Murder by Mistake Read online

  House where Lord Lucan lived after separation from Veronica

  St. George’s Hospital is one of the most famous of London’s hospitals, dating from 1733. Today the building is the Lanesborough Hotel; in 1974, the hospital’s move to larger premises was already under way. Veronica Lucan was under sedation, but conscious, and she told the detectives what had happened as the intense pain in her head and neck came and went.

  Old St. George’s Hospital

  Photo by Paul Farmer

  “She was in a terrible state,” David Gerring told a writer years later, “really bloody awful. There were tufts of hair and skin all over the pillow. She was covered in dry blood and her scalp was open with the wounds… the basement was a sight I’ll never forget. Veronica Lucan was another sight I’ll never forget.”

  The nanny, Sandra Rivett, Veronica told the police, usually had Wednesdays off, but she had changed this week to meet her latest boyfriend. At about 9 PM, she had offered to make Veronica a cup of tea and had gone down to the kitchen basement. Veronica had been watching TV earlier with her two youngest children—Lee Majors performing the impossible in The Six Million Dollar Man. Frances had been in her room watching Top of the Pops, a “must” for any girl already longing to be a teenager. By this time, the little ones were in bed and Frances was dozing in her mother’s room. It was past her bedtime.

  When Sandra had not come back after nearly 20 minutes, Veronica went to look for her. She had just reached the hall and was about to go down to the basement when she was grabbed from behind by a powerful man. They wrestled together while he tried to force his gloved fingers into her mouth and rain blows down on her head. When she screamed, he had told her to shut up. She recognized her husband’s voice in the darkness. Desperate and fighting for her life, she had grabbed his testicles, and he gave up, exhausted and shaking. She calmed him down, and they went up to the bedroom so that he could tend her wounds. Frances saw them, mummy bleeding, daddy looking distraught. Veronica sent the girl to bed, the parental order that for generations had removed children from awkward situations. While Lucan went to fetch a towel from the en suite bathroom, Veronica had taken the opportunity to run for the stairs. She would have no accurate memory of the rest, but she found the safety of the Plumbers Arms.

  With the scene of crime secured and the body of Sandra Rivett already at the morgue, Ranson and Gerring kick-started a murder case, setting up an incident room at Gerald Road and collecting crime-scene photographs and witness statements. It was well into Friday morning by now and the London rumor machine was already going into overdrive. Ranson set up a press conference at Scotland Yard, which routinely handled all media coverage, if only to disperse the army of reporters and camera crews that was descending on Gerald Road.

  Former Gerald Road Police Station

  The focus, obviously, was on the missing Earl of Lucan. He had called his mother a second time, at about 12:30 AM, and Constable Beddick was there. Lucan refused to talk to the police then, but told his mother he would be in touch with them later that day. At Gerald Road, the officers on the case opened an unofficial bet on how soon Lucan would turn up.

  Did anybody say “Never”?

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  Chapter 3: Lord Look-On

  Most of the books you will read on the Lucan case will tell you that George Bingham, the 3rd Earl of Lucan, caused one of the greatest military disasters in British history, the Charge of the Light Brigade in the Crimean War. In fact, he didn’t, but he was part of the chain of command of mind-blowing incompetence that allowed such things to happen. Before the Charge, Lucan’s curious inactivity in the face of the Russians led to his nickname—Lord Look-On. What is in no doubt is that the Lucans, who owned estates in County Mayo, Ireland and Laleham in Middlesex near London, were seriously rich and powerful. The very name was hated in Ireland because the Lucans were absentee landlords, a family who did nothing for their tenants except demand extortionate rents, even when those tenants were starving.

  Lucan family coat of arms

  motto translates “Christ is my Hope”

  The importance of all this is not mere historical padding. The pedigree of the Lucans and their place at the top of the aristocratic tree goes to the heart of the murder of Sandra Rivett, whose name would be almost forgotten in the days and months ahead. Lucan’s friends closed around his good name, put up obstacles to the police. They may have got him out of the country and one or more of them may know where he—or his body—is today.

