That is not to say that this man, or another, did not come to the house. ‘I always thought there was a third person there, according to blood types,’ says Lucan’s other sister Jane. ‘But of course one’s memory does funny things.’ Jane’s reference is to the AB group blood that was found on the mailsack, in the cloakroom basin, on the back of Veronica’s skirt, and on the lead piping. The assumption has always been that the AB blood was a mixture of Veronica’s and Sandra’s groups, and given the general blood patterning this is almost certainly correct, although it could have come from a person belonging to the AB group. But the forensic truth can never, now, be determined.
The suggestion that Sandra admitted a man through the front door, then went down into the basement with him, is an intriguing one, but it confronts an instant problem. According to the police, the working light bulb had been removed from its socket at the bottom of the basement stairs. In other words, the killer was in situ before the victim.
Therefore whoever Sandra met in the basement was already inside the house. Perhaps she let a man in when she made her phone calls, before going upstairs to put the children to bed, then returned downstairs with the teacups. Or, just possibly, this person had a key. If Pierrette had had a key to the basement door, presumably so too had Sandra. And although David Gerring stated at the inquest that only the Lucans were known to have keys to the house, it seems likely that Sandra had a key to the front door, for use on her nights off when the chain was left down.
One can hypothesize that, after killing Sandra, her murderer heard Veronica calling for her. He fled into the garden, there shedding some of Sandra’s blood. Then, realizing that he could not quickly escape that way, he went back into the basement and attacked Veronica as she ran away up the stairs. During the assault, Lucan entered the house. The killer ran out through the front door. And Veronica, whose unknown assailant had been replaced in the dark ante-room by the figure of her husband, believed that the man who had attacked her was Lucan himself.
Could it have happened this way? It is possible. Sandra’s stay at the house lasted just ten weeks, but it contained a complexity of relationships. And there is a powerful argument in support of the theory: the nature of the assault. The impression given by the police is that Sandra was struck down instantly, in the pitch dark, by a blow to the back of the head. ‘She died quickly and without a sound,’ wrote Ranson.6 But the poor girl did not die quickly. The pathologist Keith Simpson told the inquest that she was heavily bruised in three areas: on her face and shoulders, as if the weapon had missed its target of the skull; on her upper arm, as if it had been gripped; on her hand, where it had been raised in an attempt at self-protection. Her left eye and mouth showed evidence of having been slapped or punched. These were not injuries inflicted upon a semi-conscious person. They were the result of a prolonged and terrible fight.
And the basement was not pitch-dark; the slats in the blind above the sink were open at forty-five degrees. The murder took place in line with the kitchen window, where a stream of light was coming in from the street lamp directly opposite. A very dim light, it is true. But enough to glimpse shapes, features.7 Keith Simpson would later state his opinion8 that the attack had begun when Sandra and her murderer were face to face. For Ranson to say, as he later did, that when Sandra was lying on the ground ‘it is likely that the murderer… still did not realize whom he had killed’ is utterly extraordinary.
Furthermore, four of the splits in the scalp were sited as if Sandra had been facing her attacker. They lay above the right ear, towards the eyebrow. Only the last two splits, above the nape of the neck, would have landed when Sandra was on the ground. So too, possibly, did the bruising blows to the shoulders, which may have been delivered as she tried to roll out of reach. This was not just a grotesque attack, it was a grotesquely inefficient one.
Given that Sandra was a small woman, with what was later described as a ‘thin skull’, the ferocity needed to kill her is a little surprising. Either the murderer or the weapon was poor at their unspeakable job. There is the very faint possibility that the piping used to attack Veronica was not the same piece that killed Sandra, as none of her hairs were found on it; there was group B blood, but that could have come from the killer. A lighter, sharper weight of piping would explain why the assault was so prolonged and bloody. Logic suggests that the same piping was used on both women, but the facts do not, at least not unequivocally. There is, however, the possibility that the forensic analysis was not as thorough as it might have been. The piping looked like the weapon, and probably was the weapon; there was no need to put every last molecule under a microscope.
