The gloved hand clamped over her mouth just as the blows landed. Veronica knew the voice that hissed, “Shut up. ” It was her husband, Lord Lucan, the man she’d been married to for eleven years. He had come to kill her.
But it wasn’t her he’d found first. It was the nanny, Sandra Rivett. Sandra had taken a night off to be with her boyfriend, trading her usual Thursday off, so she was there when she shouldn’t have been. She had gone to the basement kitchen to make tea, and 20 minutes later, when she didn’t return, Veronica went to check on her.
As she stood at the top of the basement stairs, she was struck from behind. She fell, screaming, and then the hand was over her mouth. When she struggled free, she saw him, holding a lead pipe wrapped in bandages. He told her she was supposed to be the one.
He had killed Sandra, mistaking her for his wife. It didn’t take long for anyone who knew them to understand why. Lord Lucan—John Bingham, the 7th Earl—was an aristocrat with a gambling addiction, a violent temper, and a desperate obsession. He was bleeding money, about to lose a brutal custody fight, and had told anyone who would listen that killing his wife would solve all his problems.
He’d told his friend Greville Howard that if he dumped Veronica in water, he’d never get caught. It all started much more simply. John Bingham was born in London in 1934, the son of the 6th Earl. He was handsome, charming, and wildly entitled.
He attended college, where he spent most of his time sneaking off to the racetracks, gambling with an income he kept secret in his own bank account. After graduation, he did his national service with the elite Coldstream Guards, just like his father, then took a job at a London bank. It paid 500 pounds a year, pocket change on top of the 12,000 he collected from family trusts. He was rich enough to buy whatever he wanted when he befriended Stephen Raphael, a wealthy stockbroker who introduced him to a life of water skiing in the Bahamas, golf, and late nights at the Clermont Club Casino.
It became his home away from home, a playground of high-stakes backgammon, heavy drinking, and powerful friends. Even Ian Fleming, the author of James Bond, once suggested him for the role of 007, though Lucan passed on the screen test. He married Veronica Duncan in 1963, just months after they met. It was a quiet, low-key ceremony, and the honeymoon was a first-class trip across Europe on the Orient Express, paid for by his father.
Two months later, the 6th Earl died of a stroke, and John inherited the title, the money, and the responsibility. He received 250,000 pounds. He used it to continue his routine. Every day was the same: breakfast with the newspaper, a walk in the park, lunch at the Clermont, an afternoon of backgammon, then home to change into black tie so he could gamble into the early hours.
Veronica, meanwhile, was desperately isolated. He didn’t speak to her before the wedding, and he spoke to her even less after. She was depressed, alone, and formed an attachment to one of his friends, Greville Howard. Lucan warned Howard off before anything happened, and Veronica was crushed by what she saw as a rejection.
She sank deeper into depression. Lucan tried to have her committed to a psychiatric clinic, but she refused. She agreed to take antidepressants instead. But being medicated didn’t stop the abuse.
She would later claim he hit her with a cane, promising to beat “these mad ideas” out of her. Their marriage deteriorated into a battle for the children. In 1972, Veronica left a family holiday early. After a strained Christmas, Lucan called a doctor to ask if his wife was mentally fit to be alone with the kids.
He moved into a nearby apartment, though his Mercedes was frequently parked outside their home. He visited often, but his obsession was winning custody. He tried to get doctors to declare Veronica unfit. When none would, he started recording their phone calls, goading her into arguments to use as evidence of her instability.
He told everyone she couldn’t keep a nanny because of her erratic behavior, but the truth was probably the other way around. One nanny later said Veronica was terrified of him and had warned that he might kill her one day. Lucan finally got a court order for temporary custody. He confronted the nanny while she was out with the children, drove off with them in his car, and took the kids.
But he wasn’t satisfied with winning. He wanted to destroy Veronica completely. He canceled her grocery orders, delayed payments to the milkman and child-care agency, anything to sabotage her. He hired private detectives to spy on her and did it himself.
He befriended one nanny, plied her with drinks to get her to speak badly of Veronica, then fired her. Another nanny reported a series of strange, wrong-number phone calls, always from the same man. By late 1974, he was spiraling. The custody case had cost him 20,000 pounds, and he was nearly bankrupt.
