A little before nine o’clock on the night of November 7, 1974, Sandra Rivett went down to the basement kitchen of 46 Lower Belgrave Street in Belgravia to make a pot of tea. She never came back up. Waiting for her in the dark was a man who had removed the light bulb from its socket so that he would not have to see whose head he was breaking. He had meant to kill his wife.
In the blackness, he killed the wrong woman instead. Then he walked out the front door of a life built on an ancient name and vanished from the earth. No body. No arrest.
No grave. Only a bloodstained car left by the sea, and a question that has gone unanswered for fifty years. Richard John Bingham was born in London on December 18, 1934, the only son of the 6th Earl of Lucan. He was raised to inherit a title and a dark legend.
The earldom had been created in the 1790s, and its most famous holder was the 3rd Earl, the cavalry commander whose order helped send the Light Brigade to its slaughter at Balaclava in 1854. The name Lucan carried the faint smell of catastrophe from the beginning. The boy inherited it along with the looks and the manner. He was sent to Eton, then into the Coldstream Guards, where he served his national service as an officer.
He was tall, heavy-jawed, handsome in the way of a film star of the period, and he understood early and completely the power of appearance. He wore suits made in Savile Row, drove fast cars, raced powerboats, and rode the bobsleigh, moving through the smart rooms of London as though the whole apparatus of privilege had been built for his comfort. A brief stint at a merchant bank bored him past bearing. A man with his face and his name was not made to sit in an office and add up other men’s money.
His father died in January 1964, and Richard John Bingham became the 7th Earl of Lucan at the age of twenty-nine, only weeks after his own marriage. He took his seat in the House of Lords. He had the title, the townhouse, the beautiful young wife, and the entrance to the most glamorous private circle in the city. What the world could not see was that behind the face there was very little to hold the whole thing up.
The fortune that should have come with the title was thin and getting thinner. The confidence was real, but it rested on nothing but the willingness of other people to be dazzled. He was a magnificent surface, and surfaces need an audience. In 1962, a magnetic man named John Aspinall opened the Clermont Club at 44 Berkeley Square.
Aspinall believed with genuine conviction that the old aristocracy were a superior breed and that their decline was a tragedy for England. He gathered around him the richest and most reckless men in London and made his club a private kingdom where enormous sums crossed the tables in an evening. Lucan was one of its brightest ornaments. He was there so often, and lost and won with such apparent ease, that the tabloids gave him the name that would follow him into legend: Lucky Lucan.
It was a joke almost from the start, because across the years his losses ran well ahead of his winnings. But the name fit the image, and the image was everything. The set he moved in included Aspinall himself, the financier James Goldsmith, the comedian Jimmy Edwards, the artist and society charmer Dominic Elwes, and Lucan’s own brother-in-law, Bill Shand Kydd. They were clever and cruel and rich, and they closed ranks around one another with the reflexive loyalty of a class that had always looked after its own.
The tables cost him dearly. In a single disastrous session in 1973, Lucan is reported to have lost somewhere between twenty-five and thirty thousand pounds, a sum worth something like a quarter of a million pounds in today’s money. By 1974, his debts across the board had reached around forty-five thousand pounds, well over half a million in modern terms, owed to banks, friends, and the club itself. He had no real income to set against any of it.
He lived on overdrafts and loans and the fading credit of an old name. In the plainest language, he was broke. And he kept the fact hidden behind the same magnificent surface that had carried him all his life. In 1963, Richard John Bingham married Veronica Duncan, a young woman born in Bournemouth in 1937, of a background far more modest than his own.
Within a year he had come into the earldom and Veronica was a countess, mistress of a tall five-story terraced house in one of the grandest districts in London. They had three children in quick succession: a daughter, Frances, in 1964; a son, George, in September 1967; and a second daughter, Camilla, in 1970. For a time the house on Lower Belgrave Street held a family that looked, from the street, like the very model of aristocratic contentment. Underneath, almost from the beginning, something was wrong.
