A Different Class of Murder

by Laura Thompson

  8. Lord Bingham and Veronica Duncan, newly engaged in September 1963.

  9. The wedding of Lord Bingham and Veronica Duncan, November 1963.

  10. John Aspinall (left), his associate John Burke and his mother Lady Osborne arrive at court in 1958. Aspinall was accused and acquitted of keeping a ‘common gaming-house’.

  11. Dominick Elwes and Tessa Kennedy, with whom he eloped in 1957.

  12. James Goldsmith, 1954: during an interval in a court hearing in Paris concerning his four-month-old daughter, Isabel.

  13. Lady Lucan with her first-born, Frances, in 1964

  14. The exterior of the Clermont Club at 44 Berkeley Square.

  15. Christina and Bill Shand Kydd, 1971.

  16. Lord Lucan and Zoe Howard, wife of Greville Howard, on holiday in Portofino, 1968.

  17. Lord Lucan at a London gambling club, 30 April 1973.

  18. The mews at 5 Eaton Row (yellow door). The house backs almost directly onto 46 Lower Belgrave Street, whose garden lies behind the brick wall.

  19. 72a Elizabeth Street, where Lucan took a ground-floor flat after the breakdown of his marriage in 1973.

  20. Andrina Colquhoun, the debutante with whom Lucan formed a friendship in 1974, photographed in Hyde Park.

  21. Sandra Rivett.

  22. 46 Lower Belgrave Street on 8 November 1974, the day after the murder of Sandra Rivett.

  23. The Plumbers Arms, at the end of Lower Belgrave Street.

  24. Grants Hill House, the home of Ian and Susan Maxwell-Scott, visited by Lucan on the night of the murder.

  25. Susan Maxwell-Scott at the inquest into the death of Sandra Rivett, June 1975.

  26. The Ford Corsair borrowed by Lucan, found parked in Norman Road, Newhaven, on 10 November 1974.

  27. The police hunt for Lord Lucan on cliffs near Newhaven.

  28. Detective Chief-Superintendent Roy Ranson, who headed the inquiry, and Detective Chief-Inspector David Gerring (right).

  29. Lady Lucan returning to the house at Lower Belgrave Street after the murder. Her unofficial bodyguard, Detective-Sergeant Graham Forsyth, is to her left.

  30. The front page of the Daily Mirror, 14 November 1974.

  31. Kaitilin Lucan is driven to the inquest, 17 June 1975.

  32. Roger Rivett, Sandra’s estranged husband, arriving at the inquest.

  33. Lady Lucan with her children George and Frances, 22 November 1974.

  34. Lord Lucan in a West End club, 30 April 1973.

  35. 46 Lower Belgrave Street today.

  36. ‘Jungly’ Barry Halpin (centre, with guitar) in Goa. The folk singer was one of the many men who has been mistakenly identified as Lord Lucan.

  Endpaper

  APPENDICES

  Appendix I: Aristocratic Murderers

  Appendix II: Domestic Murderers

  Appendix III: The Lucan Family

  Appendix I: Aristocratic Murderers

  A summary of the eleven titled murderers referred to on page 3.

  1541 9th Baron Dacre, found guilty. Five years earlier he had been a member of the jury at the trial of Anne Boleyn. During a boys’ night out he and his friends decided that it would be a great wheeze to go poaching on a neighbour’s estate; a fight ensued with the landowner’s servants, in the course of which a man named John Busbrigg was killed. Although Dacre had no malicious intent he was hanged at Tyburn, ‘strangled as common murderers are’.

  1556 8th Baron Stourton, found guilty. After a long campaign of intimidation against his mother’s steward, William Hartgill, with whom he had argued over money, he ordered four of his servants to kill both Hartgill and his son. Probably the only aristocrat to have been hanged with the traditional silk rope, he was buried in Salisbury Cathedral.

  1615–16 1st Earl and Countess of Somerset, found guilty and pardoned. The couple were accused of poisoning Sir Thomas Overbury, secretary to the earl and formerly his close friend. Overbury had opposed the Somerset marriage and made an enemy of the countess’s powerful family, the Howards. His removal thus became politically desirable. The countess, although clearly guilty, was pardoned immediately. Her husband’s guilt is contested, but having fallen from his previous high favour with King James I, he was not pardoned until 1624.

