Murder by Mistake (8 page)

No doubt all these questions—and many more—would have been answered had Lucan stood as the accused in the dock in an English courtroom. The fact is he didn’t. Yet, in a curious way, he has been in the dock ever since.

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What are the possible explanations for what happened in that house in Lower Belgrave St. on the night of November 7, 1974? Had Lucan ever come to trial, all of these might have been trotted out by prosecution and defense counsel to convince a jury.

This was essentially John Lucan’s story. A large unknown male entered the house, killed Sandra Rivett and tried to kill Veronica Lucan. It falls apart immediately. Unless the intruder was a sex attacker—and there is no evidence for that at all—he would probably have been a burglar. A professional would have got in the same way that the police did, using a plastic credit card, which would explain why there was no sign of a break-in. It was no secret that the inhabitants of all the houses in Belgravia had serious cash, valuable antiques and so on, so Number 46 might have looked like a good target. Many of the lights were defective—an inevitable problem if bulbs failed in a house where the tallest inhabitants were only just over 5 feet tall—so it might have looked empty.

Even so, the timing—around 9 PM—is a little early for burglars to be at work. Lower Belgrave St. is quiet, but busy Victoria is only a few hundred yards away.

The intruder
might
have been carrying a lead pipe for self-defense. He
might
have been interrupted by Sandra Rivett and panicked. Then he shoved her body into the mailbag, which
may
have been in the basement already, and climbed the stairs, to be confronted by Veronica Lucan. He may have attacked her and then ran in a blind panic, leaving alive a woman who could identify him.

The problem with this is that Veronica identified the attacker as John Lucan, and so the case of the large intruder vanishes.

This was also John Lucan’s version. Veronica, he told Susan Maxwell-Scott, accused him of hiring someone to kill her—she had got the idea from a TV movie. There weren’t too many professional assassins around in London in 1974. In fact, beyond the realms of crime and espionage fiction, it’s not certain whether they existed at all! Let’s assume for the moment that they did and that somehow Lucan found one for hire. He would have explained the target—a short, slim, blond woman who could be found in the basement kitchen of Number 46 Lower Belgrave St. at about 9 on a Thursday night. The only other people in the house would be small children, and they would be fast asleep.

Lucan would have had a spare key cut for the front door and, if he knew about the chain, would have hoped it was not in place or the hit man would have carried a bolt cutter. Given this scenario, the mistake between Sandra and Veronica makes more sense. A stranger, having created his own darkness by removing the basement light bulb, may not have been able to tell them apart.

At this point, though, the whole thing collapses. A professional killer would know the mess that a lead pipe would cause. A blunt instrument is usually the sort of weapon used in manslaughter cases. Two people argue and fight. One of them grabs a poker, a statuette, a tree branch and swings it, perhaps again and again. It is associated with unplanned killing and blind rage. Certainly that is how the murder of Sandra Rivett looks—the attack on her was frenzied, carried out by someone who wanted to destroy his victim completely.

Any hit man worth his salt would have been as cool and detached as it is possible to be when you are taking someone else’s life. He would have done this before and would have had a favorite silent method of dispatch, perhaps a gun with a silencer, or a knife. Strangulation would be an option, especially in the case of a small woman. Because he knew there were children in the house, nothing noisy would do.

Then he had the disposal problem. Either his job was to kill Veronica and leave the body there, to make it look like she’d disturbed a burglar. Or it was to remove it completely and drop it somewhere—hence the sack. What this supposed hit man
actually
did, use an unlikely weapon, kill the wrong woman and fail to kill the right one, leaving the murder weapon behind, is so shockingly inept as to defy belief.

To get around this problem, one writer has suggested that Lucan’s hit man fell ill at the last minute and had to find a substitute who was both amateur and incompetent, leading to the shambles that took place at Number 46! Presumably, an amateur would be easier to find than a professional; no doubt a number of men could be persuaded to kill someone for money. The problem is that John Lucan did not move in those circles. How could he have made contact with the sort of man he was looking for?

