Murder mystery
Lord Lucan may have been declared dead this week by the High Court, but our fascination with the case will live on, says Laura Thompson
Lord Lucan: the fascination will never die
It has become a modern myth: the story of the 7th Earl of Lucan, who on the evening of November 7, 1974, bludgeoned his children’s nanny to death and attacked his estranged wife at the family home in Belgravia. Early on November 8, Lord Lucan disappeared into the wintry darkness and has never been formally sighted since.
Although those who knew him well believed he committed suicide soon after the murder, the absence of a body has given rise to other, more exciting possibilities. Take your pick from the sightings of the satanic Scarlet Pimpernel: drinking his favoured vodka martinis in a bar in Gaborone, lurking in a secluded Scottish monastery, dining in Guernsey… Or perhaps he was murdered, or fed to a tiger at his friend John Aspinall’s zoo. Who knows?
Most of the stories are idiotic, but some give pause for thought. When I was writing my book about the case, I was approached by a man who claimed that the day after the murder, his father had driven Lucan to an airfield in Kent. The account was detailed, clearly accurate in many minor respects. I didn’t believe it. Yet it was, undeniably, plausible.
Meanwhile the law was equally undecided – until now. Last week, Mrs Justice Asplin decreed that Lord Lucan is no more. His son George is now the 8th Earl and for him, at least, a chapter has been closed. But as an intelligent man, he will know his good-humoured plea outside the High Court – for people to move on from the story – is doomed to fail. The Lucan myth belongs within our collective national consciousness. And myths are wellnigh impossible to kill. So why has this sordid murder case dug its hooks so deeply into us all?
First, because it concerns the aristocracy. The immaculate façade of the earl, of his white stucco Belgravia house, contrasts with the bloody mayhem of murder to an almost unbearably tantalising degree. And our obsession with class remains so strong that the figure of Lord Lucan, unyielding and patrician in aspect, arouses the same complex mixture of resentment, rage and fascination that he did more than 40 years ago.
Back in 1974 Lucan was presented in the press – and by the police, who kept up a steady supply of stories – as a man with a terrifying sense of entitlement. He had sought to kill his wife, Veronica, because she had won a bitter court battle for their three children, because she was costing him money that he did not have, because she had become a damn nuisance. She had a history of instability, which was why Lucan had fought desperately for custody, but that, too, was portrayed as his fault.
As for the murdered Sandra Rivett, the accepted theory was that she was killed in error, collateral damage in the fallout of the marriage. Lucan had expected her to be out of the house that night. He launched an attack in the darkened basement upon a woman he believed to be his wife. Rotten luck, really. He then committed the assault upon Lady Lucan, who fought him off and escaped to the sanctuary of the Plumbers Arms pub at the end of Lower Belgrave Street.
And then what? Very little is known, in the sense of being corroborated. Lucan rang his mother and drove to a friend’s house in Sussex, where he wrote some letters. In the early morning of November 8, his borrowed car was seen abandoned in a street in Newhaven. If Lucan drove to the port, the likelihood is he went there to drown himself. However, according to the two detectives who led the murder investigation, the car was left as a decoy while the wicked earl began his flight from justice.
Again, the theory was presented in class terms. Lucan was helped by his friends to leave the country, because that was how the aristocracy behaved. They killed with an arrogant ease, then they scarpered: as if obeisance to the law was only for plebeians.
From the start, this idea struck a chord. In 1975, after an inquest jury named Lucan as the murderer of Sandra Rivett, the victim’s mother stated she feared he had escaped: “There is so much money around.” Her implication was that a new life for Lucan could easily be bankrolled. In fact there was hardly any money, and not simply because this was the era of outlandishly high taxation.
Lucan had gambled his birthright away, most of it at the glamorous Clermont Club in Berkeley Square. He disappeared with debts of some £60,000 and the glorious family silver waiting to be sold at Christie’s. Several of his friends were similarly cleaned out when the stock market crashed. Nevertheless the image of the fugitive earl – and of the scheming, snobbish, criminal-abetting ‘‘Clermont Set’’ – was too powerful to be dislodged.
But the lack of a body, Lucan’s literal physical absence, has become a symbol of the mystery that pervades the case. Those who believe, as I do, that he killed himself on or around November 8, 1974, have to accept that without a body their theory is similarly insubstantial. I am convinced Lucan drove to Newhaven, passed through a few hours of utter bleakness, then jumped from a cross-channel ferry. Yet this, too, can only ever be another version of events.
What of the murder itself? Again, the evidence is full of complexities that the myth does not acknowledge. As Sandra’s son, Neil Berriman, pointed out this week, the attack began when she was facing her killer; Lucan would have known she was not his wife, and Mr Berriman suggests that a hitman was hired. I favour this theory, not least because a couple of people who knew Lucan very well, who spoke openly to me, simply could not imagine him committing such a crude, violent murder. Nevertheless, they believed he might, in his drink-fuelled state of acute anxiety and depression, have hired somebody to do it.
There is also the strange story told by forensics: the presence of Sandra’s blood on Lady Lucan’s clothes and in the back garden, the apparent absence of blood on Lucan. The evidence was compromised (it hardly helped that every PC in the area descended upon the house, leaving more than 50 sets of fingerprints to be eliminated). Yet had Lucan not disappeared – the most damning fact against him – a good defence could have found room for manoeuvre.
Lord Lucan is still, as his son said last week, innocent until proved guilty. But this makes not an atom of difference to the myth that has outlived its progenitor.
Lucan arouses the same complex mixture of feelings as more than 40 years ago