The Disappearance of Lord Lucan
The Disappearance of Lord Lucan
In the world of True Crime, you don’t come across too many cases that involve a missing Earl who is accused of murder. The case of Lord Lucan has fascinated the people of England and around the world for over four decades. John Bingham, the seventh Earl of Lucan, disappeared on November 8, 1974, leaving behind a a mystery and a crime that it seems will never receive justice.
It happened in London’s Belgravia. A woman covered in blood stumbled into a pub called the Plumber’s Arms, calling for help and crying “He’s murdered my nanny!”
The woman was Lady Veronia Lucan, wife of Lord Lucan. She was covered in blood and had been wounded in the head. It was approximately 9:50 p.m. Sgt. Donald Baker responded to the police call. Lady Lucan told him the “he” who had killed her nanny was her husband, the Earl.
After putting Lady Lucan into an ambulance, Sgt. Baker went to check her house. He found her children there, safe. In the master bedroom, he found blood stains on the wall and a blood stained towel on the master bed. He made his way through the rest of the home, and when he reached the basement, he found the body of Sandra Rivett, the Lucan children’s nanny, at the bottom of the stairs in a large mail sack on a pool of blood. She had been bludgeoned to death.
At St. George’s hospital, Lady Veronica Lucan told police it was her husband who had attacked her and killed Sandra Rivett. Veronica had seven lacerations on her head. She was given sixty stitches. The following is Lady Lucan’s account of what happened the night of November 7, 1974.
That evening, Lady Lucan was watching television with her daughter Frances on the bed in the master bedroom. Lady Lucan lived at 46 Lower Belgraves Street with her children, but Lord Lucan did not live there with them. The couple had been estranged for quite some time and had even been going through an antagonistic custody dispute. Lady Lucan had been ordered by the court to have a nanny in order to have custody of her children.
Just before nine, their nanny Sandra Rivett checked in on them and asked if they wanted tea. They said yes. Sandra had been the Lucan’s nanny for only about nine weeks, according to Lady Lucan, though some accounts put it at even fewer weeks than nine. This was a Thursday, and Sandra usually had Thursdays off. At 9 p.m., the news came on, and Lady Lucan remembers mentioning to Frances after the news had begun that she wondered why Sandra was taking so long to bring up the tea. Frances was going to go and check on Sandra to see, but Lady Lucan decided to go instead. That incidental decision could have saved little Frances’ life.
Lady Lucan headed down to the kitchen in the basement and noticed that it was very dark, which she found strange. She heard a noise coming from down the stairs, and then someone hit her on the head at least four times. She screamed. Her attacker told her to shut up. She recognized the voice as her husband’s. He shoved three fingers into her mouth to stop her screams. At the hospital it would be found that she had lacerations on the back of her throat described as most likely caused by fingers thrust into her mouth.
Lady Lucan tried to fight her attacker off. He tried to push her down the stairs into the basement but she held onto the bannisters. He then started to strangle her and poke her in the eye. She kept fighting and grabbed his genitals, and he stepped back. It was dark but she could feel something metal covered in her hair on the ground. At the hospital, Lady Lucan’s neck did indeed show signs of being squeezed.
She said she begged him not to kill her, saying “Please don’t kill me, John.” She asked where Sandra was, and he responded that Sandra was dead and told Lady Lucan not to look. She tried to go along with him by asking what they should do with the body. She tried to convince him that no one would miss Sandra, that the nanny had few friends. She told him she would stay inside the house until her wounds had healed so no one would ever see them.
Lady Lucan said he seemed to accept this, and asked her if she had sleeping pills. She told him yes, and he took her upstairs back to her bedroom, where he told Frances to leave and go to her own bed. He took her into the bathroom and she saw that her head was covered in blood. She asked to lie down, and he put a towel over her pillow. When she lay down he gave her sleeping pills.
