Half a century ago, a murder took place in London. It was brutal, bloody, and committed almost certainly in error. The case was that of the 7th Earl of Lucan, a 39-year-old professional gambler who was believed to have killed his children’s nanny and attacked his wife. He then vanished, possibly in an escape organized by his circle of powerful friends.
Stoked by the press and inflamed by speculation, the case quickly took shape as a modern morality tale. And 1970s Britain, which was nearly bankrupt and torn by political strife at the time, could not get enough of it.
Fifty years on, the public’s obsession—which never really went away—is about to spark back to life. Documentaries from the BBC and Amazon will appear later this year. The Amazon project (in which I am an interviewee) finally places the victim, Sandra Rivett, at the heart of the story. The BBC’s three-parter is a full-blown reexamination of the case—and again Rivett is key. Her son Neil Berriman (given up for adoption at birth; another son was raised by her parents) believes that he has tracked down Lord Lucan in Australia, and the documentary will trace Berriman’s journey, both emotional and literal. The anniversary, and the new shows, will likely inspire a veritable torrent of words, opinions, TikTok theories, you name it, adding to the vast quantity of such things that already exist, including a 2013 drama series and a 2017 television interview with Lucan’s wife Veronica, who died not long afterward.
The subject is irresistible to writers and filmmakers, a fact I can attest to from personal experience. While researching my own 2014 book on the case, A Different Class of Murder, I spoke to numerous people who had known the couple and who were forthcoming with nuanced, previously unheard material and theories. I learned a great deal, but what struck me most, then and now, was the dearth of corroborated facts. I have come to believe this is because only one side of the story has ever been heard: that of Veronica, whose testimony became the defining version of events, the one on which the powerful Lucan myth, which combined class, old school ties, and male dominance, has been based.
Here, though, is what we actually know.
On the evening of November 7, 1974, 29-year-old Sandra Rivett—recently hired nanny of the three Lucan children—was bludgeoned to death with a piece of lead pipe in the basement of 46 Lower Belgrave Street. This tall, white, rebarbatively elegant house was owned by one of the trusts that supplied the earl with his income.
Lucan had left his wife in January 1973 and rented a flat nearby. The couple had fought a grim custody battle; Lucan won the opening round on the grounds that his wife was mentally unstable, then lost the full hearing when Veronica asserted that any instability was her husband’s doing. She accused him of gaslighting her, of physical and sexual abuse, and the judge—as the Metropolitan Police would later do—accepted every word.
By all accounts Lucan was obsessed with overturning that judgment. The myth had it that he could not bear the thought of his heirs being raised by a woman he viewed as an unfit mother, yet many of my interviewees portrayed him quite simply as a devoted father devastated by the thought of losing his children. I spoke to Veronica’s sister, who was palpably conflicted in her loyalties but did not believe the accusations made against Lucan in court. Later she and her husband would gain custody of the three children. “Everybody was distraught that [they] had been taken back [by Veronica] like that, without proper supervision,” she said. Meanwhile, Lucan’s sister, whom I also interviewed, and who was remarkably clear-eyed about John, as she called him, nevertheless said, “He really adored those children and saw that they were in bad hands.”
A condition of the custody judgment was that Veronica would have a live-in nanny, of which there had already been a long procession. Sandra Rivett arrived at the house just 10 weeks before her murder.
The pipe used to kill her was also used on Veronica. When asked how she had survived, Veronica replied, “Good breeding.” In fact, by her own account, she had cut the assault short by grabbing her husband’s testicles. She then fled the house and ran along the street to a pub, that most British of sanctuaries, from which the police were summoned. At the hospital, Veronica gave the statement upon which the official theory of the case is based. She herself had been Lucan’s intended victim, his motive a desire to regain his children and restore his finances. Rivett, who was supposed to have the night off, was killed in the darkened basement in a case of mistaken identity. The police asked whether Veronica had any thought as to where her husband might be. “Your guess,” she said, “is as good as mine.”
The following June, when an inquest jury named Lord Lucan the guilty party, the first peer to be so convicted since 1760, his whereabouts were still a mystery, as indeed they have been since a few hours after the murder. The only clue was a borrowed car, found abandoned near the south coast port of Newhaven, from which, in those less regulated days, he might have caught a ferry. Inside the car the police discovered blood stains and a section of lead pipe similar to the one used to kill Rivett.