There is one further small point in defence of this theory: it would explain how an assailant entered the house without being seen. The difficulty of doing this has never really been questioned; but if, as the police say, the means of entry was the front door, there was a considerable risk. Sandra was buzzing about that evening. She rang her mother. She received a phone call from John Hankins. Of course if Lucan were the assailant, he would not have expected Sandra to be there: but she was. If one accepts Frances’s timings, the only safe period for getting into the basement was the half-hour between 8.05pm and 8.35pm. If the assailant were known to Sandra, the risk recedes.
In truth, were it not for the weapon and the sack, it would be very easy to believe that Sandra was the intended victim: that she was killed, after a prolonged struggle, in a ghastly crime passionnel. But the weapon means premeditation, and that is less convincing. A current lover, who might have committed the impassioned manslaughter, would have been unlikely to come armed for murder. And Sandra would have been unlikely to admit to the house a rejected lover, particularly the one with whom she had just split up: the kind of man who might, logically, have committed this murder. Therefore the explanation that best supports the theory is that a former boyfriend, burning with a grievance, had somehow obtained possession of a key to 46 Lower Belgrave Street. It is also possible that Sandra’s killer was somebody who appeared to be a friend but was, in fact, mad.
The sense remains that what happened on the evening of 7 November was all about the Lucans, the playing out of the last act in the absurdist tragedy of their marriage. For Sandra to have been engaged in a drama of her own that night does, indeed, seem like the ‘unbelievable coincidence’ described by Lucan. It is so hard to rid oneself of all that a posteriori knowledge, which says that the violent events of that night were an inevitability, and that Sandra was the collateral damage. Actually this may not be true. The inevitable often only seems so after it has taken place. On 6 November 1974, Sandra Rivett probably seemed as likely a murder victim as Veronica Lucan.
‘How convenient if you could ring up Harrods and say
“Please send along two good murderers, will you?”’
AGATHA CHRISTIE, The Pale Horse, 1961
But the third hypothesis does have Veronica as the intended target. It suggests that the attacks were carried out by a hitman, paid by Lucan to kill his wife. The police dismissed this theory, which gives it instant appeal.
Psychologically, it is extremely convincing that a man like Lucan would have asked a hitman to do the job for him; that was the nature of his class. And it is not particularly hard to find a hitman, although they vary in quality. If Lucan did employ one, then his man was a hopeless amateur, not least in choosing a weapon whose only virtue was its silence. Lucan would not have known how to judge what he was getting, and the chain that led to the man would probably have been quite long. But he could have found somebody, most likely through John Aspinall. Without actually making the introduction, Aspinall was in a position to make oblique suggestions. He had mixed with low life when he staged his peripatetic gambling parties, and perforce, as a one-man casino business, would have continued to do so (especially if the story is true that he was operating occasional bent chemmy games, as suggested by the mobster Billy Hill). If he had had some idea of what Lucan was up to, this would sit quite convincingly with
the strange, show-off game of grandma’s footsteps that he played with the police. He taunted them with the possibility that he held a secret, going so far and no further. The secret might have been that he had helped Lucan to escape. But it might, far more credibly, have been the belief that Lucan had paid somebody to kill the vexatious wife.
Of course Lucan did not really have the cash to pay such a person, but he was in so deep as to make no difference. The visit to the moneylender, two months before the murder, could have been made for just such a purpose.
The hitman hypothesis appeals for another reason. It removes perhaps the strongest objection to the police case: that Lucan apparently did not know his own wife.
‘If you think about it,’ says Christina, ‘if you’ve been married to somebody for quite a few years, how do you mistake them for somebody else? The papers tried to say that they [Veronica and Sandra] were similar, but they weren’t.’
