RedHanded - Episode 396 - Lord Lucan: the Vanishing Earl

Episode Date: April 24, 2025

When the Countess of Lucan burst into a West London pub drenched head-to-toe in blood, it instantly sparked a national obsession. Lord Lucan – the suave, speedboat-racing, professional-gambling aristocrat – was wanted for the murder of their housekeeper, Sandra Rivett. And he had disappeared without a trace.This week, we sift through the theories on Britain’s most famous fugitive (from the bonkers to the actually quite credible) to try to get to the bottom of the nation’s favourite murder mystery once and for all.Exclusive bonus content:Wondery - Ad-free & ShortHandPatreon - Ad-free & Bonus EpisodesFollow us on social media:YouTubeTikTokInstagramVisit our website:WebsiteSources available on redhandedpodcast.comSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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And in our podcast, Legacy, we explore the lives of some of the biggest characters in history. This season, we're analyzing the man who literally changed our minds about everything. The father of psychology, Sigmund Freud. Freud's ideas about sex cause outrage. Is Freud still relevant? Or should we simply give him the slip? Follow Legacy Now wherever you get your podcasts. Or binge entire seasons early and ad-free on Wondery+. When a young woman named Desiree vanishes without a trace, the trail leads to Kat Taurus,

a charismatic influencer with millions of followers. But behind the glamorous posts and inspirational quotes, a sinister truth unravels. Binge all episodes of Don't Cross Kat early and ad-free on Wondery+. I'm Hannah. I'm Saruti. And welcome to Red Handed. The olden daysers. But not that olden daysers. In my head. I know. This is like, because it's got nothing if not name recognition. In my head, this is, I would say, in my mindscape, the latest 30s. Nah. Nope. So far from the truth. And the whole time, like before we sat down to record, like reading the script, everything

going through all the details, I was like, in my mind, I'm thinking black and white, past-okay, it's not a fucking past-okays. We're talking 70s fucking beige-yellow-browns. Like it is not black and white times, it just feels like it is because of the people involved. Quite. And we're going to tell you about them right now. On the evening of the 7th of November 1974... 74? Everyone keep that in your minds. My mom had graduated university in 74. Yeah, honestly. Veronica Bingham? Maybe of lasagna fame? I don't know. Probably. Come on. Shame if it wasn't. No, I know.

I've never had a Charlie Bingham's. But I'm always tempted. It's a good time. Is it? Yeah. Alright. I enjoy... I enjoy... the packaging.

It's very well packaged. I always will stop and look at the packaging, but I... Oh! They do a good job. And I always buy the big one, so the people at the checkout don't think I'm eating on my own. Anyway lasagnas aside, Veronica Bingham, the Countess of Lucan burst into a West London pub.

Of course, they're not welcome in the East. And she was drenched head to toe in privilege and blood. There was also blood. The Countess, known to everybody as Lady Lucan, lived just down the road. She was married to Lord Lucan, an infamous speedboat racing professional gambling aristocrat, whose high-stakes lifestyle even placed him in the running to play James Bond himself. That's a claim. It really is.

The couple were known as members of the old Etonian elite. They were the image of old money aristocratic class. But there was nothing glamorous about this scene. The blood-soaked Lady Lucan screamed, help me, help me, I've just escaped from being murdered, he's in the house, he's murdered the nanny. And the story she went on to tell crawled into the British imagination that night in 1974 and it has never quite left. Even if you know nothing about it, it's in there. And it's even been described by the Times themselves as a national game of Cluedo.

Which to Americans is Clue, but that's disgusting if you're wrong. Though as the astonished pubgoers waited for the police to arrive that night, Lady Lucan went on to tell her tale. And it only got more sensational. She told the confused crowd that the killing rampage had been a case of mistaken identity. Apparently, Lord Lucan, her husband, had turned up that night, drunk out of his mind, hell bent on killing her, Veronica. But he mistook the nanny, Sandra Rivet, for Lady Lucan, and savagely beat the twenty-nine-year-old

with a piece of lead pipe. Sandra's skull was obliterated, and the basement floor of the house was covered in blood. But Lucan had apparently, calmly stuffed Maid Sandra's body into a mail sack and crept upstairs. Then when Lady Lucan had come to check on Sandra, her husband, clearly now realising his mistake, burst out of the shadows and brought down his lead pipe again. And Lady Lucan had just about escaped with her life.

But her escape and her very dramatic entrance into the pub wasn't the real reason that this story became a national obsession almost overnight. The actual reason was because the high flying accused murderer Lord Lucan disappeared without a trace. And ever since that fateful night in 74, police and journalists have scoured the world for him with sightings coming in from practically every country on earth. Was he hiding out in a Buddhist monastery in Tibet?

Was he living in a Nazi commune in Paraguay, probably? Was he performing as a folk singer called Jungle Barry in Goa? Maybe a part of an esoteric folk religion in Australia? Or was Lord Lucan a permanently stoned New York drag artist called Jenny Romaine? Questions. Lots of questions to be asked. Could be any of them. Could be all of them. I'm gunning for Jungle Barry. That's my favorite one. Let's find out. And the world's biggest murder mystery was so great in fact that Agatha Christie herself, on her deathbed, posed the question, I wonder what ever happened to Lord Lucan?

But there's more to Britain's best known fugitive than even all of these wild stories might suggest, because there are those who think that the story we've just told you, the story that Lady Lucan told in the pub that night, is all just a big fat lie. So the question for us today is not just, where is he? But also, did he do it? It's time to get inside the mind of a speedboat racing aristocrat and ride full throttle into the endless mystery of Lord Lucan. So let's meet him. He was born Richard John Bingham on the 18th of December 1934 and known from the start

by his middle name, John, which is a very posh thing to do. John's father was the sixth Earl of Lucan and since John was the eldest male in the family he was set up to be the next Earl of Lucan. He was the heir. The Lucans were a seriously esteemed aristocratic family whose posh shops went back for centuries. And they were, of course, big true blue Tories until the sixth Earl. Who, it may surprise you to know, was a socialist peer. He served in Clement Atlee's Labour government and became Labour's chief whip in the House of Lords. But if you think any of that starry-eyed idealism made its way into John Bingham, you would be very wrong. Richard John Bingham loved being posh and he loved everything that

came with it. He wanted to be rich and taste as many of the finer things as he could get his grubby little hands on, which was probably all of them. And of course, being the heir to quite such a big aristocratic dynasty, he got the perfect head start. He went to Eton. He even ran a little gambling ring while he was at Eton, taking bets from other boys and passing them on to a bookkeeper in town. This little Endeavour set off a life-long obsession with gambling in Little John. He spent his summer holidays on the family estate, where the Bingham children had their very own house.

I saw something very interesting about the boarding school culture that we have in this country because obviously many countries have boarding schools. We do it in a very specific way and have you seen, I can't remember his surname, this guy called Gary and he does this thing called Gary's economics. Have you seen it? It sounds familiar but I don't know. He's a really interesting guy. He went on Piers Morgan the other day and basically he used to be a trader making millions betting like they all do on the poor getting poorer and the rich getting richer. And he stopped doing it. And now he's like, this is what they're doing and this is how it's going to work. And this is what's going to happen. And this is why it explains it in a very

relatable, understandable way. And he explained the Piers Morgan thing because it's interesting. He went on Piers Morgan and Piers Morgan was like, but can you honestly tell me that taxing the rich more will fix things? And he's like, no, I can't tell you that, but I can tell you that. In the 60s and 70s, yeah, my dad's a postman, but in the 60s and 70s taxes were higher, but working-class people owned their houses and that's not the case anymore. And then obviously Piers Morgan just had nothing to fucking say because how can you argue back from that? Anyway, what he said about boarding school was really interesting because obviously he, in the city, he's with all of these people, right?

That's where we either feed them into Parliament or we feed them into banking. And he said it's such an interesting thing that like because we take these people who are in line to be the elite, powerful class of the next generation, we take them away from their parents when they're really, really young and then we force them into this artificial, harsh, hyper-competitive environment. So are we, as a society, breeding a cruelness into these people who will go to the top? And does that have a trickle down effect really, which I thought was a really interesting question. Oh, of course.

And I think it's, but even when he says we are doing this, I'm like, I think the real problem is that like, because rich people who have got- I may have misquoted him. No, no, I mean, like rich people have got kids, like, they're obviously going to be like, I'm going to send you to the best school I can afford. I'm going to send you to boarding school. Like, obviously not everybody does that, but there is going to be a group of people that do that. And that's totally their decision. I think the real shame in this country is that social mobility barely exists. Like it's not a concept that exists. And I'm saying

that as somebody who comes from a country where social mobility absolutely does exist, it's hard fought for, but it absolutely does exist. And also the fact that we just have this kind of, this kind of like obsession with classism where people feel almost like, yes, that person is better than me because they are of a better class and therefore we are willing to accept that. And that's why most of our politicians are of that ilk and they don't know anything about the real world. They don't know anything about real people's problems because they're career politicians and they came from this world in which they didn't live a real life. And I think that's the problem.

