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June 9, 2017 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:04:09
Edition 299 - The Lucan Mystery

This time British author Laura Thompson and the nation's deepest murder mystery - thevanishing Lord Lucan...

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Across the UK, across continental North America, and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes, and this is The Unexplained.
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This edition of the show, we have something that is archetypally British, if that's the right way of putting it.
I've only got to say one word, and people in Britain, but maybe people in other parts of the world too, will know exactly what we're going to discuss.
The word I'm saying is a name, and the name is Lucan, or Lord Lucan.
This was the case of a British aristocrat in the 1970s who disappeared into thin air after a brutal murder at his home in one of the richest and most expensive parts of London.
It has all the elements of a great and chilling piece of fiction, but this really happened.
The question that's been asked for all these decades since 1974 is what became of Lucan?
Did Lucan run away after this and then kill himself?
Did he set up an entire new life in another country?
There have been sightings virtually all over the world, including in countries like South Africa.
What became of Lucan?
And how did this crime, as far as we can understand it, unfold in a world without the internet, in a world without the mass media that we have now, and in a world where the British class system operated as it had operated for hundreds of years?
A fascinating case.
Laura Thompson, London-based author, has written a book about Lord Lucan.
And, you know, the book is a couple of years old now.
But since there has been some more recent publicity about the Lucan case, I thought we'd have a conversation with her.
So that's what we're about to do.
Like I say, thank you very much for getting in touch.
When you do get in touch with me by email, please tell me who you are, where you are, and how you discovered the show and how you use it, of course.
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You know, I'm doing my best, as they say.
All right, let's get to Laura Thompson now in southwest London and talk about the disturbing case of Lord Lucan.
Laura, thank you very much for coming on The Unexplained.
Absolute pleasure.
I need to ask a little bit about you.
I did a little bit of biographical research, Laura, and I see that apart from being an author, you're also involved in acting.
You're an actress.
I was a failed actress.
I went to stage school, which was lovely and good fun.
But when I got to about 16, they sort of said, now, darling, just go and do your A-levels.
And, you know, that was like a disgrace, really.
But they were marvellous.
And I went to university from there.
Right.
Okay.
Well, of course, a lot of people involved in the acting profession, noble profession that it is, at any one time, even famous people are, as they call it, resting.
We would call it unemployed.
So it is a very tortuous profession to be in.
Exactly.
No, but it was lovely.
And I did dancing and all that kind of thing, which I still do, but I just wasn't remotely professional standard.
But it was a terrific school, Tring Park School.
Okay.
Lovely.
And now you're involved in writing books.
And we're going to talk about one of them and the research that you did for one of them to do with the disturbing case of Lord Lucan, which a lot of my American listeners will not be aware of.
We'll get into the detail of that.
But just talk to me about your authorial works.
Well, I started off writing about sport, which is a bit weird, but that was quite a good entree.
I think, you know, it never, this is probably politically incorrect thing to say, but I think being a young woman, it didn't hurt doing sport.
And my first book was about greyhound racing.
My father was a gambler, and he owned dogs and a couple of racehorses.
So I started off writing about all that, which I was completely insane about.
I mean, I just adored.
I lived in Newmarket for a while, and when dad died, he actually left me a racehorse, couldn't possibly have afforded one.
But anyway, this gorgeous horse who now lives on a friend's stud, and it was just a lovely life.
Well, you know, you've only got to read the works of Jilly Cooper if you do, or watch her interviews, and you will realize that the world of horse racing, from what we read and from what I know, is full of glamour and intrigue.
Well, nothing ever quite as exciting as happens in a Gilly Cooper ever happened to me, I have to say.
But it was, it's another world, Newmarket, and it really is.
it really is a world unto itself.
And I'm very, very glad I did it, but I don't mean I could have done it forever.
And once my horse retired, I sort of moved to the more, to the saner, the saner arena of Richmond.
And I moved to sort of two-legged subjects.
So I did Agath Christie, which was also fascinating because I've always been a fan, and the Mitford Girls.
And now I'm doing another murder case, having done Luke, and I'm now doing another murder case, which is, I mean, you know, murder, it never, never ceases to fascinate us.
I know people say, well, there's too much murder on it.
But, you know, people are interested.
I guess they're interested, and you're quite right, how can you not be?
I think people are interested simply because the vast majority of the population, although they may have enmities, they may have people they dislike, could never be brought to commit the ultimate crime.
So what questions rage around most people's minds is, how can an ordinary seeming person suddenly become a killer?
How is that possible?
What process goes on?
And I would imagine, but I won't speak for you here, that that is part at least of the fascination.
Absolutely.
You've said it.
That's absolutely right.
I mean, lovely, darling Agatha, and she, who I think is a kind of genius, ex-Christy, in her completely unobtrusive way.
And she, I know her detectives always say, anyone is capable of murder, which is, I truly believe, simply not true.
They're capable of feeling the motivation that in some people leads to murder.
I'm not talking about insane murders, you know, that kind of thing.
I'm talking about domestic murder, which is what really I think interests people.
When the dynamic, the family dynamic or the something or other, is something we can all recognize, but as you so rightly say, somebody makes that leap in the dark.
You can't really explain it ever.
Not really.
There comes a point when you cease to explain it.
