How her hidden letters could shed new light on the murder
The discovery of Lady Lucan’s letters, hidden under floorboards, could shed new light on her notorious marriage, says Peter Stanford
It is difficult not to conclude that, even from beyond the grave, Lady Lucan is determined to have the last word on one of post-war Britain’s most talked-about murders. It is now almost 45 years since the November evening when, covered in blood, she burst into the local pub near her Belgravia home screaming that her husband had tried to kill her, and in the process had bludgeoned to death Sandra Rivett, the nanny who looked after their three young children.
Yet her tale is being considered anew following the discovery of a stash of letters she had written and left for years under the floorboards in the mews house where she lived – a stone’s throw from the scene of the crime, the family’s former five-storey home at 46 Lower Belgrave Street. Written after the disappearance of her husband in 1974, in a series of exchanges with solicitors and literary agents, they reveal
Lady Lucan’s great pains in refuting the rumours that her mental fragility had somehow precipitated her husband’s resort to deadly violence.
“I submit that I am a perfectly normal person whose marriage went wrong mainly because of financial problems,” she opined over 10 pages in one addressed to Boyce, Evans and Sheppard, a solicitors’ firm in London, in 1976. At the time of his disappearance, her husband, a dashing former Coldstream Guardsman and merchant banker, had lost thousands in his new career as a professional gambler; her letters suggest that, far from her being the one who was unbalanced, it was Lord Lucan who had tipped into insanity in the battle between the couple over their children’s future.
“The custody proceedings brought out the worst in my husband and I believe he was encouraged to pursue the course he did in those proceedings by others to such an extent that he became paranoid,” she wrote in the newly unearthed letters.
Lord Lucan was 39 when he vanished that November, fuelling enduring speculation ever since that his wealthy aristocratic chums were either hiding him, or had spirited him away to escape justice. Spotting the man known to friends as “Lucky” Lucan – on account of him having once won £40,000 in a game of
baccarat (though he was cleared out many more times) – became a national obsession, though reported sightings never stood up to scrutiny.
His wife never doubted she had become a widow, imagining he most likely boarded a cross-channel ferry straight after the killing, and jumped into the water exactly where he knew the propellers would leave no trace of his body. “Quite brave, I think,” she said, revealing something of her own mixed-up feelings about the man who tried to kill her.
Right up until her death in September 2017, the woman born Veronica Duncan in Bournemouth in 1937 and raised in South Africa by her mother and stepfather never wavered in her account of the events of the night of Nov 7 1974. Only months before she died, with a cocktail of drugs beside her and believing she had Parkinson’s disease, she continued to speak candidly about the couple’s abusive marriage, first in an ITV documentary, My Husband, The Truth, and then in a headline-grabbing memoir, A Moment in Time.
In the documentary, she told how he tried to have her institutionalised, hid her possessions in an effort to convince her she was losing her mind (known today as “gas-lighting”), and beat her on the bare bottom to drive out “the madness” in her before sex. What the letters reveal most powerfully, though, is her undying sense of injustice at being, in her terms, shunned and even scapegoated for his crimes.
“I am portrayed as a bitch, a neurotic woman suffering from a degree of mental illness since the age of eight, and a calculating person pursuing my own selfish motives,” she writes in a letter instructing her solicitor to begin libel proceedings against the publishers of a 1976 article based, she believed, on off-the-record briefings from his friends to the American journal The New Review. “The article reads as though I had committed some crime rather than my husband.” “While no one would suggest other than that she had an unhappy life,” says the award-winning author, Laura Thompson, who in 2014 published A Different Class of Murder about the Lucan case, “she always wanted to own the story of what happened that night. Ninety per cent of what she did recount about it had no other source of corroboration. And, when in her later years, she began to feel the story was drifting away from her, and other explanations were being offered, she set out once more to reclaim it. Leaving these letters somewhere they were always going to be found might be seen as part of that process.”
Though she did not meet Lady Lucan, Thompson did, she says, interview many who knew the couple well. Few had anything positive to say about Lady Lucan. “Some, though, were obviously quite conflicted, feeling that it was a deeply unhappy marriage between two people who should never have been together that turned into a battleground, tragically with the nanny as collateral damage.”
Eight years after his disappearance, the couple’s children, then teenagers, went to live with Lady Lucan’s younger sister, Christina, and her husband, Bill Shand Kydd (who, Lady Lucan wrote in her memoir, once told her, “you are a bit peculiar – and I’d have beaten you if you’d been my wife”).
The aunt and uncle protested privately that they had no choice for the welfare of George, Camilla and Frances than to take them in because their mother was unable to look after them. However, it resulted in Lady Lucan being estranged not just from her sister but also from her children for the 35 years until her death.
In interviews, she would go so far as to attack them. Her son, she told one journalist, had bartered “the accidental privilege of his birth” by abandoning her. Asked in the 2017 documentary if she had been a good mother, she replied simply: “I could have been better. I did stay in bed rather too long.”
Her son, who finally inherited the family peerage in 2016 when the High Court declared his father dead, is married to Anne-sofie Foghsgaard, the daughter of a Danish billionaire who has launched a “Lucan fashion” line (a strange exercise in branding…).
Her daughter, Camilla Bloch, is a QC and mother of four – and has said the evidence against her father committing murder is “circumstantial” rather than “conclusive”. And Lady Lucan said she had stood outside a central London church watching the wedding of her youngest, Frances – but by accident rather than design. She was on her way to M&S, she explained.
Though her upbringing had been comfortably middle class, she played the part of the eccentric aristocrat with conviction, dismissing the peeling wallpaper, broken lavatory and shabby kitchen in the mews house where she lived (but did not own). “Poor old Veronica Lucan,” wrote the socialite Taki Theodoracopulos of his old friend’s widow in his magazine column.
A portrait of “Lucky” Lucan by his Eton contemporary, Dominick Elwes, always had pride of place in her drawing room, along with trophies he had won at the upper-crust gambling venue, the Clermont Club.
She left her £576,626 estate – more substantial than had been expected – to Shelter, the homeless charity. Her children’s stiff-upper-lip reaction to her death would no doubt have pleased their mother, who had in the past publicly rebuked them for a lack of good manners. They were there at her sparsely attended funeral.
A statement they released would probably have infuriated her. “She was,” it read, “in her day a beauty, and throughout life fragile and vulnerable.” However wellintentioned, in her eyes mention of her “vulnerability” would have been taken, once again, as suggesting that she was somehow implicated in what happened. In which case, those letters under the floorboards were an insurance policy that allowed her the final say.
‘The custody proceedings brought out the worst in my husband’