It's like, cause those people are going to do what they want and their kids can turn out to be however they want them. It's a fact that then they get fed into the system and like, we don't have any answer to that. Like nothing's happening to stop that from happening. Cause yeah, it's not like, why is that a foregone conclusion that those kids go into politics? That's the problem. But you know that's not the point of this story. You know those creepy stories that give you goosebumps? The ones that make you really

question what's real? Well what if I told you that some of the strangest, darkest, and most mysterious stories are not found in haunted houses or abandoned forests, but instead in hospital rooms and doctor's offices? Hi, I'm Mr. Ballin, the host of Mr. Ballin's Medical Mysteries, and each week on my podcast, you can expect to hear stories about bizarre illnesses no one can explain, miraculous recoveries that shouldn't have happened, and cases so baffling they stumped even the best doctors. So if you crave totally true and thoroughly twisted horror stories and mysteries, Mr. Bolland's Medical Mysteries should be your new go-to weekly show.

Listen to Mr. Bolland's Medical Mysteries on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Spotify or Apple podcasts. You know those creepy stories that give you goosebumps? The ones that make you really question what's real? Well, what if I told you that some of the strangest, darkest, and most mysterious stories are not found in haunted houses or abandoned forests,

but instead in hospital rooms and doctor's offices. Hi, I'm Mr. Ballin, the host of Mr. Ballin's Medical Mysteries, and each week on my podcast, you can expect to hear stories about bizarre illnesses no one can explain, miraculous recoveries that shouldn't have happened, and cases so baffling they stumped even the best doctors. So if you crave totally true and thoroughly twisted horror stories and mysteries, Mr. Bollens Medical Mysteries should be your new go-to weekly show. Listen to Mr. Bollens Medical Mysteries on the Wondery app or wherever you

get your podcasts. You can listen early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Spotify or Apple podcasts. Where were we? We're talking about how rich the Binghams were. And yeah, when the second world war rolled around, young John Bingham was sent off to America to stay with family friends. And they owned three properties out there. So little Johnny spent his wartime winters on Park Avenue in New York City, his summers in Florida, and the rest of his time playing croquet

at their mansion in Westchester County. Again, people can be like, that's grossly unfair. Obviously lots of kids here had a horrible time. Of course it is, but that's life. Obviously that family is going to send their kid to the best possible place they can send them. So as a boy, John Bingham was everything you might want your child to be. He was smart, funny and charming. Privately though, he was often very troubled, lonely and sad and often clashed with authority at school. After the war every man who was

of age had to do national service and John Bingham was no different and he was sent to the German-Soviet border with the Coldstream Guards. As well as keeping those tricky Russians at bay, national service was meant to instil a sense of duty, humility and rigor in the post-war British people. But for Lucan it just meant more opportunities to live the high life. Casinos were still illegal in the UK at the time, so in Germany, Lucan stepped foot for the first time into a casino. And he bloody loved it. into a casino. And he bloody loved it. And in the evenings, while all the other conscriptees sat in the mess hall eating their probable

mess, you could often find him getting dressed up in his finery to eat out at the best restaurants in the area and then go gambling. I hadn't connected that casinos were illegal ever here, but I suppose one thing that did happen is like in the second world war, they changed pub opening hours to be very, very restrictive because when the boys were coming back from the front on leave, obviously they just wanted to get loose and they didn't want this nation full of incredibly drunk people who were really traumatized and they didn't repeal those pub opening times until the 70s. So maybe it's the same thing.

That's very interesting. But let's get back to his dad for a second. Even though his dad, John's dad, the sixth Earl of Lucan was a Labour Party member, he still wasn't quite socialist enough because they never are to actually let go of any of his own money. He set up chunky family trusts ensuring that his son, the future Earl, would be guaranteed a big income without ever having to lift a finger. John Bingham did briefly work at Brant's, which is a merchant bank in London, but he never really took to it. When a friend was promoted above him, he packed it all in. And he decided to spend his days instead driving his Aston Martin, powerboating, racing horses,

partying on friends' yachts and being fitted for crisp, impeccably tailored suits. He also refused to talk to people who didn't have proper shoelaces, whatever that means. I was going to ask you if you knew what that meant. I wonder whether. So you know, like the laces in your trainers are flat, whereas in a man's dress shoes, they would be circular. Sure. I wonder whether it's that. Maybe. Let's just say it is. That's my best guess. Let's put it down. And someone called Albert Broccoli, who sounds made up, but apparently isn't, he's actually

the man who masterminded the James Bond films right from the very beginning, considered John Bingham future Earl of Lucan to be the absolute ideal of Bond. And as we said, there was a time where he was in the running for the role himself. Would you like to see a picture of John Bingham, the seventh Earl of Lucan, to decide whether you think he is James Bond worthy or not? And I know we've said it's not the black and white times, it's not black and white times, by the time the murder happens, this picture I'm going to show you is a black and white times picture. Yeah.

Yeah. I can see it. Totally. Yeah. I can see it. Totally. And I also think that this is something that is often overlooked about James Bond. The whole point of him is that he's a fucking asshole. Like I think that we sort of, that doesn't really translate in the films, I don't think. Like there anymore. It certainly did in the beginning, but like,

you're not supposed to like him. That's the whole point of the character. Yeah. So no, but I think he, he suits, he suits it. I can see why they thought James Bond and I can see, you know, and he does seem like a bit of a wanker. So like I can, I can see why Mr. Broccoli is like, that's your man. John Bingham very much a James Bond prototype. But above and beyond all that kind of like, rich guy James Bond suave nonsense, what John Bingham really truly absolutely fucking loved more than anything was gambling.

He traveled to Monte Carlo and other such gambling places, spending night after night, suavely throwing down chips and drinking ice-cold spirits and smoking. And his game of choice is one that I have never ever ever heard of, but I'm particularly averse to gambling so like I'm maybe not the best person to have heard of these things, but tell me if you've heard of it, Hannah. It's called Shemin De Fur. Shaman De Far. I think it's actually how you do say it.

Never ever. Still not heard of it. Nope. And apparently they should shorten it and call it Shemi. Not a clue. I don't care that much about gambling. I'm certainly not advocating it. My dad used to say I was a tax on stupid people, but I do really want to learn how to play poker.

Yeah. I would like to be able to say I know how to play poker. Because I just think it's cool. It is cool, isn't it? My LCO used to be a professional gambler, professional gambler, professional poker player. Well, same, same. Okay, I'll learn and I'll teach you. Excellent. So yes, Shemi is John Brigham's game game of choice and one night he had a particularly killer streak culminating in a single £26,000 win.

And so he decided after that he was going to finally live his dream and become a professional gambler. And by the way, just to put that win into perspective for the time period in which it happened, £26,000 was the average house price in the UK at the time and John Bingham won it in a single game of cards. I mean, you would be like, oh, maybe I'm good at this. Spoilers, he's not. He just got very lucky that one night. And when gambling was legalized here on this green and pleasant land in 1960, a friend

of Bingham's called John Aspinall opened a new club, which I believe is still open, the Claremont Club on Barclay Square. And that club became the HQ of their little gang, known as the Claremont set. But later it was more sinisterly dubbed, by the tabloids obviously, the Eton Mafia. Aspinall himself was a real character. He called himself a conservationist, but he was a lot more posh Tiger King than posh Steve Irwin. He had his own private zoo in Kent called Howlitz and it had tigers and gorillas and rhinos and loads of other exotic animals. The Claremont Club was as hoity-toity as it's possible to get. It had all of the food, the louche soirees and hard drinking expensive spirits too.

Over the years the Claremont Club opened its doors to Frank Sinatra, Elizabeth Taylor and Mick Jagger to name but a few. And all of this fancy living and hard gambling might make you think that John Bingham was a dab hand at the old Shemi tables. Especially when you learn that everyone at the Claremont Club started calling him Lucky. But no, as quite often happens, it was an ironic nickname. Have you seen that episode of Blackbooks where, have you seen Blackbooks? Yeah.

Where it turns out Fran's really good at poker and they need to win some money. And so they hustle them basically and they send in Bill Bailey to lose and lose and lose and lose and lose and then Fran's going to come in and win it all back. Sure, sure, sure. And the guy who like recruits him to this like secret poker game, he's like, Oh no, mate, they love you. They love you. They've even given you your own name.