It's like in Macbeth.
You hear him, here's the dagger, I'm going to go and do it.
What actually happens when he goes and does it is a blank even to Shakespeare.
But it's, so therefore, it's certainly a blank to me.
But it's, it, it, it, it, it cannot, I've always been interested in it.
My darling mother, who's the loveliest person in the world, but she, she had reams of books on Hamrati and Christie and all these things.
I grew up surrounded by this stuff.
So it just, it's just the, the, the, the, what's recognisable and then what suddenly is not recognisable.
I mean, it is true.
And I don't know whether it's a British trait.
I suspect it may be.
But, you know, you can often see the most demure-looking ladies of a certain age sitting by the seaside in the summer in Britain.
And you'll look at the book that they are reading, and they will be consuming the most brutal, the most, well, the least likely work of murder fiction that you would imagine.
So there is a fascination in the minds of the least likely people with this crime.
Now, in France, they have a class of murder that is crime passionnel, the crime of passion, which we don't have in the United Kingdom, and I don't think they have in the United States.
But that partly explains some of these crimes, but the ones that are difficult to explain or maybe sometimes impossible to explain, I actually knew and interviewed a number of times Helen Morrison, an expert on serial killers, which is a different class of killer.
What is difficult to explain is how somebody could premeditate and plan and actually make a decision to do something in a cold and calculating way.
Yes.
Well, again, Agatha Christie believed in evil, which is a word we don't really use.
Well, we might use it possibly now about a terrorist.
But as you say, premeditation of any kind.
I do find myself coming up against the word evil.
So many murders, and I include Lucan in this, the pressure over a number of years in his case, I think.
And similarly with the one I'm writing at the moment.
What is that case?
Can you tell me?
Oh, okay.
So this is going back in time.
This is 1922.
It was a case called Thompson Bywaters.
Edith Thompson, it was a classic eternal triangle.
Edith Thompson was having an affair with a younger man called Freddie Bywaters, and the husband was killed.
It's your, you know, it's your ultimate sort of template like Crippen or any of them, the triangle where one is not wanted, as it were.
And it's one of those murders that took place in respectability.
You know, it's that kind of the, that also fascinates, I think, the facade, the facade closing over, the respectable life going on, but this thing having happened underneath.
It's that contrast that also fascinates, I think.
So that's the story, but it's an interesting one because the woman was hanged as well as the boy, and she sort of hadn't done anything.
It was one of those things where prejudice took hold of the British psyche and launched itself at her.
And she got caught up in it.
It's a terrible story, but she was a very, very fascinating woman, sort of ahead of her time or whatever you'd want to say.
And she caught people's imagination.
So it's really about her.
The British aristocracy, and I'm talking about historically now, so we're not perhaps talking so much in the modern era, but looking back maybe hundreds of years, the British aristocracy was very much a sealed unit.
And in some cases, I get the impression that there may have been murders and acts of very bad behavior that were quietly covered up because of who the person involved was.
Oh, for sure.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
It was absolutely appalling.
I mean, I shouldn't be laughing.
They had, you know, they had sort of privilege of, I can't remember what the phrase was, privilege of peerage or whatever.
And they were only tried by each other.
They'd have trials in the House of Lords where other peers sat about and sort of said, oh, no, Lord Blah can't possibly have done such a frightful thing to this servant.
Let him off.
You know, it really, they, God, it was absolutely outrageous.
But a lot of it goes to the core of British society.
And the case we are about to discuss, that of Lord Lucan, if you're listening in America or another part of the world, you might have heard of it, you may not.
You may possibly be in one of the countries that Lord Lucan was claimed to have fled to afterwards, but that's a whole other issue.
This country is riven.
Well, totally, this country is riven with class divisions.
And that goes perhaps today a little more than maybe 40 years ago, where we seem to be coming more leveled out.
You know, class is a very big issue here.
And I think there would still be those who claim that there are different strokes and different laws for different folks.
Yeah.
The thing about Lucan, I mean, I don't really know what it was like in 1974 when this happened.
I mean, I was alive, but not in any sentient sense.
And the feeling you get reading the newspaper reports when Lord Lucan was accused of having committed this murder is that actually being an earl, which he was, worked against him.
Whereas previously it had worked so much for these people.
You know, they could be pardoned by the king or, you know, whatever.
So the thought that you're an earl, you should know better.
Yes.
What do you mean with Lucan?
Yes.
Well, it was stronger than that, I think.
It was that, you know, the country, we had a Labour government, a very, very left-wing Labour government.
The country was in economic difficulties that make today seem quite lightweight, really.
Rampant inflation, they'd had the three-day week, they'd had the lights going out, quite literally all this kind of thing, foreign capital fleeing abroad.
And his lifestyle, which was indolent, I mean, he just spent his days gambling in a club in Mayfair, which was this very beautiful cyberetic place.
And he lived off an inherited income in Belgravia, which is still the most, you know, sort of rarefied part of London.
Well, it's the kind of place where these days, you know, international capital tends to flee.
And I think, you know, if you're a Russian oligarch, it's one of the places you may well have property.
Indeed, absolutely.
Can I just, before we go further with this, can I just outline some of the facts of the case?
And you tell me where I go wrong with this.
So we establish what this crime was and the context in which it happened.
