He was a wealthy English aristocrat who disappeared after the family nanny was found brutally murdered.
In this episode, we look at the life and disappearance of the famous gambler and socialite, Lord Lucan.
[00:00:00] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are talking about a scandalous tale of expensive tastes, fast cars, gambling, and a high-flying British aristocrat’s involvement in one of Britain’s most infamous unsolved murders.
[00:00:36] This is the story of Lord Lucan, the British peer and gambling addict who disappeared after his nanny was found brutally murdered.
[00:00:46] It’s a case and, crucially, a disappearance, that still fascinates people to this very day, and has led to countless theories and supposed sightings all over the world.
[00:00:58] OK then, let’s get into it and talk about Lord Lucan - the British aristocrat suspected of murder who disappeared, never to be seen again.
[00:01:12] It was a quiet evening on the 7th of November, 1974.
[00:01:17] London’s Belgravia neighbourhood, one of the city’s most exclusive, was calm and quiet, the rows of whitewashed terrace houses lit up by lights of activity.
[00:01:29] Suddenly, the air was filled with frantic breathing and the pitter-patter of footsteps.
[00:01:35] On Lower Belgrave Street, a woman sprinted past, a look of panic across her face.
[00:01:42] She was barefoot and covered in blood.
[00:01:45] Searching desperately for help, the first place she saw was a pub, the Plumbers Arms.
[00:01:52] She burst into the bar.
[00:01:55] “Help me, help me,” she cried. “I have just escaped from a murderer. He’s in my house. He murdered the nanny.”
[00:02:03] As the barman tried to calm the woman down, the punters, the people drinking in the bar, turned in shock at what they were seeing.
[00:02:12] This poor woman, they thought.
[00:02:15] But little did they know that they had just witnessed the first step, the first clue, in one of the most infamous unsolved murder cases in British history.
[00:02:27] This woman was no ordinary punter, no ordinary lady. She was Lady Lucan, the wife of one of the country’s most flamboyant aristocrats.
[00:02:40] But before we get into the events of that fateful night, we should first consider a bit of background.
[00:02:47] Lord Lucan was born Richard John Bingham on the 18th of December, 1934, in London, to the English-Irish peer George Bingham, the 6th Earl of Lucan, and Kaitlin Elizabeth Anne Dawson.
[00:03:02] A peer, by the way, is someone in Britain with an official title, such as duke, marquess, earl, viscount or baron.
[00:03:11] Though peers can be appointed by the government, often these titles are hereditary - they are passed down from father to son, passed down through the family.
[00:03:22] They are, essentially, status symbols among the British aristocracy.
[00:03:27] And this young Lord Lucan, although he wasn’t actually a Lord or a Lucan until his father died, this young man enjoyed a very privileged childhood.
[00:03:38] For the ease of the story, by the way, I will refer to him as ”Lord” Lucan or simply Lucan throughout this episode, so as to avoid using two names to describe the same one man.
[00:03:51] During the Second World War, Lucan and his siblings were evacuated, moved to safety, first to Wales and then to the United States where they stayed with a multi-millionairess and continued their lives of luxury.
[00:04:05] When they eventually returned to England, however, the young Lord Lucan had a bit of a shock at the state of post-war England and bomb-ridden London.
[00:04:16] But for a young man like Lucan, he lived in a completely different world.
[00:04:22] He went to school at the prestigious Eton College, where he mingled with other society high-fliers and developed a taste for, a interest in, a vice that would remain with him for the rest of his life: gambling.
[00:04:38] As a young man, he was known to be charming, tall, and handsome, with a rather impressive moustache. What’s more, he was very very wealthy.
[00:04:49] He lived a life of total luxury, and enjoyed the ‘finer things in life’, we might say - fast cars, speedboats, the best wines and Russian vodkas, which were still pretty exotic at the time.
[00:05:03] Or as The New York Times put it, Lucan was - and I'm quoting directly - a "dashing British aristocrat… known for his prowess at backgammon and bridge and his fondness for vodka martinis, powerboats, and Aston Martin cars."
[00:05:20] In fact, Lucan was such a slick character that it's believed he almost played the role of James Bond. He looked a bit like James Bond, and it certainly didn’t hurt that he was also a close friend of Ian Fleming, the author of the books.
[00:05:37] He was also in the army briefly, serving in West Germany, where he began playing poker and further developed the unhealthy gambling habit he had picked up at Eton.
[00:05:48] Perhaps unsurprisingly, given his love for gambling, he would then begin a career in banking in 1954, when he was 20 years old.
[00:05:58] And although he was on a very healthy salary, and would have been a multi-millionaire by today’s standards, Lucan increasingly gambled in his free time, playing lots of backgammon and poker in particular.
[00:06:12] But he had a bit of a sudden career change in 1960, after a huge win playing baccarat, a type of card game.
[00:06:22] Lucan reportedly won £26,000 in just two days, and though that might not sound like an astronomical amount, especially to someone who already came from such privilege, it’s worth almost a million Euros in today’s money.
[00:06:39] Certainly not bad for two days of work, and it was enough for Lord Lucan to quit his job in the bank and focus on his passion, or perhaps his addiction: gambling.
[00:06:52] He became a full-time gambler and was known as ‘Lucky Lucan’ in the elite gambling circles, but he quickly transformed into what has been described as a ‘compulsive gambler’, spending most of his time at the Clermont Club, an exclusive gentlemen’s club in Mayfair.
[00:07:12] Gambling, to put it bluntly, became his entire life, although he would forever be chasing a win as large as the one that convinced him to quit his day job.
[00:07:22] A few years later, in November of 1963, just before his 30th birthday, the eligible bachelor married a lady called Veronica Duncan in a ceremony that was attended by minor members of the Royal Family.
[00:07:37] But it wasn’t exactly a natural match.
[00:07:42] Their honeymoon, which was a trip to Istanbul on the exclusive Orient Express, ended ahead of schedule because, according to Lady Lucan, “there seemed little to talk about and I longed to go home”.
