The Dowager Countess of Lucan
Central figure in the sensational 1974 mystery involving her husband Lord Lucan and the murder of the family nanny, Sandra Rivett
THE DOWAGER COUNTESS OF LUCAN, who has died aged 80, was for more than 40 years at the centre of perhaps the most enduring murder mystery of the 20th century, the killing of the family nanny Sandra Rivett and the subsequent disappearance of her estranged husband, the 7th Earl of Lucan.
It was said to have been Lady Lucan’s mental instability that drove her husband to attempt to kill her too on the night of November 7 1974, fearing for the welfare of his three children. After a bitter and protracted legal battle, his son and two daughters had been made wards of court and, once the marriage had broken down and the Lucans had separated, the question of custody settled in his wife’s favour.
After the assault, in which Lady Lucan was struck repeatedly on the head, stories and tittle-tattle began to circulate about her mental state, which Lucan had claimed teetered on madness; for his part, Lucan had been consumed by resentment that the law considered his wife a fit and proper mother.
No one disputed that Lucan had motive. But if he was his wife’s assailant, quite how he came to murder the wrong woman seems almost inexplicable, stoking the theory that the culprit was not her husband at all but a hit man he had hired.
Perhaps the only hard truth about the case is that it remains insoluble, if fascinating. And perhaps the only real mystery unexplored is why the highly strung Lady Lucan herself was never considered a suspect.
Not that she ever wavered in her account of the night of the murder. She not only identified her husband as having bludgeoned Sandra Rivett to death, seemingly having mistaken her for his wife, but also described how he had attacked her too, on the darkened stairs at 46 Lower Belgrave Street, the Lucans’ conjugal home near Victoria Station, but where Lucan himself no longer lived.
According to her account, as she sank beneath a hail of blows from a length of heavy lead piping bound with surgical tape, the voice that warned her to stop screaming was, she insisted, that of her husband.
When the earl sought to silence her by stuffing his gloved fingers down her throat, Lady Lucan had grabbed at his crotch and the couple collapsed exhausted on the stairs before he hustled her up to the second floor bedroom where they inspected her injuries in the mirror of the en suite bathroom.
Lady Lucan claimed that she had slumped on the bed while her husband paced up and down, apologising. When he momentarily returned to the bathroom to fetch a facecloth for his wife, she saw her chance, fled from the room and down the street to the nearest pub, bursting into the Plumber’s Arms “head to toe in blood”, shouting: “Help me, help me, help me, I’ve just escaped being murdered. He’s in the house. He’s murdered my nanny.”
In hospital Veronica Lucan, in a state of severe shock, was treated for seven scalp wounds and cuts inside her mouth. Although she recovered from her physical injuries, mental scars remained. In 1975 the inquest jury into Sandra Rivett’s death named the fugitive Lord Lucan as her killer. Lucan himself was declared legally dead in 1999, since when legal documents had referred to his wife as his “lawful widow”, and he was finally granted a death certificate in February 2016, his title passing to his son, George Bingham, the 8th Earl.
Small, shy and doll-like, Lady Lucan cut a pathetic figure in the years that followed her husband’s mysterious disappearance. In December 1983 she was admitted to Banstead Mental Hospital after police had found her wandering the streets of Belgravia in a confused state. She had been living quietly on the income from a small family trust, in a mews house behind Eaton Square, not far from Lower Belgrave Street.
She had been a sharp critic of her husband’s gambling habits, but had been powerless to persuade him to stop. Moreover, she insisted on witnessing his ebbing fortunes. At the Clermont Club in Berkeley Square, her husband’s regular haunt during his 11 years as a professional gambler, one observer remembered watching Lady Lucan “sitting in the corner whitefaced and hopeless, while her husband went on gambling and looking even more hopeless”. What proved fatal to the marriage seems to have been the sale of the Clermont in 1972 to Victor Lownes of the Playboy empire who, unlike the previous owner John Aspinall, did not take a benevolent view of aristocratic wasters on a losing streak and declined to bankroll Lucan.
Nevertheless, the earl kept on drinking and gambling, his wife seeming to become increasingly emotional as the losses mounted. One chronicler of the Clermont set relates how she became “dangerously unhinged and kinkily sadistic”, a reference to a story about the fate of a kitten (some versions said a puppy) which Lucan had sent round for his children.
When the earl finally drove her to the Priory clinic at Roehampton in his Mercedes with instructions to admit herself for treatment, she was said to have angrily refused. By the time of the murder, Lucan was living apart from his wife in a basement flat in nearby Elizabeth Street. They never divorced.
Veronica Mary Duncan was born on May 3 1937 and spent her earliest years at Uckfield in Sussex.
