A Different Class of Murder

by Laura Thompson

  Although there is psychological sense in the idea that Lucan died earlier rather than later, he himself wrote to Bill Shand Kydd that he would ‘lie doggo’. Bill did not believe, when he received Lucan’s letters, that he was dead. ‘Oh lord no.’ If, however, he had stayed for a day or so to see how the land lay, that would only have increased his certainty that there was no point in going on.

  ‘Yes,’ says his schoolfriend. ‘It’s possible that he waited. But I think he would have said, circumstantial evidence was such that he was in trouble, and he didn’t want his children to go through their father being tried for murder.’

  The problem with the Newhaven death is very simple: that this physically striking man was not more remarked upon, either during the half-mile walk to the sea, boarding the ferry, or taking out a boat. Although security was lax, one does come up against the sheer noticeability of Lucan. He might not have cared, if he was going to die; nevertheless the fact is that one would expect somebody to have seen him.

  Against this are a couple of other indications. It was dark; it was very early; it may well have been raining. And there was the evidence of two trawlermen, who later reported a ‘distinguished-looking gentleman’ on the pier, who ‘stuck out like a sore thumb’37 and whom they thought was perhaps a customs officer or court official. Was this the one true sighting among the thousands of fakes, like the woman who claimed to have seen Agatha Christie in Harrogate in 1926, and whose true account was lost amid the theorizing folly?

  There is also the question of who drove the Corsair to Newhaven. Lucan knew where it had been left, because he wrote the street name to Michael Stoop. He could, of course, have been given this information. But there is one fact that suggests, very clearly, that he went there himself. His letters to Stoop were written on a pad kept in the Corsair and posted in unstamped envelopes. In other words, Lucan wrote them in the car. Why would he have done this, if he had not driven himself away from the Maxwell-Scott house? If he had written to Stoop during the journey towards Uckfield, why not borrow stamps from Susan? Anyway his own words suggest a later hour. The letters to Bill Shand Kydd are not quite suicide notes; the letter to Stoop, the one that was read at the inquest, is hard to interpret as anything else. The tone is slightly different, as of somebody who has given up on everything except the club courtesies (‘I won’t bore you...’) and the children for whom this had all happened. ‘I no longer care except that my children should be protected.’ If Lucan did spend several hours alone on the road to Newhaven, if he slept in the Corsair, awoke to the clammy interior and the sharp memories of what had happened, drank yet more alcohol and perhaps took more pills, the combination was already one from which it was impossible to be roused. If he were innocent, he knew that he would be accused. If he were guilty, then he had not only done a terrible thing, but he had done it in error. ‘I said to the police,’ says Daniel Meinertzhagen, ‘I’m sure that nobody regrets what happened to Sandra more than Lord Lucan.’

  It is possible that Lucan did hole up for a day or so before moving on elsewhere. Certainly this would be the definitive explanation of why no body was found near Newhaven. Yet the facts, so enigmatic in this case, so resistant to a pattern, nevertheless do point most firmly to Newhaven as the journey’s end. Susan Maxwell-Scott, with her delaying tactics, and Michael Stoop, with his concealment of his whereabouts, may have believed that they were giving Lucan time to effect some sort of escape. The likelihood is that he simply wanted a few more hours in which not to be caught, so that he could die.

  ‘If he’d had the guts to remain,’ says Christina Shand Kydd, ‘I don’t think that they could have convicted him. They might have wanted to, but there were plenty of holes in it. The point was, if he’d stayed – it was all circumstantial, the evidence.’ David Gerring admitted to concern at the time that, if Lucan returned, ‘the rapscallion could get a split-points decision in court’. And it is quite true to say that, with regard to forensics, the evidence was inconclusive. The real case against him was, in essence, the same as it had been at the custody hearing: the word of his wife.