He borrowed money from friends and family, but more worrying were his statements. He openly discussed how murdering his wife would solve everything. He told his close friend and his mother that it would save him from bankruptcy. To Greville Howard, he suggested that if he dumped her in a body of water, he would never get caught.
In the days before the attack, someone described Lucan as unusually chipper. He was a man who normally slept until noon, but on the morning of November 7th, he was up early, making plans to meet friends. He missed all his appointments except one with a literary agent. That night, everything came to a head.
Veronica and her daughter Frances were watching television in a bedroom on the second floor. Sandra had put the other children to bed, then offered to make Veronica a cup of tea. She went down to the basement kitchen where the lights were off. And that’s where Lucan waited, in the dark, with a lead pipe wrapped in bandages.
He attacked her, mistaking her for his wife, and killed her. He had unscrewed the light bulb to make sure no one could see him. When Veronica came downstairs looking for Sandra, he struck her. She fought back, bit his fingers, grabbed his groin.
He weakened and fell back, and she saw the weapon. “I’ve killed her,” he said. “She came down first. If it had been you, you would have got it.
”
Terrified, Veronica played along. She offered to help him escape after she tended to her wounds. They went upstairs, and he sent Frances to her room. He put towels on the bed and asked if she had any sleeping pills.
He went to the bathroom to wet a towel for her injured head. That’s when she ran. She ran out the front door and went straight to the Plumbers Arms, the local pub. She burst through the doors and collapsed on the floor.
The police arrived quickly, took her to the hospital, and forced their way into the home to check on the children. In the basement, they found Sandra’s body in a canvas mail bag. They found the lead pipe and a light bulb that had been unscrewed to ensure the crime would happen in darkness. Frances told the officers she had seen blood on her mother’s face as her parents sent her to bed.
Then she heard her father call for her mother and watched him leave the house. A neighbor who knew Lucan well reported her doorbell ringing at 10:30 p. m. She hung up on a caller she believed to be him.
He called his mother, too, telling her there had been a terrible catastrophe at Veronica’s house, and claiming he had interrupted an assailant. At 11:00 p. m. , a disheveled Lucan showed up at the home of his friend Susan Maxwell-Scott.
He told her he had been walking past Veronica’s home when he saw a man attacking her through the basement window. He said he intervened and slipped in a pool of blood. When the lead detective later asked Susan why she never reported the incident, she said she didn’t think it was important. Investigators searched Lucan’s apartment.
His suit lay neatly on his bed, next to a book about Greek shipping millionaires. His wallet, car keys, driver’s license, and glasses were on the bedside table, with his passport in the drawer. His Mercedes was still in the driveway. But the car he had actually borrowed, a Ford Corsair, was found abandoned three days later in New Haven.
Inside, there was another bandaged lead pipe and a full bottle of vodka in the trunk. The inquest into Sandra’s death was a total circus. Veronica took the stand and was baited by the Queen’s Counsel for Lucan into admitting her hatred for her husband. The jury’s conclusion was clear: Lord Lucan had murdered Sandra Rivett.
His defenders called it a sham, but the evidence stacked against him. He had left no fingerprints, though Veronica said he wore gloves. He had the same type of wrapped lead pipe in his car. The blood evidence contradicted his story entirely.
Lucan was never found. Detectives initially suspected he had taken his own life, but later changed their minds. Some believed he had fled to South Africa to live near his brother. Another former detective reported a reliable witness had seen him there in the early 1980s.
The courts officially declared him dead in 2016, and his son George inherited the title. But the story doesn’t end there. In 2008, Neil Berryman learned that he was Sandra Rivett’s biological son. Since then, finding Lucan has become his life’s obsession.
In 2020, his own investigations led him to a pensioner living in a Buddhist commune in Brisbane, an 87-year-old man who would be exactly Lucan’s age. The man denied being the Earl. Authorities ruled him out. But then, Berryman found a professor who used facial recognition software to compare the man’s photos to Lucan’s.
The AI algorithm ran 4,000 cross-checks, and the professor said the match wasn’t based on opinion but on mathematical fact. For now, the identity of that man remains a secret. The courts may have declared Lucan dead, but for one son, the search isn’t over.
There is surely more of this story to come.
