The Lucan Obsession: 7. The Investigation

Summary

The Lucan Obsession: Episode 7 – The Investigation

Release Date: October 28, 2024
Podcast: The History Podcast
Host: Alex von Tanzelman, BBC Radio 4
Description: In "The Lucan Obsession," Alex von Tanzelman delves into the mysterious disappearance of Lord Lucan, exploring the intricate investigation that has captivated Britain for over half a century.

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1. Introduction to the Case

The episode opens with Alex von Tanzelman setting the scene of 1970s Britain, characterized by police procedural dramas and the enigmatic disappearance of Lord Lucan following the murder of Sandra Rivett.

• Alex von Tanzelman [00:26]:

  "How can we clear the cigarette smoke to see the reality of what happened back in 1974 and why it's fascinated us for half a century?"

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2. The Police Investigation

Detective Constable Geoff Lurie and Detective Constable Richard Swarbrick, who were directly involved in the Lucan case, provide firsthand accounts of the investigation at the Gerald Road police station.

• Geoff Lurie [02:07]:

  "It was a very picturesque little police station."

• Richard Swarbrick [02:17]:

  "In the days after the murder... we had to go on that at the time."

a. Initial Approach and Suspicions

The investigation initially focused on Lord Lucan as the prime suspect, largely due to Lady Lucan's accusation and his subsequent disappearance.

• Laura Thompson [03:07]:

  "He had an almighty massive motive. The children, the money, and he ran away."

b. Evidence Against Lord Lucan

Jackie Moulton, a retired Detective Chief Inspector, outlines the key pieces of evidence that implicated Lucan:

• Jackie Moulton [03:26]:

  "Evidence that he borrowed a Ford Corsair from his friends. Evidence that a Ford Corsair was found in New Haven with blood... inside the vehicle... the overwhelming evidence of the lead pipe."

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3. Forensic Challenges

The episode delves into the forensic limitations of the 1970s, highlighting inconsistencies and gaps in the evidence.

• Laura Thompson [04:25]:

  "It's absolutely amazing how little we really do know. We just have that one statement, really, from Veronica and some very jumbly forensics."

• Lady Lucan's Testimony [12:35]:

  "I saw that ship sink and I saw that ship break in half."

a. Blood Evidence and Memory Reliability

Discrepancies in blood evidence and witness recollections raise questions about the reliability of testimonies.

• Laura Thompson [05:19]:

  "You can't get away from the fact that Veronica had blood group B... on her shoes."

• Claire McGowan [10:30]:

  "People really do recall evidence... extremely poor witnesses."

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4. Police Procedures and Relationships

The investigation's efficacy is scrutinized, particularly regarding police procedures and their relationship with journalists.

• Jackie Moulton [06:37]:

  "There were three children in that house... preservation of life was the priority."

• Bob Strange [07:22]:

  "The drinking culture of the police tied in very well with the drinking culture of Fleet Street at the time."

a. Allegations of Corruption

Bob Strange reveals controversial practices among journalists and police, suggesting a culture of bribery and favoritism.

• Bob Strange [07:35]:

  "Our job on a Friday afternoon was to go through the list of policemen that had helped us that week... depending on how helpful they had been."

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5. Questioning the Investigation's Integrity

Contrasting views emerge regarding the thoroughness of the investigation. While some believe it was a "slam dunk" case, others argue significant oversights occurred.

• Richard Swarbrick [09:00]:

  "I think they did a pretty good job... it was a slam dunk case."

• Bob Strange [09:16]:

  "Lord Lucan's story is complete crap... he never went to check out."

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6. The Role of Unreliable Witnesses

The episode explores the concept of unreliable witnesses, emphasizing how memory distortion and personal biases can impact testimonies.

• Claire McGowan [10:30]:

  "Unreliable narrator... Veronica had a head injury... taking a lot of medication."

• Alex von Tanzelman [11:00]:

  "Memory is such a complicated thing... it's a version of a story we tell ourselves and that changes over time."

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7. Lady Lucan's Perspective

Lady Lucan's interviews reveal a complex portrayal of her as both a victim and a potential unreliable witness, adding layers to the mystery.

• Lady Lucan [11:55]:

  "It's part of her job... someone who is coming back, which leaves a void."

• Lady Lucan [12:40]:

  "For me it was just a brief incident... a marital thing. You forgive him."

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8. Conclusion and Forward Look

As the investigation into Lord Lucan's disappearance unfolds, unresolved questions linger about his guilt, his motives, and the true nature of the evidence against him. The episode sets the stage for the next installment, which will explore alternative theories and potential suspects.