  The fact that he ran away, rather than staying to put his word against hers, is of course entirely damning. Why run, if there truly was another side to this story? Christina says:

  Well, he answered that question in his letter to Bill [‘V. has demonstrated her hatred for me in the past and would do anything to see me accused.’] He knew he wouldn’t get justice. By that time I think Veronica had intimidated him to an extent that he just couldn’t believe… You know, she always won. Always, always won, because she played the little girl lost card, and she could pull herself together if she had to. And he thought she’ll say it was me, and the children will have to go through some ghastly court case.

  If he had come back he could never have had a fair trial. By that time the media and everybody had completely hanged him already. Some people say they would not have been able to try him, because of it. [Lawyers did, indeed, express this concern.]

  I can promise you, Veronica in the box would have been… [as convincing, is the unspoken implication, as she had been in the custody case]. And he would have looked so stern and cold – because he would have been so nervous and upset and things. I can quite see why he would run away, when I think about it.

  Some of Lucan’s friends, the so-called circle, did try to do their best for him thereafter. At the end of 1974 a firm of private detectives was hired in an attempt to clear his name. Kait Lucan hired Michael Eastham to do the same for her son at the inquest. None of this had any effect; in fact it backfired. These people, it seemed, would go to any lengths to defend an aristocratic murderer. They were bad losers.

  Yet misgivings about the inquest were by no means confined to Lucan’s supporters. A bill to limit the power of coroners’ juries was introduced just a month later. Lucan was not, as is often said, the last person to be named guilty in a coroner’s court; another man, Lee Ford of Brighton, was named as a murderer just a week later; but the very public controversy of the Sandra Rivett verdict helped to bring this legal oddity to an end. The law finally changed in 1977.

  It had been, says Christina, ‘a farce’. ‘You can’t really have an inquest without a person, can you?’ says the girlfriend of one of Lucan’s set. Certainly the coroner, Gavin Thurston, had had a very difficult job. A trial remained a technical possibility, so there was the danger of prejudicing it. Veronica was neither ‘compellable nor competent’ to testify against her husband with regard to the murder. Yet the tradition that a witness could not be discredited in a coroner’s court worked so much in Veronica’s favour that it was, in itself, prejudicial to Lucan. In July 1975, as the debate about the powers of the courts continued, The Times published a letter from the Coroner’s Society of England and Wales. This defended the conduct of the Sandra Rivett inquest, explaining that whereas at a trial the accused alone is allowed legal representation, at an inquest ‘every person affected by the death may be legally represented’. Justice had to be ‘accorded to all the persons who were interviewed or otherwise involved or named in connexion with [Sandra’s] death’.

  But in practice this had proved a near-impossibility. Because of the nature of the Lucan marriage, whose private battles raged on in the public sphere, Michael Eastham was unable to defend Lucan without attacking Veronica. His cross-examination of her was halted after two questions. In conference with the coroner, her counsel Bruce Coles said that it would be an intolerable infringement of Veronica’s rights if she were subjected to verbal attack or innuendo in the witness box.

  When Eastham asked Veronica if she had ‘entertained feelings of hatred’ for Lucan, and objections were instantly raised, he went on to cite the letter to Bill Shand Kydd, in which Lucan said that he was not the attacker but that Veronica was ‘deliberately making it look as though he were’. Therefore, said Eastham, the relationship between the Lucans was pivotal. Exploring it would help the jury to decide whether Veronica’s testimony ‘is an honest recollection
of Lady Lucan’s, or whether it is a fabrication’.

  The coroner, who disallowed this line of questioning, said in his summing-up:

  It is fairly clear from Lucan’s letters that there is existing in the family animosity, tensions and matters which if heard could only be prejudicial [albeit only to Veronica]. They would cause pain to the persons concerned if aired. The airing of family tensions would not benefit this inquiry. If it could benefit this inquiry then I would have taken a different view. But simply to turn this into a forum for airing family tensions would be a wrong thing.

  The judicious air with which this was said masked the fact that ‘family tensions’ were not, in this case, a frivolous froth of scandal: they were the stuff of the matter.