Veronica suffered from bouts of depression for which she was at one point hospitalized. Lucan, rather than meeting her illness with tenderness, came to see it as a weapon and proof. Here, he decided, was evidence that his wife was unstable, unfit, a danger to the children and to him. He took his wife’s suffering and filed it away as ammunition for a war that had not yet begun.
By the end of 1972, the marriage had broken down past saving. In January 1973, Lucan moved out, taking rooms close enough to the family house that he could watch it. He watched it with a concentration that curdled quickly into obsession. He did not grieve the marriage so much as rage at its loss, and above all he raged at the thought that Veronica, whom he had persuaded himself was mad, should keep the children and the house while he lived in rented rooms with his debts.
He had her followed. He hired private detectives to watch his own wife. He tape-recorded her, provoking her into rages and building a dossier of instability to lay before a court. He talked about her endlessly to his friends, always on the same theme: that she was destroying his life and her children’s welfare, that something had to be done.
He wanted custody. He wanted it declared by a court and to the world that Veronica was unfit and that he, the father, must have the children. The case came before the family court in the middle of 1973. Lucan brought his dossier, his detectives, his tapes, his account of a mad and dangerous wife.
And he lost. In June 1973, custody of the three children was awarded to Veronica. For Lucan, it was a catastrophe on every level at once: a public humiliation, the loss of the children he claimed to be fighting for, and ruinously expensive. The custody fight is reported to have cost him something in the region of twenty thousand pounds, money he did not have, added to a mountain of debt that was already past climbing.
Something in the man changed after that verdict. The obsession did not fade with the defeat. It sharpened. He went on watching the house, went on talking about her in the same fixed terms, went on nursing the grievance as though the fight were not over but merely entering a new and darker phase.
By the autumn of 1974, the debts had reached a place from which no card table could rescue him. Lucan was cornered. According to the reconstruction that the police built and that a coroner’s jury would later endorse, the watching and the grievance hardened into something with a shape and a purpose. He resolved to kill his wife.
If Veronica were dead, the custody verdict became meaningless and the children would come to him. The house would be his. The drain of the separate household and the court fight would stop. In the mind of a man who had lost his grip on every ordinary measure of reality, the murder of his wife was not an act of horror but a solution.
The preparation, as it was later pieced together, was careful and deliberate. He chose a Thursday because Thursday was the nanny’s usual night off. With the nanny gone, the house below stairs would hold only Veronica. He obtained a length of lead piping and bound it in surgical tape.
And sometime before the killing, the light bulb in the basement was taken out of its socket so that whoever waited there could strike without being seen and without clearly seeing. But the plan had one flaw. Sandra Rivett had swapped her night off because the young man she was seeing had fallen ill. She was twenty-nine years old, born Sandra Hensby, and she came from Basildon in Essex, a world away from the ancient earldom.
She had been the family’s nanny for only a matter of weeks. Thursday was her night off, and she should have been anywhere but the basement of 46 Lower Belgrave Street that evening. But the young man was unwell, so she had changed her night and stayed, and offered to go down and make the tea. A little before nine o’clock, she went down the stairs into the dark.
In the black, the man who had been waiting struck her about the head again and again with the taped length of lead pipe. Sandra Rivett died there on the kitchen floor of massive injuries to the head, killed in the dark by a man who believed he was killing someone else. She was of similar height and build to Veronica, with similar brown hair worn to the shoulder. In a room with no light, the earl could not see her face and did not need to, because he was certain who it must be.
When it was done, he pushed the dead young woman into a canvas mail sack and left her on the floor of the basement in the dark. A quarter of an hour later, Veronica, wondering what had become of Sandra, went down the same stairs into the same darkness. This time, the woman coming toward him was the one he had meant to kill all along. He attacked her, striking at her with the pipe.
Veronica was not killed. She fought with the desperate strength of someone who understands in an instant that she is fighting for her life. In the struggle, she recognized him. She bit at his fingers.
She fought back hard enough and long enough that the attack faltered. In some awful pause between them, the killing stopped. Veronica broke free and ran. She ran up the stairs and out through the front door into the night, bleeding from her head, terrified for her life and for her children still in the house.
