A shorter version of this post was my first on Substack… on 7th November 2023, to mark the 49th ‘anniversary’ of the Lucan affair. As I had a handful of wonderful subscribers at the time (still with me, for which I am intensely grateful) and the piece hasn’t had that many views, I hope you won’t mind if I repost it. I’ve expanded it a lot, in fact…. And it seems fitting to put it out now, as it coincides with the posting of the Lucan podcasts that I’ve done for the wonderful
.I think there will be quite a lot of Lucan this year…. Fifty years being so much more - something - than forty-nine. The story is now ‘history’, one might say, which ought to mean that it can now be looked at more clearly, although I wouldn’t be sure about that.
It is in the difficulty of seeing it clearly that my interest in the Lucan affair chiefly lies.
Anyway: here is the piece.
The famous murders all become myths, and that myth is not necessarily a distillation of truth. It is, more precisely, a distillation of our perceptions. It has a different kind of truth, symbolic rather than factual.
The myth of the Lucan case is a parable about class: a tale of aristocratic hubris. Every element in the story has been seen through that prism. The myth contains some truth, of course, but it is not the whole truth. Indeed it is not above telling lies. This book will go on to tell a different story, because the myth can’t be allowed to have things all its own way. Nevertheless there is nothing to be done with it. You can’t kill a myth. It is the way that a story settles, and however much you shake it up it will always fall back into position.
This is from my book A Different Class of Murder, which ten years ago I was in the midst of writing. I was so absorbed in it that for the only time in my life I became, as Martin Amis described himself. ‘one of those shits who writes on Christmas Day’; I was unable to abandon the conundrum of what really happened.
I still don’t know. Hence the quote in the subtitle above: ‘Nothing lasts like the unsolved’. It comes from one of my favourite short stories, The Enigma by John Fowles, which I’ve mentioned in subsequent posts (I really do love it). It is about a very correct Englishman - an MP - who disappears, cleanly and completely, leaving behind nothing but questions. The story appeared in 1974, a big year for disappearing Englishmen (although it must have been written earlier, a coincidence that intrigues me). John Stonehouse, the MP who vanished on a beach and tried to create a new identity in Australia, first came to the notice of the police when he was mistaken for that other, more successful disappearer; Lord Lucan, of whom there has been no corroborated sighting since the early hours of 8th November 1974.
The brief facts about the Lucan case are these. On the evening of 7th November, Sandra Rivett, aged 29 - pictured above - the recently-employed nanny to Lord and Lady Lucan’s three young children, was bludgeoned to death at the family home: 46 Lower Belgrave Street, London SW1. Lady Lucan - Veronica, 37 - also sustained head injuries. According to Veronica, the assailant was her 39-year-old husband John, the 7th Earl Lucan, from whom she was estranged. The ‘official’ version of events was that Lucan had killed Sandra in error; it was supposed to be her night off and in the darkness of the basement - where she had descended to make tea - he had mistaken her for his wife. He then attacked Veronica before she managed to talk him down. When she escaped from the house - running down the street to the sanctuary of the Plumbers’ Arms pub - he fled the scene.
We know that he made a couple of telephone calls, including to his mother, to whom (according to her) he said: ‘Oh mother, there was something terrible in the basement; I couldn’t bear to look.’ We also know that he drove to a friend’s house in Sussex and wrote a couple of letters (we have the evidence of postmarks). The car that he had been driving was found parked in a residential street in the port of Newhaven. Other than that, nothing is known of what happened to Lucan: no body has ever been found, which has led to a still-enduring belief that he may even now, aged eighty-nine, be alive. He has been ‘seen’ in almost every country on earth, although none of these sightings is truly credible; for instance the detective who headed the case, Roy Ranson, who at the time was wholly convinced that Lucan had killed himself immediately, later acquired a book deal to explore his equally powerful conviction that Lucan was in Africa.
Really, to my mind, the multiplicity of Lucan sightings are conspiracy theories, which for all their lunacy are surely impelled by some deeper belief - usually, au fond, that the ‘establishment’ can get away with things that the rest of us cannot. In this case, murder.
But it is not just the sightings that are unproven; so too is almost everything else. I find this so often with murder cases, or with enduring mysteries like the 1926 disappearance of Agatha Christie: one would sell one’s soul for corroborated facts, but instead what one finds are great quantities of hearsay that have assumed the mantle of truth. With the Lucan case - once one pushes aside all the nonsense and gossip from hangers-on who have sold a snippet here and there to the press, and will doubtless be doing so again this half-centenary year - there is a sole source for what are perceived to be the facts. Lady Lucan: Veronica.