This was November the 8th, 1974.
This man...
Sorry, Howard, it was November the 7th.
Okay, so it was, presumably, Was it discovered early in the morning, I presume, or what?
Yeah.
Well, no, it was...
The...
It all happened.
The murder itself happened somewhere around 9 o'clock in the evening.
We don't quite know.
And by just after 10 o'clock, the police were in the house.
So it happened within a fairly short...
Okay, so November the 7th, this will have started making news in the UK November the 8th, 1974, which seems and feels like an awful long time ago.
Now, this was a murder, the murder, quite a brutal and bloody murder of Sandra Rivet, the nanny of the family of the Lucans in Belgravia.
An inquest jury found the following year, there are so many references online to the case, that Lord Lucan was the murderer.
The police theory was that his wife was the intended target.
The peer, it says here, who had run up gambling debts, gambling plays into this very much, of £60,000 at a gambling club in Mayfair, was officially declared dead by the High Court in 1999.
Theories about Lucan's whereabouts have abounded, and that's where we pick up the story.
This man disappeared in a way that I'm not sure that somebody who had bludgeoned a laborer to death in a row in a pub in the east end of London could have disappeared.
This was astonishingly executed.
This man vanished into thin air.
Yes, he did.
Yes, which is why a lot of people do believe that he was spirited out of the country by what are usually called his rich and powerful friends, most of whom had absolutely no money whatsoever because they were all gamblers.
And they'd all squandered everything, six-figure sums, which then, you know, was sort of monumental, at the Claremont Club in Mayfair, which was run by their friend John Aspinall.
And they could sit there.
He sort of recreated this 18th century lifestyle, this incredibly beautiful house.
They could sit there, feel like old-style sort of aristocracy, which, of course, as we've been saying, no longer really existed in that same way, simply because they didn't have the money in the way that they then did.
Then, in the 18th century, aristocrats had all the money.
By 1974, they didn't.
You know, there was oil money coming in.
Things were being sold to...
Money was moving away from the aristocracy.
But they still had enough to sit there and gamble it all away in a ridiculous manner that understandably put people's backs up no end.
But the idea that they had enough money to get Lucan out of the country to some sort of sanctuary is a popular myth.
I think it's nonsense, but that's another thing.
Well, it is a myth, and the problem with modern media and the internet in particular is that such things still circulate.
And in a way, in the last 15, 20 years, while we've had the internet, these myths tend to grow.
But there are many myths around Lord Lucan, and the biggest interest is where he might have gone to, I suspect.
But just let's go through the nuts and bolts of the actual crime itself, if you can.
Yes, yes.
Well, it was.
Well, I spoke for my book.
The whole thing has got this mythical aspect.
It's like modern folklore, really, in this country.
The idea of this aristocrat who carried on the way he did, and he was a very handsome man as well.
He looked like an Earl from Central Casting.
And in fact, he was picked up for a screen test by an Italian film director who thought he was the perfect English aristocrat, but he couldn't act like me.
But he just looked apart so extraordinarily well.
So he took on this mystical aspect and then disappeared, you know, like, so he was like the Scarlet Pimpernel, but also like Jack the Ripper or like Dracula or, you know, it's just one of those things that's got into our collective consciousness.
But what it really was, I mean, I spoke to people who hadn't really spoken before, like he had a very, very nice sister who lived in America, a couple of friends who, in fact, took care of his three children, people who hadn't really spoken in depth before.
And you did hear a different story.
And what it was really all about was a marriage, a marriage that went terribly, terribly wrong.
He'd married Lady Luke and Veronica in 1963.
She was pretty, you know, intelligent girl.
It started going wrong from fairly early on from what I was told.
They weren't particularly well suited.
He liked gambling.
She had nothing to do.
She had postnatal depression with these three children.
It was just an increasingly unhappy liaison.
Well, one quote I read from her was that she said he talked to me more before the marriage than he ever did afterwards.
That rings pretty true, I think.
His very good friend, a man called Bill Shankid, had married Veronica's sister, Christina.
And I met them both.
Bill's now dead.
And Christina is, you know, wonderful superwoman.
Not very much like her sister, I don't think, but you slightly got the feeling that Lucan felt safe marrying Christina's sister because he was friendly with Bill and it was just a sort of...
And sometimes upper-class men don't always take...
They're marrying her.
You know, that's slightly how they think about things.
Not all of them, of course, but they, you know, it's like their racehorses, they're thoroughbred principle.
And we're talking about, look, we're talking about a tradition and not a noble one by the sounds of it that stretched backwards in time from there.
You know, life is not like that today.
But you're looking at the back end of an era here.
Yeah, that's exactly it, Howard.
You've said it.
That's exactly, exactly it.
So Lucan always seemed to me, whenever I've read about him, he always seemed to be almost an anachronism.
He was out of time, out of place.
Yep, that's it.
And deliberately so.
I mean, his parents, this always amazes people, his parents were terribly left-wing.
His father was a Labour peer.
He was leader of the House of Lords on the Labour side.
And his mother was practically a communist.
But she was, everyone absolutely adored her.
But Lucan sort of rebelled, but the kind of rebellion that meant, I'm going to go to gentlemen's clubs, you know, and damn you all kind of thing.
