‘Jungly Barry’, a Labour MP and other ‘sightings’
IN the 46 years since he disappeared, there have been dozens of ‘sightings’ of Lord Lucan all around the globe. They include:
Runaway Labour MP, 1974 A month after Lucan’s disappearance, an man was arrested in Australia for immigration irregularities. It was in fact runaway Labour MP and former Postmaster General, John Stonehouse, who had faked his suicide. Because Lucan had a 6in scar on his thigh, the police asked Stonehouse to pull down his trousers – to reveal no such scar. Saddam Hussein’s double, 1976 Lucan was claimed to be in Zimbabwe where he had a bank account, after which he also rapidly ‘turned up’ in South Africa,
Mozambique and in Brazil. Then he was spotted backpacking on Mount Etna, working as a waiter in San Francisco – and even employed as Saddam Hussein’s double. Boilermaker called Ken, 1979 Australian police arrested a man for stealing from a burned-out car in the outback 200 miles west of Brisbane. He was briefly thought to be Lucan. But it turned out he was a boilermaker called Kenneth Knight. Asked to identify him, his ex-wife Ann, from Blackmore, Essex, said: ‘That’s him all right
– that’s my Ken. He never told me where he was going.’
Smuggler’s tip-off, 1982
Adventurer John Miller found a moustachioed man on a Caribbean island and falsely claimed he was Lucan. Miller said he met Lucan in Venezuelan after a tip from a jewel smuggler. ‘Jungly Barry’, 2003 Former Scotland Yard detective
Duncan MacLaughlin claimed the peer was in Goa, where he was known as ‘Jungly Barry’ and ended up as a skinny, squalid drunk who played travellers at backgammon for cheap brandy until his death in 1996. The man was in fact Barry Halpin, pictured, a busker and former teacher from
St Helens, Merseyside.
Expat living in his car, 2007
Roger Woodgate, an eccentric British expatriate who lived in a Land Rover in New Zealand with a pet goat called Camilla, denied speculation from neighbours he was Lucan. The former photographer who once worked for the Ministry of Defence was ten years younger than Lucan and five inches shorter.