The simplest inference from the blood evidence is that Veronica Lucan went into the basement at Lower Belgrave Street. This was the explanation put forward by Dr Pereira, before the coroner suggested a different one. Roy Ranson wrote that Veronica had stated, ‘from the very first moment of the inquiry, that she had never set foot in the basement’. He also said what was demonstrably untrue, that forensics confirmed ‘every word that she had said’. It is of course very possible that group B blood was smeared on her skirt by her assailant, although it seems less likely that it would have transferred to her shoes, particularly to the sole of her left shoe.7 As for the group A blood in the basement: if this did come from Veronica, either she entered the basement after her own wounds were inflicted, or the attack upon her began in the basement, then moved to the top of the stairs.
The mixture of A and B blood in the cloakroom basin, on the sack and on the weapon opens up the faint possibility that the attacker belonged to AB group (Lucan’s own blood group is not known). Both women put up a fight and could have drawn blood. According to Dr Pereira, however, the AB was more likely a mixture of the two blood types. Nor would an AB group attacker explain the separate incidences of A and B in places where it should not, logically, have been found.
The police became uncomfortably aware of this. Hence Ranson’s description of the considerable difficulties in removing the mailsack from the basement (which the official theory requires Lucan to have planned to do alone). Accidental contact is, indeed, the explanation for all the anomalies in the blood analysis. ‘There was blood all over the shop,’ says Forsyth. ‘So you got transference.’ The blood, wrote Gerring, was transferred either by a ‘blood-spattered Lucan’ or by the police themselves. ‘Come on, you’ve got blood splashed and sprayed everywhere,’ he later said. ‘You’ve got forty or fifty policemen and photographers and forensics walking around. Of course you’ll get blood transferred. It would be a miracle if you didn’t.’8
With regard to the presence of A group blood in the basement, which Dr Pereira told the inquest she could not explain, Ranson wrote: ‘The answer, I am convinced, lies in the many movements of officers, dogs, scientists, fingerprint experts and undertakers.’ There was also the fact that drops of B group blood were found on ivy leaves in the garden, and that footprints led from Sandra’s body to the back of the basement. Blood on the floors, Dr Pereira told the inquest, could have been transferred by ‘anyone with big feet, such as a police officer’, a remark that met with some hilarity (and did not explain why footmarks were seen by DS Forsyth, before the police descended en masse). It was also suggested, with perfect seriousness, that the two cats in the house might have caused the transference.
In other words, and in order to explain away facts that did not fit the official theory, those in charge of the investigation were obliged to admit that 46 Lower Belgrave Street had become a contaminated crime scene. It was seething with policemen, a free-for-all, with every PC then on duty in central London going round to take a look. More than fifty sets of police fingerprints had to be eliminated.
At Elizabeth Street, where Lucan’s belongings were cleared, a similar chaos ensued. Later it would be claimed that some unidentified officers had used the flat for parties: ‘In the days after the Earl vanished, detectives used the flat like a private club, inviting colleagues from all over London to drink his booze, paw his possessions and even ride his exercise bike. And when forensic teams finally dusted the flat in Belgravia, Central London, they found so many fingerprints they could not identify the earl’s.’9 Although a fingerprint was found inside the Ford Corsair similar to one in the flat, no certain match with Lucan’s fingerprints was ever possible, as they were never identified beyond doubt. At the inquest it was stated that the only prints found in the basement were those of the police, the victim, and the children. (Veronica, whose prints would surely have naturally been there, was not mentioned.) Nor was Elizabeth Street ever checked for a match with the grey-blue woollen fibres found at the murder scene. Dr Pereira reported seven on the towel in the cloakroom, four on a towel in Veronica’s bedroom, and a quantity on the piping. There were also some fingerprints on the piping, impossible to lift because of the stretched tape bandaging around it. Lucan was said to have worn gloves, but prints could have been made at another time. The piping was described as nine inches long, weighing some two and a half pounds, and ‘grossly distorted’.