It was, and he sort of, in a weird way, what he looked like was, it sort of trapped him in a weird way.
I think it, because he looked so earl-like, I think he was determined to live up to his appearance.
So he was a walking dichotomy then, in some ways.
Go on.
Well, in terms of the fact that there was labor leanings, left-wing leanings in the family, but he was living to the lifestyle of somebody of his ilk and class.
Yes, that's exactly it.
That's exactly it.
And I think in the 50s, before he got married, I think he had the most marvellous time.
You know, he was, I don't know if your listeners know, Maiden Chelsea, I think its fame has traveled.
You know, he lived like the boys in that, you know, good-looking, fast cars.
He had this fabulous Aston Martin and everything.
He lived opposite Regent's Park.
He was a dream boat to look at.
He worked in the city.
He looked like a motor racing driver of the time with the slick back hair and the perfectly cut moustache.
That's it.
Yes, he did.
He did.
I mean, today we wouldn't call him good looking, really, but he was.
I think he was pretty stunning, actually.
He's very tall.
And some people say he was stupid.
I think that's not true.
I think, again, that's it's always If you don't like the upper classes, which is a perfectly valid point of view, you say, well, he was just a monster, he was thick, he was a swine, all this.
If you think they're all right, then you might sort of take a different view.
Everything is a bit stereotypical because of the figure of Lucan.
He almost wanted to be.
This will sound odd to American listeners.
I'm sorry to Laura.
It will sound odd to American listeners.
We kind of have to contextualize it a little bit.
This class system is at the core of all things.
And the strange thing about the aristocracy, I worked on the radio in some rural parts of the UK where the landed gentry were very much and still are very much in force and were a very good influence in many, many ways.
It is a strange thing because you would think that the lower classes and the upper classes would be daggers drawn, would be opposed to each other.
But that's not so because the lower classes and the upper classes need each other and understand each other.
So this country, in the way that it's always worked to do with class, is a very strange place with strange bedfellows, as we say.
That's it.
But I mean, I suppose in a way, Downtown Abbey does sort of show, I don't know if people were quite so macy with their servants as they are in that, but there is this, yes, exactly, this kind of interdependency and the safety of hierarchy, because once you do away with hierarchy, it does get scarier.
Not to somebody like me who's middle class, it doesn't, you know, I'm not bothered one way of the other, but to someone like Luke, and I think he was scared.
Particularly to go back to this strange situation in the early 1970s where there really was, I mean, we think times are turbulent now, I suspect they were even more so then because, you know, the right wing was going wild and the left wing was going wild and we had bombing from the IRA.
And I mean, actually, it does sound quite a lot like today, doesn't it?
And I think somebody like him who lived off an inherited income when tax was practically 100% for a brief time for somebody like, I mean, no wonder he liked gambling because it, you know, tax-free and also scary, scary to someone like him.
So his marriage was not happy and other aspects of his life were built on sand by the sounds of it.
That's it.
That's absolutely.
And that was, you know, when I spoke to somebody like his sister who was much more toward her parents' sort of political views and she thought he was she I think she kind of rather adored him but also saw him as weak, you know,
silly, because he had a perfectly good job in the city and as a gambler he was quite good at the financial markets and he just walked out to become a professional gambler, which is, as Bill Shankid says to me, lunatical because to make money even when you're quite good like he was at Batgamma, poker, all those things, I mean, you know, what a silly thing to do.
But he had an idea in his head of a lifestyle, again rebelling against his parents, I think.
And he just got more and more trapped in this because he was living an image, really.
But I think the marriage, which was very, very difficult for both of them, sympathy on both sides, I think, and particularly for the three children, that was what precipitated the whole thing.
Because the marriage broke down finally at the end of 1973, he walked out and then there was this custody battle for the three children, which initially he won and then he lost.
There was a temporary hearing and then a full hearing.
He lost a full hearing and it cost him a fortune.
And his gambling, which before that had been a bit silly but relatively measured, you know, he was winning, keeping afloat.
Then he started chasing money, which as we all know is fatal for gamblers, to win back the money for this court case and try and get the children back, which was the driving passion of his life.
Because there's no doubt about it, Lady Lucan was on meditation.
You know, it wasn't ideal.
And it was, as I was told by several people, driving him to a point of insanity.
And really, like all murders, like we were saying earlier, it's that human dynamic, that build-up that we can all recognize that I found really the most interesting part of this story.
But unless we start building him up as a sympathetic character, we can understand him.
But the events that transpired on that night of November the 7th were horrific.
Yes, yes, yes.
Sympathy is perhaps not the right word.
You sort of, so one of his friends said to me, I can understand him, but I don't condone it.
And that's as far as one can go.
Yes.
He was under a lot of pressure.
His financial situation was absolutely, but self-infected.
You know, what an idiot.
He was, you know, he doesn't look at by today's standards.
He was still not 40.
Why this idiot didn't just go and get a job?
But he was sort of so hidebound.
And, well, we don't really know what went on in his head.
My personal feeling was that he hired somebody to go and commit this murder.
That's a theory taken up by quite a few people.
So you think it may have been premeditated to that extent?
Well.
Yes.
But yes, it's absolutely certainly premeditated.
A certain amount of...
But yeah, yes, there's no possibility of exonerating him other than saying one can understand how it came about.
