Murder by Mistake (2 page)

Murder Scene
46 Lower Belgrave St.

Two burly coppers could probably have shoulder-barged the front door, but they used a credit card and slipped inside. Ahead stretched the hallway, leading to the stairs. Baker flicked the light switch. Nothing. He sent Beddick back to the van for a flashlight.

Alone in the house, Baker was careful. He had his hardwood nightstick in hand, but he had no idea what he might be facing. One by one, he checked the doors off the hall. All the rooms were empty and in darkness. The only light came from a small cloakroom fronted with a drape. He slid the drape back and saw blood on a washbasin; there was more on a lampshade in the hall, and as his eyes became acclimatized, he saw sprays and splashes over the walls and ceiling.

Baker doubled back and opened the door to the basement. Again he tried the light switch and again it didn’t work. Slowly, carefully, he edged his way down the stairs, and his feet crunched on broken crockery on the basement floor. Here, thanks to the street light coming in through the venetian blinds, he saw pools of blood and bloody footprints leading to the back door. The door was open and Baker went out into the night, secretly glad of the fresh air. There was a small garden and a high wall all the way around with a wooden trellis above that. No one could have left that way.

The sergeant retraced his steps and took the stairs to the upper floors. A bedside light was burning in the main bedroom and a bloody towel lay across the pillows. On the next floor, as he clicked open another door, he found a little boy, 7-year-old Lord George Bingham, fast asleep. In the next room, his little sister, 3-year-old Lady Camilla, was sleeping too. Across the room, standing by her own bed, was 10-year-old Lady Frances. She asked Baker if he had seen her mummy and her nanny.

The Lucan House at 46 Lower Belgrave St.

When Beddick finally arrived with the flashlight, Baker took it and left the constable with the kids. The sergeant went back to his search, now more properly equipped. In the hall, he saw a lead pipe, about 9 inches long, bent and wrapped in bloody surgical tape. A light bulb lay on a chair in the basement. It had clearly been removed from its socket, and Baker replaced it. The full glare of the basement light told an appalling story. The room was a kitchen, but it was also a murder scene and a charnel house. There was blood everywhere and smashed tea cups, some bits still lying on a tray. In one corner was a canvas US mailbag soaked with dark blood. Baker eased open the top and felt inside. A female arm flopped out, to be remembered, photographed and documented by the crime scene officers later. He didn’t know it yet, but Sergeant Baker could now answer the question little Lady Frances had put to him. He had found the nanny: Sandra Rivett.

Plan of the basement showing the attack sites on both women

In 1974, crime scene investigation was not what it is today. DNA evidence was still 11 years in the future, and some of the confusion of what happened that night in Belgravia was undoubtedly caused by careless policemen trampling blood and brain tissue from one part of the Lucan house to another. The Metropolitan Police (the “Met”) were fortunate, however, because the Home Office pathologist routinely called to suspicious deaths was Keith Simpson, a legend in his own lifetime. The man had an awesome reputation stretching back to the 1940s and the Second World War. This was to be one of his last cases, but age had not dimmed the intensity of his scrutiny at all.

Sandra Rivett, he discovered, was in her late twenties, 5 feet 3 inches tall, with dark hair. She was well-nourished and bore no sign of disease. She was not a virgin and had given birth. Her body had been doubled up in the mailbag after death and there was no sign of sexual assault—almost the first thing a pathologist looks for in the violent death of a young woman. She had bruises on her forearms from trying to parry the powerful blows that had killed her. Three blows had smashed into her face, two bounced off her neck and four had crashed into her scalp. There were marks on her cheek consistent with a punch or slap. Her killer had then grabbed both arms and thrust her into the bag. She had actually choked to death on her own blood. As for the murder weapon, Baker had all but stumbled over it in the hall upstairs—the bandaged lead pipe.

The first detective on the scene was Sergeant Graham Forsyth from Gerald Road Criminal Investigation Department, but he was one of many, including the divisional surgeon who had been called to give his official verdict that Sandra Rivett’s life was extinct. Forsyth got the basics from Lady Frances. Mummy and daddy didn’t live together any more, but daddy had been at the house that night, together with mummy, who was covered in blood. Daddy lived at 5 Eaton Row.

