Sorry decline of wife at centre of the 20th century’s most enduring murder mystery
T HE 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 7 th 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. 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 Ms 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 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.
Although he was officially declared dead, Lord Lucan has reportedly been sighted in Australia, Ireland, South Africa and New Zealand, and there are even claims that he fled to India and lived life as a hippy called “Jungly Barry”.
In a TV documentary earlier this year, his widow said she believed Lord Lucan had jumped off a ferry shortly after the killing.
“I would say he got on the ferry and jumped off in the middle of the Channel in the way of the propellers so that his remains wouldn’t be found,” she said, calling what she believed to be his final act “brave”.
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 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. W hat proved fatal to the marriage seems to have been the sale of the Clermont in 1972 to Victor Lownes of the Playboy empire who 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 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. They never divorced.
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.
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. Crushed by her ordeal, mental problems and shortage of money, she ceded custody of the children.
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 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”.
“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.”
Veronica Mary Duncan was born on May 3, 1937, and was found dead on Tuesday. (© Daily Telegraph, London)