The gold mine. They love you. They've even given you your own name. The gold mine. I was going to say, I feel like Lucky is an ironic name for John Bingham because it's how you feel when he sits down next to you at the Shemi table. Exactly. And that is what it is because John Bingham, despite having one time won a house cost, was actually largely terrible at gambling. This is the thing, they always say you love the thing you're good at. John

Bingham, nah, he loves the thing he is terrible at and it is just one of the worst things to love and be terrible at, isn't it? Yeah. Can you be bad at heroin? Thought experiment, move on. It's a thinker. So for a high flying jet setting would be James Bond, although he's terrible at gambling, you might think he would be a shoe-in with the ladies, especially because Hannah I just showed you a picture of him. You know, as far as like an old and timey black

and white picture of a man goes, not bad to look at. Absolutely, yeah. But he was in fact absolutely also terrible with the ladies. By the time he was in his late 20s he had never even had a girlfriend. By the time he was in his late 20s he had never even had a girlfriend. But John Bingham, being next in line to the Lucan throne, did of course have to get married. There was a family name to carry on after all. And so you might expect that for his match he would look for another uber snobbish fancy lady to match his family, you know, a meeting of the aristocratic legacies perhaps. Well, no. His friends were absolutely stunned when one day he announced his engagement to a woman named Veronica Duncan, a solidly middle-class former art student who grew

up in a pub. Veronica was the sister-in-law of John's Claremont Club friend, Bill Shandkid. Despite being looked down on from the start by the Claremont set, Veronica was, however, beautiful, well-travelled and did have a way with words, although as we will go on to discover, was also maybe not a mental posho but definitely kind of mental. Still, let's just say that Bingham's family were not so hot on his match to Veronica because they were snobs, sure, big time.

Even the left-wing ones. Everyone was certain that he was making an enormous mistake. But just before you start thinking that posh old Johnny Bingham had had some sort of love-conquer-all moment and that's why he chose Veronica to be his future wife, going against his entire family... Well, not exactly. Because John Bingham himself seemingly was not thrilled with his plan to marry Veronica. Friends at the time remember him reporting the news totally unemotionally

as though he was saying it because it was simply the right thing to do. Which when you remind your brain that this isn't Downton Abbey, it's way weirder. Yeah, yeah. This is the sixties. This is the sixties, right? Now there are a lot of rumors around John Bingham that he was perhaps gay and that's why he wasn't particularly interested in marrying any woman. And it didn't matter if it was Veronica or somebody else. And lots of the theories as to his whereabouts after the murder and when he

disappeared do include the idea that he is now off living his best uncloseted life out in the stick somewhere. We're not sure but he did definitely prefer the company of men. An evening around the Shemi table was plenty thrilling enough for old Johnny. Either way, Veronica was a means to an heir and so the pair married in 1963. And then, two months after they got married, Johnny's dad, the sixth Earl of Lucan, died. Which means we can stop calling John John and we can start calling him the seventh Earl of Lucan, 13th Baronet Bingham of Castle Barr and County Mayo

and third Baron Bingham of Malcolm Bingham and the Baronet of Nova Scotia. But that's quite long so from now on we'll just say Lord Lucan. And so, with this new title in hand, Lord and Lady Lucan moved into a six-story townhouse at 46 Lower Belgrave Street in SW1. They had three children, somehow, who were called Francis George and Camilla. And just in case you are unaware, what SW1 means, it is a postcode and it is a postcode also shared by Buckingham Palace. My last job. Fancy, lots of fucking tourists, fucking terrible place to work. Just chain restaurants and chain coffee bars as far as the eye can see.

And boat shoes. And boat shoes. And boat shoes. Red trousers. No socks. Gillets. Gillets, oh the gillets. Oh the gillets. Browns as far as the eye can see.

Bills, browns. Oh kill me. There was one place called Noodle Noodle. RIP Noodle Noodle was delicious. I went there so much it was a crime and then it got shut down. Back to fucking pret meal deals. The soul destroyer. It does not get more... Tedious? Yes. Life-sucking? Self-poshing? Depression inducing? It is so posh that most old-m money posh people cannot afford to live there.

I think that is the best. I thought we were still talking about prep meal deal, but you're right. No, you're right. It's a ridiculously, it's just a ridiculous part of London. Yes, but not if you're a Lucan. But it wasn't going particularly well in SW1 for the Lucans. Family life was pretty rocky from the start. Lord Luken, for his part, spent his days and his nights down the Clermont Club, drinking

and losing his money like it was his job, which it essentially was. He would have lunch at the Clermont every day, only popping home to put on his dinner jacket before returning for dinner, drinks and gambling until the wee hours. And Veronica went with him too because when you're that rich you have nannies. And while Lucky Luke and gambled away, Veronica sat at the bottom of the stairs at the club on what was known as the Widow's Bench. My god. Yeah, this is the thing, like she goes, and you're totally right, they have help so she can go out and about, but like, she doesn't go to the Claremont Club and like have fun. Well it's gentlemen only.

I mean, the women are allowed in, they're allowed in, they're allowed to drink, they're allowed to come there, they're allowed to hang out, but she just sits there and is like, miserable. Wow. Probably because she's watching her husband flirt with all the men at the shimmy table. God, I know. So yeah, like absolutely, the wags were welcome at the Claremont, but mostly just for like evening drinks and to hang around at the bar drinking and looking glamorous. And Veronica, Lady Lucan, is often painted in this story as the victim of sort of straight up snooty classism,

never accepted in this rarefied set because of her upbringing, which is true, but as I hinted at earlier she was also a deeply troubled person herself. She had had mental health problems from early childhood and could be very unpredictable. When she had children, and remember she had three of them, postnatal depression caused her mental state to spiral further. Even after her children were born, Veronica was rarely awake before midday. She started seeing psychotherapists and taking some pretty hardcore 60s medication with all sorts of side effects, and she actually ran away from two clinics and eventually settled on home visits and a cocktail of drugs that included lithium and medication with all sorts of side effects, and she actually ran away from two clinics and eventually settled on home visits and a cocktail of drugs that included lithium

and flupenzeneine, an antipsychotic that caused restless movement. So she'd often spend her days sat alone, with her legs shaking uncontrollably, on the widow's bench. And despite her upbringing, Veronica took to being called Lady Lucan pretty well and was in fact known to scream at staff who dared to use her first name or disrespect her in some other way. But as much as she took to the upper class life, it didn't really ever accept her. One night, Veronica threw a glass of wine over another woman at the Claremont club and called her a tart. And the Claremont set never really forgave her for that.

And maths followed in her footsteps. Lady Lucan walked so Polly could run. I do love a good drink throw in the face on maths. It can't beat that shit. Sometimes I'm watching it and this is how this is my new toxic trait. Sometimes I'm watching maths. I'm like throw a drink in his face. You hear what he just fucking said? Throw a drink in his face. Why is no one throwing a drink? Ten years into their messy marriage, Lord and Lady Lucan separated. He rented a flat

nearby on 72A Elizabeth Street. And I say flat, it wasn't very flat. It had multiple stories and five bedrooms that were big enough for his kids and a nanny. Should he ever win custody or even try? Surprisingly though, he did try. The next season of the Lucans' lives would be defined by an all-consuming custody battle. The generally accepted story of what happened next is this. Lord Lucan waged a campaign of hate against Veronica and branded her as an insane person so he could steal the kids. And there is a lot of truth to that. He

did start stalking Veronica, phoning her house, breathing down the phone, hiring private detectives to stand outside at all times to report any movements, which if you're already on antipsychotics, is going to push you, if not over, at least towards the edge. Sometimes he even sat in his Mercedes himself, wearing dark glasses. He made secret recordings of Veronica to gather evidence. And his cronies were firmly on his side. Rumours spread throughout the Clermont set of Veronica drowning kittens and making her children shape penises out of plasticine, and once almost killing her children in a mad psychotic rampage,

which as far as we can tell was all totally made up. But we do know that Veronica was in some strong mental distress. The drugs that she was given were hefty and they gave her hallucinations and she was extremely paranoid, anyone would be. And it does seem like at the start Lord Lucan did want to help Veronica, he did try and get the help that she needed, but as the custody battle wore on he became more and more obsessive

about taking the children off her, and to that end proving that she was an unfit mother and general she-beast. But the reality is, Veronica may have been struggling, but Lucan wasn't doing particularly hot himself. Lucky Lucan was losing more money than ever, even resorting to selling off his inherited paintings and spending every waking hour at the Claremont Club desperately trying to win it all back. He was building up debts all over town, spiralling into the tens of thousands, and he was lying to Veronica and the courts about his financial situation. and he was lying to Veronica and the courts about his financial situation. So let's be clear, both were not particularly primed to be great parents at this point,

but Veronica was at least at home. But in 1973, Lukan applied to have the children placed in his care, and he actually won the opening round. When Veronica heard the news she became hysterical and was sent to the priory in Roehampton to recover. But ahead of the full hearing her mental state was analysed again and at the trial a psychiatrist testified that Veronica was not schizophrenic and as long as she kept taking her lithium she was indeed fit for custody.

