← HistoryExtra podcast
HistoryExtra podcast
Lord Lucan: the vanishing earl
00:36:35
Laura Thompson revisits the story of the aristocrat who became prime suspect in a murder, then vanished...
Loading summary
Transcript35 lines
- [00:01]
Harvard Summer School Advertiser
Make this Summer Count with Harvard Summer School With Harvard's free college programs, high school students gain confidence and insight into what college is all about, challenge themselves and discover new friends. There are over 200 courses to choose from, including college credit courses, so it's the ideal way for students to learn something new. But most importantly, have fun. Visit info.summer.harvard.edu Spotify to learn more. This episode is brought to you by Amazon. The holidays are here and you know what that means. It's time to get your friends and family the gifts they deserve. Take the stress out of shopping with Amazon's great deals and low prices on a huge range of items from toys to tech and much more. Whoever you're gifting for, Amazon has great prices on everything you need this holiday season. Shop Black Friday week starting November 21st.
- [00:59]
Podcast Host
Welcome to the History Extra Podcast. Fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History magazine. On 7th November 1974, Nanny Sandra Rivet was found murdered in the affluent neighborhood of London's Belgravia. The prime suspect was the father of her young charges, Lord Lucan. But before the aristocrat could be questioned, he vanished, sparking one of the greatest core celebras of the 20th century. Laura Thompson is the author of a book about Lucan's disappearance, A Different Class of Murder, and I spoke to her to find out more about the case and what it can tell us about simmering class tensions in Britain at the time.
- [01:47]
Laura Thompson
So I wonder if we can start this story with the knight that kicked everything off. There are so many unknowns in the story of Lord Lucan, but what do we know? What can we say for certain about that night in November 1974?
- [02:03]
Expert/Commentator
Yes, surprisingly little is corroborated fact, which is very interesting. This is a case with a very strong mythology around it. What we do know is that in the extremely unlikely environs of London's Belgravia prime real estate, at a house at 46 Lower Belgrave street, in the basement of this tall six story house, a woman was murdered. Sandra Rivet, age 29, who was the nanny to the three young children of Lord and Lady Lucan who were estranged. They'd been estranged since January 1973. There'd been a very, very bitter custody battle which Lady Lucan had won. She'd had a succession of nannies and poor Sandra Rivet was the one in situ on this night. Because the general belief, which is almost certainly true, is that she was killed in error, that the intended victim was in fact Lady Lucan, the Countess of Lucan, Veronica, who was then 37. And the general belief, which again is probably true, although many other theories are available, is that the man who killed Sandra Rivet by accident in a case of mistaken identity in this darkened basement was Lord Lucan, the seventh Earl Lucan, John Lucan, as he was known to his friends, who was 39 and who then, according to Veronica's account, launched an attack on Veronica herself when she came downstairs to find out what had happened to Sandra.
- [03:43]
Laura Thompson
Well, I wonder if you could tell us a little bit more about that and the crime scene itself, what we know about how things unfolded that night or what we can theorize about how things unfolded.
- [03:54]
Expert/Commentator
Well, it was a terrible, terrible crime scene. This poor young woman, Sandra, had been bastard badly to death. It was a prolonged struggle. Her body had been placed in a mail sack on the kitchen floor. I mean, it's unspeakable. It sometimes affronts me that the central tragedy of this case can get lost in all the myth that goes around it. So it's very, very important that we remember Sandra. So according to Veronica Luke, and most of what we know about this case comes from Veronica's testimony, which doesn't mean it's not true, it just means it's her word. According to her, her husband launched an attack on her again with this piece of ghastly lead piping. She fought him off. There's then an interlude when they went upstairs together and he'd sort of run out of steam and calmed down, and he was seen by his oldest child, Francis, so we know he was there. And then during a moment when he was distracted, Veronica managed to run out of the house and ran down the road to the most English of sanctuaries, the publisher, the Plumber's Arms, at the end of Lower Bell Grave Street. And she burst in there and said, I've just escaped from being murdered. He's murdered my nanny. And then the police came and an ambulance came and then the whole thing became public and it fairly quickly became a massive, massive story, as one can imagine and as it sort of still is.