  1666 15th Baron Morley, found guilty of manslaughter and pleaded privilege of peerage. He killed a man named Hastings during a drunken brawl at the Fleece Tavern; or, as the testimony at his trial put it, ‘ran Mr Hastings through the head’.

  1678 3rd Baron Cornwallis, found not guilty. After a night out with a friend, Mr Gerrard, both were ‘somewhat distemper’d with drink’, and fell into an argument with a sentinel at the Palace of Whitehall, which seems to have revved them up for indiscriminate violence. Gerrard put his sword into a young man named Robert Clerk, who simply happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. The degree of Cornwallis’s complicity is uncertain.

  1678 7th Earl of Pembroke, found guilty of manslaughter and pleaded privilege of peerage. He killed a man named Nathaniel Cony in a tavern brawl, and later that year became chief suspect in the death of Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey, found stabbed in a ditch on Primrose Hill. Godfrey had prosecuted him for the Cony crime.

  1680 7th Earl of Pembroke, found guilty and pardoned. Charles II, whose mistress Louise de Kérouaille was Pembroke’s sister-in-law, accepted a petition on his behalf after he killed a nightwatchman, William Smeeth, during a drunken spree at Turnham Green. Pembroke was frankly out of control, and committed any number of maniacal assaults during this period. Like any good thug, albeit one with a very large house, he also owned a menagerie of fighting animals: ‘fifty-two mastives’, ‘some beares, and a lyon’.

  1692 4th Baron Mohun, found not guilty. A character straight from a thunderous Restoration comedy, he went on an all-night rampage through Covent Garden with a friend named Hill. The pair were in howling pursuit of the actress Anne Bracegirdle; eventually Hill stabbed an actor, William Mountfort, whom he had decided was his rival for her affections. Mohun was technically innocent. Nevertheless his acquittal caused much disquiet.

  1699 4th Baron Mohun, found not guilty. This was one of the rare duelling deaths resulting in prosecution for murder: a man named Captain Coote died after a duel with Mohun in Leicester Square. Mohun’s obsession with duelling, which was to kill him in 1712, is described by Thackeray in The History of Henry Esmond.

  1699 6th Earl of Warwick, found guilty of manslaughter and pleaded privilege of peerage. He had participated with Mohun in the Leicester Square duel.

  1760 4th Earl Ferrers, found guilty. He used his own carriage to drive from the Tower of London to Tyburn, and wore his wedding clothes to his execution; it was, he said, ‘at least as good an occasion for putting them on as that for which they were first made’. His request to be beheaded was denied. He then asked to be hanged with a silk rope. This, too, was almost certainly refused him. Instead he became the first person to be hanged with the ‘new drop’, a platform that came apart beneath the feet. ‘Am I right?’ he asked the hangman, as he positioned himself on the trap.

  1765 5th Baron Byron, found guilty of manslaughter and fined. He had killed his cousin, William Chaworth, in a darkened room, after a table-thumping argument over which man had more game on his land. Chaworth died, very slowly, complaining that if there had only been more light he would have seen what was happening to him. Later Byron shot his coachman and slung the body on top of his wife, who was sitting in the carriage, then casually took over the reins.

  Additional to this list is the Italian peer the Marquis de Palleotti, an obsessive gambler, who was hanged in 1718 for the murder of his servant.

  Appendix II: Domestic Murderers

  A summary of the domestic murderers referred to on page 7.

  1886 Adelaide Bartlett was acquitted of the ‘Pimlico Mystery’, although it is generally assumed that she did poison her ghastly husband with chloroform. What could not be explained, and helped her defence immeasurably, is why this corrosive s
ubstance did not burn Edwin Bartlett’s throat on its way to his stomach. A commentator observed: ‘Now that she has been acquitted for murder and cannot be tried again, she should tell us in the interest of science how she did it!’

  1928–9 In the unsolved Croydon case, three members of the same family died from arsenic poisoning. The deaths took place in two respectable houses in neighbouring streets. The chief suspect was Grace Duff, whose husband, sister and mother were the victims, although there was scant evidence against her, and the confused forensic evidence has even led to suggestions that the three died from natural ingestion of arsenic, then a substance present in many household preparations.