[00:07:55] “John,” she said, meaning Lord Lucan, “he was lost in thought and seemed a little bored.”
[00:08:02] It was certainly an ominous start.
[00:08:06] A couple of months later, in January of 1964, Lucan’s father died and he formally inherited the title “Lord” Lucan, and along with it around a quarter of a million pounds, which would be around five million Euros in today’s money.
[00:08:24] But the money went out as fast as it came in, and he was losing vast amounts at the card table.
[00:08:32] On one occasion, he reportedly lost £8,000, almost €150,000 in today’s money, and this was in a single evening.
[00:08:45] A short while later, Lord Lucan, Lady Lucan, and their three children, Frances, George and Camilla, they moved into a new house, 46 Lower Belgrave Street, which, conveniently for Lucan, was only a short walk from the Clermont Club.
[00:09:01] By this stage, his gambling habit was well-known and accepted, and Lady Lucan has described her role as one of “a gambler’s wife” and of needing to, and I’m quoting directly, “help him get out of a backgammon game when he was winning.”
[00:09:20] In other words, it was her job to try to make sure he quit while he was ahead and not lose too much money.
[00:09:28] Now, it’s important to note here that although Lord Lucan might have had, on the surface, an enviable life, everything a man could ever want, behind closed doors, in private, things weren’t quite so rosy, they weren’t going quite so well.
[00:09:46] Lucky Lucan, as it turned out, wasn’t quite so lucky after all, and was amassing enormous gambling debts.
[00:09:55] That £8,000 loss in a single night wasn’t a one-off, and as he lost more and more he was forced to begin borrowing money from friends and family.
[00:10:07] Key to understanding this story, this murder, and this disappearance, however, is the role of Lady Lucan and their deteriorating marriage.
[00:10:17] His wife, Lady Lucan, had given birth to three children in six years, from 1964 to 1970, and had suffered from severe postnatal depression.
[00:10:30] Her husband was little help.
[00:10:32] He fell deeper and deeper into gambling debts, spending more and more time at his club and drinking more and more, he failed to understand what was happening to his wife or support her, and the marriage began to fall apart.
[00:10:48] A few years later, by 1973, the marriage had collapsed and Lord Lucan had moved out of Lower Belgrave Street and into a flat on Elizabeth Street, just around the corner, and importantly, still a short distance from the Clermont Club.
[00:11:05] Lady Lucan was in a fragile mental state, and was being treated with various antidepressants. As a result, to help out around the house and care for the children the following summer she hired a nanny, a 29-year-old lady named Sandra Rivett.
[00:11:25] But that's when things start to get a little nasty, little unpleasant.
[00:11:32] When his wife was given custody of the children, Lord Lucan was outraged and his behaviour became obsessive and threatening.
[00:11:41] He hired private detectives to spy on his soon-to-be ex-wife, hoping that they’d uncover some damaging evidence about her mental instability so that he could win back custody of his children.
[00:11:54] His car was regularly seen outside the Lower Belgrave Street home, and friends of Lord Lucan even claimed that he said he was planning to kill her.
[00:12:05] And he thought he would get away with it, because of who he was and his social status.
[00:12:12] So, what actually happened?
[00:12:14] And what has the nanny, Sandra Rivett, got to do with all this?
[00:12:19] Well, it's all a little murky, a little unclear, but here is what is believed to have happened.
[00:12:26] Facing growing gambling debts, drinking more and more and having lost custody of his children, it's thought that on the night of November 7th, 1974, Lord Lucan broke into his former home on Lower Belgrave Street.
[00:12:43] At the house were the children, the nanny, Sandra Rivett, and Lady Lucan.
[00:12:49] Some time around 9pm, after the children had been put to bed, Sandra Rivett, the nanny, offered to make a cup of tea for Lady Lucan, and went down into the building’s dimly lit basement.
[00:13:04] Lord Lucan, so the theory goes, then sprung out from the shadows and beat the woman to death with a piece of lead piping.
[00:13:15] Back upstairs, and wondering why her cup of tea was taking so long, Lady Lucan eventually went downstairs and stumbled upon the bloody scene.
[00:13:27] And as you heard at the start of the episode, Lucan then allegedly attacked his wife before she managed to escape to the Plumber’s Arms pub down the road.
[00:13:38] It's generally accepted, believed, that Lucan had been expecting his estranged wife to come downstairs, not the nanny, and that she had been the intended victim.
[00:13:50] He had been planning to kill Lady Lucan, dispose of her body and take back the children and house.
[00:13:58] Now, based on what we know of Lucan’s mental state at the time, and their deteriorating marriage, this certainly seems like a plausible theory.
[00:14:08] So, what happened? What did Lord Lucan have to say about this? Did he deny it, what was his defence?
[00:14:17] Well, he said nothing.
[00:14:19] As you might have guessed from the title of this episode, Lord Lucan disappeared and was never seen again, resulting in one of the biggest murder mysteries in modern British history.
[00:14:33] We do know something of his movements immediately after the murder, however.
[00:14:38] It's thought that he drove 70 kilometres to a friend's house in a village in Sussex, close to London, but only stayed for a few hours and left in the early hours of the morning.
[00:14:52] His story, his cover, according to friends, was that he had walked in on his wife being attacked by another mystery man and that he was now hiding because his wife had accused him of hiring a hitman, a contract killer.
[00:15:09] But after that, we know very little.
[00:15:12] Three days later, on November the 10th, his bloodstained car was found abandoned – with a piece of lead piping in the boot – at the port in Newhaven, near Brighton, on the south coast of England.
[00:15:27] After that, nobody to this very day knows what happened to Lord Lucan.
[00:15:34] Well, nobody publicly knows anything about it.
[00:15:38] And, as you might imagine, this has led to a whole host of theories about what happened to him, where he went, and whether he is, in fact, still alive.
[00:15:50] In fact, over the years there have been countless - as many as 70, according to some sources - supposed ‘sightings’ of Lucan around the world in places as far-flung as Australia, India, France, and Mozambique.