And at trial she said that her husband was the unstable one, gaslighting her and carrying out relentless physical and sexual abuse. She said that he was a violent sexual sadist who made her wear a rubber exercise suit to bed. She also testified that he would come round for a service even after the split. But Lucan told the court that Veronica had been harming herself to make him look bad. And the judge eventually took Veronica's side, branding Lucan an arrogant liar with an unsustainable lifestyle, and Lady Lucan was granted full custody.

For Lord Lucan, this was rough. The trial had been very public and a lot of dirty laundry had been aired, and he'd lost custody of his children. He felt cheated, like the game had been rigged against him. And more than that, there was the small matter of the £20,000 legal fees that the whole debacle had cost him. So instead of cleaning up his act, he ramped up the campaign against Lady Lucan and gambled at the club on credit, hoping for a big win. He owed money to all of the manger banks already, totalling more than £100,000. And after he lost his children he drank more and more

every day and as will happen if you do that he started to deteriorate. Back at the house though, things were approaching normality. One condition of the custody judgment had been that Veronica got a live-in nanny. That wasn't new, she didn't really take much care of her kids ever up until now. But that judgment did mean the appointment of 29-year-old Sandra Rivet and she arrived at the Lucan house in August 1974. In Lady Lucan's book, she says that Sandra had been kind and decent and that she'd liked

her at once. Sandra was even allowed to bring her cat to join the family as well. But just ten weeks later, after her and her cat appeared in SW1, Sandra Rivet was brutally murdered in the basement of the very same house. So let's talk a little bit about who Sandra is. Sandra grew up in Australia between the ages of two and 10, when her family decided to move back to England. Before she decided to give the live-in nanny life ago, Sandra had worked as a hairdresser, secretary, chemist and cleaner.

And through various affairs in her teens and early 20s she became pregnant twice. But having children out of wedlock was still a real no-go so the first baby was cared for by her grandparents and the second baby was put up for adoption. Sandra then married a Navy captain but when he was stationed abroad, the love fell flat and they stopped writing and the relationship was never really rekindled. So when she arrived at 46 Lower Belgrave Street, Sandra and Veronica had plenty to chat about. They were both separated from their husbands and both had had brushes with mental health facilities along the way. The ten weeks she was there was a period of relative happiness in the house.

I don't mean this in a shady way. Sandra can do whatever she likes. But it is relevant to point out, at this stage in our story, that Sandra Ribbett had a fair few boyfriends on the go at this time. One was an Australian barman called John Hankins. One of the pubs that he worked in was the Plumbers Arms, just a few hundred yards down lower Belgrave Street from the Lucan House. On Wednesday the 6th of October 1974, John Hankins called Sandra. Thursday was usually her day off, but since he was going to be working unexpectedly, he asked her if she could move her shift as well. So at the last

minute she decided to work it. To this day, that phone call and that shift swap is John's biggest regret. Had he not made that call, had he not made that request, Sandra Rivet would never have been in that basement on that day primed to get her head smashed in. And Lady Lucan never would have burst into that pub. Screaming bloody murder. In the early hours of December 4th, 2024, CEO Brian Thompson stepped out onto the streets of Midtown Manhattan. This assailant starts firing at him. And the suspect,

He has been identified as Luigi Nicholas Mangione, became one of the most divisive figures in modern criminal history. It was meant to sow terror. He's awoking the people to a true issue. Listen to Law and Crime and crimes Luigi exclusively on one degree plus enjoying one degree plus one degree app Spotify or Apple podcasts. In the early hours of December 4th 2024 CEO Brian Thompson

stepped out onto the streets of Midtown Manhattan. This a silent starts firing at him and the suspect he's been identified as Luigi Nicholas Mangione, became one of the most divisive figures in modern criminal history. I was meant to sow terror. He's awoking the people to a true issue. Listen to Law and Crime's Luigi exclusively on Wondery+. You can join Wondery+, the Wondery app, Spotify or Apple podcasts.

But what really happened that night? Everything we're about to tell you comes from the official account of this story. So let's get into it. That evening, Lady Lucan, the kids, and Sandra, and maybe the cat, had all been watching TV in the upstairs bedroom. At 8.30pm Sandra took the two younger children to bed. At around 9pm Sandra asked Lady Lucan if she fancied a cup of tea and went down to the basement kitchen to make it.

And it is very much worth pointing out because I know you're all imagining some sort of fucking Lizzie Borden-esque old and timey basement kitchen that she's like wandering down into like a fucking scullery maid. No, no, no, no, no. The word basement here is very misleading. This is a London townhouse basement. So it's basically a full floor, yes, at the base of the house, but with big windows and like a full kitchen. Like there's nothing tiny and grotty and whatever about it.

It's another level of the house. It's not just where you put things you don't want. Exactly. Since the divorce, Veronica had developed a habit of getting herself a cup of tea every night at around 9pm. But tonight, Sandra went for her. As Sandra entered the basement, she flicked on the light switch. But the bulb had been removed, so no light came on. Out of the darkness a figure leapt out and brought down a heavy piece of lead piping

onto her skull. The attack was savage. Her skull was split in six places and she later died from bruising to the brain and inhalation of blood. Lady Lucan hadn't heard anything, but wondered where Sandra had got to with her tea, and so she went downstairs to investigate at around 9.15pm. When she saw no light on downstairs in the basement, she figured that Sandra wasn't there and paused at the top of the stairs. That's when she heard a noise from behind her and in an instant someone rushed out of

the corridor and brought down a metal pipe onto her head. Veronica screamed in pain and a voice told her to shut up. She immediately recognized the attacker's voice and his smell. It was her husband. The divorced couple struggled as he continued trying to beat Veronica with the pipe, making contact at least four times. And with one gloved hand, he also pushed three fingers down her throat. He tried to strangle Veronica, he tried to gouge out her eyes, and then they fell to the floor. Veronica bit him and squeezed his testicles. And he released her. And then they lay panting for a bit, as the adrenaline wore off.

And the story goes that Lord Lucan apparently left his wife to have a glass of water, whilst he admitted to having killed the nanny, but made it clear that Veronica had been the real target. And then, defeated and dejected, Lord Lucan followed Veronica upstairs to help deal with her wounds. And as Veronica lay a towel on her bed, she told Lucan that he should stay for a few days

to help her recover. Then, when he went to the bathroom to fetch a flannel, Veronica ran for it. Leaving three children in the house with the killer and the dead nanny, let's remember. She ran straight out the front door and down the road to the plumber's arms where she made her grand blood soaked entrance at 9 45 p.m. And a lot of that might seem like well how could you possibly know Cassandra's dead? The story we've told you like we said is part of the official report. This is what the police note down.

And as we'll go on to find out, they're making this conclusion using Veronica's story, because Lucan's gone, spoilers, by the time the police get there, using Veronica's story and also using like where the blood is and that kind of thing, all of that kind of physical evidence that's left of the scene. So after Veronica goes to the pub and makes her scene, the police are called and Graham Forsythe, a Met Police detective, arrived at the house at 10.05pm. As another officer checked upstairs, Graham ventured down into the basement. He saw broken crockery at the bottom of the stairs and large pools of blood where the first blows to Veronica had been

struck. But this of course was nothing compared to the absolute bloodbath that the police would discover all over the basement floor where Sandra had been killed. And obviously they only found that out once they got some light down there. But remember, the bulb was missing. Graham Forsyth, while he was down in the basement, then saw a large sack under the stairs with an arm hanging out. He didn't disturb the body. There was no need.

There was no doubt that Sandra, the nanny, was dead. Blood was seeping through the sack and pooling around it. So much so, in fact, that Forsythe said that he was convinced that she'd been decapitated. At the hospital, Veronica was understandably quite distressed, especially when staff cut off her jumper because she said it was her very best. Veronica had seven lacerations to her head, and they gave her sixty stitches to her face and her scalp. Most painful of all were the wounds to the back of her throat that had come from the

fingers that were shoved in there. After she was stitched up, Veronica gave the police a false statement. Twenty pages worth. Which is the story we just told you. The main points being that Veronica was the intended victim, Lucan wanted her dead, and he wanted that so he could get his kids and his money back. And that Sandra had been killed in a case of mistaken identity. Lord Lucan had actually been after his ex-wife. When Veronica was asked where her estranged husband may be, she said, your guess is as good as mine. Sandra's autopsy revealed six

major blows to her head, splitting the scalp and severe bruising to several areas of her face, to the top of both shoulders and the back of her right hand, which some people think may be a defensive wound. And when Lady Lucan was asked how she had managed to survive when Sandra Ribbett had so tragically not, she said, good breeding. Which for someone who has harped on so strongly for not being accepted into the aristocracy is an extraordinarily hypocritical thing to say.

