John Cannan is Dying

The headline is the only fact you can take from recent media reports about John Cannan. Their relentless connection of Cannan to the missing estate agent Suzy Lamplugh is a red herring.

Many months or years ago, I created a Google Alert for the term “John Cannan”. I get perhaps two hits a month and it is never really news. Today was different. I received 6 separate alerts for basically the same story: John Cannan is dying faster than I am, and might die at any moment. Why is that news?

John Cannan is in prison for the murder of Shirley Banks, although you will have to read a long way into the recent press coverage to discover that. The Sun quotes former detective Jim Dickie at length, and rehashes old fragments which some people use to connect Cannan to the missing estate agent Suzy Lamplugh. I really like Jim Dickie. He is a kind and honest person who has been haunted and no doubt traumatized by one of the most famous and stubborn missing person cases of the last half century. But Dickie is mistaken.

The naive willingness of the press to connect Cannan and Suzy Lamplugh makes me also question those who connect him to Sandra Court. I have not studied the Sandra Court murder in close detail, but many people are too willing to invent serial killers by joining unrelated cases. Serial killers are few and far between. Even though Sandra Court’s body was recovered, the police still cannot pin her murder on…