She thought that he was going to try to finish killing her if she went to sleep, so when he went into the bathroom to get water from the sink, she ran out of the room and out of the house. This is when she made her way to the pub down the street, the Plumber’s Arms, around 9:50 p.m. The bartender said she was covered in blood. She later found out that after she had fled the house, Lord Lucan had come out of the bathroom and called out for her, “Where are you, Veronica?” By the time the police got to the house, he was long gone.
Around 11:30 p.m., Lord Lucan showed up at a friend’s house. Susan Maxwell Scott would be the last person to see him alive, and the only person to ever hear his version of what had happened that night in person. Surprised to see him show up unannounced at such a late hour, Susan, whose husband wasn’t home, was worried Lord Lucan had come to tell her something bad had happened to her husband. But when she answered the door, he asked if her husband was home. She told him no and invited him inside. She described him as being calm but in shock. He told her that he had been walking past his estranged wife’s house on his way to change for dinner, and as he was passing by he saw a struggle in the basement. He claimed it appeared to be someone attacking Lady Lucan. Instead of calling the police or going to get help, he let himself in the front door with a key that he had. According to his story, when he got down to the basement he slipped in a pool of blood, and when he got up the attacker had run off. Susan asked him where the attacker had run off to, and Lord Lucan said “into the back somewhere”. She then asked him if he had seen the attacker enough to be able to recognize him if he saw him again, and Lord Lucan said no, that all he could say about the attacker was that he was large.
He said that Lady Lucan told him “He’s murdered the nanny” and pointed to a sack. In Lady Lucan’s version, she hadn’t made it into the basement to see the nanny, and hadn’t known she was dead until her attacker told her so. Lord Lucan told Susan Maxwell Scott that he had assumed the body of Sandra Rivett was in the sack, but hadn’t looked to see for sure. In one interview, Susan said that Lord Lucan told her his wife had mistaken him for the attacker, but in another she said he told her Lady Lucan accused him of hiring the attacker to murder her. I’ve never seen an explanation for this discrepancy. But either way, Susan believed him. He told her he had panicked and fled.
Lord Lucan called his mother from Susan’s house. He told her that the nanny was hurt at the Lower Belgraves house, and he wanted his mother to go and collect the children. He said Lady Lucan was hurt and to call “Bill”. I assume here that he was referring to his brother- in- law. Lord Lucan’s mother would later testify that he told her he saw a fight in the basement while passing the house and said he’d interrupted a fight, but she did not mention this part of the conversation in her original statement given to the police.
Susan Maxwell Scott did not call the police. She claimed later that she had not been aware that anyone was looking for him. I find this to be odd, if he had just described a murder happening in his home, and an attack on his wife, and his wife accusing him of both, at which point he had panicked and fled- how would she not assume that the police would at the very least be wanting to speak to him? He had basically just declared he was accused of murder. The logical thought following that would be that police would be looking for him.
Before he left Susan Maxwell Scott’s house, Lord Lucan wrote two letters to his brother- in- law, Bill Shand-Kitt. One of the letters was about finances, and the other was more personal. In this second letter what he wrote confirmed the part of Lady Lucan’s story about her leaving and fleeing the house while Lord Lucan was in the bathroom. He also wrote that circumstantial evidence against him was strong and that people would think that he had done it, that he was the attacker. He expressed that he wanted his children to live with his brother- in- law, and not Lady Lucan. He wrote that Lady Lucan hated him and would accuse him.
Even though Lord Lucan described slipping in a pool of blood, and therefore by his own story should have had blood on him, Susan Maxwell Scott says she doesn’t remember seeing any blood on him. Frances, his daughter who had been in the bedroom when he came upstairs with Lady Lucan, also couldn’t recall seeing any blood on him. The chair that he sat in to write the letters to his brother in law while at Susan’s house apparently had no blood on it, though I’m not sure if this declaration is a statement Susan made, or if police had later gone to check it out after finding out he’d been there.
But… both of the letters he wrote to his brother-in-law Bill had bloodstains- blood on the back of the envelopes, smeared.
