Lord Lucan: Solving the riddle

When all this happened back in November 1974, the handsome young Dai Llewellyn — baronet son of the Olympic champion showjumper Sir Harry Llewellyn and brother of Roddy Llewellyn, Princess Margaret’s lover — was social secretary of the Clermont Club in Berkeley Square.

The Clermont was the creation of one of the most extraordinary characters of the 1960s, John Aspinall, high priest of gamblers, showman of genius, and close friend of tigers and gorillas. He became the self-appointed Pied Piper of gambling to the English upper classes.

With high-stakes gambling at the Clermont upstairs and disco dancing in the cellars — where Mark Birley opened a nightclub named after his wife Annabel — 44 Berkeley Square was at the forefront of Swinging London.

Aspinall and his closest circle — the so-called Clermont set — lived by taking risks and shared a code of loyalty to each other. It seemed as if through gambling they had attained everything they wanted — the smartest friends, the most beautiful women. Some enjoyed enormous luck while others met with disasters. The most disastrous gamble was that embarked on by Lucky Lucan.

On November 7, 1974, somebody smashed in the skull of a 29-year-old nanny, Sandra Rivett, with a 2ft length of lead piping in the basement of a house in Belgravia where Lucan’s estranged wife Veronica lived with their three children.

Although no one was ever put on trial, the coroner named Richard John Bingham, 7th Earl of Lucan, as the murderer. But Lucan had disappeared and in spite of tantalising “sightings” of the apparently homicidal earl as far apart as India, Mozambique and South America his whereabouts, if by some faint chance he has survived, remain as big a mystery as the Mary Celeste, the lost books of Livy or the crown jewels of Ireland.

In the midst of all the far-fetched theories that were soon appearing, some basic questions were overlooked. And that would have been that, but for the appearance on television in 2000 of a celebrated south London criminal.

The story he told got me thinking about one of the most intriguing features of 1960s London: the links between some of the more louche figures of wealthy west London and the gangsters of the East End.

This set me on a trail that led back to a key witness in the Lucan case, the last person known to have seen him alive. The widow of one of Lucan’s closest friends, she had spoken to me many times without giving a clue, but before she died last year she told me what really seems to have happened to Lucky.

The key figure in her story — an international financial fixer — still cannot be named, but she explained what had previously been inexplicable. And her key point was that Lucan is dead: he was rescued but then murdered by his own minders.

WHEN Lucan first entered Aspinall’s orbit in the 1950s, he was one of the brightest members of what became the Clermont set. He could have been a sort of template for the club — hereditary aristocrat, Eton and the Guards, risk-taking member of the British Army bobsleigh team, fearless gambler and man of honour. His distant kinsman Andrew Duke of Devonshire told me that he had the most perfect manners of any gambler he’d ever met.

He was a particularly close friend of Ian Maxwell-Scott, gambling gourmet and secretary of the Clermont club. Lucan and Veronica often took their children down to Gants Hill, the Maxwell-Scotts’ big house in Uckfield, Sussex, for weekends.

Lucan had sufficient money to live very comfortably indeed, but the Lucans had never got remotely near the financial league of families such as the Derbys or the Devonshires. As addiction to chemin de fer began to bite, the money dwindled and then ran out entirely.

He was effectively bankrupt, and his wife seemed under severe stress as she tried to cope with her desperate husband and their three young children.

In 1973 they separated and a judge awarded Lady Lucan care of the children. This was greeted with indignation at the Clermont, where Aspinall’s philosophy prevailed. If the female of the species resists the authority of the silverback gorilla who has fathered her children, she must expect the sort of treatment that a rebellious female primate would encounter in the wild.

Many ex-husbands have fantasies of murdering their former wives, but Lucky’s fantasies became an open secret among the Clermont set. Veronica had to disappear without trace so that no suspicion would fall on him and he could instantly pick up a new, untroubled life with his children.

Lucan seems to have had no qualms about turning to a number of his Clermont friends for unknowing help. He asked Michael Stoop, a banker, to lend him his spare car, a Ford Corsair.

For reasons that have not been properly understood until now, but are the key to the underworld connection I have discovered, the Sussex ferry port of Newhaven figured prominently in Lucky’s plans. I have been told that he drove Stoop’s car on at least two trial runs from Belgravia to Newhaven. On one of these he returned with a US mailbag in the back, another clue that has not been properly understood before. A friend from the Clermont had accompanied him on the trip.

Lucky apparently needed a considerable sum of ready cash. He asked Jimmy Goldsmith, the richest of the Clermonteers, for a £10,000 loan. Saying he never lent money to his friends, Goldsmith offered the one thing he knew that, as a gentleman, Lucan could not accept — a gift of £10,000.

Goldsmith then lay low in Paris, keeping clear of whatever Lucky was up to. Other friends rallied round to put together the money.

