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Lady Lucan found dead at London home after being reported missing Lady Lucan, key figure in 1974 murder mystery, found dead at London home
(about 11 hours later)
Lady Lucan, whose husband famously vanished more than four decades ago, has been found dead at her home. Lady Lucan, whose husband vanished more than 40 years ago in a murder mystery that still piques lurid fascination and excites conspiracy theorists, has been found dead at home aged 80.
Police forced entry to the 80-year-old’s property in Westminster on Tuesday afternoon after she was reported missing, and found her unresponsive. Veronica, the Dowager Countess of Lucan, was the only known witness to the terrible events that led to the murder of her children’s nanny Sandra Rivett, 29, in 1974 at the family home in Belgravia, central London.
A spokesman for the Metropolitan police said: “Police attended an address in Westminster ... following concerns for the welfare of an elderly occupant. Officers forced entry and found an 80-year-old woman unresponsive. With her death, described by police as “unexplained” but not believed to be suspicious, the mystery will endure.
“Police and London ambulance service attended. Although we await formal identification, we are confident that the deceased is Lady Lucan.” The countess ferociously maintained that Rivett was bludgeoned to death by her estranged husband, John Bingham, the seventh Earl of Lucan, who in the dimly lit basement mistook the nanny for his wife.
Police said her death is being treated as unexplained but is not believed to be suspicious. She always contended that she disturbed the aristocratic professional gambler during the fatal assault and he hit her four times with a length of bandaged metal piping before she managed to escape and raise the alarm at a local pub, the Plumbers Arms.
Her son, George Bingham, the 8th Earl Lucan, told the Daily Mail: “She passed away yesterday [Monday] at home, alone and apparently peacefully. Police were alerted by a companion to a three-day absence and made entry today [Tuesday].” The head barman at the Plumbers Arms, Derrick Whitehouse, told a newspaper reporter at the time that Lady Lucan had “staggered in” and said: “I think my neck has been broken. He tried to strangle me.” He said she was in “just a delirious state” and had “various head wounds” that were “quite severe”.
Lady Lucan, formerly Veronica Duncan, was one of the last people to see her husband John Bingham, the 7th Earl of Lucan, alive before he disappeared. Lucan vanished after the murder, his borrowed car found abandoned and blood-spattered, with a section of bandaged lead piping in the boot, at the cross-Channel port of Newhaven, East Sussex.
He vanished after the murdered body of Sandra Rivett, nanny to his three children, was found at the family home in Lower Belgrave Street, central London, on 7 November 1974. En-route to his unproven destiny, Lucan stopped off to visit friends in a Sussex village, telling them he had stumbled on an attacker hitting his wife, who then accused him of hiring hitmen to kill her, and that he was going to “lie doggo” for a while.
Even though he was officially declared dead by the high court in 1999, Lucan has reportedly been sighted in Australia, Ireland, South Africa and New Zealand, and there are even claims that he fled to India and lived life as a hippy called “Jungly Barry”. An inquest later determined Lucan as Rivett’s murderer. He was never convicted in a criminal court. He was reportedly sighted in Australia, Ireland, South Africa and New Zealand. One claim had him fleeing to India and living life as a hippy called “Jungle Barry”. He was officially declared dead by the high court in 1999.
The same night as his disappearance, the attacker also turned on Lady Lucan, beating her severely before she managed to escape and raise the alarm at a nearby pub, the Plumber’s Arms. On Tuesday, Lady Lucan was found unresponsive at her Eaton Row mews cottage in Belgravia by police who had forced entry to the property after she was reported missing. Although the Metropolitan police are awaiting formal identification, a spokesman said: “We are confident that the deceased is Lady Lucan.”
Lucan’s car was later found abandoned and soaked in blood in Newhaven, East Sussex, and an inquest jury declared the wealthy peer the killer a year later. Estranged from her three children, Frances, 52, Camilla, 46, and George, 50, a merchant banker and now the eighth Lord Lucan after his father’s death certificate was issued last year, she lived alone in the house where her husband had been staying a short distance from the former family home and scene of the murder.
Roger Bray was the first journalist on Lord Lucan’s doorstep the morning after the dramatic events unfolded, and wrote one of the first newspaper reports about the mystery. George Bingham told the Daily Mail: “She passed away yesterday at home, alone and apparently peacefully. Police were alerted by a companion to a three-day absence and made entry today.” The paper said she was reported missing by a friend after she failed to appear in Green Park, where she walked every day at the same time.
Derrick Whitehouse, head barman at the Plumber’s Arms, told Bray that Lady Lucan “staggered” in and said: “I think my neck has been broken. He tried to strangle me.” This year Lady Lucan gave a television interview in which she said she believed her husband had jumped off a cross-Channel ferry, “in the way of the propellers so that his remains wouldn’t be found – I think quite brave”.
The barman said Lady Lucan was “just in a delirious state” and added: “She just said ‘I’m dying.’ During the ITV programme, Lord Lucan: My Husband, The Truth, she spoke of her depression and her husband’s violent nature after their marriage in 1963. Describing how he would beat her with a cane to get the “mad ideas out of your head,” she said: “He could have hit me harder. They were measured blows. He must have got pleasure out of it because he had intercourse [with me] afterwards”.
“She kept going on about the children. ‘My children, my children,’ she said. She came staggering in through the door and I gave her all the assistance I possibly could. I’ve only seen her in here once before.” Of her estrangement from her children, she told the interviewer Michael Waldman: “It’s not my fault that I lost my family … it will always be a mystery to me.”
Whitehouse told Bray that Lady Lucan had “various head wounds” that were “quite severe”, adding: “She was covered in blood. She’d been bleeding profusely when she came in.” Waldman told the Radio Times: ‘She is, I think, genuinely perplexed as to how it all went wrong, but equally she is not bitter and twisted about it and is getting on with her life. You can take the view that she is selfish, or self-preserving.”
Earlier this year, Lady Lucan, formally named Veronica, Dowager Countess of Lucan, gave a TV interview in which she said she believed Lord Lucan had made the “brave” decision to take his own life.
Ahead of the hour-long documentary interview called Lord Lucan: My Husband, the Truth, Radio Times magazine shared some of what she had told director Michael Waldman.
She said: “I would say he got on the ferry and jumped off in the middle of the Channel in the way of the propellers so that his remains wouldn’t be found – I think quite brave.”
During the ITV programme, she spoke of her own depression and her husband’s violent nature following their marriage in 1963.
Describing how he would beat her with a cane to get the “mad ideas out of your head”, she said: “He could have hit harder. They were measured blows.
“He must have got pleasure out of it because he had intercourse [with me] afterwards.”