- [05:18]
Laura Thompson
Well, tell us more about that. Why do you think that the public clamored for this story in the way that they did? And the press was so eager to feed that hunger.
- [05:30]
Expert/Commentator
You have a murder which I'm afraid we are most of us interested in. And then there's this element of the unsolved about this crime? Because Lord Lucan has not been seen since the early hours of the 8th of November, 1974, and there are people who still think he's alive and he has been cited in practically every country on Earth. It played into that belief, which I think is very strong in this country, that, you know, the establishment can get away with things, the elite can get away with things.
- [06:00]
Laura Thompson
I really want to return to the massive question of Lord Lucan's disappearance and what happened to him later. But before we do, I wonder if we could circle back to the crime and a bit of background and context. What do we know about Lord Lucan? His background, the kind of man he was, his character? What kind of picture of the prime suspect can we build?
- [06:25]
Expert/Commentator
That's such a great question because it's very, very hard to answer. I mean, it's very weird writing a book about somebody who's like almost like a black hole.
- [06:34]
Laura Thompson
How so?
- [06:35]
Expert/Commentator
Well, I just did not know how to get a handle on him. Like many of us, I've grown up with this myth. I mean, there are obviously people today who've never even heard of this case. And that is quite an amazing thought to me because it was always part of almost like modern folkloric, you know, Lord Lucan, where is he? So not to know anything about it is very interesting and I'm intrigued to know how sort of Gen Z, what they will make of this story. Because he is like a figure from myth. He had this extraordinary look. I mean we think of the 70s, we think of, you know, guys with long hair, guys with flares, the whole sort of glam rock or overhang from the hippie era, all this sort of thing. He looked like something from Edwardian era, really. A very good looking man. I mean he was once identified by cobby broccoli in a casino and he said, that's James Bond. You know, that was what Bond should look like as a young man. He was incredibly good looking, but I met quite a lot of people who'd known him very well, including like his sister in law and brother in law who were wonderful to me and very, very honest about it. And they sort of described this crippling introvert who it seemed to me his life was looking like an owl, really. Living like an earl would have done 200 years earlier. He was on an income, like a trust fund income of £12,000 a year, which I suppose now is a quarter million maybe. I mean very, very nice. But he lived like a multimillionaire, you know, the Belgravia life. He was into power boats, he was into skiing, winter sports, all this sort of thing. He had Aston Mart before he got married. He had the life, you know, it was sort of made in Chelsea for the Harold macmillan era. And what was also intrigued me was that his parents were staunch socialists. His father, Pat Lucan, had been the Labour Whip in the House of Lords, and his mother was out delivering election literature for the 1974 election for Labour. Of course, on the night that all this happened. But he sort of rebelled against them and his rebellion took the form of, I'm going to go to Brooks's and I'm going to live like one of my forebears would have done when we really were Masters of the Universe. Because an earl with not much money in the late 60s, early 70s was no different from anyone else. It's just an aristocratic facade and he really did fit it. Lord Lucan had some connections who were rich, aristocratic. He himself had very little money. He gambled most of it away. He spent most of his time at the gambling tables at the Claremont Club, which was on Berkeley Square, which used to be run by a friend of his and had recently been sold to Playboy. But anyway, he'd done most of his money there. But lots of people liked him very, very much. And what they said was that it was just the worst possible marriage you could ever have imagined. He married Veronica Lukin in 1963. She was a very pretty young woman, too clever for the life that she. I mean, today she would have had a fulfilling job, she was a really bright young woman, but of course, things were so different then and what she wanted was to get married. And she married Lord Lukembe because he was friends of her sister Christina, who had married Bill Shankid, who was a rich man and. Etc, etc, you know, those traps that women fell into, and she had had mental health issues since childhood, and being married to a man like that and having postnatal depression after these three children that she had through the 60s, the whole thing just turned more and more toxic. And if he did commit that murder, which I'm kind of 90% sure he did, I'm not going to put it any higher than that, but that's still pretty high. Then. He was obviously capable of great evil. But marriage and murder often go together, I'm afraid, and this was an ultimate example of it. And after he walked out of the marriage and after the custody battle, which initially he won because she did have these mental health problems, but she got more evidence and she got doctors to say, she'll be fine, she went to the priory for treatment and she was put on very strong drugs and he was out of his mind with worry, which one could also understand. But that's not to exonerate him. It's just to sort of try and give a backdrop to what looks like this random act of violence. In fact, it had been building up and building up and building up.