She ran some fifty yards along the street to a public house called the Plumbers Arms and burst through its door covered in blood. She named her attacker to the landlord and to the police who came: her husband, the Earl of Lucan. In the hours after the murder, Lucan did not go to the police and he did not go home. He telephoned his mother and asked her to fetch the children.
Then he drove south out of London some forty miles to a house near Uckfield in East Sussex, the home of Ian and Susan Maxwell Scott. Ian was away in London that night, but Susan received the earl at around half past eleven. He told her a story: that he had been walking past the house, had seen a man attacking Veronica through the basement window, had let himself in, and the intruder had fled. He wrote two letters.
One was to Michael Stoop, apologizing for the borrowed car. The other was to his brother-in-law, Bill Shand Kydd. The circumstantial evidence against him was so strong, he wrote, that he would lie doggo for a while. There was no horror in it for the dead nanny, no grief, no reckoning with what had been done in that basement.
Somewhere around one o’clock in the morning, Lucan left and drove away. Susan Maxwell Scott was, as far as the record can ever establish, the last person to see the 7th Earl of Lucan alive. On the 10th of November, the Ford Corsair that Lucan had borrowed from Michael Stoop was found abandoned in Norman Road in Newhaven on the Sussex coast. It was bloodstained.
There was blood matching Sandra Rivett’s group in the boot, and blood matching Veronica’s on the seats. And there, in the car, was a length of lead piping bound in tape, the twin of the weapon that had done the killing. Newhaven was a ferry port, the English end of the crossing to Dieppe in France. The obvious reading was that Lucan had driven to Newhaven to take the boat to France.
But no crossing was ever confirmed. No ticket. No reliable sighting. No proof he had boarded.
Two rival explanations took shape and were never reconciled. The first was that Lucan had escaped, helped by his rich and loyal friends, spirited abroad to live out his life in hiding. John Aspinall did nothing to discourage this version, hinting over the years that he knew more than he would tell. The second explanation was simpler and sadder: that Lucan, ruined, exposed, his plan collapsed, had killed himself that first night and let the cold water close over the whole failed story.
A warrant was issued for Lucan’s arrest on the 12th of November, 1974. Over the years, reported sightings poured in from every corner of the earth, and the police chased them one after another and found nothing. In 1999, a death certificate was issued for the purposes of probate. Under the Presumption of Death Act of 2013, his son George brought a fresh application to have his father finally declared dead.
On the 3rd of February, 2016, the High Court granted that declaration, forty-one years after the disappearance. George Bingham, who had been a boy of seven when his father vanished, became the 8th Earl of Lucan. Veronica, who had fought off her husband in the dark and run bleeding to name him, never wavered in her account. She stayed in Belgravia, growing more reclusive with the years.
In September 2017, Veronica, Countess of Lucan, died by her own hand at the age of eighty. In June 1975, the inquest into the death of Sandra Rivett opened at Westminster Coroner’s Court. The jury retired and returned after roughly thirty-one minutes with a verdict of a kind that had not been heard in an English court in living memory and would never be heard again. They found that Sandra Rivett had been murdered by Lord Lucan.
He became the first member of the House of Lords to be named a murderer by a court since 1760, when Laurence Shirley, the fourth Earl Ferrers, was named for the killing of his steward. And it was the last time such a thing would ever happen, because the Lucan verdict became the reason the law was changed. The Criminal Law Act of 1977 removed the power of a coroner’s jury to name an individual as a murderer. No English coroner’s jury would ever again be permitted to do what the Lucan jury had done.
The world has remembered the vanished earl and the question of where he went. It has too often forgotten the woman on the kitchen floor. Sandra Rivett was twenty-nine years old, a young woman from Basildon who had been a nanny for a few weeks, who swapped her night off because a young man she cared for was ill, and who went down a dark staircase to make a pot of tea and was beaten to death in mistake for another woman. She was not the footnote to an aristocrat’s mystery.
She was the one who died. The earl spent his whole life being looked at, and he ended it by making himself the one thing that could never be found. As his own letter put it, he would lie doggo for a while.
He lay doggo for fifty years and counting.