Although an obvious weapon, the piping presented two problems. When it was first seen by Sergeant Baker at the top of the basement stairs, he described it as looking like ‘a doll’s leg’. It was, he told the inquest, ‘turning red’. This oddity has been explained in a couple of ways. It could have been a trick of the light. Or it could have been, as Ranson would later suggest,10 that Lucan had washed the piping in the cloakroom before leaving the house, removing the surface redness, and that the blood beneath the bandages was seeping through.
The likelihood that Lucan stopped to do this is, of course, remote to non-existent. Far more probable is that Sergeant Baker was simply mistaken in his impression. However, the possibility that the piping was rinsed at some point would help to explain the other anomaly: that none of Sandra’s hair was found on it. At the inquest, the pathologist Keith Simpson said that the piping was ‘highly likely’ to have been the murder weapon, as it was consistent with ‘some of Sandra Rivett’s injuries’. Dr Pereira found on it a mixture of A and B group blood, with a preponderance of A. She also found several of Veronica’s hairs; but Sandra’s hairs should also have been found on the piping.
A subsequent analysis of the piping could never take place, however, for the simple reason that it disappeared. ‘It has not been stored as it should have been,’ it was later said, ‘and the lead pipe is missing.’11
In 2004 Scotland Yard made a public announcement that it was re-examining the case. ‘The investigation into the murder of Sandra Rivett and the disappearance of Lord Lucan remains open. As with any unsolved murder, the investigation is subject to review to examine evidence and any possible new lines of inquiry. We are now able to use modern techniques, including the use of DNA, in reviewing our cases.’ This all sounded very good, very scientific. It made no mention of the fact that, without a murder weapon, it was clearly doomed to founder. The use of DNA evidence is now, of course, a scientific means to establish the ‘what really happened’ that in crime fiction emerges from the omniscient brain of the detective. At the time of the Lucan case this was still another ten years in the future: all that could be done was establish blood types, fingerprints, hairs, fibres, what now seems like the Heath Robinson mechanics of forensics.
Nevertheless, and even by those more basic standards, the Lucan inquiry was as shambolic as the Charge of the Light Brigade. Evidence was destroyed, literally walked all over, and, when it presented difficulties, brushed aside. ‘It’s no good going on bits and pieces,’ David Gerring would later assert, in typical Gene Hunt style. ‘As a policeman, you have to go on the whole thing.’12 ‘We knew who did it,’ says Graham Forsyth.
‘The police never looked for anybody else,’ says Christina Shand Kydd. ‘They made up their minds, that minute, that he had done it. Straightaway. And there was no question of ever looking at any other evidence – they weren’t interested. Whatever you said to them, about anything else, was just completely bypassed.’
‘I wasn’t very impressed with the blood analysis at the inquest,’ says Bill Shand Kydd. ‘There were things that needed investigating.’ ‘That’s what you kept on saying,’ says Christina. ‘And they didn’t like us, for that reason.’
‘The blood evidence is so ambiguous,’ says Lucan’s sister Jane. ‘I think the police did deserve a lot of blame, for not doing it better. Are they very defensive?’
At 9.50pm on 7 November, as Veronica Lucan was entering the Plumbers Arms, Lord Lucan was still in his former home at Lower Belgrave Street. The couple were separated by just one hundred footsteps. Some of what Lucan did in the next three and a
half hours is known. His daughter Frances said in her statement:
After Mummy told me to go upstairs I got straight up and went upstairs to my bedroom, which is on the top floor of the house. I got into bed and read my book. I didn’t hear anything from downstairs. After a little while, I don’t know how long, because I don’t have a clock in my room, I heard Daddy calling for Mummy. He was calling Veronica, where are you?
I got up and went to the banisters and looked down and saw Daddy coming out of the nursery on the floor below me. He then went into the bathroom on the same floor as the nursery. He came straight out and then he went downstairs. That was the last I saw of him. He never came up to the top floor of the house that night, either to look for Mummy or to say goodnight to me.
