Who is Lord Lucan? Real story of killer aristocrat 50 years after he vanished following nanny's murder
4 November 2024, 10:16
Fifty years ago, on November 7, 1974, the dead body of a children’s nanny, Sandra Rivett, was discovered in a mail sack in the basement of a Belgravia townhouse.
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The chief suspect was the father of the children, an Eton-educated gambler called Richard John Bingham, the seventh earl of Lucan, who had vanished.
While most of Lord Lucan’s friends and family insisted that he had taken his own life, no body has ever been found. The manhunt for Lucan has lasted decades.
Read More: Three missing Cluedo cards discovered in Lord Lucan's car deepen nanny murder mystery
Who was Lord Lucan?
Richard John Bingham was the seventh Earl of Lucan, whose great-great-grandfather ordered the Charge of the Light Brigade, and whose father was a socialist peer who served in Clement Atlee's government.
Born in 1934, Lucan went to Eton, did National Service in the Coldstream Guards, and briefly worked at Brandt's merchant bank in London.
A spectacular win at chemin de fer (worth £26,000, when his annual salary was only £500) convinced him to become a professional gambler. He did not thrive: his nickname, "Lucky", was ironic.
Even so, he lived a ritzy lifestyle, driving powerboats, racing bobsleighs and owning race horses; his suave demeanour led to him apparently being considered for the screen role of James Bond.
How was his marriage?
Lord Lucan was a snob who reportedly refused to talk to people who "didn't have proper shoelaces", but he still married a middle-class woman, Veronica Duncan, in 1963; she was the sister-in-law of his friend Bill Shand-Kydd.
Soon after, his father died and he succeeded to the earldom. The couple had three children, but Lady Lucan suffered from postnatal depression and the marriage gradually fell apart.
He tried to have her committed to a psychiatric hospital, and they separated in 1973. A bitter custody battle ensued; Lucan became obsessed with the idea that she was incapable of raising his children, but he lost the court case, running up huge legal fees in the process.
What happened on the night of Thursday 7 October 1974?
At around 9:45pm, Lady Lucan stumbled from her home on Lower Belgrave Street into the nearby Plumber's Arm. drenched in blood and screaming: "Help me, help me, help me! I have just escaped from being murdered! He's in the house! He's murdered the nanny!"
It transpired that at around 9pm, she had asked her nanny, Sandra Rivett, 29, to make a cup of tea. Rivett had gone down to the basement kitchen. When she did not reappear, Lady Lucan had gone down to investigate, and had been attacked by a man whose voice she said she recognised as her husband's.
After fighting him and convincing him to stop the attack; she said that he admitted to having killed Rivett (by mistake). After he had taken her up to her bedroom, she managed to escape. When the police arrived, they found Rivett's body in a sack, with a bloody lead pipe that had been used to beat her to death.
What Lucan did after the attack?
He left London and arrived at his friend Ian Maxwell-Scott's home, in Uckfield in Sussex, at 11:30pm.
His told Susan Maxwell-Scott that he had had a "traumatic night of unbelievable coincidence." While passing the family house he seen an intruder struggling with his wife in the basement. He had run in to help, and the man had run off.
Realising that his wife would accuse him of being responsible and that the evidence looked damning, he said he had decided to "lie doggo for a while".
The last confirmed sighting of Lucan was him leaving Uckfield in the early hours of Friday. His car was found near the harbour in Newhaven, 16 miles away; it had been parked between 5am and 8am.
What is the evidence against him?
In a landmark inquest in June 1975, it took a jury just 31 minutes to find that Lucan had murdered Rivett. This was based on Lady Lucan's testimony, and on a wealth of other details.
The car Lucan was using, a Ford Corsair, was found splattered with blood types matching both Rivett and Lady Lucan, along with another length of pipe, similar to the murder weapon.
Lucan had borrowed a car, perhaps because it was less conspicuous than his Mercedes, and had found out from his daughter that the nanny's night off was on Thursdays, though she in fact swapped her days that week.
He knew that his wife made a cup of tea at 9pm; a light bulb had been removed in the basement.
Lucan's friend Greville Howard later told police Lucan had told him that killing his wife would save him from bankruptcy, because he would reclaim his house, and that he could dump her body in the Solent; she "would never be found".
What happened to Lucan?
Initially police believed he had fled to Africa. Some speculated that the peer's wealthy friends, dubbed "the Clermont set", had helped spirit him away, and perhaps killed him because he had become an embarrassment, or at least encouraged him to shoot himself before his body was fed to tigers owned by John Aspinall at Howletts, his private zoo in Kent.
There have been 'sightings' of the missing peer as far away as India, Mozambique and Australia.
The most plausible theory remains that he committed suicide shortly after the nanny's death. Lady Lucan believed that he took a ferry from Newhaven and threw himself into the Channel.
In 2016, his son George Bingham said he believed his father had been dead since 1974, and that it was time to find "another Loch Ness monster out there".
Why are people still fascinated by the case?
There has been a real human cost in this case and tragically people often forget that Sandra Rivett is the real victim
The BBC is to air a documentary series looking to solve the mysterious disappearance of Lord Lucan following the murder of his children’s nanny Sandra Rivett almost 50 years ago.
The three-part series follows Ms Rivett’s son, Hampshire builder Neil Berriman, who has been consumed by the case since he discovered his mother’s identity at the age of 40, having been put for adoption as a baby.
In 2016, Lord Lucan’s son Lord George Bingham inherited his title as the eighth Earl after he applied for a death certificate 42 years after his father vanished, under the Presumption of Death Act, which came into effect in 2014.
Lady Lucan was estranged from her children and lived as a recluse, before killing herself in 2017.