  Eastham also submitted that the letter’s reference to ‘the dream of paranoia’ needed elucidation. The coroner turned him down. Had Bill Shand Kydd been allowed to offer an explanation of the phrase, it would have led to revelations about Veronica’s history of instability. This was alluded to only briefly. After a wrangle between counsels, Graham Forsyth attested that Kait Lucan had described Veronica as a ‘manic depressive’. Then Kait herself recounted telling Christina Shand Kydd that Veronica was in hospital, to which Christina asked if her sister had ‘attempted to kill herself again’. The implication of previous suicide bids,38 about which no details are in the public arena, drew an objection from Veronica’s counsel. He asked that the press should not report what Kait had said, but of course the remark appeared anyway. Bill Shand Kydd also referred to suicide attempts, and again questioning was halted. Sensitive though this undoubtedly was, it was a highly relevant line of inquiry. As a commentator would later write: ‘A suspect could not probe the credibility of his accuser, a basic right of English justice.’39

  Meanwhile Lucan’s witnesses were attacked repeatedly, in particular his mother and Susan Maxwell-Scott, so the ‘tradition’ of not discrediting them was clearly one that could be overlooked as and when. Furthermore, while Eastham represented the Lucan camp, Veronica effectively had two counsels on her side: her own man, Bruce Coles, and Brian Watling for the police.

  The coroner was an experienced man, but not a worldly one. He had led the inquest into the death of the boxer Freddie Mills, who was shot through the eye in 1965, and had failed to address the fraught issue of Mills’s gangland connections. A verdict of suicide was brought in, but it has always been disputed. Doubtless the verdict was a convenient one. As much as anything, Gavin Thurston was a man who did what was expected of him.

  The jury was less amenable. On the third day of the inquest, the foreman said: ‘We heard about Lady Lucan going to the barman at the Plumbers Arms and saying to him, “He has murdered my nanny.” How did she know the nanny had been murdered?’

  It was a damn good question; a better one than the coroner had been prepared to answer. ‘Quite right,’ he said, as to a particularly bright pupil. Later, after a private conference, he told the jury that they should not speculate as to why this was said. ‘The difficulty is that in law Lady Lucan is barred from giving evidence other than that concerning an assault.’

  Although the inquest was prevented from offering enlightenment, the jury’s question had in fact been answered, very publicly, some five months earlier. Veronica gave a long interview to the Daily Express; or, as David Gerring put it, broke her ‘dignified silence’. Although the article was assiduous in not mentioning Lucan’s name, this was of course meaningless. It pictured Veronica standing in the breakfast room ‘at the spot where Sandra’s body lay’. During the interview, which according to Gerring must have been hated by Lucan’s supporters because Veronica came across so wonderfully, she described how she had asked her assailant: ‘Where is my nanny?’ The reply came: ‘She is dead.’ The question of whether this newspaper article was prejudicial never arose.

  ‘He wouldn’t have told her,’ says Christina. ‘Nobody would, would they? They wouldn’t admit to it. So how did she know? She never went into the basement!’

  Incidentally, the assertion that Lucan told Veronica of Sandra’s death is in direct contravention of Susan Maxwell-Scott’s evidence. This stated the complete opposite: that it was Veronica who told Lucan. ‘She told him’, said Susan, ‘that the man had killed the nanny and had attacked her.’

  Lucan’s alleged confession to murder was deemed inadmissible at the coroner’s court; quite rightly, since it was wholly uncorroborated. Clearly there were other possible answers to the jury’s question. Veronica could, for example, have gone into the basement and seen Sandra’s body. Yet despite the blood on her shoes, it was gospel that she had never done so. ‘If the blood came about through walking in the basement that would not be compatible with what Lady Lucan has told us,’ said the coroner, firmly. In his final address to the jury, he maintained his air of supreme fairness as he outlined the case against Lucan, as told to the police by Veronica, as enshrined in myth ever since.

  You have seen Lady Lucan for yourself. You have had her sitting there in the witness box for over two hours. You have heard her give evidence. You have had the advantage of seeing her for yourself and of observing her demeanour, of the way she answered questions. She answered very carefully and gave each question a great deal of consideration.

