Murder by Mistake (4 page)

They were the ideal couple in many ways. Six months into their marriage, John was the 7th Earl of Lucan, with property in Ireland and Middlesex. He had a power boat on the south coast, a mews house at 5 Eaton Row, jewelry (including the regimental silver of the 17th Lancers, belonging to the 3rd Earl (of Light Brigade infamy) and bank accounts in Africa, the Bahamas and Switzerland. They bought the opulent house at Number 46, Lower Belgrave St. He gambled. She shopped. He gave her two race horses, Bombproof and Travelling Light. She gave him three adorable children—Frances, George and Camilla.

As Veronica Lucan would remember it later, “It was a golden life.”

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A little rain fell into the Lucans’ lives by the mid-1960s, and that rain would become a torrent, threatening to sweep them all away. John’s gambling was now becoming a problem. Veronica had no idea of the huge debts he was running up, but she knew he was hardly ever home. As she struggled with pregnancies and post-natal depression, he was at the Clermont, often all night. So she decided to go with him.

No doubt she thought he might be having an affair. He was rich and titled, with a charming personality. But John’s only love was the tables, and because Veronica was not a player, she spent her time at the Clermont with other gamblers’ wives on what came to be known as the “widows’ bench.” She was bored and began chain-smoking. She was also on sedatives for depression and there were embarrassing scenes at the Clermont. In one final show of temper, Veronica threw a glass of wine over another “widow” for blocking her view of the television set.

In September 1967, perhaps on advice from his family or friends or both, Lucan took Veronica to the Priory, a private nursing home that had been running since the 1870s. He had not told her where they were going, and there was a huge row. She refused to talk to staff, still less to be admitted, but she did promise to see a psychiatrist as an outpatient. Lucan saw her volatile nature, made worse by post-natal depression and his apparent inability to sympathize, as mental instability and as time went on he would discuss his wife’s “madness” with almost anybody. In the meantime, she took lithium and Moditem, which did little to control her panic attacks. She became what she still is today—somewhat of a recluse hiding behind venetian blinds. Four years after the Priory incident, he tried to commit her again at a similar nursing home, Greenways, in London’s northern suburb of Hampstead. By now it was late 1971, and the marriage staggered on, somehow, until January 1973, when the inevitable split occurred.

The Priory Hospital
Photo by Christine Matthews

On his return from an overseas gambling trip, Lucan found that Veronica had fired the nanny, Lilian Jenkins, with no recourse to him at all. He sent for the family doctor, Christopher Powell-Brett, hoping, no doubt, that he could have Veronica committed to an institution for this latest example of “insanity.” In that clipped, public-school way of his, he asked the doctor, “Is she fit?” and when Powell-Brett answered, “Yes, she is fit,” Lucan packed his bags and left.

Map of key sites

It was not the first time he had stormed off, but it was to be the last. He rented a flat at 72A Elizabeth St., only a couple of hundred yards away from his home. It had five bedrooms, clearly large enough for him to live with his children and a new nanny he would appoint.

There was never any doubt that Lucan loved his children. His feelings for Veronica first cooled, then changed to icy disdain and finally hatred, but to the children he was just “daddy,” constant, reliable and funny. He read them bedtime stories, tucked them in, kissed them goodnight. He took them to relatives’ and friends’ houses in the country, where they rode ponies and flew their kites. And now, after the debacle with Powell-Brett, he wanted them back.

Green Park is one of those small open spaces that are the “lungs of London.” There, on March 23, 1974, Lucan, in the company of two private detectives, snatched his children, George and Camilla, from the hands of their new nanny, Stefanja Sawicka, and bundled them into his Mercedes. He then drove to Frances’ school and extracted her from a classroom. All this was perfectly legal—Lucan showed a court order to the nanny and the headmistress—and both women had no choice but to comply. Veronica, who had held herself together in her husband’s absence, went to pieces and, ironically, booked herself into the Priory for a week, something Lucan had wanted her to do seven years earlier.

The battle lines had been drawn in the case of Lucan vs. Lucan, and the rules of engagement, played out day after day by unhappy families all over the world, became clear. Both parents wanted the children. The natural inclination of courts and public is that the mother should have them. But Veronica had no income of her own, lived at Number 46 by the generosity of her husband and was bordering on the neurotic. John was a peer of the realm with properties galore. He paid for the children anyway, from their school fees to the sweets they no doubt consumed from time to time.

In fact, as Chief Superintendent Roy Ranson discovered by December of that year, Lucan’s finances were in a grim state. He had managed to lose £10,000 ($23,400 or almost $100,000 today) in one night at the roulette tables, and that was before he gave up the job at the bank. The much-vaunted £250,000 ($562,000) inheritance was not that large in actuality. It may have been as little as £50,000 ($112,400). He was a member of various expensive clubs and was incurring charges by hiring private detectives to watch his wife.