- [11:15]
Laura Thompson
So if we are to go with this central theory that it was of course, Lord Lucan that did commit the murder, you're suggesting there that the motivation was essentially to get his wife that he was estranged from out of the picture. Why could he not just divorce her? Or do you think there was a streak of kind of vengeance in there as well, since they'd had this whole bitter legal battle?
- [11:38]
Expert/Commentator
Yes, there was hatred there. His sister said that to me. There was a hatred in there on both sides, I think. Although she also always claimed that she was still in love with him. Well, her story changed. That's why I say I'm 90% sure he did it, because her story, which the police said was immutable, in fact did change quite a lot. And she even on one occasion said, I'm not sure who attacked me. I'm not saying I believe that either. But yes, why didn't they get divorced? That was a question I put to quite a lot of people and nobody could really satisfactorily answer it, you know, even the police, the Met, who were very sympathetic to Veronica with very good reason. And he became the sort of embodiment of evil. Again, completely understandably, everybody, even they said, nobody really doubts the very strong love he had for his children. To an extent that we would think almost more like a modern father. You know, he was what they called a hands on father. He was. I can remember talking to a couple of nannies who looked after the children of friends of his. They said, you know, the only one who ever came to the nursery and took an interest was Lord Lucan. Almost like he had this soft side to him that was obviously overlaid by layers of whatever else. But I think what he really wanted was the children.
- [13:02]
Laura Thompson
That's interesting, because if this theory stands, he did intend to murder their mother while they were in the house. So there's a lot of conflicting stuff at play there.
- [13:12]
Expert/Commentator
I completely agree with you and it's one of the reasons why I'm not completely sure he did it.
- [13:16]
Laura Thompson
So let's go with your 90% if we're to indulge in the other 10%. As you've said, there's been a lot of mythologizing around this case in the 50 years since it happened. If we are to entertain some of those other theories about who committed the murder, who's in the frame?
- [13:33]
Expert/Commentator
Well, I'm Afraid, I have to say that two people said to me that they thought Veronica had done it. I mean, these were two people who knew her very, very well. And they said their initial reaction was, oh, my God, Veronica's killed the nanny. Either to incriminate Lucan or because she sometimes thought that the nannies at the house were in league with him, and reporting back to him about her alleged incompetence in order to get that custody judgment overturned, which had become his great obsession at the time, the reporting, he became almost like this kind of national scapegoat. You know, Britain in 1974 was not a very happy place to be. A high cost of fuel, instability, terrorism, IRA terrorism, you know, inflation, et cetera. You know, Britain was not a happy place. And this man who came along and whose work was sitting at the Claremont Club playing backgammon and who looked like this ultimate sort of seigneurial figure from the kind of person you just long to see brought low, and he did. I think that's a lot of the reason why the case took such a hold on the press, because the press knew that the public were loving, hating this guy, which I completely understand, he's.
- [14:57]
Laura Thompson
A very easy target for a villain.
- [14:59]
Expert/Commentator
And when you read the newspaper coverage, and of course the press were hand in glove with the police, when you read the coverage, you completely understand the pleasure that it would have generated this kind of twisted, well, not twisted, sort of pleasurable rage that people would have felt, you know, when they're struggling to heat their homes and there's this guy lording about and killing a servant as if it means nothing, you know. So the fact that nobody else ever entered the frame as a potential killer, and it wasn't a terribly well run investigation, the forensics were pretty kindergarten. There was blood where it shouldn't have been and the murder weapon was lost. And they had to eliminate about 50 sets of fingerprints from Met police who fancied having a look at whether this aristocratic monster had committed murder. And nobody ever knew which of those fingerprints were indeed, if any of them would, Lord Lucan's, because his were never identified. I mean, it really was like, we know who this is, we've just got to find this swine.