This is confirmed, oddly enough, by the person who endorsed the mistaken identity theory: Veronica herself. ‘He said “shut up” and then I knew it was him,’ she would later tell a newspaper. ‘I knew his voice and I could tell it was him from the way he smelt. A wife knows her husband’s smell. I know it was him.’9
It could be said that Lucan was so overwrought, so full of alcohol, that he simply fell upon the woman who came down the stairs because he assumed that it was his wife. And this is possible. Indeed it must have been that way, if the police and the coroner’s jury got it right. Sandra resembled Veronica sufficiently in essentials not to set off an immediate alarm. She was small, albeit fuller of figure than Veronica, and her hair was longer, more like Veronica’s, than in the familiar, smiling picture taken four years before her death.
But the attack upon Sandra was not the swift cosh-to-the-head of myth: seven blows were inflicted when she was facing her killer. The intimate nature of this assault raises serious questions, which are answered if the man who murdered Sandra did not know that she was not Veronica.
A hitman would have turned up for the job in more appropriate clothes than Lucan’s ‘gentleman’s casual’. He could have had access to the exotic mailsack and prepared the weapons with his hacksaw. He could, of course, have been given a house key; either to the front door or the basement. He could have driven to the house in the Ford Corsair that Lucan borrowed from Michael Stoop, and have left the second piece of lead piping in the boot. After the attacks he could have made his getaway in the Corsair. It is an incidental oddity that blood was found on both front seats of the car. A possible explanation is that it was parked with the passenger side against the kerb at Lower Belgrave Street, that the assailant used that door to minimize the risk of being seen in the road, and that as he slid into the driver’s position both seats were smeared with blood. It is also possible that a bloodied garment was placed on the passenger seat.
There is something more in defence of the theories that Lucan did not, himself, commit these crimes. Billy Edgson, the linkman at the Clermont, told the police that Lucan had spoken to him outside the club at 8.45pm. If that information is correct,10 then the plain fact of the matter is that the man named as guilty has our old friend: an alibi.
This is pretty seismic, really. It is as if, back in 1910, somebody mentioned in passing that Dr Crippen had been on holiday at the time that his wife was buried in the cellar. The police were perturbed by this statement, of course, but they overcame it admirably.
Nevertheless Edgson, together with Frances, knocked annoying little holes into the watertight case against Lucan. They were the human equivalent of that deeply irritating blood evidence. Frances stated that Sandra went downstairs before 8.40pm, and her mother at about 8.50pm. Edgson stated that Lucan was outside the Clermont at 8.45pm. Therefore Lucan did not commit the crimes. Simple as that. The police sought, in an avuncular way, to dismiss Frances as a witness. ‘The evidence of Frances was always slightly muddled,’ wrote Ranson; in fact it was notably precise. Frances, he wrote, was ‘half asleep’ as she lay on her mother’s bed watching television: there is no evidence for that at all. She had not even been to school that day, so was probably very much awake (another small contradiction here was Veronica’s statement, in her 1975 Daily Express interview, that on the day of the murder ‘the children were home from school on time’). David Gerring described Frances as ‘highly intelligent’, not ‘horror-struck’, possessed of the ‘amazing resilience’ displayed by her grandmother. He too was aware of the problem that she posed, contradicting as she did the gospel according to Veronica, and sidled up cunningly to address it. ‘Time’, he later mused, ‘is a funny thing in murder enquiries, and people have different ideas about it. In most enquiries timing is terrible, people can’t remember times even though they think they can. The timing was marked on the working copy [of Veronica’s police statement] as needing tightening up but no great significance was attached to it.’
This all reads very reasonably. But Frances, in her statement, wasn’t making confident guesses. If she did not know what time something happened, she said so. Otherwise she referred to an accurate corroborative source: the television. She was quite right to say, for instance, that Top of the Pops began that night at 7.20pm. She was probably right to say that her mother had gone downstairs before the start of the nine o’clock news: a good, firm, memorable marker. Veronica, however, said that she left the bedroom at 9.15pm. ‘The BBC news had been on for fifteen minutes,’ wrote Ranson, doggedly parroting this version of events as if no other could ever have existed.
