The following is the Tale of the murder which occurred at 46 Lower Belgrave Street, Belgravia – on Thursday, 7th November 1974. It will be performed in four acts. Discretion is advised, this one is about to get messy, and bloody … and full of some really awful people. 

Act One: The basement, in typical upstairs- downstairs fashion, where the kitchen is located. Enter a young, slender lady. She pauses to turn on the light. “Strange, the bulb must have blown” and continues towards the kettle. In near complete darkness she fills a kettle and prepares to make a cup of tea. Unbeknownst to her a tall figure, decked out all in somber dark grey, creeps toward her. Sure-footedly he moves closer and closer – till within striking distance. One imagines that feeling you get, when even in the darkest of rooms you know someone is staring at you; that unease when you hear another’s aspiration in the room. The hair stands up on the back of her neck, she spins on her heels at the last moment. Her eyes struggle to focus on her attacker’s silhouette. All too late. The killer unleashes a flurry of heavy blows with a lead pipe. He strikes the victim hard enough to crack her skull in several places. Hard enough to bend a solid lead pipe.

The victim crumples, dead on the floor. A blood filled floor in a blood soaked room. Zoom in for a close up of the attacker’s face, as he realises to his horror, he’s missed his target. He was there to kill the lady of the house. Instead, he’s bludgeoned the childrens’ nanny, Sandra Rivett. 

It bears saying a little something about Sandra. Born in Australia in 1945, her family moved to Croydon when she was a toddler. She was a smart but un-academic kid, and left school to become a hairdresser. Her early adulthood had been bumpy. As a teen she got engaged, then pregnant to a builder, who left her. She fell into a deep depression and spent time in a mental health facility, while her parents adopted her son as their own. She married a sailor at 21, later falling out of love and separating. By 29, she was a nanny for posh people; something she excelled at. She’d met a young man named John Hankins. The couple spent Thursday nights together, leaving the lady of the house the job of making her own cup of tea that evening. I recall reading an article a decade ago that stated the couple changed nights that week as John was preparing to fly to Australia the following day. I couldn’t find this detail in any of the texts. That he was around for the police to question suggests this wasn’t the case.

From what I’ve read, Sandra may be the sole good person in this tale; so it bears to pause a second to mourn her loss. Alas poor Sandra…. 

As the killer stuffs Sandra’s body into a sack, and drags her to a hiding place under the stairwell, he is disturbed by the sound of footsteps from above. [The house lights fade to black.] 

Act Two: A large estate in County Mayo, Ireland. Some time in the late 1840s. 

I feel it safe to say, for his crimes – Richard John Bingham, known as John, or sometimes the wildly inappropriate appellation Lucky – or officially, the 7th Earl of Lucan – was still only the third most awful member of the family. His namesake, a several times great uncle, was a thug Elizabeth I sent to Ireland to enforce her rule. We’ve covered that murderous Richard Bingham in the Tale of Grace O’Malley. He governed Ireland with an iron fist and was given a large estate – which passed down his brother’s side when he died childless. The third Earl of Lucan, Field Marshall George Bingham, was in charge of even more square miles of land, and had 100,000 Irish tenants.
During the Great Potato famine – a man-made disaster which caused the death or displacement of millions of Irish from 1845 – 1852 – George evicted several thousand tenants; not for non-payment – but because he wished to build himself a dairy farm. To do so he had an entire village demolished. 

To add insult to injury; as a trustee of the local poorhouse, he locked the gates, turning the starving away to die by the thousands. Before he set off for the Crimean War, and in 1854 mistook an order – which led to the infamous Charge of the Light Brigade – he already had the blood of thousands of innocents on his hands. 

Over time, the Bingham family got more likeable. They also became, by degrees, less wealthy. John Bingham’s parents, the 6th Earl and Countess Lucan could not have been more different than these earlier monsters. They were members of the Labour Party, who advocated for the aristocracy to be stripped of their privilege. John, it bears stating, was nothing at all like his parents. 

John ‘ Lucky’ Lucan, born 18th December 1934, got his first real glimpse of extreme wealth during World War Two. To keep the Bingham children safe, John, his two sisters and brother were sent to the USA to live with the wealthy Brady- Tucker family. Though homesick and depressed, Lucan got a sense of what living large truly looked like. Carll and Marcia Brady Tucker had incalculable wealth made from gambling less wealth on the stock market. Hardly a victim of the great crash, they owned stately homes across the country, and lived exuberantly.

