A Different Class of Murder

by Laura Thompson

  Somebody unlocked the back door, went into the garden and dripped Sandra’s blood. There is a faint possibility that, as the police said, the door could have been left unlocked inadvertently; also that the blood in the garden could have been transferred accidentally, although dripping implies that it came from a heavily bloodied source.

  Lord Lucan entered the house, either because he was passing and saw something through the basement window; or because he was intent on murder; or for some other reason that is unknown.

  So much that is unknown; one is cast adrift from the consolations of fictional omniscience. Nevertheless it is possible to assemble theories, facts and suspects in a metaphorical library, and test them.

  ‘The crime was not committed so –

  M. Poirot must know that perfectly well.’

  AGATHA CHRISTIE, Murder on the Orient Express, 1934

  The first theory is that the attacks on Sandra Rivett and Veronica Lucan were incidental. What had been attempted at 46 Lower Belgrave Street was not murder but burglary, possibly arranged by Lord Lucan.

  This seems psychologically bloodless, in the face of all the passionate motives that were flying around: it is rather like the suggestion by Hercule Poirot that the murder on the Orient Express was committed by an outsider, a character who does not appear in the book, a nameless assassin who skipped on to the train disguised in a wagon-lit uniform. This is solutionus interruptus. It lacks the catharsis of true resolution. But it could have happened that way. Sometimes a solution is not an epiphany.

  Similarly, when one comes down to cool-headed fact, it must be said that what Lord Lucan needed more than anything in the world was money. Veronica herself would later say that his motivation was ‘purely financial’:

  He decided that he was about to go bankrupt and he had to save the reputation of the family. The only way he could do that was either to win a terrific amount at the tables – which obviously he couldn’t – or to get hold of the house and sell it as fast as he could. Since I was firmly in place at the house he had to get rid of me. It was a calculated act. There was no personal feeling involved.1

  It is quite true that Veronica was immovably stationed at 46 Lower Belgrave Street. Could Lucan have told the courts that he needed to sell the house? The former lawyer, who commented on the custody case, says: ‘He had the right to ask. He couldn’t force it. Because she is resident in the house. They would look at the overall finances of the family, and say is the house in Belgravia of disproportionate value in the circumstances? It’s simple arithmetic.’

  The fact that Lower Belgrave Street had been handed unquestioningly to Veronica, as if it were her inalienable right to live in a six-storey house off Eaton Square, would have caused agony to Lucan. Nevertheless the idea that he planned his wife’s death in order to get control of the house cannot be true. The lease was in the hands of a family trust, set up by Pat Lucan as part of the marriage settlement for his son.

  Lucan had already tried to get Coutts bank to release capital from one of the trusts, but had backed off because this might have reflected badly in an appeal against the custody judgment. He knew, therefore, that 46 Lower Belgrave Street could not be sold simply because Veronica was no longer there to live in it. The terms of the trust would not permit it.

  He could, however, have dreamed up the idea of an insurance scam. The auction of the family silver was imminent at Christie’s, but estimates did not cover Lucan’s liabilities, and anyway he may have been reluctant to go through with it: the loss of those beautiful, irreplaceable things. He could, therefore, have been attracted by the thought of a staged burglary. Alternatively there could have been a genuine burglary, carried out by parties unknown and independent of Lucan, which ended in violence.

  For all that Lucan was flirting dangerously with the prospect of bankruptcy, he had a family house full of valuable items. In the basement, close to where Sandra was attacked, was a large safe. Somebody may have intended to get into that safe. There were also heirlooms and jewellery in the property. A sapphire and diamond necklace was around Veronica’s neck at the time of the attack.

  In support of this theory are two small points. The first is the American mailsack, which the police found impossible to trace. David Gerring wrote in his book that it had probably come from the Clermont, but this typically casual statement was unsupported even by Ranson; actually the sack is most easily explained if the killer was a professional. The second point is that the Lucans had been burgled before. In 1964 there was a mysterious theft of £2,000 worth of jewellery, although it was reported that ‘no sign of forced entry to the house was found’.2 In such circumstances, two explanations are likely: either somebody connected to a member of the Lucan household had cut a key, or Lucan himself was behind the theft.

