LORD LUCAN IN THE HALL WITH A LEAD PIPE?
Lord Lucan’s disappearance in 1974 after bludgeoning the family nanny to death with a lead pipe and seriously injuring his wife has remained shrouded in mystery. The car he was using, a Ford Corsair, was found abandoned in Newhaven, East Sussex, and it is widely believed that the fugitive lord took a ferry from there to Dieppe in France and committed suicide by jumping overboard into the Channel. However, his body has never been found, and there are persistent rumours that he escaped and lived on in obscurity, shielded by his Establishment friends, with occasional sightings making the headlines. One of these inadvertently revealed a fugitive MP, John Stonehouse, who had successfully faked his own suicide and was living under an assumed name in Australia until outed by the Lucan manhunt. Another was of a hippy named “Jungle Barry” in India, who bore a passing resemblance to Lucan but turned out to be an ex-teacher from Merseyside, who really was named Barry.
Now, an investigation by the Daily Mail has revealed that when police found Lucan’s Corsair in Newhaven, in it were three cards from the board game Cluedo showing Colonel Mustard, the lead pipe and the hall. This has never been made public before and the Mail raises the possibility that the cards indicate the murder of the nanny, Sandra Rivett, had been planned. It has always been assumed that Rivett was killed by accident when Lucan mistook her for his wife, with whom he was involved in a bitter divorce, but while her body was found in the basement kitchen of the Lucans’ Belgravia house, forensic evidence showed the attack had started in the hall. The three cards, which have been traced to a Cluedo set owned by the Lucan family, would have had to have been taken before the attack, as after botching the assault on his wife, Lucan immediately fled the house, leaving him no time to collect anything.
While the lead pipe and the hall cards seem to refer to the location of Rivett’s killing and the weapon, the third card, Colonel Mustard, would seem to be a reference to Lucan himself. In the classic version of the game, Mustard not only bears some physical resemblance to Lucan, being a dapper moustachioed man with a military background, he is also, like Lucan, a colonialist member of the Establishment and a big game hunter. A former investigator involved in the Lucan case told the Mail: “If Lucan did leave the Cluedo cards, it makes me think the whole thing was pre-planned. It is interesting. It is strange. The more you think about it, the more it has got implications.” It could, however, just indicate that Lucan expected to find his wife in the hall as it should have been Rivett’s night off – so her death could still be a tragic error.
The Mail investigation also turned up another Lucan sighting, this time by a woman who claimed to have been introduced to him at a party at a villa in the Algarve owned by one of Lucan’s close friends in the weeks or months after he vanished. Although her sighting was described as “credible” by police at the time, they declined to follow it up on cost