Murder by Mistake

by M. J. Trow

  She was born Sandra Hensby in the little town of Basingstoke, Hampshire, to a factory worker, Albert Hensby, and his wife, Eunice. The couple was too upset to identify their daughter in the morgue, but they told the police the story of an ordinary girl with an ordinary upbringing who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. One day, a novelist is going to rewrite the Lucan story with Sandra Rivett as the real target, and everything else, including the attack on Veronica, as a byproduct of that murder. That would be pure fiction. If the police ever considered it as a real possibility, that possibility vanished as soon as they had spoken to the Hensbys.

  Sandra had the usual string of boyfriends as a teenager. She was a pretty girl with a mass of dark brown hair and had married Roger Rivett, a security guard at Gatwick Airport, a few years before the murder. The marriage was not a success, and the couple’s son was being looked after by the Hensbys while Sandra found work in London. She was bright, funny, vivacious and marvelous with children. When Veronica hired her in September, she took to her at once and they became friends; the Lucan children adored her.

  In November, Sandra was going out with John Hawkins, relief manager at the Plumbers Arms, down the road from Number 46. His usual night off was Thursday, but that was changed in the first week of the month to Wednesday. According to Sandra’s mother, the change was at Sandra’s suggestion because she was unwell with a sore throat. Whatever the reason, with Veronica’s permission, Sandra switched nights.

  It would cost Sandra her life.

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  Chapter 11: Countdown to Murder

  Thursday, November 7, 1974. At 4 PM, Sandra Rivett took all three Lucan children to post some letters. At about the same time, John Lucan, wearing a blue suit, went into a chemist’s shop at 9 Lower Belgrave St. and asked the pharmacist to identify a pink-and-green capsule. It was Limbitrol 5, a treatment for people suffering from depression with anxiety. It was not the first time Lucan had turned up with similar questions.

  Forty-five minutes later, while Sandra and the Lucan children were getting ready for the children’s dinner, Lucan rang a friend, Michael Hicks-Beach, who was a literary agent. He was writing an article on gambling for an Oxford University magazine and needed the man’s advice. Hicks-Beach arrived at 72A Elizabeth St. between 6:30 and 7 PM and they chatted about the article. Lucan downed a couple of vodkas, while the agent had two Scotch and sodas. At 8 PM, Lucan drove Hicks-Beach home to Chelsea in West London, in a battered old car, almost certainly Michael Stoop’s Corsair, but half an hour earlier he had phoned the Clermont club to reserve a table for dinner. When the police later followed up on this clue, the Clermont had logged the request at 8:30, and the hour’s discrepancy has never been explained. The people invited to dinner were Greville Howard, a Clermont club friend who sometimes used 5 Eaton Row; a secretary, Sarah Smith-Ryland, and James Tuke, a banker and his wife, Caroline. The table was booked for 11, as the others had a theater engagement that evening. Oddly, the table was booked for four people, not five, as though Lucan had no plans to join them.

  At some point in the early evening, Sandra rang her parents with her plans to spend Christmas with them in their trailer home in Basingstoke. Then she went to her room on the top floor of the house to do some ironing. For the rest of the evening, events were, not unnaturally, a little vague. Sandra had put George and Camilla to bed as usual, probably by 7 PM. Frances had been off school that day because the bus hadn’t turned up and Veronica had let the girl stay home. Shortly after half past eight, Frances and her mother were curled up on Veronica’s bed. The little girl was in her pajamas and Veronica was wearing a brown sweater over a green jumper.

  Around 8:45 PM, Lucan drove up to the door of the Clermont club in the Mercedes. He didn’t get out but wound down the window and called to Billy Egson, the doorman, “Anyone in the club?”

  “No, my Lord,” Egson told him. “None of the usual crowd.”

  “Okay,” said Lucan. “I’ll be back later.”

  At Number 46, Sandra Rivett popped her head around Veronica’s door. “Would you like a cup of tea?”

  “Yes,” said Veronica, “I’d love one.”

  They were probably the last words Sandra Rivett heard.

  The rest, 37 years later, is still a mystery.

