John Cannan

John David Guise Cannan (born 20 February 1954) is a British murderer and rapist. A former car salesman, he was convicted in July 1988 of murder and sexual offences. He was given three life sentences with a recommendation never to be released, for the murder of Shirley Banks in Bristol in October 1987, the attempted kidnapping of Julia Holman on the previous night and the rape of a woman in Reading, in 1986. He targeted professional women.

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'. In November 2002, however, the Crown Prosecution Service decided that there was insufficient evidence to charge him. That month, Scotland Yard held a press conference at which, in a rare move, officers named him as the man they believe murdered Lamplugh.

Cannan indecently assaulted a woman in a phone box in Erdington in 1968, when he was 14, and was placed on probation. He left his wife in 1980 for Daphne Sargent, who he assaulted when she tried to leave him. He robbed a petrol station at knifepoint in February 1981, and that March, he robbed a knitwear shop at knifepoint, tied up the assistant's mother with tights, and raped the shop assistant after threatening to stab her baby. He served five years of an eight-year sentence for rape after being convicted in June 1981. He served his sentence at HM Prison Bristol and was then transferred to London. He was on day release from a hostel at Wormwood Scrubs in 1986 when Suzy Lamplugh went missing.

Police say that Cannan's modus operandi was to pretend to be a West Country businessman. He would ply women with chocolates and flowers and the attacks often followed rejection. While living in Bristol, he had an affair with a solicitor, which ended in August 1986; he threatened her and her family.

Only ten weeks after he had been finally released from prison, he raped a woman at knife-point in Reading in October 1986, an attack he was linked to by DNA from semen. He had been arrested for this offence earlier but he gave an alibi that he was in Sutton Coldfield at the time and the forensic evidence was not strong enough to charge him. An early DNA profile was inconclusive but the Home Office and ICI both ran the test again in 1988, and demonstrated a match.

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