A Different Class of Murder

by Laura Thompson

  In October 1985, a thirty-seven-year-old man named Nicholas Boyce was tried at the Old Bailey for the murder of his wife. He had headbutted and strangled her at their London home while his children were asleep, cut up the body and distributed its parts in skips and dustbins. Boyce, a good-looking man with a degree in economics, who at the time worked as a cleaner, had given himself up to the police. He admitted the killing and said that the removal of the body, unspeakable as it was, had been done to protect his children. He pleaded extreme provocation.

  ‘It is easy’, said counsel for the prosecution, ‘to make allegations about her in court – she is not here to defend them.’ The defence replied: ‘You are examining a non-stop form of humiliation and degradation which drained every bit of respect from a grown man.’ Boyce, his counsel claimed, had suffered months of mental torture, accusations of sexual deviancy, threats that his wife would leave home with his two young children and deny him access. ‘If you divorce me,’ she was reported to have said, ‘I’ll make sure I get custody of the children.’ She had forced him to take the cleaning job. He was, he claimed, terrified of her. ‘She screamed abuse and accusations – could it not have worn down any person? He finally broke in circumstances in which an ordinary man may also have done.’

  Boyce was convicted of manslaughter. Sentencing him to six years, the judge said: ‘Before these dreadful events you were hard-working, of good character, devoted to your children and a good father. You were simply unable to get on with your wife.’

  Nicholas Boyce’s wife was Christabel Martin, who worked as nanny to the Lucan children following the custody case. Originally employed as a temporary, she returned to the job after the dismissal of Mrs Murphy. She volunteered to do so again after the murder of Sandra Rivett. There was even a later, rather wild suggestion that she had done occasional shifts on Sandra’s days off.23 Like most of the nannies she was very young, just twenty-one in 1974, and she grew close to Veronica. It was Christabel who told Roy Ranson that Lucan had been trying to force his wife into a state of mental breakdown. She told him other things: that the delayed payments to the Knightsbridge Nannies agency had been a deliberate tactic; and that Veronica had warned her not to discuss the household with Lucan because he would distort information for his own ends. It was Christabel who said that Veronica was nervous because Lucan still had a key to the house;24 that Veronica lived in fear of him.

  In rebuttal of Lucan’s contention that some of the nannies had found Veronica difficult, Ranson wrote that they ‘usually found her to be a sympathetic and friendly employer. The nannies discovered that it was Lucan whom they needed to avoid [this despite the fact that those who stayed only a few days would scarcely have met him].’ It is quite true that both Christabel and Stefanja Sawicka spoke out strongly for Veronica. They were in her confidence. So too, it would later be said, was Sandra Rivett. Of course the poor woman could not confirm or deny this. Sandra only worked at the house for ten weeks before her death; afterwards a suitcase was found in her bedroom still partly unpacked; but Veronica subsequently portrayed a friendship of some depth between them:

  She was very sensitive to my situation. She would call me on her day off if she went anywhere. She used to say I was vulnerable. She did not like my husband. She saw him far more than I did because she used to hand over the children when he came for them at access. Often I didn’t want to face him… She told me once that he frightened her. I suppose that sounds melodramatic in hindsight, all these years later. But that was what she said. He called round one day and she dealt with him and afterwards she came into the kitchen and said that she found him frightening. He could be intimidating with that great height and bearing. I knew what she meant.25

  Yet Pierrette Goletto, nanny to the Lucan children throughout part of 1974, presents a very different view. Her sympathies, firstly of course with the children, in the matter of the marriage were straightforwardly with the husband. A sunny-natured and confident Frenchwoman, she cuts through the image of Lucan as glowering monster and presents instead a friendly, faintly bewildered man, whose oddities of behaviour were rendered comprehensible by his situation. ‘I liked to talk to him. He loved the south of France, it was nice to talk to him about it. I liked John. He was there for his children.’ After the murder Pierrette was interviewed by the police, although she had left Britain by that time. ‘They asked me: why did I go away? Did I know this was going to happen? Well, I knew that the situation between John and Veronica was getting worse, it was obvious.’

