I don’t think, if he really was going to do it, that he’d say it! I mean – the worst scenario is he blew up. It could have boiled up in him over those fifteen months. After losing the children, he may have got very, very upset, and into such a state… But I just can’t believe... I don’t know what it was, but definitely something wasn’t right about what was said.
It is a fascinating test, to consider who among one’s acquaintance might be capable of murder. Those who pass have either a streak of sudden unaccountability, a hint of darkly glinting deviousness, or an unnatural air of polite self-control. Lucan had this last quality, of course: the mask, behind which his life was crumbling. He could have snapped, broken out. Jane says:
I just thought that he was so deranged that he could have wanted to remove her. But I didn’t think he’d have the ability to do it himself. Sally was adamant that he hadn’t done it. My brother Hugh – I don’t know what he actually thinks about who did it. I think he would probably say what I’m saying, which is that I didn’t think it was possible for him to have done it.
For there is not merely the fact of murder; there is the way in which the murder was carried out. The attacks were not just evil. They were clumsy, lumbering, thuggish. It would take a lot, to wait in the dark and batter a woman to death. The bludgeon is a bungler’s tool, at odds with Lucan’s physical fastidiousness. The remorseless blows, the punches to Sandra’s face, were the actions of somebody used to violence.
‘If you’d known him – the first thing that we’ve always said to everybody,’ says Christina, ‘it was always a joke how squeamish John was. So the idea of him actually bludgeoning somebody, is sort of laughable, really.’
In the past Bill Shand Kydd has stated that it is impossible to imagine Lucan wielding the piping. He even left the room when his dog scuffled with another. The former nanny Lilian Jenkins recalled him wincing at the sight when she cut a finger, and asking her to cover it with a plaster.15
‘I couldn’t imagine that he would have done such a bloody thing,’ says Jane, ‘because he was very squeamish. I was in medical school, and he didn’t like the thought of anything to do with the body, really. Those things can go by the board, I guess, when the mind does something... But it would be there, still, the squeamishness.’ This is a repeated emphasis: the fact that drawing blood, inflicting wounds that would visibly and audibly damage, was inimical to Lucan.
There is also the laconic comment of his brother Hugh: ‘You can’t plan to go berserk.’ This is extraordinarily to the point. Because the oddest thing about this murder, or failed murder, is that it falls somewhere between a planned crime and an uncontrollable impulse.
Lucan might have lost his temper during a row, and launched an attack upon Veronica that might then have turned lethal. Indeed she stated that he had done exactly that in the past (pace her remark that he was ‘not a violent man’). But that is not what happened on 7 November. If Lucan was the man with the bludgeon, then he had thought hard about what he was doing. He had planned, as Hugh Bingham says, to go berserk. So the only explanation is a kind of madness. He was lost in the dream of his own violence, which lasted through the planning and many minutes into the execution, and only ended when his wife broke the spell: by inflicting a literal version of the low punch that she had laid on him during the custody case.
Yet nobody who knew him well, except his wife, believes that Lucan could ever have entered that state. His desire to do violence is not denied. His sister, in particular, who saw his guard right down, speaks of his hatred and anger towards Veronica. Jane is not the sort of person to defend her brother out of sheer sentiment; she is plain-speaking, and does not shirk the truth about him. If she thought that Lucan had planned and committed the attacks, she would almost certainly say so. But she cannot, quite, picture it.
