A Different Class of Murder

by Laura Thompson

  This story does give an answer of sorts to the imponderable question: why, despite having every chance to do so, Lucan did not actually kill Veronica. She stated a couple of times that he did make a second attempt, but with pills. On or around 15 November 1974,25 Veronica related the story of that night to Christabel Martin, her nanny, in a long telephone call. When Christabel returned to work at Lower Belgrave Street, the two women talked further. Christabel then wrote up the account in a diary, ‘based on eighteen hours of conversations with Lady Lucan’,26 and revealed after she herself was murdered in 1985. It recounted:

  She fought with him like mad. Eventually he gave up and sat on the stairs. They talked. V bleeding badly. He admitted killing Sandra. Was going to put V’s body in safe. V persuaded him to go up to the bedroom. She said she wanted to lie down and wash her face. She said they would hide the body to calm him down.

  They went upstairs and Frances came down and saw them both. He was covered in blood. He told Frances to go back upstairs. She did. In the bedroom he said they must go away together and would she bring her sleeping pills to take an overdose. Yes, yes. She got up and ran like hell downstairs… I hope they catch the bastard Lucan. Dead, I hope.

  Although this story is familiar in essentials, there are discrepancies: most notably the strong hint at a suicide pact. There is, too, the reference to Frances coming down to the bedroom, whereas in fact she was there already; and the description of Lucan as ‘covered in blood’, which Frances did not say to the police. She said that she could not see if there was blood on his clothes. It is possible, of course, that the child had sought to protect her father. But would she really have done that, given that he had apparently attacked her mother?

  It was natural that Veronica and Christabel would have discussed these events. That does not mean that the diary recorded them wholly accurately. When Christabel left Lower Belgrave Street for the last time in early 1975, it was reported that ‘among her plans is to write a book’.27 There was no suggestion that her subject was to be the Lucan case, but it does imply that she was capable of embellishment: the Mayerling touch.28 Did Lucan really make this highly remarkable suggestion that they both take sleeping pills? Did he, as Veronica previously stated, suggest that she alone should take them? Veronica does not consistently mention it in her accounts.

  She did not mention it in the News of the World interview, which gives a different, detailed version of the post-attack period. The police do not mention it at all. But if Lucan did believe that he could induce somebody to take an overdose, then he was truly as mad as a hatter. His daughter, one of the people for whom he had supposedly committed these crimes, had just seen him with Veronica. What did he think he would do with his wife’s battered and drug-filled corpse? And what, if the two of them were preparing to go away together, was to become of the children?

  It frankly beggars all belief that Lucan, having killed once, and having at his mercy a tiny woman close to the oblivion of unconsciousness, did not finish her off there and then, but instead started trying to ply her with sleeping pills. Why, if he was her assailant, did he not kill her during the attack? Yes, she had put up a fight, but he was still twice her size. He may have been crying with the ordeal, as she later said (although later still she would say: ‘My husband did not cry on my shoulder or break down and weep during our conversation sitting on the stairs following the murder of Mrs Rivett’29). But she herself was bleeding from the head. She was, as she told the Daily Express, ‘weakening physically’. If Lucan was the killer, he should have killed her. Otherwise, what had been the point of it all?

  ‘The moment had passed, I think they would argue,’ says Christina. ‘The adrenalin had gone.’

  ‘He was worn out,’ says the former detective-sergeant Graham Forsyth. ‘He’s killed someone. That’s a shock to his system. I think that really would have drained someone.’

  And that argument might hold; were it not for this rigmarole of the sleeping pills. Lucan was too exhausted to strike or to strangle, but he was prepared to perform a Svengali-like hypnosis to compel his victim’s self-destruction.

  What went on between the Lucans, in the aftermath of the attacks, is a mystery: perhaps the deepest in this story. Such is the nature of marriage, even in its death throes. As Christina said, there was a bond between them. Even their hatred was a kind of bond.