I mean, as we said at the start, which is from a normal middle-class family, grew up in a pub, but now she is very much of the mindset, I am Lady Luca. So yeah, she loves it. And I also do think we'll come onto this later, but it's just worth pointing out now. There are quite a lot of wounds to Sandra of it that do look like defensive wounds, like you said, which for me is like, especially the wounds like her shoulders, like the bruising to her shoulders, it's like, how is it mistaken identity? It was like the attack went on for quite a long time and you probably got a quite good look at her. But is it also a thing of like whoever started to attack Sandra, maybe it wasn't mistaken identity, maybe she was the intended target, or maybe it was just like, well I hit this woman a couple of times

now. I realise it's not who I was here to kill but I better finish the job. I don't know. The question of who did it, who had killed Sandra and attacked Veronica, was decided within an hour of the murder. Police never strayed from the account that Veronica had given them. It was Lord Lucan. It had to be. Thinking it was the nanny's night off, he had obviously let himself into the house and removed the light bulb in the basement. And then he had sat and waited in the dark to attack Veronica at her regular 9 p.m. tea time. He'd then probably planned to hide her body somewhere, perhaps thinking people would assume

that she'd killed herself or just wandered off. And the authorities concluded that the blood spatter mostly corroborated this story. At the time, remember, this is the 70s, there was no DNA testing. But they could, at the time time still tell the blood type. Veronica had type A and this was found at the top of the basement stairs where she said she had been attacked and Sandra who had type B blood this blood was found all over the basement so so far so accurate. But then there was also some of Sandra's type B blood on Veronica's shoes. But remember she said she never went down into the basement because it was dark down there so

she didn't think the nanny was down there. And also Veronica's type A blood was also found on the bloody mail sack in which Sandra's body was found. Now this could easily be explained by cross contamination or something like that because there were lots of other discrepancies like this too with the crime scene. But for the police there was a pretty compelling reason to abandon pursuing any other avenues of inquiry with this case even despite these inconsistencies. And that's because the crime scene was an absolute fucking shit show. Classically, tons of police had trampled their way through the Lucan House. The infamy of the case in the national press meant that every copper in London wanted to have a look. And some have even reported that police would invite people round after hours to see the famous house and drink Lord Lucan's

fancy booze. Either way, dozens of fingerprints had to be eliminated that were not the family's. So as for the question of whether there had been anyone else in the house that night, there is literally no way we will ever know. Still, whatever happened in that house that night, the more pressing question for investigators at the time was, because they had decided who they thought had done it, where the shit was he? Quite. So after Veronica had fled the house, her daughter Frances said she had seen her father

dart out of the house. We also know that Lord Lucan, after this, went to a friend's house round the corner. When they didn't answer, Lucan then phoned the house, saying, I know you, before mumbling something about checking on the kids, then hanging up. Lucan then phoned his mother and asked her to fetch the children. Then he drove fifty miles south to his friend's house, a man named Ian Maxwell Scott, in Uckfield, Sussex, and he arrived there at about 11.30pm. Now Maxwell Smith was a director of the Claremont Club, and although he was away that night,

his wife Susan was home. Lucan told Susan that he'd had a quote, traumatic night of unbelievable coincidence. She let him in, gave him a stiff drink, and he told her the following story. Lucan said that he had been passing the family house on his way to his little flat that's not little, and he saw an intruder attacking his wife. So he let himself into the house, slipping on blood in the hall as he entered. The man ran off and Lucan went to his wife who was hysterical. As soon as she saw him, Veronica started

screaming that Lucan had hired the man to kill her and that the hit man had killed Sandra by mistake. So Lucan calmed his wife down and took her upstairs to help her clean her wounds up before he called the police. And it was then while his back was turned that Veronica ran into the street shouting murder. And he realized that his wife was going to accuse him of being responsible for said murder and the evidence didn't look great for him. According to Lucan himself, Veronica had already misrepresented him in court and won. So what chance would he have this time? So he wrote that he had decided to quote

lie doggo for a while. I bet you wish you could. And after telling Susan this story, Lord Lucan asked her for something to help him sleep and she gave him four Valium which is a lot. I was gonna say four do you want four I've got loads do you want four? I'd love four. But soon after he received these four Valium Lord Lucan left the Maxwell Smith House in the early hours of Friday morning, specifically at 1.15am. And Lord Lucan was never seen again. The car he was using that night, a blue Ford Corsair, was found parked in Newhaven, a port town on the south coast of England. From sightings, police knew it had been parked there between 5am and 8am. That's at least four hours after he left Susan.

The car was examined on Sunday 10th November. In the boot, police found two bottles of vodka. And inside the car, there were smears of blood and sections of lead pipe, almost identical to the one that had been used on Sandra. Both of the pieces of lead pipe, the one found in the car and the one used in the murder, had been hacked off with a saw in the same exact way. Weirdly, the police thought, the car was parked on the other side of town from the harbour. So if you're thinking that he drove it to the harbour, jumped on a ship and made it

out of the country, it seemed a weird place to park. But still, a fugitive leaving his car in a harbour town usually means one of two things. Ferry or cliffs. And so the English Channel after this was scoured by police on both sides. Boats patrolled the water and investigators trawled the coasts in case his body washed up. Police even had a ferry taken out of the water to test propellers for DNA in case Lucan had jumped in and been mangled underwater. Still, nothing. Lucan's friends' houses across Europe, the US and the Caribbean

were all searched and watched. And fun fact, this was the only murder inquiry ever to have included a search of Warwick Castle. of Warwick Castle. Eight months later, with still no sign of a body, a jury gathered at London Coroner's Court for an inquest. Alongside the official account, the court heard Lady Lucan's testimony. After just 31 minutes, the jury found that Lord Lucan was guilty of murder, given that his abandoned Ford Corsair was spattered with blood types matching both Sandra Rivett and Lady Lucan, and that there was a lead pipe

consistent with the killing in the boot of the same car, the jury also heard a fair amount of circumstantial evidence as well, including that Lord Lucan had recently been told by his own daughter that the nanny's night off was Thursday's and there was a motive to, even if it was misguided, revenge for winning the custody battle and the drunken idea that if Veronica was out of the picture that everything would go back to normal and he could have his kids back and he wouldn't have to deal with her anymore. Lucan's friend, Greville Howard,

remembered Lord Lucan saying that killing his wife might just save him from bankruptcy. I don't think I'd forget someone saying that to me. No, no, especially not when somebody tried to kill their wife. By this time, however, the story of Lucan's whereabouts was on everyone's lips. And it wasn't just the flavour of the month. It has been a sustained national mystery ever since. But at the time it was absolutely enormous news.

Journalists even later admitted that they'd worked together. One paper would push the story that Lukin was dead while the other would say that he was still alive, all to keep the story going. And the police and press very much worked in tandem. Detective Chief Superintendent Roy Ranson, who led the murder inquiry, became convinced that Lucan had fled to Africa. But at the time Lady Lucan believed that her husband had taken a ferry to New Haven and then thrown himself into the Channel. Meanwhile Lucan's friends all insisted

that he'd killed himself in the UK and the theories didn't end there. Some believed that the IRA had offed him. As a landowner in County Mayo I guess it made sense that he'd be their enemy. And that's what they did to... Mountbatten. They knocked off Mountbatten in this lago. Others thought that perhaps Lucan had been killed by people that he owed debts to. And apparently, whether this was true or not, debt collectors in London soon started telling people who owed them money, we killed Lord Lucan, we can kill you too. But the theory that really stuck, a narrative that still clings to this story today, is that Lucan was spirited out of the

country by the Eton Mafia. If anyone can, it's them. But if you need convincing I'm gonna give it a good go. Susan Maxwell Scott, who claims that Eerlucan visited her in Sussex and told the whole story to her, she didn't go to the police. She waited for them to come to her, saying that she saw no reason to tell them. And neither did Lord Lucan's mum mum who he had also called that night. And in case it wasn't clear, the Claremont set occupied an incredibly closed-off old-school form of aristocracy and as such they felt totally superior and above even the law. Actually they were willing to go actively against it. So it's not a

huge stretch to say that many of them would have welcomed an opportunity to demonstrate the power that they held. And we also know that the day after the murder, Lord Lucan's closest friends all went for lunch at the Claremont Club. And it's been theorized that they knew exactly where Lord Lucan was and they were having that lunch to hatch a plan to get Lucky set up abroad. In her very comprehensive book, A Different Class of Murder, Laura Thompson presents a theory on how this all started. She spoke to the son of a taxi driver whose dad swore until his dying breath that he had

given Lord Lucan a lift from Susan's house in Sussex to Headcorn Airfield. to head corner field. So yes, the Claremont gang met up and it looks bad. But they probably should keep in mind the possibility that they just met up to conspire to tell the police as little as possible. And also it fucking sounds like they met up every single day for lunch and dinner anyway. I was just going to say that. They're desperate to be away from their wives, it would seem quite. And look, even if they did decide to meet up and talk about Lucan disappearing, which I'm sure would have been top of the fucking chat list that day, they may also have just been deciding amongst themselves what to do if Lucky Lucan turned up.