Post war and back in Britain, John became deeply depressed – so the 6th Earl and Countess – in spite of their own feelings on posh schools – sent their son off to Eton. He was not a terribly capable student, but he learned two life skills. First, he acquired all the social capital needed to mix with fellow aristocrats. Second, he fell head over heels in love with gambling. In the days before casinos became legal (this happened in 1961) this meant running bets on the dogs and horses down to a local bookie. He was an awful student, but very popular with the other kids, as the school’s de facto bookie – collecting bets then shuttling them to the real bookies. Academia not for him, John Bingham left school to complete his national military service in 1953.

Completing officer training, the future Earl served two years in West Germany – where he frequented casinos on his leave, and got in a lot of card playing in with his fellow officers while on base. He strolled from peacetime service straight to a well-paying job in finance with the merchant bankers William Brandt’s sons & co. His started at £2,500 per annum – a small fortune in 1955 when you consider the average wage was around £10 a week, and £1,900 could buy you a brand new home. All the same, he gambled most of his salary away, and sent letters to his uncle – a venture capitalist – full of daydreams of having £2 million in the bank, a mansion and a yacht. Gambling was a significant element in his plan to get there. It also bears mention, he was also a trust fund baby with a further £10,000 a year to sustain him. 

A colleague getting a promotion he felt he deserved was all Lucan needed to quit the job at Brandt’s, and rebrand himself as a ‘professional gambler’

Were one to ask ‘Lucky’ Lucan about his glamorous life post Brandt’s, no doubt he’d recall the time he won £26,000 at the table (incidentally just before he handed in his notice). Maybe several other nights where he came out ahead – of course ignoring all the times he lost the shirt off his back. He may share the time a film director commented he could be the next James Bond, and how he screen tested for a Shirley MacLaine movie in Paris. He may omit he never got the role cause he couldn’t act. His life was one giant, hedonistic party. There was gambling, soirées and jet setting. He won and lost more money in a single night, sometimes, than most people made in a year. He hung out with rich friends on Florida golf courses. He bought a power boat and raced it. Lucan was the fastest pilot on the water, till Mother Nature reminded him too fast sometimes leaves your boat at the bottom of the lake.

In 1963, he met Veronica Duncan, his friend Bill Shand Kydd’s 26 year old sister in law. The two hit it off, and married in November 1963. She promised never to change him, and his free-wheeling, gambling ways. He promised to never change. Veronica bore an heir, and a couple of spares, and cracks soon appeared in the marriage. 

Veronica suffered terrible post-natal depression, something the Earl found quite insane – conveniently forgetting his own bouts of childhood ennui. Second, she didn’t fit in at the Earl’s new home away from home – the Clermont Club. Established in 1961 by his roguish pal John Aspinall, Lucan was a founding member of the club. He spent most of his life there. As his wife sat on the sidelines, clearly not mixing with his aristocratic clique; and looked increasingly bored to tears as he gambled every night till well after midnight – as she went through bouts of crippling depression, and fought back when he tried to institutionalise her – 

after she jealously fought with another woman one night, and was rude and demanding to the help, and nagged him constantly over his degenerate gambling and emotionally distant ways – the Earl packed his bags. He left Veronica in January 1973. 

Lord Lucan spent the following 18 months in a downwards spiral, running up huge debts all over town. He spread ugly rumours over his ‘crazy, bitch wife’ – to paraphrase, not necessarily quote, his lordship. He continued to try to have Veronica committed.

At one point Lucan applied for full custody of his kids. Before the hearing he kidnapped the children, something the judge looked poorly on. Full custody and hefty alimony were awarded to Veronica – so long as she had a nanny to help her raise the kids. No doubt his lordship would tell several nannies could not handle the crazy old ball and chain. There is no doubt Veronica was difficult. She seemed to have some mental health problems which couldn’t just be chalked up to being gaslighted and physically abused by her monster of a husband for a decade. There’s no doubt however, several nannies left due to Lucan’s tardiness in paying them – and due to the constant surveillance by either the private investigators he hired, or the Earl himself. 

The Earl blamed his current financial hardships – owing significantly to increasingly reckless gambling, on Veronica. In late 1974, now £65,000 in debt and in the process of selling off the family art and silverware, Lord Lucan confided in a friend, Greville Howard, he’d thought of murdering Veronica. Murder her. Dump the body off his boat into the Solent river. People would think she went mad and ran away. Howard laughed the suggestion off, countering the children were better off with a bankrupt than a jailbird for a dad. In the weeks leading up to the murder, Lord Lucan took out a hefty life insurance policy on his wife. 

Act Three: The Plumber’s Arms, a pub a few minutes’ walking distance from the Bingham residence. 

It is around 9.50 pm on 7th November 1974. The low murmur of the pub is suddenly shocked into silence at the arrival of Veronica Bingham – badly beaten, and covered head to toe in blood. 