And yet: even if Veronica’s timings were the right ones, and Sandra did not go down to the basement until 8.55pm, if Edgson’s statement is accepted, then it was still well-nigh impossible for Lucan to have committed the murder. Lucan had to drive to the house from the Clermont, a journey of at least seven or eight minutes. He had to enter without being seen, remove a light bulb and conceal himself. And he had less than ten minutes in which to do it all. In other words, for Lucan’s alibi to break, Edgson had to have been mistaken. Possibly he was. He may have got the wrong time, the wrong night, the wrong everything. Nevertheless his testimony placed a giant question mark over the official solution to this case; the way in which it has been batted away is alarmingly casual. Surely it was men like Lucan who dismissed the words of a servant?
If, however, Edgson’s evidence was reliable, and Lucan did indeed drive past the Clermont at around 8.45, this was a slightly odd and flagrant thing to do. In fact it constitutes a further support to the hitman theory. It has the distinct air of a deliberately created alibi: look at me, doing something innocent! Furthermore, Edgson stated that Lucan was almost certainly driving the Mercedes, which if true creates an additional difficulty for the official theory, with its insistence upon the role of the Ford Corsair. The police believed that Veronica was to have been stowed in this car, probably after the sack had been placed in the basement safe. It is usually said that the Corsair was borrowed because it had a capacious boot, as if a Mercedes does not; its real advantage would have been its insignificance. According to Edgson’s timings, Lucan could not possibly have swapped cars. But a hitman could have used the Corsair, transported the body into its boot, then left the car near to Lucan’s flat in Elizabeth Street. Lucan would have been summoned by Sandra, when she returned from her night off and found Veronica gone; or perhaps he would have found a pretext for ringing the house. At some point thereafter he would, if the police theory is correct, have driven to the south coast and effected his wife’s ‘disappearance’. In fact the body could just as easily have been thrown from a Thames bridge in an appearance of suicide. The blows to the head would today be identified as murderous, but in pre-Silent Witness 1974, when the average person was far less forensically clued-up, Lucan may not have thought that way. He may also have thought that one blow would be enough to kill, and that post-mortem it would seem to have been caused in the water, effectively as if self-inflicted.
There is, however, something rather nonchalant in the belief th
at Lucan intended to dispose of a body in this way, particularly to load it into a car on a London street with nobody the wiser. This was also pre-CCTV, of course, so much more could be done under wraps; even so, the moment of hauling the burden out of the house and into the boot would have been a nasty one. As ever, the police shift their words to suit their argument. Gerring, who theorizes that the body would have been removed via the basement door, also says that Lucan had earlier parked the Corsair directly outside the house. In flat contradiction Ranson says that there were cars all along Lower Belgrave Street that night, which means that the body would have been carried almost into the middle of the road before being placed in the boot. Not very discreet, but Ranson had been too busy making another point to worry about this: he wanted to underscore the fact that Lucan, if he had been driving past the house, could not possibly have seen anything through the basement window. Therefore it is unclear how close the car would have been to number 46, had the plan been enacted.
For Lucan himself, bundling a body into a sack and taking it out into the street would have been unspeakably terrifying; almost as alarming as murder. For a hitman it was all in a night’s work. And if one believes that Veronica was the intended victim, this must have been Lucan’s plan. It would seem that she had simply wandered off into the night, that there had never been a murder at all. Her history of instability would make this a feasible scenario; the visit to the chemist that afternoon, in which Lucan asked about some of his wife’s pills, may have been intended to support it. Anyway Lucan would never have left Veronica lying dead in the house. Nicholas Boyce, who in 1985 would kill the other nanny, Christabel Martin, in a violent rage, nevertheless went to grisly lengths in disposing of her body so that it would not be seen by his children.
A Different Class of Murder Page 36