  The police would say that Veronica was playing for time when she suggested to Lucan that they conceal his crime. ‘You know, saying, “let’s talk this over”,’ says Graham Forsyth. ‘Thinking, “if he gets me upstairs he’s going to finish me off.” She was fighting for her life.’ If Frances’s timings were correct, however, Lucan did get Veronica upstairs quite quickly, where he did not finish her off. Nor did he call an ambulance. One or the other, surely, would have been logical. What they talked about, if anything, is entirely unknown. A pact? If so, Veronica broke it when Lucan went into the bathroom and she ran to the pub; and yet, more than thirty years on, she was still expressing her retrospective desire to have helped her husband. When the police entered the bedroom, they found just one lamp switched on and Veronica’s blood on a towel spread over her pillow. A strange scene, darkly intimate, a Sickert set in Belgravia.

  Equally strange is this remark, made by Veronica in 1998: ‘If I had known how to do it I would have hired a hit man and got him first. But I didn’t know what to do and I hadn’t got £2,000.’30

  What does this mean? Was it, perhaps, an expression of Pierrette Goletto’s analysis: ‘She wanted to destroy John. I cannot have you so I’m going to kill you’? In other words, hell hath no fury. Lucan had walked out on the marriage, and nobody really finds it forgivable to be left. Veronica later repeatedly insisted that she had wanted Lucan to come back to her, and that he too had wanted to return. This is contrary to all other evidence, in particular Jane’s recollections, as Veronica must surely have known.

  Yet in the face of this she said:

  He didn’t hate me and I certainly didn’t hate him. He was my husband. There wasn’t even an official separation between us and there was certainly no talk of divorce. There was a battle to get the children, of course, but I felt then and I have always felt that we were soul mates and the feelings we had for each other transcended those difficulties.31

  Another remark was made in a BBC television interview, when Veronica said that it might have been better if she had, in fact, been murdered.

  These profound oddities cannot really be explained, except, just possibly, in a fictional retelling of the events of 7 November 1974. Fiction would allow that something far stranger went on that night than contradictory, inconvenient reality can accept. It would dip beneath the facts, into the subliminal waters of the unconscious. It would suggest that Lucan was seeking to escape from the immaculate absurdity that his life had become, and that his wife, with whom he shared a mysterious bond, understood that desire. That the murder of Sandra Rivett was the unintended culmination of the folie à deux that was the marriage between these two: the real endgame.

  It would say that Veronica, in a fugue-like state that mirrored her husband’s, was trapped in that endgame; that when she left the chain off the front door, when she followed Sandra down into the darkness, she was caught up in her husband’s destructive impulse; that he fell into that temptation, then, at the last moment, when they were fighting together, resisted it. That they discussed the possibility of concealing his crime, finding a way together out of the trap. That when he was no longer with her she ran out of the house, and that after sitting in the pub for a minute, lost in silence, she broke the bond and denounced him: ended his life, as he had sought to end hers.

  This is fiction only. Yet it might contain psychological echoes of the truth.

  The most powerful inconsistency in Veronica’s story came in the News of the World interview, when she seemed suddenly to give way to doubt about the identity of her attacker.

  What is extraordinary is that there was no blood on Lord Lucan. O
ur daughter confirmed this… There is a theory that someone else was in the house and that it was he who killed Sandra and hit me and knocked me unconscious. Some people don’t believe I could have withstood such heavy blows and it does seem strange that I did.

  I only know that at the time, I thought my husband had hit me. I didn’t think I had fallen. Maybe I did. Maybe he had lifted me to my feet when I recovered consciousness.

  There could quite easily have been someone hiding downstairs or in the cloakroom. Our house was heavily carpeted and I would not have heard them if they had kept still.

  I simply don’t know.32

  Christina Shand Kydd says:

  She admitted to us that she couldn’t be absolutely certain that it was John who attacked her on the stairs. And I said, well, you should tell the police that. You should tell them you couldn’t swear to who it was on the stairs.