He also wrote a letter to his friend Michael Stoop. I’ll go more into detail about that later, but Michael Stoop considered this letter to be a suicide note.
Lord Lucan told Susan that he had to go back and sort things out, and that he would let her know how it went. She says he then left her house, and was never seen again.
This is the point where Lord Lucan disappeared into thin air. Since he left Susan’s home after midnight, his date of disappearance is recorded as November 8, 1974. He left without his passport, checkbook, or license, and his bank accounts were never touched again.The car he left in was a Ford Corsaire that he had borrowed from his friend Michael Stoop before the murder ever happened. Stoop said that during a game of bridge, about two weeks before the murder, Lord Lucan had asked specifically to borrow the Corsaire. Stoop had two cars, and one was much nicer than the Corsaire. He offered Lord Lucan the better car, but Lucan wanted the Corsaire. The police alleged that he chose this one because it was not the type of car that would normally be associated with him, and that he probably planned to use it to dispose of a body or bodies. They believed the borrowing of the car showed premeditation. Lord Lucan had a Mercedes, and had no reason to need to borrow his friend’s car.
The Ford Corsaire was found three days later, abandoned at a port in New Haven. Lord Lucan was very familiar with boating. He had competed in boating races. Police speculated that the car being left at a port brought forth a high possibility that he had used a boat as his means of transportation to escape from the area. The harbor was searched, as well as the buildings around in and the areas around the coast. No further sign of Lord Lucan was found. But inside the car, there were bloodstains. Fibers in the car matched fibers found at Lady Lucan’s house. Fingerprints in the Corsaire matched the fingerprints in Lord Lucan’s flat where he was living. In the trunk, they found his hat and a length of lead piping. The lead piping was wrapped up in a bandage. Remember the piece of metal Lady Lucan had described feeling in the basement covered in her hair after her attack? That turned out to be a length of lead piping, also. It was most likely the weapon used to murder Sandra Rivett- and it was also wrapped in bandaging just like the one in the trunk of the Corsaire. Lord Lucan became a suspect.
An understanding of the relationship and marriage between Lord and Lady Lucan is necessary to see what led up to the events of November 7, 1974. Before he was the Earl, he was born John Bingham, the second of four children, on December 18, 1934. He married Veronica Duncan, the future Lady Lucan, on November 20, 1963. She was 26 and he was 29. At the time that they met, he was a professional gambler, which his family did not approve of. His family also did not understand why he married Veronica. They said they didn’t even know about her until the engagement came along. Veronica mentioned not having many people at her wedding because the couple was not very “popular”. After they were married, Lord Lucan began gambling more and with higher stakes. The couple traveled a lot, and liked to film much of their lives with a video camera they owned. They had three children, Frances, George, and Camilla. Lady Lucan described him as a distant husband. She quotes him as saying “That’s the point of being married. You don’t have to talk to the person.” She said he had a need to appear richer than he was and to project a certain image.
People who knew the Lord and Lady describe them as being happy in the beginning of the marriage. Lady Lucan is described as an undemanding wife who was very happy to be Lady Lucan, and so she tolerated his lifestyle, which was a lot of gambling and living more like a bachelor than a husband. Lady Lucan went frequently with him to gambling clubs. After a while, Lord Lucan began to lose more and more money, and people began to see them having fights and disagreements, as Lady Lucan did not approve. Friends describe seeing Lord Lucan lose his temper with Veronica, and also seeing Veronica have outbursts. They seemed to drift further apart each time they had a child. At one point Lady Lucan developed a close friendship with a man whom she began to have feelings for, but Lord Lucan found out and threatened the man away. Lady Lucan became depressed, and Lord Lucan tried to commit her to a mental hospital. She began to take medication at home. He later tried to claim she was mentally unstable. He would tell doctors that she was psychotic to keep her on medication. Lady Lucan says her husband just stopped being nice to her, and he also began to beat her. She describes him telling her “I’m going to beat these mad ideas out of your head.” She said he would make her bend over a chair and give her ten strokes at a time with a cane, then afterwards he would be nicer and act remorseful. This sounds very much like what we know today as the typical cycle of domestic violence.
