A Different Class of Murder

by Laura Thompson

  Nevertheless, on 20 July 1973, Lucan was advised to concede. The hearing had already lasted nine days, and had cost him upwards of £20,000. Veronica was given custody, with the proviso that a nanny must be in residence. Lucan was given access on every other weekend. This was better than the worst scenario he had outlined to Mrs Tucker, although not much.

  Lucan was a good loser, he could lose ten grand at chemmy and remain cool and unmoved, but when the custody case was over he sat stricken on a bench outside the courtroom with his head in his hands. This was not what happened to somebody like him. ‘His expression changed completely,’ Lilian Jenkins would later say. ‘He didn’t smile and looked older. His faith in the law was quite shaken.’13 From this time on, the façade would start visibly to crack: Veronica had inserted her dainty stiletto behind its shield. On the great battlefield of the Lucan marriage, she had won the day. She had taken his home, his money, his reputation, his self-respect and his children. As an act of revenge by an abandoned wife, it was magnificently complete. She could not have done better had she had a top PR firm and the whole of Twitter at her disposal. ‘He told people’, she later said, ‘that no matter what you did as a husband it was always against you. He had to trot out the usual lines.’14

  If he were honest he would have had to admit, not without a certain wry admiration, that she had played her hand better than he. She had commanded the sympathy of the court with her female vulnerability. He was guilty, through and through, of anything that she cared to name.

  ‘The trouble was,’ says Christina simply, ‘his looks were always against him.’ It was the aristocracy, at it again, still believing that they had the right to whatever they chose to take.

  The judge, Sir Stanley Rees, was said to have taken a strong dislike to him. In Rees’s 2001 obituary, it was said that he had found Lucan ‘arrogant and untruthful and was less than pleased to discover that the earl had recently flouted the law by snatching the children from his wife’. This perverse interpretation reads very much like prejudice: the terrible imponderable in a courtroom.

  As Lucan emerged into the sunlight on the Strand, probably headed for the nearest triple vodka martini, Veronica returned to the family house. Christina says:

  The children were just literally, that afternoon, removed from their father’s flat – their belongings all sort of shoved in paper bags – and just pushed into Lower Belgrave Street, goodbye, and the door slammed. And it wasn’t Veronica’s fault – that’s what I try and say all the time. She was let down, wasn’t she, by the psychiatrist at the Priory and by the judge, really. None of them looked further than the end of their noses, really. And none of them, in my opinion, thought about the children.

  Everybody was distraught that the children had been taken back like that, without proper supervision. She loved the children. She just couldn’t cope. She was taking lots and lots of pills – she used to spend a great deal of time in bed [a statement backed by Lilian Jenkins, who recalled that Veronica ‘practically lived in her bedroom, in a sort of twilight world, with the blinds drawn all day’15].

  Within all the violent verbal bloodletting there was, of course, a very real issue: Lucan’s gambling. Had he won the custody case, and acquired his family without what he perceived to be its disruptive element, it is entirely possible that he would have gambled less. He would have become happy, and happy people are not addicts. He must have known that his lifestyle would play badly in court. Yet he clearly believed that his evidence against Veronica would outweigh it. As Veronica herself later put it: ‘He had gone around telling everyone that he was going to win and that the courts couldn’t fail to see his argument.’16 Again, however, one might say that he had already won the children once, and therefore could reasonably assume that he would win them again. ‘You wouldn’t think that anyone who was a gambler would get custody of three children, would you, really?’ says his old schoolfriend. ‘But he did, at that first hearing.’

  The loss of the children was a blow that Lucan could barely withstand. His love for them is well-nigh undisputed. Veronica told the inquest that his attitude towards them was ‘very affectionate’. Only Roy Ranson says: ‘I believe that, rather than the much quoted love of his children, it is his lack of money, all of it lost through uncontrollable gambling, that provides the key to this case.’ Otherwise it is recognized that he was always a kindly, easygoing, generous father, far more so than was usual at the time within his class, and that he subsequently became overwhelmed with the need to have the children in his care.

