Met officers say Suzy Lamplugh disappearance still haunts them after 40 years

Police officers investigating the disappearance of estate agent Suzy Lamplugh in west London say they remain "haunted" by the case, four decades after she went missing.

Lamplugh, 25, vanished after leaving her Fulham office to meet a client on the afternoon of 28 July 1986. She never returned and her body has never been found.

As the Metropolitan Police investigation is due to be mothballed next year, cold case detectives say they are troubled by the continuing mystery.

To mark the 40th anniversary of her disappearance, the Lamplugh family has released previously unseen photographs featuring her siblings Lizzie, Tamsin and Richard and her parents Paul and Diana.

In releasing the intimate family images, her siblings described her as "a truly beautiful person inside and out".

On the day she vanished, Lamplugh's diary noted an appointment with a man listed only as "Mr Kipper" in Shorrolds Road.

Her white Ford Fiesta was later found abandoned nearby but there was no trace of the estate agent.

She was declared "presumed dead" in 1993.

Det Ch Insp Teresa Foster from the Met Police said she believed Lamplugh may have been targeted by a stalker.

She had been given a desk in the office window because her employers thought she was attractive and would draw in customers.

Foster said: "I'm more inclined to believe that stalking side, that someone has seen her, a predator of some type, and then lured her into a false meeting."

The theory chimes with the cause taken up by Lamplugh's parents, who set up the Suzy Lamplugh Trust after she vanished. The charity campaigns on personal safety and runs the National Stalking Helpline.

Foster said it was the fact Lamplugh had never been found that continued to trouble officers.

"It haunts myself as the senior investigating officer, and I think that comes down to the fact that Suzy's never been found," she said.

Her wish, she added, is still to "bring Suzy home".

Evidence gathered from the headrest of a seat in her car using adhesive tape was sent to the US for DNA testing, but no profile could be found.

A smudged fingerprint on the rear-view mirror has also never been matched.

Foster believes advances in AI or forensics could one day crack the case, or that someone may finally come forward. She pointed to two recent Met convictions that turned on relatives passing on information decades later.

Janice Nix was convicted in June of the 1978 manslaughter of her five-year-old stepdaughter Andrea Bernard.

In the same month, brothers Michael and Anthony Stewart were jailed for the 1984 murder of civil servant Anthony Littler.

Months after Lamplugh's disappearance, her parents set up the Suzy Lamplugh Trust, which campaigns on personal safety.