Lucan spent a lot of time working out the perfect murder. The children had told him that Rivett always took Thursday evenings off and that their mother would go down to the kitchen in the basement to make tea. He decided this was his opportunity. He would kill her, put her body in the mailbag and get away without leaving a trace.

The flaw in the plan was that Sandra Rivett did not take her customary night off on Thursday November 7. When she came down to make the tea shortly before 9pm, Lucan mistook her for his wife and struck her so hard that the skull virtually exploded.

When he heard Veronica coming down to find out what was going on, he started hitting her as well. Somehow she managed to grab his balls. Suddenly he seemed to come to his senses.

She escaped and ran screaming into the local pub.

Lucan fled.

Later that evening he drove the Corsair down the familiar road to Newhaven but branched off to Uckfield and the home of Ian Maxwell-Scott.

His old friend was staying at the Clermont, however, and his wife Susie opened the door.

She told me later that Lucan “was clearly in a dreadful state. Unusually for him his hair was mussed up, and he seemed distraught. I noticed a large damp patch on the right hand side of his trousers but didn’t notice any sign of blood”.

Lucan told her an improbable story about seeing someone attacking Veronica in the basement kitchen.

He left shortly after 1am, telling Susie: “I must get back and sort things out. I must find out what that bitch has done to me.”

Two days later the borrowed Corsair was found in Newhaven.

After questioning members of the Clermont set, the police began searching country houses on the faintest rumour. They also spent a lot of time examining the animal cages at Howletts, Aspinall’s zoo. When for the umpteenth time detectives arrived to interview Aspinall, they were shown into the dining room where he was having dinner with his wife, his mother and a gorilla.

The investigation ground slowly to a halt in the sinking sands of Belgravia — and has stayed there for 30 years.

In the absence of a body or a serious sighting, it seemed that nobody was ever going to know what became of him. But there were several potential leads arising out of the circumstances of the murder.

First of all: why Newhaven? Why had Lucan felt obliged to make not just one but two trial runs in the Corsair before the murder? And why, as one member of the Clermont said to me, did he feel it necessary on his second trip to take one of his old Clermont friends and return with a mailbag in the back of the car? If he was simply anxious to reach the port by a certain time, why all this trouble?

When most people fuss about their time of arrival at a ferry port it is because they want to catch the ferry. But this made little sense for someone planning a perfect murder. Had everything happened as intended, the last thing on earth he would have wanted would have been to get to France, which could only have aroused suspicion.

So why had Lucan twice visited one of the least charming seaside towns in southern England? Why did he have to reach it by a certain time? Why the mailbag? And if he didn’t catch the ferry after murdering Rivett why did he still park his car in Newhaven in the small hours of the morning after killing her?

FREDERICK FOREMAN was a man of some standing in the London underworld in the 1960s. In 1968, as a favour to an east London gang headed by the Kray twins, he helped dispose of a fellow criminal, Frank Mitchell, better known as “the Mad Axe Man”.

Originally Mitchell had been something of a hero to the Krays, but after arranging his escape from Dartmoor and concealing him from the police they soon realised the Axe Man was a dangerous liability. Foreman and an accomplice finally relieved the Krays of this embarrassment so skilfully that no trace of him was ever found.

A murder charge against Foreman was dismissed for lack of evidence and it was not until he appeared on television five years ago — protected by the rule that no one can be tried for the same crime twice — that he described how he had disposed of the body.

It involved what he casually referred to as “a little facility”: the skipper of a deep-sea fishing boat who knew where and how to dispose of a body at sea so that it sank for ever. Foreman demonstrated how the skipper wrapped the body in canvas, weighted it with stones and encased it in chicken wire.

This reminded me of working on The Profession of Violence, my biography of the Kray twins published in 1972. A former close associate of the Krays had told me what had happened to the bodies of their murder victims. It matched virtually word for word Foreman’s account of his “little facility”. And according to my informant the facility had been at Newhaven.

Recently I went there to see the town for myself, and I began to understand the real reason for Lucan’s visits and why he left his car there.

There are in fact two Newhavens, split by the River Ouse. The east bank is the Newhaven from which the Channel ferries come and go. It is clean and brightly lit at night. The west side could be in another world. The waterfront is formed by ancient wooden piles driven deep into the estuary mud, like a scene from Dickens. Vessels of all sorts are moored here, from trawlers to derelict fishing boats ready for the breakers’ yard.

Late at night it is a badly lit, distinctly creepy place where a boat could come and go and anything could happen. It is hard to imagine a better spot for the captain of a fishing boat to take on board a body in the dead of night. This must explain why Lucan came here on those two occasions before the murder.

