[dramatic music begins]
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[dramatic music continues]
- [Reporter #1] Of Lucan himself,
nothing has been seen since his children's nanny was found
battered to death here in the basement
of the family home in Belgravia.
Exhaustive police searches
of the South Coast produced no clue.
- [Reporter #2] A massive manhunt is underway
for the location of John Bingham,
Seventh Earl of Lucan who has disappeared
and is suspected of murder.
Anyone with information is urged to contact police.
[dramatic music continues]
Bludgeoned to death at 46 Lower Belgrave Street.
The Lucan family's 29-year-old nanny.
- She is the primary victim and yet we don't talk about her.
What we are really interested in, say the press,
is the glamorous story of Lord Lucan and Veronica Lucan,
and that is immensely tragic.
- The murder that saw her lose her life has been defined
in terms that don't even namecheck her.
She's referred to retrospectively in the press
as Little Miss Nobody.
Well everybody is a somebody.
- And she was always well turned out,
very quiet girl just like the rest of us really.
Very sad 'cause you don't want someone
you went to school with to be murdered, do you?
It's just in the wrong place at the wrong time.
- I feel guilty even now.
I feel guilty because of a young baby going
to grow without his mommy.
- The victim in this case did have a name.
That name was Sandra Rivett.
[dramatic music fades]
- The Lucan case.
I can't remember a time when I didn't know about it.
It's something that so many people have grown up with
just in the collective consciousness somehow.
People used to tell jokes.
It's almost like he was a character
rather than a person.
I probably came across his name more commonly like
that than I did for what he'd actually done.
- I joined the police in 1981
and he was the suspect in a murder investigation.
There would be times when I can remember friends
and we were joking about something
and I said, "Maybe Lord Lucan's gonna appear in a minute."
- It has so many of the elements that make murder so very,
very interesting and the fact that it happened in
that incongruous setting of
that beautiful tall white House in Belgravia
and it's an unsolved mystery because Lord Lucan disappeared.
So it's one of the great stories.
- I've heard a lot of stories about Lord Lucan,
but I know very, very little about Veronica Lucan
and I didn't know Sandra Rivett's name until I came
to do this project, which is alarming, isn't it?
- This period of the 10 weeks when Sandra Rivett was nanny
to the Lucan children is an unknown really.
I believe she had a very good
relationship with the children.
There is no reason to disbelieve that she was happy there.
She brought a cat to the house as well actually.
So that was quite a sweet sort
of domestic thing to do if you like.
And it does seem like it was happy,
it does seem like it worked for all parties.
[gentle music]
- She always wanted to go back to Australia.
She talked about it a lot actually.
She'd spent a lot of her childhood there
and she just missed it terribly and she wanted to go back.
She missed the weather, she missed the life.
[dramatic music]
My name's Mary Mackenzie
and I went to school with Sandra when I lived in Caterham
my friends rang me up
and told me that Sandra had been murdered.
Well I was shocked, hard to believe really and sad
'cause she's got two boys.
Sad for her children.
They're more interested in him, weren't they?
Than they were her.
They seem to just put her as
an afterthought really I thought.
- [Reporter #2] The family's nanny killed in a murder
most horrid.
But the question on everyone's lips is
where is Lord Lucan?
Did he do it?
If not, why has he disappeared
and where could he be?
- There's an article in which it says it was an ugly real
life performance of upstairs, downstairs.
And they then say,
and she was firmly kept in her place downstairs
where she was slaughtered.
[dramatic music continues]
So it is leaning into the class narrative.
I mean by what parameters are individuals judged.
The Lucans were somebody
and in relation to them, Sandra, she was erased.
She was erased.
[peaceful music]
- Lord Lucan had a certain status in life
and it was that status
that protected him really.
And we might think that things have changed,
but if we look through history now,
we've got our cultural royalty now rather
than our actual aristocracy.
People like Oscar Pistorius who are in these elevated
and privileged positions and they killed partners.
And yet in those cases, even given what we know now,
we still focused on their narrative
using their charisma to excuse
and justify what they might have done.
So things haven't changed that much.
[peaceful music]
- I got a call from a junior officer,
like many officers in London
that night would've heard the gossip.
I think I'm right in saying I was probably the youngest
reporter on the staff of the Evening Standard.
I'd only just taken over on the crime desk.
It was a very different time in the 70s.
The police and the press, particularly in London,
were very much in each other's pockets.
There was also quite a lot of money passed
and changed hands between reporters and police officers.
In return for a good story, a return for a good tip.
As a young crime reporter, I asked a colleague,
"How do you get a policeman
"to accept money in return for a story?"
And I was told, "Well any copper in Britain will be happily
"accept a bottle of scotch."
And after a while you say, I found this new way
of putting a bottle of scotch in a brown paper envelope.
It's called cash.
And I found that little method of recruiting contacts
to be quite powerful
and in fact that was one of the ways I heard about
that night was someone that I had recently treated
to a paper envelope drink.
Looking back on it, it was wrong,
it was corrupt and I probably shouldn't be talking about it,
but it happened in every Fleet Street newspaper
and in every police station.
[bell tolls] [dramatic music]
- In terms of notifying police of the murder,
it was actually the landlord of the Plumber's Arms.
It was quite quiet that evening when Lady Lucan came
through the door covered in blood being hysterical
and almost fainting in front of them.
It would've been a difficult scene.
You know some people may have thought, is this a windup?
She initially said her nanny had been killed.
She said she'd been attacked by her husband.
At that point the publican decided the best thing they could
do was to try and calm her as best they could
and inform the police.
- I had a very good contact with Roy Ranson,
the senior investigating officer,
and I met him there that night at the scene.
It was already quite chaotic.
There was one or two policemen on the door.
The forensic scientist I think had arrived.
There was an ambulance,
there was people looking out windows at
what on earth was going on in the road outside.
It was a very posh part of Belgravia and a very posh road.
You didn't expect to see something like that.
As I was about to join some of my other colleagues
and photographers moving away down the street a little way,
I literally got the wink from Roy.
I slipped across to him and talked to him on that doorstep
and he said there was a body, that it wasn't Lady Lucan,
that Lady Lucan and had been hurt
and that he was really interested in finding out
where Lord Lucan was.
[bell tolls] [dramatic music]
- When you read the account provided by Roy Ranson
and others, it was obviously a lot
of officers had entered the premises,
which would not happen now,
the scene would have been contained very quickly,
but back in 1974 it was a different time, a different era
and things weren't necessarily dealt with
as you would've wanted them to at the time.
- Roy Ranson hadn't had any chance to talk to Lady Lucan.
As we were talking, we were gravitating together almost
to the top of the stairs
and I got one look down into the basement.
It had police lights down there.
There were police officers who were walking through the pool
of blood and tramping it up the stairs
and it was just general mayhem.
In the bottom of the stairs on the floor was the sack
and Sandra Rivett's body was in that sack
and she was doubled up.
She'd been put in head and feet first.
It was a very large American canvas mail sack,
and as far as I know, they have never been able to find
where that sack came from and why Lucan had it.
We know why he took it to the house.
It was to get rid of the body.
So the only thing you could see
of Sandra was very undignified.
She had tights and white pants on and that was it.
