My dear Michael,
I have had a traumatic night of unbelievable coincidences. However I won’t bore you with anything or involve you except to say that when you come across my children, which I hope you will, please tell them that you knew me and that all I cared about was them.
The fact that a crooked solicitor and a rotten psychiatrist destroyed me between them will be of no importance to the children.
I gave Bill Shand Kydd an account of what actually happened but judging by my last effort in court no one, let alone a sixty-seven-year-old judge, would believe – and I no longer care, except that my children should be protected.
Yours ever,
John
After the discovery of the car in Newhaven, the police combed the area between it and the sea, including the docks, the marina and the ruined nineteenth-century fort. Fishermen on the quay thought they saw someone near the marina in the early hours of the morning on 8 November. Lord Lucan was nowhere to be found. Possibly he had boarded a cross-Channel ferry. Possibly he had taken a boat from the marina. Possibly he had gone up into the fort and committed suicide in the maze of unexplored underground passages there.
Because there was an expectation that Lucan would at some point reappear and resolve some of the questions about the death of Sandra Rivett, the inquest was delayed. After seven months, it began to look as though Lord Lucan had made a determined effort to disappear. Sandra Rivett’s inquest was opened on 5 June 1975 at Westminster Coroner’s Court.
The major available source of evidence was Lady Lucan, but she made it clear in her statements to the police that she intended to incriminate her husband. At that time, English law prevented wives from testifying against their husbands unless they were charged with assault. Lucan had not been charged, since he was not available to be charged, so it looked as if, strictly keeping to the law, Lady Lucan would be unable to give evidence. Given the peculiar circumstances, the coroner made an exception. Lady Lucan gave her account of what happened. Then a statement by the daughter, Frances, was read out.
Frances had heard her mother scream from what sounded a long way away. Frances was unafraid: she assumed the cat had scratched her mother. Later, her parents walked in together. Her mother’s face was bloody and her father was wearing an overcoat. Frances was sent to bed, then she heard her father calling her mother; she saw her father looking for her mother before he went downstairs.
The pathologist Keith Simpson said that Sandra Rivett had suffocated by choking on her own blood, dying within minutes of the attack. This was quicker than the police surgeon’s version of events; Dr Smith, the police surgeon, thought Sandra was alive until shortly before she was discovered. Lord Lucan’s mother said her son had called her twice during the evening, but that he was incoherent. He had talked of blood and mess, but gave no detail. She said her son had asked her to pick up the children, which she did at a quarter to eleven. When he called a second time, he asked about the children, but his mother would say little because she had police in the house. The inquest also heard evidence from Susan Maxwell-Scott, Bill Shand Kydd and Michael Stoop.
The police forensic experts reported on their blood analyses. Sandra Rivett’s blood (type B) and Lady Lucan’s blood (type A) were found in two main areas of the house. Sandra’s blood was found mainly in the basement. Lady Lucan’s was concentrated mainly in the ground floor hallway at the top of the stairs down to the basement. There were also hairs in that blood which matched Lady Lucan’s, supporting the idea that she had been attacked at the top of the stairs. But there was also blood of Lady Lucan’s type on the mailbag containing Sandra’s body. Possibly the attacker had the same blood type as Lady Lucan. Both Lady Lucan’s blood type and Sandra Rivett’s blood type were found on the lead pipe and also in the Ford Corsair. The piece of bent pipe wrapped in tape that was assumed to be the murder weapon, used in fact to batter both women over the head, contained no hairs belonging to either of the women. This was very strange, and suggested that the lead piping was not the murder weapon at all.
The envelopes sent to Bill Shand Kydd carried bloodstains of type AB, though this could have been a mixture of two separate blood samples, in other words the blood of Sandra and Veronica mixed. Further bloodstains of Sandra Rivett’s blood type were found in the back garden. A bloodstained footprint was found in the basement, leading towards the garden. It had been made by a man’s shoe, and it gives some corroboration for Lord Lucan’s story that he disturbed an unidentified intruder.
Some fibres found in the house and in the Ford Corsair were a focus of interest at the inquest. Some blue-grey wool was found in the car, in the basement, on a bloodstained towel and on the lead pipe allegedly used to bludgeon Sandra and Veronica. These blue-grey wool fibres were believed to come from the attacker’s clothing and the forensic evidence was made to imply that whoever attacked the women had also been in the Ford Corsair. Similarly, the rather crude (pre-DNA) analysis of the blood samples seemed to prove that Lord Lucan’s story about his intervention in the basement in a struggle between his wife and her attacker was untrue; ‘her’ blood samples were found on the floor above the basement, which was where she said she had been attacked.
The investigators explored Lord Lucan’s claim that he had seen the attack on his wife from outside. They tried to re-enact what he described and found that it was difficult to see anything at all from a standing position outside the basement window. Lucan would have had to stoop down to see in and even then he could only have seen the bottom four steps of the staircase into the basement. Given that the incident happened in the middle of a November evening and the light bulb had been removed, the basement would have been plunged in darkness anyway. Things looked very black indeed for Lord Lucan’s version of what happened.