[00:16:07] Although in 1999 he was declared ‘legally dead’ and a death certificate was officially issued in 2016, his body has never been found, so nobody can say for sure whether he’s dead or alive.
[00:16:24] The first supposed sighting came in January of 1975, in Melbourne, Australia, and he was also allegedly seen in northwest France in the year or so after the murder.
[00:16:37] People also claimed to have seen him in Mozambique and Zimbabwe, and there was even a theory that he was living in India as a beach hippy called "Jungle Barry.”
[00:16:49] Some of the other whacky theories include that Lord Lucan was held to ransom by the Irish Republican Army and, incredibly, that he had shot himself and his remains were fed to the tigers in an English zoo immediately after the murder.
[00:17:07] And there’s more.
[00:17:08] Police have investigated fingerprints on beer glasses in South Africa, and tracked money moving to bank accounts in Latin America.
[00:17:16] People have claimed to see Lucan at an ex-Nazi colony in Paraguay, living in a car in New Zealand, and even working as a waiter in California.
[00:17:27] And the mystery of Lord Lucan continues to this very day, almost 50 years after the murder.
[00:17:34] In 2022, a facial recognition specialist claimed that a photo of an elderly man living in Australia is an exact match for Lord Lucan.
[00:17:45] Could he have escaped and been living in Australia all these years?
[00:17:50] Using artificial intelligence to cross-reference photos of Lord Lucan with this old man in Australia, the specialist concluded that, and I’m quoting directly, “they produced a match. This isn’t an opinion, it’s science and mathematical fact”.
[00:18:08] Some say, however, that the most likely scenario is that he took a ferry from Newhaven just days after the murder, jumped off the boat, committing suicide, and his body was lost at sea, forever consigned to Davy Jones’ Locker, as a sailor might say.
[00:18:27] The only truth of this murder mystery, of this ‘whodunnit’, as we say in England, is that nobody knows for sure what happened to Lord Lucan.
[00:18:36] It was a real-life murder mystery, a real life game of Cluedo, complete with “lead piping”, one of the murder weapons used in the game of Cluedo.
[00:18:46] As a quick reminder, or if you didn't know, Cluedo is a popular board game where players try to solve a murder mystery by guessing the character, murder weapon and room where the crime occurred. And in fact, the parallels between the real-life case of Lord Lucan and the game of Cluedo aren’t limited to the discovery of the lead piping.
[00:19:09] Incredibly, in what seems like fiction but was in fact real life, in 2022 it was reported that investigators didn’t only find the lead piping in Lucan’s car in Newhaven.
[00:19:22] According to the British press, investigators also found cards from the game of Cluedo in the car.
[00:19:31] And it gets weirder.
[00:19:33] Which cards did they find?
[00:19:35] Colonel Mustard, a lead pipe, and the hall.
[00:19:40] And why is this particularly strange?
[00:19:44] Colonel Mustard is a dashing military character with a large moustache, not too dissimilar to Lord Lucan’s own; his weapon was exactly the same; and the ‘hall’ location is the closest to the cellar in the game.
[00:20:00] In a further twist, police revealed that these three cards were also found to be missing from Lucan’s own Cluedo set.
[00:20:10] So, what does this all mean?
[00:20:12] Was it Lord Lucan taunting, or mocking, the police before making his escape?
[00:20:18] Was he framed by someone else? Or was someone trying to play a “funny” trick?
[00:20:25] It seems quite clear that the murder was committed by this man, by Lucan, and an innocent young life was taken. If he wasn’t the killer, then his disappearance is most suspicious.
[00:20:39] But as to what happened next, and to the question of what actually happened to Lord Lucan, well unless something drastically changes, then this is a mystery that will most likely forever remain unsolved.
[00:20:56] Ok then, that is it for today’s episode on the disappearance of Lord Lucan.
[00:21:01] I hope it was an interesting one, and whether you knew the story before, or this was the first time you’d ever heard anything about Lord Lucan and this murder mystery, well I hope you learned something new.
[00:21:13] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:21:16] Had you heard about Lord Lucan before?
[00:21:18] What do you think really happened that night in Lower Belgrave Street?
[00:21:22] And where do you think he went?
[00:21:24] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:21:28] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:21:36] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:21:41] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
[00:00:00] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are talking about a scandalous tale of expensive tastes, fast cars, gambling, and a high-flying British aristocrat’s involvement in one of Britain’s most infamous unsolved murders.
[00:00:36] This is the story of Lord Lucan, the British peer and gambling addict who disappeared after his nanny was found brutally murdered.
[00:00:46] It’s a case and, crucially, a disappearance, that still fascinates people to this very day, and has led to countless theories and supposed sightings all over the world.
[00:00:58] OK then, let’s get into it and talk about Lord Lucan - the British aristocrat suspected of murder who disappeared, never to be seen again.
[00:01:12] It was a quiet evening on the 7th of November, 1974.
[00:01:17] London’s Belgravia neighbourhood, one of the city’s most exclusive, was calm and quiet, the rows of whitewashed terrace houses lit up by lights of activity.
[00:01:29] Suddenly, the air was filled with frantic breathing and the pitter-patter of footsteps.
[00:01:35] On Lower Belgrave Street, a woman sprinted past, a look of panic across her face.
[00:01:42] She was barefoot and covered in blood.
[00:01:45] Searching desperately for help, the first place she saw was a pub, the Plumbers Arms.
[00:01:52] She burst into the bar.
[00:01:55] “Help me, help me,” she cried. “I have just escaped from a murderer. He’s in my house. He murdered the nanny.”
[00:02:03] As the barman tried to calm the woman down, the punters, the people drinking in the bar, turned in shock at what they were seeing.
[00:02:12] This poor woman, they thought.
[00:02:15] But little did they know that they had just witnessed the first step, the first clue, in one of the most infamous unsolved murder cases in British history.
[00:02:27] This woman was no ordinary punter, no ordinary lady. She was Lady Lucan, the wife of one of the country’s most flamboyant aristocrats.
[00:02:40] But before we get into the events of that fateful night, we should first consider a bit of background.