Over the past 50 years, however, Lucan has been seen in almost every country on earth. I myself was given a story by a former employee of one of the earl’s friends, who told me that his father had been asked to take Lucan to a small airfield in the early hours of November 8. I did not believe this, just as I don’t believe the sightings that had Lucan sobbing in a gym changing room in Vancouver or strolling through a hotel foyer in Botswana. Nor do I accept the theory posited by Neil Berriman, although I understand his desire to believe that justice for his mother is still possible.
My own view is that Lord Lucan died by his own hand, probably by drowning. But the notion of a fugitive aristo drinking vodka martinis over a laconic game of backgammon, subsidized by his rich and powerful friends, is integral to the myth, and that is what counts. The Metropolitan Police found a good cover for their own failings in tales of how the Lucan set (the “Eton Mafia,” as the papers called them) refused to assist their inquiry. In their excuses they were greatly helped by John Aspinall, founder of the Clermont Club in Mayfair, where Lucan cascaded his private income over the chemin-de-fer tables like one of his 18th-century forebears.
Aspinall, who had deliberately cultivated an antique gentlemen’s club atmosphere and got wonderfully rich on the back of it, embarked on a public tease about how he knew more about dear old “Lucky” Lucan’s fate than he would ever deign to let on. In the end, however, it amounted to nothing. Meanwhile, the billionaire businessman James Goldsmith, another Clermont habitué, successfully sued over a claim that he had been party to an escape plot.
The rest of the group—like Lucan himself, who would be declared bankrupt in absentia—had been cleaned out by Aspinall and were anything but the masters of the universe that they were presumed to be. (One of them, Charles Benson, was offering newspaper tips for the Royal Ascot horse races during the week of the inquest.) These people, in fact, had no power and only an echo of privilege. Lucan, an earl without money, was less like a member of the ruling class than like one of the trade union leaders who back then were holding governments and industry to ransom.
Yet it is so enticing and believable, the notion that a peer’s freedom has been valued over justice for a working-class woman. Fifty years later the English public is asking the same questions about Prince Andrew’s connection to Jeffrey Epstein and his alleged sexual assault of Virginia Giuffre.
Class, the unwanted glue that holds British society together even as people chafe and tear at it, was the heart of the myth. Today, in a country that increasingly resembles its 1970s incarnation, not much has changed. The last vestige of deference may have gone with the death of Queen Elizabeth II, but there remains a masochistic obsession with the public school brigade, the Saltburn breed, whom it is deliciously permissible to loathe while, at the same time, half craving entrée into their circle.
My best guess, therefore, is that any 2024 reevaluation of the Lucan case will come to precisely the same conclusions as in 1974. As I learned after my book was published, you cannot kill a myth. It is the way that the story settles, a distillation of perceptions and, one might say, preconceptions. Even so, there has to be more to these events, a bedrock of reality, an explanation.
For me, ultimately, this is the tale of a marriage: a misalliance of Strindbergian proportions, an attenuated battle with the children as spoils of war, in which each party sought the destruction of the other and Sandra Rivett was collateral damage. What is so hard to convey, given the long-established narrative—and the visuals—is that the wife, described by her own sister as “a consummate actress,” was really the stronger party.
Since Veronica’s death it has become possible to reveal that two of my interviewees held the view that she herself had committed the murder, either because of her mental state (an issue since childhood, again according to her sister) or as an act of revenge on Lucan. In fact, there was a conundrum within the forensic evidence. Blood from Sandra’s group B was found in Veronica’s shoes and on her clothes, while blood from Veronica’s group A was on the mail sack into which the victim’s body had been bundled. No questioning about this was permitted at the inquest, although a medical witness did attest that Veronica’s head injuries could—unlikely as it seems—have been self-inflicted.
Such a reversal of the narrative, so compelling, like an Agatha Christie denouement, although I do not subscribe to it. The forensics were compromised by the investigation and impossible to rely upon.
Which leaves us with people. Human nature. My own belief is that Lucan—a fantasist, a waxwork earl whose superbly confident looks belied the inadequacy and tumult within—employed a hit man to commit the murder. This explains why a man apparently does not recognize his own wife, and it is psychologically convincing. The servant, again.
“He’d become not rational,” was how Lucan’s sister put it to me, adding, in some distress, “I could imagine that John might have hired a hit man, yes.”
Unless one day rather soon somebody enters a bar in, let’s say, Gaborone, and encounters an old man of stately bearing, and is able to make him talk, theories are all that we have. But then, in the words of the novelist John Fowles, “Nothing lasts like a mystery. The one thing people never forget is the unsolved.” I give the Lucan case another 50 years, at least.
This story appears in the March 2024 issue of Town & Country. SUBSCRIBE NOW