  Pierrette, who now runs a language school near Nice, recalls visiting Chancery Lane to be interviewed by a lawyer for the job as nanny. ‘Perhaps it was because I came from France,’ she says. ‘But I was told later that John wanted to be sure that the person was reliable.’ This would appear to contradict the police assertion that he wanted the nannies to keep walking out.

  Pierrette has extremely precise memories of 46 Lower Belgrave Street, its geography and its inhabitants. She describes an odd situation: bleak, stark, the life of the house concentrated in the nursery and in the basement kitchen, where she taught the children to cook.

  We had such fun, the children and me. But of course it was a strange atmosphere! It was not a normal family home. OK, it was in the best part of England, it was a beautiful house. I was given a car, a DAF, and driving through London – taking the children to the park, the school, everywhere. Veronica was taking medication. I was really sorry for her. But for the children, and for me, it was hard work.

  Pierrette also confirms the assertion by the former nanny, Lilian Jenkins, that Veronica spent a good deal of time in her bedroom.

  Among the allegations by Christabel Martin was that Lucan rang the house repeatedly. The police later referred to frequent threatening anonymous calls, made to a number that only he knew (which would also mean that he wanted Veronica to know who was ringing her). Again, however, Pierrette contextualizes them as the kind of stupid thing that warring couples do.

  There was ringing often, but Veronica was ringing [him] often. It was both ways.26 She wanted him to come back – not to go to casinos, not to spend money, and not to be with some of his friends. Because she was always saying that his friends didn’t like her. She was always telling me that she hated John, because he had left her and she did everything for him. And then one day she cried and she said to me, she adored him from the first day.

  It was obvious to Pierrette that Lucan was sitting in his car, observing the house and his children. ‘They said he was following… He wasn’t following them, he was watching them.’ Equally obvious was the presence of a private detective. ‘He was parking just opposite, in the same place always. To me, it didn’t shock me.’ On one occasion a man visited, purporting to be a friend of the Lucans, and asked questions. ‘He wanted to know what was happening with the children. Asked if I was coping OK.’

  Like the other nannies, Pierrette had been told by Veronica that Lucan was violent, although she herself was perfectly comfortable with him (as evidenced by her willingness to confront him about the Harrods account: ‘I went round to his flat, I wasn’t frightened. No way.’). With regard to the Lucans, her own recollections are of:

  Word fights. Saying nasty things together. Screaming, arguments, yelling at each other. He would come to the house – and sometimes I would get the children and Veronica would say to me not now, I want to talk to my husband. So she’d send me upstairs to the nursery, and I obey, I stay there with the children – and I knew it was going to be a fight.

  But I never saw her with any bruises – and I saw her every day. Come on, John was six feet tall, she was a tiny little thing – you could have put her on the end of your finger like a puppet. She was telling me he was violent, to be careful with the children, but I didn’t see any marks. He never showed me that aspect of being violent.

  Given that Lucan was named as a killer, it seems only logical to see his life through the prism of that judgment, and believe that he had behaved appallingly beforehand.
After the murder, Veronica said: ‘My husband was a violent man and he had tried to kill me before.’27 John Aspinall, in his usual indiscreet way, claimed that Lucan had given Veronica a few knocks (the subtext being: only what she deserved), and another friend says, with some reluctance, that ‘she might have egged him on – you don’t mean to hit badly, but…’ Utterly untenable though this is, it does happen. Friends were said, after the inquest, to have ‘almost ashamedly recalled incidents that had caused him to shake with rage’,28 although neither the names of the friends nor the nature of the incidents are known.

  The most damaging thing that a man can do to a woman is inflict violence upon her. But the most damaging thing that a woman can do to a man is accuse him of violence. Lucan’s sister Jane, who saw him several times in the fifteen months between the custody case and the murder, refers to the ‘violent outlook’ that was developing in him at that time, the product of frustration and despair. There is nothing starry-eyed about Jane’s sad, conflicted vision of her brother. She does not flinch from describing him with honesty. Nevertheless she has extreme difficulty in imagining him inflicting actual physical harm. ‘He had a very soft side. Underneath this rather fierce exterior.’