  1876 The poisoning of Charles Bravo at the Priory in Balham also remains an unsolved case. His wife Florence fell under suspicion, as the marriage was an unhappy one; so too did Florence’s much older former lover, Dr Gully, and her friend-companion Jane Cox. The book Death at the Priory by James Ruddick (Atlantic, 2001) presents a well-researched and very convincing solution.

  1857 Madeleine Smith, a young woman living in the Glasgow home of her socially prominent family, was accused of poisoning her lover Emile L’Angelier. She was said to have plied him with arsenic-laden cocoa after she ended the affair. Her love letters, full of magnificently pagan declarations of passion, were viewed as even more shocking than the crime. Miss Smith was acquitted on the Scottish verdict of ‘not proven’; her guilt seems overwhelmingly likely. F. Tennyson Jesse’s essay in Famous Trials, volume 1 (Penguin, 1941) is superb.

  1889 American-born Florence Maybrick was convicted of poisoning her much older husband at their home near Liverpool. James Maybrick has occasionally been named as a Jack the Ripper suspect. He was an arsenic eater, and his wife’s conviction was unsound, but although the death sentence was commuted she remained in prison until 1904. Kate Colquhoun’s Did She Kill Him? (Little, Brown, 2014) gives an excellent account of the case.

  1910 Dr Crippen poisoned his nagging wife, the failed music-hall singer Cora, then cut her up and buried her beneath his cellar in Camden Town. He might have got away with it had he not behaved idiotically. He dressed his mistress, Ethel Le Neve, in Cora’s jewels, paraded her in front of Cora’s friends, suddenly took fright and absconded with her. The pair were apprehended on board ship. Ethel was disguised as Crippen’s son. Both were tried; Crippen was hanged.

  1912–14 George Joseph Smith, the ‘Brides in the Bath’ killer, was a multiple bigamist who exerted a mysterious spell upon women who were otherwise sensible but deemed to be ‘on the shelf’. Smith met them on his prowls around seaside towns and murdered them for their savings. He married Bessie Mundy, Alice Burnham and Margaret Lofty in quick succession, then drowned them in their boarding-house baths. He was hanged in 1915.

  1931 The insurance agent William Wallace was found guilty of clubbing his wife to death in the sitting room of their Liverpool house, but the conviction was quashed on the grounds that the evidence did not support it; effectively, that the jury got it wrong. Wallace offered a strange alibi, stating that he had been telephoned and asked to call at the house of a prospective client, but that the address given did not exist. P.D. James, a student of the case, wrote a fascinating article positing Wallace’s guilt (Sunday Times, 27 October 2013).

  Appendix III: The Lucan Family

  Notes

  INTRODUCTION

  1. This information comes from James Fox’s White Mischief (Cape, 1982), as does the account of the crime.

  2. When the body of Courvoisier’s victim was discovered, he said: ‘My God, what shall I do? I shall never get a place again.’ His execution was described by William Thackeray in the essay ‘Going to See a Man Hanged’. ‘I feel myself ashamed and degraded’, wrote Thackeray, ‘at the brutal curiosity which took me to that brutal sight.’

  3. The legend was always that Webster had dropped her victim’s head into the Thames from Richmond Bridge (it was also said that she sold dripping to her neighbours, concocted from the corpse). However, during excavation works at a former pub beside the home of Sir David Attenborough, who lives close to the murder site, a skull was uncovered that was almost certainly that of Mrs Thomas.

  4. From Volume 5 of Old and New London by Edward Walford (1878).

  5. For example in the Daily Express, 11 November 1974.

  6. Quotation from V. S. Naipaul.

  THE LUCAN MYTH

  1. Quotations respectively from: Guardian, 9 September 2003; Sunday Mirror, 22 June 1975; The Times, 28 October 1999; Observer, 3 May 1998; Sunday Mirror, 22 June 1975; Observer, 3 May 1998; Guardian, 2 November 1994.

  2. Daily Express, 20 November 1974.

  3. Stuart Wheeler, in conversation with the author.

  4. Roy Ranson, Looking for Lucan: The Final Verdict (Smith Gryphon, 1994).

  5. In conversation with the author.

  6. In James Fox’s article for Sunday Times Magazine, 8 June 1975.

  7. Ibid.

  8. David Gerring, Lucan Lives (Robert Hale, 1995).

  9. Fox, op. cit.

  10. In conversation with James Ruddick, in his book Lord Lucan: What Really Happened (Headline, 1995).

  11. According to legal opinion this is the most likely estimate, although some sources, for example Gerring, put the cost as high as £40,000.

