Great Unsolved Crimes

by Rodney Castleden

  The police hoped to use the killer’s obvious love of publicity to trap him. A film was made about the Zodiac killings, and when it was shown in San Francisco a suggestion box was set up in the foyer, where people could leave any information or ideas they had about the identity of the killer. It was a big box, big enough to have a detective hidden inside it. The detective read each letter with the aid of a torch as it was dropped in and the idea was that he would raise the alarm if there was anything that looked as if it might have come from Zodiac himself.

  The Oakland police thought they had the killer at one point. The suspect had seen the film three times and had been observed acting strangely during the showings. But it turned out he was a Vietnam War veteran who was sexually excited by the scenes of violence – and his handwriting did not match.

  Police in San Francisco came to think that Zodiac was either dead or in prison for a crime in another state. But one criminologist at least thought the killing had continued – in a new location. There were several murders of young women, often students or hitch-hikers, in the Santa Barbara area in the early 1970s. Like Zodiac’s victims, none of them had been sexually molested.

  One possible suspect was a former boyfriend of Darlene Ferrin, who lived at Riverside at the time when Cheri Jo Bates was murdered. The suspect lived with his mother, whom he hated, and cut up small mammals as a hobby. During the period of three years when the Zodiac Killer was completely inactive, 1975–1978, the suspect had been in a psychiatric hospital after being charged with child molesting. In spite of these promising-sounding leads, it has proved impossible to identify the Zodiac Killer with any certainty.

  Over the years, many people were investigated as suspects. The lead suspect was Arthur Leigh Allen (1933–1992). In 1971, a friend of Allen’s reported to the police his suspicion that Allen was the killer. It seemed to the police that there was a good deal of circumstantial incriminating evidence that agreed with this. Arthur Allen was a convicted criminal and there were components of weapons in his home. When asked if he had read a short story called The Most Dangerous Game, he said he had and that it had impressed him. The police thought this significant, as the cipher code Zodiac used appears to refer to this story. The police kept returning to Allen as their prime suspect, searching his home three times, in 1972, 1991 and again in 1992, just two days after his death. Arthur Allen always denied any connection with the crimes, and the police were unable to find any physical evidence of his involvement. It was one of those cases where the police were convinced they had the right man, but could not prove it. It is worrying that policemen can see reading books – and being impressed by them – as indicating or reinforcing criminal tendencies. One of my own books was recently found in the home of a murderer, and the local sheriff observed that it was ‘not normal reading matter’. I suppose much depends upon your point of view.

  The Vallejo County Police Department wisely decided not to proceed with charges against Arthur Allen. Allen’s handwriting did not match Zodiac’s; his DNA did not match the DNA on Zodiac’s letters either. In this remarkable case, in which there seem to be no shortage of witness reports, descriptions and physical evidence, even the prime suspect evaporated into thin air.

  The Vanishing Earl: Lord Lucan and the Murder of Sandra Rivett

  London. 1974. It was the middle of the evening of Thursday 7 November, and Lady Lucan began to wonder what had happened to her nanny. Five minutes before nine o’clock, the twenty-nine-year-old nanny, Sandra Rivett, had gone downstairs to the basement kitchen of 46 Lower Belgrave Street to make some tea for Lady Lucan. A quarter of an hour had passed, and Veronica, wife of the seventh Earl of Lucan, was concerned that Sandra had not returned. She left her three children upstairs and went down to the ground floor to find her.

  The house was a typical upmarket London town house, with its rooms spread across six floors, including a basement where the kitchen and breakfast room were situated. The ground floor, where Lady Lucan now was, accommodated the dining room, living room and a cloakroom. The upper floors were mostly bedrooms. Lady Lucan noticed that the basement light was off. When she tried the switch, it did not work. Lady Lucan called Sandra’s name, but there was no answer. She could hear faint noises, which she thought might be coming from the cloakroom, and wondered if that was where Sandra was.