Yet another possibility—and one that
just
makes sense of the forensic evidence—is that Lucan paid a killer and then either changed his mind at the last minute or arrived to see that the job had indeed been carried out and/or dispose of the body.

In this version, the hit man killed the wrong woman by mistake (let’s ignore the unlikely weapon for a moment) and Lucan, on his way to stop him, saw the struggle in the basement from the street and assumed it was Veronica going down under the rain of blows. When he went in and realized it was Sandra, he and the hit man stuffed the nanny into the mailbag. Did the hit man panic? Did Lucan tell him to get out—he’d deal with things from now on? In that case, who hit Veronica at the top of the stairs? The assailant could have been Lucan. He had taken the pipe off the hit man and used it on the real target, but didn’t have the stomach to go through with it and let Veronica live.

The story is ridiculously untidy, relies on Veronica Lucan’s memory of the events being garbled by pain, shock and perhaps brain damage (in that she makes no mention of another man in the house) and also relies on the fact that no unexplained footprints are found in the blood in the basement or on the stairs. Some unexplained fingerprints
were
discovered, however, which, of course, could belong to anyone and could have been made at any time.

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In British law, a man is judged to be innocent until proven guilty. In that sense, John Lucan remains innocent of the murder of Sandra Rivett and the attempted murder of his wife. On the other hand, the coroner’s jury decided he was guilty. On yet another hand, Richard John Bingham, better known as John Lucan, the 7th Earl of Lucan, has been declared dead.

I have stared long and hard at Lucan’s letter to Bill Shand Kydd and cannot decide on the sentence that is best known from the case: “When [the children] are old enough to understand, explain to them the dream of paranoia and look after them.” It is
just
possible that the word “dream” is actually “disease,” but either way, what did Lucan mean?

A dictionary definition of paranoia gives us “a mental illness characterized by delusions of persecution, unwarranted jealousy or exaggerated self-importance.” A lesser definition reads “a tendency to suspect and distrust others or to believe oneself unfairly used.”

Given the broken relationship between Lucan and Veronica, and the drip-drip of invective he had been guilty of for months before he disappeared, we must assume that Lucan was talking about his wife. In other words, when his children were old enough to grasp it, Bill Shand Kydd was to tell them how deranged and difficult Veronica was. She was taking prescribed drugs, she had public rows in the Clermont Club, refused to accept psychiatric help and, from Lucan’s perspective, was an unfit mother for his children. A more reasonable man, of course, might have been referring to himself. His friends had noticed in the weeks after he lost the custody case that he had become morose, introverted. His sole topic of conversation was almost always Veronica and how she, a geriatric judge, a dodgy lawyer, and a complicit psychiatrist had conspired to ruin his life.

Whatever the ins and outs of this surprisingly tortuous case, whatever questions remain unanswered and anomalies exist, there is, in the end, only one scenario that truly makes sense. It makes sense because it contains the one piece of information that Veronica Lucan was not allowed to give at the inquest.

Let us go back to the night of November 7, 1974. John Lucan had borrowed a nondescript car to transport the body of his wife to the south coast, where he could use a boat he already had or hire one to dump it, suitably weighted down, in the English Channel. For all his powerful build and “action man” image—he drove power boats, went fox hunting and shot grouse—he was not mentally cut out for killing. However, killing Veronica seemed the only way out of his dilemma. If she “disappeared” (surprising no one, after the stories he had put around about her) he would get his house back and, more importantly, the children. His financial worries would not vanish overnight, but it would be a clean start surrounded by people who loved him.

He must behave as usual, having selected the night he knew was the nanny’s night off, so he had the meeting with Michael Hicks-Beach and made the dinner booking at the Clermont for later. By that time, Veronica’s body would have been in the trunk of his car and he would have turned up at the restaurant, full of relief and bonhomie and they’d all have had a joke about the fact that he’d forgotten to include himself at the table.

In the meantime, Sandra Rivett would have come back to Number 46 and assumed that Veronica had gone to bed. The next morning, she would realize the woman was missing, and by the time Lucan and the police were informed, the 7th Earl of Lucan could well be dropping a heavy bundle over the side of his boat off the south coast.