[00:02:47] Lord Lucan was born Richard John Bingham on the 18th of December, 1934, in London, to the English-Irish peer George Bingham, the 6th Earl of Lucan, and Kaitlin Elizabeth Anne Dawson.
[00:03:02] A peer, by the way, is someone in Britain with an official title, such as duke, marquess, earl, viscount or baron.
[00:03:11] Though peers can be appointed by the government, often these titles are hereditary - they are passed down from father to son, passed down through the family.
[00:03:22] They are, essentially, status symbols among the British aristocracy.
[00:03:27] And this young Lord Lucan, although he wasn’t actually a Lord or a Lucan until his father died, this young man enjoyed a very privileged childhood.
[00:03:38] For the ease of the story, by the way, I will refer to him as ”Lord” Lucan or simply Lucan throughout this episode, so as to avoid using two names to describe the same one man.
[00:03:51] During the Second World War, Lucan and his siblings were evacuated, moved to safety, first to Wales and then to the United States where they stayed with a multi-millionairess and continued their lives of luxury.
[00:04:05] When they eventually returned to England, however, the young Lord Lucan had a bit of a shock at the state of post-war England and bomb-ridden London.
[00:04:16] But for a young man like Lucan, he lived in a completely different world.
[00:04:22] He went to school at the prestigious Eton College, where he mingled with other society high-fliers and developed a taste for, a interest in, a vice that would remain with him for the rest of his life: gambling.
[00:04:38] As a young man, he was known to be charming, tall, and handsome, with a rather impressive moustache. What’s more, he was very very wealthy.
[00:04:49] He lived a life of total luxury, and enjoyed the ‘finer things in life’, we might say - fast cars, speedboats, the best wines and Russian vodkas, which were still pretty exotic at the time.
[00:05:03] Or as The New York Times put it, Lucan was - and I'm quoting directly - a "dashing British aristocrat… known for his prowess at backgammon and bridge and his fondness for vodka martinis, powerboats, and Aston Martin cars."
[00:05:20] In fact, Lucan was such a slick character that it's believed he almost played the role of James Bond. He looked a bit like James Bond, and it certainly didn’t hurt that he was also a close friend of Ian Fleming, the author of the books.
[00:05:37] He was also in the army briefly, serving in West Germany, where he began playing poker and further developed the unhealthy gambling habit he had picked up at Eton.
[00:05:48] Perhaps unsurprisingly, given his love for gambling, he would then begin a career in banking in 1954, when he was 20 years old.
[00:05:58] And although he was on a very healthy salary, and would have been a multi-millionaire by today’s standards, Lucan increasingly gambled in his free time, playing lots of backgammon and poker in particular.
[00:06:12] But he had a bit of a sudden career change in 1960, after a huge win playing baccarat, a type of card game.
[00:06:22] Lucan reportedly won £26,000 in just two days, and though that might not sound like an astronomical amount, especially to someone who already came from such privilege, it’s worth almost a million Euros in today’s money.
[00:06:39] Certainly not bad for two days of work, and it was enough for Lord Lucan to quit his job in the bank and focus on his passion, or perhaps his addiction: gambling.
[00:06:52] He became a full-time gambler and was known as ‘Lucky Lucan’ in the elite gambling circles, but he quickly transformed into what has been described as a ‘compulsive gambler’, spending most of his time at the Clermont Club, an exclusive gentlemen’s club in Mayfair.
[00:07:12] Gambling, to put it bluntly, became his entire life, although he would forever be chasing a win as large as the one that convinced him to quit his day job.
[00:07:22] A few years later, in November of 1963, just before his 30th birthday, the eligible bachelor married a lady called Veronica Duncan in a ceremony that was attended by minor members of the Royal Family.
[00:07:37] But it wasn’t exactly a natural match.
[00:07:42] Their honeymoon, which was a trip to Istanbul on the exclusive Orient Express, ended ahead of schedule because, according to Lady Lucan, “there seemed little to talk about and I longed to go home”.
[00:07:55] “John,” she said, meaning Lord Lucan, “he was lost in thought and seemed a little bored.”
[00:08:02] It was certainly an ominous start.
[00:08:06] A couple of months later, in January of 1964, Lucan’s father died and he formally inherited the title “Lord” Lucan, and along with it around a quarter of a million pounds, which would be around five million Euros in today’s money.
[00:08:24] But the money went out as fast as it came in, and he was losing vast amounts at the card table.
[00:08:32] On one occasion, he reportedly lost £8,000, almost €150,000 in today’s money, and this was in a single evening.
[00:08:45] A short while later, Lord Lucan, Lady Lucan, and their three children, Frances, George and Camilla, they moved into a new house, 46 Lower Belgrave Street, which, conveniently for Lucan, was only a short walk from the Clermont Club.
[00:09:01] By this stage, his gambling habit was well-known and accepted, and Lady Lucan has described her role as one of “a gambler’s wife” and of needing to, and I’m quoting directly, “help him get out of a backgammon game when he was winning.”
[00:09:20] In other words, it was her job to try to make sure he quit while he was ahead and not lose too much money.
[00:09:28] Now, it’s important to note here that although Lord Lucan might have had, on the surface, an enviable life, everything a man could ever want, behind closed doors, in private, things weren’t quite so rosy, they weren’t going quite so well.
[00:09:46] Lucky Lucan, as it turned out, wasn’t quite so lucky after all, and was amassing enormous gambling debts.
[00:09:55] That £8,000 loss in a single night wasn’t a one-off, and as he lost more and more he was forced to begin borrowing money from friends and family.
[00:10:07] Key to understanding this story, this murder, and this disappearance, however, is the role of Lady Lucan and their deteriorating marriage.
[00:10:17] His wife, Lady Lucan, had given birth to three children in six years, from 1964 to 1970, and had suffered from severe postnatal depression.
[00:10:30] Her husband was little help.
[00:10:32] He fell deeper and deeper into gambling debts, spending more and more time at his club and drinking more and more, he failed to understand what was happening to his wife or support her, and the marriage began to fall apart.
