Lucan’s wife killed herself as she thought she had Parkinson’s
IT HAS been more than 40 years since Lord Lucan vanished after murdering his children’s nanny when he mistook her for his estranged wife.
Now, in a final twist, it seems that the legacy of their toxic relationship has claimed his intended victim.
Veronica, the Dowager Countess of Lucan, 80, killed herself with a cocktail of drink and drugs after wrongly self-diagnosing with Parkinson’s disease – an illness she had claimed had been brought on by him forcing her to take medication.
She had spent her final years as a recluse, having not spoken to her sister or her three children since the Eighties, and she was determined that she turn to assisted suicide rather than become a burden to anyone through ill health.
Noticing a tremor in her right hand, unable to sleep, losing her sense of smell, feeling tired, anxious and becoming forgetful, Lady Lucan convinced herself that she had Parkinson’s disease, her inquest heard yesterday.
She claimed in an interview just months before her death that her Parkinson’s was “drug-induced” by the anti-psychotic medicine that was forced on her after John Bingham, her husband, the 7th Earl of Lucan, convinced everyone – including her – that she was mad.
“My husband had a campaign to destroy me,” she said. “I was a nuisance. He was an imposing character; an earl, and the doctors believed all he told them about me.”
She had never been to the doctor about her fears, but she had detailed it in her diary and told David Davies, her friend, with whom she had discussed euthanasia.
It was Mr Davies who reported her missing after she had not been seen for two days and missed their regular meeting in St James’s Park. The coroner noted that she was “a lady of a regular routine and regularly met with friends on a daily basis in St James’s Park, to have lunch and go to the library”.
Police smashed a window to break into the same twostorey terraced town house in Belgravia, central London, from which her husband disappeared in 1974.
Lady Lucan was discovered on the dining room floor with an unmarked bottle under her body with just one pill left inside. A builder’s face mask with lipstick on it was found next to her.
Dr Fiona Wilcox, the coroner, ruled that her death in September last year was suicide. Lady Lucan had always maintained that her missing husband had committed suicide. In a written statement Mr Davies, who had known her for two years, said that the pair had discussed ending their lives if they suffered a terminal illness.
A year before they had attended a lecture “on how to help people with a terminal illness end their lives peacefully and Dignitas was mentioned”. He said: “We both discussed how to end our lives but only if we developed a degenerative or terminal illness or became reliant on other people.”
He added: “But there was nothing to suggest she was considering this and she seemed cheerful the last time I saw her.”