Serial killer Steve Wright – The Suffolk Strangler – and missing Suzy Lamplugh worked together on a luxury liner.
A cold case police probe into a missing estate agent are looking at possible links with a notorious serial killer. The Metropolitan Police is examining the relationship between Suzy Lamplugh and Steve Wright, also known as The Suffolk Strangler.
Detectives from the cold case Homicide unit have been carrying out a review of ‘Operation Phoebus,’ the original investigation into Suzy’s disappearance, and are exploring a possible connection between Suzy and Steve, after new witnesses told The Mirror about his time on board the luxury liner with Suzy, who went missing aged 25.
Wright – who is serving a whole life tariff for killing six women – worked with Suzy on the QE2. The 67-year-old finally admitted he was a murderer last week, pleading guilty to strangling Victoria Hall. Police are now expected to speak to him about the missing woman.
The QE2’s movements indicate that Wright arrived in the UK on the morning Suzy disappeared, according to official records seen by The Mirror. The ship docked at Southampton for two days. Wright’s ex wife also recalls him appearing at their home in Essex briefly around that time for a surprise visit.
A spokeswoman for the Met Police said: “The Metropolitan Police Service’s investigation into the disappearance and murder of Suzy Lamplugh is ongoing, and detectives remain committed to securing justice for her family.
“Over the years, hundreds of pieces of information have been carefully followed up by officers, and we continue to assess any new information brought to our attention.”
Wright is believed to have been working on the liner when it docked there on July 28, 1986, the same day Suzy vanished after going to meet a client called ‘Mr Kipper’. His ex-wife, Diane Cole, who spoke to police 17 years ago for five hours about Wright’s links with Suzy, told The Mirror she’d left the ship months earlier than Wright in 1986.
But she now recalls him appearing on her doorstep in Halstead, Essex, “in the height of summer” during a surprise visit. She said he arrived loaded down with posh makeup but only had time to stop for a cup of tea.
“I remember it being the height of summer because I had the kids that lived next door in a paddling pool in my garden,” Di, who is now 71 from the north east, told the Mirror. “He drank that (the tea) and said he had to rush and get back. He arrived with all this Christian Dior makeup for me. Where did he get it all from? Suzy was a beautician on the ship. I do think it is right the police look at him.”
She also points out she saw Wright twice chatting to Suzy in the corridor by their cabins when they were all working on the QE2 together. The “beautiful” worker was a beautician and Wright a steward.
Their ship QE2 started the four-and-a-half day transatlantic journey from New York the Wednesday before, meaning it arrived in the early hours, giving Wright plenty of time to get to London, according to the Mirror.
The ship’s log shows the boat spent 26 days in total moored in Southampton in 1986. The rest of the year it was either at sea or docked in foreign ports.
The records confirm Di’s recollection that Wright left his job in October 1986 when the boat was taken out of service to remove the steam turbine engines.
Suzy started working as a beautician on the QE2 three years earlier, aged 22. At the time of her murder she had been an estate agent for 16 months. Witnesses have confirmed that Wright got to know Suzy during her time on the ship.
Steve Adler, a former steward on the QE2, said in 2006: “Steve wasn’t really one of the lads and was on the periphery but he liked the girls. He would ‘sniff’ around all the girls and particularly the beauticians like Suzy.” Fellow QE2 shipmate Paul Tennant, a former waiter, said previously that Wright “tried to become a friend of Suzy’s all the time”.
And more recently Terry Cassidy told the Mirror he would definitely have known Suzy who was behind reception at the salon right next to the shop where his then girlfriend Di worked.
Suzy vanished in the middle of a working Monday after apparently going to show a client around a house a few minutes’ walk from her office in Fulham, south west London. A note scribbled in her appointments diary read: “12.45 Mr Kipper, 37 Shorrolds Rd o/s outside”.
It could not be established when the arrangement to meet the mystery man was made or whether he had come into the office or telephoned. Suzy left her office after 12.40pm and a woman fitting her description was seen at the Shorrolds Road house.
Her company car, a white Ford Fiesta, was found by police in Stevenage Road at 10.01pm on the day she vanished. It was badly parked around a mile from the flat on Shorrolds Road that she was due to show to a “Mr Kipper”.
The handbrake was off and her purse was in the door pocket. Her seat was not in its usual position but pushed further back, suggesting Suzy may have been attacked in the car or had not been the last person to drive it. It was parked outside another flat being marketed by her estate agency and one theory was that she had shown her killer around that property.
The spot is close to the Thames, and police frogmen searched the river in the early days of the investigation. A woman fitting Suzy’s description was seen by a number of witnesses leaving the Shorrolds Road flat with a man at around 1pm and getting into her car with him.
An artist’s impression showed an “extremely smart” man wearing a dark suit with dark, swept-back hair, who bore a resemblance to killer John Cannan. He was between 5ft 7in and 5ft 9in tall, white and aged between 25 and 30.
Cannan was considered to be the prime suspect, but the CPS ruled there was not enough evidence to charge him in 2002. It was not until 2006 that Wright featured in their investigation. Inmate Cannan died last year aged 70 before officers had a chance to quiz him again. It is thought Wright has never been quizzed by police about Suzy’s disappearance.
Suzy, who was 5ft 6in tall and wearing a black jacket, grey skirt and peach-coloured blouse, was spotted by a friend with a man she did not recognise driving north up Fulham Palace Road at 2.45pm. The case is thought to be the UK’s longest-running murder probe, having been actively investigated since the day she disappeared .
Suzy’s mother Diana Lamplugh died in 2011 after being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 2003, and her retired solicitor father Paul passed away in 2018.
Wright’s ex wife Diane, feels lucky to have escaped with her life after numerous violent attacks during her relationship with Wright. They started dating after meeting on the QE2 and married in 1987, a year after Suzy disappeared.
Talking about the time she saw them chatting on the ship, she has told The Mirror: “They came to my attention twice when I stuck my head out of the cabin to see where the hell he was and I saw them talking. He was having a lovely time. I don’t think she was interested in him but he was her.
“I was in the main shop with Suzy working nearby and she was very pretty, very nice. She was most popular with most people, especially the men. But he never mentioned her to me at all. He was a man of mystery. He’s like Jack the Ripper.”
She also recalls his violent outbursts attacking her with a knife or scissors in her cabin, but missing and hitting her cabin door and trying to strangle her. Diane told how Wright would take ‘uppers’ on the ship to keep awake on his long shifts.
And on one occasion he used her lipstick to scrawl ‘whore’ and ‘slut’ on her cabin door after she went out for the day. “I quickly wiped it off,” she said. But not before the crew passing down the corridor had seen it.
She added: “He should tell the truth for the sake of Susie’s family. And for anybody else he’s done in. It’s cruel. I definitely do think the police really need to look at him again because I know how bad he could be. “
Wright is serving time for five murders in Ipswich all in 2006; Tania Nicol, 19, Gemma Adams, 25, Anneli Alderton, 24, Paula Clennell, 24, and Annette Nicholls, 29.
He recently admitted killing Victoria Hall, 17, after she was on a night out in Felixstowe where he had family and was born. But it is believed he could be behind at least five more, including three sex workers from Norwich.
Jeannette Kempton, aged 32 from Brixton, whose body was found in a ditch in 1989, Natalie Pearman, 16, who died of asphyxia in Norwich in 1992, Amanda Duncan, 26, from Ipswich went missing a year later in 1993, Kellie Pratt, 28, last seen in Norwich in 2000 and Michelle Bettles aged 22 from Norwich who was strangled in 2002.
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