• Alex von Tanzelman [14:04]:

  "Why did Lady Lucan want her husband back? Did she believe he was alive? Did she believe he was guilty?"

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Final Note:
This episode meticulously examines the multifaceted investigation into Lord Lucan's disappearance, highlighting procedural flaws, questionable evidence, and the intricate dance between police and media in the 1970s. Through interviews with key figures, the podcast paints a nuanced picture of a case that remains one of Britain's most enduring mysteries.

Transcript

[Alex von Tanzelman]

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the uk.

[Paul McGann]

Titanic Ship of Dreams, the new podcast from the award winning Noiser Network. Join me, Paul McGann, as we explore life and death on Titanic. I'll delve into my own family story following my great Uncle Jimmy as he tries to escape the engine room. We'll hear the harrowing tales of the victims and the testimonies of the lucky survivors.

[Lady Lucan]

I saw that ship sink and I.

[Witness]

Saw that ship break in half.

[Paul McGann]

Titanic Ship of dreams. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

[Alex von Tanzelman]

BBC Sounds Music Radio podcasts A dim office acrid with cigarette smoke. Typewriters clatter A tea trolley trundles past. All male cops in beige slacks and brown ties argue over printed mugshots, then shoot off for the next car chase. I've watched my share of 1970s police dramas, but in the case of Lord Lucan, there were no car chases. No Starsky and Hutch, Colombo or the Sweeney to figure it out. How can we clear the cigarette smoke to see the reality of what happened back in 1974 and why it's fascinated us for half a century? We've asked to see the police files on the murder of Sandra Rivet and attack on Lady Lucan, but it's still an open case, so nothing is available, at least not officially. The Lucan story has been hot news for half a century. Snippets leak out, stories seep into the press, witnesses appear from the shadows. Is it clear how the police conducted the Lucan inquiry? The prime suspect, Lord Lucan, has never been found. He said another man was involved. Did the police ask the right questions? I'm Alex von Tanzelman and for BBC Radio 4, this is the Lucan Obsession, episode seven, the Investigation.

[Geoff Lurie]

The police station is still much as.

[Alex von Tanzelman]

It was in November 1974. Jeff Lurie was a detective constable assigned to the Lucan case at Gerald Road, the police station, handling the investigation.

[Geoff Lurie]

There used to be flower baskets on the front. A couple of the PCs used to man all the flowers and everything. It was a very picturesque little police station.

[Richard Swarbrick]

I got to work at Hammersmith police station about 8 o'clock in the morning.

[Alex von Tanzelman]

In the days after the murder, Detective Constable Richard Swarbrick joined Geoff and his.

[Richard Swarbrick]

Team and was told, don't take your coat off, Rich. You're going onto a murder inquiry and you need to go to Gerald Road police station.

[Geoff Lurie]

Of course, in those days there was no computers, it was all a card index. So you might have had a couple of WPCs that would be writing out cards, et cetera.

[Richard Swarbrick]

Do recall that there was little doubt in the minds of the investigation team that this was not a murder inquiry in the normal sense, it was a manhunt.

[Geoff Lurie]

It was just circumstances were that Lady Lucan had said it was him. So obviously we had to go on that at the time.

[Alex von Tanzelman]

And the fact that he'd vanished, Lord Lucan ran away. That did look incriminating.

[Laura Thompson]

He had the motive.

[Alex von Tanzelman]

Author Laura Thompson.

[Laura Thompson]

He had an almighty massive motive. The children, the money, and he ran away. If he were innocent, why did he run?

[Jackie Moulton]

In this case, you've got lots and lots and lots of evidence, what we would say, corroborative evidence, a continuity of evidence.

[Alex von Tanzelman]

Jackie Moulton is a retired Detective Chief Inspector who used to work for the Metropolitan Police.

[Jackie Moulton]

Evidence that he borrowed a Ford Corsair from his friends. Evidence that a Ford Corsair was found in New Haven with blood, a mixture of Lady Luke and Sandra Rivet's blood inside the vehicle, plus, of course, the overwhelming evidence of the lead pipe. Now, that lead pipe is not a complete mechanical fit, but it is been cut from the same piece of lead. And then the white elastoplast that's going around, the lead pipe is of the same as the one at the murder scene.

[Alex von Tanzelman]

And we have Lady Lucan's version of events. Plus the publican from the Plumber's Arms who said Lady Lucan was shouting about murder, if you remember, though she didn't say who the murderer was. The publican noticed that specifically.