- The officers recovered a length of lead piping
and it had been wrapped with tape.
It was likely that that was the item that was used
to attack not only Sandra Rivett but also Lady Lucan.
We know that Lady Lucan's hair fibres were
found on that item.
One of the things to bear in mind is in this day
and age, if you had a a weapon like that recovered,
there would probably be that much more information
that could be gleaned that you were more than likely
to get DNA off of the weapon.
But back then what they would mainly be looking
for will be the fibres, blood and whether
or not there were any traces of fingerprints.
[dramatic music]
Roy Ranson was the chief superintendent at the time.
I tried to put myself in his shoes
and think, so what would I do next?
Well, we know that some of his staff were going
to be doing the initial work at the scene in terms
of exhibits, forensication, house to house inquiries.
He would've been thinking, how am I going to identify
how many suspects were involved in it?
- The person who attacked her attacked her brutally
and with an extreme amount of force,
the force was from a blunt weapon
and all of it was directed towards her head
and face, which means that they were determined
to do the most damage possible.
This was a rage-fueled attack
and it wasn't just one blow or a couple of blows.
This was a lot of blows to Sandra's head.
- The number one question
that next morning would've been, who died?
Who was murdered?
And where's Lord Lucan?
I can remember that being a very fierce topic of debate
where he could possibly be, where he might be hiding.
Had he done it?
Sandra's identity and details
such as they were would've come out the next day.
- The police knowledge of the victim in terms
of victimology was that she was the nanny
to the three children.
She had only been working at that address
for about three months.
She only started in August.
It would've become apparent that the relationship
between Lady Lucan and Sandra Rivett was healthy.
It was good.
- Sandra Rivett was almost certainly murdered in error.
The intended victim had been Lady Lucan.
This appalling set of circumstances
whereby Sandra, who should have been on her night off,
descended into the dark basement of this tall house
to make some tea
and in the dark was mistaken for Veronica Lucan.
- I think it's quite quickly forgotten
that while Sandra is the victim of this piece,
she's the young woman who lost her life,
inexplicably and horribly.
There is another victim and that's Veronica.
[sombre music]
- I have some sympathy with Lady Lucan
because I think she did have mentally challenging issues.
Lord Lucan wasn't a particularly caring husband to her
and I don't think that
after they got married he even liked her for long,
from everything that I've heard.
- Towards the end of 1972, Veronica turns to one
of Lord Lucan's relatives
and describes how she's been feeling
and she says she could no longer cope.
She describes how alone and unhappy she felt.
She spoke of her husband's mental cruelty
and she hinted at sexual and physical abuse.
- We have to bear in mind
that the accidental player in this narrative is Veronica.
She's the person who survived
and who later gave her testimony, wrote a book, et cetera.
So we have to treat what she says with caution,
but certainly she is very clear about aspects
of their marriage that are shocking to read about.
You know, the cane that was in his cupboard that he used
to beat sense into her,
beating out the nonsense before they had intercourse.
This happened more than once.
- There were accusations of abuse
and control
and stalking, which are the three classic,
classic risk-markers that we would expect to see
and I don't think I was surprised to see them,
but I was surprised that they were
actually pretty well known,
but nobody seemed to think they were particularly relevant.
[sombre music continues]
- Lord Lucan and starts telling people
that Veronica's behaving oddly, suggesting
that she's mad, making out that she's harmed herself
by throwing herself down the stairs.
He says all kinds of things that starts
to build a very negative picture of her with other people.
His motives for doing that feel very devaluing.
It's like, "I've had enough of this particular person
"and I want them gone out of my life
"and I will tell whatever story I need to get what I want."
- The press knew within a day
or two that some of the basic story
that Lord Lucan wasn't living at the family home,
that there had been disagreements
about the custody of the children.
There were several custody battles
and Roy showed me the details of the one that really sank
Lord Lucan in the end.
Veronica reveals that Lord Lucan had made her dress
in a rubber exercise suit so that she was hot
and sweaty when they went to bed together.
He had no clue that she'd ever used
that information in public.
So when Lord Lucan is sitting there in the custody hearing
and he has his aged mother, Caitlin, the Doja Countess
of Lucan at his side
and suddenly out of the blue Veronica starts revealing
the secrets of their bedroom sex games and his kinkiness.
He had been so embarrassed that he hadn't been able
to look at or talk to his mother for weeks afterwards.
He didn't expect that to ever come out.
I personally think
that was the moment when Lord Lucan decided she had to die.
- It's in the official record that he,
I say manipulated her in her words,
to go and get psychiatric treatment.
He told her that she was going crazy.
He told her that she needed drugs to keep her stable.
- Veronica Lucan must have been a lonely person
and Sandra must have filled a hole in her emotional
and you know, social life.
So they probably were getting on okay,
they were getting on well enough for the children
to really like her.
They told their dad that she was a very nice nanny
and that everything seemed to be going fine.
[gentle piano music]
- Sandra Elanor Hensby was born
on the 16th of September, 1945.
Her parents were Eunice and Albert
and she had three sisters, two older, one younger.
According to her school report, she was bright
but not academic.
She left school at age 14, which was not that unusual then.
And then went out to work, which is what women did
before they got married.
First she trained to be a hairdresser, but then she moved on
and became a secretary.
- Sandra lived in the flats near me,
we were all teenagers starting out on life
and enjoying meeting people
and looking forward to, well, deciding
what you're gonna do the rest of your life.
I took Sandra on one occasion
to a dance in the barracks next door to us
where the army was.
It was always very nice, danced
and met all the people there.
I was 20 when I met my husband,
I was at a dance at the barracks
and he got me to pull out the raffle tickets
and then he asked me out
and then we went out together for a while
and then we decided to get married and that was it.
- In 1963 when she was 17, 18,
Sandra had mental health issues
and she did spend a bit of time in a hospital.
That was after a very bad breakup,
which I suppose is possible.
You know girls are very susceptible at that age,
but that seems to have resolved itself.
But it was significant in another way
in that she met a guy there slightly older who was working
as a builder at the hospital
and they fell for each other, young love,
and when she was discharged,
they carried on seeing each other
and announced their engagement.
- Very soon after Sandra becomes pregnant
and she wants to get married to this guy
and he gets cold feet and starts to withdraw
and tells her, "You know what,
"I'm not gonna go ahead with this."
And this leaves Sandra heartbroken
and on top of that, she's also pregnant at a time
where single women pregnant,
unable to look for support,
would've left her in a very isolated
and tricky position.
[sombre music]
[laughs]
- Contraceptive options.
Really the only way
of not getting pregnant was to not have sex.
[sombre music]
- If girls had carried anything like condoms
in the 60s, they would've been classed as loose women.
It was a different world then you had to be more aware.
- The contraceptive pill is not legalised until 1961
and it's certainly not available to anyone initially.
Wait for it, you have to be married
and with one child to get the contraceptive pill
in the early 1960s.
- Abortion wasn't legal until 1967,
she was either gonna become a single mother
or she would do what a lot of young women did,
which was give the baby up for adoption
and that is what she prepared to do.
But then her parents stepped in
and said that they would bring him up
and the baby believed
that Sandra was his older sister, which was quite common.