The timing of the events, on the other hand, favoured Lord Lucan. He had made reservations for four at his club for half past eight that evening. The club doorman said Lucan had arrived in his Mercedes at a quarter to nine, asking if his friends had arrived. Lucan was dressed casually, as if for golf and seemed untroubled. The doorman had the impression that Lord Lucan was on his way to his apartment to change for dinner. These timings made it virtually impossible for Lucan to reach the basement, take out the light bulb, wait for his wife to come down and commit the murder at nine o’clock. He would have had a bare ten minutes to drive two miles through city traffic to his apartment, park his Mercedes and walk (or run) back to 46 Lower Belgrave Street, which was half a mile away from his apartment. In fact the only way Lord Lucan could have been guilty of the murder is for the doorman’s timings to have been wrong. But they would have had to be wrong by fifteen minutes or more, and it is difficult to see how Mr Edgson, the doorman, could have carried out his duties at all if he was as clueless about time as that.
The inquest on Sandra Rivett was a remarkable event in its own right. An inquest is held solely to decide the cause of death. Yet this inquest heard a lot of evidence that went well beyond that. There was widespread interest in the murder and people wanted to know whether Lord Lucan really was the murderer, but the inquest was not the proper place to determine that. There was, in effect, a large-scale impropriety in turning the inquest into a trial for murder, and the person put on trial was not even present to defend himself. The evidence presented was heavily slanted against Lord Lucan, because, characteristically, the police decided prematurely who was to blame and slanted the evidence accordingly.
The inquest lasted four days. The coroner decided that the jury had heard enough and it took them thirty-one minutes to return a sensational verdict. The verdict was that Sandra Rivett had been murdered by Lord Lucan. The general and widespread reaction to this was that the inquest had gone a step further than was appropriate – or just. As a direct result of this, a month later a bill was passed to prevent coroner’s courts from naming murderers. It pre-empted the result of a trial; if Lucan had then been found, he would have been condemned in his absence, without having had the opportunity to
defend himself, or appoint lawyers to present his case.
But the most sensational and remarkable aspect of the whole case is that Lord Lucan was never found. To this day, what happened to him after he left the car in Norman Road in Newhaven and walked down towards the marina is a complete mystery. Lord Lucan was able to disappear so efficiently because, for some reason, a warrant for his arrest was not issued immediately. This is odd, because the police seem to have had little doubt from the beginning that he was Sandra Rivett’s murderer. They waited a week before issuing the warrant, and by then he had escaped, many think, abroad. If the warrant had been issued at once, the houses of his friends might have been searched.
Some think Lucan boarded a ferry and slipped over the side, drowning himself in the Channel. Others think he waded into the sea or jumped off the long harbour breakwater at Newhaven. But no body was washed ashore and police divers explored the waters of the harbour in vain. Others thought he might have gone up into the fort at Newhaven or onto the open shrubland beside it to commit suicide, but sniffer dogs failed to pick up Lord Lucan’s scent there; heat detection devices found nothing either. Detectives went to France to interview immigration and security staff, but there had been no sightings of him getting off the ferry there.
There were nevertheless reported sightings from various places abroad. Interpol picked up a report that a hotel owner in Cherbourg recognized a frequent guest at the hotel as Lord Lucan. When members of the hotel staff were shown photos of Lucan, they confirmed that this was so. The mystery guest spoke fluent French. It is known that Lucan made a point of improving his French, taking French coaching several times a week. From then on, reports of sightings came from almost every country in the world. The British police were actively interested in tracing Lucan, but they never succeeded in tracking him down.
He had relatives in Zimbabwe, whom he visited before his disappearance. It may be that when he needed to disappear, he chose southern Africa. There are several persuasive stories of sightings there. The police became interested in these when they discovered that Lord Lucan’s children were spending significant amounts of time there when they entered adulthood, and therefore became free to travel. In 1995, there were press reports that Scotland Yard detectives were convinced that Lucan was alive and living in Johannesburg. There was still no confirmation of this. Lucan was never apprehended, never brought back.
One former Scotland Yard detective, Duncan MacLaughlin, thought he had traced Lucan to the subcontinent of India. Lucan had lived in Goa under the name Barry Halpin until he died in 1996. But Barry Halpin turned out to be Barry Halpin, a Merseyside folk musician who had taken the hippy trail to India in the 1970s. It was another false scent.
By October 1999, the High Court decided that the seventh Earl of Lucan was, for all legal purposes, officially dead. His estate, amounting to less than £15,000, was scarcely worth inheriting. Lady Lucan commented that she hoped that would be an end to it. She believes that her husband is dead, referring to herself as ‘the dowager countess’. Lucan’s son, George Bingham, also believes his father is dead. He declared his intention of becoming the eighth Earl but, because the Lord Chancellor ruled that there was still no definitive proof that his father was dead, he was unable to take his seat in the House of Lords.
The ultimate question of Lord Lucan’s guilt remains unanswered. Perhaps some of his friends, who saw him after the murder, know the answer. But they have said nothing. The inquest verdict is plainly unsatisfactory, because the inquest developed into a trial in the absence of the accused, and because no one was there to present Lord Lucan’s case for him. By disappearing, Lord Lucan created an almost unprecedented legal and ethical situation, where the verdict has to be suspended – apparently for ever.