Doesn't necessarily mean that they were hatching some sort of dastardly plan and they were already up to their necks in this murder mystery escape plot. Still, there is this later quote from John Aspinall, the guy with the fucking hobby zoo that he definitely shouldn't have, that kind of sums up their attitude. He said, If a close friend of yours came in, covered in blood, having done some frightful deed, the last thing that would have occurred to you is to turn him in. It goes against every last instinct of human loyalties.

And to help with the law or the common norms of civic behaviour or something, if he had begged asylum, he would have had it. It may have involved him giving himself up or giving him funds to go to Costa Rica. He would certainly have had a lot of money. And there are definitely a lot of ifs in there. I mean could it just be posho trolling from Aspenall? Possibly. But we don't know.

Maybe. But members of Lucan's own family were even more direct than this. In 1981, one of Lord Lucan's sisters, Lady Sarah Gibbs, said he went away because he wanted to protect the children from unwelcome publicity. The time may come to say more, but for now, let me say that we are sure that he is alive. Sarah, if that's true, why are you saying it? I feel like Sarah doesn't know shit and she just wants to be involved.

I mean, I think Sarah wants her feature in High Society magazine, but I don't doubt that like she feels like she can say stuff like that and get away with it. Quite. And she does. Absolutely. That's entirely possible. Absolutely. So yeah, there's a lot of theories out there that the Claremonts that helped Lucan escape But there are also just as many theories that the Claremonts that actually killed Lucan themselves for giving them a bad name Look, they're pathetic. Yeah, they really are but I do I think that is a push. Yeah, me too really are but I don't I think that is a push. Yeah me too. There's also theories that they encouraged Lucan to kill himself with his body then being thrown to the animals at John Aspinall's

private zoo in Kent with Aspinall's mother Lady Osborne saying the last I heard he was being fed to the tigers at my son's zoo. I mean that is a pretty good way to get rid of someone. It is. I also feel like Lady Osborne is just trying to get her son's zoo some airtime there. She's doing a little interview in Tatler magazine. Where is Lord Lucan? Have you been to Howlitz? Yeah, because it's quite expensive to keep all of those big cats in Kent. However, let's leave the tigers behind. The majority of the Lucan mystery focuses on, not if he did it, but where he is.

But having said that, it is worth taking a look at the idea that perhaps it was not Lord Lucan that killed Sandra Ribbett at all. idea that perhaps it was not Lord Lucan that killed Sandra Ribbett at all. The mistaken identity theory was taken as fact immediately based on the testimony of a very traumatized and disturbed lady who had just been attacked. But it isn't the only explanation that we have. As we said, Sandra had quite a lot of men on the go and was known to have fiery rows with some of them. John the Barman was working at another pub that night and he had a solid alibi.

But it's not totally impossible that one of the other boyfriends could have done it. It would explain how the killer got into the house with no signs of forced entry. And Lucan's version of events could also fit with this idea. He said he saw a mystery attacker, disturbed him, and then the attacker bolted. Especially when you take into account the so-called mystery man. Yes, because two of the children, ten-year-old Francis and 4-year-old Camilla, mentioned that around the time of the murder, a mystery man had been staying at the house. Apparently he sometimes slept in the nanny's room.

But they never learned this man's name. And it was never presented at the 1975 inquest. Despite calls from Lucan's brother Hugh to look at the evidence afresh, it has never been investigated as a possible theory. So let's take a look back at the official account and see if we can prick some more holes in it. Firstly, with so many blows to Sandra's head, blood would have gushed out. Remember we told you the basement was absolutely covered in blood. Whoever killed her would also have been soaked. And if Lord Lucan was the killer he should have been absolutely

covered in blood. But the only blood found upstairs in the house, because remember Veronica and Lucan say the same thing, that after Veronica was attacked, Lucan went with her upstairs to try and help her clean up. The only blood that was ever found upstairs in the house was the blood on the towel that Veronica lay on and it was Veronica's blood. There was also no blood on the stairs or anywhere else in the bedroom or upstairs. That also goes for the blood found in the car. There was very little blood found in there, just smears of it. And also there was just a tiny bit of blood found on his friend's doorstep.

Not nearly enough for him to have recently bludgeoned a woman to death. It was said at the time by police that on the night of Sandra's murder, Veronica was clear-eyed and very consistent in her testimony. But we can see pretty clearly that that's just not true. And as the years went by, Veronica embellished more and more, adding new details to her account that didn't really make sense. She became a regular fixture in the press over the years and she was always happy to give a sassy quip filled interview. Once she said that Lucan had

phoned his mother while still at the house, which was a totally new plotline, and contradicted her previous story. Also it was impossible. Lord Lucan's mother had been out until 10 p.m. which was after Veronica ran into the pub. Yeah and it's very much before mobile phones so who's he calling? We have her here a year after the murder talking to the BBC about whether she'd like to see her husband again. I always hoped to but I have a feeling that I won't see him again. I don't think he'll come back. He'll have made another life for himself. I always hope, though. There's always a possibility.

And then here, in 1987, she says it was 100% Lord Lucan that attacked her. But she's less sure about him attacking Sandra. At the inquest I really, I only gave evidence about the attack on me and my husband certainly was my attacker. Do you believe also that he killed Sandra Rivett? I think so, yes. She also told a paper, if I had known how to do it,

I would have hired a hitman and got him first. But I didn't know what to do and I didn't have £20,000. And in 1981, Veronica gave a very unusual interview to the News of the World. She brings up the theory that someone else killed Sandra, saying, It does seem strange that I survived. I only know that at the time I thought my husband had hit me. I didn't think I'd fallen. Maybe I did.

There could easily have been someone downstairs hiding in the cloakroom. I would not have heard them. I just don't know. Okay, Belle Gibson. At the time, I thought... Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And yeah, look, if you think about it, why didn't this person, if it was Lord Lucan, why didn't he kill Veronica? Like we said, they sort of roll around, they get out of breath, and then he's like, oh, fuck it, go on then, go have a glass of water,

let's get you upstairs and get you cleaned off. He's already killed the fucking nanny, and he's apparently smashed Veronica's head in multiple times, and she's seen him. What is he thinking? Oh, well let's just make up. Let's just go have some wild makeup sex while you lay a towel on the bed and bleed after death.

That's well darling. I've only got one matter in me this evening. It doesn't make sense. That part doesn't make sense. You know, allegedly he saws off a piece of lead pipe, goes to his house to kill his wife and accidentally kills the nanny instead, his wife comes down. He tries to kill her. And then with just a twist of his nuts, he's forced to stop. Like that's all it takes to stop

him from killing his wife when he's in a rage-fuelled rampage. Also, it wasn't just like a snap and a red misdecend situation, especially with all that pre-planning with the lead pipe. But also, he kills Sandra, stuffs her in a mail bag and then is like, shit, killed the wrong woman. Let me hide until my wife comes downstairs to look for her cup of tea and then kill her ah but she punched me in the nuts i'm gonna stop like it is very very strange there is also the theory therefore that it was actually veronica who killed sandra the nanny in order to frame luken or perhaps she just did it during some sort of random psychotic break. That is a theory that people play around with,

but I don't know. I don't know. Could it be true? Maybe, especially with all the blood types mixing around, but it could also just be because the police handled this crime scene in an incredibly shit way. Well, that's it. Like... No matter who did it, somebody... Well that's it. Like, no matter who did it, somebody left that house without getting loads of blood upstairs. Yeah, and according to both Veronica and Lucan, he went upstairs.

Yeah. There's also the theory that Lucan had hired a hitman, but changed his mind and then rushed round to stop it, only to find that the wrong woman was dead. But would a hired killer really plan to bash their victim to death with a blunt object, creating an enormous bloodbath with plenty of people including children still in the house? I don't know. I mean everyone has a bad day at the office, you know? Exactly. Surprises coming up, he's nervous, really fucks it up at the last minute.