Whose word was gospel to the police, the inquest jury, the press and most of the public. And, perhaps, rightly so. Nevertheless hers is just one side of the story; and unless somebody one day enters a bar in - say - Gaborone and encounters an old man of stately bearing, drinking a vodka martini and playing backgammon, and is able to make him talk, the other side will never be known.
I did, however, hear some of it.
When I was commissioned to write this book, I thought that it would be, in essence, a rewriting of what I call the ‘Lucan Myth’. Like many of us I had grown up with this late 20th century London legend, the quasi-folkloric image of a man who was part Jack the Ripper, part Scarlet Pimpernel, part waxwork earl. I had no thought of challenging the settled narrative, which ran thus: Lucan, a ‘professional’ gambler who in 1973 had been bested by Veronica in a custody battle for their children, and whose anger about this knew no bounds, had plotted a wicked murder in a spirit of droit de seigneur. When he screwed up and killed the wrong woman - and it’s so hard to get good nannies was the reputed reaction of one of his set - his decadent gambler friends covered up for him, possibly enabled him to flee the country, and refused to cooperate with the police. Come and see me when I get back from skiing etc etc. Thus, although Lucan became the last (bar one) person to be named as a murderer by an inquest jury, he was never apprehended, and justice was never fully served.
All of which fascinated me. Class, of course. And murder, of the most interesting kind: domestic murder, where the motive springs from the human dynamic, and the crime - never more so than in the Lucan case - lies behind an impenetrable facade. Where, as I put it in my book:
Mayhem is screened behind the polite formality of door, brick and window. This is the paradox that enlivens English murder, and makes it the stuff of Agatha Christie and the Cluedo board: Lord Lucan, in the kitchen, with the lead piping.
And then, the era of the early seventies… I was fascinated by the thought of Lucan, pinstriped and Trumpers-sleek in the age of T-Rex and Wimpy bars, proceeding every day from Belgravia to Mayfair, from white stucco townhouse to the Clermont Club on Berkeley Square - an exquisite 18th century construct, designed to conjure the spirit of the men who would hazard their estates on the roll of a dice (‘it’s a pleasure to lose it, by God!’) - while the 3-day week and the oil crisis raged through a troubled country that at night settled itself to watch Upstairs. Downstairs. Fascinated, too, by the marriage to Veronica, the pale doll-like woman whom Lucan - according to the myth - had sought to drive off her head (channelling Charles Boyer in Gaslight, with a strong dash of old-style wife-confining aristo) in order to keep control of his children, his heirs. And by the friends, the ‘set’, the ‘Eton Mafia’, headed by the creator of the Clermont, John Aspinall, his satanic majesty, the man of wealth and taste who conjured an ice-cold tease for the police about how loyalty to one’s own kind is paramount.
But the story itself, of where guilt and blame truly lay, regardless of who was posher than whom… that, it never occurred to me to challenge.
However.
When I began to talk to those who had inhabited the reality, who had actually known the Lucans, what I discovered was a whole new story beneath the myth: the other side of the story, as one might say. I had been insanely nervous of approaching these people. The myth, again. I had grown up with the idea that these were monsters. I imagined the worst kind of Oxford dining club member who had ever peered at me from on high and noted that I was wearing the wrong kind of shoes.
But what I found were just… people. Whose lives had been afflicted, to a greater or lesser degree, by the events in which they were involuntary supporting players; who expressed profound sympathy with Sandra Rivett and her family; and who, ever since the publication of an influential 1975 article in the Sunday Times magazine, which characterized them as devils playing merry hell with a bunch of poor decent salt-of-the-earth detectives, had had not a chance in hell of ever getting a fair hearing. We now know much more about the police, how they are all too capable of shaping a story to their own ends, and in this case they were covering up their gross incompetence (forensics wrecked by plod footsteps and fingermarks; they even used Lucan’s exercise bike) by blaming the heartless intransigence of the idle rich. (Incidentally I don’t for one second believe that anybody ever reacted to Sandra’s death with the words ‘and it’s so hard to get good nannies’, which read like the invention of a particularly dimwit screenwriter, or even a particularly inventive Met officer like David Gerring, the Gene Hunt sidekick to Roy Ranson, who freely admitted to his pleasurable loathing of the Lucan ‘set’).
This was a recurrent theme in my conversations with Bill and Christina Shand Kydd, who after the event had brought up the Lucan children. Christina was Veronica’s sister, and as such extremely conflicted in her loyalties. I could scarcely believe the openness with which she talked to me, for which I remain immensely grateful.
‘Nobody’s ever wanted to understand it,’ she said to me. ‘But the police – they bought the whole thing.