If Lucan did do it, however, the plot must have gone like this. He had learned from his daughter that Sandra was away from the house on Thursdays. He also knew, somehow, that Veronica went downstairs to make tea at around 9.00pm. ‘After eleven years of marriage he knew her routine,’ wrote the faithful Ranson. In fact during the marriage (only nine years of which were spent in the same house), there would not have been much evening tea-drinking: Veronica was at the Clermont, having a dreadful time. The tea came later, post-separation. How, then, did Lucan know about it? Bill Shand Kydd took the robust view that he could have stood in the basement every evening for a week before somebody came down to make a cup of tea. Could Lucan, however, have learned the routine from the children? Frances did not mention this to the police, but it is possible that her father asked a question along these lines. Veronica herself suggested that if somebody had watched the house ‘they would have known about my habit of going down to make tea at about nine o’clock on a Thursday evening’;16 a remark that gives rise to a couple of thoughts. First, it implies that she did not make tea on any night other than Thursday. Did this mean that tea was usually made by a nanny, or perhaps not made at all? Either way, if Veronica had been observed, then Lucan must have been looking into the basement of the house at a very specific time: effectively, the time of the murder. He must have been doing pretty much what he claimed in his story, the one that was so ridiculed by the police at the inquest.
There are, in fact, small indications that Lucan had slightly more to do with his wife than was generally assumed. Pierrette Goletto, who worked for the Lucans in 1974, says that they spoke on the phone, and had frequent arguments in a ground-floor room when he turned up to collect the children. Veronica told the inquest that she last saw her husband ‘to speak to’ at George’s sports day, around 18 July 1974, and that her last sighting of him was on 24 October, when he was parked outside the house. Nevertheless he must, somehow, have got hold of the pills that he showed to the chemist on the afternoon of the murder: a minor mystery. Also, if Lucan entered the house by the front door on 7 November, he must have known somehow that the chain was left down when Sandra had her days off.
The police usually cite the front door as his means of entry, although David Gerring did say that the outside basement door would have been used for the removal of Veronica’s body. In fact the basement door was also a better way in. Lucan could have locked the door from the inside, or more likely after he left the house.
One then has to accept that Lucan waited in the dark for a woman to come down the basement stairs; that he began his assault unthinkingly and that, once it became clear that his victim was not Veronica, was compelled to continue it; that he placed Sandra’s body in the mailsack because he did not know what else to do with her; and that he then attempted to murder his wife, presumably thinking that he would shroud her in a monogrammed sheet and remove two bodies from the house: or perhaps not thinking at all.
According to Veronica, Lucan was in the ground-floor cloakroom when she looked down into the basement for Sandra. He had, wrote Ranson, walked ‘calmly’ upstairs. Why? What was he doing in there? Rinsing the blood from his leather gloves, and perhaps from the piping? Sponging his trousers? Grey-blue fibres were found on the towel and basin. It would have made more sense to do all this in the kitchen, although the cloakroom was also in darkness. Perhaps he had gone in there to wait for his intended target, who at any minute might come in search of her nanny. Or did Veronica’s opportune appearance simply impel him to go berserk again?
Veronica told the inquest that she heard somebody behind her in the cloakroom. ‘I walked towards the sound, or at any rate moved towards it.’ Then: ‘somebody rushed out and hit me on the head.’ There is an oddity here. The blood was said to have been trajected ‘backwards’ on to the ante-room ceiling and the cloakroom door. Yet one would think that, if Veronica had been moving towards her attacker, thus facing him, the blood would be trajected backwards on to the wall behind her: the area at the top of the basement stairs. Nevertheless it is beyond question that blows did land on Veronica’s head in the vicinity of the ante-room, so the remark about moving ‘towards the sound’ is not ov
erly relevant.
Again, however, there is the vexed question of the blood anomalies, so blithely dismissed by the police: the group A blood in the basement, the group B on Veronica’s clothes. As other commentators have suggested,17 there is no reason why Veronica should not have innocently entered the basement. Her denials exonerate her from any implied involvement in Sandra’s death (she later said, in reference to the inquest: ‘It was only then I realized that I myself was suspected of murdering her’18). They also destroy Lucan’s story of seeing a fight through the window. This was obviously desirable from Veronica’s point of view; but it was a bizarre story anyway, so why worry about it? Theoretically, it is possible that the attack on Veronica began in the basement. It is also possible that she entered the basement after the attack. She could have gone to see for herself what had happened to Sandra. Again, this is an entirely innocent thing to have done.