  12. James Fox, revisiting the case in Sunday Telegraph, 10 October 2004.

  13. Fox, Sunday Times Magazine, 8 June 1975.

  14. Patrick Marnham, Trail of Havoc (Viking, 1987).

  15. Both Marnham and Ruddick espouse the hitman hypothesis in their books.

  16. Marnham, op. cit.

  17. In the Daily Mirror.

  18. Daily Express, 14 November 1974.

  19. This phrase came from the journalist Richard Ingrams. In the Independent, 7 January 2003, he recalled an article written for Private Eye soon after the murder, which included ‘a sentence that went something like: “From the beginning, the police have met nothing but obstruction from the circle of boneheads and gamblers who are friends of Lucan.”’

  20. Patrick Marnham in the Daily Telegraph, 19 September 2000.

  21. Marnham, Trail of Havoc.

  22. In conversation with the author.

  23. Gerring, op. cit.

  24. In 2014 much publicity was given to the fact that John Bingham, MI5 operative and Lucan’s distant cousin, had been the inspiration for John le Carré’s George Smiley. It was suggested that during the 1970s Bingham had been interested in the right-wing activities at the Clermont Club. Be that as it may, one can imagine that there would have been more useful places to observe.

  25. Sunday Times, 3 July 2005.

  26. Sunday Mirror, 22 June 1975. The royal meeting was afflicted that year by a strike for higher pay by stable lads.

  27. Daily Mail, 20 June 1975.

  28. In September 2014, it was reported that an author named Russell Edwards had in fact identified Jack the Ripper. DNA found on a shawl, said to have belonged to the fourth victim Catherine Eddowes, appeared to correlate with that of Aaron Kosminski, a Polish barber who died in an asylum, one of the six men commonly named as a suspect for the murders.

  29. Daily Express, 27 June 1975. Lady Lucan stated that her husband would never pass for a Frenchman and spoke the language ‘like a sixth-former’. On the same day, however, the Daily Mirror told her that the sightings had been dismissed by Lucan’s friends, who had cited her own argument that his French was not fluent enough. Her reaction was: ‘Oh my God, how could they? How could they?’, implying that she herself wanted to believe the report. This may, of course, have been journalistic licence. Nevertheless Lady Lucan’s attitude did shift publicly, and not only in 1975: in 1981, for instance, she told ITN’s News at Ten and the News of the World that she believed her husband to be alive, but in 1994 told ITV’s GMTV that he was dead.

  30. The encounter between Lucan and Brian Hill was cited by Richard Ingrams in the Guardian, 14 August 1994. In the same article Ingrams wrote: ‘It has always been my hun
ch that if Lucan is alive (as I believe him to be), he is lurking somewhere in this part of the Dark Continent…’

  There were further sightings in Mozambique. It was suggested that Lucan had lived there with a German woman (his German was certainly better than his French). In 2002 photographs were passed to Scotland Yard of a man using the name John Crawford and bearing a resemblance to the earl.

  31. Daily Mirror, 27 April 1976.

  32. In 1982 a convicted murderer on the run saw Lucan in a Harare hotel: ‘I called him Lucky, like people used to, and he didn’t even raise an eyebrow’ (Daily Mirror, 1 March 2012). In 2001 the former detective John Stalker said that he, like ‘the cops in charge of the case’, believed Lucan to be living in Africa. ‘One of them went to, I think it was Zambia, or Zimbabwe, and is absolutely sure he came within a day of laying a hand on him.’ (Daily Mail, 25 February 2001)

  33. In 2012 a former secretary to John Aspinall named Shirley Robey claimed that she had been asked to organize passports for Lucan’s two elder children, Frances and George, to visit Kenya and Gabon. She also stated that she did not know Lucan had been named as a murderer: ‘The last thing I would look at would be scandalous news.’ As reported in the Daily Telegraph, 20 May 2012, her story detailed arrangements between Aspinall and his then business associate, Sir James Goldsmith (both men were safely dead by this time). ‘It suggests’, the article stated, ‘that John Aspinall, the casino owner who died twelve years ago, was in prolonged and regular contact with the peer. It also implicates Sir James Goldsmith, who in the 1970s sued Private Eye, the satirical magazine, over claims he had helped Lucan after his disappearance.