[Laura Thompson]

It's absolutely amazing how little we really do know. We just have that one statement, really, from Veronica and some very jumbly forensics.

[Alex von Tanzelman]

Talk me through the jumbly forensics.

[Laura Thompson]

You can't get away from the fact that there is blood group A, group.

[Alex von Tanzelman]

A, that belongs to Lady Lucan, who insisted to police that she never went into the basement.

[Laura Thompson]

Just a little bit in the basement itself, that is near the sink and on the mail sack. And you can't get away from the fact that Veronica had blood group B.

[Alex von Tanzelman]

That's Sandra's blood on her clothes, the.

[Laura Thompson]

Back of her clothes, which you could explain away quite easily, but also in her shoes. So the police said, well, she got it when she was struggling with Lucan. But there's not much evidence that Lucan had blood on him. And why was there not a ton of blood and transference and what have you in that marital bedroom?

[Alex von Tanzelman]

And is it just the blood that raises questions about forensics?

[Laura Thompson]

He'd seen a friend earlier that day who said he was wearing a jumper and gray flannel trousers. Now, the fibers from those gray trousers were found on the lead Piping, but they weren't found on the mailbag, which I find really strange.

[Alex von Tanzelman]

Is it possible to put a body into a sack without it touching your trousers? DCSI Roy Ransom, who was friendly with journalist Bob Strange, let Bob into the house on the night of the murder to have a peek.

[Bob Strange]

They knew that they shouldn't really allow outsiders anywhere near it. And neither I nor Roy or any of the policemen at the scene had any sort of forensic suit. And quite a few of the policemen involved, the PCs, the ordinary coppers, had got very interested. In fact, there was a woman's dead body downstairs and had taken them the chance to tramp downstairs and walk through the bloodstains themselves.

[Jackie Moulton]

You could see on any television news bulletin, forensic tents, crime scene people coming in with all booted and suited in forensic suits, you know, gloves, feet. That is the preservation of the scene as done today. So it's completely different ball game. You can actually say that in 1974 compared today.

[Alex von Tanzelman]

So what was police procedure at the time?

[Jackie Moulton]

Let's be fair to the police on this occasion, there were three children in that house. Your job is about the preservation of life. And was the attacker still in the house? So the consequence of that is that the crime scene was not preserved as.

[Alex von Tanzelman]

Best it could be 50 years later. Police leave any crime scene as intact as possible, so forensics can take DNA samples. They also call up CCTV and mobile phone records. None of that existed in 1979. Maybe that's why we like historical police dramas. Cases were so much harder to solve. But the technology isn't the only thing that's changed. In the 1970s, many policemen had close friendships with journalists.

[Bob Strange]

The drinking culture of the police tied in very well with the drinking culture.

[Alex von Tanzelman]

Of Fleet street at the time. Bob was an ambitious 24 year old reporter, learning the crime beat from his boss, John.

[Bob Strange]

John and I would sit at his desk in the middle of the open plan office in Shoe Lane and we'd have a pile of five pound notes and a big pile of brown envelopes. And our job on a Friday afternoon was to go through the list of policemen that had helped us that week. And we would distribute five pound notes into envelopes, depending on how helpful they had been and what their rank was.

[Alex von Tanzelman]

I'm surprised to hear someone say this out loud, that journalists were paying police for information. The police certainly haven't confirmed it. While Bob was getting close to Roy Ranson, who was leading the inquiry, Sunday Times journalist James Fox was wining and.

[Richard Swarbrick]

Dining Ransom's deputy outside Simpsons in the Strand. Here I used to come here with Detective Dave Goering, who was a rotund man, you might say, and he did like his lunch. And I remember having one here, huge thing of whatever it was. We were eating steak and kidney pie and four vegetables or something, and him saying to me, don't mind me, I eat like a horse. And I thought, well, I'm very glad to be able to supply you. I do seem to remember a case of Scotch changing hands at one point and saying, roy and Dave, where shall I bring it? And they said, don't worry, we'll come by and pick it up.

[Alex von Tanzelman]

How effective was the police investigation?

[Richard Swarbrick]

I think they did a pretty good job. I don't think they missed anything, particularly because it was such a straightforward case. I mean, it was a slam dunk case, to use an expression.

[Alex von Tanzelman]

I'm not sure this case is a slam dunk, though. Bob has a different view of police competence.