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  Chapter 12: Inquest

  The days turned into weeks and the weeks into months. They say that if the police cannot crack a murder case in three days, they will never crack it, but in a way that pleased almost nobody, the inquest into Sandra Rivett’s death did it for them.

  Inquests are normally held in Britain within days of a suspicious death. They are presided over by a coroner, once a royal official, and the actual decision over the cause of death is made by a jury picked at random. It is not a trial in the full sense of the word, but this particular inquest was so badly handled that it might as well have been.

  The coroner was Gavin Thurston, and the case was heard at the Westminster Coroners’ Court on Horseferry Road, not far from the murder scene itself. Thurston had a good reputation and had handled some high-profile cases including the deaths of Hollywood star Judy Garland and Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein. But he had made mistakes in the past, and this was not his finest hour.

  The court looked like a battlefield with two sides drawn up in a fight to the death. On the one side was Veronica Lucan, her legal team and the police (Sergeant Forsyth was her unofficial bodyguard). An eyewitness described Veronica.

  “She sits staring ahead. She is emotionless, her eyes drawn through lack of sleep… sometimes looking around her defiantly, outstaring those prepared to play the dangerous game of trying to catch her eye.”

  On the other side sat the far more formidable army of Lucan’s family and friends. Christina Shand Kydd, Veronica’s sister, was there, but throughout the proceedings, the two never spoke a word to each other. Sandra Rivett’s family and her ex-husband were there too, but they were at the back, out of the limelight, almost as if someone thought, grudgingly and at the last minute, perhaps they ought to be invited to the inquest on their daughter and ex-wife.

  Roger Rivett was the first witness. He confirmed that Sandra had been 5 feet 2 inches tall, exactly the same height, it would be affirmed later, as Veronica Lucan. The police provided a plan of the Lucan house so that what followed would make sense to the jury. Then Veronica herself took the stand.

  She explained the souring of the relationship with Lucan from the mid-1960s, told the court about Sandra and the changing of the night off and what happened from 9:15 onwards on the night of November 7, when she went down to the basement in search of Sandra. She heard a noise in the hall cloakroom and moved towards the sound. She’d already seen there was no light in the basement, so she knew that Sandra couldn’t be down there. She remembered four blows to her head and that she began screaming. Little Frances’ statement, read out in court to lessen any more trauma to the child, also mentions this scream. Two floors above it sounded muffled, minor, and Frances believed that perhaps the family cat had scratched her mummy. When she called and heard no response, she went back to her bedroom.

  Sketch of Veronica Lucan at Rivet Inquest

  While this was happening, her parents were fighting on the hall floor and the top of the basement stairs. He told her to shut up. “Did you recognize the voice?” the coroner asked. “Yes,” said Veronica. “Who was it?” Thurston asked. “It was my husband.” A conversation then took place between the literally warring husband and wife, which Veronica was not allowed to repeat in court because it might have prejudiced the jury. She then explained how the struggle had stopped and described how she had run from the house while he was in the bathroom fetching towels for her. Frances had seen them arrive in the living room on their way upstairs and later heard her father calling “Veronica, Veronica? Where are you?” She hadn’t seen either of them leave.

  Inevitably, the lawyers for both sides waded in. Technically, an in
quest does not have prosecution and defense teams, but anyone can have their counsel present. So Michael Eastham, hired by the Dowager Lady Lucan, tried to paint a hostile picture of Veronica as a warped, bitter woman who so hated her husband that she would say anything about him. The coroner stopped him in his tracks. The police’s counsel then spoke, as did the Rivett family’s lawyer and finally, Brian Coles, who spoke for Veronica. In the event, everybody’s hands were tied because witnesses in a coroner’s court cannot be discredited. In a full trial, Lucan’s counsel would have had a field day with Veronica—the prescription drugs, the depression, the irrational outbursts at the Clermont; a whole army of Lucan’s friends would have testified to that. None of this was admissible in the coroner’s court, and the jury knew nothing of it.

  The rest of the first day was taken up with witnesses from the Plumbers Arms and St. George’s Hospital, all of whom essentially backed up Veronica’s version of events as far as they could.

