaps around you can get their DNA
and match their DNA to that.
Yeah, you could identify a body.
Theoretically, could the body
of Suzy Lamplugh still be in this stretch of the canal?
If you've got the silt there
and it hasn't been touched over the last 13 years,
theoretically they could be, yeah, yeah.
So it could be worth?
Dredging the canal.
Would you say?
Not for me to say, but yeah.
There could be a sort of quite a decent amount
of human remains still in the, in the canal.
Gosh.
Millie, the body of Suzy Lamplugh
might be within this stretch of the canal.
[slow music]
We have made some significant discoveries,
haven't we?
The geo profiling,
the very first time that that has been done on this case.
That geo profiling crosses
with new information that we've uncovered.
And so we're coming to this spot.
We've heard a forensic pathologist say
that well, it's worth dredging here.
And I'm glad that we're ending by thinking about
Suzy Lamplugh.
Because for me that's quite personal.
I mean, I knew Diana her mother.
I shared a stage
with her talking to young women about personal safety.
And I think if she were still alive
I could look Diana in the face and say
we've helped move this investigation on,
uncovered evidence
about the prime suspect,
and might even have an answer
to where Suzy's remains could be.
[eerie childish music]