  Suddenly she was attacked, bludgeoned repeatedly over the head. She screamed and was told forcefully to shut up. She was a small, slight woman only five foot two inches tall, and she found herself struggling with a large and threatening figure, which stuck three gloved fingers down her throat. He tried to strangle her. He tried to gouge out her eyes. She found herself fighting for her life. She grabbed and squeezed her attacker’s testicles, which made him back away momentarily and she was able to get away.

  Lady Lucan managed eventually to get out into the street and stagger to the nearest pub. The Plumbers’ Arms was just thirty yards along the street, and she knew there would be people there who could help her; it was a place of safety. She burst in, gasping, ‘Murder, murder! I think my neck has been broken! He’s tried to kill me. I’ve just escaped being murdered. He’s in the house. He’s murdered the nanny.’ She managed to explain that her children were still in the house, but no-one went to save them. Instead, the police were called, while Lady Lucan slumped to the floor in a faint and was taken to hospital.

  The police forced open the door and noticed a lot of blood on the stairwell. Then they went upstairs to check that the children were unharmed. The seven-year-old boy and the four-year-old girl were asleep in their bedrooms. The ten-year-old Frances was quietly watching television in a bedroom on the second floor. They were far enough up the building not to have been disturbed by the violent incident in the basement.

  The police noticed that the basement door was open. Close to it they found a twisted length of lead pipe, about nine inches long and wrapped in tape. In the breakfast room there was more blood, with pieces of smashed china. On one of the basement chairs, there was an unscrewed light bulb; the police suspected that the intruder removed the bulb so that the victim would be unable to see him. In the basement there was a canvas mailbag resting in a large pool of blood. Inside they discovered the battered body of Sandra Rivett. She had died of blows to the back of her head.

  At midnight, the police went to find Lord Lucan. They thought this would be a simple matter of going to his apartment in Elizabeth Street, where he had lived since separating from his wife over a year before. He was not there.

  The following evening, the police visited Lady Lucan in hospital. She was in a poor state, suffering from the effects of seven head wounds, loss of blood and shock. Her injuries had been examined. There was a suspicion, never really followed up, that the injuries inside her mouth had been self-inflicted; it is extremely unusual for an attacker to put his fingers inside his victim’s mouth. Perhaps there was a clue here to what really happened, but for the moment the police were ready to accept Lady Lucan’s version of events. She was able to tell them that she had put the two youngest children to bed and then watched television with Frances. Sandra had knocked and come in shortly before nine to ask if they would like some tea. Then she described going downstairs to meet her attacker, who she was certain was her husband.

  She said that after the struggle they had both fallen to the floor exhausted and her husband had admitted accidentally killing the nanny. Sandra normally took Thursday evening off, and Lucan was expecting to find his wife, alone, in the basement. Typically, it was Lady Lucan herself who made the tea in the evening, as her husband would have known, and her husband had intended to kill her. Because of the change of routine he had killed Sandra by mistake.

  The Lucans got up off the floor and went upstairs to the bedroom where Frances was still watching television. Frances told the police she noticed her mother had blood on her face when her parents came into the room; then Frances was sent to her own room. After that, according to Lady Lucan, the Lucans went into the bathroom, whe
re ‘Lucky’ Lucan inspected her injuries before laying a towel on the bed for her to rest on. When he went to the bathroom for more towels to clean her up, and she was on her own for a moment, she took her chance and ran out of the house.

  A difficulty with all of this is that there is only one available version of what passed between Lady Lucan and her attacker. We have only Lady Lucan’s word that her attacker was Lord Lucan, and there were no witnesses to the conversation. One possibility is that Lady Lucan tried to calm her husband down by pretending to collude with him. She persuaded him that Sandra would not be missed. They could hide the body and she could tell the police that a burglar had broken in. She was terrified that he was going to kill her too and was ready to agree to anything. Lucan suggested that she should take some sleeping pills. She agreed, but only if she could lie down for a while upstairs on her bed.

