Murder by Mistake

by M. J. Trow

  In fact, as Chief Superintendent Roy Ranson discovered by December of that year, Lucan’s finances were in a grim state. He had managed to lose £10,000 ($23,400 or almost $100,000 today) in one night at the roulette tables, and that was before he gave up the job at the bank. The much-vaunted £250,000 ($562,000) inheritance was not that large in actuality. It may have been as little as £50,000 ($112,400). He was a member of various expensive clubs and was incurring charges by hiring private detectives to watch his wife.

  His aim, of course, was to prove that Veronica was not a fit mother for their children and should never be allowed to get them back. He drip-fed stories about her paranoia, with tall tales of her drowning a kitten and pushing it through Lucan’s letterbox in Elizabeth St. She, he said, was putting about stories that he was trying to kill her.

  The custody battle ended in court on July 11 in a tortuous case that lasted nine days. Lucan expected to win. He not only had the title and, as far as the court knew, money on his side, but he had secretly taped conversations with Veronica (tapes still in the possession of Scotland Yard) in the few fleeting moments they had spent together over the last few months. He also had a psychiatrist who claimed that Veronica would not be able to look after the children properly. She, of course, had a psychiatrist who said the opposite, and in the end, the judge sided with her.

  It is difficult to underestimate the effect the loss of his children had on Lucan. Detective Chief Superintendent Roy Ranson was convinced that it was actually all about money. Lucan’s gambling debts stood at £20,000 ($47,000, or a quarter of a million dollars today). He had just lost a court case that had incurred a further £40,000 ($94,000 or $470,000 today). He had overdrafts at four major banks, as well as colossal rents on his flat, his payments on his Mercedes, the children’s allowances and school fees and the cost of the nanny. His total debts were in excess of £70,000 ($164,000 or $820,000 today) and his annual income was only £12,000 ($28,000).

  He could have declared bankruptcy, but the shame and humiliation of an Earl of Lucan appearing in the dock for debt was something he could not contemplate. So he hatched a plan, and on October 23, he asked his friend Michael Stoop at the Portland Club if he could borrow his battered old Ford Corsair car.

  He did not tell him why.

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  Chapter 7: The Midnight Run

  Fast-forward to the night of November 7. While Sergeant Baker and Constable Beddick were checking on Veronica Lucan lying soaked in blood in the Plumbers Arms, her husband was a few hundred yards away in Chester Square, outside the house of a friend, Madeleine Floorman. Lucan knocked on the door, but because it was relatively late, Floorman assumed it was kids roaming the streets for laughs and refused to answer it. Later, the police would find blood spots on the step.

  Moments later, Mrs. Floorman’s phone rang. There were no “pips,” the bleeps on the line that would have heralded a call from a telephone booth, so whoever the caller was, he or she was ringing from a building. The voice was rambling, incoherent, but she recognized it as that of John Lucan. Why he should have tried to contact Madeleine Floorman, who was the mother of one of Frances’ friends, remains one of the many mysteries of the Lucan case and is still unresolved today. Perhaps he merely wanted her to go to Number 46 to check on his children.

  Lucan then made another call, this time to his mother, asking her to collect the children instead. The call was made between 10:30 and 10:45 PM—again, not from a telephone booth. If he made this or the earlier call from the Elizabeth St. flat, why was there no sign of blood (with which he would have been covered), and why didn’t he take the opportunity to change, grab his passport and driving license before vanishing into the night?

  While the police were locating this property and the one in Eaton Row, Lucan was driving the Corsair through the cold London night. His own Mercedes, with its hood cold and its battery as dead as Sandra Rivett, had been found in Elizabeth St., so at that stage, no one knew what vehicle Lucan was driving. He would have been careful not to run a red light or attract attention because the steering wheel, the gear shift and door were covered with bloodstains, and in the trunk was a length of lead pipe wrapped in surgical tape, identical to the murder weapon the police had already found in Belgrave St.

