A Different Class of Murder

by Laura Thompson

  As the ambulance and police were being summoned, Madeleine Florman heard a ring on her doorbell at 51 Chester Square. Unnerved, she did not go downstairs to answer it. Not long afterwards she was phoned by a man whose voice she believed to be that of Lord Lucan. He also telephoned his mother at her flat near Lord’s cricket ground, after which the dowager countess immediately left for Lower Belgrave Street. Both women told the police that they had heard no ‘pips’ at the start of these calls. This meant that Lucan had not used a public phone box, and raised the question – in those quaint pre-mobile days – as to where he did in fact make the calls.

  Lord Lucan then drove to the home of his friend Susan Maxwell-Scott in Uckfield, Sussex. In her account, she stated that Lucan turned up unannounced at around 11.30pm and asked for her husband Ian (who was in London, where he worked as a director of the Clermont). Mrs Maxwell-Scott said that Lucan described the events of that night to her. His story was that he was walking past his former home and saw a fight going on in the basement between Veronica and an unknown man, who had already killed the nanny. Lucan intervened to save his wife, whereupon the assailant fled.

  At about 12.15am Lucan telephoned a second time to his mother. He wrote two letters to his friend Bill Shand Kydd, the husband of his wife’s sister. One of these reiterated the story told to Mrs Maxwell-Scott; the other contained directions as to paying off Lucan’s creditors. He then wrote two letters to another friend, Michael Stoop, only one of which was shown to the police. According to Mrs Maxwell-Scott, Lucan left her house at around 1.15am. He had asked for something to help him sleep, and she had given him four valium.

  At some point between 5am and 8am, according to witnesses who observed the road at those times, the Ford Corsair that Lucan had previously borrowed from Stoop was abandoned in a residential street in the port of Newhaven. When the police examined it on Sunday 10 November, they found smears of blood on the car interior. In the boot was a piece of lead piping, almost identical to the one found at Lower Belgrave Street.

  Lord Lucan himself had disappeared. Newhaven, it seemed, was the journey’s end.

  The police had no doubt, from the very first, that the earl was their man. Veronica told them so, when they visited her at St George’s Hospital at Hyde Park in the early hours of 8 November. Later that day she gave a full statement: some twenty pages of painstaking longhand. According to Roy Ranson, she ‘never varied from the essential facts of her account of that night – to my mind a clear indication that she had told the plain, unvarnished truth’. There were discrepancies between her statement and that of her ten-year-old daughter, Frances, who had been watching television in her mother’s bedroom throughout this period; in Ranson’s view, however, ‘the evidence of Frances was always slightly muddled’. What was contemptuously dismissed was Lucan’s own story, that he had entered the house to save his wife from an attack in the basement. As Ranson put it, Veronica ‘stated, from the very first moment of the inquiry, that she had never set foot in the basement’. Blood from her group was in fact found there, but this was explained as accidental transference, from what Ranson described as ‘the many movements of officers, dogs, scientists, fingerprint experts and undertakers’.

  The newspapers, meanwhile, were going into paroxysms: understandably. Although Lord Lucan was not a well-known peer, he was a peer all the same, and earls do not commit murder. Yet it was beyond question that this earl had. The police and the press formed a close alliance, and from the first the papers were making clear not only who killed Sandra Rivett, but why she had died: the theory of mistaken identity was posited almost immediately. Sandra’s mother, Eunice Hensby, stated in an interview on the 13th that ‘Sandra and Lady Lucan looked amazingly alike’.17 That same day, it was reported that warrants for Lord Lucan’s arrest had been obtained at Bow Street Magistrates’ Court.

  But where was the man? Although a body was sought in the area surrounding Newhaven, the prevailing opinion, or perhaps the better story, was that Lucan was alive. ‘World hunt for the Earl’, ran a headline on the 14th. ‘Detectives were posted to watch thirty homes in Europe, the USA and the West Indies’:18 houses belonging to friends of Lord Lucan. The following day it was stated that fourteen ‘country estates’ were being investigated. Almost certainly this is the only murder inquiry that has ever included a search of Warwick Castle, whose presiding earl had married Lucan’s second cousin. Another powerful component of the Lucan myth was beginning to grow: the belief that his circle of friends had closed ranks around him. As a newspaper article would later put it: ‘From the beginning, the police met nothing but obstruction from the circle of boneheads and gamblers who are friends of Lucan.’19