It is like, fuck, I've really fucking done a number here. I've killed the fucking nanny. He told me she'd come downstairs to make her own cup of tea at 9pm. Yeah, who knows? While we may not believe all of these other theories, I don't know, there is a chance, albeit small one, that Lucan's story might actually check out. But we don't care, and neither does the world. The world is much more interested, even now, in tracking Lord Lucan down. The prevailing idea was and still is that Lucan, helped by

his posh friends and their nefarious connections across the globe, had made his way through Europe, potentially even having plastic surgery to alter his appearance along the way. An Interpol red notice was issued for him and that meant he could be arrested by law enforcement anywhere in the world, which severely restricted his travel options. But it's still in effect as we speak. Still, seeing as he left his passport in his flat, we have to assume that he's got a fake one. The point is, as soon as the escape to Europe theory spread, there were an avalanche of

Lucan sightings. Sightings were called in from France, India, Guam, Japan, the Philippines, Mozambique and New Zealand. Lord Lucan was seen sobbing in a gym in Vancouver and backpacking on Mount Etna. One report saw him strolling through a hotel foyer in Botswana. He was also seen at a colony of former Nazis in Paraguay and working as a waiter in San Francisco. But the very first of these high- high profile sightings was in December 1974 in Melbourne, Australia when a suspicious, mustachioed British man walked into a bank and the clerk thought it had to be Lucan.

The man was arrested and ordered to drop his trousers and that's because Lucan was known to have a six inch scar on the inside of his right thigh. Have a look at this boys. It was determined that that man was not in fact Lord Lucan. It was however another British fugitive named John Stonehouse, the Labour MP who had staged his death in Miami to go live with his mistress in the outback. That guy. I've forgotten about him. And that is another huge story which we'll have to come back to another day. But basically, the story of Lord Lucan was so high profile and Lucan himself was so distinctive that

essentially anytime anyone around the globe saw a weird posh English man with a moustache, someone called it in and presumably tried to get him to drop his trousers. In 2003, a retired detective claimed to have tracked Lucan down to Goa in India and said he was living it up out there as Jungle Barry Halpin, a folk singer from St Helens. jungle Barry Halpin, a folk singer from St. Helens. The search for Lord Lucan became a worldwide running joke. British puppet satire show Spitting Image used to always include a Lucan puppet in the background of their sketches as a gag for eagle-eyed viewers. Last year even after government minister Sue Gray came under fire our health minister Wes Streeting joked in a speech,

Sue Grey is hiding Lord Lucan and shot JFK. I don't even want to tell you what she did to Sherga. Sometimes, however, when we're not making jokes, even though puppet jokes are the best jokes, please see my upcoming musical, David Icke, The Musical, where everyone is a puppet apart from David Icke. Patent pending. Sometimes the clues that came to light were a bit more convincing.

In the late 70s, former Coldstream Guards officer and occasional Clermont Club gambler David Hardy was killed in a road accident. When police arrived on the scene they went through his pockets to identify him and found an address book. Under L they found the listing! That's amazing! Lord Lakin care of Hôtel l'Ambassadeur, Bouira, Mozambique. Nailed it. And there is more! Hardy's widow had given him the address book as a present three or four years after Lord Lucan had disappeared.

Which means that that note, that address listing, that entry in that address book had to have been written after Lucan went on the run. But by the time a journalist managed to get to Boira, there was no Lord Lucan anywhere. And there's more. When Lord Lucan's son Hugh appeared on TV, he made a passing comment about wishing he could have seen his father one more time. And to one woman watching at home, enough was enough. It was time to speak out. Because according to Marianne Shirley Roby, Lucan had seen his son Hugh since the disappearance. Hugh just didn't know it.

Starting in the late 70s, Shirley had worked as a secretary for none other than John Aspinall, the guy with the mental back garden zoo. And she says that in 1979, she was asked to be involved in arranging for Lord Lucan's children to visit him in Africa. According to Shirley she organised flights for the children to Tree Tops Lodge in Kenya as well as secret second passports for all of them so that Lady Lucan would remain none the wiser. By this time a court order had in fact removed the children from Veronica's custody and their legal guardians were actually Veronica's sister and her husband, Bill Shandkid, who

remember was a nailed-on gold card holding member of the Claremont set. Shirley says that she was present for conversations between John Aspinall and Sir James Goldsmith concerning Lucan's desire to see his children and in one of these conversations Aspinall said if he doesn't see them he'll just come back and risk everything. Shirley says that Bill Shandkid took the kids out of school for a week and sent them to Kenya so that Lucan could see them from a distance without ever knowing. Is there some weird safari irony to that?

That he's just watching his kids at a watering hole from across the savannah? Dressed as a bush. Yeah! Savannah dressed as a bush yeah and again just like with the taxi driver there's no ambiguity here Shirley says definitively that Lord Lucan was alive and he was in Africa and he was being actively aided and abetted by the Claremont set in 1979 she also says that she spoke to him on the phone herself. Is she full of shit? This is the thing, right? Everyone's like, oh she's saying it and she's super certain about it, as is a taxi driver, but I'm like, it's a massive fucking story.

Everyone wants to be involved in this, everyone wants to know something about what's going on, like I don't know. It seems like a strange thing to lie about. However, People are strange. What you just said. But also I'm like, if you're genuinely talking shit about these incredibly rich and powerful people who like, I'm not saying that they like cavorted him out of the country. I think they did, but like it is not hyperbolic to say that those people can knock you off if they want to.

Yeah, if they want to get you, they're gonna get you. If they got... You already got. Yeah, if they got him out of the country and have successfully hidden him away in Africa for years and years and years and years, why are you saying anything, Shirley? And so all that leaves us now is with the story of Neil Berryman. Neil's story entered the picture in the recent BBC series, Lucan, by filmmaker Colette Camden. Now look, the story of Lord Lucan has so many threads that we can't cover all of them fully in this episode.

So if you are even slightly interested in this case we really recommend you watch the three-part documentary that's on the PPC. I'm sure they're real sticklers with the whole like VPN situation but it's probably on like Britbox or something if you're not in the UK. But basically the series starts off with the basic story but goes off into some truly incredible places and ends up somewhere you'd never really expect. Now we're gonna do our best to like summarise this very briefly but I do love this moment in this story because we have actually met Neil Berryman in our story today already. Guess who he was?

He was in fact the second child of none other than murdered nanny Sandra Rivet who was given up for adoption. And Neil Berryman was raised by a foster family and actually only found out who his birth mother really was after his own foster mother died. And from then on he dedicated his life to trying to solve the mystery of who had killed his bio-mum Sandra River once and for all. Neil was convinced that the official story was all wrong. He thought that Lucan knew exactly what he was doing, that he killed Sandra to frame

Veronica and make everyone think that she was mad. And here's why. Neil reckons that Lucan must have known that it was Sandra, and he uses her potential defensive wounds as evidence. And also, Sandra and Veronica looked entirely different. However, we do have to say, Neil is an extremely unreliable narrator, which is quite bittersweet really. In the documentary that Saru just told you about you can see his wife and his daughter talking about how he spends every evening and weekend on his computer digging deeper on Lord Lucan. And he has dug some stuff up which we'll get onto in a second.

But he does definitely ignore any evidence that might disagree with his take on matters. And Neil's also joined by an investigative reporter called Glen Campbell who got so into the case that he has named his dog Luke. Slightly weird, slightly cute. Exactly, but you know, tenacity does get them to some very interesting places. One, for example, being an intelligence report drawn up by Scotland Yard in 2002 that talks about credible evidence that Lucan did indeed get away to Africa and says that he was living under the name John Crawford in Mozambique. It even specifies that he was living on a ranch and letting out holiday shallows to tourists. Which is a risky job for a man out on the run. But okay. Just never wear shorts, they

never see that big scar on his thigh. Never wear hot pants I think you mean. It is Mozambique. It's hot out there. Then, Lucan's brother Hugh Bingham, not his son, his brother, was tracked down to Johannesburg, just across the border, where he'd moved just six months after the murder. And he was there as part of a weird little esoteric sect called Theosophy, which was founded in New York in 1875. In the BBC documentary we told you about they actually managed to get access to this tightly guarded compound and interview Hugh Bingham who says he believes his brother to be innocent and probably to have taken himself off

somewhere. But then apparently in a sort of jinx-esque moment when the cameras were off Hugh admitted the truth. That Lucan did escape going to India to become a Buddhist, where everyone goes apparently, and that he apparently died in 2008. Again, very specific, very definitive, but this man is in a fucking mental cult so do we believe it? I don't know. These things always tend to happen when the cameras are off, don't they? Just get a little sticker for the red light

and just say it's off. It's all good. What else you got, crazy man? Well, I've got another theory is what I've got. Another trail follows Luke into Australia and the supposed confession of a Buddhist monk who said that he'd killed two women called Sandra Veronica in the 70s who had karma to be repaid. I don't think that's how Buddhism works.

I was going to say. I'm not sure. Is, can we get a fact check on that somebody? Is that what the Buddhists believe? I don't know if Buddhists do penance, do they? Seems like a very Christian thing to do. I guess their penance is getting reincarnated. To something worse. Yes, exactly. But I don't think you can scrub it, can you? I think it is... Oh, fuck. Let's stop.