Lady Lucan believed he derived pleasure from beating her because he would have intercourse with her after he did it. His cane, which he would beat her with, was bandaged up at the end, wrapped in sticking plaster- the same way the lead piping found in the basement and the trunk of the Corsaire were. During her marriage, Lady Lucan thought he must have bandaged up his cane to make it hurt less, or cause less physical damage, but she also thought it meant it must have been something he had thought of or fantasized about for a while.
Ten years into their marriage, one day Lord Lucan called a doctor and asked if Lady Lucan was fit to be left with the children. When the doctor told him she was, Lord Lucan packed up his things and left, and never moved back in with his wife. Lady Lucan got a lawyer and sued for support. Lord Lucan also got a lawyer and took custody of the children, claiming his wife was mentally unfit. Nevermind that a doctor had told him otherwise and that it seemed Lord Lucan had only left after being assured she was fit to keep the children. Lady Lucan went to court to fight him for custody. She says he would provoke her into getting angry and having outbursts and he would secretly record them to use against her. This is all, again, part of what we know today is a cycle of domestic abuse.
Lady Lucan did get custody of her children back but was required to have a nanny. Lord Lucan was given visitation on every other weekend and half of the holidays, and he was required to pay support. He began to gamble more.
His friends say that he never liked any of the nannies before Sandra Rivett, although he reportedly had taken Sandra to dinner and liked her. He was having a private investigator follow Lady Lucan around and still trying to provoke her to have outbursts. Friends say he was bitter when Lady Lucan won custody, and that it seemed to be mostly because of the money he would have to pay. He was having money problems. His friends say this point was the angriest they had ever seen him, and that he quit fighting in court because it was costing too much money. Shortly after came the attack on Lady Lucan and the murder of Sandra Rivett.
Police did look into Sandra Rivett’s life and came to the conclusion that they couldn’t find anyone who would mean her harm. She had a husband that she was separated from, and at one point had a child she had given up for adoption. Her estranged husband had an alibi. Police gave a press conference announcing that anyone aiding or harboring Lord Lucan would be arrested. His friends all claimed that they did not know where he was, although one did say in an interview with press that even if he did know he would not tell police.
Now let’s get into the evidence from the scene of the crime. There was blood everywhere, on the walls around the basement and the stairs. There were bloody footprints leading to the garden, on leaves in the garden, and on the bandaged lead piping. The footprints were large and clearly from a man. Police determined that it was not possible to see a struggle in the basement of the house from the street where Lord Lucan had claimed he was passing by. There were venetian blinds and no clear line of sight into the lower basement level from the street. A lightbulb had been unscrewed and set on a chair, which explained the darkness Lady Lucan described as she descended to the basement. Lady Lucan said the attacker must have been the one to take the light bulb out, and that she and Sandra did not usually change the lightbulbs themselves because they were both too short.
Sandra Rivett’s body was found “doubled over”, bundled into the sack with her head and feet in the outermost position. A pool of Sandra’s blood was found right behind her body and also at the bottom of the stairs. Her blood has splashed across the breakfast room to the left of the stairs, onto a rosebowl, a book on the piano, and on pictures and portraits. On the right side there was more of the same blood type, Sandra’s type B, against the stair wall and trickling down to the skirting board. This was consistent with directional blood spatter coming from a wound that was already bleeding. The ceiling had blood spatter from repeated blows. There were foot marks in blood leading to a room behind the staircase that had a boiler in it. There was a blood smear on the staircase halfway up which appeared to have come from fabric, possibly smeared on there by the attacker, or by the sack. The sack was described as hard to carry up the stairs and likely brushed against a wall or stairwell. Sandra’s shoes were off and placed beside her, or beside the sack. The mail sack was of American origin and pulled together by a cord with the top folded over. Sandra’s left arm had fallen out still had her gold watch on it. This was one detail that made robbery seem unlikely.
