Murder by Mistake Read online

  If he left the country by other means, how did the Corsair get to Newhaven? Roy Ranson was of the opinion that someone else drove it there, which explains the time lag between Lucan leaving the Maxwell-Scotts’ and the earliest time the car could have been parked on the coast.

  The police began to get calls from all over. The calls started in November 1974 and are still going on today. A friend of mine was told by a retired Met officer in 2004 that they knew exactly where Lucan was—his body lay in a cave in Sussex, not far from Newhaven where the Corsair was found. Cranks of all sorts came forward with theories. Mediums, clairvoyants, even water dowsers all claimed to be able to pinpoint the position of the missing earl. He was sailing on cruise ships, like some sort of latter-day Flying Dutchman, never able to get off anywhere for fear of being recognized. He was operating roulette and backgammon tables in Monte Carlo. He was holed up in friends’ farms in South Africa, deep in the bush (Ray Ranson actually spent weeks there trying to track him down). He was with the drug lords in Colombia, South America. He was working as a double for Saddam Hussein!

  One sighting that proved fascinating was that of an Englishman found in Australia. An Australian cop thought he looked like Ranson’s and Interpol’s circulated photographs of Lucan, so he arrested the man. He was certainly English. He was the ex-Cabinet Minister John Stonehouse, who had faked his own suicide months earlier by abandoning his clothes on an Australian beach. Why? Because back home, he was wanted on fraud charges.

  It seems unfair to single out one book that got it badly wrong, but it does illustrate a point. Ex-undercover cop Duncan Maclaughlin believed he had tracked Lucan down in the remote and inaccessible jungles of Goa, India. The man known as Jungle Barry was dead by the time Maclaughlin got there (in 2002), but when he showed photographs of Lucan to people who had known Barry, they all swore they were one and the same man. The book is well-written, and Maclaughlin worked hard and honestly to prove his case, comparing photographs, dates and places. He came to the conclusion that Jungle Barry, a backgammon player of formidable talent and with an ear for music, was indeed Lucky Lucan. His body had been cremated, so there was no possibility of knowing for sure.

  When Dead Lucky—Lord Lucan: The Final Truth was published and serialized in a British newspaper, a radio celebrity and musician called Mike Harding spoiled the party. Jungle Barry was Barry Halpin, a Liverpool banjo player who had gone to Goa in a quest for spiritual enlightenment in the 1970s and had never come back.

  Rather like Lord Lucan.

  www.crimescape.com

  Chapter 14: The Unanswered Questions

  In any murder inquiry, there are loose ends, questions to which there are no obvious answers. This is doubly true of a case where there is no trial and where neither the victim nor the alleged perpetrator can give evidence. So, what are the unanswered questions in the Lucan case?

  1. Unless it was to dispose of his wife’s body in an inconspicuous vehicle, why did John Lucan borrow Michael Stoop’s Corsair? He gave no explanation and Stoop, gentleman to the last, didn’t ask. When the police located Lucan’s Mercedes in Elizabeth St., the engine was cold and the battery flat. Did Lucan merely need another car because his was not drivable? Why not hire one, or do the “ungentlemanly” thing and borrow Stoop’s Mercedes?

  2. For a man planning a cold-blooded murder on November 7, Lucan was extraordinarily cool. He invited Michael Hicks-Beach to his flat, entertained him and drove him home (almost certainly in Stoop’s Corsair). Then he drove to the Clermont Club and, according to the timings, drove straight to Lower Belgrave St. to kill his wife.

  3. What about the Clermont Club? There are three issues here. First, Lucan apparently made two phone calls to reserve a dinner table. The first was at 7:30, in the presence of Hicks-Beach; was this to help establish an alibi for what was to come? The second was an hour later—why make the call twice? Was this simply a mistake on the part of the Clermont? In Britain, all the clocks in the country go back one hour at the end of October (the actual date varies) to provide more daylight in the mornings. The Clermont famously had no clocks, but are we seriously to believe that the club’s restaurant manager, Andrew Demetrio, did not have a watch?