Death in Jeddah: Helen Smith
Helen Smith was born in Britain in 1956. She was working as a nurse in Jeddah in Saudi Arabia when she met her death at the age of twenty-three in 1979. She had been working in Saudi Arabia for only four months. The circumstances of her death are still unclear, though it is known that she died violently.
On the evening of 19 May 1979, she went to a party at the house of Dr Richard Arnot and his wife Penny. In the morning, after the party, her body was found in the street seventy feet below the balcony of the Arnots’ third floor apartment. Beside her, impaled on the spiked railings that surrounded the apartment block, was the body of Johannes Otten, a thirty-five year old Dutch tugboat captain. They had clearly died in the same catastrophic accident or act of violence.
There were some clues as to what might have preceded Helen’s death. Although she was fully clothed, the trousers and underpants of Johannes Otten were round his ankles, implying that some sort of sexual activity or attempted sexual activity took place immediately before their deaths.
There was an official Saudi investigation into the incident. Its conclusion was that the couple had accidentally fallen from the balcony while they were drunk, perhaps during a sexual encounter on the balcony. At the time, this finding was endorsed by the British Foreign Office.
Helen’s father, a retired policeman called Ron Smith, was unable to accept the official version of events, which he saw as a cover-up for murder. He believed that the cover-up came from a high level in the British establishment. He spent twenty-five years trying to uncover what really happened that night in Jeddah, and get justice for those who, he believes, killed his daughter. While he pursued this quest, Ron Smith refused to allow his daughter’s body to be buried. Instead it was preserved at Leeds General Infirmary so that it was available for forensic tests. During the long years following Helen’s death, her body was investigated in no less than six post mortem examinations, which did not all arrive at the same conclusions.
Ron Smith attempted to have an inquest into his daughter’s death in Britain. The autopsy report he ordered after inspecting her body in Jeddah was kept by the British Foreign Office, and he was refused a copy in spite of requesting one. When it was finally released, one vital page was missing; eventually that too was passed to Mr Smith. He tried to have an inquest opened in West Yorkshire, but coroner Philip Gill refused to hold an inquest on the grounds that the death occurred outside his jurisdiction. A Home Office pathologist examined Helen Smith’s body and found evidence that she had injuries that were not consistent with a fall from the balcony. She had received a series of blows to her head and face. Two other pathologists, one of the British, the other Danish, carried out their own post mortems and they too concluded that the injuries were not consistent with a fall. There was an implication that the two victims had been murdered and then thrown from the balcony to make the double murder look like an accident.
In March 1982, there was a High Court hearing to decide whether the West Yorkshire coroner was right, and it neither upheld the coroner’s decision nor overruled it, which was frustrating for Mr Smith. The High Court judges, Lord Justice Ormrod and Mr Justice Forbes, reserved judgment because of the complexities of the case. The eventual inquest returned an open verdict.
In July 2002, Ian Lucas MP asked a question in the House of Commons about the case. He asked the Secretary of State for the Home Department if he would order a new inquiry into the death of Helen Smith. Hilary Benn MP, answering, said, ‘An inquest was held into Helen Smith’s death in 1982. Inquest proceedings can be reviewed by the courts and we are not aware of any grounds for the government to take further action.’
Ron Smith still refuses to have his daughter buried until her killers are brought to justice. He remains convinced that she was murdered and that the murder was made to look like an accident. ‘People say it is a mystery, but there is no mystery. She was murdered and I know who murdered her. I will just keep up the fight. What else can I do?’
At the root of the problem in Jeddah is the clash between the lifestyles of Western migrant workers, like the doctors and nurses at the expatriate party, and the official, Islamic code of conducted expected by the Saudi authorities. When individuals are caugh
t out, for example consuming alcohol, their Western embassies often fail to support them strenuously. It is possible that something of this kind happened regarding Helen Smith. However she actually died, the Saudi version of events clearly indicated that as far as the Saudi authorities were concerned she was behaving badly, by drinking and engaging in casual extra-marital sex. She was in the wrong. What Ron Smith found when he went to Jeddah is that both Saudi and British authorities were uncommunicative. The Embassy’s subdued response implied that Helen should not have been at the party in the first place. That naturally made Ron Smith suspicious. But was he right to assume foul play?
His hypothesis, that Helen was raped and then murdered, was openly supported by many of the people she worked with at the Baksh Hospital. Naturally, the other guests at the party did not wish to incriminate themselves or their friends and they all insisted that Helen’s death was an accident. Some of the people at the party were in fact surprisingly frank. One woman admitted that she did not know what was happening to Helen because she (the non-witness) was in another room having sex with a man who was not her husband. It was an extraordinary admission to make, in a country where the punishment for adultery is death by stoning. Given the drinking at the party and the other violations of Saudi law, the expatriates at the party were given, by Saudi standards, light sentences. The host was sentenced to a year’s imprisonment; the others were sentenced to public flogging.
Great Unsolved Crimes Page 34