45 minutes earlier, Veronica went downstairs to check on Sandra Rivett. She was very clear over the years that she never went into the basement, never saw Sandra – Sandra’s blood type found on the soles of her shoes and her clothes suggest she may have disturbed her husband in the basement rather than the cloakroom on the next floor up. What isn’t in question is she crossed paths with her husband – who beat her with a now bent piece of lead pipe. He split her head open, leaving wounds that would require 60 stitches, then tried to suffocate her by shoving his gloved fingers down her throat. Veronica stopped the attack by grabbing John by the balls and squeezing till he let go. 

The two ventured upstairs, exhausted. Veronica did her best to convince John she’d say nothing. This could all be worked out. John was at a loss for his next step. When he went to get Veronica a flannel, she ran for the pub. 

The police arrived, and a search was conducted for the Earl. Strangely, the Earl’s mother Kait showed up at the house some time after 11 pm for the children. The police searched high and low for Lord Lucan, but he was nowhere to be found. 

Act Four: the part where I break the fourth wall…. 

Wait, I hear you ask, why am I even telling this tale? For that matter why spend the last couple of weeks reading books and articles on this man – who is clearly a complete loser? Oh boy, if you only knew the half of it – I’ve been fascinated with this story since I was 8 years old. Not that 8 year old me realised, but the public reaction to the case shines a light on some of the conditions which led to my family packing up everything and moving 12,000 miles to New Zealand in the early 1980s. The Lord Lucan incident is fascinating to many because it happened in the middle of a culture war that concluded with the introduction of Thatcherism in Britain, Reaganomics in the USA… and a few years later, Rogernomics in New Zealand. We moved halfway round the world to escape neoliberalism, with it’s inequalities and high unemployment, and it bloody well followed us! I’ll come back to this, but keep that thought in mind.

Lucan, a very distinctive-looking man anyone should have been able to pick out in a crowd, did quite the disappearing act. We know on the night of the murder he rang the doorbell of one Madeline Florman, a woman of Lucan’s class, who refused to answer her door so late at night. Madeline later got a phone call from a mysterious man believed to be Lucan. He also called his mother, twice. It’s believed he most likely called from his flat – though he left without much other than the clothes on his back. This includes leaving his passport, contacts books and guns behind. Driving a Ford Corsair lent him several days ago by one of his gambling buddies, a Michael Stoop, he then drove to his friends, Ian and Susan Maxwell- Scott. He covered the normally hour and a half drive in possibly under an hour. Ian, a fellow gambler who would himself be bankrupt in a year, was not in. Susan was. She let the Earl in, claiming not to notice any blood on him.

Bingham spun a tale of passing the house and seeing a burglar in there killing the nanny. He claimed to have fought with the burglar, wresting away the lead pipe. He then, was caught holding the murder weapon by Veronica, while the burglar snuck out the back. Lucan borrowed some writing paper, and wrote letters to Bill Shand Kydd and Stoop. The Stoop letters were possibly written at the seaside town of Newhaven, as they stated where he could find his car. I believe Susan would never have said a word to police were it not for Shand Kydd taking his letters – envelopes included – to the police. The letters were stamped from the town of Uckfield. The Maxwell-Scotts’ of the Clermont set lived there. It wasn’t hard to connect the dots. Susan then claimed Lucan left, taking a handful of her Valiums’ with him. 

We know someone polished off a couple of bottles of Vodka in the Corsair – though not necessarily that night. There were suggestions that he jumped a ferry from Newhaven to France. Others questioned if he had his boat moored there – though many in Lucan’s circle denied he even had a boat at the time. In either case he should have been observed and recorded – and he wasn’t. 

While police swept the area, finding the bones of several others in nearby grassland – including a judge who went missing in 1965 who I can find nowhere near enough information on – what became known as the Lucan Circle met at one of gambling kingpin John Aspinall’s homes. They maintained the meeting was to decide what to do if Lucky Lucan suddenly returned. Others suspect their meeting, on the 8th November, was to come up with a plan to get him out of the UK.  While some in his wider circle did let things slip – Bill Shand Kydd always appeared helpful, and Greville Howard shared the murder anecdote with them – the police were to run into a great deal of obstruction from his friends. Many suggested he must have scuttled his boat in the river and drowned himself (when they admitted he still had a boat), others that he probably boarded a ferry for Calais and jumped – possibly into the propellers. Numerous interviewees either treated the police contemptuously, like servants, or avoided them altogether. 

“Sure, we’ll speak to you, but after our ski trip to St Moritz, ok?”

Aspinall, the rogue gambler who had sold the Clermont to the Playboy Corporation prior to the murder seemed to be stringing the police, and media along. Giving interviews where he definitely didn’t know what happened to Lucky Lucan …. But if he did, of course he’d have helped his old chum. He’d tease reporters with rumours Lucan shot himself, then was fed to his zoo animals. In his last interview before his death he looked set to reveal the truth…. Then trailed off.