  ‘We hear now about fathers who kill their children because they can’t see them,’ says Pierrette Goletto, the French girl who spent several months as nanny at Lower Belgrave Street in 1974. ‘And this is forty years ago – the rights of a father were completely ignored. But he adored his children.’

  ‘He was always very interested in the fact that his children get a good education,’ says Jane, ‘and not fritter themselves away’: as he had done. ‘He always said they were absolutely perfect,’ says his old schoolfriend. ‘Perfect, the three of them.’ The Maxwell-Scott nanny describes weekend parties at Grants Hill House, at which a collection of children would be deposited in the nursery:

  The parents would come in, and they’d often be drunk, and they would say oh, it’s the monkeys’ tea party. They’d sort of poke fun at them. Lord Lucan never did. He’d come in to the nursery – normally when they came in they’d say, this is Johnny and he’s allergic to whatever, and we’ll see you on Sunday night. Dumped! But Lord Lucan used to come in and out, in and out.

  He talked to me as if I was a person. He played the piano, and so do I, and I can remember exactly, we played a duet and Frances sang it in German. He used to give me a fiver – a huge amount of money – he was the only one who did that. He would be very loving to the children. It was noticeable, he stood out because he was very paternal.

  I suppose afterwards he felt he had totally lost them, and he couldn’t live with that.

  At the inquest into Sandra Rivett’s murder, Bill Shand Kydd was asked about Lucan’s relationship with his children. ‘He was very fond of them,’ he replied. ‘He was very worried about them. He considered they were not being properly looked after.’ Veronica’s solicitor objected to this, and the objection was upheld. But Bill was in a position to know Lucan’s feelings. The children often spent weekends with their father at Horton Hall, the Shand Kydd home. Christina says:

  We bought a completely new set of clothes for all of them, that they just went into when they got to us. John would play endless games with them, and with our children, on the lawn and things, and they had really lovely happy times. And then you had the agony – and it must have been even worse for him – of taking them back on the Sunday night.

  Lucan also spent access weekends with his younger sister, Sally, to whom he remained very close, or at homes belonging to friends such as the Earl of Suffolk and Berkshire, who lived at Charlton Park in Wiltshire. ‘And then I think Veronica would be terribly unhappy,’ says Christina, ‘because the children weren’t there. Because although she liked being alone, she was terribly lonely, I think. It was hopeless.’ ‘When she got control of them,’ says Bill, ‘there was nothing he could do.’

  It is said that Lord Lucan was unable to accept this defeat, but that is not quite accurate. Defeat is precisely what a gambler can accept. What they object to is the skewing of the odds. A bent game. That is what he believed the custody case to have been. It is impossible, in those circumstances, to bring the game back to a fair footing. All that can happen is more of the same, low tactics, a fight to the death. The myth is quite right when it says that Lucan spent the next fifteen months engaged in dubious activities, designed to have the court order overturned. What it does not say is why he felt compelled to do these things. It also says that Lucan spent this period gambling with a terrifying abandon and borrowing money from all sides. Again, it does not say that the court case had blown a socking great hole in his already precari
ous finances, which he spent the rest of his known life trying to fill.

  ‘He would have needed a huge amount of money,’ says Christina, ‘because remember he had to pay her costs as well. And he just didn’t have it. He wanted to appeal, but his counsel said it will cost you thousands, and you’re unlikely to win. What with the evidence that was given by [Dr] Flood and Veronica’s picture of him… She painted quite a picture.’

  Nevertheless Lucan, tormented by thoughts of what might be going on at his house, became immersed in a campaign to have the judgment reversed. He ploughed on and on, rather as the 3rd Earl had done when he believed himself wronged. The question is whether his methods were simply attempts to acquire genuine evidence that his wife was an unfit parent; or whether, as the myth suggests, Lucan was escalating his former behaviour in the renewed hope of driving Veronica into madness, or even suicide.17

  For instance: Lucan often used a pocket cassette recorder to tape conversations when he phoned or visited Veronica. He had begun doing this before the custody case, in fact, and some of the tapes formed part of the evidence at the hearing. So James Comyn, although he may have had misgivings, had obviously been prepared to use them; and Michael Eastham hinted that he might do the same thing at the inquest (the coroner forestalled any such action).18