  On the day after the murder, several members of the Clermont set had met for lunch at the Belgravia house of John Aspinall. It was speculated that they had concocted a plan to enable Lucan to flee the country. ‘Men like Goldsmith and Aspinall saw themselves as outlaws,’ it was said, ‘and the murder of Sandra Rivett gave them a rare chance to live out that fantasy.’20

  It was also said that the police encountered an unbreakable wall of silence when they tried to interview what they called the ‘Eton Mafia’. ‘All over London, Lucan’s friends had begun to rally round. Their telephones were off the hook; no one was to be available until a plan had been formed.’21 The nobs were sticking to their own kind. The fact that murder, and attempted murder, had been committed did not weigh in the balance against the necessity of protecting their friend, the earl. For Veronica, bandaged and doped in her hospital bed, there was no sympathy. She should never have aspired to marry Lord Lucan. In a sense, the whole sorry situation was her fault.

  On 15 November an article was printed under the headline ‘Anatomy of Honour’, hinting that justice was being obstructed by a refusal to betray the old school tie. When Aspinall loudly proclaimed on television that Lucan was an ‘old Roman’, a man of ‘dignitas and gravitas’, this gave further credence to the notion that these were people who moved in their own sphere above the law, holding to an obscure code that set them above the ordinary people, who cared about dead nannies. No, that is not quite true: they did care, in their way. ‘What a pity! Good nannies are so hard to find’, was one woman’s reaction, when told about the murder of Sandra Rivett.

  The circle acquired an image of its own. It was the Happy Valley thirty years on, amoral and louche, shruggingly indifferent to a public that regarded it with disapproval, envy, downright amazement that such a set still existed. A woman who was a student in the early 1970s recalls: ‘We had thought, I suppose rather naively, that sort of thing had had its day.’22 The names of Lucan’s friends became familiar: Aspinall, maestro of the Clermont, whose private zoos in Kent were dedicated to the rearing of the wild animals that he considered superior to humans; businessman James Goldsmith, whose showy love life included an eighteenth-century-style elopement with an underage heiress; glamorous society painter Dominick Elwes; racing tipster and bon vivant Charles Benson; Colonel David Stirling, who founded the SAS; and Greville Howard, who had worked as an aide to Enoch Powell. This close little bundle of posh boys huddled around the chemmy table while, in the world beyond Berkeley Square, people struggled with near-20 per cent inflation and IRA bombs shattered glass and limbs. They were throwbacks, clinging to the meaningless rituals of a vanished age, posing like waxworks in their exquisite bunker. They were immovably reactionary: as the former DCI David Gerring would later write, with regard to the circle’s staunch defence of Lord Lucan, it wasn’t as though he had done anything terrible, ‘like voting Labour’.23

  Small talk at the Clermont, when it was not about gambling or poor Lucky’s frightful wife, was lamenting the dire state of 1970s Britain. Harold Wilson was a KGB plant, the workforce akin to the sans-culottes of revolutionary Paris. The only answer was to reclaim the country for its rightful owners. Stirling formed a de facto private army that would cross picket lines in the event of a Communist coup. Michael Stoop and Dominick Elwes joined up. MI5 observed
with interest.24 ‘It was’, a journalist later wrote, ‘in the fetid, self-deluding, pseudo-Nietzschean atmosphere of this set that Lucan’s infamous plan to murder his wife was born.’25

  The story of Them versus Us reached a climax in June 1975, at the inquest into Sandra Rivett’s murder. The victim and her quiet, dignified relations were mere incidentals, bit part players in the tragedy. ‘It was Lucan’s aristocratic family and gambling friends who dominated,’ wrote one editorial, railing against this ‘ugly real-life performance of Upstairs, Downstairs’. Ranks were closed against Lady Lucan, ‘who dared to accuse her husband, the 7th Earl of Lucan. Damned bad show, don’tcherknow.’ Alluding to the fact that Bill Shand Kydd and his wife had gone racing on the fourth day of proceedings, the editorial concluded: ‘What with the beastly inquest, into the bargain it was Ascot Week, too!’26