According to Frances’s timings, Veronica was attacked just before 9.00pm.
Mummy said that she wondered why Sandra was so long [Frances has Sandra going downstairs at about 8.35pm]. I don’t know what time this was but it was before the news on the television at 9pm. I said I would go downstairs to see what was keeping Sandra but Mummy said no, she would go. I said I would go with her but she said no, it was okay, she would go. Mummy left the room to go downstairs and I stayed watching TV. She left the bedroom door open but there was no light in the hall because the bulb is worn out and it doesn’t work.
Just after Mummy left the room I heard a scream. It sounded as though it had come from a long way away. I thought maybe the cat had scratched Mummy and she had screamed. I wasn’t frightened by the scream, and I just stayed in the room watching TV. I went to the door of the room and called ‘Mummy?’ But there was no answer so I just left it. At about 9.05pm, when the news was on television, Daddy and Mummy both walked into the room.
Later Veronica said that it was ‘utterly incredible’19 that Frances had blamed the scream on the cat, and had continued to watch television. It is perhaps surprising that the scream was all that she heard, but the site of the attack was two floors away.
By Frances’s timings, Veronica and Lucan were downstairs for approximately ten minutes. Of course the attack itself would not have lasted very long. Nevertheless there was not much time for the halted colloquy on the stairs, during which Lucan supposedly confessed to murder.
Veronica’s account, on the other hand, in which she went downstairs at 9.15pm, and upstairs at a time unspecified, easily allows for the confession on the ground floor. It also minimizes the mysterious period when the Lucans were alone together in the bedroom. Having fought with her husband, gone to the cloakroom and talked on the stairs, there was then time for little more than what Veronica told the inquest: going upstairs, lying on the bed, escaping at 9.50pm. In the account supplied by Frances, however, the Lucans spent some forty-five minutes together in the bedroom.
Factually there are things that do not make sense, if Lucan were indeed guilty as named. There was blood at the sites of attack, but in no other part of the house where he was that night. There was nothing to say that he was blood-boltered, as he undoubtedly would have been, except the possibility that he covered himself afterwards in a coat: a circumstance that his wife is likely to have mentioned. There was blood in the garden, where he had no reason to go, and an inexplicably unlocked back door. The smears and smudges of blood in the car, on his trousers, on the letter to Bill Shand Kydd, on Mrs Florman’s doorstep, were in minimal quantities given the violence of these crimes, and could have been present for reasons that were innocent as well as guilty. Lucan had undeniable contact with Veronica, who was covered in blood. And he admitted having entered the basement, whose floor and walls were similarly bloody. Grey-blue fibres, presumed to have come from his trousers, were found in the cloakroom and the car. Those can be legitimately explained. There were also fibres on the lead piping, which could have been briefly examined for an innocent reason; although their presence more strongly suggests guilt. Yet no fibres were left on the mailsack into which Lucan must have forced Sandra’s body, despite the fact that the police would certainly have wanted to find them there. This, if he was guilty, is a near-impossibility.
At what point did he enter the basement? This is difficult. He told his mother that he had seen ‘something terrible’: the body in the mailsack. It could be, of course, that he saw it because he had put it there. Assuming that he did not, however; assuming that he entered the house after Veronica was attacked: he could have gone down to the basement before taking her to the bedroom. It would have been natural to do this, to see what had happened to Sandra. The problem is that no blood was reported on the upper floors of the house, yet was found on Mrs Florman’s doorstep. Logically, this implies that Lucan went down to the basement after taking Veronica upstairs, and before leaving Lower Belgrave Street. He had time to do this; just. It is possible. It may seem a good deal more probable that Lucan entered the basement in order to commit murder, but again one returns to the conundrum of the forensic evidence.