  More usually, however, Lucan’s willingness to tape his wife has been regarded not as an act of desperation, but of warped terrorism. The police, who found seventy hours of recorded material at the Elizabeth Street flat, certainly portrayed it that way. Furthermore, according to Roy Ranson, Lucan was fixing the game when he taped Veronica; he would needle her into a state of rage, then switch on the machine and record what sounded like an unstable woman. Veronica herself endorsed this, saying: ‘He [Lucan] would say something so outrageous, in a holier-than-thou voice, that I’d fly into a fury. My language on occasions was more Billingsgate than Belgravia.’19

  Yet Ranson’s inspector, David Gerring, would later offer a rather different view, stating that the tapes were ‘pathetic rather than revealing’. Gerring described a lot of ‘Hello – how are you – what have you been doing’, interspersed with long pauses. ‘The impression I gathered was that Lucan was himself disturbed,’ he concluded, although no reason is given for this assertion. Another account of the conversations, which came from a newspaper, had Lucan murmuring ‘yes, dear, yes, dear’ throughout. It described Veronica ‘firing off a barrage of criticism against her husband’; at one point she ‘refers to him disdainfully as “poor old Blucey”, a pet name [possibly a reference to his ‘house blue’ status at the Clermont]’.20

  At the start of 1974 Lucan employed Devlin and Co., a firm of private detectives based in Baker Street, to watch the Lower Belgrave Street house. Some of their findings were unsensational in the extreme: at 3.20 Veronica walked down the street; at 3.25 she walked up it; and so on. Devlin’s revved into action, however, when a Mrs Elizabeth Murphy took on the job of nanny. At the end of February a report was sent to Lucan, detailing Mrs Murphy’s movements on a particular Saturday morning, after she and the children had been followed to a newsagent’s shop in Ebury Street. ‘A few moments later they left those premises and were followed to the Irish Club, 82 Lyall St, London SW1, where they arrived at 12.10pm. Thereafter Mr Cranstoun [the tec] observed Mrs Murphy and the three children sitting at the bar drinking from glasses.’

  The hapless Mrs Murphy was an alcoholic, who had been twice sacked from former positions for heavy drinking and encouraging her charges to drink. She was a kind woman, but it would have been a strange father who was comforted by the thought of her acting as nanny to his children. Lucan replied to Devlin: ‘Thank you for your most useful report. I would like if possible the same arrangement for next Saturday and Sunday. Remember that my wife is extremely suspicious (the psychiatrists agree on a form of paranoia) so that if she was to go out with the three children and your man followed them he would have to be very careful.’

  Lucan made a complaint to the Official Solicitor, and Mrs Murphy was sacked. She was then hospitalized with a cancer that was soon to kill her. ‘May I say “thank you sincerely” for visiting me in hospital,’ she wrote to Lucan, ‘and your gift of lovely grapes, it was most considerate of you. I did not see Lady Lucan, perhaps she was tied up with household affairs…’

  Again Roy Ranson took the view that Lucan was manipulating the situation to incriminate his wife. Mrs Murphy died, wrote Ranson, ‘never knowing that the unhappiness of her later days had been directly caused by the Lord she had thanked so profusely’. In other words, by following the nanny who was having a midday drinking spree in the Irish Club with his children, and reporting her flagrant unsuitability to the authorities, Lucan had acted disgracefully. By visiting her in hospital, he was acting hypocritically. ‘The level to which Lucan now sank in his battle against Veronica’, spat Ranson, ‘was demonstrated by his subsequent behaviour towards the unfortunate Mrs Murphy.’

  Devlin’s were expensive, as much as £400 a week on some occasions. Therefore Lucan did some of their work himself. As he had in fact done ever since the custody judgment, he would park his dark-blue Mercedes on Lower Belgrave Street and watch the house through his sunglasses. He also sometimes watched his children when they went out to play in the nearby squares and parks. ‘Quite often John was there in his car,’ says Pierrette Goletto, ‘and he was looking at us. I don’t think the children saw him. It was a very sad situation.’