  Second, if the dinner reservation was to establish some sort of alibi, it would not have worked. Lucan ordered dinner for four, not five. In fact when his guests arrived at the Clermont, Greville Howard rang Lucan’s home but got no answer (by that time he was on his way to Uckfield) and they arranged for a fifth chair to be brought pending what they all thought would be Lucan’s imminent arrival.

  Third, how are we to explain that Lucan drove up to the club’s entrance in his Mercedes (a car that was supposedly out of action), had a brief chat and drove away again? Once more, this may have been to establish an alibi, but it was an odd thing to do, and the timing—Egson remembered Lucan driving away at just before 9 PM—is impossibly tight. He would have to park the car on Elizabeth St., walk around the corner (actually several hundred yards) to Number 46 Belgrave St., get in and be down in the basement waiting for the woman he took to be his wife, in the unlikely time frame of 10 minutes. Of course, if Egson got the wrong night, then it is all explained and the whole sighting becomes irrelevant.

  4. How did Lucan get into Number 46? The simple answer is that he still had a key, but Veronica and Sandra routinely put a safety chain across the front door at night. It is not known whether Lucan knew that or not, but if it had been in place, it is likely that Sandra Rivett would be alive today. Had she or Veronica simply forgotten to use it that night?

  5. If we believe Veronica, John Lucan entered the house, removed the light bulb in the basement, and waited. He did not know that Sandra had changed her night off at the last minute, but did know that Veronica was in the habit of making herself a cup of tea at 9 PM. This habit of Veronica’s would be perfect, because she would be on her own, two floors below where the nearest child would be, so the children would not be involved in any way. Veronica told the police that Lucan had killed Sandra by mistake, hitting the wrong woman in the darkness of the basement. True, Veronica and Sandra were the same height, but Sandra was dark-haired, whereas Veronica was blond, and there was some light coming in through the basement window from the street lamp. Sandra had a much fuller figure than Veronica, and Keith Simpson’s inquest evidence made it very clear that she had been hit in the face with a fist or an open-handed slap. In other words, her attacker was facing her rather than bludgeoning her from behind. John Lucan had been married to Veronica for 10 years; they had had three children together. Was it likely that a man, however psyched up to commit murder, could have made a mistake like that?

  6. What about the murder weapon? There is little doubt that the lead pipe found in the hall was used on both Sandra and Veronica, and the surgical tape was probably wound around it to give a better grip. But why two pipes? The second one, found in the trunk of the Corsair, was damning evidence of Lucan’s guilt, albeit circumstantial. Why would he need two, and if he did, why not take them both to the crime scene? Perhaps he did, but why then take one (unused) pipe away and leave the damning one (used) for the police to find?

  7. What about the US mailbag? If you’re British, have a rummage around your house and find an item like this. If you’re American, dig out that old British Post Office sack you’ve got lying around. It is a very odd item to find 3,000 miles from where you’d expect it to be, and no one at the inquest found this in any way odd. If it was there, handy, in the basement already, we must ask why. If Lucan brought it to carry out Veronica’s body, could he really have assumed that it would do the job? Surely he would have realized that smashing someone’s skull in with a heavy blunt object is going to cause a lot of blood, and carrying a sack dripping blood out of a Belgravia house, even at night, would be a rather giveaway thing to do. Sturdier polyethylene ones were available. Why didn’t Lucan use one of those?

  8. If Veronica’s contention that Lucan attacked her is true, why didn’t he finish her off? Jo
hn Lucan was a foot taller than Veronica and very much stronger. Having realized his mistake in killing Sandra Rivett, why not put that right to the only extent he could by killing Veronica too? The account of her fighting back, even by grabbing his testicles, does not actually make sense. Why, then, having tried to kill her, did he help her upstairs, in full view of Frances, and tend to her wounds?