- [16:07]
Laura Thompson
So if we turn now to the second part of this case, as it were, and probably the reason why it has been so enduring, the disappearance of Lord Lucan, same question, really, as my first question to you. What can we say for certain about that? When was he last seen or heard from?
- [16:26]
Expert/Commentator
For sure, very little corroborated. We only really know he was at the house because his daughter saw him. You know, I don't like anything unless there's two people involved to back each other up in their story. We know he made a couple of phone calls and that one was to a nearby friend who hung up on this weird sounding bloke. The second was to his mother by the time she got home, which was, please go and get my children out of that house. And what he supposedly said to his mother, the Dowager Countess, was, mother, there was something terrible in the basement. I couldn't bear to look, which is if that's true and I don't think she would have made that up. That is such an ambivalent and terrible statement. Anyway, she did then go to the house and take the children to her flat. We don't know where those phone calls were made. It wasn't a public call box. He had a flat nearby, but the police said, well, he can't have made them from there because there's no blood in this flat. But there was no blood in lots of places in that house, the murder house. You know, the blood evidence is very, very confusing. You know, you just long for modern forensics, a bit of cctv. Anyway, he supposedly tried to get hold of his brother in law in London who wasn't at home. But then he drove out to Sussex to a place called Uckfield where another friend, Ian Maxwell Scott lived and his wife was at home. Susie, Susie Maxwell Scott. Again, we only have her word for anything that happened that Lucan turned up, but I'm pretty sure he was there because he wrote a couple of letters there and they were posted and they had the Uckfield postmark and she didn't come forward with this story that he'd been there. When the Uckfield postmark was identified. She fessed up and said, oh yes, he was, yes, he was with me. And partly her demeanor led to this idea that people are covering up for him, which I again, I completely understand. She behaved very peculiarly and some bloke came out of the woodwork and said to me, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, my dad used to work for Susie Maxwell Scott. He was told to drive a person to an airfield in Kent. I mean, it was a good story, it was a good story. It could have been.
- [18:45]
Laura Thompson
So after, we're pretty sure he was at the Maxwell Scots. Do we know what happened to him then? Did he tell Susie Maxwell Scott anything about what had happened and where did he go next? Or does he disappear into the ether after that?
- [18:58]
Expert/Commentator
Well, what he told her was the same story as he wrote in a letter to his brother in law, Shank Kidd, who was married to Christina, who was Lady Lucan's sister. And the same story, which is along the lines of, I was walking past the house, number 46 Lower Belgrave street, and I saw in the basement a man who appeared to be struggling with Veronica. And I raced in and the man raced off. What he said to Bill and to Susan Metswell Scott was, Veronica accused me of hiring this man to kill her. And I sometimes wonder myself whether he had hired someone and then went there, maybe got cold feet, something like that. Too many people said to me he was squeamish, he would never have physically been able to do it, but they could imagine him hiring someone and of course going to casinos, that sort of thing. It wouldn't have been difficult to find someone, I don't think so that if we're talking who's in the frame for the murder, to me that's always seemed quite a plausible solution. It doesn't explain everything and actually nothing explains everything, but to me it has a kind of, if you like, psychological plausibility. So then what we know is that he drove off from Susan's, we don't know what time, we don't know if he was driving the car. That's the other thing. He borrowed this car from another friend. And then the car was seen the next morning in the early hours in New Haven, parked in some obscure residential road, looking completely blameless in New Haven, although the interior was described as looking a bit dirty and they were like smudges of blood. And of course New Haven's a port and of course that you might think of as journey's end. And he did write another letter to the man from whom he had borrowed the car. And that to me always reads a bit like a suicide note. He said, you know, if you see my children, as I hope you will tell them, all I cared about was them. And to me it always has the air of a signing off, but, you know, that's me.