After the death of her father, an Army major, in a car crash when she was two, her mother took her and her sister to South Africa. There, according to Patrick Marnham in his study of the Lucan case, Trail Of Havoc (1987), Veronica grew up “an intense, competitive little girl, over-anxious to be accepted and to succeed.” This lack of confidence dogged her all her life.
In childhood she received psychiatric treatment for unspecified mental problems, but on her return to England after her mother remarried, she attended St Swithun’s School, Winchester. She went on to study briefly at art college and spent 18 months in the early 1960s working as a fashion model. Meanwhile her stepfather had taken the tenancy of a small hotel at North Waltham near Basingstoke, later contemptuously referred to by one of Lucan’s friends as “a pub on the way back from Ascot”.
As a hotelier’s stepdaughter, Veronica Duncan may well have considered her middle-class circumstances déclassé, for she had developed an obsession with social standing, apparently exacerbated by her own lack of physical stature: she was smaller than her younger sister, Christina, who went on to marry Lucan’s wealthy friend Bill Shand Kydd.
A keen pony rider as a teenager, Veronica was particularly exercised by thoroughbred bloodlines and pedigree. For example, asked how her skull had withstood the onslaught with the lead piping on the murder night, she replied: “Good breeding.”
Lucan’s gambling left him little time for women, and settling for his old friend’s sister-in-law was considered by another observer of the Clermont set to have been something of an easy option. The couple married in November 1963, having met only the previous January when Veronica had been bridesmaid at her sister’s wedding to Shand Kydd.
The couple met again that spring at the Shand Kydds’ house in Berkshire and after a whirlwind romance, Lucan bought a ring at Cartier’s and proposed. “I was looking for a god,” she later explained, “and he was a dream figure.” But many were surprised that in Veronica Duncan, the aristocratic Lucan had chosen a “pretentious commoner” as a wife.
The marriage lasted just over nine years. By the time the couple separated in January 1973, Lucan had become obsessed with the welfare of their three children. When he snatched two of them as they walked in a park with their nanny, he kept them at his flat in Elizabeth Street but lost his case to win custody. At the same time, as his gambling debts and other financial problems multiplied, he was blaming his estranged wife for his predicament.
She in turn began to suffer from depression, her husband’s losing streak at the gaming tables adding to her stress. When she complained to her husband’s friends, they cut her dead. The couple quarrelled in public. Lucan hired detectives to watch his wife, and in 1972 secretly started taping his conversations with her, playing the recordings to his friends to demonstrate that she was mentally unbalanced and unfit to care for his children; he also attempted to have her committed.
While suffering from paranoia and hallucinations, possibly aggravated by prescribed medication, Lady Lucan began receiving nuisance calls to her ex-directory telephone number which only her husband knew. She would often see him at night, cruising past the house in his Mercedes. A fortnight before the murder, she glanced out of the window at Lower Belgrave Street to see him parked at the wheel of his car wearing dark glasses.
Following Lucan’s disappearance, Lady Lucan remained convinced that there existed a conspiracy by friends of her missing husband to call her mental state into question. On her website she claimed that during 1978, “I was horrifically and medically abused with steroids in combination with benzodiazepines (tranquillisers). I complained to the police and this was reported in the press. The matter was investigated and my claim was found to be substantiated but a decision was made that it was ‘not in the public interest’ to prosecute.”
She clung to Lucan’s title, but not to his children. In 1982 she suffered a mental breakdown and while all three children were at boarding school, her 15-year-old son George told her that he would find it “much more congenial to live as part of the family of his uncle and aunt”. Lady Lucan did not attend the hearing, nor did she apply for access. Crushed by her ordeal, mental problems and shortage of money, she eventually ceded custody of the children to the Shand Kydds.
She was distraught when her daughter Camilla announced her engagement in The Times as “younger daughter of the 7th Earl of Lucan wheresoever and the Countess of Lucan”, and in 1998 turned up at the wedding, watching through the railings outside the church in Eaton Square, clutching an umbrella and a Marks & Spencer carrier bag.
Although her evidence was accepted at the inquest into her husband’s death, her son for many years publicly rejected it, and when he finally succeeded to the Lucan title in 2016 she posted on her website the view that “my son is a disgrace, an absolute disgrace”.
“I tried to commit suicide but it didn’t work,” she declared in an interview. “I’ve been celibate since the age of 35 and I now have no friends. Society shunned me for my husband’s crime. I don’t care what happens any more. I’m waiting to die – a nice heart attack would suit me fine.”
Her three children survive her.
The Dowager Countess of Lucan, born May 3 1937, found dead September 26 2017