  By half past 12, Lucan was driving into the grounds of the executive home of two friends, Ian and Susan Maxwell-Scott, in the little Sussex town of Uckfield, 16 miles from the south coast and 44 miles from Knightsbridge. Ian had been playing backgammon at the Clermont and had decided to stay up “in town” as he’d had a few drinks. Susan was already in bed, but she went down to let Lucan in.

  Lord Lucan route after murder

  She knew at once that something was wrong. The usually immaculately tidy earl looked rough, his hair uncombed, and he had what looked like a “wet patch” on one hip of his trousers. As she poured him a stiff Scotch, he said, “I’ve been through the most nightmarish experience. It’s so incredible I don’t know whether you or anyone else will believe it.” He told her a story which strained credulity at the time and has ever since.

  Lucan then rang his mother—this was the call the Dowager received in the presence of Constable Beddick—and Susan Maxwell-Scott heard Lucan say, “No, I won’t speak to [the police] now. Tell them that I’ll ring in the morning.”

  Next, the disheveled Lucan called the Shand Kydds, his brother and sister-in-law. They were not in, so Lucan accepted Susan’s offer of a pen and paper and wrote a letter:

  “Dear Bill, The most ghastly circumstances arose tonight which I briefly described to my mother…” and it ended, “I will… lie doggo [low] for a bit but I am only concerned for the children. If you can manage it I want them to live with you… V [Veronica] has demonstrated her hatred for me in the past and would do anything to see me accused. For George and 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, John.”

  He then wrote a second letter, again to Bill Shand Kydd, relating specifically to finances. A sale of family silver was coming up at the famous London auction house of Christie’s on November 27, and it would pay off Lucan’s bank overdrafts. The note ended, “The other creditors can get lost for the time being, Lucky.”

  Susan Maxwell-Scott made them both a cup of coffee and promised to post the letters for him. She tried to get him to stay the night, as she was clearly worried about him and the whole situation. Lucan refused, saying he had to get back to sort things out. Then he said he’d be in touch soon, as soon as he talked to the police; he thanked her, kissed her cheek and drove away into the Sussex night.

  That was the last that anyone, apparently, saw of Lord Lucan.

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  Chapter 8: Lord Lucan, in the Basement, with a Lead Pipe

  So what was the story that John Lucan told his mother and Susan Maxwell-Scott, which he had hinted at in his first letter to Bill Shand Kydd?

  Not content to let his private detectives do the snooping for him, Lucan was in the habit of watching the house in Belgrave St. himself, either from his Mercedes or on foot. On the night of November 7, he had been passing the house when he witnessed a fight going on in the basement. When the Dowager Lady Lucan first relayed this to the police in her official statement, she used the word “driving,” and Ranson’s team quickly demolished that possibility. Even if no cars were parked outside Number 46, a passing vehicle, even traveling very slowly, would not have had a view into the basement. Lucan would have had to have been standing on the pavement in order to see what he claimed.

  Lord Lucan

  Portrait

  According to John Lucan, he dashed into the house. He still had a front-door key and did not comment on the fact that a safety chain was usually stretched across the inside, but was not in place that night. Once in the hall, Lucan would have turned a sharp left down the basement stairs.
The first anomaly in his story occurs at once. The police had found the light bulb out of its socket, so Lucan must have hurtled down there in the total darkness at break-neck speed. It explains why his footprint should have been found in the blood on the floor and why he could only describe Veronica’s attacker as a “large” man. It doesn’t explain, however, how he could have seen anything in the basement from pavement level just by the aid of a street lamp.

  Lucan and the intruder presumably struggled, but he skipped over that and merely said that the man got away. Because the basement door led to a garden from which there was no apparent escape, he must have gone back up the stairs he had just come down and out of the front door. At this point, Lucan claimed that Veronica, covered in blood and hysterical, was so disoriented that she assumed he was her attacker, and the two of them fought.