  ‘I think’, Veronica would later say, ‘he walked past the house to see the children or maybe just to walk past the house where we lived. I think that is a strong indication we were both hoping to get back together again.’21 It was a view that she would reiterate after the murder: that the marriage had not in fact been over. The implication is that, despite having accused her husband of things that no man could forgive, she still in some way longed to have him back; and perhaps found it unforgivable that he did not want to return.

  In December 1973 Lucan wrote to his lawyers:

  Today was Camilla’s Nativity Play and Frances’s Carol service. Veronica informed me of neither, but other parents had told me. I arrived at 11.10 for the play and, not seeing Veronica, I sat through it. At the end of the performance Camilla came down from the stage to see me. If I hadn’t been present she would have been one out of just two or three children who didn’t have a parent present. Camilla’s new nanny [Christabel Martin] came up to me after a short time and took her home. In the afternoon I went to Frances’s Carol Service. V arrived at 2.15pm, stood next to me and started to tell me that I was in breach of the court order. I told her to be quiet. At the end of the Service I left without saying Hullo to Frances.

  Christabel Martin was just one of the procession of nannies who marched in and out of Lower Belgrave Street between the end of the custody case, on 20 July, and the arrival of Sandra Rivett thirteen months later. One, Hazel Drobbins, stuck it out for four days. Two Spanish girls lasted a little longer. Pierrette Goletto stayed for several months in 1974, followed very briefly by Nadia Broome; then by Sandra. Lucan wrote in the letter to his lawyers:

  I told my wife on Friday that I was not prepared to pay £35 a week for the new nanny. She said that it was impossible to get anyone for less [in fact Sandra was paid £25]. She accused me of trying to ‘sabotage’ her. In ordinary circumstances, £15–20 is the going rate. I recognize that the circumstances are not normal, and that I must pay more. But there are limits. Am I obliged to bribe someone to live at 46 Lower Belgrave Street so that my wife may comply with the court order?

  The answer to this, apparently, was ‘yes’. The Knightsbridge Nannies agency issued a writ for unpaid fees in April 1974. According to the police, Lucan was deliberately dilatory in his payments; he wanted a constant turnover of nannies to make it look as though Veronica was not complying with the court order.22 Ranson also threw in the notion (partly contradicting the assertion about the non-payments) that the nannies left because they were uneasy about being ‘spied on’
by Lucan. Meanwhile Lucan himself suggested that some of them had found Veronica a tricky employer. ‘She got through a lot, did she?’ says the former lawyer. ‘I mean, the girls must have got the money, or the agency wouldn’t have provided them.’ Pierrette Goletto’s recollection is that the woman who ran the agency was, in fact, a friend of Veronica’s. This was confirmed by Veronica herself at the inquest.

  The unsatisfactory quality of some of the nannies – ‘Some of them were nice, and some were absolutely appalling,’ says Christina – may have been a factor in Lucan’s reluctance to pay for them. Who would rush to spend money on a girl who walked out after four days? Although in the letter to his lawyers Lucan accepted that he had to keep forking out, he would have been heartily sick of doing so. As well as the nannies he was giving Veronica £40 a week for living expenses, and running her establishment on top of his own. Payments were, as she said at the inquest, ‘erratic’, although the money came ‘in the end’. Pierrette Goletto recalls that when Lucan came to the house ‘he was nagging Veronica – telling her he was stopping the money, and things like this. All the food we were having came from Harrods, and he stopped it.’ Pierrette herself strode round to Elizabeth Street and asked Lucan to reinstate the Harrods account, which he did.

  Part of the problem, of course, was his pitifully feeble cashflow. But there probably was, too, a desire to exact a petty revenge. At the end of 1973 Lucan received a letter from Veronica’s milkman: ‘Your wife Lady Lucan asked me to send her account to you, but the amount of £57.62 has not been forthcoming. As we have sent several accounts, we have been forced to stop supplying. However Lady Lucan assures me on the telephone that you will pay this account directly you receive this bill.’ The payment to the milkman was one of the last cheques that Lucan ever wrote.