- [21:12]
Laura Thompson
And so what are some of the theories, perhaps not your own, about what happened to Lucan after that and where he has been essentially since he disappeared?
- [21:23]
Expert/Commentator
Well, there are lots of theories, there really are. The most straightforward is that he got on a ferry at New Haven because there weren't obviously the Czechs like there would be today. And there was a stray paragraph in a newspaper where it said a couple of men, trawler men, had seen this unusually well dressed looking gentleman. And I always thought, oh, I wonder if that was him, and then he jumped off and got caught up in the propellers or some such thing. But of course no body has ever been found. There are stories along the lines of the one I mentioned, you know, that he was taken off to a private plane, that he was just got out of the country. He did have a friend in Spain, you know, he was seen in. The first sightings were in northern France and the police and the press all went herring off to Cherval, you know, is he here, is he there? You know, it's all a bit Scarlet Pimpernel and yet at the same time, you know, you feel bad for making light of it, but there is that very. It's a very English sort of extremely dark humor that has infected this story. I think the most usual place for seeing him, where he's been cited, oh Lord, so many times, is an African country. Botswana, Kenya, Mozambique, South Africa, etc, etc, take your pick. He's been seen in Australia, he's been seen working as a waiter. He's been seen, you know, in a. He's been seen directing traffic. He's been seen. I mean, he's just lunatic most of the theories.
- [22:56]
Laura Thompson
But do you think that there's any plausibility to the idea that he did make it abroad and kind of lived out his days in hiding?
- [23:04]
Expert/Commentator
See, I don't know what he's been living on because he was declared bankrupt quite soon after all this happened. In order to chase the money to take that custody case back to the High Court. He had been gambling. It's never overly sensible to call yourself a professional gambler, but if you keep a cool head, which he did in the early days, you can make an income of sorts. You know, he was a good backgammon player, he was a good blackjack player after the custody case, once he lost, his gambling did go very, very, very wild. But because, I mean, it's elementary, once you're chasing money, you start losing. And he was in debt all over the place. I mean, you look at the figures, it's horrifying. I remember one of the coppers saying to me, oh, you know, when the bills are unopened, you know there's trouble because when they went to the flat, they just found all this unopened mail. To me, he'd reached the end of the line in every respect. And most murders where people try to kill a spouse, they're usually about money. They're usually because they don't want to keep paying out for this person that they hate whom they think is ruining their life and taking their children. And an earl with money wouldn't have needed to do that. They could just flash off and live in the south of France. But an earl without money had no power. This is where I peel away from the Lucan mythology, because to me, he just looked like establishment. He wasn't really establishment. The people spending money at the Clermont Club were Arabs. They were the people with the money in London in the early 1970s, and a few rich aristocrats and a few rich businessmen, but that was not Luke and Circle. On the whole, you know, Bill Shankid was a rich man, but he was a respectable man. The idea that he would have been party to a flight from justice is laughable. So he either knew rich, respectable people, or he knew people like himself who'd lost all their money gambling. So I don't know who would have, other than John Aspinall, who used to own the Clermont Club but had sold out and who might have enjoyed. I'll get Lucky Lucan out of the country and that'll be jolly, that frightful wife of his. And he did do a lot of damage, John Aspinall, by talking that way. To me, it's like a ghastly tease, enjoying stringing along the credulous hacks, the credulous coppers, but it could have been. But getting them out is one thing, and then how's he going to live? Is someone really going to bankroll him? Possibly for 50 years? To me, it's just implausible, but I can see that it fits that idea of people like him can get away with things. And that's why it's so satisfying, because it fits this mythology that's grown up around the case.
- [26:01]
Laura Thompson
So, having looked at this case in so much depth, and, as you say, having spoken to people who knew Lucan and were involved in the case, what do you think happened after that night?