Some blood on ivy leaves in the garden was determined to be Sandra’s, and the back door leading out into the garden at the rear of the basement was unlocked. It seemed this was the way the attacker had left the house. It would have been a good way to exit under some cover if the attacker had blood on him, and also smart to go this way if he was expecting the police to enter the house through the front door. There was hair and blood from two blood groups in the sink in a the cloakroom. Perhaps the attacker had hastily tried to wash it off before leaving. There were no prints on Sandra’s body or the mail sack. Lady Lucan said her attacker wore gloves. Fingerprints on the lead piping weren’t likely to be found because of the bandaging. The piping was consistent with Sandra’s injuries and likely the murder weapon. The pipe did not have any of Sandra’s hair on it. but it did have Lady Lucan’s hair on it, and it had blood of both types A and B on it. The fact that they didn’t find Sandra’s hair on it could suggest that it was what the attacker was washing off in the sink of the cloakroom, perhaps after attacking Sandra but before Lady Lucan had come down the stairs, so it was partially washed and then used to attack Lady Lucan. We must also keep in mind that forensic testing in 1974 was nothing like it is today, and evidence in microscopic amounts could have been harder to find. The piping has gone missing in the years since the murder and is no longer in police custody.
Seven months after Lord Lucan disappeared, a coroner’s jury was assembled to to determine if he was responsible for the murder. The coroner was Dr. Gavin Thurston. Lady Lucan testified to her statement of what happened. A DS Forsyth with the police testified that you could not see into the basement while passing by on the street. Sandra’s autopsy showed that she had she had six splits to the scalp from heavy blunt injury. She had three areas of heavy bruising. The first was in her face around her eyes and mouth. The second was on top of her shoulders where she was bruised without splitting the skin. The third area was the front of her upper right arm, where she had a series of four inline bruises as if fingers had been gripping her arm tight enough to leave marks. Sandra also had defensive wounds on her right hand and lesser injuries to her face that were probably caused not by a weapon but by a hand. She was likely knocked unconscious and was inhaling blood. Her brain was bruised. This combination of injuries was her cause of death.
Forensics confirmed Lady Lucan’s account of the attack. Blood typing was used to distinguish whose blood was where and therefore reconstruct how and where each victim’s attack probably happened. Sandra’s attack had begun at the foot of the stairs, and after being struck she had slumped down onto the ground by the piano and the rest of the blows were inflicted upon her as she lay there. Lady Lucan’s attack was in the hall and her blood was not found in the basement because she never made it that far. This was clear and hard forensic blood evidence that directly contradicted Lord Lucan’s story that he somehow saw his wife fighting or being attacked by someone in the basement as he innocently strolled by the house at coincidentally the same moment this attack was happening.
Lady Lucan’s blood had flicked off onto the wall to the left along with some of her hair. Blood spatter showed repeated blows trajected backwards onto the ceiling, a lampshade, and the cloakroom door behind. There was a total of six instances of mixed blood types found in the crime scene area. There was a mix of blood types on Lady Lucan’s clothing. Lord Lucan’s blood type is unknown. Lady Lucan had blood on her shoes, but she said she didn’t step into the basement. The forensic doctor testified that the blood on her shoes could have come from Lord Lucan as transfer.