  But you don’t know whether she just decided to say that. You know, it’s something she could just suddenly say, to make you interested in her, and then deny it three hours later. And you’d say, you said so and so, and she’d say no, I didn’t.

  In fact there is something oddly poignant about Veronica’s words to the News of the World. It is as though her desire to put the case for the defence is motivated, not just by an instinct to play fair, but by a kind of wishful thinking: it was not he who wanted to kill me. ‘He could have finished me off at any time and it would have been to his advantage to do so,’ she said. ‘But he didn’t.’

  Nevertheless – and whatever the reasons for making it – the admission of uncertainty, of confusion, opens up a possibility. It suggests that Veronica could indeed have been attacked, in the darkened hall, by a man who was not Lucan; and that when Lucan himself arrived at the house she believed that the attacker was him.

  The people who knew Lucan best all say the same thing, that he was incapable of wielding that piece of piping: that he could not have planned to go berserk. The Shand Kydds believe him to have been entirely innocent, and hold to the theory of a second man connected to Sandra.

  Lucan’s schoolfriend also believes in a second man, but thinks that this man was connected to Lucan himself. ‘He could have, I suppose, hired someone to do it. Which is not a nice thing to say about your great friend.’

  Lucan’s sister Jane, who perhaps saw most clearly his state of mind, and can still conjure its lurching anguish, says:

  I think it is an unlikely scenario, that he planned something when the children were in the house. But when you’ve got to such a point, and off the rails – which I think he was very close to – almost anything is possible.

  He was so desperately paranoid, and taping all of her conversations on the telephone – there was a real sort of a violent outlook, I think. He’d become not rational. He just sounded so… He visited us shortly before – he came two or three times every year. And he was very anxiety-ridden, pacing the floors – very upset. Because he really adored those children, and saw that they were in bad hands.

  I found it impossible that he should have done… But he might have hired somebody, that was always an option. I could imagine that John might have hired a hitman, yes.

  Yet the hitman theory presents its own conundrum: why was Lord Lucan at the house that night? And it does not supply a satisfactory answer.

  There is, however, this.

  It was always apparent that Susan Maxwell-Scott, that loyal sphinx, was hiding something. The police suspected different things: that Lucan had told her about the murder, that she was implicated in his escape, that she had driven the Corsair to Newhaven, lent him her husband’s clothes, what you will, and that she kept silence partly because she was half in love with him. One could hardly blame Susan if she had preferred sleek, courteous Lucan to the dishevelled and bad-tempered Ian; but that, even if it were so, is not really relevant.

  The police came closest to the truth with their first assumption. Susan gave Lucan sanctuary for a few hours and, in between ringing his mother and writing his letters, it seems that what he mostly did was talk. Knowing that she would not give him away, that this might be his last chance to say it all, he told her what really happened that night. Not the story of walking past the house and seeing a fight in the basement. That was the public version, the one that could be said out loud; a story full of holes, but the best that he could come up with. He was compromised, after all. He had been at the house. He had blood on his hands. The story told to Susan in private was not so very different, in a way, from the story that she told on his behalf at the inquest. In another way it was different altogether.

  Susan died thirty years after the murder, having lived for some years as a widow in Battersea. During that time she talked, occasionally, about the events of that night. Her former nanny, who remained close to the Maxwell-Scotts, was told this story by a member of the family.

  In the absence of the ex-pat with the nobleman’s profile, drinking martinis in the bar in Gaborone, it must suffice as his testimony.

  The nanny says:

  So Lord Lucan arrived at Susie’s. They had several drinks, and he told her this. He said he’d had enough of Veronica. He was losing control, he’d lost access to the children and he felt desolate – he couldn’t live with it. And so he hired a hitman to kill her. He did that. Whether it was done in a drunken stupor or not… Anyway.