  The same explanations hold, ten years on. In the intervening period, particularly the sixteen months leading up to the murder, a large number of people had been employed by the Lucans. The antecedents of some of these were unknown. Any one of them might have seen and talked about what was in the house, and had access to a key. Many burglaries are, of course, carried out in these circumstances.

  And a burglar could have attacked the two women who surprised him. Veronica described her assailant putting his hands around her throat, which was encircled by a valuable necklace. ‘At one point’, read the Daily Express interview that she gave in January 1975, ‘[she] felt her assailant grabbing at it. Surprisingly she found the composure to demand: ‘What are you doing with my necklace?’ The sound of her voice seemed to make him stop...’ This account is at odds with the story given to the inquest, where Veronica stated that the attack stopped for an altogether different reason: she had grabbed her husband’s testicles. Perhaps modesty prevailed in what was then, in some ways at least, a more decorous press.

  The burglar, who had entered the house with a key that had been previously cut or loaned, could have fled when Lucan arrived. The police expressed downright scepticism about any such ‘second man’, saying that nobody saw a blood-stained person in Belgravia on the night of the murder, but the same objection applied to Lucan himself. And if Lucan could be said to have made his getaway in a car, so too might anybody else have done.

  In 2004 Channel 4 broadcast a documentary entitled The Hunt for Lord Lucan. In it Lucan’s son, George Bingham, suggested that Sandra Rivett was murdered by a burglar; Lucan was waiting outside the house, and went in when he sensed that something had gone wrong. ‘I suspect’, said George, in defence of his alternative theory, ‘that the original investigation into this matter fell well short of what a reasonable general public might expect of the police. And I think on that basis alone the case merits a further investigation.’

  This is incontrovertible: the investigation was little short of pathetic. Nevertheless Veronica reacted fiercely in the press, accusing George of impugning her evidence, and insisting that there was nothing of value in the basement safe.

  It is true that most of the silver was at Christie’s, but a silver regimental dagger was actually found in the safe after the house was sold, and it has been suggested that there were other items kept there.3 The bloody footmarks mentioned at the inquest by Graham Forsyth, which could not have been transference as he was so early on the scene, led to the area of the safe. It ‘appeared to be locked’, Roy Ranson wrote carefully. Of course the safe may not have been the target of this hypothetical burglary. A thief who wished to steal items upstairs might wait in the basement until Veronica was asleep; although it is a moot point whether jewellery, for instance, was in fact Lucan’s to claim on insurance.

  If Lucan were behind such a burglary, he would clearly have chosen to stage it on Sandra’s night off. Hence his question, as recounted by his daughter: ‘Daddy asked me when Sandra had her days off. I said her day off was Thursday.’ It is possible, just, to interpret this in a favourable light: Lucan’s concern for his children meant that he wanted to know when his wife was home alone with them, and accordingly checked on
the house to ensure that all was well. Nevertheless the more obvious interpretation, that Lucan sought confirmation of when his wife would be the only adult in the house, constitutes extremely damaging evidence against him.

  A burglar could have made the bloody footprints that led to the back door, and shed the group B blood in the garden. Susan Maxwell-Scott, in her account of the conversation with Lucan, told the inquest: ‘He said the man made off. In my imagination it was probably out of the back door.’ If the intruder failed to escape that way, he could then have left the house by the front door when the Lucans went upstairs.

  Susan was leaving the exit route deliberately unclear; but it may be that the back wall was not as difficult to scale as has been implied. It was six feet high, with a three-foot trellis on top and some handy creeper to climb. At the inquest, Veronica said: ‘It would have been a prickly business’: not an impossible one. The police claimed to have found no evidence of anybody climbing the wall, but they were not looking for it. They had their man.