Other evidence presented that was more circumstantial included Lord Lucan borrowing the car, and the fact that the weekend before the murder he had questioned his daughter Frances about which days the nanny usually had off. The night of November 7, 1974 would normally have been her night off. This would point to Sandra Rivett not being the intentional target of the murder, and police posited that Lord Lucan had planned to kill his wife and was inquiring to find out when the nanny wouldn’t be at the house. They theorized he had killed the nanny by mistake, that when she came down into the dark basement to make the tea, he had thought it was his wife Lady Lucan. While I see this as a valid possibility, I don’t think a case of mistaken identity is the only possibility. Given Lord Lucan’s motive and state of mind he was described to be in, I think if he had decided to kill his wife, and the nanny just happened to get in the way, he probably would have gone forward with killing her. By his own admission he still had a key to the house, and the police believe he had let himself in and was hiding in wait in the basement. Sandra could have come down to make tea and caught him waiting there, and he had to kill her. Or she could have come down and he realized she was there when she wasn’t supposed to be, and knew that if he was going to kill his wife he was probably going to have to kill the other adult in the house as well- the nanny. If he was in the state of mind to murder his wife, it’s not a stretch to say he was capable of killing Sandra too.
Other circumstantial evidence was that on the night of the murder, around 8:45 p.m., Lord Lucan had stopped by the Clermont Club, the gambling club Lucan attended, but only stopped for a moment to ask if his friends were there. When he was told they were not, he drove off. The man he spoke to at the club thought this was out of character for Lucan’s behavior, and so did the police. They believed he did this to try and establish some form of an alibi, then went to the house and hid in the basement. As I mentioned before, their most prominent theory was that he took the light bulb out to make it dark, but in the darkness mistook Sandra for his wife, killed her, folded her body into the mail sack, went to wash himself and the weapon off, and then heard Lady Lucan calling for Sandra and realized he had killed the wrong person.
Lady Lucan testified that she had seen Lord Lucan watching her at the house in his Mercedes, and police surmised this was one of the reasons he needed to borrow a different car- so that Lady Lucan wouldn’t know he was parked near the house if she saw it. The drive from the Clermont club to the house was ten minutes so he could have been at the house by 8:55 p.m., which fits right into Lady Lucan’s timeline of events in her statement. He wouldn’t have even had to be hiding in wait, he could have been entering the basement about this time, and Sandra coming down to make tea at the same time would have caused her to run right into him or catch him coming in, which circles back to the possibility of him killing her just because she caught him and would have alerted Lady Lucan. If he was waiting in the basement, I also think it’s highly possible he was waiting for Lady Lucan to go to sleep and was then planning on attacking her, but when someone entered the basement, he either thought it was her and thought he’d found a lucky opportunity, or we circle back to him realizing the nanny was there and would foil his plans.
The coroner’s jury found Lord Lucan guilty. It was the last time in England that a jury was allowed to find someone guilty in absentia- in other words, without him being there to defend himself.
Some people who knew the Lucans or Sandra Rivett have proposed the idea of Lord Lucan hiring a hitman to kill his wife, and that maybe he wasn’t the actual attacker. To believe this theory, though, you have to decide that you don’t believe Lady Lucan’s version of what happened. She says she knew it was her husband, that she knew it from the time he spoke in the dark basement, and the person who spoke was also assaulting her- face to face, as he shoved his hand down her throat and then squeezed her neck. Even in the dark, this close she could probably recognize her husband. When you have spent a lot of time close to a person, especially intimately, you can recognize things like the way his hands feel, the smell of his breath, the smell of his skin. Lady Lucan had lived with Lord Lucan as her husband for ten years before he left and moved out. It seems nearly impossible that another man committed the actual physical attack on her, during which she was certain it was her husband, and then somehow without her noticing escaped out the back door as her husband barged in to save her, not running after the attacker but replacing him so quickly next to Lady Lucan that she somehow mistook them as being one and the same person. After which, she went upstairs with her husband, out of the darkness and into her bedroom where there was no mistaking that it was him, and Lord Lucan never denied that this was him. He admits he was there, he admits he was in the bedroom and bathroom with Lady Lucan after her attack, and his daughter says she saw him. He even admits to being in the basement, with his claims that he intervened and scared off the attacker. He puts himself at the scene.