[Bob Strange]

Lord Lucan said, I was walking past my house that night, or my wife's house, and I looked through the window of the basement and saw this man attacking my wife. So Dave Goering went along to try and prove that the sight lines from the pavement through that window would not have allowed that to happen. And he came back to Roy at the end of that day and he said, I've checked it all out, boss, and Lord Lucan's story is complete crap. I mean, he actually used those words, complete crap. He said, I've tried to see through that window and you can't do it from the pavement. In the inquest, that became quite a point of contact contention, whether or not Lucan's version could be true. But the truth of the matter is that Dave Gehring that day never went to check out, that he went instead to the Three Horseshoes pub, I think it was next to Scotland Yard. Instead of going to Belgravia and bending down on a pavement, he started drinking.

[Alex von Tanzelman]

If this is true, it sounds like the police barely bothered to investigate Lord Lucan's version of the story. They just decided Lady Lucan must be telling the truth. And that made the rest of it what James calls a slam dunk. But was Lady Lucan telling the truth? Crime writer Claire McGowan.

[Witness]

It's actually something that comes up in the case quite a lot, is how well do people remember facts? And as I know from writing crime fiction is very poorly is the answer. People really do not recall evidence. Well, even right after it happens. So, yeah, I think people actually are extremely poor witnesses, as any police officer will tell you.

[Alex von Tanzelman]

And memory is such a complicated thing, isn't it? Because it's not a record of events. It's a version of a story we tell ourselves and that changes over time. Time. What do we mean, Claire, by an unreliable witness or narrator?

[Witness]

Typically, in fiction, somebody will be an unreliable narrator for a number of reasons. Either because they don't have the capacity to know what they saw. So a child would be one. And we have a child narrator in this too. It could be because they have some kind of head injury. So Veronica had a head injury, so maybe her memory was distorted. She was also taking a lot of medication. That can also make you unreliable. Often people might be unreliable because they see things but don't understand what they've seen or because of trauma, they can't quite recall what it is that they've seen or what they know or then you just have the outright liar type of unreliable narrator. But people can be very unreliable for many reasons that aren't lying.

[Alex von Tanzelman]

If we were reading this story in crime fiction, Lady Lucan would make a classic unreliable narrator. Several years after her husband apparently tried to murder her, she gave what I find a very strange interview to Newsnight.

[Lady Lucan]

Does fear hang over you, Lady Lucille? Fear? If you believe your husband is still alive. Oh, good heavens. I don't think he would murder me or anything like that. No, it's not fear, really. I'm used to quite a lot of boredom and loneliness because a gambler's wife has to become used to that. It's part of her job. But she has somebody who is coming back. Now that somebody, it appears, is not coming back, which leaves a void.

[Alex von Tanzelman]

She seemed to view the violent assault on her as a thing of little importance.

[Lady Lucan]

I suppose I've forgotten about was just a brief incident. For me personally, I'm not talking about the Ribbet family. I'm leaving them. Obviously it's a tragedy for them, but for me it was just a brief incident I've forgotten I've recovered from was just a marital thing. You forgive him.

[Alex von Tanzelman]

And certainly you don't have to be a perfect person to be an accurate witness. Maybe Lady Lucan's testimony was accurate and maybe her continuing devotion to her husband and downplaying of the violence she alleged he committed is some kind of trauma response. But it's still a weird take and I can't help wondering why the police found her so convincing.

[Bob Strange]

Roy Ranson was looking at the Countess laying in a hospital bed, heavily bandaged, seriously wounded and very sympathetic character. And she was telling him what he believed to be the truth. He was a gentleman, Roy. He wasn't the sort of man who was going to challenge her story of this injured woman in a hospital bed. And from the day that he met her, he believed Lady Lucan's version absolutely. And that clouded every possible things that followed.

[Alex von Tanzelman]

Chivalry and deference, as well as booze and bribes. There seem to be a lot of 1970s tropes getting in the way of this story. The more I find out about it, the more questions I have. Why did Lady Lucan want her husband back? Did she believe he was alive? Did she believe he was guilty? And if Lord Lucan didn't do it, who could have been the murderer? That's in the next episode.

[Paul McGann]

Titanic Ship of Dreams, the new podcast from the award winning Noiser Network. Join me, Paul McGann, as we explore life and death on Titanic. I'll delve into my own family story following my great Uncle Jimmy as he tries to escape the engine room. We'll hear the harrowing tales of the victims and the testimonies of the lucky survivors.

[Lady Lucan]

I saw that ship sink and I.

[Witness]

Saw that ship break in half.

[Paul McGann]

Titanic, Ship of Dreams. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.