  Lord Lucan, Richard John Bingham, was born in 1934, the son of George Bingham, the sixth Earl of Lucan. He was the second of four children, with a younger brother and two older sisters. During the Second World War, the children were evacuated to the United States, where they lived in luxury in mansions in Florida and New York. After the war, Lucan went to Eton, developing into an imposing figure six foot four inches tall. He did his National Service in the Coldstream Guards before joining a merchant bank. He spent most of his free time gambling at the casino tables at the Claremont Club in Berkeley Square. After winning £26,000 in two days, Lucan decided to devote himself full-time to gambling. He left the bank.

  Lucan met his wife, Veronica Duncan, in 1963. By chance, Veronica’s sister married Bill Shand Kydd, who was a wealthy friend of Lucan’s. Just two months after they married, Lucan’s father died and he inherited the title and a large amount of money. The seventh Earl of Lucan was not the first to acquire a spectacularly bad reputation. His great-great-grandfather, the third Earl, was responsible ordering the catastrophic Charge of the Light Brigade at the Battle of Balaclava.

  After the birth of their children, Veronica developed severe post-natal depression, which was unfortunately incorrectly diagnosed and inadequately treated. As a result, her mental condition gradually deteriorated, though she was still able to run the household and care for the children. Lord Lucan was supportive and keen to help her out of the depression. He researched the subject and tried to persuade her to seek professional help. In 1967, he urged her go into a psychiatric hospital, but she refused treatment. It seems he tried again in 1971 to have her admitted to hospital after she experienced hallucinations. He got her as far as the front door of the hospital before she ran off in a fright.

  The pressure on their marriage brought it to breaking point in 1972. Lucan became increasingly impatient with Veronica’s illness and her refusal to do anything constructive about it. He spent more and more time with his friends at the gambling tables. There he lost a great deal of the money he had inherited.

  According to one of the nannies they employed, Stefania Sawicka, Lord Lucan beat his wife, pushed her down the stairs and tried to strangle her. Lady Lucan was frightened and told Sawicka, ‘Don’t be surprised if he kills me one day.’ She acknowledged that her husband had a violent streak and that sometimes he would beat her with a stick wrapped in tape.

  It was in 1973 that Lord Lucan moved out, taking up residence in a basement flat in Elizabeth Street. He confided in his friends that he was worried about the well-being of the children. Veronica was in such a poor state mentally that she was incapable of looking after them properly. He decided that the children would be safer living with him, and launched a formal battle for custody. The custody hearing was to take place in May 1973. In March that year he decided he would not wait. He followed the nanny when she took the children into a park and persuaded them to go back with him to Elizabeth Street – to stay. For several weeks the children lived with their father while he waited for the custody hearing. He hired a private detective to follow his wife, with the idea of collecting information about her that would help him to secure permanent custody. He also taped his wife’s emotional outbursts so that he could demonstrate her instability.

  When the custody hearing came to an end in June 1973, Lucan lost. The judge described his behaviour as lawless and decided that Lady Lucan should have custody of the children. Lucan’s luck seemed to be running out. He had been spending fast on the maintenance of his family and two homes, detectives, medics and lawyers; he now had debts amounting to over £40,000. He too began to have psychological problems. He could not sleep, and he started drinking heavily. He also blamed his wife for his predicament, sometimes openly expressing hatred for her.

  It is alleged that in October 1974, Lucan confided to his close friend John Aspinall that he wanted to kill her. A few weeks before the murder of Sandra Rivett, he told another friend that he would like to kill his wife and drop her body into the Solent. People said overheated things like this when they were drunk, and nobody took them very seriously, at least until the awful events of 7 November.