So moving on three years, we are in 1967,
Sandra was having a relationship with a local estate agent
and he was married so it didn't have a lot of future,
unluckily got pregnant again.
So she went down to her older sister Theresa,
who lived in Portsmouth
and this time she didn't really have a lot of choice
but to give the baby up for adoption.
- That's quite standard to move away
when you're pregnant, you don't wanna be seen,
don't wanna bring the family's name down
and she gives birth when she's dating the man
who becomes her husband, Roger Rivett.
The baby, they don't keep, for whatever reason,
they decide they can't manage the child
who is subsequently given up for adoption.
- When I was researching the book,
I found the adoption letter for the baby.
I'm pleased to tell you we have a baby son for you.
- [Tessa] He was born on February the fourth
and weighs seven pounds, eight ounces.
- His mother is a single girl, age 21.
She already has one little boy
who at the moment is being cared for by her parents
and she feels she cannot possibly
bring the baby up properly herself.
- The baby's father is a man she's known
for quite a long time.
Unfortunately while his wife had a period in hospital,
she visited his home on a number of occasions
to help in the house.
Intercourse occurred and she became pregnant.
- She did not want to break his marriage,
so came away from the area.
God, that tells a tale, doesn't it?
[sombre music continues]
I think it's pretty sad, really.
She was very attractive
and it sounds like she was quite susceptible and she was 21.
It's not very old and it sounds like the bloke might have
thought his lucky day had come
when his wife was in hospital.
- Sandra had very few life choices when it came
to how she lived her life.
But at the same time, I get the sense
that Sandra was a very carefree,
energetic kind of human being.
So she was almost ahead of her time in the way
that she was living.
- Her sister Teresa subsequently says,
"My sister said she loved children
:but she wasn't cut out to have them."
Theresa is trying
to justify why her sister didn't bring up her own children,
but she doesn't need to
because we know in that decade, in the 60s
and the 70s, the majority of girls
who had children out of wedlock could not keep them.
We were the highest year
for adoption rates in Britain in the 60s.
1968,
24,000 babies adopted.
That is how many girls were trying their luck.
Didn't know how to say no, fell the wrong side of the gamble
and had a baby that was illegitimate.
[babies crying]
- She married Roger Rivett when she was 22.
They got married in a registry office in Croydon.
He was away at sea a lot of the time.
Apparently he got suspicious when she used
to write regularly and then the letters became a bit
less frequent.
- He's in the Navy.
I mean she's quite lonely I think when he's away,
but she's always working.
- In 1969, Roger came back to England.
I think the marriage probably got back on track.
Sandra was actually working at an orphanage.
She started as a cleaner,
but I think she got more involved
with working with the children.
But then we go to 1973
and Roger went back to sea again.
We had that pattern of letters becoming less frequent.
And then the final, the sort of climax
came in May of 1974.
They had a huge row and he left.
That was the end.
- We know that when the marriage breaks down,
she moves up to London.
[sombre music continues]
- She seemed to experience a new lease of life
after separating from Roger, she was going out,
she was engaging with friends, she was having a good time
and she puts her name down for domestic service.
She has one job that's fairly short-lived
and then her next job is with the Lucans.
[suspenseful music]
- That was sort of paralleled almost by the dislocation
and breakdown of Veronica's marriage
and I think that's one of the reasons why the girls,
the women hit it off.
And actually Veronica says herself, these were happy times.
They laughed a lot together.
- She was employed to be a nanny to the three children
of the Lucan marriage, Francis, George and Camilla.
The wage was 25 pounds a week,
which even in modern money isn't very much,
but of course she had accommodation.
She was living in a house in Belgravia,
a really very lovely house.
She hadn't even unpacked all her things when she died.
[tense music]
- Veronica was a fairly challenging employer,
but nonetheless Sandra knows how to please people,
it's one of the things that makes Sandra so appealing,
so attractive.
- She was one of a long procession of nannies.
There was one that only lasted four days.
There was one that lasted a bit longer.
There were 6, 7, 8, I don't know, it's not clear.
But anyway, she arrived
and it seems to have been a success.
- Both Sandra
and Veronica in their own lives had psychological struggles.
They'd had real challenges and difficulties
and they were trying
to find their way in their own lives
and this is the point at which they come together under
Veronica's roof and they make sense to one another.
- What's interesting is noting
how Sandra checked in on Veronica when she
wasn't working the weekends.
She picked up on her employer's vulnerability
and Veronica felt able to share
that vulnerability with Sandra.
There was a kinship.
There clearly was a feeling of mutual sympathy.
They understood each other's circumstances.
[bright music]
- Veronica Duncan as she was,
was born in 1937.
She had a younger sister, Christina
and her father was an army officer
who was killed when she was quite young.
He was killed in a car crash, but her mother married again
and they spent some of their childhood in South Africa.
- Her and her sister Christina are sent to boarding school
and I think this is incredibly difficult
for the very young Veronica.
Her and her sister are bullied for a number of reasons,
which makes life for Veronica incredibly difficult.
And I think her mother struggles with what to do,
sends Veronica to a psychiatrist
who labels her, a troubled child
and I think that's where some of her issues begin.
- The family left South Africa in 1949.
They came back and they lived quite near
where Sandra was born in Basingstoke.
The stepfather ran a pub called the Wheatsheaf.
I can remember one of the policemen talking
to me about Veronica
and he said, she always said,
"I am a Countess of the realm."
And he said she grew up in a pub,
but they were the daughters
of an army officer and what have you.
She was very status aware, Veronica, no question.
- Veronica got herself up to London.
She tried her hand at various jobs.
She wasn't a sticker.
She left art college.
She couldn't really bear the idea
of doing four years on a course.
Now that again doesn't surprise me.
Nobody had long-term really invested in her
or spent time with her.
She'd never lived or been settled in
one place for that long.
- By now, Veronica is 25
and very hard for us to understand.
But that was then getting to the point
of why aren't you married?
You know the shelf, the dreaded shelf,
I suppose the shelf was when you were 30,
but 25 is, you know, the shelf is visible.
One of the things that was said was
that Veronica had a complex about being very, very small.
She was, she was tiny.
She was like a China doll almost.
And she thought that being small was a sign of bad breeding.
- Veronica absolutely felt single.
She tells us later in her memoir, she admits,
she says herself, "I cannot stress the importance
"of getting married for my generation of women."
Of course, a situation for her, compounded
by the fact her younger sister,
she had a successful marriage into the Shand Kydd dynasty
and all the trappings of wealth
and prestige that came with it.
Poor old Veronica wasn't quite so lucky.
- Christina married Bill Shand Kydd
who was very connected, connections
to the late Princess of Wales, Diana.
A rich man,
but that put Veronica in an orbit if you like,
because she could visit Bill and Christina
and there would've been Bill's friends.
[tense music]
One of Bill Shand Kydd's friends was
the then John Bingham who would become Lord Lucan.
John Bingham was beyond her wildest dreams.
She would've thought he was a god.
He was regarded as extremely good looking.
I mean, he was asked to test for films and so on.
He was a catch, no question.
And possibly she may have thought a better catch
than Bill Shand Kydd, which I think she might have enjoyed.
- Lucan was considered as a possible James Bond.
I mean, he was a handsome man, he was very sporty.
