A Different Class of Murder

by Laura Thompson

  Two weeks after the murder, this letter was published in a newspaper:

  The ordinary people of this country are accustomed to being told how lazy and greedy they have become and how they must make greater sacrifices. If I were a miner, factory worker or railwayman and I had read of Lord Lucan’s lifestyle (rise at noon, lunch at the Clermont, gambling losses of £5,000 in one afternoon) I would have said a few well chosen words when my alarm went off this morning.2

  Them and Us, that great British theme, had found in the Lucan case a perfect conduit for its own expression. From the first, therefore, it has been almost impossible to question the Lucan myth without questioning the political orthodoxy that lay behind it. To suggest that the case might be a more nuanced business than it was perceived to be, that an earl is not evil merely because he is an earl, is a dangerous business. It is to become an implied apologist for the aristocracy, for the privilege of birth not merit, for the world before Attlee: all the wrong things. Meanwhile those who uphold the myth are on the right side, and can get away with prejudice because the prejudices are acceptable. It is entirely understandable, when one considers the centuries of dominance by men like the Earl of Pembroke, or indeed the 3rd Earl of Lucan. How to resist using the story of Lord Lucan as a means to balance those absurdly weighted social scales?

  And Lucan was so earl-like: an aristocrat straight from central casting. He was screen-tested for the role of an archetypal English gentleman by the Italian director Vittorio De Sica, who had been struck by his remarkable presence and beauty in a Deauville casino. He failed the test, being too much the part to be able to act it.

  At six feet two inches he ‘stood like a guardsman, very stiff and upright’.3 His face, a handsome shallow sculpture, wore its arrogance like a shield. His demeanour was impeccable. He was amazed, or thought that he should be, by the sight of a man in Annabel’s wearing a pink shirt. On the London streets men not much younger than he were dressing as rock stars, with hair down to collars like the wingspans of model aeroplanes. But Lucan was contained within the structures of gentlemanliness, buttoned and tailored like a man who employed somebody to dress him, although he did not.

  He presented an impenetrable façade; and, because murder is most fascinating when it wears a mask, this image of Lucan’s became central to the myth. As with 46 Lower Belgrave Street, it seemed to magnify murder by its supreme incongruity. Unlike the classic domestic killers – Crippen and his prim detachable collar, Madeleine Smith and her rustling balloon of a crinoline – Lucan did not present an air of respectability. He went way beyond that, into the realm of the thoroughbred. Earls, after all, did not have to bother about being respectable, even though some of them were. They simply acted as they chose, and looked the way that they looked. In 1970s Britain, with its hippy-hangover fashions, its prime minister Harold Wilson doing his man-of-the-people act in a crumpled Gannex mac, this was a perpetual shock to the eye, a reminder of why Lucan must be hated.

  So the myth begins and ends with class, as did the life of Lord Lucan himself. Both, in their way, were rendered incomplete by that strange and powerful nonsense.

  Here, then, is the forty-year-old Lucan myth. It tells a simple story, as myths do: that of a man whose charmed life went wrong. The damage was self-inflicted, but the story is not a tragedy, because the man never had the capacity for greatness that a tragic hero requires. He was simply born lucky. He had every advantage, and he squandered them all.

  Richard John Bingham was born on 18 December 1934, the second of four children. His father, although not excessively rich, was more than comfortable. The 6th Earl owned land in Ireland and on the Surrey–Middlesex border, and later set up family trusts that would ensure his son a substantial unearned income. Both he and his wife were Labour Party supporters, with the earl becoming Labour chief whip in the House of Lords. They were in tune with the times. Their son, flagrantly, was not.