  After Sandra Rivett’s murder, the police combed Lucan’s apartment for clues. They found that his car keys, driving licence, wallet, address books and passport were all still there. The address books were a starting point, and the police started ringing his friends. One of the people they made contact with in this way was Susan Maxwell-Scott. She gave an account of the events of 7 November that differed from Lady Lucan’s, and this is where the case becomes a maze of speculation. Up to this point we really have only Lady Lucan’s version of what happened in her house that evening, backed up at one point by the evidence of her ten-year-old daughter. Lady Lucan’s version of events may have been completely accurate, or it may have been a complete travesty of what really happened. Now that Susan Maxwell-Scott gave different version of some key facts, doubts began to arise in many people’s minds about the reliability of Lady Lucan’s version.

  According to Susan Maxwell-Scott, Lord Lucan knocked on her door at 11.30 p.m. He was dishevelled and had evidently recently washed his trousers: they were still wet. She naturally offered him a drink and asked what was wrong. He said he had been walking past the house where his wife lived on his way to his own apartment, where he intended to change for dinner. He said he peered into the basement window and saw his wife locked in a struggle with a man. He let himself into the house with his key and went down to the basement. He slipped and fell into a pool of blood as he approached the man wrestling with his wife. The man ran off when he saw Lucan. His wife became hysterical and blamed him for hiring a hit man to kill her. He had helped his wife to clean herself up, but while he was fetching more towels she ran out of the house. He was afraid she would tell the police that he, Lucan, was responsible for injuring her and that he had decided to lie low. Susan Maxwell-Scott said Lucan told her he had made three phone calls, one to his friend Madeleine Floorman, one to his mother, one to Bill Shand Kydd.

  Possibly Lucan had visited Madeleine Floorman’s place before going to Susan Maxwell-Scott’s. She had been woken up by someone knocking hard at her door at ten o’clock in the evening, and she had decided not to answer. A little later she had a phone call from someone she believed to be Lord Lucan. He sounded distressed and incoherent and she eventually hung up and went back to sleep.

  Some time between ten o’clock and half past ten, Lucan phoned his mother to tell her there had been a catastrophe at Belgrave Street. He wanted his mother to collect the children and take them to her own house for safety. He told her that his wife and Sandra had been injured. It was of interest to the police that the story he told his mother exactly matched the story he told Susan Maxwell-Scott, which added to its credibility. Before going to see Susan Maxwell-Scott, Lucan tried to phone Bill Shand Kydd but could not speak to him.

  He wrote two letters to Shand Kydd. The first was a brief description of the evening’s events and the second dealt with financial matters. The letters, in their bloodstained envelopes, were posted on 8 November. The first letter ran as follows:

  Dear Bill, />
  The most ghastly circumstances arose tonight, which I briefly described to my mother, when I interrupted the fight at Lower Belgrave St and the man left.

  V. accused me of having hired him. I took her upstairs and sent Frances up to bed and tried to clean her up. She lay doggo for a bit. I went into the bathroom then left the house.

  The circumstantial evidence against me is strong in that V. will say it was all my doing and I will lie doggo for a while, but I am only concerned about the children. If you can manage it I want them to live with you – Coutts St Martins Lane will handle school fees.

  V. has demonstrated her hatred of me in the past and would do anything to see me accused.

  For George & Frances to go through life knowing their father had stood in the dock for attempted murder would be too much. When they are old enough to understand, explain to them the dream of paranoia and look after them.

  Yours ever,

  Lucky.

  Lord Lucan left Susan Maxwell-Scott at quarter past one in the morning, driving off in a Ford Corsair after saying that he had to ‘get back’. On Sunday 10 November, Newhaven police found the Ford Corsair parked in a residential street, Norman Road, a short walk from Newhaven Marina. There were lots of bloodstains in the car. The Ford belonged to his friend Michael Stoop, and Lucan had borrowed it because the battery in his own car was faulty. When they opened the car’s boot the police found a length of lead piping similar to the one found at the scene of the crime. Inside the car was a notepad from which a page had been torn. The missing page was delivered by post to Michael Stoop; it bore a note from Lord Lucan.