He raced powerboats and he was really good at it.
When you look at it, if I was producing a James Bond movie
and I needed a character,
then a powerboat racing, handsome, bobsleigh skiing,
gambling aristocrat is a pretty good choice.
He would've been a good James Bond.
- It always reminds me a little bit
of when Diana met Prince Charles, you know,
and they seemed to understand each other
and he may have thought this sweet young girl will
be a nice docile wife.
And she seemed to understand him
and Lucan said to her, you know, "I'm a gambler.
I'm gonna, this is my way of life."
And she said to him, "Oh no, that's fine.
"That doesn't matter at all."
[gentle piano music]
- Lord Lucan operated in a clandestine world,
the Clermont Club, this is a gambling fraternity.
They're operating without the standard norms of society
and they are very much a boys club.
In an old school world where class, status, wealth
and title really meant something,
[gentle piano music continues]
- By the time that they are married, it becomes clear
that Lord Lucan's friends don't really think that much
of Veronica.
She's not one of their set.
And I think this message is reinforced when she goes
to the Clermont Club where she is made
to sit on the widow's bench
and he is at the centre gambling,
doing whatever he wants to do as the man's man.
[dramatic music]
- Lord Lucan was living in a quite a misogynistic time
in history.
He certainly thought he was superior to women.
He recognised that Veronica was actually
quite an intelligent, witty, quick woman,
and he said to her,
there can only be one captain of the ship.
That's like, "Whatever I say goes,
" it doesn't matter if you think you know better
"or even if you actually do know better.
"I'm the captain of this ship."
He started to undermine Veronica,
and one of the ways that he started
to undermine Veronica was to question her mental health,
her emotional stability.
And this was something that got a lot worse
and worse over time.
- The Lucans had three children.
Francis was born in 1964, George,
so the heir, was born in 1967
and Camilla was born in 1970
and there were questions of postnatal depression.
- Veronica was known to rock back
and forth from a very early age,
and she was seen doing this in the Clermont Club,
and I think that might have been a way
of self-soothing whatever she was experiencing,
and I think it's just one of those behaviours
that she found helpful without consciously being aware that
that's what she was doing.
It was something almost very primal to her.
- There were two incidents in 1972.
One was that the Lucans were at the Clermont Club
and Veronica threw a glass of wine in a woman's face,
which was like a thunderbolt.
People had been sort of more
and more saying, "Oh, she's a nightmare."
Which you can interpret as you wish,
but the fact is she did throw a glass
of wine in someone's face.
You might be sympathetic to her for doing it, but she did.
And then the second thing was that she sacked this nanny,
the long-term nanny,
and that seems to have been the last straw for Lucan.
[sombre music]
- The family was clearly in crisis.
He moves out of the marital home.
Clermont Club is sold, his gambling's out of control.
He's having to spend a lot of money claiming custody or
otherwise of his children.
Building up to the main custody battle.
She has to prove that she's mentally capable of looking
after those children, of being the primary parent.
So she checks herself into the priory and is assessed.
- She had a guy from the priory come
and say that she was completely cured.
As long as she kept taking the right drugs,
she was completely cured.
She won the hearing and all the things she'd said
about Lucan which were meant to be kept under wraps,
all came out.
You know all these things about his sexual deviancy
and his general violence,
general ghastliness, all this came out.
[sombre music continues]
- Veronica is told she has to have a nanny to help her look
after the children full time.
And this is hugely problematic.
- Sandra, she'd had quite a few predecessors
over the previous year or so.
- My name is Pierrete Goletto.
I am French by birth
and Italian by both my parents.
I live with the Lucan family for a long time
of I think over a year,
and I look after the three little children.
[gentle piano music]
In 1974, I saw an advert of
an agency looking for nannies.
I was told that the nanny before me lasted for a few days.
I have to go to a lawyer to be accepted.
The lawyer, and I remember his question,
"Will you stay if they have trouble in the family?"
I say, "I am here to protect the children,
"to take them away from it.
"That's all."
And then he said to me,
"Right, you got the job. You can start. Great."
I really loved the children.
Really, really.
Camilla was about two and a half.
George was about five.
Francis was the biggest one.
She was about seven.
We get up in the morning,
I bring the food up in the nursery, we eat up there.
We have a lot of fun.
We read the story, get ready, take
Francisca to the school, George would stay with me,
then I cook the supper.
This was seven days a week, but on Sunday it was fun
because we could go to the park.
[tense music]
- This isn't a standard nannying situation, bearing in mind
that it's not normal to be fighting the custody of children.
Divorce isn't commonplace in the early 1970s,
so the situation is unusual.
It's highly charged
and I would think challenging, emotionally challenging.
- I remember clearly my first meeting with Lady Lucan,
with Veronica.
I was lying on the floor, playing with the children.
She said to me, "Is this the way you do in France?"
I said, "This this the way the children like it."
And she just walk away.
The children didn't see their mother sometime for weeks,
and when I was seeing her dancing around the table
with a bottle of vodka,
I knew it wasn't the time to talk to her.
- What one did here repeatedly was
that Lucan was a very hands-on father,
unusually so for, you might say, the time,
the class, whatever,
he was a very affectionate father.
I remember speaking to a nanny of the children of one
of his friends and she said he was the only one
who came into the nursery.
[gentle music]
- He was living down the road.
I think it was Elizabeth Street if I remember rightly,
because sometime I was in the dining room downstairs
studying when he was coming at two o'clock,
three o'clock in the afternoon
before I go to pick up the children.
I could hear them arguing, arguing about money,
arguing about gambling, arguing about wasting money,
arguing about the children.
"I am going to prevent you to see George."
And that was the biggest threat Lord Lucan can have
because one thing is sure, he love his children.
Just outside Belgrave Street is a little kind of park
and I was going there and I know he was passing
and taking photos of the children.
- He did two things with the nannies.
He had them followed
and he also did his best to tape record their conversations.
So he had a private investigation company
that was working for him.
At times, they had two different operatives
who would follow the nannies when the children
left the house and follow Lady Lucan.
It was a concerted bit of espionage that was going on.
- The most startling behaviour for me
that I saw in this case was the stalking that happened
after they had separated
and it probably wouldn't have been called stalking back in
the 70s, but what he was doing was actually stalking.
He was parking up outside Veronica's house
and he would sit there for hour upon hour
staring at the house.
One of the nannies reported that there were 22
heavy breathing phone calls to the house in just one hour,
leaving either silent messages or heavy breathing.
[tense music]
Now that is to frighten somebody.
This man is actually wanting
to dominate Veronica's life.
"I'm still here. I'm not going anywhere."
- He would tape a call to Veronica
and he would start off talking reasonably to her,
and then he would slowly provoke her into losing her temper
on the telephone and starting to rant and rave at him.
And only when she was ranting
and raving, he would then turn on his tape recorder when he
realised that nothing was gonna work to get those kids back
other than removing Veronica from the scene,
he abandoned all the sort of the nanny shenanigans,
if you like, and just began concentrating on
how do you kill your wife and get away with it.
[suspenseful music]
- I think one marry the other one for money
and one marry the other one for a title.
Veronica was very, very attached of her title of the lady.
I don't think he has any sign of violence.
