Murder by Mistake (7 page)
Authors: M.J. Trow
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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“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?
If he left the country by other means, how did the Corsair get to Newhaven? Roy Ranson was of the opinion that someone else drove it there, which explains the time lag between Lucan leaving the Maxwell-Scotts’ and the earliest time the car could have been parked on the coast.
The police began to get calls from all over. The calls started in November 1974 and are still going on today. A friend of mine was told by a retired Met officer in 2004 that they knew exactly where Lucan was—his body lay in a cave in Sussex, not far from Newhaven where the Corsair was found. Cranks of all sorts came forward with theories. Mediums, clairvoyants, even water dowsers all claimed to be able to pinpoint the position of the missing earl. He was sailing on cruise ships, like some sort of latter-day Flying Dutchman, never able to get off anywhere for fear of being recognized. He was operating roulette and backgammon tables in Monte Carlo. He was holed up in friends’ farms in South Africa, deep in the bush (Ray Ranson actually spent weeks there trying to track him down). He was with the drug lords in Colombia, South America. He was working as a double for Saddam Hussein!
One sighting that proved fascinating was that of an Englishman found in Australia. An Australian cop thought he looked like Ranson’s and Interpol’s circulated photographs of Lucan, so he arrested the man. He was certainly English. He was the ex-Cabinet Minister John Stonehouse, who had faked his own suicide months earlier by abandoning his clothes on an Australian beach. Why? Because back home, he was wanted on fraud charges.
It seems unfair to single out one book that got it badly wrong, but it does illustrate a point. Ex-undercover cop Duncan Maclaughlin believed he had tracked Lucan down in the remote and inaccessible jungles of Goa, India. The man known as Jungle Barry was dead by the time Maclaughlin got there (in 2002), but when he showed photographs of Lucan to people who had known Barry, they all swore they were one and the same man. The book is well-written, and Maclaughlin worked hard and honestly to prove his case, comparing photographs, dates and places. He came to the conclusion that Jungle Barry, a backgammon player of formidable talent and with an ear for music, was indeed Lucky Lucan. His body had been cremated, so there was no possibility of knowing for sure.
When
Dead Lucky—Lord Lucan: The Final Truth
was published and serialized in a British newspaper, a radio celebrity and musician called Mike Harding spoiled the party. Jungle Barry was Barry Halpin, a Liverpool banjo player who had gone to Goa in a quest for spiritual enlightenment in the 1970s and had never come back.
Rather like Lord Lucan.
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In any murder inquiry, there are loose ends, questions to which there are no obvious answers. This is doubly true of a case where there is no trial and where neither the victim nor the alleged perpetrator can give evidence. So, what are the unanswered questions in the Lucan case?
1. Unless it was to dispose of his wife’s body in an inconspicuous vehicle, why did John Lucan borrow Michael Stoop’s Corsair? He gave no explanation and Stoop, gentleman to the last, didn’t ask. When the police located Lucan’s Mercedes in Elizabeth St., the engine was cold and the battery flat. Did Lucan merely need another car because his was not drivable? Why not hire one, or do the “ungentlemanly” thing and borrow Stoop’s Mercedes?
2. For a man planning a cold-blooded murder on November 7, Lucan was extraordinarily cool. He invited Michael Hicks-Beach to his flat, entertained him and drove him home (almost certainly in Stoop’s Corsair). Then he drove to the Clermont Club and, according to the timings, drove straight to Lower Belgrave St. to kill his wife.
3. What about the Clermont Club? There are three issues here. First, Lucan apparently made two phone calls to reserve a dinner table. The first was at 7:30, in the presence of Hicks-Beach; was this to help establish an alibi for what was to come? The second was an hour later—why make the call twice? Was this simply a mistake on the part of the Clermont? In Britain, all the clocks in the country go back one hour at the end of October (the actual date varies) to provide more daylight in the mornings. The Clermont famously had no clocks, but are we seriously to believe that the club’s restaurant manager, Andrew Demetrio, did not have a watch?
Second, if the dinner reservation was to establish some sort of alibi, it would not have worked. Lucan ordered dinner for four, not five. In fact when his guests arrived at the Clermont, Greville Howard rang Lucan’s home but got no answer (by that time he was on his way to Uckfield) and they arranged for a fifth chair to be brought pending what they all thought would be Lucan’s imminent arrival.
Third, how are we to explain that Lucan drove up to the club’s entrance in his Mercedes (a car that was supposedly out of action), had a brief chat and drove away again? Once more, this may have been to establish an alibi, but it was an odd thing to do, and the timing—Egson remembered Lucan driving away at just before 9 PM—is impossibly tight. He would have to park the car on Elizabeth St., walk around the corner (actually several hundred yards) to Number 46 Belgrave St., get in and be down in the basement waiting for the woman he took to be his wife, in the unlikely time frame of 10 minutes. Of course, if Egson got the wrong night, then it is all explained and the whole sighting becomes irrelevant.