Oh, fucking no. Whatever. Whatever you want to fucking believe. Anyway, this man, who was Buddhist and in confession at the same time, was said to have changed his name constantly to Bargaharama, to Bama, and then to Sādhātiśa. Why not? Sure. And apparently we have a letter from this man of many names in all capitals that says, all I want to do is come clean and I would if I could. The documentary track this man down to a tiny Buddhist sanctuary near Perth, and then an ex-member shows the team a photo and it is Sadati Sir, or one of his many names, dressed as

a wizard at a kid's birthday party. Sure. At this particular moment in time he was using the name Derek Crowther and with this in hand, the documentary team set off on a quest to find this wizard man holding pink balloons. And amazingly they do. He was living in Brisbane at 82 years old, which is the same age that Lord Lucan would have been. But lots of people are 82. Is this true? I want to see the thigh. What's that weird wizard got on his thigh? We don't know. So yeah, like I said, we can't go through all of it. If you want to know everything and to experience the full weirdness of this particular part of the story, you just got to go watch the BBC talk.

They do actually speak to Derek Crowther in it and it is as weird as you would expect it to be. Sometimes he seems like an old confused man who's losing his marbles slightly but then sometimes he talks in this kind of preachy spiritual jargon about changing his name because of different energies and that the end of the world is coming soon and sometimes he also talks totally lucidly about his upbringing and he says that he grew up in Belgravia London and was friends with Princess Margaret and that he grew up in the Theosophical Society, the same organization Lucan's brother Hugh is a member of which only

has 35,000 members worldwide. And in the documentary when they directly accused Derek of being Lord Lucan and killing Sandra Rivet, he doesn't even deny it. He just says, there isn't much you can do about it. It's all in the hands of the divine. Technically everything is in the hands of the divine. It doesn't mean that no action can be taken. Exactly. But nothing does really happen to him because he even later, apparently off

camera, tells Neil Berryman, well, if I am Lord Lucan, what the fuck are you going to do? Maybe Neil needs to go to some sort of filmmaking class because it seems like he's turning off the camera all the really pertinent moments. He's nailing it. And that's not all because Neil and Glenn then contact a scientist who invented the AI recognition software used to catch the Salisbury poisoners. See our episode on that for more details. And this guy who knows nothing about the Lucan case swears that his technology is 99.9% accurate. With a score of anything above 75%, meaning that it is the same person for sure. I'm going to call slight bullshit on this, more than slight.

Face recognition software is actually terrible. It is actively terrible. All of this stuff about all of the social currency stuff that's going on in China and like the introduction increasingly of like AI face recognition in like crime fighting in the UK because London super CCTV'd it's really really bad. But anyway let's stick with this story. So this guy who's invented this particular AI recognition software, says that the images of this guy, Derek Crother, compared to Lucky Lucan, range from 76.2 to 88.5% a match. We'll put the pictures up on social media and look, I'll say that in the picture that we have of Lucan, maybe he's like in his 30s, late 20s, 30s.

I think people looked a lot older back then, that's probably where he is. And this guy's 82. Like I don't really see it. Especially the ears. The ears are the thing for me. The ears, your ears don't really change throughout your life and they are apparently as accurate as fingerprints. Like an ear print, you just don't really get them as often. But Lord Lucan's ears are quite flat to his head and Derek's ears are not so flat to his head. And even if, you know, someone could make some weird comment about ears growing and changing blah blah blah, I think that's a myth, isn't it? But in my job in the time

before, I did a lot of passport training because I had to spot a fake passport and I had to be able to tell if the person in the passport was the person standing in front of me. So nasty terrors and things. And I can't remember all of them, but there are a list of things that they tell you that will never change. And the height of the top of your ears never changes. So if the person in the picture has different height ears to the person

you're looking at, it is not the same person. And I wish I could remember them all because there were about four that they were like, if that is different, it is categorically not the same person. So I think it's the ears for me as well. I just don't see it. The nose looks different. The ears look different. Like, I don't see it. Maybe the eyes are quite similar, but that's about it. No, I'm not sold. No me either. And neither are the Australian and British police.

It was the ears and the nose that did it for them as well. Plus, among the supposedly damning notes from Derek Crowther, there are also other ones that are less pertinent to the Lucan case including I was birthed into Stonehenge and brought up by the Druids. So that's an example for you of Neil cherry picking evidence. But if the wizard is Lord Lucan then he certainly did have a wonderful time on the run. Years ago, Derek, known then as Peter Jason, went to Toronto and opened a theatre company called Fassade. And Fassade had a drag show, by all accounts a very, very good one.

And Jason slash Derek's stage name was Jenny Romaine. Backstage was a non-stop haze of weed smoke and Timothy Leary also showed up with his LSD and they all had a lovely time. Which may explain the birthed into Stonehenge stuff. After he left Toronto behind him, according to Derek, he then met Kalu Rinpoche, a Tibetan master who gave him a spiritual path and acknowledged him as a holy man. They travelled through India together and the Dalai Lama himself said that Derek was his western incarnation. No, he didn't. Anyway, it's not a strong theory, but it is an entertaining one. Go and watch the documentary. And there is, although Neil

clearly has investigative issues, it is very sweet to witness his determination in finding out who really killed his mum. Absolutely. So through the 90s and early 2000s, Lucan's son Hugh grew sick of all this non-stop Lucan theorising, especially since he wanted to get his hands on that earldom. Lucan was declared legally dead in 1999 but no death certificate was issued. That meant his heir Hugh couldn't enter the House of Lords and couldn't become the eighth Earl of Lucan.

Hugh's own belief is that his father had had access to a boat and took it out onto the English Channel and deliberately sank it. And after 50 years of speculation, the courts finally ruled in Hugh's favour. It was in 2016 that Lord Lucan was finally declared dead for all legal purposes. In a speech on the steps outside, Hugh told the press, I would be very grateful if we all moved on and found another Loch Ness monster out there. As for Lady Lucan, she had a series of mental health crises and spent the rest of her life in and out of institutions. And as we told you in 82 she lost custody of her children, it was given to her sister.

The Lucan kids tried to contact their mother many times over the years but she refused to reply saying it is better for them to know that I am a strong person. Veronica lived in semi-isolation in her final years and she killed herself in 2017 leaving her entire fortune to the homeless charity shelter. Which leaves us with full bladders and one question. What do we think happened? I don't know. I think...

I think he tried to frame Veronica. And I think he probably went to Mozambique. And then I think he tried to frame Veronica and I think he probably went to Mozambique and then I think he died there. I like that theory. Yeah, I think the things that make me think it wasn't him, like the fact that whoever killed Sandra, I mean, I guess it was dark down in the basement, but whoever killed Sandra seems to have had a pretty bloody good go at it for a while. And like, how could they not have realized it was Veronica at that point? But mainly really just the idea that if it was Lucan, he apparently tried to attack Veronica quite ferocious attack. Like she had 60 stitches in her head, but then was just like, oh, nevermind. Yeah. Let's go upstairs and get you cleaned up.

Like their door to Francis was in the bedroom when they went up there. Like, you know, I'm just like, how do you get back to that level of base calm after you've tried to attack your wife and you've murdered the servant? Like, I don't know. That just seems quite weird that he stays in the house and the fact that they don't find any blood. Like he would have been drenched in blood. Yeah. And there's no sign of it but again I understand that the crime scene was like a total shit show. He is quite an unstable person he could have easily been quite drunk when he turned up and therefore nobody's

thinking clearly. Veronica also not the most like clear-headed person. You know is it enough to make me believe that he didn't do it? Not really. But there's just enough there that maybe he didn't. But whether he did or he didn't do it? Not really. But there's just enough there that maybe he didn't. But whether he did or he didn't, I don't think he killed himself. I do think he fled to Africa. 100%. 100%. Yeah. So that's it. Who the hell knows? Who the hell knows? Come up with your own theories and discuss amongst yourselves. For once in a fucking life, always looking at us to give you the theories. No, we don't bloody know, but something happened. And we'll see you next time. We will. Goodbye. Bye.

In the early hours of December 4th, 2024, CEO Brian Thompson stepped out onto the streets of Midtown Manhattan. This assailant pulls out a weapon and starts firing at him. We're talking about the CEO of the biggest private health insurance corporation in the world. And the suspect. He has been identified as Luigi Nicholas Mangione. Became one of the most divisive figures in modern criminal history.

I was targeted premeditated and meant to sow terror. I'm Jesse Weber, host of Luigi, produced by Law and Crime and Twist. This is more than a true crime investigation. We explore a uniquely American moment that could change the country forever. He's awoken the people to a true issue. Finally maybe this would lead rich and powerful people to

acknowledge the barbaric nature of our health care system. Listen to Law and Crimes Luigi exclusively on Wondery Plus. You can join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Spotify or Apple podcasts.