[00:10:48] A few years later, by 1973, the marriage had collapsed and Lord Lucan had moved out of Lower Belgrave Street and into a flat on Elizabeth Street, just around the corner, and importantly, still a short distance from the Clermont Club.
[00:11:05] Lady Lucan was in a fragile mental state, and was being treated with various antidepressants. As a result, to help out around the house and care for the children the following summer she hired a nanny, a 29-year-old lady named Sandra Rivett.
[00:11:25] But that's when things start to get a little nasty, little unpleasant.
[00:11:32] When his wife was given custody of the children, Lord Lucan was outraged and his behaviour became obsessive and threatening.
[00:11:41] He hired private detectives to spy on his soon-to-be ex-wife, hoping that they’d uncover some damaging evidence about her mental instability so that he could win back custody of his children.
[00:11:54] His car was regularly seen outside the Lower Belgrave Street home, and friends of Lord Lucan even claimed that he said he was planning to kill her.
[00:12:05] And he thought he would get away with it, because of who he was and his social status.
[00:12:12] So, what actually happened?
[00:12:14] And what has the nanny, Sandra Rivett, got to do with all this?
[00:12:19] Well, it's all a little murky, a little unclear, but here is what is believed to have happened.
[00:12:26] Facing growing gambling debts, drinking more and more and having lost custody of his children, it's thought that on the night of November 7th, 1974, Lord Lucan broke into his former home on Lower Belgrave Street.
[00:12:43] At the house were the children, the nanny, Sandra Rivett, and Lady Lucan.
[00:12:49] Some time around 9pm, after the children had been put to bed, Sandra Rivett, the nanny, offered to make a cup of tea for Lady Lucan, and went down into the building’s dimly lit basement.
[00:13:04] Lord Lucan, so the theory goes, then sprung out from the shadows and beat the woman to death with a piece of lead piping.
[00:13:15] Back upstairs, and wondering why her cup of tea was taking so long, Lady Lucan eventually went downstairs and stumbled upon the bloody scene.
[00:13:27] And as you heard at the start of the episode, Lucan then allegedly attacked his wife before she managed to escape to the Plumber’s Arms pub down the road.
[00:13:38] It's generally accepted, believed, that Lucan had been expecting his estranged wife to come downstairs, not the nanny, and that she had been the intended victim.
[00:13:50] He had been planning to kill Lady Lucan, dispose of her body and take back the children and house.
[00:13:58] Now, based on what we know of Lucan’s mental state at the time, and their deteriorating marriage, this certainly seems like a plausible theory.
[00:14:08] So, what happened? What did Lord Lucan have to say about this? Did he deny it, what was his defence?
[00:14:17] Well, he said nothing.
[00:14:19] As you might have guessed from the title of this episode, Lord Lucan disappeared and was never seen again, resulting in one of the biggest murder mysteries in modern British history.
[00:14:33] We do know something of his movements immediately after the murder, however.
[00:14:38] It's thought that he drove 70 kilometres to a friend's house in a village in Sussex, close to London, but only stayed for a few hours and left in the early hours of the morning.
[00:14:52] His story, his cover, according to friends, was that he had walked in on his wife being attacked by another mystery man and that he was now hiding because his wife had accused him of hiring a hitman, a contract killer.
[00:15:09] But after that, we know very little.
[00:15:12] Three days later, on November the 10th, his bloodstained car was found abandoned – with a piece of lead piping in the boot – at the port in Newhaven, near Brighton, on the south coast of England.
[00:15:27] After that, nobody to this very day knows what happened to Lord Lucan.
[00:15:34] Well, nobody publicly knows anything about it.
[00:15:38] And, as you might imagine, this has led to a whole host of theories about what happened to him, where he went, and whether he is, in fact, still alive.
[00:15:50] In fact, over the years there have been countless - as many as 70, according to some sources - supposed ‘sightings’ of Lucan around the world in places as far-flung as Australia, India, France, and Mozambique.
[00:16:07] Although in 1999 he was declared ‘legally dead’ and a death certificate was officially issued in 2016, his body has never been found, so nobody can say for sure whether he’s dead or alive.
[00:16:24] The first supposed sighting came in January of 1975, in Melbourne, Australia, and he was also allegedly seen in northwest France in the year or so after the murder.
[00:16:37] People also claimed to have seen him in Mozambique and Zimbabwe, and there was even a theory that he was living in India as a beach hippy called "Jungle Barry.”
[00:16:49] Some of the other whacky theories include that Lord Lucan was held to ransom by the Irish Republican Army and, incredibly, that he had shot himself and his remains were fed to the tigers in an English zoo immediately after the murder.
[00:17:07] And there’s more.
[00:17:08] Police have investigated fingerprints on beer glasses in South Africa, and tracked money moving to bank accounts in Latin America.
[00:17:16] People have claimed to see Lucan at an ex-Nazi colony in Paraguay, living in a car in New Zealand, and even working as a waiter in California.
[00:17:27] And the mystery of Lord Lucan continues to this very day, almost 50 years after the murder.
[00:17:34] In 2022, a facial recognition specialist claimed that a photo of an elderly man living in Australia is an exact match for Lord Lucan.
[00:17:45] Could he have escaped and been living in Australia all these years?
[00:17:50] Using artificial intelligence to cross-reference photos of Lord Lucan with this old man in Australia, the specialist concluded that, and I’m quoting directly, “they produced a match. This isn’t an opinion, it’s science and mathematical fact”.
[00:18:08] Some say, however, that the most likely scenario is that he took a ferry from Newhaven just days after the murder, jumped off the boat, committing suicide, and his body was lost at sea, forever consigned to Davy Jones’ Locker, as a sailor might say.
[00:18:27] The only truth of this murder mystery, of this ‘whodunnit’, as we say in England, is that nobody knows for sure what happened to Lord Lucan.
[00:18:36] It was a real-life murder mystery, a real life game of Cluedo, complete with “lead piping”, one of the murder weapons used in the game of Cluedo.