- [26:13]
Expert/Commentator
I think he killed himself that night. I think he was a very weak man. He was not a dashing gambler, really, you know, he wasn't. Oh, I'll give it a shot. I'll see if I can get away. He was a man who gambled as an. Almost like a retreat from reality, it seems to me, you know, living this aristocratic construct from the 18th century. I mean, what a strange way to live your life. And when the facade fell apart, and if he had planned to kill his wife and then had killed this other girl, so it wasn't just evil, it was evil and for nothing, in his logic, as it were. And he knew that people would say well, if he didn't do it, why did he run? And that is an extremely good question, and it was answered to me by a couple of people, because he knew that Veronica would always win. She won the custody case, even though there was quite a lot of evidence on both sides, good and bad. It was fairly evenly weighted, in fact. But she won. She persuaded the judge. The judge thought he was the worst man ever, once she'd finished. And as I say, maybe he was, maybe he was. If I'm right in my reading of it, and there was about a marriage that went horribly wrong and about the children as the kind of spoils of war, as it were, it just becomes a lot more interesting, I think. And that's why I think he killed himself, because I think he knew that if he'd done it for the sake of his children, he had surely lost them for good. And that's why I think that last letter is a signing off.
- [27:53]
Laura Thompson
Whether he threw himself into the sea or whether he hopped aboard a plane and went for a new life elsewhere, Lucan kind of vanishes from the picture at that point. But there is an interesting code to this story, isn't there, in that over the 50 years since this case unfolded, it has continued to fascinate people and also continue to impact people's lives. I'm thinking particularly of his son here. I wonder if you could tell us a bit about its afterlife, its legacy.
- [28:23]
Expert/Commentator
Oh, terrible. I mean, imagine you read about Sandra's inquest in 1975 and her poor parents saying, you know, we've been forgotten here. This has all become about Lord Lucan and Lord and Lady Lucan and where's Sandra in the middle of all this. And then Lucan had three children, George, Francis, Camilla, and George couldn't even get his father declared dead so he could inherit the title, which he wanted to do as a kind of closure almost. But that's quite a thing to have grown up with, that's quite a legacy. And I mean, Lady Lucan's life, it really does fill you with quite a lot of sadness. She became estranged from her children. That was her doing. She would give interviews saying, oh, no, I no longer want to see them anymore. And then poor Sandra, this poor young woman, sort of caught in the crossfire of this marriage.
- [29:20]
Laura Thompson
And I guess finally, Laura, if we are to look back at this 50 years on, is it historically significant? I think quite often, you know, true crime is dismissed as low brow and not real history. But what do you think we can learn from this case?
- [29:37]
Expert/Commentator
I think true crime is real history. I think these murders that endure it so often, because they do encapsulate a time. It is that clash of his ridiculously antediluvian lifestyle and the way the modern world was moving. This says a lot about that era. I think it says so much about, you know, how our attitudes to class were evolving, not disappearing, that I'm afraid we haven't got there yet. But they were evolving and shifting. I just think it's interesting, with the perspective we have now, to look at it anew. Then we were watching Upstairs, Downstairs. Now we watch Saltburn. It doesn't go away. It just sort of shapeshifts. And he was just this lost soul in the era of a Britain that was societally changing so much. He couldn't command deference in life anywhere but at those gambling clubs, really. And I find the thought of this happening at that time, I think, is peculiarly powerful. And I think it really does say a lot about that and about the press reaction to him, the public reaction to him, the way Lady Lucan was perceived almost in a feminist light, you know, which wouldn't have been the case earlier. So I think certain crimes, certainly in British history, say something about their social context. I think they do. And this is one of them.
- [31:07]
Podcast Host
That was Laura Thompson. Her book is A Different Class of Murder. You can read a feature by Laura on this case in the December issue of BBC History magazine. And for more on the murky history of murder, then listen to our episode with Kate Morgan, where. Where she discusses the cases that shaped UK murder laws. Check out the link in this episode's description. Thanks for listening. This podcast was produced by Daniel Kramer Arden.