A tragic life
The hidden world of Lady Lucan
The act of murder is swift, on the whole. But then there is the aftermath. Veronica, Dowager Countess of Lucan, who died this week at the age of 80, would have known that better than most. Lady Lucan lived for almost 43 years with the fallout from the events of November 7, 1974: events that have passed into urban mythology. On that night, she was attacked at her Belgravia home by a man whom she subsequently named as her estranged husband, the 7th Earl of Lucan. The assault took place as she was on her way to the basement kitchen in search of her children’s nanny, 29-year-old Sandra Rivett, who had gone to make tea.
In those interim minutes Mrs Rivett had been battered to death in what was assumed to have been a case of mistaken identity. The theory, as put forward by the police and thereafter generally accepted, is that in the darkness Lord Lucan – or possibly his hitman proxy – had killed the nanny and not the wife: a wife who had won custody of his three children, who was costing him money he did not have and whom, by most accounts, he hated with a frustrated passion.
After the attack, Lady Lucan escaped to a pub on Lower Belgrave Street. And Lucan disappeared, in a manner so complete as to arouse a near-infinity of suppositions. Only in February 2016 was his peculiar “undead” status formally brought to an end, and his son George able to finally inherit the earldom.
Lady Lucan’s stated view was that her husband had jumped off a ferry and been caught in the propellers. She reiterated this opinion only recently, in June, when she appeared in the ITV documentary Lord Lucan: My Husband, the Truth. She was a compelling figure and, as ever, she told her story with the utmost conviction. What can only now be openly acknowledged is that this was – by definition – only one side of the story.
For all that Lady Lucan’s veracity was so widely accepted, there is in fact scant corroboration of much that she said about her husband, and indeed about the events of November 7, 1974. There was, for example, the unexplained circumstance of blood from her own group being discovered in the basement at Lower Belgrave Street, which has led some to consider whether she herself might have been the guilty party, who framed her husband in an act of revenge worthy of Doctor Foster.
Far-fetched, of course; although two people whom I interviewed for my 2014 book about the case did, tentatively, admit that this had been their first reaction. Researching my book, I talked to close family and friends. Their recollections of the 11-year Lucan marriage portrayed it as complex, much more so than had been suggested by Lady Lucan’s tales of domestic violence, ill-treatment by Lucan’s gambling circle, and postnatal depression.
The nannies, for example, who had no particular axe to grind, had found Lucan to be highly likeable, and spoke of how he, rather than his wife, had often been the parent playing with the children in the nursery. They readily dismissed the accusation that he lurked threateningly outside the Belgravia home after the marriage breakdown in 1973. “He was concerned about his children, that’s all.” It was the loss of custody of the children – Frances, now 52, George, 50, and Camilla, 47 – that many say destroyed Lucan. The odd thing is that Lady Lucan also spoke with forgiving tenderness of the man whom she said had tried to kill her. She lived until her death in a mews directly behind the former marital home, scene of that murderous cataclysm.
Her little house on Eaton Row, where she spent hours listening to talk radio, was filled with reminders of the man whom she had called a “dream figure”: a portrait of him in his ermine robes; the backgammon cups he won at the Clermont Club.
“There was no bitterness on my side,” she said in the 1990s. “I have always called it a tragedy, a misunderstanding.” As her sister Christina Shand Kydd – who introduced Veronica to one John Bingham in 1963 – put it to me: “She always said she still loved him.” Despite her fondness for Lady Lucan, even Mrs Shand Kydd questioned the official version of the marriage, saying that her sister had been mentally fragile since childhood and that Lucan – certainly at first – had tried rather clumsily to help his wife, rather than destroy her.
Public opinion, however, was always with Lady Lucan. She was much cleverer than her husband and she knew how to attract sympathy: at the court where she won custody (despite her dependency on lithium), at the inquest, with the police and the press. She was helped, of course, by the image of Lucan as some monstrous seigneurial throwback. Yet even her staunchest supporters were obliged to admit the oddity of her relationship with her children, who this week issued a kindly tribute to their mother’s sharp mind, outrageous humour and courage. Nonetheless the first line told quite a story: “Although Veronica severed relations with her family in the 1980s and continued to decline contact with them…”
It was some eight years after their father’s disappearance that care for the Lucan children was assumed by Christina Shand Kydd and her late husband, Bill. Lady Lucan declared this an appalling betrayal and it led to a series of highly remarkable outbursts in the newspapers, for instance this in 1999: “If I was a bad mother, too bad. I am so disgusted with them that I feel ashamed to be their mother. To be loyal to another family is despicable, especially as they know how I have suffered.”
Lady Lucan also claimed that her son had defamed her when he suggested that his father’s guilt was not entirely proven – an opinion shared, incidentally, by his QC sister Camilla. Then there was the episode of Camilla’s wedding: Lady Lucan told the press that she had not been invited, a lie that is still widely believed. Two years ago she declined to join her son for tea at the Goring Hotel. Nor did she ever meet her five grandchildren.
So how did she spend those 47 years of aftermath? She gave her interviews – and with the ITV documentary she may have felt that she had put her case, to her satisfaction, one last time – and she was pestered continually by people such as myself.
Oddly enough I saw her just a month ago near her home. She was smartly dressed and made up, impressive despite her small stature; a rather grand lady who had lived a life that had not been happy, but that she had weathered with a singular strength: who still had tales to tell.