[00:18:46] As a quick reminder, or if you didn't know, Cluedo is a popular board game where players try to solve a murder mystery by guessing the character, murder weapon and room where the crime occurred. And in fact, the parallels between the real-life case of Lord Lucan and the game of Cluedo aren’t limited to the discovery of the lead piping.
[00:19:09] Incredibly, in what seems like fiction but was in fact real life, in 2022 it was reported that investigators didn’t only find the lead piping in Lucan’s car in Newhaven.
[00:19:22] According to the British press, investigators also found cards from the game of Cluedo in the car.
[00:19:31] And it gets weirder.
[00:19:33] Which cards did they find?
[00:19:35] Colonel Mustard, a lead pipe, and the hall.
[00:19:40] And why is this particularly strange?
[00:19:44] Colonel Mustard is a dashing military character with a large moustache, not too dissimilar to Lord Lucan’s own; his weapon was exactly the same; and the ‘hall’ location is the closest to the cellar in the game.
[00:20:00] In a further twist, police revealed that these three cards were also found to be missing from Lucan’s own Cluedo set.
[00:20:10] So, what does this all mean?
[00:20:12] Was it Lord Lucan taunting, or mocking, the police before making his escape?
[00:20:18] Was he framed by someone else? Or was someone trying to play a “funny” trick?
[00:20:25] It seems quite clear that the murder was committed by this man, by Lucan, and an innocent young life was taken. If he wasn’t the killer, then his disappearance is most suspicious.
[00:20:39] But as to what happened next, and to the question of what actually happened to Lord Lucan, well unless something drastically changes, then this is a mystery that will most likely forever remain unsolved.
[00:20:56] Ok then, that is it for today’s episode on the disappearance of Lord Lucan.
[00:21:01] I hope it was an interesting one, and whether you knew the story before, or this was the first time you’d ever heard anything about Lord Lucan and this murder mystery, well I hope you learned something new.
[00:21:13] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:21:16] Had you heard about Lord Lucan before?
[00:21:18] What do you think really happened that night in Lower Belgrave Street?
[00:21:22] And where do you think he went?
[00:21:24] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:21:28] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:21:36] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:21:41] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
[00:00:00] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are talking about a scandalous tale of expensive tastes, fast cars, gambling, and a high-flying British aristocrat’s involvement in one of Britain’s most infamous unsolved murders.
[00:00:36] This is the story of Lord Lucan, the British peer and gambling addict who disappeared after his nanny was found brutally murdered.
[00:00:46] It’s a case and, crucially, a disappearance, that still fascinates people to this very day, and has led to countless theories and supposed sightings all over the world.
[00:00:58] OK then, let’s get into it and talk about Lord Lucan - the British aristocrat suspected of murder who disappeared, never to be seen again.
[00:01:12] It was a quiet evening on the 7th of November, 1974.
[00:01:17] London’s Belgravia neighbourhood, one of the city’s most exclusive, was calm and quiet, the rows of whitewashed terrace houses lit up by lights of activity.
[00:01:29] Suddenly, the air was filled with frantic breathing and the pitter-patter of footsteps.
[00:01:35] On Lower Belgrave Street, a woman sprinted past, a look of panic across her face.
[00:01:42] She was barefoot and covered in blood.
[00:01:45] Searching desperately for help, the first place she saw was a pub, the Plumbers Arms.
[00:01:52] She burst into the bar.
[00:01:55] “Help me, help me,” she cried. “I have just escaped from a murderer. He’s in my house. He murdered the nanny.”
[00:02:03] As the barman tried to calm the woman down, the punters, the people drinking in the bar, turned in shock at what they were seeing.
[00:02:12] This poor woman, they thought.
[00:02:15] But little did they know that they had just witnessed the first step, the first clue, in one of the most infamous unsolved murder cases in British history.
[00:02:27] This woman was no ordinary punter, no ordinary lady. She was Lady Lucan, the wife of one of the country’s most flamboyant aristocrats.
[00:02:40] But before we get into the events of that fateful night, we should first consider a bit of background.
[00:02:47] Lord Lucan was born Richard John Bingham on the 18th of December, 1934, in London, to the English-Irish peer George Bingham, the 6th Earl of Lucan, and Kaitlin Elizabeth Anne Dawson.
[00:03:02] A peer, by the way, is someone in Britain with an official title, such as duke, marquess, earl, viscount or baron.
[00:03:11] Though peers can be appointed by the government, often these titles are hereditary - they are passed down from father to son, passed down through the family.
[00:03:22] They are, essentially, status symbols among the British aristocracy.
[00:03:27] And this young Lord Lucan, although he wasn’t actually a Lord or a Lucan until his father died, this young man enjoyed a very privileged childhood.
[00:03:38] For the ease of the story, by the way, I will refer to him as ”Lord” Lucan or simply Lucan throughout this episode, so as to avoid using two names to describe the same one man.
[00:03:51] During the Second World War, Lucan and his siblings were evacuated, moved to safety, first to Wales and then to the United States where they stayed with a multi-millionairess and continued their lives of luxury.
[00:04:05] When they eventually returned to England, however, the young Lord Lucan had a bit of a shock at the state of post-war England and bomb-ridden London.
[00:04:16] But for a young man like Lucan, he lived in a completely different world.
[00:04:22] He went to school at the prestigious Eton College, where he mingled with other society high-fliers and developed a taste for, a interest in, a vice that would remain with him for the rest of his life: gambling.
[00:04:38] As a young man, he was known to be charming, tall, and handsome, with a rather impressive moustache. What’s more, he was very very wealthy.
[00:04:49] He lived a life of total luxury, and enjoyed the ‘finer things in life’, we might say - fast cars, speedboats, the best wines and Russian vodkas, which were still pretty exotic at the time.
[00:05:03] Or as The New York Times put it, Lucan was - and I'm quoting directly - a "dashing British aristocrat… known for his prowess at backgammon and bridge and his fondness for vodka martinis, powerboats, and Aston Martin cars."
[00:05:20] In fact, Lucan was such a slick character that it's believed he almost played the role of James Bond. He looked a bit like James Bond, and it certainly didn’t hurt that he was also a close friend of Ian Fleming, the author of the books.