  After the struggle, as they both calmed down, she accused him of hiring a hit man to kill her. This accusation made a certain amount of sense; after all, Veronica knew about the private detectives. If they could spy on her and help kidnap her children, what else might they be persuaded to do?

  Lucan could not handle this situation. Having helped Veronica onto the bed and having gone to get towels to tend her wounds, as a distraught but loving husband would, she had panicked and rushed out of the house. She would raise hell, get sympathy on her side. No one would believe him. He would end up charged with attempted murder. No one, in Lucan’s version of events, mentioned the dead nanny, Sandra Rivett. Already, it was as though she didn’t exist.

  The two versions of events at Number 46 stand in stark contrast to each other. In a way, they are a gruesome extension of the custody war that the Lucans had fought in court back in July, except that now it was for real. And it was about murder.

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  Chapter 9: Friends

  News of the murder spread like wildfire. Lucan’s friend Stephen Raphael was telephoned by another friend who had seen the police breaking into 5 Eaton Row soon after 11 PM. He phoned Charles Benson, who had been to school with Lucan, and he in turn phoned the Gerald Road police station to find out what was going on.

  Within hours, a wall of silence had been built around the missing John Lucan. A Chelsea resident told the police, “Murder is not the sort of thing we do.” Whether she knew it or not, the last aristocrat to be executed was Lord Lovat (for the unlikely combination of treason and rape), and that was back in 1747! Britain had officially abolished the death penalty in 1969, so there was no risk of death for Lucan. Even so, he faced life imprisonment. “Such a pity,” said another, whose name was found in Lucan’s address book. “Nannies are so hard to find these days.” Detective Chief Superintendent Roy Ranson, who would be kinder in his book on the case, was furious at the time. He called it “the horse-play of the upper classes.” Another (anonymous) detective said, “You know how the Mafia work? They all stick together. And this lot stick together like shit to a blanket.” In the eyes of many members of the aristocratic clique around Lucan, the police were decidedly working-class and little better than servants.

  Some time later, Susan Maxwell-Scott wrote a defense of their position to the Daily Star newspaper—“Friends have loyalty to each other: else they are mere acquaintances… loyalty among friends is, in my opinion, the highest morality in life… I cannot imagine in what way I could have helped Ranson more!”

  That Friday morning, as Ranson and Chief Inspector David Gerring were still waiting for Lucan to turn up, probably in the company of his lawyer, a group of the missing earl’s friends met at John Aspinall’s house in Lyall St., Belgravia, to decide what could and should be done. The meeting was seized on by the left-wing press and dubbed the meeting of the Just Men, in homage to Edgar Wallace’s crime-busting fictional heroes of the 1930s who were themselves above the law. Charles Benson was there, so was Bill Shand Kydd, and, as it would turn out later, the flakiest friend of all, Dominick Elwes. He was all for getting Lucan out of the country—if he hadn’t gone already—on a cargo ship to South America. It is likely that this meeting was not the sinister cabal that the media slavered over—wealthy, privileged men giving the law and morality the finger in order to save one of their own. They really didn’t know where Lucan was or what had happened, although most of them would probably have believed his version had he told it to them.

  Dominick Elwes was sent to St. George’s to check on Veronica, and he went with Hugh Bingham, Lucan’s brother, and sister-in-law Christina Shand Kydd. When Elwes saw Veronica with her open wounds and black eyes, he burst into tears. “Now who’s mad?” Veronica asked them all. “Now who’s the one with paranoia, eh?”

  Dominic Elwes

  www.freebase.com

  Madeleine Floorman had not contacted the police, assuming it was their job to come to her. Susan Maxwell-Scott hadn’t either, and only when Bill Shand Kydd brought Lucan’s letters with their Uckfield postmarks did the police know about the midnight run.