‘It was just such an appalling time. The frustration. You wanted to get up on the rooftops and yell.’
Of the police, and their loyalties, she also said:
‘They looked at one side, and they listened to everything she said, and from that minute on he was finished. Because she was a consummate actress. She was a consummate actress.’
I spoke to a good many people, in fact, most of whom have since died, and who had seemed to want to talk. What I received from them was a picture of the most toxic marriage since Strindberg’s Dance of Death, with by no means all the fault being on Lucan’s side. I don’t necessarily subscribe to the view of the intermediary who said to me - as it were en passant - ‘that wife of his was a ball-breaker’, but he had had nothing to gain by saying it. They all seemed to be saying the same thing, in essence: that there is more to this story than the myth.
The marriage had begun its slow march towards the endgame after Lucan walked out on Veronica, at the start of 1973, and the battle began for the spoils of war: the children. In the first instance Lucan gained temporary custody, which was portrayed as a ‘kidnap’ and of course was nothing of the kind; it was a legal decision and a highly unusual one, as was explained to me by a man who had worked in family law at the time. The basis for the decision was almost certainly Veronica’s mental instability, which was subsequently portrayed as being all Lucan’s doing although, according to her own sister, this too was nonsense.
At the main hearing, Veronica gained custody, a decision that still troubled Christina some forty years on - she blamed a judge who had, again, seen only one side of the story - and it was from this point that Lucan spiralled downwards into chaos. His anxiety about the children was acute and, from what I was told, justified. His obsessive watching of the Belgravia house was portrayed by the police and press as stalking; but again, given that his children were for some time in the care of an alcoholic nanny, and at other times with young women who walked out after a matter of days, it was not unreasonable. Imagine it! Nobody, not even the police, denied that Lucan was a caring father, although testimony as to this - which was plentiful - became submerged in the more satisfying narrative that he didn’t want his children to be brought up by a commoner woman. Meanwhile his gambling, hitherto relatively controlled albeit a ridiculous way of trying to make a living, now became wild; essentially because he was chasing money (fatal for a gambler) in order to appeal the custody decision. In this venture he was backed by James Comyn, an eminent and liberal-minded barrister (defender of Brian Jones after a drugs bust) whose staunch support gives the lie to the myth that Lucan was behaving out of irrational entitlement.
The Lucan myth? That’s the tragedy of it, really.
As well as speaking to Veronica’s sister, I spoke to Lucan’s. The quote above is from her. I went to New York for the day to interview Jane, a doctor who had lived in the US for many years. She was marvellous; it was impossible to convey in the book the quality of sincerity within her testimony; I had to rely on the fact that readers would respond to how unlike Lucan she was. Although how she had looked like him, arriving to meet me at a vast hotel opposite Madison Square Gardens…. that upright English bearing. which stuck out a mile and would have made the ‘disappeared’ Lucan so noticeable.
Jane was palpably distressed by the whole business. Intensely compassionate about Sandra. Still fond of her brother. She described how she had found his way of life absurd and alien (as her parents had been, she was politically on the Left); nevertheless she was obdurate in her belief that he had been destroyed by Veronica, rather than the other way about. If he had planned to kill, then it was because the besetting anxiety about the children - and consequently about money - had pushed him into a place where he was no longer in command of his sanity. As she put it:
‘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.’
I also spoke to Lucan’s closest friend from school, a member of the great and good who has since died, whose position would render him familiar but whose anonymity I promised to preserve. This likeable man - who again spoke very openly - took a similar view, that Veronica was malign. He was deeply shocked when I relayed a story from the police that Lucan had mistreated his dog, recognizing at once what must have been the source. ‘No, no, that’s not right. He adored that dog’.
His own, reluctant belief was that Veronica had poisoned Lucan’s life to the point where he felt that only her removal would save it.
‘He could have, I suppose, hired someone to do it. Which is not a nice thing to say about your great friend.’
The hitman theory - the use of a person who had perhaps come via Aspinall - does, indeed, have a good deal to recommend it. Jane emphasized her brother’s squeamishness about blood, a small but convincing point. It would fit the mentality of the aristocrat, to employ somebody to do your less pleasant jobs. It would also explain the bizarre circumstance in which a man does not recognize his own wife (the darkness of the basement was not total, as the police had asserted). It does not. however, explain why Lucan went to the house that night - surely the point of the exercise would have been to stay well away, creating an alibi? Yet we know that he was there, because a third party, his daughter Frances, attested to his presence… My book does contain an intriguing explanation as to why he turned up; I don’t say that I believe it - I don’t know what I believe. Perhaps because nothing seems quite to fit the facts. But then, and this is the most important fact of the lot, so few facts are known.
