Lord Lucan’s closest chum takes secrets to the grave
SCARCELY a week after the Earl of lucan’s 80th birthday, the last person to see the fugitive peer alive has died. William Shand Kydd, who was married to lady lucan’s sister Christina, passed away peacefully at home two days after Christmas, aged 77.
‘It’s the end of an era,’ says a friend of the family. ‘Bill was an amazing man.’
Wallpaper heir Bill was the l ast survivor of ‘lucky’ lucan’s gambling chums, the tycoon Sir James Goldsmith, zookeeper John Aspinall and Mark Birley, founder of Annabel’s nightclub.
Bill raced power boats with lucan before turning to horse-racing and becoming a successful amateur jockey, riding 117 winners over jumps and also taking part in the Grand National.
He became a tetraplegic after breaking his neck in a riding accident in 1995 and went on to raise thousands of pounds for spinal research.
However, it was the father of two’s unwitting role in lucan’s disappearance in 1974 that created all the headlines. On the night that nanny Sandra rivett was bludgeoned to death in the Earl’s family home in london’s Belgravia, the peer tried to contact Bill.
lucan wrote him two letters, outlining details of his bank account and estate, and explaining that he had been involved in the ‘most ghastly circumstances’. In the letters, which
Bill read out at the official inquest into Rivett’s death, Lucan begged Bill to look after his heir George, then seven, and his daughters Frances, ten, and Camilla, four, over whom Lucan had fought a bitter custody battle after he split up with his wife, Veronica.
The earl was named by the inquest’s jury as Rivett’s murderer and his children continued to live with Lady Lucan i n the years i mmediately afterwards.
However, in 1982, custody of all three was transferred to Bill and Christina, who lived at Horton Hall in Bedfordshire.
Lady Lucan did not contest this and George and his sisters have not had contact with their mother since.
Bill was related to Princess Diana through his late half-brother, Peter Shand Kydd, who was her stepfather.
‘He will be deeply missed,’ says his friend. Bill had been separated from Christina for seven years before his accident and lived with his lover, interior designer Sally Ramsay Patrick, at Horton Hall.
But Christina showed unswerving loyalty and moved back in after his fall and set about restoring her husband to health.
Sally proved an equally determined nurse and the two women — reputed to have met for the first time when they stood either side of the trolley that took Bill to intensive care — agreed to separate visiting hours.