His aim, of course, was to prove that Veronica was not a fit mother for their children and should never be allowed to get them back. He drip-fed stories about her paranoia, with tall tales of her drowning a kitten and pushing it through Lucan’s letterbox in Elizabeth St. She, he said, was putting about stories that he was trying to kill her.

The custody battle ended in court on July 11 in a tortuous case that lasted nine days. Lucan expected to win. He not only had the title and, as far as the court knew, money on his side, but he had secretly taped conversations with Veronica (tapes still in the possession of Scotland Yard) in the few fleeting moments they had spent together over the last few months. He also had a psychiatrist who claimed that Veronica would not be able to look after the children properly. She, of course, had a psychiatrist who said the opposite, and in the end, the judge sided with her.

It is difficult to underestimate the effect the loss of his children had on Lucan. Detective Chief Superintendent Roy Ranson was convinced that it was actually all about money. Lucan’s gambling debts stood at £20,000 ($47,000, or a quarter of a million dollars today). He had just lost a court case that had incurred a further £40,000 ($94,000 or $470,000 today). He had overdrafts at four major banks, as well as colossal rents on his flat, his payments on his Mercedes, the children’s allowances and school fees and the cost of the nanny. His total debts were in excess of £70,000 ($164,000 or $820,000 today) and his annual income was only £12,000 ($28,000).

He could have declared bankruptcy, but the shame and humiliation of an Earl of Lucan appearing in the dock for debt was something he could not contemplate. So he hatched a plan, and on October 23, he asked his friend Michael Stoop at the Portland Club if he could borrow his battered old Ford Corsair car.

He did not tell him why.

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Fast-forward to the night of November 7. While Sergeant Baker and Constable Beddick were checking on Veronica Lucan lying soaked in blood in the Plumbers Arms, her husband was a few hundred yards away in Chester Square, outside the house of a friend, Madeleine Floorman. Lucan knocked on the door, but because it was relatively late, Floorman assumed it was kids roaming the streets for laughs and refused to answer it. Later, the police would find blood spots on the step.

Moments later, Mrs. Floorman’s phone rang. There were no “pips,” the bleeps on the line that would have heralded a call from a telephone booth, so whoever the caller was, he or she was ringing from a building. The voice was rambling, incoherent, but she recognized it as that of John Lucan. Why he should have tried to contact Madeleine Floorman, who was the mother of one of Frances’ friends, remains one of the many mysteries of the Lucan case and is still unresolved today. Perhaps he merely wanted her to go to Number 46 to check on his children.

Lucan then made another call, this time to his mother, asking her to collect the children instead. The call was made between 10:30 and 10:45 PM—again, not from a telephone booth. If he made this or the earlier call from the Elizabeth St. flat, why was there no sign of blood (with which he would have been covered), and why didn’t he take the opportunity to change, grab his passport and driving license before vanishing into the night?

While the police were locating this property and the one in Eaton Row, Lucan was driving the Corsair through the cold London night. His own Mercedes, with its hood cold and its battery as dead as Sandra Rivett, had been found in Elizabeth St., so at that stage, no one knew what vehicle Lucan was driving. He would have been careful not to run a red light or attract attention because the steering wheel, the gear shift and door were covered with bloodstains, and in the trunk was a length of lead pipe wrapped in surgical tape, identical to the murder weapon the police had already found in Belgrave St.

By half past 12, Lucan was driving into the grounds of the executive home of two friends, Ian and Susan Maxwell-Scott, in the little Sussex town of Uckfield, 16 miles from the south coast and 44 miles from Knightsbridge. Ian had been playing backgammon at the Clermont and had decided to stay up “in town” as he’d had a few drinks. Susan was already in bed, but she went down to let Lucan in.

Lord Lucan route after murder

She knew at once that something was wrong. The usually immaculately tidy earl looked rough, his hair uncombed, and he had what looked like a “wet patch” on one hip of his trousers. As she poured him a stiff Scotch, he said, “I’ve been through the most nightmarish experience. It’s so incredible I don’t know whether you or anyone else will believe it.” He told her a story which strained credulity at the time and has ever since.

Lucan then rang his mother—this was the call the Dowager received in the presence of Constable Beddick—and Susan Maxwell-Scott heard Lucan say, “No, I won’t speak to [the police] now. Tell them that I’ll ring in the morning.”

Next, the disheveled Lucan called the Shand Kydds, his brother and sister-in-law. They were not in, so Lucan accepted Susan’s offer of a pen and paper and wrote a letter:

“Dear Bill, The most ghastly circumstances arose tonight which I briefly described to my mother…” and it ended, “I will… lie doggo [low] for a bit but I am only concerned for the children. If you can manage it I want them to live with you… V [Veronica] has demonstrated her hatred for me in the past and would do anything to see me accused. For George and Frances to go through life knowing their father had stood in the dock for attempted murder would be too much. When they are old enough to understand, explain to them the dream of paranoia and look after them, Yours ever, John.”