One could argue that maybe Lord Lucan had hired someone to kill his wife, and then changed his mind and gone to the house to intervene and stop the attack from being carried out. In this scenario he would have known ahead of time that an attack would be happening, which makes more sense than him passing by the house at the same time his wife was being attacked and somehow being able to see it in the basement even though by all accounts that view wasn’t possible. But there are a couple of problems with this idea. A hired hitman sent to the house wouldn’t have known ahead of time that someone would be coming down into the basement at that exact time. He would probably have been hiding and waiting for the right opportunity. So how would Lord Lucan have known when to rush into the basement to intervene? Or even that the basement would be where the attack would end up taking place? And even if he did hire a hitman, Lord Lucan would still be guilty of murder.
The biggest mystery in this whole case is what became of Lord Lucan. Did he escape to a different place and continue to live out his life under a new identity? Did one of his friends, who all seemed to champion his innocence, help him? Or did he commit suicide? And if suicide was his ending, how did he do it in a way where his body has never been found?
The abandoned car was the last sign ever found of him. As I mentioned before, since it was left at a harbor, the prevalent theory was that he used a boat to leave the area, especially since he was an experienced boater. Police did consider, though, that someone who was helping him get away could have driven the car to that spot and left it there as a diversionary tactic. Both Lady Lucan and some of his friends have stated in interviews that they believe he did commit suicide. Others think he has been alive all this time, including some members of the police. In an interview in 1980, Lady Lucan said she was convinced her husband was still alive because his body had never washed up anywhere- note that for some reason she used the words “washed up”. But later in life she said she had been heavily drugged in the early eighties and had since decided he had committed suicide. She was very specific in her theory about this. She said she thought he had written his last letter to his friend Michael Stoop as a suicide note, then gotten on the ferry, and had jumped off into the channel, directly into the propellers of the ferry so that it would destroy his body and his remains would not be found. I’m not sure where such a specific idea came from, though I’ve seen this same idea spoken in an interview of Michael Stoop. I’m not certain but I believe his interview predated Lady Lucan’s, so I wonder if he gave her this idea. But if that had happened, would the propellers of a ferry boat have completely destroyed all bits and pieces of his body without any trace left behind? Would the people on the boat or steering the boat not have noticed anything? Wouldn’t it have caused blood in the water at the very least?
Michael Stoop, the friend who had loaned Lucan his car, believes the letter Lord Lucan wrote to him before disappearing was a suicide letter. This is what the letter said:
“My Dear Michael,
I have had a traumatic night of unbelievable coincidences. However I won’t bore you with anything or involve you except to say when you come across my children, which I hope you will, please tell them that you knew me, and that all I cared about was them. The fact that a crooked solicitor and a rotten psychiatrist destroyed me between them will be of no importance to the children. I gave Bill Shand-Kitt my account of what actually happened, but judging by my last effort in court no one, let alone a 67 year old judge, would believe it, and I no longer care, except that my children would be protected. Yours Ever, John.”
This letter does seem to portray a sense that Lord Lucan had given up, and he does mention that he “no longer cares”. But it also shows bitterness and anger about his custody case and the legal battles with his wife. He seems put the blame on others, specifically a lawyer, a psychiatrist and even the judge. His choice of words suggests he is angry at them. What I see when I read this is a lack of taking any responsibility for anything that had happened, and no remorse about anything besides the fact that he lost in court and lost his children. Some people have also suggested that the manner the letter was addressed to his friend- “My Dear Michael”, and “Yours Ever, John”- seems intimate. There had been unconfirmed rumors throughout his marriage that Lord Lucan was actually homosexual, and that this caused many of the problems in his relationship.
The family and friends of Lord Lucan have always maintained that he never communicated with them after November 8, 1974. They have all denied ever knowing where he was. His sister said in an interview that the family had thought that he would come back one day for his children, but that he never did. They then began to consider that he’d committed suicide, but still had their doubts because of the difficulty of hiding your own body after dying. It’s been mentioned they considered the possibility that he’d been murdered.
