History in close-up, through the people who were there.
When I was growing up in the 1980s, it seemed like almost every weekend there was a story in the newspapers about where British aristocrat Lord Lucan had been spotted around the world. He was the world’s most famous missing person. His name became synonymous with mysterious disappearances: he was often the punchline to a joke about something that was hard to find.
Yet the case which made him infamous was very far from being a laughing matter. On 7 November 1974, someone beat Sandra Rivett to death with a length of lead piping in a basement in London’s exclusive Belgravia. She worked as a nanny for the three children of Veronica, Lady Lucan, who was also beaten with the same weapon. Lady Lucan said the perpetrator was her estranged husband John, Lord Lucan.
There was a coroner’s inquest into Sandra Rivett’s murder, during which a jury was directed to name who was responsible. They named Lord Lucan. Because Lord Lucan had disappeared, he wasn’t there to defend himself. This was the last but one case in England where a suspect could be declared guilty by an inquest jury. If Lord Lucan returned now, the verdict would not suffice. He would still have to face a criminal trial to determine his guilt or innocence.
The Sunday Mirror published a letter from Lady Lucan to her husband appealing to him to give himself upIn the macho, hard-drinking culture of 1970s London, male police and journalists often socialised with each other and shared information. Standards of ethics and forensics were not what they are today.
Lord Lucan spent most of his time gambling at London’s ritzy Clermont Club. The day after he disappeared, the club’s owner John Aspinall gathered Lucan’s friends together for lunch. Aspinall said they were discussing what to do if Lucan returned, but there has been a lot of speculation about whether some associates helped him to escape. The police believed some of Lucan’s friends were withholding information.
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