  As a child growing up in Eaton Square, Lord Bingham had, it was later said, a personal maid, as well as a nanny. During the Second World War he was sent, with his brother and two sisters, to the safety of America. There he lived with the Brady Tucker family, awash with nineteenth-century banking money and owners of the last private house on New York’s Park Avenue. Summers were spent on the family estate at Westchester, where the Lucan children had a house of their own. The future earl ate liberally from the fruits of near-infinite riches: the child’s unquestioning familiarity with luxury would become, in adulthood, an insatiable yearning for it. ‘He wouldn’t have known how to be poor,’ wrote Roy Ranson, the detective chief-superintendent who led the investigation into the murder of Sandra Rivett.4 ‘Lucan’s trouble’, says another former police officer who worked on the case, ‘was that he thought he was entitled to things that he wasn’t.’5

  Lord Bingham attended Eton, completed his national service as a second lieutenant in the Coldstream Guards, and walked into a job at a merchant bank. In the innocent 1950s the City was full of well-born dilettantes, who took pleasure infinitely more seriously than work. Lord Bingham was the supreme example of the breed, with his bachelor flat near Regent’s Park, his power-boating and bobsleighing, his Aston Martin. He owned racehorses: before 1974 his name appeared in the newspapers most frequently in connection with his runners at Newmarket. Although remaining semi-detached from high-society husband-hunters, he was an adornment at any party. He was astonishingly good-looking, as striking a creature as then bestrode the streets of London. And he led a playboy life: James Bond, without the spying. Indeed his acquaintance, Cubby Broccoli, considered Lord Bingham the very image of Bond.

  He gambled, as his kind often did. Gambling, in fact, was the one thing that excited true passion in him. He was an immaculate fixture at the casinos of Deauville and Monte Carlo, and at the tables of his London clubs. Then he made a tentative entry into the set created by the young adventurer John Aspinall, who in the late 1950s began staging aristo-packed illegal gambling soirées. In 1962, two years after the Betting and Gaming Act liberalized the industry, Aspinall opened the Clermont Club casino at 44 Berkeley Square. Lord Bingham was one of its original members.

  He also chucked his job. Although he worshipped wealth he had no desire to work for it in the normal plebeian way. After winning some £26,000 on chemin-de-fer at Le Touquet he conceived the idea that gambling could become a profession. He explained as much to the girl to whom he proposed in 1963: twenty-six-year-old Veronica Duncan, a pretty former art student. Veronica accepted the proposal, as well as Lord Bingham’s theories of money-making. He was a remarkable catch, after all. ‘I was looking for a god,’ she later said, ‘and he was a dream figure.’

  In January 1964, just two months after the wedding, the 6th Earl died. The Lucans made their home at 46 Lower Belgrave Street, whose lease was acquired through a marriage trust fund. Between 1964 and 1970 they had three children: Frances, George and Camilla.

  All should have been set fair. Behind the façade, however, life was falling steadily apart. Lucan’s gambling grew ever more obsessive. One night he lost £8,000, another night £10,000, and so on. Other members of the club, such as King Fahd of Saudi Arabia or the businessman James Goldsmith, could sustain far greater losses with a shrug, but they represented the larger part of Lord Lucan’s annual income. His countess accompanied him to the Clermont most evenings. There she sat alone, ignored, worrying herself half to death over the money that was scattering itself heedlessly across the chemmy table. ‘But she had no business to come there,’ John Aspinall would later say.6 Most of Lucan’s friends disliked her; they thought her socially beneath them, odd and difficult and not particularly attractive, unworthy of their precious earl. One evening Veronica threw a glass of wine over another of the Clermont wives. It confirmed, in the minds of the Lucan set, the belief that the countess was a strange little item promoted well above her station. She later retaliated by saying that they were the real social embarrassment: ‘That is why they had to stay at the Clermont Club all the time.�
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  As Roy Ranson would write, in the voice of egalitarian modernity: ‘Veronica was an intelligent woman sentenced to a life as an upper-class bimbo.’ She had no chance against the eighteenth-century allure of the Clermont, and could not break down the walls of Lucan’s laughing, Stuyvesant-smoking, vodka-drinking, rigidly right-wing circle. They locked themselves together like a rugby scrum, like the bunch of public schoolboys that they were, and she was left outside, sitting on the ‘widows’ bench’ beside the free-standing staircase at the Clermont, despairing at what her life had become.