  By the time Richard John Bingham, known in the family as John, was born in a Marylebone, London, nursing home on December 18, 1934, the Lucans were already strapped for cash. The 6th Earl was an army officer with the prestigious Coldstream Guards, but he was also a socialist and would become heavily involved in Prime Minister Clement Attlee’s reforming government after the Second World War. His wife—the formidable Dowager of 1974—was Kaitlin Dawson, the daughter of a naval officer.

  Little John was brought up in the usual round of nannies and nursemaids, living first in Chelsea along the Thames River and then in Belgravia, which would remain his home until his disappearance on the night of November 7. In April 1940, as Britain stood alone against the might of Hitler’s Third Reich, the Lucans used their relative wealth to evacuate their children to total safety. Where most Londoners had to hope their little ones would escape the bombs of the Luftwaffe by sending them to the country, the Lucans sent their children, John, Hugh, Samuel and Jane, to the United States, not yet involved in the war and beyond the range of the German bombers.

  John acquired a taste for the finer things in life at the Westchester home of a wealthy socialite, Marcia Brady Tucker. This world of fabulous riches left its mark on the little boy; money was easy to come by, and money was everything. What happened in 46 Lower Belgrave St on that November night over 40 years later is directly linked to that.

  On his return to England in 1945, John was sent, like generations of aristocratic sons before and since, to the great public (actually, private!) school of Eton. He was no scholar, but he fitted in well. He was a keen sportsman, enjoyed music and history, and was popular and “charming.” In fact, everybody who knew him, except, later on, Veronica Lucan, used that word to describe him. John was a charmer, suave, debonair and a great catch in terms of marriage. He was also a throwback to the earlier generations of Lucans, with an arrogance that fitted the 19th century more than the twentieth. Friends called him “the Relic” and “Old Fossil,” and he seemed to belong to a time of “upstairs, downstairs,” where the master did as he liked and the servants took off their caps to show respect. The John Lucan now wanted by the police to “assist them in their enquiries” was caught in a time warp of his own making.

  He joined the army as a 2nd Lieutenant in the Coldstream Guards, his father’s old regiment, in 1953 and was posted to Krefeld in West Germany as part of the Army of the Rhine that would stay in Germany for years after the war. All young men in Britain had to go through national service at the time, and by 1955, he was back in London with a career to launch. His father had been the 6th Earl for a while by this time, and so John was now officially Lord Bingham. The title cut through a lot of red tape and opened doors. Young John, now 21, became a merchant banker with the City of London firm William Brandt.

  Bingham took to the job like a duck to water, although finance and money had never loomed large in his math curriculum at school. He rented a flat near London’s Regent’s Park and joined the party set of champagne, beautiful girls, fast cars… and gambling.

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  Chapter 4: Lucky

  Gambling was definitely not on the curriculum at Eton, but young John learned it anyway and enjoyed it. He became a compulsive gambler and won the nickname “Lucky” because of the rare times he won. The name may even have been ironic. He was at school, in the army and in the City of London, a small area within Greater London that is a major business and financial center, with rich men to whom placing a bet, o
n cards, dice or horses was a way of life. He was a frequent visitor at England’s race courses, many of which were a stone’s throw from London and became adept at poker and backgammon. In fact, by the late 1960s, he was probably one of the world’s top 10 backgammon players, and he enjoyed the prestige that the ranking gave him. Casinos were still illegal in London in the 1950s, but they were all the rage in Germany where Bingham had been with his regiment, so he turned easily to the games of chance—baccarat, roulette, blackjack and chemin de fer.

  Richard John Bingham, 7th Earl of Lucan

  passport photo

  Once established in the City, of course, John had to be more discreet. He played bridge for low stakes because that was the acceptable side of card-playing. As soon as possible, he adopted a millionaire lifestyle, taking holidays in the Bahamas with a rich stockbroker friend, Stephen Raphael. He played poker with the Aga Khan, one of the richest men in the world and, as his more staid family became more and more alarmed, he became a professional gambler and gave up the day job.