Yes, well, you can understand what circumstances, the confluence of circumstances, that put these actors in that position, if you can call them actors, people involved in this terrible bloody drama that unfolded On that night 43 years ago.
Can you just explain to our listeners briefly the events?
What exactly happened on the night?
Yeah.
So he was living just around the corner and he had been a succession of nannies.
I met one of them and she didn't paint a very happy picture of life at this house that had formerly been the marital home, which was now Lady Lucan's.
The custody case was a nightmare for him.
It took everything away from him.
It also trashed his reputation, which some may say deservedly, but others thought it was too harsh, helped push him over the edge.
So there'd been a succession of nannies, some of them only stayed a day, this, that, and the other.
Finally, this girl who'd only been there a few weeks, in fact, when this happened, Sandra Rivet, her case was still not fully unpacked in her room.
She was friendly with Lady Luke, and they were all sitting on Lady Lucan's bed with the children.
There were these three children, ages 10, 7, and 4.
And they were in and out of Lady Lucan's bedroom, basically watching, you know, top of the pops, this, that, and the other.
And then Sandra said, I'm going to go down and make some tea.
And that is how Sandra, innocent, 29, well, Lady Lucan was also innocent.
But, you know, this girl was literally caught in the crossfire, went down to make some tea and was bludgeoned to death in what is pretty well accepted as a case of mistaken identity.
Because in physical essentials, she was not dissimilar to Lady Lucan.
And it was a basement, you know, one of those tall thin London houses with this basement where the light bulb had been removed.
And somebody was down there waiting.
And the horror of it is just beyond belief.
Which plays into the theory that somebody else executed the actual crime, somebody lying in wait, who wouldn't have been closely connected enough to Lady Lucan to have identified the person who came down as not being her.
Yeah, I mean, I did always feel that because the thing about Sandra, not to go into details because it's so horrific what happened to this poor girl, but quite a lot of the attack was conducted.
It wasn't like just a knock on the head.
Some of it happened face to face.
She had a huge number of injuries.
It was a big fight.
And they could see who they were attacking.
And London basements are never pitch, pitch dark.
You know, there was a street light outside and all that.
I just, and for various other reasons, which I won't bore your listeners with, I was fairly convinced that Lucan himself had not done it.
Anyway, it was his mentality to get a servant to do it.
And then Lady Lucan came down the stairs looking for Sandra.
She'd been a long while with the tea.
And then Lady Lucan was also attacked pretty badly, but she fought the person off.
She is, of course, has always maintained that it was her husband.
Well, there was one interview where she said she wasn't sure.
I think that was given in 1981.
But anyway, whatever.
There are also theories that Sandra was the intended victim.
There's a theory that it was a burglary for insurance to make an insurance claim because Lucan was so hard up, which also went wrong.
There are other theories.
I sort of lay them all out in my book.
But I felt the hitman.
There are so many complexities in it.
And Lady Lucan herself being attacked, Laura, doesn't, well, as far as I, and what do I know?
You know, my father was a policeman, but I'm not.
It doesn't play into the narrative so much that Lucan himself was the prime mover in this, the person who did it, in other words.
Because if he'd accidentally bludgeoned to death Sandra Rivet, then if he, being the person that he was and not being a professional killer, then his reaction may have been, oh, God, what have I done?
And then to either turn himself in or run away, but that didn't happen.
No, no, I agree.
I agree.
But the complexities of it are huge.
And of course, this is an era before, you know, DNA and blah, blah, blah.
And the investigation was a bit wayward.
There were a lot of police sort of descended on the house.
It was, of course, celebre, as you can imagine, because no Earl had even been accused of murder for 100 years or something.
You know, I know that sounds ridiculous, but in this class-aware country, the fact of him being Lord Lucom, that was the thing.
And it was a bit of a, you know, they had to eliminate 50 sets of police fingerprints from the murder scene all there, because a lot of people had come just to have a nose about.
Did you get the sense, Laura, that the upper classes, a very cohesive unit, were sitting around in their clubs smoking cigars saying, well, terrible business, terrible business, but needs to be dealt with as quickly as possible because, of course, it would reflect badly upon the whole class of people, maybe some may have thought.
Well, that's, yeah, it's interesting.
In other words, if you have the chattering classes believing that all the gentry lived like that, that's very bad for them.
Yes.
I have to say a couple of the ones I spoke to were not...
They weren't that Stupid.
I mean, they were educated.
They'd gone to Oxford.
They were gamblers, which is silly to try and do that for a living, but they were not crass in themselves.
Again, there was this public image of the, what did they call it, the sort of Ethan Mafia or whatever, which plays into people's, oh yeah, you know, like they used to say about Cameron and Osborne and all that kind of thing.
There is truth in it, but it's not the whole truth.
It's just, it's shorthand for kind of, let's get the tofs.
Sometimes one can understand it, and sometimes one thinks this isn't actually getting us anywhere.
It is a bit of a circular thing.
There will always be people who hate the aristocracy, and there will always be people who want to defend its interests, and that is just the way of life here.
Yeah, it really is.
And doesn't it sound silly when we say it?
It just sounds so ridiculous.
It almost sounds in this decade.
It almost sounds unreal.
But, you know, that's been the fact of life for as long as you and I have both been alive.