  Veronica had suffered post-natal depression after the birth of each of her children. In the late 1960s her husband began carting her off for psychiatric treatment. She ran away from two clinics although, wrote Ranson, ‘in desperation she agreed to home visits from a psychiatrist and to a course of anti-depressant drugs’. It was a means to placate Lucan, who had told her that refusing treatment was the sign that one needed it. Like the smoothly sadistic husband in Patrick Hamilton’s play, Gaslight, he was implanting in Veronica the idea that she was mad in order to make her so; like the 4th Earl Ferrers, he was exerting the cruellest form of control over a wife whom he believed to be unfit. After the birth of his son in 1967, he told his friends of his concerns about her mental state. Grotesque stories began to be spread about her. ‘As far as I know,’ wrote Ranson’s chief-inspector sidekick David Gerring, ‘not one of the rumours was true.’8 Ranson, more forcefully, wrote that Lucan had lied to his ‘young and vulnerable wife’ about money; then, in the face of her anxious questioning, he had started a ‘vicious and unrelenting campaign to brand her insane’.

  For her part Veronica was telling people that Lucan was a violent, abusive husband. Lucan countered with a story that she had thrown herself against the furniture and threatened to accuse him of assault. ‘The problem’, wrote James Fox in a Sunday Times Magazine article about the Lucan case, ‘was that from the moment of her alienation, her detractors had the monopoly on the gossip.’9

  At the start of 1973, Lord Lucan moved out of Lower Belgrave Street. Life there had become untenable: the Clermont was now his home. Veronica was taking a complicated cocktail of drugs. These encouraged paranoia and hallucinations, and caused her foot to tap uncontrollably on the floor beside the widows’ bench. Not that she would be sitting there again. ‘There was no attempt to work the problem through, to really sit down and sort things out,’ was how Veronica later described the end of her marriage. ‘He just said to the GP: “Is she fit?” and the GP said: “Yes, she is fit.” And with that he just turned on his heel and went upstairs and began to pack.’10

  Lucan first moved to the mews house at 5 Eaton Row, also owned in trust, directly behind Lower Belgrave Street. Then he went a little further afield, albeit still within the sacred precincts of SW1, to a flat at 72a Elizabeth Street. The idea of taking on this five-bedroom property was that it would be large enough to accommodate his children and their nanny. The idea, in fact, was to win custody.

  In March 1973 Lucan made an application at the High Court to have the children placed in his care. This was granted, pending a full hearing. Accordingly he organized what would later be described as a ‘kidnap’. When Veronica learned that her children had been seized, she became hysterical. She then spent eight days at the Priory clinic in Roehampton, in order that a report on her mental condition could be made, and prepared painstakingly for the High Court custody hearing in July.

  Lord Lucan lost. Mr Justice Rees, who heard the case, thought him an arrogant liar with an outrageous lifestyle. Veronica supplied evidence that he was a sexual sadist. A psychiatrist at the Priory testified that Veronica had been cured by lithium. The judge decreed that the children should live with their mother, with a permanent nanny in residence.

  Lucan had lost his children, and he had lost £20,00011 that he did not have in paying for his wife’s victory. Now Veronica was in control: living in Lucan’s house, with his children, on his money. Again like Earl Ferrers, he had been bested by a woman who had proved her sanity in court; and his reaction would be very similar.

  Between July 1973 and November 1974 Lucan hoped for a reversal of the High Court judgment. Escalating his former behaviour, he embarked upon a campaign of terror that ‘made it clear that he was trying to drive his wife into madness or suicide’.12 As he had done before the court case, he taped conversations between himself and Veronica. He began making anonymous telephone calls to Lower Belgrave Street. He paid private detectives to watch movements at the house, while he himself sat outside in his Mercedes, staring through dark glasses, a sinister and unignorable presence. His desire for custody is generally believed to have sprung from genuine motives, although Roy Ranson would later dispute this: ‘I believe that, rather than the much quoted love of his children, it is his lack of money… that provides the key to this case.’

  Indeed Lucan’s financial situation, which had been worsening for some years, disintegrated after the custody hearing, and his gambling became concomitantly wilder. The absurd nickname of ‘Lucky’ Lucan, used by friends and subsequently embraced by the press, took on an ever-grimmer irony. He turned up at the Clermont with a dogged regularity, although the place had changed since John Aspinall sold it to the Playboy Club in 1972. ‘Like many of his friends,’ wrote James Fox, ‘[Lucan] resented the fact that any member of the Playboy could now come to the Clermont and dilute the exclusivity.’13 The Clermont was about posh chaps together. Playboy was about bunnies and birds. That particular outlet for masculine boyishness held no charm for Lucan. He had a girlfriend of sorts, a pretty twenty-one-year-old named Andrina Colquhoun, but women were never really his thing. He was a man’s man, through and through.