  ‘He was a sweet man,’ says Christina Shand Kydd. ‘Had a sweet side that he, being a typical Englishman, would not show willingly, if you know what I mean.’ ‘He was always charming,’ says Nick Peto, who knew Lucan well. ‘I find that hard to believe. I can’t imagine him doing anything violent.’ ‘I never saw him angry, in any way,’ says his old schoolfriend, ‘except on a golf course, when he hit the ball into a tree, and it sort of perched up there, and we had to dislodge it. He was so angry. He said, that’s a bad shot. But I never really saw him angry at all.’

  There was, of course, the façade, beneath which lay who knew quite what? But what was said later, that Lucan evinced all the arrogant aggression of his forebears (two of them, to be precise: Sir Richard Bingham and the 3rd Earl), is wisdom after the fact. ‘In the years since the murder I have learnt of the other side of Lucan,’ wrote Ranson, who was prepared to say absolutely anything in support of the police case, ‘the less patient, the less even-tempered, the more violent man that he was becoming.’ Patience and even temper were indeed scarce by this time, at least towards his wife. Yet so too was the actual evidence of violence. This is not to deny that it happened, only to say that there is no proper corroboration. The melodramatic story of the horse, chosen to throw Veronica when she went hunting, was contradicted by Ranson himself. It was also said that Lucan attacked his doberman pinscher, Otto, in a fit of rage. ‘He doted on that dog, on all his dogs,’ says Jane, who in fact cited Otto as evidence of her brother’s softness. An officer who worked on the case now says that Lucan used an electric probe on the dog, an allegation that can only have come from the usual sources. Lucan’s schoolfriend sternly refutes it. ‘No, he never treated that dog badly.’

  So perhaps the only thing he treated violently was his wife; although against this is the argument put forward by Pierrette Goletto. Veronica’s fragility was such that a man, particularly one at least a foot taller than she and more than twice her weight, could have taken her out with a single blow.

  Like other people in this affair, Pierrette saw the literal weakness of Veronica, but sensed that it was Lucan who was truly the weaker of the two. Beneath the Doll’s House role play – the big man, the supplicant wife – something very different was going on, more like a fight between a maddened bull and a nimble matador. Pierrette says:

  He didn’t have a leg to stand on. And don’t forget, she can play that she was the poor woman, the martyr. She was quite good at it.

  And then there is this. In the course of a long interview given in 1981, Veronica herself said of Lucan: ‘He was not a violent man. He could be studiedly cruel, but not spontaneously.’29

  The Clermont, where Dominick Elwes was telling Lucan ‘to brace up and be a man’ and members were openly whispering about his problems, was now a refuge more from habit than anything else. All Lucan’s habits were a refuge: the lamb chops, the Stuyvesants, the alcohol, the gambling. The gilded gleam of the club, once so alluring, now had a brittle aspect. One needs a kind of toughness to live one’s life in the social arena. People want lightness, laughs, the shallow sparkling spray of flirtation and faint malice; introspection is for home; to bring it out for the evening is crashing bad form. But Lucan did not really have a home. So he sat on at the Clermont, drinking and gambling ever more doggedly, his dry humour submerged in a mudslide of misery. He acquired a girlfriend, Andrina Colquhoun, an extremely pretty debutante nearly twenty years his junior, but the relationship was casual and almost certainly platonic. He was still handsome, still immaculate, what with the club arranging his laundry, but he now looked different: the shallow sculpture of his face was softened and puffy. He was no longer the beau ideal of Vittorio De Sica’s dreams, more a recumbent Rowlandson, an eighteenth-century earl prematurely aged by the mysterious harshness of easy living; and by anxiety.

  ‘People became listening receptacles,’ says Daniel Meinertzhagen, who still lunched with Lucan most days. ‘He was obsessive about the children and Veronica. It was horrible for him. I remember going round to his flat and seeing all the children’s Christmas presents laid out on the bed. Very sad. But he became’, he adds apologetically, ‘a bit of a bore.’