As mentioned earlier, Britain was in the midst of a depression which left many struggling on three day work weeks, as the price of everything shot through the roof. The class war at the time is too complex to break down in the middle of a 20 minute whodunnit, there was a lot going on – but what’s pertinent is while everyday Britons were doing it hard a story emerges of a do-nothing peer who murdered a nice working class woman. As details of his lifestyle, and spending habits, and the obstructiveness of his upper class friends were covered by the press, the story went viral. In short order thousands of sightings of Lord Lucan occurred all around the world. People wanted this posh bastard caught and brought to justice for his crimes. There would be the tiniest measure of justice, when a coroner’s court hearing on Sandra Rivett’s death found Richard John Bingham guilty of murder in absentia – only the 12th peer in 500 years to be declared a murderer. 

Like the many hundreds of the peerage who, in that timeframe had the blood of others on their hands – the 3rd Earl included – I doubt he ever got his just desserts. 

Epilogue: But, what happened to Lord Lucan?

I’ll tell you what I know. A handful of tantalising clues point to some possibilities. 

First, two stories emerged in the 1990s, the veracity of both are questionable, but are worth sharing. One came via a woman who claimed to be babysitting for the Maxwell-Scotts a few days after the murder. They were joined by a mysterious man wearing a blue suit which seemed borrowed. At around the same time, the son of the local taxi company owner in Uckfield told a story which seems to corroborate the anonymous babysitter. His father sent two cars out – one to Newhaven to pick up a pedestrian – not far from where the Corsair was found. The other, the man’s father himself – drove a man in a slightly oversized blue suit to the town of Headcorn – where the man’s father insinuated there was a private airfield. This witness only came forward after his father passed on, though his father relayed his suspicions to him in the mid 1980s. 

Another clue, in 1980 David Hardy, an army buddy of Lucan’s died in a car crash. As police were going through his pockets to ascertain identity they found a booklet full of contacts – gifted to him in 1976. There was an entry for Lord Lucan, giving the address c/o- Hotel Les Ambassadeurs, Beira, Mozambique. This was one of several clues he’d fled to somewhere in Africa. Were he a battle-hardened soldier, and not some guy who did his training then played cards for two years this would be a great fit. Several African nations were casting off the chains of colonialism in this time – and there was plenty of work, both for left leaning mercenaries in resistance movements but also far right conservatives like Lucan, fighting to keep the status quo. Mozambique particularly was in the midst of ridding itself of Salazar and the Portuguese. Someone went through the guest books for the hotel, finding the surname ‘Maxwell-Scott’ in the guest book, back in 1975. 

As early as 1976, a woman who knew Lucan from the Clermont club claimed to have seen him, now blond and clean shaven, in the Cafe Royale, Cape Town. In 1975, a Welsh GP claims to have spoken with a tearful Lucan in Mozambique. Roy Ranson, a detective who investigated the case, claimed Lucan established a clothing company in South Africa before moving to Botswana. In 2012, Shirley Robey, a former secretary to John Aspinall claimed she arranged flights to Kenya for Lucan’s children. The murderous peer never made contact with the kids – but watched from a distance. Lucan’s brother, Hugh gave an interview for a documentary several years ago where he was reputed to have told the reporters ‘off the record’ that Lucan died in 2004 – his body buried somewhere in Africa. 

And yes, there have been numerous sightings. You name a place, I can find a claim. Goa, India? Turns out there was a similar-looking Englishman there, going by the name ‘Jungle Barry’. He is a folk singer named Barry Halpin. Las Vegas? Someone claimed he was a croupier there. Moscow? He was, allegedly working on a road gang. The Swiss Alps? This is where the Lucan Circle allegedly had Lucan assassinated, as he was insisting too loudly he wanted to return to Britain.

 New Zealand? A farming family in Marton claimed in 2007 an Englishman living next door in the back of a Land Rover – with a pet possum and a goat called Camilla, no less – was the missing Earl. Scotland Yard sent detectives over, only to find he was an expat named Roger Woodgate. He’d left the UK for New Zealand in 1974 but was not the killer peer. As recently as January 2021, Sandra Rivett’s son Neil Berriman claimed he’d tracked Lord Lucan down to a large shared facility in Australia, where the Earl – now a housebound Buddhist on a waiting list for a major operation – has vociferously denied he is Neil’s mother’s killer. 

Oh, and there is the other Australian Tale – but I’m saving that one for the Patreon only stream – the first post there should be up soon.   

What happened to Lucky Lucan? We may never know, but I can’t help but suspect a clique of aristocrats took the answer to their graves.