  There was also a third means of entry: the door at the bottom of the steps that lead down from street level to the basement. The police, who dismissed any idea that this door had been opened on the night of the murder, stated that it was found locked. According to Pierrette Goletto, however, who had a key to the basement door while she worked for Veronica, it was in frequent use. Therefore, although a less certain means of access than the front entrance at Lower Belgrave Street, the door cannot be completely overlooked.

  The burglary scenario goes some way to backing up Lord Lucan’s own story. This has him passing the house for no other reason than that he liked to keep an eye on it; particularly, it might be said, on the nanny’s night off. He was on his way to Elizabeth Street, to change for dinner, and so he took the route past the house. It is perfectly credible that he would do this, given his anxieties about his children; people do stare at houses when they are fixated on their inhabitants.

  The problem, however, is that given the effort that is required to see into the basement, Lucan must have looked deliberately through the window. For what reason? Why would he have peered and stooped? He might have done so if he had heard something untoward. Yet he did not say this.

  It could be, however, that Lucan, having arranged a burglary, was hanging around and on the alert, as his son George suggested. He might, then, have looked through the basement window. But the only way in which he could have ‘interrupted a fight in the basement’, as his mother told the inquest, was if Veronica received most of her injuries on the ground floor, then ran downstairs, followed by her assailant. If that is untrue, and it certainly seems most unlikely, there remains the possibility that Lucan looked through the window and glimpsed evidence of violence; that he saw blood on the floor, or even the mailsack; and realized that something had gone very wrong. Nevertheless his story remains problematical in the extreme.

  The most difficult question of all is why a hypothetical burglar should have committed acts of such tremendous violence. If he had come armed with the piping, why not simply use a knockout blow? One can stretch possibility to its fullest extent and say that the man may have been an unsuspected psychopath. In the ‘A6 Murder’ of 1961, the petty criminal James Hanratty pulled a gun on an adulterous couple, drove around with them through the night, then, in the early hours, shot the man dead and left the woman paralysed. It was suggested that he had been paid to frighten the pair into ending their affair, although his motive may simply have been theft; either way the extreme violence was out of character. Nevertheless, it happened.

  This, then, is the first theory: not impossible, but far from satisfying.

  ‘I said to myself: “Let us be simple. What has really happened?” And I saw that what had really happened was that Maggie Buckley had been killed. Just that! But who could want Maggie Buckley dead…?’

  AGATHA CHRISTIE, Peril at End House, 1932

  The second hypothesis, which is more interesting, is that Sandra Rivett was the intended victim all along.

  Why did Sandra go downstairs that night? To make tea, say Veronica and the police. Yet Veronica also said, at the inquest, that it was unusual for her nanny to offer to make tea.

  There was a Baby Belling on the third floor, which Veronica has subsequently stated was ‘disconnected’. There is no reason to doubt the truth of this, although the facility to make tea was presumably there for the convenience of the Lucan nannies. If Veronica liked to drink tea in the evening, it was for her convenience also. Why, then, should it have been disconnected? It is hardly desirable to have to go down three or four floors to a darkened basement, in a house where the light bulbs were frequently blown out, to make tea at night. In fact it would be downright unnerving to many women. Ranson knew this, and sought to counter it. Sandra, he wrote, was ‘settled in comfortably to this friendly, family home. The creaks of the stairs and the dark of the waiting kitchen held no fears for her.’ Nor was she bothered when the light failed to switch on at the top of the basement stairs. She continued down, ‘undaunted by the darkness’, despite the fact that she was wearing dainty little court heels and carrying teacups.

  There is another oddity about the tea, contained within the evidence given by Frances. Her statement was not always convenient to the police; and Michael Eastham objected to its inclusion at the inquest, probably because of Lucan’s question as to when Sandra took her night off. Yet the words of a bright ten-year-old, who had the clarity of mind to report facts but not the adult ability to interpret them, nor to bend or elide them to any particular end, are peculiarly trustworthy.