[00:05:37] He was also in the army briefly, serving in West Germany, where he began playing poker and further developed the unhealthy gambling habit he had picked up at Eton.
[00:05:48] Perhaps unsurprisingly, given his love for gambling, he would then begin a career in banking in 1954, when he was 20 years old.
[00:05:58] And although he was on a very healthy salary, and would have been a multi-millionaire by today’s standards, Lucan increasingly gambled in his free time, playing lots of backgammon and poker in particular.
[00:06:12] But he had a bit of a sudden career change in 1960, after a huge win playing baccarat, a type of card game.
[00:06:22] Lucan reportedly won £26,000 in just two days, and though that might not sound like an astronomical amount, especially to someone who already came from such privilege, it’s worth almost a million Euros in today’s money.
[00:06:39] Certainly not bad for two days of work, and it was enough for Lord Lucan to quit his job in the bank and focus on his passion, or perhaps his addiction: gambling.
[00:06:52] He became a full-time gambler and was known as ‘Lucky Lucan’ in the elite gambling circles, but he quickly transformed into what has been described as a ‘compulsive gambler’, spending most of his time at the Clermont Club, an exclusive gentlemen’s club in Mayfair.
[00:07:12] Gambling, to put it bluntly, became his entire life, although he would forever be chasing a win as large as the one that convinced him to quit his day job.
[00:07:22] A few years later, in November of 1963, just before his 30th birthday, the eligible bachelor married a lady called Veronica Duncan in a ceremony that was attended by minor members of the Royal Family.
[00:07:37] But it wasn’t exactly a natural match.
[00:07:42] Their honeymoon, which was a trip to Istanbul on the exclusive Orient Express, ended ahead of schedule because, according to Lady Lucan, “there seemed little to talk about and I longed to go home”.
[00:07:55] “John,” she said, meaning Lord Lucan, “he was lost in thought and seemed a little bored.”
[00:08:02] It was certainly an ominous start.
[00:08:06] A couple of months later, in January of 1964, Lucan’s father died and he formally inherited the title “Lord” Lucan, and along with it around a quarter of a million pounds, which would be around five million Euros in today’s money.
[00:08:24] But the money went out as fast as it came in, and he was losing vast amounts at the card table.
[00:08:32] On one occasion, he reportedly lost £8,000, almost €150,000 in today’s money, and this was in a single evening.
[00:08:45] A short while later, Lord Lucan, Lady Lucan, and their three children, Frances, George and Camilla, they moved into a new house, 46 Lower Belgrave Street, which, conveniently for Lucan, was only a short walk from the Clermont Club.
[00:09:01] By this stage, his gambling habit was well-known and accepted, and Lady Lucan has described her role as one of “a gambler’s wife” and of needing to, and I’m quoting directly, “help him get out of a backgammon game when he was winning.”
[00:09:20] In other words, it was her job to try to make sure he quit while he was ahead and not lose too much money.
[00:09:28] Now, it’s important to note here that although Lord Lucan might have had, on the surface, an enviable life, everything a man could ever want, behind closed doors, in private, things weren’t quite so rosy, they weren’t going quite so well.
[00:09:46] Lucky Lucan, as it turned out, wasn’t quite so lucky after all, and was amassing enormous gambling debts.
[00:09:55] That £8,000 loss in a single night wasn’t a one-off, and as he lost more and more he was forced to begin borrowing money from friends and family.
[00:10:07] Key to understanding this story, this murder, and this disappearance, however, is the role of Lady Lucan and their deteriorating marriage.
[00:10:17] His wife, Lady Lucan, had given birth to three children in six years, from 1964 to 1970, and had suffered from severe postnatal depression.
[00:10:30] Her husband was little help.
[00:10:32] He fell deeper and deeper into gambling debts, spending more and more time at his club and drinking more and more, he failed to understand what was happening to his wife or support her, and the marriage began to fall apart.
[00:10:48] A few years later, by 1973, the marriage had collapsed and Lord Lucan had moved out of Lower Belgrave Street and into a flat on Elizabeth Street, just around the corner, and importantly, still a short distance from the Clermont Club.
[00:11:05] Lady Lucan was in a fragile mental state, and was being treated with various antidepressants. As a result, to help out around the house and care for the children the following summer she hired a nanny, a 29-year-old lady named Sandra Rivett.
[00:11:25] But that's when things start to get a little nasty, little unpleasant.
[00:11:32] When his wife was given custody of the children, Lord Lucan was outraged and his behaviour became obsessive and threatening.
[00:11:41] He hired private detectives to spy on his soon-to-be ex-wife, hoping that they’d uncover some damaging evidence about her mental instability so that he could win back custody of his children.
[00:11:54] His car was regularly seen outside the Lower Belgrave Street home, and friends of Lord Lucan even claimed that he said he was planning to kill her.
[00:12:05] And he thought he would get away with it, because of who he was and his social status.
[00:12:12] So, what actually happened?
[00:12:14] And what has the nanny, Sandra Rivett, got to do with all this?
[00:12:19] Well, it's all a little murky, a little unclear, but here is what is believed to have happened.
[00:12:26] Facing growing gambling debts, drinking more and more and having lost custody of his children, it's thought that on the night of November 7th, 1974, Lord Lucan broke into his former home on Lower Belgrave Street.
[00:12:43] At the house were the children, the nanny, Sandra Rivett, and Lady Lucan.
[00:12:49] Some time around 9pm, after the children had been put to bed, Sandra Rivett, the nanny, offered to make a cup of tea for Lady Lucan, and went down into the building’s dimly lit basement.
[00:13:04] Lord Lucan, so the theory goes, then sprung out from the shadows and beat the woman to death with a piece of lead piping.
[00:13:15] Back upstairs, and wondering why her cup of tea was taking so long, Lady Lucan eventually went downstairs and stumbled upon the bloody scene.
[00:13:27] And as you heard at the start of the episode, Lucan then allegedly attacked his wife before she managed to escape to the Plumber’s Arms pub down the road.