Lot of sadness, lot of hunger yes, but violence.
This wasn't a term that we used for him.
No.
And one thing is sure,
when he was telling hello to me, he was not telling hello,
like if I was a dog, he was looking at me.
He was looking and saying, good afternoon.
Thank you for looking after the children.
- Any behavioural issues that Veronica displayed.
The police theory was that they were Lucan's fault.
They said that Lord Lucan had been trying to send her mad
or convince her that she was mad.
She said to them, "He used to take me off to psychiatrists."
There was pretty strong evidence
that the children shouldn't be with her.
He had concerns about her as early as 1967
and he didn't even leave the marriage until 1973.
So that means he was playing a very long game,
which frankly he wasn't capable of.
And it's ridiculous.
He just wasn't that imaginative.
He just wasn't.
- There are conflicting descriptions of what Lord Lucan
was like as a person.
Some people describe him as very charming
and very charismatic and friendly and nice.
Other people say that that mask slipped quite a lot.
One of the things that we know about controlling people is
that they are very, very manipulative.
So they will learn as they go through life.
What works, what gives me the most control?
Most of this charm would've been used on people
who could be useful to him.
- His motivations to get rid
of Veronica were very, very strong.
Veronica was, in his eyes, ruining his life.
And it wasn't only that she had won custody of the children
in the most embarrassing way possible for him.
It was also that she was living in the Lucan Trust's
Belgravia mansion, while Lucan was living around the corner
in a little two bed flat
and she was spending money at Harrod's like it was water.
No court was going to let him sell their family home
so he couldn't access any of the money
that he had locked up there.
He was like many aristocrats.
He was asset rich and cash poor.
Divorcing her, which he almost certainly would've wanted
to do, would possibly have made the situation
even worse for him.
- I think it was about the end of September, I was told
by the lady from the Au Pair agency I wasn't needed anymore
and they needed somebody
English to replace me.
I have to go.
And then I did my, they were at school.
I put my thing and I went.
- Sandra was with an agency in Belgravia
and her next job was at 46 Lower Belgrave Street.
- I know almost nothing about Sandra.
I met Sandra once because I forgot some books
and I rung up to come to get them
and she opened the door.
She was not very big.
She looked like a pleasant lady.
I don't think she say a word to me.
She hold the book and I say, "Thank you very much."
She closed the door. Nothing else.
No contact.
I would've loved to ask how the children, no,
they were at school, the babies.
[gentle piano music]
- It was very hard to get a nanny, a good nanny in London
for a rate that wasn't too over the top
because we know Lucan had money issues and therefore
you get this extraordinary sort of revolving door
of carers and au pairs
and nannies that arrive in the family house,
some of whom leave, some of whom aren't appropriate,
some of whom don't cut the mustard,
some of whom Veronica doesn't get on with,
some of whom are only temporary anyway
until the agency can get the right nanny.
We know Francis, the older girl didn't really get on
with the nannies and can you blame her?
She had a different one every week virtually.
[soft music]
- I became a penthouse pet and a Bunny Girls,
and I love it.
I love the money I was making.
It was just glamorous.
I cannot remember the exact date,
but I know that I left weeks
before everything happened.
My boss said to me, "Have you read the last article?"
And I said, "No."
He said, "You worked with Lord Lucan, didn't you?"
And he gave me the paper and I read it.
And I just walk out and I walk in the street
and I said, "It could have been me."
And then I straightaway said, "No,
"that would not have happened if I did stay."
And from this minute, the guilt came.
First of all, I thought it was Veronica was killed,
and that really shocked me.
Then when I saw it was a mother of a young baby,
a young child, I felt guilty.
And this guilt is still here now,
50 years on this guilt is here.
It's all right.
I have to cope, I live with it.
[music box plays]
- I mean, when you think of the chain of events
and how they're affecting people's lives,
the idea that a judge saying there has
to be a nanny in situ all the time,
and Sandra happily, innocently
thinking, oh, what a great job.
It's awful really.
- When the police ask me question, I said to them,
"I feel guilty.
"No way they would ever murdered me."
I never heard from the children again.
My guilt was so great at the time.
I felt that the children could have been killed as well.
[gentle piano music]
- Sandra appeared happy at her place of work,
and she told her mother that.
She'd ring her mother every evening.
She would ring her boyfriend and say how happy she was.
They probably felt very secure
and safe within the environment at that address at the time.
Unfortunately, that was to then to become a significant
and horrendous murder scene.
Less than half an hour after they were watching a television
and she'd gone downstairs, Sandra would've been killed.
- On the night it happened with Lady Lucan
taken off to hospital, desperately injured.
She had massive wounds to her scalp.
Sandra Rivett dead in the basement.
The children were completely alone in the house
with this horrible scene happening downstairs.
Lucan himself tried to get some help for them.
He telephoned his mother
and said, could you go to the house?
I believe that the only person in the room with
the Dowager Countess of Lucan was a police woman.
The police woman realised Lucan was on the phone
and then just did nothing, just sat there and listened.
- Lord Lucans mother asked Lord Lucan whether
or not he wanted to speak to the officer.
And his response was, "No, tell the officer I will speak
"to her tomorrow."
And for me, that was where part
of the investigation was going to be hindered.
You can't have your possible suspect on the opposite end
of the phone who says, "I'll ring you tomorrow."
Your natural instinct would be, "Give me that phone.
"Hello, mate, you need to wind your neck in
"and we need to talk."
That's just policing.
I don't think of any police officer who would go,
"Yeah, I agree with that."
I don't understand why the officer didn't do it, I'm sorry.
- I think the details of how Sandra died
and the details of how Lady Lucan was hurt
didn't really come out in any great detail
until the inquest into Sandra's death,
which was some considerable time later.
The whole attention of the police
and the press was supposed
to be the worldwide hunt for Lord Lucan.
- I wish to interview him
and I'd like to interview him as soon as possible.
And if any person is helping him
or assisting him, we'd like them to
or have any knowledge of his whereabouts.
We'd like them to let us know.
- After Lady Lucan ran off
to the pub screaming and shouting,
and Lucan realised that he had to get away.
He into his car, the car that he had hoped to carry,
Lady Lucan's body away in, and he fled the scene.
And the only indication of
what he did then comes from the late Susan Maxwell Scott,
who days later reported
that he had turned up at her house on
the night of the killing.
- He looked a bit dishevelled,
may have had a bit of blood on him.
He asked if he could get a pen and paper,
and he wanted to write a couple of letters.
He then left.
- One of the letters, went to Bill Shand Kydd,
his brother-in-law.
Bill was a very, very close friend of his.
- No, I obviously can't divulge the contents of the letter.
All I can say is that it confirmed the story,
which he had told his mother
that there had been an intruder in the house.
Apart from that, I can't divulge any of the contents.
- I think he used the phrase, it's been a night
of unbelievable coincidences.
And he set the scene for what is his version,
his alibi for what happened that night,
or rather his defence for what happened that night.
- And he saw the intruder? - Yes.
He disturbed the intruder.
- What sort of a man was he?
- Generous man. A very gentle man.
Very much a family man.
He's really devoted to his children.
They are the most important thing in his life.