  Opinion against the circle, already unfavourable, had further hardened in the days before the inquest, after the publication of James Fox’s coolly persuasive Sunday Times Magazine article. This subsequently became definitive in its detailing of Lord Lucan’s cold, aggressive behaviour towards his wife, her desperate isolation, the ‘condescending, almost patronizing’ attitude towards the investigation shown by Lucan’s friends. It was said that people offered to meet the police for a chat ‘in about three weeks, old boy’. Susan Maxwell-Scott failed to inform the authorities about Lucan’s visit to her house: ‘I had no reason to go to the police.’ Madeleine Florman waited four days before telling them about the ring at her doorbell after the murder: ‘It’s the police’s problem, actually. They’re obviously trained to discern these things.’

  At the inquest, the inhabitants of the Lucan world were paraded before the public gaze: his mother, his sister Lady Sarah, the Shand Kydds, the Maxwell-Scotts, Michael Stoop. People could behold, as it were in reality, the clipped restraint of their idiom, the untouchable glaze of their appearance. One journalist who attended the inquest wrote:

  The leading personality of that set, Lord Lucan, is in trouble. Wanted, dead or alive, on a warrant that alleges murder. Therefore, it is particularly important that his friends should put on the right show. That they should dress correctly, that they should behave with proud confidence, that every move they made during the long official proceedings should display that loyalty and show the importance for them of Lord Lucan’s honour. So it comes down to a question of style. And if their style might not be to the taste of the rest, that was a matter of indifference. Proud, unbending and exclusive, they do not seem worried by what the world thinks of them.27

  The world, naturally, did not like them one bit. They were as inimical to the British mood as the royal family would be twenty-two years later after the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. Sandra had died, but as the representative of normal human decency she had won the day, as surely as Veronica Lucan had won against her husband.

  After the inquest, and indeed this has continued until the present time, the impression grew ever stronger that Lucan’s set had enabled his escape. The coroner’s jury had pronounced him guilty, and the next step was a trial. But the 7th Earl, unable to rely upon the beneficent judgment of his peers in the manner of the Earl of Pembroke, had found another way around the pesky legal system. The more that his friends and relations insisted that he had killed himself on 8 November, the more it was suspected that he had in fact scarpered.

  After the inquest, Sandra Rivett’s mother said: ‘I like to think he is dead and rotting in hell.’ Yet she spoke for the majority when she continued: ‘Lord Lucan has so many friends. There is so much money around.’ In other words, he had the means to get away with murder. That was what his kind did.

  In her novel Aiding and Abetting (2000), Muriel Spark brought to glorious literary life the myth of Lord Lucan. The sections of the book that deal with the ‘truth’ about the case are based upon the story as above: Lucan treated his wife abominably, he killed Sandra Rivett in error, he was a ‘sick’ gambler, he lived on lamb chops, he had ‘no imagination, or at least very little’, his friends gathered together to bankroll his escape. ‘Lucan is a friend of ours, he is one of us and you don’t understand that people like us…’

  There are two Lucans in Aiding and Abetting, both of whom are attending sessions with a female psychiatrist based in Paris. One of them (bien entendu) is an impostor. This uncertainty is a metaphor for the fact that Lucan’s identity was a façade, an assemblage of earl-like attributes. It is also a creative expression of the doubt that infects Lucan’s fate.

  Disappearing is a rare trick. Marguerite Dixblanc tried to do it after murdering her employer in 1872, but she was quickly found in Paris. The Labour MP John Stonehouse tried to do it, just thirteen days after the murder of Sandra Rivett. He left a pile of clothes on a beach in Miami, then hotfooted it to Australia, where he was arrested on Christmas Eve 1974. His problems, like Lord Lucan’s, were financial, and attention was first drawn to him because the Australian police had believed that he was Lord Lucan.

  Agatha Christie also disappeared, in December 1926. She was found after eleven days, but then she had wanted to be. Indeed she had planned to be found almost immediately, by the husband who had recently asked her for a divorce: her intention had been to reclaim his love. Nevertheless she was one of the few people, at the time of the Lucan disappearance, who knew what it felt like to cease to exist. When she was nearing the end of her life, infirm and almost senile, she suddenly posed the question: ‘I wonder what has happened to Lord Lucan?’