  9. Can we explain Lucan’s behavior after he left Number 46? According to the perceived wisdom, he dashed out of the house almost immediately after Veronica did, leaving Sandra’s body in the mailbag and evidence of the crime(s) all over the place. He then went to Madeleine Floorman’s. Why? Presumably he would have told her the same garbled, semi-coherent story he later told to his mother and Susan Maxwell-Scott, about interrupting a fight in the basement. But why her? She was the mother of one of his children’s friends, and nothing suggests they were any closer than that. Would he trust his children to an acquaintance?

  There was no reply at her door, so he called her. Where from? Not from a phone booth, or she would have heard the tell-tale “pip” sounds. Did he call from Elizabeth St. or Eaton Row? Perhaps, but why were no blood traces found there when he had dripped blood (both A and B types) on Madeleine Floorman’s front step? If he now planned to run, why didn’t he take his passport, driver’s license, checkbook and cash? A clean suit was lying on the bed at Elizabeth St. Although he was already on the run, why not change to hide at least some of the blood to avoid suspicion?

  Leaving London made sense: Get away from the crime scene as quickly as possible. Perhaps the choice of the Maxwell-Scotts’ was random. There were many other friends Lucan could have called, even at outrageous hours, around the country. Clearly, from what Susan remembered of his conversation, he expected his friend Ian Maxwell-Scott to be at home. He appeared to be wearing the same clothes he had worn when he had entertained Michael Hicks-Beach earlier the previous evening, clothes that should have been bloodstained but weren’t. All Susan Maxwell-Scott saw was a damp patch on one hip. Yet the letters that Lucan then wrote to Ian in her presence still had blood traces on them when Maxwell-Scott took them to the police.

  10. What about the timing of the journey? We’ve looked at this one already. Uckfield is only 16 miles from Newhaven where the Corsair was found, but it apparently took Lucan a minimum (and it could have been longer) of three hours to do it. Where was he in that time frame?

  No doubt all these questions—and many more—would have been answered had Lucan stood as the accused in the dock in an English courtroom. The fact is he didn’t. Yet, in a curious way, he has been in the dock ever since.

  www.crimescape.com

  Chapter 15: Worst-Case Scenarios

  What are the possible explanations for what happened in that house in Lower Belgrave St. on the night of November 7, 1974? Had Lucan ever come to trial, all of these might have been trotted out by prosecution and defense counsel to convince a jury.

  SCENARIO ONE—THE INTRUDER

  This was essentially John Lucan’s story. A large unknown male entered the house, killed Sandra Rivett and tried to kill Veronica Lucan. It falls apart immediately. Unless the intruder was a sex attacker—and there is no evidence for that at all—he would probably have been a burglar. A professional would have got in the same way that the police did, using a plastic credit card, which would explain why there was no sign of a break-in. It was no secret that the inhabitants of all the houses in Belgravia had serious cash, valuable antiques and so on, so Number 46 might have looked like a good target. Many of the lights were defective—an inevitable problem if bulbs failed in a house where the tallest inhabitants were only just over 5 feet tall—so it might have looked empty.

  Even so, the timing—around 9 PM—is a little early for burglars to be at work. Lower Belgrave St. is quiet, but busy Victoria is only a few hundred yards away.

  The intruder might have been carrying a lead pipe for self-defense. He might have been interrupted by Sandra Rivett and panicked. Then he shoved her body into the mailbag, which may have been in the basement already, and climbed the stairs, to be confronted by Veronica Lucan. He may have attacked her and then ran in a blind panic, leaving alive a woman who could identify him.

  The problem with this is that Veronica identified the attacker as John Lucan, and so the case of the large intruder vanishes.

  SCENARIO TWO—THE HIT MAN

  This was also John Lucan’s version. Veronica, he told Susan Maxwell-Scott, accused him of hiring someone to kill her—she had got the idea from a TV movie. There weren’t too many professional assassins around in London in 1974. In fact, beyond the realms of crime and espionage fiction, it’s not certain whether they existed at all! Let’s assume for the moment that they did and that somehow Lucan found one for hire. He would have explained the target—a short, slim, blond woman who could be found in the basement kitchen of Number 46 Lower Belgrave St. at about 9 on a Thursday night. The only other people in the house would be small children, and they would be fast asleep.