[00:13:38] It's generally accepted, believed, that Lucan had been expecting his estranged wife to come downstairs, not the nanny, and that she had been the intended victim.
[00:13:50] He had been planning to kill Lady Lucan, dispose of her body and take back the children and house.
[00:13:58] Now, based on what we know of Lucan’s mental state at the time, and their deteriorating marriage, this certainly seems like a plausible theory.
[00:14:08] So, what happened? What did Lord Lucan have to say about this? Did he deny it, what was his defence?
[00:14:17] Well, he said nothing.
[00:14:19] As you might have guessed from the title of this episode, Lord Lucan disappeared and was never seen again, resulting in one of the biggest murder mysteries in modern British history.
[00:14:33] We do know something of his movements immediately after the murder, however.
[00:14:38] It's thought that he drove 70 kilometres to a friend's house in a village in Sussex, close to London, but only stayed for a few hours and left in the early hours of the morning.
[00:14:52] His story, his cover, according to friends, was that he had walked in on his wife being attacked by another mystery man and that he was now hiding because his wife had accused him of hiring a hitman, a contract killer.
[00:15:09] But after that, we know very little.
[00:15:12] Three days later, on November the 10th, his bloodstained car was found abandoned – with a piece of lead piping in the boot – at the port in Newhaven, near Brighton, on the south coast of England.
[00:15:27] After that, nobody to this very day knows what happened to Lord Lucan.
[00:15:34] Well, nobody publicly knows anything about it.
[00:15:38] And, as you might imagine, this has led to a whole host of theories about what happened to him, where he went, and whether he is, in fact, still alive.
[00:15:50] In fact, over the years there have been countless - as many as 70, according to some sources - supposed ‘sightings’ of Lucan around the world in places as far-flung as Australia, India, France, and Mozambique.
[00:16:07] Although in 1999 he was declared ‘legally dead’ and a death certificate was officially issued in 2016, his body has never been found, so nobody can say for sure whether he’s dead or alive.
[00:16:24] The first supposed sighting came in January of 1975, in Melbourne, Australia, and he was also allegedly seen in northwest France in the year or so after the murder.
[00:16:37] People also claimed to have seen him in Mozambique and Zimbabwe, and there was even a theory that he was living in India as a beach hippy called "Jungle Barry.”
[00:16:49] Some of the other whacky theories include that Lord Lucan was held to ransom by the Irish Republican Army and, incredibly, that he had shot himself and his remains were fed to the tigers in an English zoo immediately after the murder.
[00:17:07] And there’s more.
[00:17:08] Police have investigated fingerprints on beer glasses in South Africa, and tracked money moving to bank accounts in Latin America.
[00:17:16] People have claimed to see Lucan at an ex-Nazi colony in Paraguay, living in a car in New Zealand, and even working as a waiter in California.
[00:17:27] And the mystery of Lord Lucan continues to this very day, almost 50 years after the murder.
[00:17:34] In 2022, a facial recognition specialist claimed that a photo of an elderly man living in Australia is an exact match for Lord Lucan.
[00:17:45] Could he have escaped and been living in Australia all these years?
[00:17:50] Using artificial intelligence to cross-reference photos of Lord Lucan with this old man in Australia, the specialist concluded that, and I’m quoting directly, “they produced a match. This isn’t an opinion, it’s science and mathematical fact”.
[00:18:08] Some say, however, that the most likely scenario is that he took a ferry from Newhaven just days after the murder, jumped off the boat, committing suicide, and his body was lost at sea, forever consigned to Davy Jones’ Locker, as a sailor might say.
[00:18:27] The only truth of this murder mystery, of this ‘whodunnit’, as we say in England, is that nobody knows for sure what happened to Lord Lucan.
[00:18:36] It was a real-life murder mystery, a real life game of Cluedo, complete with “lead piping”, one of the murder weapons used in the game of Cluedo.
[00:18:46] As a quick reminder, or if you didn't know, Cluedo is a popular board game where players try to solve a murder mystery by guessing the character, murder weapon and room where the crime occurred. And in fact, the parallels between the real-life case of Lord Lucan and the game of Cluedo aren’t limited to the discovery of the lead piping.
[00:19:09] Incredibly, in what seems like fiction but was in fact real life, in 2022 it was reported that investigators didn’t only find the lead piping in Lucan’s car in Newhaven.
[00:19:22] According to the British press, investigators also found cards from the game of Cluedo in the car.
[00:19:31] And it gets weirder.
[00:19:33] Which cards did they find?
[00:19:35] Colonel Mustard, a lead pipe, and the hall.
[00:19:40] And why is this particularly strange?
[00:19:44] Colonel Mustard is a dashing military character with a large moustache, not too dissimilar to Lord Lucan’s own; his weapon was exactly the same; and the ‘hall’ location is the closest to the cellar in the game.
[00:20:00] In a further twist, police revealed that these three cards were also found to be missing from Lucan’s own Cluedo set.
[00:20:10] So, what does this all mean?
[00:20:12] Was it Lord Lucan taunting, or mocking, the police before making his escape?
[00:20:18] Was he framed by someone else? Or was someone trying to play a “funny” trick?
[00:20:25] It seems quite clear that the murder was committed by this man, by Lucan, and an innocent young life was taken. If he wasn’t the killer, then his disappearance is most suspicious.
[00:20:39] But as to what happened next, and to the question of what actually happened to Lord Lucan, well unless something drastically changes, then this is a mystery that will most likely forever remain unsolved.
[00:20:56] Ok then, that is it for today’s episode on the disappearance of Lord Lucan.
[00:21:01] I hope it was an interesting one, and whether you knew the story before, or this was the first time you’d ever heard anything about Lord Lucan and this murder mystery, well I hope you learned something new.
[00:21:13] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:21:16] Had you heard about Lord Lucan before?
[00:21:18] What do you think really happened that night in Lower Belgrave Street?
[00:21:22] And where do you think he went?
[00:21:24] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:21:28] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:21:36] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:21:41] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
