John Cannan

John David Guise Cannan (born 20 February 1954) is a British murderer, serial rapist, serial abductor and suspected serial killer.

A former car salesman, Cannan has claimed to have had 100 one-night stands and was said to be charming.

John Cannan was born to father Cyril Cannan, a flight lieutenant in the Royal Air Force during the Second World War, and career engineer, and housewife mother Sheila Cannan in Sutton Coldfield, Birmingham, on 20 February 1954.

Cannan came from a middle-class family and attended public school until the age of 15.

He was first sent by his parents to Keyse private school for boys at age 4.

Cannan has said that, when he was seven or eight years old, a teacher sexually abused him, forcing him to drop his trousers and touch the abuser while being indecently assaulted himself; he continued to be abused by the teacher for months.

These events had a lasting effect on Cannan, who felt deeply ashamed by them, and he became afraid of school and developed a stammer from being nervous in the school environment.

At age 9, Cannan was removed from the school and taken to a doctor over his anxiety.

Cannan later claimed that the sexual abuse left him struggling with feelings of humiliation and shame, which in turn led him to express much anger and resentment.

Cannan also had a difficult relationship with his father, "who was quick to criticise and had an unpredictable temper."

Cannan was in the merchant navy for three months aged 17 then began working as a car salesman in his father's company.

In 1968, at age 14, Cannan indecently assaulted a woman in a phone box in Erdington, for which he was placed on probation.

Starting from the late 1970s up until 1980, during the final years of Cannan's troubled marriage, a series of mysterious and brutal rapes occurred in homes for sale in the West Midlands, where he was living at that time.

The unidentified rapist specifically targeted homes on the market at estate agents and became known as the House For Sale Rapist.

Twenty women were assaulted and raped in properties in the area, and no one was ever arrested for the crimes.

Police now suspect that Cannan was responsible for these offences, and that he began committing them as his marriage deteriorated.

He was married in May 1978 to June Vale and had a daughter but left them in 1980.

He married his first wife, June Vale, in May 1978, seven years after they had originally become engaged.

She would prove to be his one and only steady girlfriend although he claimed that he was hassled into marrying her.

Vale soon gave birth to a child, which Cannan did not want.

By 1980, he had slipped into alcoholism and spent much of his time frequenting bars and nightclubs in order to avoid going home to his family after work.

The rapes stopped in early-1980 when Cannan began a new relationship with a woman named Sharon Major.

Detectives would later note that the offences bore all the hallmarks of his later crimes and also noted the similarities to the disappearance of Lamplugh, who herself was an estate agent.

Notably, Cannan showed up uninvited to a house that was for sale in Shorrolds Road in Fulham days before Lamplugh was last seen there, believing that the young female occupant was alone in the house.

He was acting strangely until the woman's husband appeared, causing him to quickly leave.

Cannan left his wife in 1980 for Major, whom he attacked when she tried to leave him.

After turning up at her house on New Year's Eve with a bottle of wine (and unbeknownst to her, a gun).

He strangled her during the rape while telling her he was going to kill her.

Major was able to fight Cannan off and was taken to hospital in an ambulance.

Cannan told her on the way to the hospital that he had meant to kill her.

Cannan robbed a petrol station kiosk in February 1981, using a knife to threaten two female assistants.

In March that year, during a robbery at a ladies' knitwear shop, Cannan raped shop assistant Jean Bradford at knifepoint after threatening to stab her 17-month-old baby, who was in a back room; Bradford's mother arrived during the attack, only to be tied up by Cannan and made to watch the attack.

Cannan is the only suspect in the Disappearance of Suzy Lamplugh, who had an appointment in July 1986 to meet a man calling himself 'Mr Kipper' and has not been seen since.

He was given three life sentences for the murder of Shirley Banks in Bristol in October 1987; the attempted kidnapping of Julia Holman on the previous night; the rape of a woman in Reading, Berkshire, in 1986; the rape of his girlfriend in December 1980; and several other abductions, attempted abductions and sexual offences.

He became eligible for parole in September 2023, but this was refused in October 2023.

He was convicted in July 1988 of murder and multiple sexual offences, abductions and attempted abductions.

In November 2002, 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 Cannan as the man they believed murdered Lamplugh.

Cannan says he knows who killed Lamplugh, and states that this person is the same person responsible for the murder of Shirley Banks, of which he himself was convicted.

DNA evidence showed Lamplugh had previously been in a car Cannan used at the time of her disappearance.