John Cannan

John Cannan

John David Guise Cannan is a British murderer and rapist. He is the only suspect in the murder of Suzy Lamplugh, who vanished in July 1986 after going to meet a man calling himself ‘Mr Kipper’ Cannan, a former car salesman, was convicted in July 1988 of murder and sexual offences. He was given three life sentences with a recommendation that he never be released.

About John Cannan in brief

Summary John CannanJohn David Guise Cannan is a British murderer and rapist. He is the only suspect in the murder of Suzy Lamplugh, who vanished in July 1986 after going to meet a man calling himself ‘Mr Kipper’ Cannan, a former car salesman, was convicted in July 1988 of murder and sexual offences. He was given three life sentences, with a recommendation that he never be released. Cannan’s modus operandi was to pretend to be a West Country businessman. He would ply women with chocolates and flowers and then attack when the women rejected him. He served five years of an eight-year sentence for rape after being convicted in June 1981. Only ten weeks after his release from prison, Cannan raped a woman at knifepoint in Reading, Berkshire, in October 1986, an attack he was linked to by DNA from semen. In October 1987, he tried to abduct 30-year-old Bristol businesswoman Julia Holman from a car park at around 6. 50 pm at gunpoint, but she fought him off and later identified him as her attacker. The next night he abducted Shirley Banks. Police believe that Banks was held overnight in Cannan’s flat and that he then persuaded her to phone in sick to her work, after pretending he was going to release her. In November 2002, Scotland Yard held a press conference at which, in a rare move, officers named him as the man they believe murdered Lampl Hugh. The police had first planned to link the attempted abduction of JuliaHolman to Cannan in November, before his further crimes led to his arrest.

He then lived at Foye House, Bristol, and was arrested on 29 October 1987 in Leamington Spa for an assault at a dress-point on an assistant. He evaded them briefly and they found a knife and bag with blood on it on it, then spotted him and saw his hand was bleeding, then arrested him. They found a black BMW which contained rope and an imitation handgun, which they found hidden in a toilet cistern in a garage where they found his tax disc. He had gone missing three weeks after Banks went missing, but police found his car three weeks later and found his black BMW in the garage. Police say that Cannan had been arrested for this offence earlier but he gave an alibi that he was in Sutton Coldfield at the time of the attack, and the forensic evidence was not strong enough to charge him. 150 officers from five police forces spent around 140,000 man-hours on the case. The police put out television appeals and searched Bristol Docks for Banks’ car. They also considered whether her husband Richard could be a suspect; he was quickly eliminated. When she again failed to return home, he called the police. When he rang her work the next morning, he was told she had just phoned in sick with an upset stomach 15 minutes earlier. They considered that the telephone call to herWork could mean she had left voluntarily.