I think that if he had escaped, he wouldn’t have cared enough about coming back for his children to risk being captured. His letter to his brother-in-law containing his wishes for the children to be taken care of by the Shand-Kitts hints at finality in his concern for the kids and their future. And if he’d committed murder in the house with his children upstairs, that shows a lack of parental concern in the first place. It obviously wouldn’t have bothered him that his children might have gotten up to find their mother and then found her dead, or that it was always possible any of the children could have walked in on the attack or murder as it was happening. Lady Lucan always believed his motive for what he did was financial, because he had money troubles and a gambling problem and didn’t want to pay support for the children. He could have seen the children as a burden, and trying to get custody of them could have been more about punishing his wife than an actual desire to have his children with him. Lord Lucan seems to display signs of narcissism, and I don’t think he would have had any qualms about leaving his children behind to save his own skin. It’s even possible he could have been planning to kill the children that night as well, but that didn’t happen when his attack on Lady Lucan was never completed and she escaped, at which point he knew he had only moments to get away.
Over the next seven months after his disappearance, there were many alleged sightings of Lord Lucan from all over the world. Eventually those dissipated to only a few sightings over the years. There was rumor that he had been hiding out at his friend John’s zoo, and had ended up eaten by a tiger after shooting himself. This friend John once said that Lucan had weighted himself down with stone and jumped into the English channel. In 2004, a retired Metropolitan police officer allegedly told someone that they knew exactly where Lord Lucan’s body was- that it was in a cave in Sussex not far from where the abandoned Corsaire had been found. Tips have been reported of him being spotted alive in Ireland, Greece, Australia, Botswana, and New Zealand, and even rumors of his children having been flown to Africa so that he could look at them from a distance without ever speaking to them.
At one point, not long after the murders had happened in 1974, the police even arrested a man in Melbourne, Australia thinking that he was Lord Lucan. This became another odd twist in the story of the Earl’s disappearance, because the man they arrested turned out to be John Stonehouse, a former government minister and Labour MP in England who had faked his own death by staging a drowning on a Florida beach.
In 2003, an ex-Scotland Yard policeman claimed he had found that Lord Lucan had been living in Goa up until his death in 1996. He had a grainy photograph of a bearded man that was known as “Jungly Barry”. This was quickly discredited when a newspaper disclosed that the man in question was Barry Halpin, a known folk singer. People who had known him long before Lord Lucan disappeared and had even grown up with him confirmed this.
In 2007, locals in Marton, New Zealand were convinced a man living there was Lord Lucan in hiding. The man was living in a 1974 model Land Rover with his pet cat, goat, and possum, and had an upper-class English accent and a moustache. The man’s name was Roger Woodgate, and he denied being the missing Earl. He was ten years younger than Lord Lucan and five inches shorter.
In 1999, Lord Lucan’s son George Bingham had his father declared dead by the High Court. In 2016 a presumption of death certificate was finally issued. This allowed George Bingham to then become the new Lord Lucan.
After the murder of Sandra Rivett, Lady Lucan became more dependant on drugs, and the children did indeed end up being raised by the Shand-Kitts. Lady Lucan lost contact with her children and never re-established it before she died. In September of 2018, she was found dead in her home, lying on rop of a bottle of pills that was nearly empty. A drug overdose had caused respiratory failure. She had written previously about suicide in her journal and had discussed assisted suicide with a friend. She had said that if she ever became terminally ill or was diagnosed with a degenerative disease, she would prefer the option of suicide. In the time leading up to her death, she had become convinced she had Parkinson’s disease, but she was never actually diagnosed with it. She had financial troubles and was in need of money, and had recently finished her autobiography. The verdict of the coroner was suicide. Her autopsy showed no signs of Parkinson’s disease. She had never met her five grandchildren.
This is a story that is full of tragedy and mystery. If Lord Lucan is alive, he would be 85 now, and he would have outlived his estranged wife. It’s doubtful he would ever return of his own accord, given that he has already been found guilty of the murder of Sandra Rivett. The Disappearance of Lord Lucan may be one mystery that will never be solved.