  Lucan would have had a spare key cut for the front door and, if he knew about the chain, would have hoped it was not in place or the hit man would have carried a bolt cutter. Given this scenario, the mistake between Sandra and Veronica makes more sense. A stranger, having created his own darkness by removing the basement light bulb, may not have been able to tell them apart.

  At this point, though, the whole thing collapses. A professional killer would know the mess that a lead pipe would cause. A blunt instrument is usually the sort of weapon used in manslaughter cases. Two people argue and fight. One of them grabs a poker, a statuette, a tree branch and swings it, perhaps again and again. It is associated with unplanned killing and blind rage. Certainly that is how the murder of Sandra Rivett looks—the attack on her was frenzied, carried out by someone who wanted to destroy his victim completely.

  Any hit man worth his salt would have been as cool and detached as it is possible to be when you are taking someone else’s life. He would have done this before and would have had a favorite silent method of dispatch, perhaps a gun with a silencer, or a knife. Strangulation would be an option, especially in the case of a small woman. Because he knew there were children in the house, nothing noisy would do.

  Then he had the disposal problem. Either his job was to kill Veronica and leave the body there, to make it look like she’d disturbed a burglar. Or it was to remove it completely and drop it somewhere—hence the sack. What this supposed hit man actually did, use an unlikely weapon, kill the wrong woman and fail to kill the right one, leaving the murder weapon behind, is so shockingly inept as to defy belief.

  To get around this problem, one writer has suggested that Lucan’s hit man fell ill at the last minute and had to find a substitute who was both amateur and incompetent, leading to the shambles that took place at Number 46! Presumably, an amateur would be easier to find than a professional; no doubt a number of men could be persuaded to kill someone for money. The problem is that John Lucan did not move in those circles. How could he have made contact with the sort of man he was looking for?

  SCENARIO THREE—THE HIT MAN AND THE HUSBAND

  Yet another possibility—and one that just makes sense of the forensic evidence—is that Lucan paid a killer and then either changed his mind at the last minute or arrived to see that the job had indeed been carried out and/or dispose of the body.

  In this version, the hit man killed the wrong woman by mistake (let’s ignore the unlikely weapon for a moment) and Lucan, on his way to stop him, saw the struggle in the basement from the street and assumed it was Veronica going down under the rain of blows. When he went in and realized it was Sandra, he and the hit man stuffed the nanny into the mailbag. Did the hit man panic? Did Lucan tell him to get out—he’d deal with things from now on? In that case, who hit Veronica at the top of the stairs? The assailant could have been Lucan. He had taken the pipe off the hit man and used it on the real target, but didn’t have the stomach to go through with it and let Veroni
ca live.

  The story is ridiculously untidy, relies on Veronica Lucan’s memory of the events being garbled by pain, shock and perhaps brain damage (in that she makes no mention of another man in the house) and also relies on the fact that no unexplained footprints are found in the blood in the basement or on the stairs. Some unexplained fingerprints were discovered, however, which, of course, could belong to anyone and could have been made at any time.

  www.crimescape.com

  Chapter 16: The Dream of Paranoia

  In British law, a man is judged to be innocent until proven guilty. In that sense, John Lucan remains innocent of the murder of Sandra Rivett and the attempted murder of his wife. On the other hand, the coroner’s jury decided he was guilty. On yet another hand, Richard John Bingham, better known as John Lucan, the 7th Earl of Lucan, has been declared dead.

  I have stared long and hard at Lucan’s letter to Bill Shand Kydd and cannot decide on the sentence that is best known from the case: “When [the children] are old enough to understand, explain to them the dream of paranoia and look after them.” It is just possible that the word “dream” is actually “disease,” but either way, what did Lucan mean?

  A dictionary definition of paranoia gives us “a mental illness characterized by delusions of persecution, unwarranted jealousy or exaggerated self-importance.” A lesser definition reads “a tendency to suspect and distrust others or to believe oneself unfairly used.”