Lucan then left the house. He secured one of the locks on the front door. What happened next is less certain, but it is overwhelmingly likely that he went directly to 51 Chester Square, five minutes’ walk away (almost certainly, of course, he was driving). This would have taken him along Lower Belgrave Street, towards the Plumbers Arms, then down a right-hand turn just before the pub. Roy Ranson actually suggests that Lucan may have headed towards the pub, almost as if he intended to enter. The Chester Square house was owned by the rich Swedish gastronome, Charles Florman. He and his wife Madeleine were acquaintances of Lucan; great hosts, whose dinner parties were attended by a variety of people including both the King of Sweden and Tony Curtis, although on the night of 7 November the house presented a darkened face. Lucan rang the doorbell. Mrs Florman, alone and in bed, was too nervous to answer. About a week later she would tell Dominick Elwes about some mysterious brown marks on the doorstep. She did not report these to the police, although Elwes did. The marks were later reported to be smudges of B group blood. Despite house-to-house enquiries, they had not been noticed by the police.
Some time after 10pm Mrs Florman received a phone call. A man said ‘Madeleine? I know you…’, followed by a disorientated muddle of words. She believed the voice to be that of Lord Lucan, which it almost certainly was. Their daughters attended the same school, and the obvious inference is that, as she was the nearest person to 46 Lower Belgrave Street, he wanted her to arrange some sort of check on the children. As he began to speak, he probably realized that this was not a good idea.
He then rang his mother and, in her words to the inquest, asked her to ‘get the children out as soon as possible’. Reports as to the time of this call are confused. Kait’s own accounts varied. She had been out that evening at a meeting of the Marylebone Labour Party Association, and told the inquest that the phone was ringing when she entered her flat. ‘It surprised me by its lateness. It was between 10 and 10.30pm. I don’t pretend to exactitude.’ At the inquest, Graham Forsyth stated that Kait told him, when she arrived at Lower Belgrave Street, that Lucan had rung at about 10.45. Given that Kait reached the house around 11pm, this was quick going from North London if she had only just spoken to her son.
The next fact is Lucan’s arrival at the Maxwell-Scott home in Uckfield, Sussex: some fifty miles from London. The drive would normally take at least an hour and a half. At night, and in an era of far less traffic, a fast driver like Lucan might just do it in an hour. Susan Maxwell-Scott told the inquest that he ‘called in at 11.30’. If that is so, then Kait is correct in saying that Lucan telephoned between 10 and 10.30 (the assumption, surely correct, is that he rang her after Mrs Florman). There is, however, no knowing the exact time he reached Uckfield.
What is entirely unknown is where Lucan made the calls to Mrs Florman and to Kait. The police checked phone boxes in the Belgravia area for blood, despite the fact that neither woman reported any pips before Lucan spoke, meaning that he used a private phone. It is theoretically possible that the calls were made on the road, somewhere between central London and Sussex, but no obvious location presents itself. Instead it is suggested, and seems to be generally believed, that one of Lucan’s friends took him in for the brief span of time between the murder and the drive to Uckfield. The person most likely to have done this was John Aspinall: he lived at 1 Lyall Street, just three minutes’ walk from Elizabeth Street.13 Nobody actually knows if Aspinall was at home that night, yet the myth has grown that Lucan used his phone, perhaps to make more calls than the two that are known about, perhaps also to receive help and advice. It is even suggested that Aspinall lent Lucan some clothes. Yet Susan Maxwell-Scott recalled Lucan as wearing a shirt, grey trousers and sleeveless pullover. This is the same description given by Veronica; and indeed by Michael Hicks-Beach, with whom Lucan had a friendly drink earlier that evening, in the world before it caved in.
Geographically, the logical place for Lucan to have made the phone calls is from his own flat. From Lower Belgrave Street to Elizabeth Street is a distance of some eight minutes on foot, if one takes the quickest route, which is to cut through Chester Square. Quicker still, of course, by car. Lucan could have passed the Florman house and decided, on impulse, to try the door. This certainly makes sense. It may not have made sense to go to Elizabeth Street, where the police might turn up at any moment; but nor, by that reckoning, should Lucan have been ringing a doorbell just a couple of minutes from the Plumbers Arms.
Ranson says that Lucan ‘does not appear to have returned to his own flat’. No blood was found in it (the flat was not, of course, evidentially preserved). Nor was there any blood at Eaton Row, where the calls might also have been made. But the question of the blood, exceedingly vexed with regard to the crime scene, remains so with regard to Lucan himself.