And it was much more in play at the time of this particular crime in 1974 because the attitudes that were prevalent at that time, you know, they were people born in the 50s and in the 40s and in the 30s when life really was different.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, I mean, you could almost say that the Lucan crime did sort of, if there'd ever been any lingering deference to the aristocracy, which there probably still was at that time, probably killed it pretty much, certainly in the public sensibility.
But I think this idea, you see, the press and the police were doing a kind of dance macabre together.
I met one of the policemen who'd worked on the case closely, the first detective there.
I mean, he was smashing, but he did say, you know, we use the press.
We know that that goes on.
And this idea of portraying them as this evil bunch who wouldn't talk to the police, who wouldn't cooperate, who were shielding Lucan in one of their stately homes or something, this did take a hold, and it didn't really square with the fact.
Actually, not even that many of them were actual aristocracy.
They weren't aristocracy.
They were just sort of, you know, vaguely posh hangers-on, a lot of them, just sort of liked hanging around this gambling club.
And you know what gambling clubs are like.
They do a lot of idiots quite often congregate at them because they think it's glamorous.
So we can rule out conspiracy, more or less, but we can rule in planning then.
Intense planning.
Can we?
intense I didn't get the feeling that it was I think if it had been worked out to commit this murder if Lucan Lucan was in a He was in a wild state.
His sister, who was really very, very nice woman, and she said he came to visit us in New York and he was just pacing the floor.
He was drinking.
Oh, that's the other thing.
Drinking.
drinking, drinking, drinking way too much, which, as we know, is conducive to criminality quite often, and just not in his...
But he was in a state, and he was in a state about his children.
That's kind of everyone accepted that.
Everyone said he was a lovely father.
He was a kind father.
He got them every other weekend and he'd take them down to the Shankids.
And he was good with them.
He was also out of his mind about worry, of course, out of his mind about money because he was keeping this big house in Belgravia for Lady Lucan.
He was trying to pay for the court because he was trying to challenge the court decision.
He was on a sort of whirligig of a vortex of just alarm and anxiety.
So back to the night of November the 7th into the morning of November the 8th.
This happens.
Sandra Rivet is dead.
Lady Lucan is injured.
Yeah.
And what happens then?
Okay.
So what I'm really saying is if it had been planned, I think it might have been planned a bit better.
It was planned fairly in a fairly short, rather hysterical, drunken period of time, I would say.
Because it was just a calamitous.
And the other thing is, when people say, oh, he was got out of the country, as you rightly said, that would have needed huge planning.
And that was not what was intended to happen.
It was intended to go right.
You know, it was Lady Lucan who was meant to be the victim, not this poor girl, Sandra.
And Lady Lucan's body was presumably going to be removed from the house.
And it was going to be said she'd wandered off because she was on an awful lot of medication, et cetera, et cetera.
And then he would have just blithely sailed back into his life.
He wasn't meant to disappear.
So he was not only had he done something evil had been perpetrated, but also something calamitously wrong, a mistake.
So he rang his mother in a complete panic, told her to go to the house and look after the children.
And then he went to the house.
We know very little of what he did, because it's not corroborated.
Very little of this is corroborated.
But he was at the house of a friend in Sussex, about 50 miles from London, Susan Maxwell Scott.
And was this a friend who would have known what had happened at this stage?
Well, he arrived, about 11.30, midnight, something like that, and he told her.
What he really told her, we don't know.
We know what she told the inquest he told her, and she shielded him.
She said there'd been an intruder at the house, etc., etc.
Which is maybe semi-true because there may have been a hitman, but she was shielding him.
It's plain and simple.
Is she still alive?
No.
There's hardly any of them still alive.
So he, but we know he went to her house because he wrote a couple of letters that were postmarked.
You know, one of her children posted them.
And the next thing we know is that a car he'd borrowed from a friend was found parked in New Haven, which is a port.
New Haven, of course, very close to cliffs, very close to Beachy Head.
Yep.
Which is a well-known suicide spot.
Yeah.
Again, I hesitate to sound sympathetic, but that drive to New Haven, oh my God, you know, I mean, because I firmly believe that he went to New Haven in order to kill himself.
Well, New Haven, I mean, sadly, the cliffs there is a well-known suicide location, and they have people patrolling them now, trying to make sure that this kind of thing does not happen.
But over the years, it regularly has.
New Haven, also a port, of course.
If you were looking to get to France, you could go from New Haven.
Yeah.
And in those days, the officialdom was, you know, I mean, things were much more free and easy.
Well, people don't understand this these days, but in those days, you could go to France for a day on a little piece of cardboard that you could buy from the post office for a day.
You know, no passports required if you didn't have one back then.
So things were a lot laxer.
Yes, and there was a, you know, there have been, oh, God, how many sightings of Lord Lucan in the last 43 years.
But there was a sighting, I think it was in the Daily Express, two guys who worked, boatmen, and they said, we saw this man.
He looked like a customs official.
He was so tall and he looked so out of place.
I mean, it just read like true, actually, sort of the only true sighting.
You know, a lot of people believed he got on the ferry and jumped off.
And it's what I would tend to believe.
There are variants on it.
You know, he took out a boat, he had a boat ready to put Lady Lucan's body in, and he used that to dispose himself.