  The then girlfriend of one of his set says:

  We had dinner with Lucan actually quite a lot, and he talked obsessively about his children, and the custody, and the case, and the wife. Absolutely obsessive. Slightly to the point where I said, gosh, do we really have to have dinner with Lucky Lucan again?

  He obviously thought he would have been a more suitable parent. He was saying it to the table, general topic of conversation. Everyone was totally sympathetic, and rightly so. It was only me thinking oh crikey, have we got to hear this again. Probably unfair of me. But I thought it was a bit of a gramophone record going round and round and round… Looking back now it was absolutely horrid for him. Horrid. Having a wife whom he didn’t trust with his children.

  After dinner came the tables, and yet again the necessary delusion that here was where money could be made, where it could all come right. The court case; the bills for Veronica’s legal team; Veronica’s food account at Harrods, which was stopped and reopened, stopped and reopened; the nannies; the milkman; the £70 every week for his own flat: it all careered around his head as he held his chemmy cards and prayed to God that they totalled nine. He began throwing dice: a fool’s game if ever there was one. When the police went round to Elizabeth Street, they found a heap of unopened bills. ‘Always a good sign,’ says the former officer, ‘if you don’t open the mail.’

  His bank managers were writing to him with the ghastly courtesy of barely concealed contempt. He had four accounts, with Lloyd’s, the National Westminster, the Midland and Coutts, which he juggled as if their contents were on fire. ‘I was very pleased’, wrote his manager at Lloyd’s in Pall Mall, not long after the custody hearing, ‘when you paid in £6,000 the other day to restore the position on your Current Account. You can imagine my disappointment when cheques totalling no less than £3,500 were presented to me for payment yesterday in the absence of funds, particularly as the cheques were all in favour of Cash or Clubs and have, I surmise, all gone in one particular direction…’ Three months later the manager was writing again. ‘You will know from my recent letters how disappointed I am that you have not been in touch before this to let me know what arrangements are being made to adjust your overdraft here which stands at £4,238.94 as I write. I must confess that I find it difficult to understand why you have not corresponded with me.’ At the same time Coutts, who managed the family trusts, refused a £20,000 overdraft. A bank statement with them, dated 16 November 1973, shows a balance of £10,417.56 reduced to £569.86 by 3 December. Withdrawals to ‘Cash’ are made on a near-daily basis: £12,000 on one day alone, 21 November. Lucan began raising money
on the promise of selling the family silver, some of which had already gone to Christie’s.

  He also began borrowing. His mother lent £4,000. Selim Zilkha, chairman of Mothercare and a business associate of James Goldsmith, lent £3,000, as did Stephen Raphael. ‘He borrowed from Sally and I,’ says his sister Jane. ‘It was sort of up and down. One time, John was a little bit, without any shame, he was going to ask the Brady Tuckers to see if he could get some money. Certainly the last time they wouldn’t give him any money – they may have done before, I don’t know. Just because he was, you know, going under financially, rapidly.’

  In fact Lucan had, on this last occasion, asked Mrs Tucker for £125,000 (not £250,000, as was claimed by Veronica;30 but still an unbelievable request). She turned him down. Instead of giving up he visited Mrs Tucker’s son, the Reverend Luther, in Munich. In November 1973 he wrote:

  Although I have made my proposals in the bluntest possible way, as being a straight purchase of the children by you, on my behalf, the offer would naturally have to be dressed up in order to give Veronica the maximum amount of face saving. It may seem incredible to you that she would entertain such a monstrous proposal, or that it should be necessary to go to such extreme lengths when a solution should be available in the courts. But I am reasonably confident that the offer would be considered by her. I regret having to involve you and your family in my domestic problems, but I did everything I possibly could in court and although we did not have judgment given against us (we conceded after two weeks’ ruinous court action) we ran into a brick wall in the shape of the current shrink.

  If I could have afforded to battle on there would have been an appeal. But even if we were still successful there would be nothing to prevent Veronica from going back once a year to ask for their return. The financial solution would have the advantage of Lady Lucan herself applying to the courts to return the children to me. In a way, this would be more binding on her than a court order based on a relapse – alleged to have been temporary – in her mental health.31