  On the second day, Sergeant Forsyth explained that no one passing Number 46 could see into the basement and the famous “CKS,” Keith Simpson, the Home Office pathologist, took the stand to explain the injuries inflicted on Sandra Rivett, whose autopsy he had carried out. Dr. Robert Davies of the Metropolitan Police Laboratory told the jury about the likely murder weapon. It had been bent out of shape by colliding with a hard object, and any fingerprints on it were unrecognizable because of the stretching of the surgical tape. The lead piping in the Corsair’s trunk was similar, but Davies could not definitely say it came from one originally longer piece.

  Ian Lucas, senior fingerprint expert at Scotland Yard, explained that prints found in the Corsair matched those at 72A Elizabeth St. At the crime scene, there were no prints on Sandra Rivett’s body at all. Nor were there any on the US mailbag in which the body had been placed.

  Day Three saw a series of Lucan’s family and friends give their version of events. The Dowager Lady Lucan remembered her son’s first phone call—“Oh, Mother, there was something dreadful in the corner [of the basement] I couldn’t bring myself to look.” She told of John interrupting a fight in the basement, but the rest of the call had been about the children. The police’s counsel, Brian Watling, tried to unnerve the Dowager, who had not mentioned the interruption of a fight in her original statement to the police. It didn’t work, but Watling thought it had: “I need go no further; the jury have seen this woman for themselves.”

  Susan Maxwell-Scott was next, telling the jury what a kind and charming man John Lucan was. She described his clothes—a blue shirt, grey trousers and sleeveless brown sweater—which sounds very like the clothes Michael Hicks-Beach remembered him wearing earlier in the evening. Mrs. Maxwell-Scott was a lawyer, although she had never practiced law and was very correct in her answers: “I will do my best to repeat what [Lucan] told me but you have to remember that it was seven months ago.” She recounted Lucan’s story to her, that when he had gone into the house and the intruder had “made off.” Veronica had accused him of hiring a hit man to kill her—“she got the idea from an American TV movie.” When Lucan had calmed her down, he intended to call an ambulance and the police, but she dashed out of the house, screaming “Murder! Murder!” Veronica herself would later deny this.

  Lucan’s brother-in-law, Bill Shand Kydd, who had not been reachable on the phone by either Lucan or his mother on the night of Sandra’s murder, appeared next, explaining the receipt of the two letters from Lucan and the fact that both were bloodstained. The letters were read out in court and Shand Kydd was asked whether he understood the meaning of the odd phrase “the dream of paranoia.” He said he did, but could not go into that in a coroner’s court. He then asked to be excused because he had “important business.” The press took photographs of him later in the day in the Royal Enclosure at Ascot Race Course, Berkshire, 27 miles from the court.

  Michael Stoop appeared to explain Lucan’s borrowing of his car. He had offered Lucan his Mercedes, but “I imagined through natural good manners he didn’t want to deprive me of my better car.” He had left the keys in the ignition of the Corsair for Lucan to collect whenever he liked, and Stoop asked no questions.

  Dr. Margaret Pereira had a long career as Senior Scientific Officer at Scotland Yard. She had investigated every area of the crime scene in Lower Belgrave St. and was able to assure the jury that Sandra Rivett, whose blood group was B, had died in the basement, whereas the attack on Veronica Lucan, group A, had occurred in the hall. The initial attack on Sandra had happened at the foot of the stairs, and the woman had slumped to the floor next to a piano there. The rest of the blows hit her while she was lying on the ground, and the blood sprays on the ceiling would have been caused by the murder weapon being raised for each successive blow.

  The attack on Veronica was of a similar nature, with chunks of her hair flying off along with the blood. The fact no blood from group A was in the basement totally undermined Lucan’s story of seeing his wife fighting with a large man below street level. Lucan’s lawyers tried to upset her by raising the inevitable problem of contamination, which has dogged so many crime-scene investigations—policemen accidentally transferring blood from one part of Number 46 to another. Dr. Pereira had no doubts, but a jury in an actual trial might have been confused. Their task was to decide on guilt or innocence “beyond a reasonable doubt” and the blood group evidence was not clear enough to make this task possible for them.