The house, now lived in by Veronica Lucan, is in a narrow mews, a side street of converted stables, directly behind Lower Belgrave St. and Forsyth went round there. The place was in darkness and locked, so Forsyth found a ladder, smashed an upstairs window and climbed in. At that stage, he didn’t know that the tenant had sublet the flat to a friend, Greville Howard, but of course, Howard wasn’t home. Neither was the tenant himself; John Lucan, Frances’ father and Veronica’s husband, had vanished into the Belgravia night.

www.crimescape.com

The Dowager Lady Lucan, John’s mother, was a formidable woman and she brooked no nonsense, especially from the police. When Forsyth got back to the murder house, she was there, doing what she’d always done—sorting things out and defending the family honor, come what may. “I’ve come here to collect the children,” she told him. “My son telephoned me a short while ago and asked me to pick them up and take them back to my flat.” He had also asked her to contact a friend, his brother-in-law, Bill Shand Kydd.

She told the sergeant her son’s version of events. He had been shocked and almost incoherent on the phone, but essentially, he had been passing Number 46 and had seen his wife struggling with someone in the basement. He’d gone in, the intruder had got away, and Veronica had blamed him for the attack. The basement scene was “ghastly”; blood was everywhere. Forsyth explained that he needed to talk to Lord Lucan urgently. His mother told the detectives that her son had another flat in nearby Elizabeth St. and that he drove a blue Mercedes. She collected the kids and Constable Beddick went back to her flat in St. John’s Wood to the north with them all, in case Lucan should call his mother again.

Forsyth rang his boss, Chief Inspector David Gerring, shortly after 11 PM. The man was in bed, but calls like this came at all hours. He told his wife he’d be “gone for a couple of hours” and drove to pick up
his
boss, Detective Chief Superintendent Roy Ranson, based at Cannon Row police station. It would be four days before Gerring would get home again.

As the senior policeman on the case, Ranson immediately took charge of the investigation and would eventually write a book on the subject. He immediately reduced the number of officers in the house to a bare minimum and placed a uniformed man on the front door. He went through the house from top to bottom, noting mentally what Sergeant Baker had first seen nearly three hours earlier.

Then he and Gerring went to 5 Eaton Row and 72A Elizabeth St., Lucan’s current home. A suit was on the bed in Elizabeth St., still on its hanger and ready for wear. There was also a driving license, checkbook and about £80 ($187—all money is calculated at the exchange rate in 1974) in cash. Ranson left officers at both addresses, in case Lucan should return. His next port of call was to see the still-living victim; other people were taking care of the dead one.

House where Lord Lucan lived after separation from Veronica

St. George’s Hospital is one of the most famous of London’s hospitals, dating from 1733. Today the building is the Lanesborough Hotel; in 1974, the hospital’s move to larger premises was already under way. Veronica Lucan was under sedation, but conscious, and she told the detectives what had happened as the intense pain in her head and neck came and went.

Old St. George’s Hospital
Photo by Paul Farmer

“She was in a terrible state,” David Gerring told a writer years later, “really bloody awful. There were tufts of hair and skin all over the pillow. She was covered in dry blood and her scalp was open with the wounds… the basement was a sight I’ll never forget. Veronica Lucan was another sight I’ll never forget.”

The nanny, Sandra Rivett, Veronica told the police, usually had Wednesdays off, but she had changed this week to meet her latest boyfriend. At about 9 PM, she had offered to make Veronica a cup of tea and had gone down to the kitchen basement. Veronica had been watching TV earlier with her two youngest children—Lee Majors performing the impossible in
The Six Million Dollar Man
. Frances had been in her room watching
Top of the Pops
, a “must” for any girl already longing to be a teenager. By this time, the little ones were in bed and Frances was dozing in her mother’s room. It was past her bedtime.

When Sandra had not come back after nearly 20 minutes, Veronica went to look for her. She had just reached the hall and was about to go down to the basement when she was grabbed from behind by a powerful man. They wrestled together while he tried to force his gloved fingers into her mouth and rain blows down on her head. When she screamed, he had told her to shut up. She recognized her husband’s voice in the darkness. Desperate and fighting for her life, she had grabbed his testicles, and he gave up, exhausted and shaking. She calmed him down, and they went up to the bedroom so that he could tend her wounds. Frances saw them, mummy bleeding, daddy looking distraught. Veronica sent the girl to bed, the parental order that for generations had removed children from awkward situations. While Lucan went to fetch a towel from the
en suite
bathroom, Veronica had taken the opportunity to run for the stairs. She would have no accurate memory of the rest, but she found the safety of the Plumbers Arms.

With the scene of crime secured and the body of Sandra Rivett already at the morgue, Ranson and Gerring kick-started a murder case, setting up an incident room at Gerald Road and collecting crime-scene photographs and witness statements. It was well into Friday morning by now and the London rumor machine was already going into overdrive. Ranson set up a press conference at Scotland Yard, which routinely handled all media coverage, if only to disperse the army of reporters and camera crews that was descending on Gerald Road.