- When I interrupted the fight at Lower Belgrave Street
and the man left, Veronica accused me of having hired him,
I took her upstairs and sent Francis up to bed
and tried to clean her up.
She laid Doggo for a bit,
and when I was in the bathroom, left the house.
The circumstantial evidence against me is strong in
that V will say it was all my doing.
I will also lie Doggo for a bit,
but I'm also concerned for the children.
If you can manage it, I want them to live with you.
- To use the term, the circumstantial evidence against
me is strong.
It doesn't sit right with me.
It doesn't feel like the thing a normal person would say.
- He said to Bill Shand Kydd that he was going to run away
and lie doggo for a while.
That phrase has haunted me for 50 years
because lying doggo for a while is not I'm gonna go
and kill myself.
It's I'm gonna go
and hide under the bed clothes until somebody finds me.
And it's just, he's been hiding very well
for five decades.
- On the 9th of November, police had received information
that the Ford Corsair, that Michael Stoop had loaned
to Lord Lucan had been found in Newhaven.
The individuals who came across the vehicle said it had been
parked between five and 8:00 AM that day.
The vehicle was subsequently found by the officers locked,
which would imply that whoever was in it
may have intended to come back to the vehicle.
- The natural suggestion would be
that he then got on the Newhaven to Dieppe Ferry
and escaped to France.
But the reality is
that the police questioned just every passenger they could
find who had made that crossing on the day after the murder.
And they could find nobody among the passengers
or crew who saw
or remembered a six foot tall former guards officer
with a very big bushy moustache
and talking in a very plummy, aristocratic accent.
He wasn't somebody you could mistake in a crowd.
I think the police believed
that the car was left at Newhaven as a red herring.
Nobody would know apart from Susan Maxwell Scott.
And and her evidence was just never forthcoming.
- I would think that the probability is that he is alive,
but I have no knowledge, no foundation for that.
It's just a feeling. I think he's alive.
- I don't think there's anybody, certainly in London
that didn't know about this case.
It would've been front page, back page news, everything.
But that sometimes can work against you
because you're gonna get lots
of sightings coming from all over the world.
They were coming from Australia,
they were coming from Europe, certainly in the UK.
So that would've made it even more difficult.
- In the days and weeks after the murder,
the media generally were full of stories
of this worldwide hunt for the missing Lord Lucan,
it was a great headline.
The truth of the matter is that Roy Ranson,
the detective in charge of the case,
never went on a worldwide hunt
because he had no evidence of where Lucan might be.
- 14 years ago when I was in the Met, I believe
that they would've identified where Lord Lucan was
and he would've been arrested within days
or even weeks at the maximum
because there's so much stuff now that we have to do
that the moment you have your phone in your pocket,
it's pinging away on
where you are from the moment he left the scene from the
moment he ended up out in Newhaven,
all that information would be downloaded
and would have all that information in a matter
of 72 hours max.
So Roy Ranson
and his team were hamstrung by the lack
of technology
and all of those things
that an SIO now has to bring to bear.
If you're lucky in this day and age,
you could have solved that within 72 hours.
And if you're not, maybe in a couple of weeks.
[tense music]
- The most plausible thing I think,
and supported by the evidence, is that Lord Lucan
was absolutely enraged
that he had no control over Veronica.
He wanted custody of his children, basically.
He wanted to win and he was losing.
He went through an escalation period.
He started to fantasise about how he was gonna win.
He was gonna win by killing her.
He planned to kill her.
He went round there to execute the plan.
He killed the wrong woman.
A typical intimate partner homicide that went wrong.
- I think the murder was very premeditated.
There were a number of indications that it was premeditated.
The week before it happened,
he had custody of the children for a weekend or an evening,
and he talked to them about their new nanny, Sandra,
and they told him all about Sandra
and what a nice girl she was.
So he said, "I suppose your nanny has a boyfriend?"
And the oldest, Lucan girl said, "She's got a boyfriend."
and giggled.
And I think said, "We saw her kissing him."
and Lucan then said, "Does the boyfriend take Sandra out?"
And the children said, "Oh yes,
"she goes out every Thursday night
"because that's her day off."
It was the very next Thursday night that Lucan
turned up in the house with his intent to kill.
So it was certainly premeditated to the point where he knew
that the nanny would be out of the house
and Lady Lucan would be alone
and he was most likely to be able to kill his wife.
- It was common knowledge
that Sandra normally had the Thursday night off.
But on this occasion, she decided
that she wanted to change it.
We know before the attack she'd spoken to her boyfriend,
they talked about meeting up the next day.
[dramatic music]
- The murder happened on the evening
of the 7th of November, 1974.
As ever with this, there are very few hard facts.
We don't even know what time it happened
because there are conflicting reports.
While Veronica, two of her children
and Sandra were all upstairs in the main bedroom,
Veronica's bedroom, they were all on the bed together
watching the $6 million man.
And on the floor above was Francis, the elder child
who was watching top of the pops.
At some point between
25 to nine and five to nine,
Sandra Rivett went down into the basement to make tea.
There was a light bulb had been removed,
so she was in the dark.
She went down those stairs
and at the bottom of the stairs was attacked.
[dramatic music crescendos]
- I think maybe after the first two or three blows.
And she may have screamed.
He may have thought this is not her,
but he could not have stopped then.
He couldn't say, "Oh, sorry, wrong person."
So he had to kill her.
- Sandra collapses in a pool of blood and Lord Lucan
scoops up the body
and puts it into the big sack that he's come prepared with.
Now, it is entirely possible
that he doesn't know he's killed Sandra.
He thinks he's killed Lady Lucan.
And so he goes off to wash off the blood,
leaving the body in the sack.
All he can see of the body is her rocked up skirt
and underwear, which could well have been his wife's.
So he goes upstairs to
where there is a light in the ground floor, cloak room,
and that's where he starts to wash the blood off.
And it's at that point that he hears a noise outside
and he throws open the door, and there's his wife.
The woman who he firmly believed at
that stage was downstairs dead in a sack.
[water Trickling] [tense music]
He's totally shocked by this.
And he attacks Lady Lucan viciously.
I mean, he's got this lead pipe in his hand
and he's still swinging his pipe at her.
He hits her across the head several times.
She wouldn't have had the slightest chance
or knowledge of what was happening to her.
- It is so hard to know what was actually going
through his head at that point.
But what I would theorise is that he sounded
blood hot angry.
And after that, there might have been a moment
where he went, "Oh God, what have I done?"
- Upstairs, he's in a narrow corridor.
He's facing Lady Lucan.
And although he hits her without enough force
to knock her out, she's a wiry, feisty young woman.
And she's fighting for her life.
She scratches him, they're wrestling together.
And in the end, she reaches down
and she grabs hold of his testicles and squeezes
and twists as hard as she can.
And Lucan collapses to the floor with her.
They slide down the walls together.
And Lady Lucan is so clever.
She says, "What are you doing, John?
"What on earth are you doing?"
And he mumbles incoherently.
And she says, "Where's Sandra?
"Where's my nanny?"
And he says, "I think I've killed, I've killed your nanny."
- They went upstairs to the bedroom
and he rang out a towel to clean her up a bit.
We know he was there because Francis, his daughter, saw him.