  Most inexplicably of all, Dr. Pereira talked of grayish-blue fibers found at various places in the Lucan house and in the Corsair. The inference was unmistakable—they had come from Lucan’s gray trousers. But if Lucan had killed Sandra Rivett, why were no fibers found on the US mailbag into which he stuffed her body? No one at the inquest seemed to be asking any questions about that mailbag at all.

  Coroner Thurston’s summing up tried to provide a balanced view, but the upshot was that it had all sounded like a trial of Lord Lucan at which the accused had not been able to speak for himself. Lucan’s family, Lucan’s friends, and much of the world at large were shocked by the jury’s decision: “It is murder by Lord Lucan.”

  For the last time in British legal history, a coroner’s jury was allowed to name a suspect. Such was the outrage that Thurston’s career ended soon afterward (he was due for retirement anyway) and the law itself was changed to make such verdicts impossible in the future.

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  Chapter 13: Looking for Lucky

  “As a gambler,” John Aspinall said a year after John Lucan disappeared, “I would give even odds on whether he is dead or alive.” Whole books have been written on sightings of Lord Lucan, and in many ways, that story has almost eclipsed the events of the night of November 7, 1974. It has certainly wiped the death of Sandra Rivett from the public’s memory.

  The police description of John Lucan as circulated in the days after the murder and attempted murder shows him as 6 feet 2 inches tall. His complexion is described as “ruddy”; his hair is brown and his moustache is brown flecked with ginger. His eyes are blue and he has gold fillings in his teeth. He was last seen (by Susan Maxwell-Scott) wearing a light-colored sweater and dark-colored trousers. His habits? He smokes Peter Stuyvesant cigarettes, drinks vodka, attends race meetings, gambling clubs and, perhaps unhelpfully, “may travel abroad.”

  Looking at the familiar photographs of the man, reproduced in every book on the case, we can add that his hair is parted on the left and slicked down with Brylcreem. His heavy eyebrows nearly meet over the bridge of his nose—an English old wives’ tale is that men with this facial characteristic are born to hang! The photos of Lucan’s engagement and wedding in 1963 show a slim man of thirty-one. By the time of Sandra’s murder, he was over 40 and beginning to put on weight.

  Imaginative sketch of Lord Lucan on the run after the murder

  Now take away the moustache. Comb the hair in a different way or bleach it. Stoop slightly. Do what you can with the cut-glass English accent. Do that and anyone reading this
account may have walked past John Lucan on any day in the last 37 years and not noticed him at all.

  More difficult to arrange than mere physical appearance, however, is survival over that period. Lucan left his flat in Elizabeth St., Belgravia, without his passport, his checkbook or his driver’s license. He didn’t have much money because of his gambling debts, but even so, the various bank accounts he owned have remained untouched. His initial problem would have been to get out of the country.

  If the obvious conclusions are drawn from the car abandoned at Newhaven, Lucan took the cross-Channel ferry to Cherbourg or St. Malo and somehow slipped past customs officials by slick movements or bribery. From there, he could have gone literally anywhere in the world.

  Alternatively, we know he owned a speedboat, the White Migrant, in the 1960s, because it sank spectacularly in an offshore power-boat race off the Isle of Wight near England’s south coast. Could he have had a similar boat moored at Newhaven, perhaps under an assumed name or at the River Hamble nearby? If he did, then he’d be able to cross the Channel himself and come ashore anywhere on the European coast, most likely France, Spain or Holland. However, there is no record of any such boat; neither did one go missing in the days following the murder.

  What about flight? A careful police watch was mounted on all ports and airports, but was it set up quickly enough? Lucan would have been able to get to any of London’s airports before Ranson and his team could put out an all-points bulletin for him. We still have the problem of the passport, but if Lucan had a second one, which he took with him, that would pose no problem at all. Why risk an airport with all its red tape and official snoopers when Lucan’s friend, the racing driver Graham Hill, had his own biplane that could have dropped Lucan at, say, a French airfield within an hour of his leaving London?