There are other things. Lucan had an alibi; albeit an imprecise one. Furthermore, after Veronica ran from the house he lingered in the area and rang the doorbell in Chester Square, whereas a guilty person would surely have scarpered as fast as possible. He managed to raise the piping over his head in the ante-room, despite the fact that he stood six feet two and the ceiling was only four inches higher. Taking an overview, there was a sheer lack of logic to the whole enterprise. Did he not think about the practical problems of, say, cleaning up the blood in the basement? Would it not have been better to murder his wife in some other way, less susceptible to the vagaries of chance; possibly even when his children were staying at Elizabeth Street (although it would have been necessary for Sandra also to be out of the house)? And why, if what he wanted was his children, would he have taken even the slightest risk of being arrested for the murder of their mother? He could so easily have been seen that night; the dangers were very considerable.
If this had indeed been Lucan’s plan, it was not a good one. It is said that he was sufficiently stupid to think that it was, but that is not true. Only in moments of lunacy would he have believed such a thing. There were times when he did behave like a madman; when he rushed towards the endgame, as though the future could be won or lost on a throw of the dice. At other times he pulled back and was himself again. For the police, it was precisely these displays of good-humoured normality that proved Lucan to have been planning murder. In other words, he was in his right mind. Like the aristocratic killers of old, the only lunacy in Lucan was that of unconscionable arrogance: the sense of entitlement that said, away with my unbearable little wife.
Except, of course, that this was not that kind of murder. It was domestic murder. Not sudden and sword-flashing, but secretive, stealthy. Planned and plotted. The sort of thing that Lucan might have dreamed up, in his lonely flat, when he receded into the black holes of his life: a story that he told himself.
Veronica’s own story is said to have been immutable. Roy Ranson wrote that she ‘never varied from the essential facts of her account of that night’. In fact some inconsistencies did later arise, most notably in a long interview with the News of the World given in 1981.
For instance: although Veronica had previously stated that Sandra Rivett made her offer of tea at around 8.55pm, to the newspaper she was more precise. ‘Sandra put her head round the door just as Big Ben came on the screen.’20 Veronica then described going downstairs, being attacked by her husband and sitting with him on the stairs. According to the police story, it was at this point that Lucan confessed to murder. Here, however, the account was rather different.
‘Where’s Sandra?’ I asked. It was in my mind that if she were in cahoots with him, like the other nannies,21 I was a goner. They were going to be able to do away with me without any difficulty.
In reply to his wife’s question, Lucan did not confess but simply said: ‘She’s down there.
But don’t look. It’s an awful sight.’ He then started to complain that Veronica’s solicitor had been demanding more money. ‘I’m fed up with it. It’s getting me down.’ After a long rant about lawyers and his financial situation, he said suddenly: ‘I’ll have to go away… Will you come with me? The children will be all right with your sister.’22
The implication of these remarks, which were never publicly reported by the police, is that if Lucan committed the crimes then he did so for monetary reasons; and that, far from being obsessed with his children, he was willing to parcel them off casually to Christina Shand Kydd.
In 2008 Veronica offered another version of this post-murder conversation, claiming to have suggested to Lucan that they cover up Sandra Rivett’s death. ‘I offered to help him conceal her body.’23 Four years later, she would say something similar when she told a newspaper:
If I could have helped him I would have done. I wouldn’t have given him money, I would have said, ‘Go away, I will handle it from here.’ But I was too badly injured to try to help him. I had to have my injuries seen to. If he had not attacked me I would have said, ‘Get out. I have not seen you.’ I would have protected him.’24
Veronica had brought up this theme as early as January 1975, in her long interview with the Daily Express. At that time, however, she portrayed the offer of protection as a ruse, a diversionary tactic. ‘I pretended to be helpful. I said that as Sandra had no friends or relatives [sic] no one would miss her...’ Veronica then described sitting on the stairs with her attacker, who demanded to know if she had any sleeping pills. ‘When I replied that I had some he asked me if I would take them. I suppose to finish the job! I said I would. Then he took me up to my bedroom.’
A Different Class of Murder Page 38