  In between the unvarying meals of lamb chops (grilled in winter, en gelée in summer), the steady stream of booze and the berserk bouts of gambling, Lucan spent his time at the Clermont telling anybody who would listen about his wicked wife and what she had done to him. The wicked wife, meanwhile, was trying to cope with the procession of nannies that wandered in and out of Lower Belgrave Street. In August 1974, however, a new candidate presented herself. She was Sandra Rivett: competent, pretty and good-natured. The two women, both separated from their husbands, became friendly. This was no mistress–servant relationship, but something more modern and enlightened. There seemed no possibility of Sandra leaving the position, as others had done. Veronica had established a status quo of her own. By the autumn of 1974, Lord Lucan was despairing of its reversal.

  He wanted his children and his house, but he could not have these things because they now belonged to Veronica, and there was no money left to dislodge her. In every way, therefore, the scene was becoming set for a classic domestic murder. ‘Lucan’, it would later be said, ‘wanted his life to continue as before, but without his wife. She had to be erased. It was a fantasy, and it required a fantastic plan of action.’14

  The plan, in sum, was this. Lucan would kill his wife on the nanny’s night off, when Veronica went downstairs to the basement to make her evening cup of tea. Some theorists posit that he paid a hitman to do the job,15 but this suggestion was never seriously considered by the police and it does not explain why Lucan himself was at the scene of the crime. He would bundle Veronica’s body into a sack, and either conceal it temporarily in the large safe that stood behind the basement stairs, or transport it directly into his car boot. Then he would drive to Elizabeth Street, change into his tenue de soirée and head for dinner at the Clermont, where he would assume his aspect of the guardsman who knew how to lose like a gentleman before disposing of his wife. With her body stowed in the car he would drive to the south coast and take a boat out into deep waters, where the body would be sunk.

  Sandra Rivett, on her return to the house, would alert Lucan to the fact that his wife was missing. He would then make a concerned report to the Belgravia police. Veronica, with her history of instability, would be assumed to have wandered off; eventually, there would be a presumption of suicide. V
eronica had disappeared before, albeit briefly, when she ran away from Greenways nursing home in Hampstead. ‘It is possible’, as was later written, ‘that this incident gave Lucan one of his occasional ideas.’16

  At some point before 9pm on the night of 7 November, Lucan entered the former marital home with his front-door key while his wife and children were watching television upstairs. Then he waited in the basement, lead piping in hand, in the expectation that Veronica would come down into the kitchen to make her tea. What Lucan did not know was that Sandra had changed her usual night off, and that she would be the woman who descended into the basement. Having removed the overhead light bulb in the kitchen, Lucan could not see that he was killing the wrong woman. It was a prolonged attack. Sandra Rivett’s skull was split in six places. She died from bruising of the brain and inhalation of blood. Her body was then shoved into a mailsack. The basement area around the stairs was splashed and soaked with blood, as if a can of red paint had been emptied over the walls and floor.

  Veronica would later testify that she had gone in search of Sandra, and that as she stood at the top of the basement stairs, calling to see where her nanny had got to, Lucan launched his second assault. The husband and wife grappled together. The piping landed at least four times on Veronica’s head. Lucan then thrust gloved fingers down her throat and tried to strangle her. As they were rolling around together on the small square of floor, Veronica wrenched her husband’s testicles and he released his grip. They sat together, breathless and spent, and Lucan confessed to having killed the nanny. Then they went upstairs to Veronica’s second-floor bedroom. While Lucan was soaking a flannel in the bathroom with which to bathe his wife’s wounds, Veronica escaped from the house and, at about 9.50pm, ran the short distance to the Plumbers Arms at the end of Lower Belgrave Street. There, after sitting silently for a few moments, she gasped out her story to the people in the pub.