Just how bloody would a man be, after perpetrating two assaults of the kind that Lucan is said to have committed? The eminent pathologist Keith Simpson, whose evidence at the inquest was detailed, dispassionate, and less susceptible to suggestion than Dr Pereira’s, met the Shand Kydds some time after the event. He told them, as Christina puts it: ‘Whoever did it would have been smothered. That amount of blows on the head, the blood would have been coming out like a huge fountain.’ Even more to the point, the terrible business of forcing a body into a sack would have been extraordinarily bloody. And the basement at Lower Belgrave Street was a horror scene. ‘The blood was all still there a few days later,’ says Christina, who was obliged to visit the house. ‘Lots of it.’
Therefore Lucan, by rights, should have been drenched. Indeed the police case stated that he must have been, in order to explain the presence on Veronica of Sandra’s blood: it was there because Lucan put it there. In Ranson’s word, he was ‘soaked’. Yet the only blood reported in Veronica’s bedroom was on the towel where she had lain. ‘No blood in the bedroom is ridiculous,’ says Christina. In fact Veronica’s shoes should also have left marks, although David Gerring describes her entering the Plumbers Arms ‘barefoot’, so these may have been discarded after the attack. Nor was any blood reported in the third-floor nursery and bathroom, which Lucan entered before leaving the house. In response to this, Graham Forsyth now says that ‘it doesn’t necessarily happen that you’re covered in blood’ after these types of attack. But one can’t have it both ways. If Lucan was not smothered, the question arises once more as to why Sandra’s blood was on Veronica’s clothes.
Blood was found in the Ford Corsair, although not vast quantities: when the car was seen in Newhaven on the morning of 8 November, witnesses described its interior as ‘dirty’. Some group B blood was found on the inside of the passenger window. On the floor of the passenger side was hair matching Veronica’s. There was group A blood on the dashboard, and an AB mixture on the armrest of the passenger door. A mix of groups was found on both the front seats.
Group B blood was found, belatedly but presumably accurately, on Mrs Florman’s doorstep; this is odd given the absence of blood either in, or leading to, the bedroom. Nor was any found in Susan Maxwell-Scott’s drawing room, although the envelope to one of the letters that Lucan wrote at the house was smudged with unidentified blood, possibly from a cuff.
There was, too, Susan’s evidence regarding L
ucan’s clothes. She told the inquest that she had noticed a damp patch at the side of his right hip, as if something had been sponged away. She could not be questioned as to the nature of this something, but subsequently testified that Lucan had entered the basement after the murder and ‘slipped in a pool of blood’. The fact that Susan, who was entirely pro-Lucan, freely hinted at this stain gives her evidence an appearance of openness; which may have been her intention. She was also making clear that Lucan, even if innocent, would naturally have come into contact with blood. This was perfectly true. After all, if Veronica could be marked by her husband, then the same argument applied the other way. It was also true that if Lucan had been minimally bloodied from entering the basement, he could have transferred Group B smears to his wife’s dress; that is not the police’s contention, however, nor would it easily explain the blood on her shoes.
What is as near as possible to certainty is that the amount of blood generated by the attacks, and the handling of Sandra’s body, would have been immeasurably greater than one splash across the hip. David Gerring, who disliked Susan, mistrusted her legal training and suspected, along with his superior Ranson, that she had a massive crush on Lucan, charged her with lying about this. He questioned her as to the state of Lucan’s clothing, saying that it must have been covered in blood, and would she admit as much? She did not, and had the evidence of her completely bloodless house (which could of course have been cleaned) to support her.
Against this, however, was the statement made by Frances, which contained a crucial and intriguing remark. Describing the sudden appearance of her parents in the bedroom, she said:
As far as I can remember Daddy was wearing dark trousers and an overcoat, which was full length and was fawn-coloured with brown check. I was sitting on the bed as they came in the door and I couldn’t see them very well. There were two lights on above Mummy’s bed and one other side light on… I couldn’t see if Daddy’s clothes had any blood on them.
A Different Class of Murder Page 25