  New gaming laws in 1960 allowed private casinos to spring up, and one that became Bingham’s second home was the Clermont Club, set up by millionaire zoo owner John Aspinall, at 44 Berkeley Square, one of the most fashionable addresses in London and close to Lucan’s home. Older gentlemen’s clubs, some of which had been operating for 200 years, turned up their noses with the finely-tuned snobbery for which those establishments are famous, but Aspinall made the Clermont the place to be. It had expensive interior décor and, interestingly, no clocks. Here was a magic place where time did not exist, and that suited Lucan very well. As Aspinall cynically put it, “I wanted to create a place where English gentlemen could ruin themselves as stylishly and suicidally as their ancestors had done.”

  Clermont Club, 44 Berkeley Square

  Night after night, Lucky would sit at the tables, smoking and drinking heavily, winning or losing (but usually losing), acting as a magnet for the gullible who would enjoy playing with a lord. When he inherited the Lucan title in 1964, he was generally known as John Lucan, and the £240,000 ($562,000—well over $2.5 million today, allowing for inflation) that came with it, the lure and the prestige and the stakes all became higher.

  Now, the man about town, member of the House of Lords, Old Etonian and ex-Brigade of Guards, looked for a wife to make his life complete.

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  Chapter 5: Veronica

  Veronica Mary Duncan did not come from Lucan’s social class, and from day one of their marriage, some of his friends clearly did not approve. By the 1960s, London was the “swinging” center of the universe and Carnaby St. the mecca to which anyone under 35 would go on pilgrimage. Union Jacks and red buses and black cabs and “bobbies on bicycles, two by two” were potent images known all over the world.

  Lucan’s circle did not belong to all that. Some of his friends, it is true, wore their hair long and their photographs today, of them wearing flared “hipster” trousers and “Regency” collars to their jackets, freeze them in time and look faintly ridiculous. Many of them were dinosaurs, like Lucan himself, disapproving of the new equality of the age.

  Veronica Duncan was born in May 1937 in Bournemouth, a pretty and quiet seaside resort on the south coast. Her father, an army major, had been killed in a car crash, and her mother took the little girl and her younger sister, Christina, to South Africa, where she remarried. On their return soon after the war, the girls went to the private school of St. Swithun’s in Winchester. Veronica, like her future husband, was not an academic, and she worked as a model and a secretary in London on leaving school. With her blond hair and pencil-slim body, Veronica was co-director of a small printing company by the early 1960s, but, thanks partly to her sister, she was already moving up in the world.

  Christina had met and married the wallpaper tycoon Bill Shand Kydd in January 1963 after a whirlwind romance, and the couple lived at his country estate, Horton Hall, in Bedfordshire. It was here, at one of those “country house weekends” for which England had long been famous, that Veronica met the handsome and eligible bachelor John Bingham, destined to become the 7th Earl of Lucan. Not in the least put off by his rather formal and clipped “How do you do?” she would meet him again at a similar event weeks later. Having driven her back to her London flat, Bingham took her to the theater the following night, then to dinner and finally to the Clermont Club.

  Their courtship was almost as lightning fast as Christina’s. They began dating in August and were married at Brompton Holy Trinity church in Knightsbridge, London’s most elite and expensive shopping area. The reception, at the Carlton Towers Hotel, was very lavish and they honeymooned on the Orient Express, rattling across the European countryside from Paris to the dazzling minarets of Istanbul.

  They were the ideal couple in many ways. Six months into their marriage, John was the 7th Earl of Lucan, with property in Ireland and Middlesex. He had a power boat on the south coast, a mews house at 5 Eaton Row, jewelry (including the regimental silver of the 17th Lancers, belonging to the 3rd Earl (of Light Brigade infamy) and bank accounts in Africa, the Bahamas and Switzerland. They bought the opulent house at Number 46, Lower Belgrave St. He gambled. She shopped. He gave her two race horses, Bombproof and Travelling Light. She gave him three adorable children—Frances, George and Camilla.