  On Sunday there was a breakthrough; Michael Stoop’s battered old Corsair—license plate number KYN 135D—was found by the local Sussex police in quiet Norman St. in Newhaven, the Channel port on the south coast. Dried blood was all over the interior and the lead pipe was in the trunk, but there was also a problem. Eyewitnesses were able to pinpoint the approximate time of the car’s arrival between 5:30 and 8:30 AM on Friday morning. The police now knew that Lucan had left the Maxwell-Scotts in Uckfield by 2:30. Yet the car did not appear until 5:30 at the earliest—a time-lag of three hours to cover a journey of only 16 miles. Either Lucan had parked somewhere on the way, weighing his options and drinking from the two bottles of vodka found in the Corsair, or he had tried to sleep the whole nightmare off with the valium pills Susan Maxwell-Scott had given him, or… and the possibilities were even now crowding into Roy Ranson’s mind.

  On the face of it, Lucan, guilty or merely panicked, had dumped the car and caught the cross-Channel ferry that would have taken him to Cherbourg or St. Malo in France. The ferries left every hour, and if Lucan had had time to change his clothes or was as free from blood as Susan Maxwell-Scott maintained, he would have passed unnoticed among the regular cross-Channel foot passengers. He had no passport, but security on the ferries was notoriously lax in those days. Without the all-intrusive CCTV, anyone intending to lose himself in France could probably do so with the minimum of luck. Of course, if Lucan didn’t actually intend to arrive in France at all, but throw himself overboard, that was easier still.

  While the car was towed away to be checked by forensics, Ranson’s team was drafted to Newhaven to knock on doors, check hotels and guest houses and trawl the miles of gorse-covered headland around the town itself. Helicopters were used, including a new gadget that was able to detect bodies hidden in undergrowth using X-ray, infrared and ultraviolet cameras. A body was found quickly, but it belonged to a man who had hanged himself from a tree and the corpse had been there for three years. The Downs is a large area for the kind of thorough search required. Despite the cameras, the technology and the dogs, investigators found nothing. Eventually, because of the cost in manpower and ever-draining resources, the search there was scaled down and finally called off.

  The police reasoned that if any of Lucan’s friends was hiding him, they all had large country estates miles from the glare of London publicity, and white police patrol cars began turning up on the carriage drives of stately homes. Holkham Hall, an 18th-century house in Norfolk, was checked; so was Warwick Castle, which belonged to Lucan’s cousin. One of the more grisly rumors circulating was that Lucan had killed himself and arranged for his body to be fed to the tigers at Howlett’s, John Aspinall’s private zoo in Kent. Aspinall was less than helpful: “Don’t come that line with me, because if she’d been my wife I’d have bashed her to death five years earlier and so would you.”

  On the Monday following the murder, Michael Stoop received a letter from Lucan—the last communication, as far as is known, that anyone received from him. He took it to the police the ne
xt day, but the letter had been addressed to him at the St. James’ club. By throwing away the envelope, he threw away the all-important postmark, which would have told Gerring and Ranson where the letter had been sent from.

  “My dear Michael,

  I have had a traumatic night of unbelievable coincidences. However, I won’t bore you with anything or involve you [he already had, by borrowing the Corsair] except to say that if 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 psychiatrist and a rotten solicitor [lawyer] 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 efforts in court no one—let alone a sixty-seven-year old judge—would believe me and I no longer care except that my children should be protected.

  Yours ever

  John”

  Most writers on the case have seen this as a sort of suicide note, Lucan’s farewell to the world. Perhaps it was…

  … except that in 2004, Lucan’s old school friend James Fox revealed to the world that Stoop had received a second note from Lucan. He couldn’t quite remember details, but he did remember the phrase “keys in glove compartment… in Norman St.… please forget you ever lent it to me… burn envelope.”

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  Chapter 10: Sandra

  Nanny Sandra Rivett

  Victim

  The Earl of Lucan may have gone missing on the night of Thursday 7/Friday 8 November, but there is someone else missing from the case—the murdered nanny, Sandra Rivett. The media, then and now, refers to her death as the Lucan case, and her distraught parents back in 1974 were appalled that their daughter should be sidelined by the lord-loving English obsession with their aristocracy.