  At the last minute, at the eleventh hour, he panicked. He changed his mind – came to his senses. He didn’t want it to happen, and he tried to call it off. Then he went round there. He rushed round to the house, and it had already happened, and the guy had killed the wrong woman.

  Susan Maxwell-Scott, in her later life, did speak more openly about the Lucan case; and not always very cogently. But this story has never before been told. There was no reason for Susan to invent it. What would have been the point? As a Roman Catholic, she would have known that a mortal sin exists in its intention, as well as its commission. So the story did not exonerate Lucan. Nor does it have the air of invention: it is too straightforward for that. The tendency, therefore, is to believe that Lucan did tell Susan exactly this.

  It can only ever be a hypothesis. Nevertheless the story is the one into which the facts do fit. It takes on the theory of the hitman, by far the most convincing solution to the case, and at a stroke resolves the central problem: why Lucan himself was at the house. It explains the ‘plan to go berserk’, because the man who planned, and the man who went berserk, were two different people. It explains the testimony of Lucan’s mother at the inquest: he did go into 46 Lower Belgrave Street to ‘interrupt a fight’, although (as Kait may or may not have been told) it was he who had instigated the fight in the first place. It explains the remark made to Kait, which has the pleading sound of absolute honesty: ‘Oh mother, there was something terrible in the basement. I couldn’t bring myself to look.’ It explains the letters that he wrote: their references to a man who had been ‘hired’, to a ‘night of unbelievable coincidence’; and their odd obliqueness of tone, as if something were being implied that was not quite a confession, but could not quite be said.

  It accommodates the belief of those who knew Lucan best, who say that he could not have planned to commit those acts himself. It reflects the waywardness of Lucan’s moods, the energetic resentment and violent despair that could shift, quite suddenly, and give way to a sane acceptance. It suggests a delusional state from which he awakened into sobriety: too late. This was how his life had been, after all. A series of dreams, of a magical deliverance from traps of his own making, that were not always his fault.

  Above all the story explains Lucan. It makes him guilty, and not guilty. Which he always was, in truth.

  But myths are not so easy to kill.

  I was in Belgravia on the same night, at the same time, thirty-nine years later; an uneasy walk, that made the events of 7 November 1974 both more and less real to me; and a strange thing happened as I walked down Lower Belgrave Street. An oldish man came lumbering towards me. He had the f
uzzy appearance of one slightly drunk. He was tall, straight, dressed in a suit and coat, an upper-class type, one would have said, who had fallen on difficult times. In the unsettling light he gave the impression of being dusty grey: his face and hair, as well as his clothes. He was muttering as he walked. As he approached me, outside number 46, his eyes glanced into mine, askew yet direct. There was an aggression in the look; as if I had trespassed upon his territory; and there was something else, a kind of half-amused knowingness.

  I turned the corner into Chester Square and rang a friend. I said: ‘I’ve just seen Lord Lucan.’

  I had believed it, for a moment.

  We hope you enjoyed this book.

  Laura Thompson’s next book, Life in a Cold Climate: Nancy Mitford The Biography, is coming in 2015

  For more information, click one of the links below:

  Plate section

  Appendix I: Aristocratic Murderers

  Appendix II: Domestic Murderers

  Appendix III: The Lucan Family

  Notes

  Acknowledgements

  Bibliography

  Index

  Picture credits

  ~

  Laura Thompson

  An invitation from the publisher

  Plate Section

  1. The 7th Earl of Lucan in 1973.

  2. Laleham House, built by the 2nd Earl of Lucan in 1803, sold by the 5th Earl in 1928.

  3. The 3rd Earl of Lucan.

  4. The Lucan memorial in the churchyard of All Saints’, Laleham.

  5. The wedding of Lord Lucan’s parents, December 1929: Kaitilin Dawson walks up the aisle of Southwark Cathedral to marry George Patrick Bingham.

  6. Lord Bingham, the future Lord Lucan, at St Moritz: early 1960s

  7. Lord Bingham at the helm of his powerboat, White Migrant, 1963.