People say, but there's no body.
I wouldn't regard that as a stumbling block.
No, because, of course, people could jump off a ferry into the channel, and it is possible that a body might not show up.
Or might not show up in a place where it would be found.
Well, exactly.
I mean, apparently when they dug the channel tunnel, they found an awful lot of bodies.
It's rather a terrible thought.
But yeah, no body means no end to the mystery.
And that, of course, is one of the reasons why, I mean, when you talk about it, there are so many reasons why it's continuing to fascinate people.
You know, it does abound in fascinating elements, no question.
And the fact of the matter is that had he lived, whether he was in Victoria or Vanuatu or wherever he was, I'm not suggesting he was in those places, but if he'd gone to some far-flung place and created a new identity with whatever money he might have had or been able to get hold of, he might well be dead now of natural causes.
Yes, he'd be 83 at the end of this year, and he, you know, he smoked his head off.
He liked to drink.
That doesn't necessarily kill you off, but it wasn't what one would today call a healthy lifestyle.
That image that people always have of him eating lamb chi, he ate the same dinner every night, smoked salmon and lamb chops, and in the summer he had the mangeolet.
Now, whether that's true, it's sort of this image of this, again, what we're talking about, the image of the Earl, the cardboard Earlier, in today's terminology, I don't know if this is right, but the unreconstructed male.
Yes.
Now, of course, this almost today is worse than murder, that he, I don't mean to sound flippant, but that he was, you know, his wife had these problems.
She did, by her own admission, see psychiatrists and was put on fairly strong drugs and what have you, and that she couldn't talk to him.
And of course, he was not a big one for talking to her, let's be fair.
No, I think I suppose from his point of view, she'd come from, she'd had no money or, you know, he probably thought he'd elevated her.
He'd given her a huge house in Belgravia.
She could have her hair done where she liked, buy expensive clothes.
She was taken to Monte Carlo.
She was taken to Deauville or La Tuque or skiing or the Clermont Club, which was a very, very smart place.
People like Sinatra, Elizabeth Taylor, you know, I mean, it was, it wasn't, when you look at it that way, I can think of worse lives.
And I suppose he may have thought, what's so terrible about her life?
But of course, we can never know what goes on behind closed doors.
And, you know, even if you are rich or have the appearances and trappings of being rich, you can still have a miserable life.
You can.
You can.
But I think the only thing I would say and that I try to do in my book is that we have always heard, like when any marriage breaks down, people have a side of the story.
And we have always, always, always heard Lady Lucan's side, Always, always, always.
And I think there is another side.
And her children have had a pretty raw time from I can't imagine what it must have been like over these years to be them.
I don't mean to sound patronizing.
I think they're so admirable.
I mean, one of them has never said a word.
Very wise.
Very hard to do.
The other two have said a bit.
But I think they're incredible, actually, in the early 80s.
They did go to live with the Shand kids.
Christina Shankid was her sister.
I mean, that must have been difficult.
Problematical.
I mean, this is all just to get a sense of the levels we're talking about here.
The Shand kids, of course, were linked with Princess Diana's family.
Yes, yes, exactly.
Well, Bill.
Oh, it's complicated, isn't it?
Because Diana's mother married twice.
It was one of Diana's mother's husbands.
Well, not Earl Spencer, obviously.
There was a relationship there.
But they moved in the highest circles, is what we're saying.
Yes.
Yes, yes.
So this is a mystery.
It's an enigma wrapped up in a mystery or the other way around.
We still don't have the answer, and perhaps we'll never get it.
Lucan himself, there have been, as you rightly say, sightings reported just about everywhere and in every decade since, including this one, of this man.
But realistically, you think there is slim to no chance of him being alive somewhere now, under another identity?
Well, I don't.
I mean, it's opinion, and many people would say, I don't agree with you, and that's completely, you know, completely fair.
I mean, the man who headed the investigation, Roy Ransom, detective, who's also now dead, he spent the whole investigation believing that Lucan was dead.
And then suddenly, in the 90s, he started saying, no, he's in South Africa, wrote a book about it, got a television program going out there and all this kind of, because there'd been this tall bloke who looks a bit like Lucan, and everyone suddenly started saying, that's him.
You know, the number of times people have said, that's him, because it's some tall bloke standing by a roulette table.
And of course, if you're a journalist and someone says, oh, Lucan's in the Seychelles, you're going to think, okay, I'll have an expensive paid trip to go and find him.
Well, South Africa's a possibility because, of course, during the apartheid years, we didn't have an awful lot to do with South Africa.
And yet there was a huge English connection and some very, what we would call, posh people, they still do, living out there in places like Cape Town.
Also a lot of gambling there.
So if you were building conspiracy theories, then a possibility.
It is.
It absolutely is.
And Botswana was very favored, and Mozambique was quite favored.
The only thing I'd say, when you looked at it, he was a bankrupt.
He had debts of, I think it was $58,000.
He was a bankrupt.
His friends were skint.
They really were.
So what you're saying then, Laura, the trail would have gone cold.
Well, not the trail would have gone cold, but he'd have run out of rope at some point.
If he'd escaped to another country, the money would have run out and anybody who might have been protecting him, he might have found out there would also have ceased to do that because there'd be nothing in it for them.
