Lucan’s widow in overdose mistake
BRITAIN: Throughout the decades of speculation about her husband’s fate, Lady Lucan insisted resolutely that he had taken his own life. An inquest into her death was told yesterday that she took her own life in the mistaken belief that she had Parkinson’s disease, which she blamed on drugs that she claimed her husband had forced her to take.
The widow of Lord Lucan had confided in a friend that she was worried about her health and finances. In the months before her death at age 80, she read books on suicide, attended a meeting of a group that advocates assisted dying, and finished her memoirs.
Police discovered Lady Lucan’s body in September last year at her home in Belgravia, central London. A pathologist concluded that she died from respiratory failure caused by an overdose of barbiturates and alcohol poisoning.
Lady Lucan had become worried that she had developed Parkinson’s after noticing she had a tremor in her right hand and had lost her sense of smell and had become forgetful.
Last year she told a journalist that as their marriage disintegrated, her husband mounted a ‘‘campaign to destroy me’’, which included forced injections of antipsychotic drugs, which had caused Parkinson’s disease.
However, the coroner, Dr Fiona Wilcox, said: ‘‘There is no formal diagnosis, and examination of her brain was normal.’’ She recorded a verdict of suicide.