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Murder and vanishing without a trace: the mysterious case of Lord Lucan

Murder and vanishing without a trace: the mysterious case of Lord Lucan

Fifty years ago, the notorious peer disappeared, never to be seen again (officially), following a brutal murder in his Belgravia home. Laura Thompson reviews the case of the gambling earl suspected of killing his children’s nanny Sandra Rivett and attacking his estranged wife – and explores what the cause celebre reveals about social attitudes of the time

Lord Lucan and his wife Veronica, shortly after becoming engaged in 1963. It is thought that Lady Lucan was the intended target of the attack in 1974 (Photo by Evening Standard/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Published: December 12, 2024 at 9:00 AM

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Just before 9pm on Thursday 7 November 1974, the rarefied calm of Belgravia, that oasis of white stucco in the heart of London, was defiled by violence.

Behind the stately façade of 46 Lower Belgrave Street, family home of the 7th Earl of Lucan, 29-year-old nanny Sandra Rivett descended from the top of the six-storey house into the basement to make tea. In the darkness, an assailant was waiting. Sandra was bludgeoned to death with a length of piping, bundled into a sack and left on the bloodied kitchen floor.

Shortly afterwards, near the top of the basement stairs, another woman – 37-year old Veronica Lucan, the earl’s estranged wife – was similarly battered. She fought off her attacker and, just before 10pm, burst into the Plumbers Arms pub at the end of Lower Belgrave Street. The late-evening customers were confronted with the sight of a small, barefoot woman, her head coated with blood.

“Help me, help me – I’ve just escaped from being murdered!” she exclaimed, followed by: “My children, my children – he’s murdered my nanny!”

Sandra Rivett, who was working as a nanny for Lady Lucan when she was attacked and killed in 1974. Lord Lucan vanished the following morning (Photo by TopFoto)

From that moment, the story became public property. Shortly afterwards, police kicked in the elegant door of the Lucan home. There, within the formal interior, they found Sandra Rivett’s body. Upstairs were the three children who had been in her care: Frances, aged 10; George, seven; and four-year-old Camilla. No trace of an assailant was discovered.

Quite soon, however, the identity of the man whom Veronica Lucan claimed had “murdered my nanny” would be known to Scotland Yard detectives. From her bed in hospital, where she’d received 60 stitches to close her head wound, Veronica stated that the attacker had been her husband, Lord Lucan – 39-year-old Richard John Bingham, a professional gambler nicknamed ‘Lucky’.

Sandra Rivett descended from the top of the six-storey house into the basement to make tea. In the darkness, an assailant was waiting. Sandra was bludgeoned to death with a length of piping, bundled into a sack and left on the bloodied kitchen floor

It was then, too, that the ‘official’ theory about the case was formed – a version of events that was instantly accepted by the police and which, even after half a century of speculation, has never been supplanted.

According to this narrative, Sandra Rivett, who should have had the night off, was murdered in error, her killer mistakenly believing that the woman descending into the basement was Lady Lucan. When Veronica herself appeared around 9pm, Lord Lucan realised his mistake and attacked her, but wasn’t able to finish the job.

Lord Lucan before and after the murder

The Lucans had lived separately since January 1973. In July that year, Veronica had won a vicious custody battle that cost Lucan around £20,000, and which he was obsessed with overturning. He became deeply concerned for his children, not least because Lady Lucan suffered with a number of mental health problems which, he judged, might leave her unable to care for them adequately.

By this point he was drinking heavily and gambling more heavily still. It seemed, then, that his motive for killing his wife was strong, both financially and emotionally. Sandra, who had been employed for just 10 weeks, was the collateral damage.

After Veronica ran to the pub, Lord Lucan also left the house. Almost nothing is known of his movements thereafter. From an unidentified location, he rang his mother, Kaitilin, the dowager countess and a Labour party activist, asking her to collect the children. According to her, he added: “Oh mother, there was something terrible in the basement. I couldn’t bring myself to look.”

Read more | The curious case of Lord Lucan, plus 10 other mysterious disappearances from history

Some time before midnight he visited the home of Susan Maxwell-Scott, a friend in Uckfield, Sussex. At the 1975 inquest into Sandra Rivett’s death, Susan related the story that she said Lucan had offered her: he had been passing the house in Belgravia, saw a fight going on in the basement and rushed in to interrupt it, whereupon Veronica accused him of hiring a hitman.

This story was also told in a letter, post marked Uckfield, sent to Lucan’s brother-in law, Bill Shand Kydd. “V. has demonstrated her hatred for me in the past and would do anything to see me accused,” Lucan wrote. At some point in the early hours, he wrote two letters to an old friend, Michael Stoop.

The car that the suspect had been driving, a Ford Corsair borrowed from Stoop, was found on Sunday 10 November, parked in a residential street in the port of Newhaven, some 17 miles from Uckfield. Lord Lucan himself had disappeared.