It would also explain why he took so much trouble with the mailbag. There was one crucial fact about that mailbag that nobody appeared to notice at the time: it was American. British mailbags are much smaller and would not have been large enough to take a body.

American mailbags are far from being readily available in London. One can only think that someone connected with the “little facility” gave it to him when they were finalising their arrangements.

Lucky’s anxiety over timing his arrival can have had no connection with the departure of the ferry. What really mattered was that he arrived in time, with Lady Lucan’s body in the mailbag, for the skipper to wrap it in chicken wire, weigh it down with heavy stones and catch the early morning tide. Since such services did not come cheap, this also explains why Lucky had to rustle up ready cash.

The idea of using the “facility” to dispose of his wife’s body suggests the involvement of someone with the criminal expertise that Lucky lacked. Neither he, nor any of his fellow gamblers from the Clermont, would have known very much about it. Someone from outside their immediate circle must have been advising him.

Furthermore, when the murder went so disastrously wrong more help was suddenly needed. As Susie Maxwell-Scott made clear, by the time Lucan reached her house that night he was in no fit state to think coherently, let alone to organise his escape and disappearance so effectively. Somebody he trusted must have made a number of snap decisions for him.

One of these involved him sticking to the plan he had rehearsed, by driving the car to Newhaven and leaving it in a road close to the West Quay. This is the last place one would choose to park a car before catching the ferry, but it is only a few minutes’ walk from the waterfront and the “facility”.

Whether someone from the “facility” helped him when he got there is something we will never know; but long before the Sussex police were alerted he had definitely been met and driven away on the next stage of his journey. But what happened then?

Through his sheer ineptitude it was likely that Lucan had placed not just himself but several friends from the Clermont at risk. If he were caught and made a full confession, as was more than likely in the state he was in, certain members of the Clermont set could have ended up sharing his disgrace as accessories to his lethal gamble. With so much suddenly at stake, damage limitation had become the priority.

Aspinall once called Lucky “my sixth or seventh best friend”. From everything we know of Aspinall’s mentality, the bonds of friendship would have been more binding than the obligations of the law, and he would have done everything he possibly could to help a friend before leaving him to the police.

(Lynn Barber once asked him in an interview: “Do you think it’s right for someone to murder his wife?” He replied: “Certainly, if she’s behaving in a bad way.” Had he known Lucan was a murderer, would he still have helped him? “Well, I always think that if someone who has been a great friend is then in a terrible position, you feel more warmly towards him because that’s when you’re needed.”)

If suddenly rung up in the middle of the night, however, it would have been difficult for Aspinall to have organised Lucan’s faultless flight unaided. And since Lucan almost certainly ended up abroad, the brains behind his disappearance must have belonged to someone with powerful connections in the European underworld.

I had absolutely no idea of who this could be until one early April afternoon when I visited the widowed Susan Maxwell-Scott, who by then was living in a terraced house in Battersea. She had previously made it plain that she did not wish to discuss what became of Lucky. So I was surprised when she suddenly asked me outright:

“Now that your research is almost finished, have you discovered what happened to Lord Lucan?”

“I’m still not sure,” I said. “Either someone helped him to escape and he started life afresh with a new identity, or he must have killed himself.”

She paused, lit another cigarette, inhaled deeply as she always did, and said: “You’re wrong on both counts. I knew him well enough to know he didn’t have the guts to kill himself. And if he had begun another life abroad, I know that I’d have heard from him by now in some way or another.”

“But if he didn’t kill himself, and didn’t manage to escape, what happened to him?”

“Have you considered that there could be a third possibility?”

“Like what?”

She paused again, then looked me straight in the eye: “That he was murdered. Ian certainly thought he was, and Ian knew more about him and his goings on than anyone.”

“So why didn’t Ian go to the police?”

“In the first place Ian had no real proof. More important, it would have stirred up so much trouble for some of our friends.”

“So who murdered him?” I asked.

She murmured a name I failed to catch. I repeated my question. She looked me in the eye again, and in a clear voice told me who it was.

Since I have subsequently discovered that the person is still alive, I must call him Mr X. I asked her to tell me about him. She was, by the way, the only person I met who still used the name Aspinall gave himself at Oxford: Jonas.

“Mr X knew Jonas well. He was one of those international money men who seemed to flourish in the Sixties. He had connections everywhere. In the days of exchange controls some people used him to get money in and out of Europe.”

She laughed at the idea, and went on smiling at the thought of happier days when Ian was alive. “I remember once when we were holidaying abroad and found ourselves cleaned out after an evening gambling at the casino. Next morning Ian telephoned Mr X, who told him to go to the casino cashier in a couple of hours and mention his name. We did so, and the helpful cashier seemed to know all about us and gave us several hundred pounds of high denomination chips.