Veronica would be missed, of course, but judging by the way Lucan’s family and friends closed ranks around his memory and cold-shouldered her, she would not be missed for long.

Did he go to the Clermont Club shortly before 9 PM? Unlikely—I think this was a plain, old-fashioned mistake by the doorman, Billy Egson, who got his days mixed up. By 9 PM, Lucan was in the basement of Number 46 in the darkness. He was wearing gloves and carrying a lead pipe, his badly chosen murder weapon. He knew Veronica was small and not very strong. On TV, it looks so easy, doesn’t it? A hard whack to the back of the head and it’s all over. The weight of the lead and the momentum of his blow would crack her skull like an egg.

He psyched himself up. He hated her.
All
the problems he faced—his debts, the strange looks he’d had to endure from friends and acquaintances—it was all because of Veronica. As he heard her flick the light switch at the top of the basement stairs, he was ready for her. In fact, he was so furious that as she reached the bottom stair he lashed out, hitting her in the face with his fist. The tray she was carrying flew out of her hand and the crockery smashed. Before she hit the floor, he smashed the pipe down on her skull, then hit her again and again, the red mist of his fury dimming his vision. In the near darkness, he couldn’t see the sprays of blood arcing over the walls, the ceiling, and his own clothes. He couldn’t see, until it was too late, that he had just killed the wrong woman.

In a blind panic, he lifted her up and pushed the body, grotesquely folded over on itself, into the mailbag he’d brought to take Veronica away. He may or may not have realized that Sandra’s blood was already seeping through it, and he left the ghastly mess in the corner, trying to stay rational, trying to decide what to do.

He climbed the stairs, dithering in the darkened hallway. Then he heard footsteps on the stairs coming down from the second floor. Veronica. He ducked behind the drape that partitioned the cloakroom and waited. He still had the pipe in his hand, smeared with Sandra’s hair, brains and blood, and he launched himself at Veronica, intending to finish the job he’d come to do. All rational thought must have left him by now—how he would clean up the mess he had created in the basement, how he could explain the disappearance of Veronica
and
the nanny. For now, he just wanted to kill his wife.

There was a problem. They struggled on the top of the basement stairs and he probably lost his footing. The lead pipe was badly bent out of shape and it wasn’t doing the same damage it had done to Sandra. Veronica screamed at the first blow, so he rammed his gloved fingers into her mouth to shut her up. Mustn’t wake the children. He snarled at her, “Shut up,” and closed his hand around her throat.

Perhaps it was that, the sound of his voice, which was the moment. It was somehow, oddly, such a touch of reality in a scene that was otherwise totally unreal and totally awful. They struggled for a while longer, and then she grabbed his testicles and they both sank down, exhausted physically and emotionally.

Even now, with all that had happened in the last few seconds, in such pain she thought her neck had been broken, shocked and pouring blood, Veronica asked, “Where’s Sandra?” A rather feeble voice told her the nanny had gone out. Veronica knew this was nonsense and told him so—Sandra would never just leave without telling her she was going.

“She’s dead,” said Lucan. “She’s down in the basement. But don’t look. It’s a ghastly mess.”

Many books on the case leave it at that before Lucan took Veronica up to the bedroom to clean her up, but the damning indictment is clear enough from the version she gave to Roy Ranson. He told Veronica he had killed the nanny. Veronica’s pulverized brain must have gone into overdrive. There was no reason at all for Lucan to have killed Sandra—he rather liked her, in fact. He had mistaken Sandra for Veronica in the darkness and still had the means, motive and opportunity to kill her too, to finish the job he’d started. They talked as he frog-marched her up the stairs. There was a way out of this. If he would just take care of her head wounds, stanch the blood, they could calm down and decide rationally what to do about Sandra. He asked her if she had any Tuinal—sleeping tablets—around. Was he trying to find a pain killer for her, or even now was he coming up with a very belated Plan B to effect her “suicide”?