  As regards motive, there is the question of Lord Lucan’s financial situation. There is no doubt that, as a result of the separation, he was having to keep two establishments with all their outgoings. It could have eased his financial situation if he had only one establishment instead of two. [He was also] obsessed with his children.

  The coroner then moved on to Lucan’s behaviour towards his wife after the attack. ‘If – as Lord Lucan says – he was only trying to help his wife and give her succour – why did she then run out into the street screaming “Murder! Murder!”? What is an instinctive reaction for someone in that situation? Would an instinctive reaction be to do what the barman of the Plumbers Arms did, when he telephoned at once for an ambulance and the police?’ In fact, as Mr Whitehouse testified, he had not done this ‘at once’. First he had acted exactly as Lucan did: he laid Veronica down and fetched a cloth for her wounds.

  ‘The circumstances are quite clear,’ the address concluded. ‘If you are satisfied on the evidence that you have heard that there was an attack by another person, then your verdict will have to be murder. And you’ve got to decide on the evidence whether you can name the person responsible.’

  The jury was out for thirty-one minutes. The guilty verdict came at 11.45am on Thursday 19 June. One has to think that Lucan did, perhaps, do the right thing in running away.

  The witnesses emerged into the sunshine of Horseferry Road, where huge crowds had gathered, and some of them spoke briefly to the press. Susan Maxwell-Scott said she believed ‘implicitly’ in Lucan’s story. Christina also asserted his innocence. Kait Lucan, holding Bill’s arm, remarked in characteristic fashion: ‘No comment. It is a useful phrase and I shall be having a record made of it.’

  ‘I don’t know that my mother allowed herself to think too deeply about it,’ says Jane now. ‘Although I say that, she must have, because she was a very thoughtful person.’

  Kait’s son-in-law, William Gibbs, said: ‘This is not British justice. To me, it is frightening and amazing that a man can be named in court as a murderer without the jury hearing all the relevant evidence, and without being given a chance to defend himself.’

  ‘It was certainly true’, wrote a later commentator, ‘that the verdict represented a breathtaking breach of contemporary legal etiquette.’40 A great deal of evidence had been suppressed or obfuscated. The inquiry was innately flawed. At the time, Roy Ranson remarked that Lucan had only to have turned up, and ‘I would have been delighted to have given him the full trial that his supporters were demanding.’

  But the inquest had been tainted with prejudice, the prejudice that is so hard to avoid, that once worked so gruesomely in favour of murderous earls, and that had now swung so firmly to the other side:
being an earl was the worst thing that Lucan could possibly have been. As for his supporters: ‘On that professional stage they were made to appear selfish, heartless, antediluvian, dangerously close to being unworthy of respect, dangerously close to being ridiculous.’41 The prejudice flooded over Lucan’s family, his mother and sisters, as well as his friends. There was nothing to be done about it. Prejudice has its own logic, against which no argument is possible.

  Now that a form of justice had been done, the wreckage of lives was horribly apparent. Sandra’s mother said: ‘I have prayed for three days and three nights that this would be the verdict’, but the comfort must still have been cold as ice. She and her husband returned to Stephen, who the following year would discover that Sandra was not his sister but his mother, and that she had been horribly murdered. It seems peculiarly spiteful that compensation was not awarded by the Criminal Injuries Board, for his sake at least.

  After the change in law limiting the powers of coroners’ juries, Kait Lucan tried very hard to have the verdict on her son retrospectively removed, but failed. From the age of seventy-five, until her death in 1985, she had not a clue of what had happened to him. Like almost all the people who had been close to Lucan, she would suffer grievously for having known him. Lucan had escaped, but they never would. Only John Aspinall and James Goldsmith dealt with the taint of the case, as tough people can, and sailed on to greater fortune, rather as the 3rd Earl of Lucan and the 7th Earl of Cardigan had done after the Charge of the Light Brigade.