But when he was in the bathroom
cleaning up the towel and everything,
Veronica ran down the stairs, ran out the house,
ran up the street to the The Plumber's Arms pub,
and burst into the bar.
This was 10 to 10
and said, "Help, help my husband's murdered my nanny."
And from that point, it became a police matter.
They descended on the house.
[sombre music]
- Lady Lucan attended the inquest,
and her role was to give an account of
what happened to her in terms of the attack,
which resulted in her receiving those injuries.
The problem in this case is that at the time,
the law did not allow her
to talk about her husband's attack on Sandra Rivett
because at that time a spouse couldn't give
evidence against the other.
So all that Lady Lucan could talk about
was the attack on her.
She couldn't, in any way, give evidence about
what Lord Lucan said when she managed to calm him down
and he actually confessed that he had killed Sandra.
She could not give that evidence.
But that law has subsequently changed
where a spouse can give evidence against the other spouse in
relation to any offence
that they may have committed against them.
- At the inquest, which was June, 1975,
Sandra became more striking to my mind, really,
because you can understand the initial flurry around Lucan
and the excitement.
This very unlikely murderer.
Sandra's family were there
and her father, Albert said to the press, you know this,
"This is all meant to be about my daughter."
And her Aunt Vera said the same thing,
but more, she was stronger.
"My niece is caught in the crossfire between the Lucans
"and it's all about the Lucans."
Veronica had had a tough time as well,
but Sandra's family is where the sympathy should be going.
- It's just the dad
and the aunt sitting at the back quietly.
And what they reflect on is
why wasn't this about Sandra?
Why was she completely ignored?
And that is devastating
because within that you can hear the frustration,
the pain, and I reckon the rage of
"How dare you ignore my child, my niece,
"the victim of this story as if she doesn't matter."
- I saw the crime scene photographs
and she had taken blows
to her head, which were clearly unsurvivable.
I am no medical expert.
But you could not have survived the beating
that Lord Lucan gave her.
At the inquest, the main source of interest was not
how Sandra died.
It was where was Lord Lucan
and what was the jury going to say in their final verdict?
Because the inquest turned into the trial of Lord Lucan.
Sandra was virtually forgotten.
- And so it became a bit of a circus to some degree.
[tense music]
The media were there.
People turned up in their fine regalia.
You had Lady Lucan
who was still suffering from her injuries.
She had a hat that she wore every day to hide them.
- Lord Lucan had hit her over the head three times
with the metal bar with which he'd killed Sandra.
And she had vertical gashes running down her scalp like
this deep bone revealing gashes.
And she was still scarred
and her hair was completely wrecked by this.
So she was in the habit
of wearing tight turban hats each day.
Lady Lucan's hat attire
became a sort of a fashion item in the papers.
- Nine times out of 10 when you have a inquest
and a coroner obviously involved, nobody knows about it.
But this one was like everyday news
and public could have attended.
It was a circus and I don't think that that necessarily
allowed Sandra's family to find some closure.
The postmortem in relation to Sandra Rivett basically showed
that she had received, at least is it nine blows
to the head and face.
There was significant blunt trauma
and ultimately she died as a result of those blows
as well as asphyxiation from her own blood.
- It's what we call overkill.
So this was gratuitous in a way.
It was more violence than was necessary just to cause death.
Plausibly, he probably thought
that it was Veronica that he was attacking.
She was the one he felt all this rage towards,
that rage was pent up.
And because it was such gratuitous violence,
this killer is not only
and simply performing a homicide,
they're getting some emotional kind
of benefit from this as well.
- The coroner's conclusion,
and this was quite rare, he basically said
that Lord Lucan was responsible for Sandra Rivett's murder
and that is something that was unheard of.
And it created a bit of a backlash
because the whole point of the inquest was
to establish the circumstances surrounding someone's death.
Was it an accident? Was it deliberate?
But the coroner in this case went beyond that
and actually indicated that Lord Lucan was the person
who had murdered Sandra Rivett.
[sombre music]
- What's interesting is because
of the fanciful nature in the way this story was written up,
the press behaved in a way
that I think disrespected the death of Sandra Rivett.
There was a case of the newspaper report offering a case
of champagne to a reader who came up
with the most inventive
or fanciful end for Lord Lucan I.E, where is he now?
Give this horror story an end
and we will give you a crate of champagne.
So they're turning it really into a drama
and it had become, yeah, a fairy story,
a horror fairy story, a grim fairy story.
- The Fleet Street reporters
and I speak as someone who was proudly one
for many reasons,
are a pretty unfeeling
and pretty nasty pack of people.
A lot of my former colleagues are now snarling at me.
But it's true.
If you are dealing with a constant stream of nastiness,
one of the ways of dealing with that is to laugh it off
and make gallows jokes about it.
So I can't deny that the death
of Sandra Rivett would not have been greeted by
the Fleet Street Crime reporting pack with great sympathy
and sorrow.
That's not to say that on a personal level,
I, or many of my then colleagues
would not have had every sympathy for her
because she was just so unlucky.
But when you are in that situation now,
50 years ago, the intense competition
of Fleet Street, and I'm talking really intense.
You were going through a time in the 70s when she died,
when both the police and the press
were not at their finest,
their morals were distinctly un-fine.
It's regrettable, but it was how it was
and it wasn't driven by anyone's malice,
it was driven by a need as reporters and media
and editors would've seen it at the time by a need to
inform and keep circulation.
I mean, you know, it was a very competitive era.
- I think the police investigation was pretty terrible.
There was quite a lot of insinuation about
how she had a lot of boyfriends.
- She clearly liked having a boyfriend.
Is that a crime to like having a boyfriend?
I mean, it's a confusing world, the 60s
and 70s where women have to have a man,
but they have to have a man according
to the very narrow social expectations of the day
and the way Sandra did it outside of wedlock or divorced.
Wow.
And a slight overlap.
I mean, how many men have had an overlap?
Does one really deserve to be murdered
for having a very slight emotional overlap
in your heterosexual relations?
I think not, Great Britain.
- What really makes me sad about Sandra is
that if she'd been born 20, even 10 years later,
I think her life would've been completely different.
Sandra's sort of acknowledged boyfriend was Australian,
he was called John Hankins
and she'd met him in the Plumber's Arms Pub.
They seemed to have been quite serious
because it was reported
that she had asked Roger Rivett for a divorce
'cause they never actually got divorced.
And he said, "Okay, I'll divorce you."
But he never heard from her again.
Presumably that was
because she was getting serious with John Hankins.
- Veronica states on record several times,
including during the inquiry.
She never had a problem with Sandra.
Sandra had relations with men,
but she did not bring those men home.
They did not affect her work.
It's irrelevant, it's totally irrelevant.
- She had a really attractive sort of
conventionally attractive appearance
and obviously that's appealing to the press.
There was a certain amount about her boyfriends.
There was a certain amount about her broken marriage
and I think that
I'm afraid is par for the course.
Sadly, I'm not sure how much that's changed.
- I don't believe that there were any preconceived views
by the officers at the time.
I tried to put myself in their position.
The officers would've turned up to a horrendous scene.
They would've established at a pretty early point the nature
of the injuries that she received, that she was a nanny,
her having a boyfriend or boyfriends.
I don't think that was necessarily anything
that would've been then thinking
that had anything to do with it.