The Ford Corsair used by Lucan, abandoned in Norman Road, Newhaven on the morning of the murder (Photo by Express/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Why did the murder strike a note with the nation?

It is not hard to understand why this case became an immediate cause celebre. It had everything, including a mystery – whither the vanished earl? – that remains unsolved to this day.

The most famous murders carry both a mythic element of the timeless and an atmospheric imprint of their time – and none more so than this one. It was a parable of class, of the high-born brought low, of aristocratic hubris. But the flavour of the story – the peculiar piquancy of its social context – is that of the early 1970s.

Before the murder, Lord Lucan – pinstriped and sleek in the age of T-Rex and Wimpy bars – had proceeded every day from Belgravia to the Clermont Club, an elite gambling house on Berkeley Square, while the three-day week and the oil crisis raged in a troubled country that settled down at night to watch Upstairs, Downstairs.

The most famous murders carry both a mythic element of the timeless and an atmospheric imprint of their time – and none more so than this one. It was a parable of class, of the high-born brought low, of aristocratic hubris

Lucan, living a seigneurial life on an income of £12,000 a year (around £110,000 in today’s terms), could not have existed in a later era. His kind – aristocrats with neither sufficient means nor the will to earn them – were on the edge of extinction. In an earlier age, he would not have been so profoundly incongruous, and his life would probably have been quite different.

In 1974, his rebarbative image, looming arrogantly from every newspaper, was – to use a then-unknown phrase – supremely triggering. There was never a second of doubt about his guilt, though the case against him rested upon the word of Veronica, Lady Lucan. She was portrayed as frail yet impressively indomitable, perhaps rather reminiscent of Diana, Princess of Wales in a later era.

Lord Lucan, seen at a West End club playing cards. A keen gambler, on more than one occasion he lost many thousands of pounds (Photo by Evening News/Shutterstock)

Arguably the strongest evidence against the earl was that he had run away. So much for the mottos of the old school tie (in his case, Eton) that mandated facing the music and behaving like a gentleman. Here was proof that ‘They’ were no better than ‘Us’ – an intensely satisfying narrative.

The national mood was summed up by a letter to the Daily Express printed on 20 November 1974: “The ordinary people of this country are accustomed to being told how lazy and greedy they have become and how they must make greater sacrifices,” it said. “If I were a miner, factory worker or railwayman and I had read of Lord Lucan’s lifestyle (rise at noon, lunch at the Clermont, gambling losses of £5,000 in one afternoon) I would have said a few well chosen words when my alarm went off this morning.”

Lord Lucan evades justice

Britain was bankrupt and volatile, crippled by strikes, high energy costs and taxation. This was also the year of the IRA pub bombings. On the night of 7 November, as the first detective was entering 46 Lower Belgrave Street, two people were killed at a pub near Woolwich Royal Artillery Barracks. A couple of weeks previously, there had been a minor explosion at Brooks’s club in St James’s Street.

The world of Lord Lucan was not, in fact, immune to the national situation, but it certainly looked that way. Had Lucan been arrested and tried, there would have been a glorious sense of catharsis. Instead, he continued to evade justice.

“Where is this jerk? He’s giving me a headache,” was how Detective-Sergeant Graham Forsyth, the officer assigned as Lady Lucan’s de facto bodyguard, summed up the general mood. Yet there was also a kind of pleasure within the frustrated rage at the way that this story was playing out. It was confirming a communal belief that those who belong to ‘the Establishment’ can get away with things.

“Lord Lucan has so many friends. There is so much money around,” said Eunice Hensby, Sandra Rivett’s mother, at her daughter’s inquest, which opened on 16 June 1975 and ended with a guilty verdict against Lucan.

Police divers prepare to search Newhaven harbour in November 1974 after the car driven by Lord Lucan was found nearby. No trace of the missing earl was discovered (Photo by Daily Mirror/Mirrorpix/Mirrorpix via Getty Images)

Having been fixated on the earl for seven months, the press now lamented the fact that there was so little focus upon his victim. “It was Lucan’s aristocratic family and gambling friends who dominated,” wrote the Sunday Mirror, railing against this “ugly real-life performance of Upstairs, Downstairs”.

It claimed that ranks had closed against Veronica, “who dared to accuse her vanished husband, the Seventh Earl of Lucan. Damned bad show, don’tcherknow.” Alluding to the fact that Bill Shand Kydd and his wife – Lady Lucan’s sister – had spent 19 June at the races, the editorial concluded: “What with the beastly inquest, into the bargain it was Ascot Week, too!”

