Det Ch Insp Teresa Foster first heard about the disappearance of Suzy Lamplugh when she was 12, watching TV news in her small New Zealand hometown. “It was a huge story,” she recalls. “It was shocking.” Foster later emigrated to the UK and now leads the Metropolitan police’s cold case homicide team. Four decades after Lamplugh vanished, she is making a final appeal for information that could lead to the discovery of the estate agent’s body and bring closure for her family.
The 25-year-old left her south-west London office at about 12.40pm on Monday 28 July 1986 and was never seen again. Colleagues believed she intended to take a client on a viewing because she took the keys for a nearby flat; a diary entry noted a 12.45pm meeting with a “Mr Kipper” at 37 Shorrolds Road, Fulham. It became one of the largest missing persons investigations ever mounted in the UK.
“Met police issue final appeal for information on Suzy Lamplugh's disappearance, 40 years after she vanished.”
Foster, whose 15-strong team remains hopeful, said: “We’re not going to give up on trying to find where Suzy is. It’s going to take a change in forensics or technology, or a change of allegiance, or someone coming forward.” The Met has this year solved two other historic cold cases – a murder and a manslaughter – after family members of those involved abandoned loyalties to relatives in later life.
Despite the vast passage of time – the year of Lamplugh’s disappearance saw Prince Andrew’s wedding, the Chernobyl fallout, mad cow disease, and Gorbachev’s glasnost – the case still troubles police. “We’re very close to the family, so it does haunt us that we can’t give them answers,” Foster said.