Well, exactly.
I mean, it sounds good.
It's very alluring notion, isn't it, of this old guy propping up a bar somewhere with one of his martinis and in his head is the memory of the 7th of November 1974.
It's, you know, it's part of the myth.
But I just don't know where the money would have come from to do these things.
I think this idea that he had these, it's like something out of James Bond, you know, the rich and powerful elite.
His friends were not like that.
I mean, one of them, Charles Benson, he used to be at White City Dog Track.
I remember as a kid.
And he was just a...
He went from one bet to the next.
Well, dog racing is another thing that's very much a part of the British culture.
And as you say, White City Dog Track, is it still in existence?
I don't think it is, is it?
No.
No, no.
No, it went when I was quite young.
But Lucan loved all that.
Yeah, well, no, it was very much part, again, of this thing that unites, just like horse racing.
The lower classes and the upper classes united in one passion.
It is a fascinating part of our country.
Clear up something for me, if you could, Laura.
He was declared dead, was Lucan, by the High Court in 1999, but wasn't he also legally declared dead more recently, officially?
Yes, it's been such a mix-up, really.
He was sort of, he was declared dead, but he was kind of undead.
Because although he was dead, in other ways, his son, George, couldn't inherit the title, which he wanted to do, which I can sort of understand, a way of drawing the line or proving he had nothing to be ashamed of or something I don't know.
And the will wasn't, I mean, there was nothing really, but probate had to be granted.
There were all these different legal stages.
And wasn't it to do with inheriting a title?
Yes.
And so the actual death certificate was only issued last February.
Whether George, who's now 8th Earl of Lucan, whether he thought that would stop the speculation, he was wrong, as he probably knew he would be wrong.
And now Lady Lucan herself has spoken in a new television documentary, which unfortunately, because of other events that I was dealing with, I did not see, but I gather you did.
Yes, it was of interest.
How can it not be?
There were things she, I mean, it was familiar territory, But obviously a new generation comes along and wants to hear it again.
And how does I guess there's only one question because I didn't see it.
In your view, how does she regard him and those events now?
What does she, if people ask her about them, what does she say about them today?
I should be asking her, but she doesn't do a lot of interviews.
No, no.
She's a highly intelligent woman.
If I can...
I don't mean to speak for her.
But, I mean, she...
She knows...
I think she still holds a residual channel for him in a weird way.
She said he was like a god when he came into her life.
I mean, when she was 26 or something, it's inconceivable, but in those days, you know, you were getting close to being a bit on the shelf.
And then along comes an earl or an earl to be with his Belgravia house and all that kind of thing.
I know it sounds shallow, but, you know, there's a whole literature based on being swept off your feet by people like him.
So it must speak in some way to people.
And I think in some way she still sees him in that way.
She seems more bitter toward other people, like the Shang kids who got custody of the children.
You know, that kind of thing.
She says he was an abusive husband.
That's the kind of stuff that came out at the custody case that really ensured he didn't get his children.
But what we do know is that a brutal crime happened.
A poor young nanny died, and anybody close to her over these years have had to bear that particular cross for that time.
And I don't know how they've done that.
And if there was another party involved, if there had been a hit person of some kind involved there, what happened to that person?
The club where he went gambling, you know what gambling clubs are like.
There's a Cedia side to them.
There's a sort of protection racket type side to them.
I kind of assumed it might not be that difficult to find someone who knows a guy who knows a guy.
Who would have slipped back into the underworld?
Yeah.
I mean, it sounds a bit melodramatic when I say it like that.
I just...
I cannot imagine him physically doing it.
And that sort of struck a bit of a chord with me.
Again, I'm hesitant to sound like I'm defending him.
I'm not defending him.
I'm saying all stories have another side to them.
I mean, I guess there's a difference between defending somebody and what we're talking about here is completely, in case anybody's getting that impression, is completely and utterly indefensible on any level.
And understanding how a thing came to pass.
I guess that's the dance that we're dancing at the moment.
Do you think that the media and others should now leave this alone?
It's been 43 years.
Well, I can't really say that having written a book about it, I suppose.
No, we can't.
You can't.
But there is a fascination you see.
And I always, whenever it appears in the papers, if it appears in the Daily Mail or something, I always think, what more can you possibly say about this that hasn't already been said?
There is more.
I think there is a bit more to come out.
I've got reams of stuff.
Anything, I mean, I don't expect you to, unless you would like to volunteer it, but anything that might be in future decades worth reading about?
Well, that would be the intention.
You do end up with the danger of defending someone who has done something indefensible.
But it's like you said, you're trying to...
There was a reason, and the reason is the really interesting bit.
However twisted, however distorted the reason may be, this man is not somebody from a Hammer horror film.
He's not a zombie.
But the good chance is now that this man is dead, and for the sake of those who still live, for the children, perhaps it's time for the media to turn down the wick on this and unless we discover something new.
But a fascinating case.
And the fact that we are talking now shows that I've always been, because it spans my lifetime.
I was a kid when this happened, and I'm still here.
It's something that will always hold a fascination, I think.
Laura, thank you very much for talking with me.
Oh, it's been so enjoyable.
Thank you, Howard.
British author Laura Thompson.
I'll put a link to her and her work on my website, theunexplained.tv.
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