  In her recollection of the evening of 7 November, Frances said that she watched The Six Million Dollar Man with her mother, siblings and nanny in the second-floor bedroom.

  When the programme finished at 8.30pm, I went back upstairs to the nursery and played a little more with my game. Sandra brought George and Camilla upstairs and put them to bed...

  I stayed in the nursery for about five minutes only, then I went downstairs again to Mummy’s room. That would have been about 8.40pm. I asked Mummy where Sandra was and she said she was downstairs making some tea. I didn’t see her go downstairs so I don’t know if she took any empty cups with her.

  At the inquest, Veronica gave a different version of these events, which shifted the timeframe of the attacks forward by some twenty minutes. Sandra, she said, had looked into the bedroom at around 8.55pm and asked if she would like a cup of tea.

  ‘Where were you’, asked the coroner, ‘when she said she would get you some tea?

  ‘I was lying on the bed.’

  ‘And your daughter also?’

  ‘Also.’

  ‘You can place the time from the television programme at about five to nine?’

  ‘Yes.’

  In direct contradiction, Frances said: ‘The last time I saw Sandra was when she took George and Camilla upstairs to bed.’ In other words, if Sandra had looked in on Veronica, it was at around 8.35pm, while Frances was briefly in the nursery. If anybody noticed the discrepancies between these statements at the inquest, nothing was said. Once Frances’s statement became admissible, Eastham might have made use of it to quiz Veronica about the accuracy of her own, but his cross-examination was halted after two questions. Twenty years later Veronica gave another, again slightly different version of the half-hour between 8.30 and 9.00pm. She said that Sandra had phoned her parents, then gone upstairs and done some ironing in her room, before making the offer of tea.4 This is impossible if one accepts Frances’s statement.

  As some crockery was found dropped close to Sandra’s body, it would be absurd to say that she did not go down to make tea. But if the offer to do this was unusual, did she have another reason for going downstairs? The first reaction to the murder of the former nanny, Lilian Jenkins, whom Veronica had sacked in late 1972, was that Sandra had gone to let somebody into the house.

  There are indications that Sandra was a possible victim in her own right. Women who enjoy a fun, sexy fr
eedom arouse strong emotions in those who do not: puritanical disapproval, envy, spite. In men they can arouse anger. How dare they live as they please? Among Sandra’s male friends there could have been one who turned nasty, a misfit beneath the charm. Her ‘official’ boyfriend John Hankins, to whom Sandra spoke that night, and who was working near to the house, was cleared by the police. But there was the man with whom she had broken off a few days before the murder; presumably the same man as was mentioned by Christina, whom the children described as driving a Mercedes. There was, too, the mysterious Norwegian seaman, whose existence is only a rumour but such a particular one (would anybody invent the fact of him being Norwegian?) that it carries conviction. At the time, there was definitely a vague swirl of opinion that Sandra had been killed by design rather than in error.5 Wishful thinking within the Lucan camp may have been the origin of the idea. Yet there was something to it, a small fire within the smoke.

  Supporting it was the statement made by Lucan’s sister Sally. This alluded to a man who sometimes stayed at Lower Belgrave Street. It is likely that Sally was piecing together scraps of information in the hope that, when assembled, they would create an alternative culprit. She was a pleasant, sincere woman, liked even by the police, but insistent upon her brother’s innocence. Indeed she was so desperate to exonerate him that she fell for the tale of a punchy ex-boxer, Michael Fitzpatrick, who claimed that a friend had seen a man, definitely not Lucan, leaving the house on the night of the murder. Later Fitzpatrick would admit in court that the story was an invention, although rumours persisted that there was substance to it. Sally was not the kind of person to invent stories, although she may have exaggerated. And if the man who allegedly stayed at Lower Belgrave Street had been in the house on the night of the 7th, one has to think that Frances would have mentioned it. ‘She was muddying the waters,’ says Graham Forsyth, of Sally’s statement. ‘But I admit, we weren’t looking elsewhere.’