“This was one occasion when Ian and I did not gamble. Instead we took ourselves off to the bar and had a drink. Then half an hour later we returned and cashed in all the chips we’d been given. The money paid for the rest of our lovely holiday, and when we got back to London all we had to do was to settle up with Jonas.”

“But what has that to do with Mr X’s involvement in Lucan’s death?”

“According to Ian it was Mr X who helped get him out of the country fast and arranged with certain people he knew to have him looked after. Ian seemed to think that later there was no alternative for Mr X but to arrange to have him killed.”

“Why was that necessary, when he’d taken so much trouble to rescue him in the first place?”

“I wouldn’t know. I suppose [he] just got too hot to handle.”

“Did Ian ever mention where he might be buried?”

“It was a long time ago, but I do remember Ian saying something about him being buried somewhere in Switzerland.”

At first her story struck me as unlikely, and although I tried talking about it to her later, we never got much further.

I finally discovered more about Mr X on my own account. For several years dating back to the early Sixties he seems to have provided an invaluable service to Aspinall and others. During the miserable days of exchange control, Mr X was the man many rich people turned to when they needed to transfer money in and out of Britain. I even heard he had helped Lucan bring back some of the £20,000 he had won at Le Touquet that earned him the nickname Lucky.

Mr X’s true skill came from his knowledge and his contacts among bankers, rich Europeans and the international underworld. This enabled him to trace a number of high-rolling continental gamblers who owed Aspinall large amounts.

Apart from having grown rich operating between England, foreign casinos and banks, Mr X also enjoyed a considerable reputation as an international fence, specialising in stolen jewellery.

He was certainly the only person Lucan would have known who could possibly have told him about the “little facility” at Newhaven.

Once the murder went wrong, Mr X had an interest of his own in keeping Lucan out of the clutches of the police, having been involved with him over the “little facility”. It would not have been too difficult making the necessary arrangements to ship him instantly and secretly out of Britain.

As much of Mr X’s business was done through Swiss bank accounts, Ian Maxwell-Scott’s theory about Lucky ending up in Switzerland may have been closer to the truth than I had first imagined. Once across the Channel, he and his minders could have driven to Switzerland within hours. But once Lucky’s new associates had him safely out of England and in a safe house on the Continent, their problems would have only just begun.

Within a few hours of killing Sandra Rivett, during his brief visit to the Maxwell-Scotts, Lucan had tried to convince Susie of his innocence. Now that he had time to brood upon his situation he could have soon convinced himself as well. Once he had done so, nothing would have stopped him trying to return to England to see his children and attempt to clear his name.

Those who were hiding him would soon have had to cope with the dangerous situation faced by anyone who helps a criminal escape. When dealing with an eerily similar situation, the Krays decided they had no alternative but to have their former friend Frank Mitchell murdered. If Ian Maxwell-Scott was right, whoever had charge of Lucan made a similar decision.

Aspinall wrote an epitaph for a bust of his friend: “John, 7th Earl of Lucan, who gambled his life to repossess his children.”

But Lucky lost. And the Clermont set did not survive the scandal. Soon it was riven by suicide, disgrace and feuding. Dai Llewellyn’s words rang true. After that November night it was all gone with the wind.

Disappearing act that fuelled a thousand theories

Everyone loves a murder mystery, especially newspaper editors and particularly when the crime involves a member of the aristocracy. The story of Lord Lucan has given the British media a wonderful run for an awful lot of money.

Chief Inspector David Gerring, one of the top detectives on the case, subsequently wrote a book entitled Lucan Lives. Gerring’s boss on the case, Detective Chief Superintendent Roy Ransom, firmly believed, like Aspinall, that he was dead.

Muriel Spark wrote one of her weirder novels on the subject, with a Paris psychiatrist treating two identical Lucans, both on the run. One was the real Lucan, the other an impostor, and the story ends with the genuine Lucan being eaten by cannibals in the Congo.

The last “sighting” of the disappearing earl was of an elderly banjo-strumming hippie recently demised in Goa, called Jungle Barry. Despite the fact that the old musician had spoken with a strong Yorkshire accent and had given not the faintest indication of a murderous, let alone an aristocratic, past the story filled the pages of newspapers for a week.

Lucan’s spirit still hovers in the limbo of those unfortunates who are dead and not dead. In October 1999 the High Court granted his family full probate and solemnly proclaimed: “Be it known that the Right Honourable Richard John Bingham, 7th Earl of Lucan, died on or since the 8th day of November 1974.”

But when his son George applied to the lord chancellor to use his father’s title, the lord chancellor insisted there was no proof that the 7th Earl was dead.

© John Pearson 2005

Extracted from The Gamblers by John Pearson to be published by Century on July 7 at £16.99. Copies can be ordered for £13.59 plus £2.25 p&p from The Sunday Times Books Direct on 0870 165 8585