  Lucan is undead: even in law. In 1992 the High Court made this declaration: ‘Be it known that the Right Honourable Richard John Bingham, seventh Earl of Lucan, died on or since the eighth day of November 1974.’ Yet in July 1999, even as probate was about to be granted on Lord Lucan’s estate, his son was refused permission to take his seat in the House of Lords, there being reasonable doubt as to whether the earldom was his to assume. A statement was issued, ‘that the Lord Chancellor did not authorise the writ of summons to George Bingham on the ground that he was not satisfied that his case had been made out’. Now, forty years after his disappearance, Lucan is seventy-nine years of age, and could feasibly be alive: technically, if in no other way, he is Earl of Lucan still.

  This non-existent status has, over the years, become the most insistent aspect of the myth. The vanishing earl is part of our collective consciousness. It is, in fact, a kind of joke. An impossible occurrence is deemed ‘about as likely as seeing Lord Lucan riding Shergar’. Lucan was named as the vicious killer of a young woman, and the Derby-winning racehorse Shergar was wickedly spirited away by the IRA, but the evil of these events has become absorbed into the kind of ironic bad taste upon which the British pride themselves. Sometimes Lucan is alluded to with a lighter touch, also very British, as displayed by the jockey Stan Mellor on the occasion of the last National Hunt meeting at Nottingham racecourse. ‘I rode a double for Lord Lucan there, but I’m not looking for him. He paid me.’ A Lucan lookalike described an occasion when he was driving along the Mall in London, and the chauffeur of an oncoming car leaned out of the window and shouted his cap-tipping, deferential encouragement: ‘Good luck, sir!’

  Undead as he is, part-Dracula, part-Scarlet Pimpernel, part-monster, part-folk hero, Lucan floats like another figure of murderous myth, Jack the Ripper, who although quite obviously dead still hovers in his cloak of unpenetrated identity. Even if Jack the Ripper were definitively named, the myth would endure.28 As with Lucan, it is now too bound up in cherished perceptions to be abandoned. It has acquired the power of fiction.

  If Lord Lucan is dead, then the most likely explanations are that he jumped off a ferry from Newhaven to Dieppe, or killed himself somewhere in the undergrowth of East Sussex. There is, however, the question of habeas corpus, or lack of it: no body has ever been found.

  And there are other theories, some not entirely sane. Lucan was shot by the IRA, to whom, with his residual acres in Co. Mayo, he was a landowner enemy. He was disposed of by a friend
who had abetted his escape, to whom he later became an embarrassment and a financial drain. He was killed by the army, which feared the disgrace of seeing a former officer stand trial at the Old Bailey. He was murdered because he owed money: Sir Rupert Mackeson, who himself disappeared for three years to evade debts of £100,000, told the police in 1980: ‘I vanished because my life was threatened. Two thugs in London told me: “We’ve killed Lord Lucan and you will go the same way unless you keep your mouth shut.”’ He was shot by an unknown assailant in the drive of the Maxwell-Scott house, after his visit to Susan on 8 November. He committed suicide at John Aspinall’s private zoo, Howletts, having requested that his body be fed to the tigers.

  Against all this is the belief that Lucan did not die after the murder. The main theories as to his escape are that he sailed to France, or was flown out of Britain. He then made his way through Europe, and moved from country to country. He was given money by friends, who possibly also paid for plastic surgery. He remains the subject of an Interpol red notice, issued for restricting the travel of dangerous criminals. Since 8 November 1974 Lord Lucan has been seen, or rumoured to have lived, in almost every country in the world.

  In the year following his disappearance, a thousand-plus sightings placed him in numerous different locations simultaneously. Lucan was road-painting in Spain; drunk-driving on the M1; travelling on a train to Edinburgh; buying flowers in Piccadilly; disguised as a policeman in Whitehall; hidden in a Midlands nursing home; enjoying dinner with a girl in Guernsey; stranded with a broken-down car in Colombia; and using the public baths in Finchley. In late 1974, an Iranian student, travelling on a bus in Hove, was formally cautioned as Lord Lucan. A boilermaker named Kenneth Knight, who had disappeared from his home in Kent, was arrested in Sydney, Australia. On seeing his photograph Mrs Knight said: ‘That’s not Lord Lucan, that’s my Ken, that is.’