  As Veronica Lucan would remember it later, “It was a golden life.”

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  Chapter 6: End of a Fairy Tale

  A little rain fell into the Lucans’ lives by the mid-1960s, and that rain would become a torrent, threatening to sweep them all away. John’s gambling was now becoming a problem. Veronica had no idea of the huge debts he was running up, but she knew he was hardly ever home. As she struggled with pregnancies and post-natal depression, he was at the Clermont, often all night. So she decided to go with him.

  No doubt she thought he might be having an affair. He was rich and titled, with a charming personality. But John’s only love was the tables, and because Veronica was not a player, she spent her time at the Clermont with other gamblers’ wives on what came to be known as the “widows’ bench.” She was bored and began chain-smoking. She was also on sedatives for depression and there were embarrassing scenes at the Clermont. In one final show of temper, Veronica threw a glass of wine over another “widow” for blocking her view of the television set.

  In September 1967, perhaps on advice from his family or friends or both, Lucan took Veronica to the Priory, a private nursing home that had been running since the 1870s. He had not told her where they were going, and there was a huge row. She refused to talk to staff, still less to be admitted, but she did promise to see a psychiatrist as an outpatient. Lucan saw her volatile nature, made worse by post-natal depression and his apparent inability to sympathize, as mental instability and as time went on he would discuss his wife’s “madness” with almost anybody. In the meantime, she took lithium and Moditem, which did little to control her panic attacks. She became what she still is today—somewhat of a recluse hiding behind venetian blinds. Four years after the Priory incident, he tried to commit her again at a similar nursing home, Greenways, in London’s northern suburb of Hampstead. By now it was late 1971, and the marriage staggered on, somehow, until January 1973, when the inevitable split occurred.

  The Priory Hospital

  Photo by Christine Matthews

  On his return from an overseas gambling trip, Lucan found that Veronica had fired the nanny, Lilian Jenkins, with no recourse to him at all. He sent for the family doctor, Christopher Powell-Brett, hoping, no doubt, that he could have Veronica committed to an institution for this latest example of “insanity.” In that clipped, public-school way of his, he asked the doctor, “Is she fit?” and when Powell-Brett answered, “Yes, she is fit,” Lucan packed his bags and left.

  Map of key sites

  It was not the first time he had stormed off, but it was to be the last. He rented a flat at 72A Elizabeth St., only a couple of hu
ndred yards away from his home. It had five bedrooms, clearly large enough for him to live with his children and a new nanny he would appoint.

  There was never any doubt that Lucan loved his children. His feelings for Veronica first cooled, then changed to icy disdain and finally hatred, but to the children he was just “daddy,” constant, reliable and funny. He read them bedtime stories, tucked them in, kissed them goodnight. He took them to relatives’ and friends’ houses in the country, where they rode ponies and flew their kites. And now, after the debacle with Powell-Brett, he wanted them back.

  Green Park is one of those small open spaces that are the “lungs of London.” There, on March 23, 1974, Lucan, in the company of two private detectives, snatched his children, George and Camilla, from the hands of their new nanny, Stefanja Sawicka, and bundled them into his Mercedes. He then drove to Frances’ school and extracted her from a classroom. All this was perfectly legal—Lucan showed a court order to the nanny and the headmistress—and both women had no choice but to comply. Veronica, who had held herself together in her husband’s absence, went to pieces and, ironically, booked herself into the Priory for a week, something Lucan had wanted her to do seven years earlier.

  The battle lines had been drawn in the case of Lucan vs. Lucan, and the rules of engagement, played out day after day by unhappy families all over the world, became clear. Both parents wanted the children. The natural inclination of courts and public is that the mother should have them. But Veronica had no income of her own, lived at Number 46 by the generosity of her husband and was bordering on the neurotic. John was a peer of the realm with properties galore. He paid for the children anyway, from their school fees to the sweets they no doubt consumed from time to time.