Jill Dando might have been described as the next Suzy Lamplugh - an exceptionally glamorous young woman suddenly meeting a grisly fate in the pleasant purlieus of Fulham. Or to the resentful, she might be classed as an extreme case of Missing White Woman Syndrome, unfairly hogging the front pages.
After all the painstaking research into the case, we're pretty sure we know what happened. But we still have no facts to go on, only a lot of likelihoods, some of them put forward by unlikely people. On balance, it seems that a laddish villain from Bristol, newly released from custody, is looking in an estate agent's window, not for desirable properties (as a man in his position might well not) but for desirable office staff. Selecting his target, he pretends he's interested in a house and makes friends with her while she's showing him round, because he seems to be the dodgy boyfriend with the West country accent whom she has been describing (rather uneasily) to a friend.
His next appointment is marked in her diary, where he is identified as 'Mr. Kipper', an improbable name. But villains use many names, and chillingly we learn that this man, with his truly shocking record of violent crime (he has a 'problem' about rejection) was nicknamed Kipper by the other jailbirds. Then it turns out that this rendezvous has nothing to do with property - which is why the two of them (or a couple remarkably like them) are seen arguing quite heatedly in his car, her own company-car having been abandoned unlocked several streets away, for reasons still unknown.
And that remains the last sighting of lovely, forever-young Suzy Lamplugh. But her name registered sharply on the public, always pictured with that famous optimistic smile that was never out of the media for years on end.
Somewhere in the prison system, a lifer called John Cannan is amusing himself by scattering periodic clues about where Suzy may have been buried, sending whole squads of honest cops to excavate fields and woodland, so far without result. And the Suzy Lamplugh Trust, launched by her heartbroken parents, makes some attempt to alert young office workers to take care when they're left alone with strangers. There are countries where the John Cannans of this world suddenly vanish mysteriously, without too much lamenting of their human rights.