I should say, however, that two people to whom I spoke were of the view that Veronica herself had committed the murder. These were people who had known her very well.
And I am aware, even now, that the Lucan myth remains too strong to accommodate this reversal of the narrative: to contemplate the notion that it was not the dominant man but the oppressed woman who, in truth, controlled events. There is a glibness about it, a detective fiction last-minute-twistiness, which compels yet at the same time induces a sense of ‘oh come on….’
Nevertheless the possibility is there. Lucan was a weak man. To my mind he was almost ludicrously remote from the ‘rich and powerful’ image that has held sway for fifty years, glued into position by our healthy national resentment of privilege, our love of schadenfreude, our pleasure in such a glaring - almost cartoonish - proof that the establishment is as rotten as we wish to believe. But Lucan was establishment on paper only. He was a man whose sole status came from a minor title, living off a couple of family trusts and the promise of selling - literally - the family silver, who towards the end was on the verge of bankruptcy, his rented flat scattered with unopened bills and scolding letters from Coutts bank. And an earl without proper money was, by the 1970s, a figure with no authority at all: a melting waxwork indeed. His friends, meanwhile, who reputedly shielded Lucan from the law, even perhaps to the point of allowing him to abscond and funding his prolonged retirement, were in the main a bunch of tapped-out gamblers who were paid to sit at the Clermont tables and ‘paper the house’ for its new owner, the Playboy Club (Aspinall had sold up and was dedicating himself to the nobler cause of animal conservation).
This is Victor Lownes, who ran Playboy in London and spoke to me about the Clermont in 1973-4. His tone, amused and almost compassionate, said still more than his words.
‘The Clermont guys were part of the atmosphere. They were a bit like schoolboys. They were pleased to be welcome there, even if they weren’t gambling. I was comping them all meals and stuff. And hundred-year-old brandy – they were happy to be drinking from this wonderful liquor cellar that I got from Aspinall.’
Aspinall himself, of course, was capable of engineering an escape for Lucan - the one person, according to Bill Shand Kydd, who would have been prepared to do such a thing - and his ongoing tease was that he might indeed have helped his dear old friend Lucky, oh yes but he wasn’t going to say how, ha ha! Indeed his theatrical speechifying to a credulous media was integral to shaping the myth.
However: if Lucan had wanted to eliminate his wife, and had achieved this as intended, he would not have needed to abscond. He would have said that she had wandered off in a state of mental confusion - eventually her drowned body would have been recovered - and he would have resumed his life without its unwanted element, like a domestic murderer of old. So there was no need for a plan to escape. That only became necessary when events went horribly awry. Therefore, if one believes that there was a plan to help Lucan escape, it was dreamed up on the spur of the moment yet was so watertight that it has succeeded for almost fifty years. I find that impossible to accept, not least because the sums involved to effect it would have been immense.
Yet the myth persists. Because it fits that other, simpler narrative: the one that I described in my book.
… Them and Us, that great British theme, had found in the Lucan case a perfect conduit for its own expression. From the first, therefore, it has been almost impossible to question the Lucan myth without questioning the political orthodoxy that lay behind it. To suggest that the case might be a more nuanced business than it was perceived to be, that an earl is not evil merely because he is an earl, is a dangerous business. It is to become an implied apologist for the aristocracy, for the privilege of birth not merit, for the world before Attlee: all the wrong things. Meanwhile those who uphold the myth are on the right side, and can get away with prejudice because the prejudices are acceptable. It is entirely understandable, when one considers the centuries of dominance… How to resist using the story of Lord Lucan as a means to balance those absurdly weighted social scales?
Laura spoiling us yet again! Seriously, anyone who is thinking of reading this, I can't recommend it enough. I'm so glad I dove into this particular rabbit hole. It's an intriguing story but Laura's book turns it into something beyond the normal whodunit; for starters, it is so well written, as Laura imbues the story with a sense of real empathy and a quest for the truth. It's also amazingly well researched and it literally takes you to 1970's London, the whole Clermont set, the 5 and 6 storied Belgravia streets, the out of time-ness of Lucan and his peers...plus you'll definitely look at the case from a different perspective to the usual (and conveniently Cluedo-ish) 'Lord Lucan, with the lead pipe, in the kitchen' standpoint. I've spun my head around countless times with this, and one thing is for sure; whatever did happen, it was absolutely not as per the official narrative from the police, press and Lady L herself. A 10 pipe problem this one.
I didn't know this book of yours. I'm off to find it. It's a fascinating story. I was in my late teens at the time and remember the brou-ha-ha very well.