4. How did Lucan get into Number 46? The simple answer is that he still had a key, but Veronica and Sandra routinely put a safety chain across the front door at night. It is not known whether Lucan knew that or not, but if it had been in place, it is likely that Sandra Rivett would be alive today. Had she or Veronica simply forgotten to use it that night?
5. If we believe Veronica, John Lucan entered the house, removed the light bulb in the basement, and waited. He did not know that Sandra had changed her night off at the last minute, but did know that Veronica was in the habit of making herself a cup of tea at 9 PM. This habit of Veronica’s would be perfect, because she would be on her own, two floors below where the nearest child would be, so the children would not be involved in any way. Veronica told the police that Lucan had killed Sandra by mistake, hitting the wrong woman in the darkness of the basement. True, Veronica and Sandra were the same height, but Sandra was dark-haired, whereas Veronica was blond, and there was
some
light coming in through the basement window from the street lamp. Sandra had a much fuller figure than Veronica, and Keith Simpson’s inquest evidence made it very clear that she had been hit in the face with a fist or an open-handed slap. In other words, her attacker was facing her rather than bludgeoning her from behind. John Lucan had been married to Veronica for 10 years; they had had three children together. Was it likely that a man, however psyched up to commit murder, could have made a mistake like that?
6. What about the murder weapon? There is little doubt that the lead pipe found in the hall was used on both Sandra and Veronica, and the surgical tape was probably wound around it to give a better grip. But why
two
pipes? The second one, found in the trunk of the Corsair, was damning evidence of Lucan’s guilt, albeit circumstantial. Why would he need two, and if he did, why not take them both to the crime scene? Perhaps he did, but why then take one (unused) pipe away and leave the damning one (used) for the police to find?
7. What about the US mailbag? If you’re British, have a rummage around your house and find an item like this. If you’re American, dig out that old British Post Office sack you’ve got lying around. It is a very odd item to find 3,000 miles from where you’d expect it to be, and no one at the inquest found this in any way odd. If it was there, handy, in the basement already, we must ask why. If Lucan brought it to carry out Veronica’s body, could he really have assumed that it would do the job? Surely he would have realized that smashing someone’s skull in with a heavy blunt object is going to cause a
lot
of blood, and carrying a sack dripping blood out of a Belgravia house, even at night, would be a rather giveaway thing to do. Sturdier polyethylene ones were available. Why didn’t Lucan use one of those?
8. If Veronica’s contention that Lucan attacked her is true, why didn’t he finish her off? John Lucan was a foot taller than Veronica and
very
much stronger. Having realized his mistake in killing Sandra Rivett, why not put that right to the only extent he could by killing Veronica too? The account of her fighting back, even by grabbing his testicles, does not actually make sense. Why, then, having tried to kill her, did he help her upstairs, in full view of Frances, and tend to her wounds?
9. Can we explain Lucan’s behavior after he left Number 46? According to the perceived wisdom, he dashed out of the house almost immediately after Veronica did, leaving Sandra’s body in the mailbag and evidence of the crime(s) all over the place. He then went to Madeleine Floorman’s. Why? Presumably he would have told her the same garbled, semi-coherent story he later told to his mother and Susan Maxwell-Scott, about interrupting a fight in the basement. But why her? She was the mother of one of his children’s friends, and nothing suggests they were any closer than that. Would he trust his children to an acquaintance?
There was no reply at her door, so he called her. Where from? Not from a phone booth, or she would have heard the tell-tale “pip” sounds. Did he call from Elizabeth St. or Eaton Row? Perhaps, but why were no blood traces found there when he
had
dripped blood (both A and B types) on Madeleine Floorman’s front step? If he now planned to run, why didn’t he take his passport, driver’s license, checkbook and cash? A clean suit was lying on the bed at Elizabeth St. Although he was already on the run, why not change to hide at least
some
of the blood to avoid suspicion?
Leaving London made sense: Get away from the crime scene as quickly as possible. Perhaps the choice of the Maxwell-Scotts’ was random. There were many other friends Lucan could have called, even at outrageous hours, around the country. Clearly, from what Susan remembered of his conversation, he expected his friend Ian Maxwell-Scott to be at home. He appeared to be wearing the same clothes he had worn when he had entertained Michael Hicks-Beach earlier the previous evening, clothes that should have been bloodstained but weren’t. All Susan Maxwell-Scott saw was a damp patch on one hip. Yet the letters that Lucan then wrote to Ian in her presence still had blood traces on them when Maxwell-Scott took them to the police.