I genuinely think that those officers were steadfast in
their desire to establish the facts.
So I don't believe that that had any bearing whatsoever on
the mindset of those officers at that time.
- I think she'd have had a great time now.
For somebody like her who didn't settle,
which, you know it's not a crime
and she wouldn't have had to be a nanny in
that weird household, let's face it,
she'd be alive almost certainly.
[sombre music]
[dramatic music]
- After nearly 50 years,
my understanding is that this is still a cold case
for the Metropolitan Police Service.
This case would've been very frustrating
for those officers involved because initially,
and this is no disrespect to my colleagues,
they may have assumed that this was an open and shut case.
Everything pointed to Lord Lucan.
The problem for them is they were never ever able to speak
to him because he disappeared
and has never been seen for 50 years.
- There are all these unanswered questions,
but it may be that they're just unanswered questions
for YouTubers and podcasters.
And the fact is we still know who did it.
If I had to put forward a theory, I'd probably say Lucan
employed a hitman and that's why they got the wrong woman
and attacked Veronica in a panic.
But even that doesn't fit all the facts.
- We all have our views
and thoughts as to what may have happened to Lord Lucan.
From my perspective, there's nothing to suggest
that he committed suicide.
For me, it would suggest that
after the event somebody helped him
to possibly leave the country at some point in time.
It didn't have to be in the first 48, 72 hours.
It could be a week, two weeks after
and has probably been able to look after him
and support him over the years.
That is my own personal view.
I know other people may probably disagree,
but it seems too convenient for someone to have disappeared
after such a significant incident
and not be found for 50 years without having some help.
- I still don't believe Lord Lucan did it.
No way.
I don't see him hurting a fly.
I never allow myself to judge her.
They were both lost creatures in this world of madness.
[gentle music]
- The trouble with this story is so many hangers on
after the event were just saying the most unbelievable.
I still hear things from people who say, "Oh,
"Veronica did this."
or "Do you know Lucan was fed to a bunch of tigers?"
And it's all, it's a story
that breeds a lot of real nonsense.
- I've heard the stories
of Aspinall feeding Lucan into the tigers.
I would've believed it more if he'd fed him to pigs
'cause pigs will eat anything.
It's never really rung true with me.
Aspinall wasn't a close friend of his.
He didn't particularly like Lucan,
but Lucan was very useful to him
because he was seen
as an aristocratic playing member at the club,
an attraction to others to go to Aspinall's clubs.
I can think of no reason on earth that he would've gone
to the trouble of trying to feed, you know,
Lucan to the tigers.
What happened to him?
I don't believe he's dead.
He may by now have died of natural causes.
He will be 90 very soon.
But his father lived to a decent age.
So if you accept that he ran away that night and escaped,
then he may well still be out there.
But the family
and friends of his have tried very hard through the years
to suggest that he took the honourable course
and killed himself.
But I've never believed that for one moment,
it's very hard to kill yourself and hide your own body.
[suspenseful music]
- Veronica had a really tough time after all this.
She got these head wounds.
She was in hospital.
She sort of seemed to cut herself off.
Her life did start to sort of fall apart really.
She did in fact lose her children at the end of it all.
- [Interviewer] Are you going to start proceedings
to get your husband declared legally dead?
- No, I'm not. - Why not?
- Because I don't think he is.
- [Interviewer] Would it not make a difference to your life
if you did?
As far as the last seven years have shown me,
it would make absolutely no difference
to my life whatsoever.
Apart from doing something which I don't
really believe to be true.
- [Interviewer] Do you think you'll see him again?
- I always hope 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.
- How has life changed for you?
What do you do from day to day?
- It's changed to one day is like another.
It's like being isolated.
It's worse than being in prison
because I haven't got any prison inmates with me to talk to.
I'm in solitary confinement
and I feel hostility from those that I knew before.
- She lived in the muse house behind Lower Belgrave Street.
And then she would occasionally say, "I still adore John."
As she called him, Lucan.
She kept his portrait.
She's very complicated, Veronica.
She deliberately went on television near the end
of her life and just to reassert her version of events,
[gentle music]
she was brilliant, absolutely brilliant
'cause I think it did worry her that people said,
you know, some of this evidence is a bit conflicting.
She did have friends, but she seemed still to be
very, I don't know if she was obsessed with Lucan,
but I think the idea of having married him,
I think that still pleased her.
I saw her near Buckingham Palace not that long
before she died actually.
And she looked very, you know, she was immaculate
like older ladies in the 1970s really.
She died in 2017.
It seems a very difficult life.
- Veronica said towards the end of her life,
her biggest fear was becoming dependent on others
and that she supported assisted suicide.
And I don't think it's any real surprise
that she was subsequently found dead in her own home.
And it was presumed that she had indeed taken her own life.
There is something really very pitiful
about the whole episode.
- She was quite a feisty lady who was able
to stick up for herself.
I met her many years after this all happened.
I went to her house and I spoke to her
and she invited me in knowing I was a journalist
or knowing as I was then an author.
I wanted to write a book about it.
So I introduced myself.
She invited me into a little tiny living room that she had
and she actually brought out tea
and we had a cup of tea together.
And she was pleasant and helpful
and she tried to paint Lord Lucan in quite a good light.
She wasn't desperately nasty about him at all.
And I went back the very next day, banged on the same door
and she opened the door and threw a cup of urine in over me
and started literally in the middle
of the street screaming I was gutter press
and I should F off.
And I told that story to Bill Shand Kydd,
who'd raised her children and knew her very well indeed.
And he said, "Oh, that was typical Veronica."
- I think what was very touching
and really in some ways typical of what we've got to know
of Veronica, that she was able to recognise that the tragedy
of their marriage and the discord in that marriage led
to the loss of Sandra Rivett's life
and how sorry she was about that.
And that there was nothing she could do about that,
but that she would never forget her or it.
And that really speaks to Veronica's humanity, her empathy,
and also to a sisterhood, if you like, almost,
with a fellow woman who hadn't had an easy path
and who'd got caught up in a psychodrama
that was really of none of her doing.
[gentle piano music]
- Sandra's sister described her in the newspapers.
She said she was fun-loving.
She was, you know, up for a laugh.
She was sociable, she was kind, thoughtful.
Just all the things that make you
think she was actually a lovely young woman.
And it it just very, very poignant tribute to her.
- John actually,
her last boyfriend said she was a really good girl.
He actually was deeply one of the most touching bits
of the case, but never gets heard.
She was a lovely lass.
She might have had a rather lovely future
after a bit of a questionable start in life.
Poor girl.
- John Hankins talked to the papers quite a lot
after it all happened.
He gave the impression that they might have gone
to Australia, they might have had a happy life together.
- She was a lovely girl, lovely nature.
And it's sad really 'cause she didn't deserve that,
didn't have a bad bone in her at all.
[bright music]
- I think it's so often the case when we report
or record crime, the victim gets overlooked
time and time again.
And when we refer to the case of Lord Lucan,
can we please put before his name,
the name of the victim of the murder.
She was called Sandra Rivett,
and she lost her life on
that night in a basement in London in 1974.
The innocent victim of the case.
[bright music]
[bright music continues]
[bright music ends]