There was also a kind of pleasure within the frustrated rage at the way that this story was playing out. It was confirming a communal belief that those who belong to ‘the Establishment’ can get away with things

A highly persuasive article by the writer James Fox, published in the Sunday Times Magazine a few days earlier, had set the prevailing mood in elegant stone. Lucan was a cold, aggressive throwback, it suggested, a monstrous emblem of male privilege.

His wife was a quasi-feminist figure, an intelligent modern woman who, despite her struggles with depression, had stood up to Lucan and suffered for it. His friends, ranged stubbornly on his side, were also “condescending, almost patronising” towards the police investigation.

This last, of course, played into the belief – strongly implied from early on – that Lucan had been helped to flee justice. The circle of upper-class gamblers who congregated at the Clermont – the “Eton Mafia”, as Scotland Yard called them – would, it was suggested, do anything for one of their own, the freedom of an earl being worth more than the life of a servant in their ghastly antique code.

Re-examining the Lucan case

It is a belief that dies hard. Yet 50 years on, now that the Lucan case is ‘history’ and the societal anger that occluded it has calmed, its nuances should surely be clearer to see.

Since the death of Lady Lucan in 2017 it has, for instance, become possible to question her testimony which, during her lifetime, was presented as a kind of gospel. One can also criticise the conduct of the police; no other suspect was even considered, so in essence there was no investigation.

There was, however, a good deal of relish among the police at having the ‘nobs’ in their power. Indeed, Lucan’s friends became useful scapegoats for police failure to find the man himself, that intoxicating hate figure who had quite possibly got away with murder because that is what the rich and powerful did.

Newspaper stories claiming to have traced Lucan’s movements continued to run decades after his disappearance – this headline in the Daily Mirror appeared in 2012

Yet Lucan merely looked rich and powerful. In fact, he was a weak man, though liked by many, including those who thought him capable of eliminating a woman he had come to hate (others thought him innocent).

He could scarcely have been more remote from the image that has long held sway, glued into position by our healthy national resentment of two-tier justice, our love of schadenfreude, our pleasure in such a glaring – almost cartoonish – proof that ‘the Establishment’ is as rotten as we wish to believe.

In truth – as should also now be clear – Lucan was ‘Establishment’ on paper only. He was a man whose sole status came from a minor title, living off a couple of family trusts, teetering on the brink of bankruptcy. And an earl without proper means was, by the 1970s, a figure with no authority at all: a melting waxwork, paid to sit at the Clermont tables and dress the house for the truly rich and powerful – the ones with oil money.

Yet within the British psyche, the class system exerted its strange, illogical, atavistic pull. It would do still, I think, should the case occur today.

Enduring mystery: what happened to Lord Lucan?

Ever since the grisly murder of Sandra Rivett in 1974, theories have swirled to try and explain Lucan’s fate

In 1992, the high court made this declaration: “Be it known that the Right Honourable Richard John Bingham, 7th Earl of Lucan, died on or since the eighth day of November 1974.” That, effectively, was an acceptance of the evidence of Susan Maxwell-Scott, who said that Lucan drove away from her house in Uckfield in the early hours of 8 November. Of course, that statement is unprovable. The car that Lucan was driving was seen, parked in Newhaven, in the early morning of that November day – but there was no way to prove who had driven it there. So it is possible that Lucan was at that moment being flown out of the country – and even that he is, at the age of nearly 90, still alive today. Indeed, in 1999 his son, George, was refused permission to take his seat in the House of Lords, there being reasonable doubt as to whether the title was his to assume. It was not until 2016 that George became the 8th Earl of Lucan – and even then, his accession did not mark an end to speculation about the fate of his father. In the past 50 years, Lucan has been ‘seen’ all around the world. He has been identified as, among many other people, a pot-smoking hippy in Goa. When disgraced Labour MP John Stonehouse was arrested in Australia in December 1974, having faked his own death, he was apprehended in the belief that he was Lucan. There have even been claims that the earl himself was murdered. The detective who headed the investigation – and who at the time was wholly convinced that Lucan had killed himself – later signed a book deal to explore his powerful new conviction that the earl was in Botswana. The son of Sandra Rivett, adopted at birth but understandably possessed with an urge to achieve justice, pursues a belief that Lucan is now a Buddhist living in Australia. I myself agree with the 1992 statement by the high court. If there was a plan to help Lucan escape, it was dreamed up by his friends – most of whom were tapped-out gamblers rather than masters of the universe – on the spur of the moment, yet was so water tight that it has succeeded in keeping him hidden and alive for half a century. I find this impossible to accept, not least because the cost involved would have been immense. To my mind, Lucan knew that Newhaven was the journey’s end. His words in a final letter to Michael Stoop – “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” – read like a signing-off. Then he threw in his hand, and jumped into the English Channel. Other theories are available.

Laura Thompson is the author of A Different Class of Murder: The Story of Lord Lucan (Bloomsbury, 2014)

This article was first published in the December 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine