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The Disappearance of Lord Lucan

In the world of True Crime, you don’t come across too many cases that involve a missing Earl who is accused of murder. The case of Lord Lucan has fascinated the people of England and around the world for over four decades. John Bingham, the seventh Earl of Lucan, disappeared on November 8, 1974, leaving behind a a mystery and a crime that it seems will never receive justice.

It happened in London’s Belgravia. A woman covered in blood stumbled into a pub called the Plumber’s Arms, calling for help and crying “He’s murdered my nanny!”

The woman was Lady Veronia Lucan, wife of Lord Lucan. She was covered in blood and had been wounded in the head. It was approximately 9:50 p.m. Sgt. Donald Baker responded to the police call. Lady Lucan told him the “he” who had killed her nanny was her husband, the Earl.

After putting Lady Lucan into an ambulance, Sgt. Baker went to check her house. He found her children there, safe. In the master bedroom, he found blood stains on the wall and a blood stained towel on the master bed. He made his way through the rest of the home, and when he reached the basement, he found the body of Sandra Rivett, the Lucan children’s nanny, at the bottom of the stairs in a large mail sack on a pool of blood. She had been bludgeoned to death.

At St. George’s hospital, Lady Veronica Lucan told police it was her husband who had attacked her and killed Sandra Rivett. Veronica had seven lacerations on her head. She was given sixty stitches. The following is Lady Lucan’s account of what happened the night of November 7, 1974.

That evening, Lady Lucan was watching television with her daughter Frances on the bed in the master bedroom. Lady Lucan lived at 46 Lower Belgraves Street with her children, but Lord Lucan did not live there with them. The couple had been estranged for quite some time and had even been going through an antagonistic custody dispute. Lady Lucan had been ordered by the court to have a nanny in order to have custody of her children.

Just before nine, their nanny Sandra Rivett checked in on them and asked if they wanted tea. They said yes. Sandra had been the Lucan’s nanny for only about nine weeks, according to Lady Lucan, though some accounts put it at even fewer weeks than nine. This was a Thursday, and Sandra usually had Thursdays off. At 9 p.m., the news came on, and Lady Lucan remembers mentioning to Frances after the news had begun that she wondered why Sandra was taking so long to bring up the tea. Frances was going to go and check on Sandra to see, but Lady Lucan decided to go instead. That incidental decision could have saved little Frances’ life.

Lady Lucan headed down to the kitchen in the basement and noticed that it was very dark, which she found strange. She heard a noise coming from down the stairs, and then someone hit her on the head at least four times. She screamed. Her attacker told her to shut up. She recognized the voice as her husband’s. He shoved three fingers into her mouth to stop her screams. At the hospital it would be found that she had lacerations on the back of her throat described as most likely caused by fingers thrust into her mouth.

Lady Lucan tried to fight her attacker off. He tried to push her down the stairs into the basement but she held onto the bannisters. He then started to strangle her and poke her in the eye. She kept fighting and grabbed his genitals, and he stepped back. It was dark but she could feel something metal covered in her hair on the ground. At the hospital, Lady Lucan’s neck did indeed show signs of being squeezed.

She said she begged him not to kill her, saying “Please don’t kill me, John.” She asked where Sandra was, and he responded that Sandra was dead and told Lady Lucan not to look. She tried to go along with him by asking what they should do with the body. She tried to convince him that no one would miss Sandra, that the nanny had few friends. She told him she would stay inside the house until her wounds had healed so no one would ever see them.

Lady Lucan said he seemed to accept this, and asked her if she had sleeping pills. She told him yes, and he took her upstairs back to her bedroom, where he told Frances to leave and go to her own bed. He took her into the bathroom and she saw that her head was covered in blood. She asked to lie down, and he put a towel over her pillow. When she lay down he gave her sleeping pills.

She thought that he was going to try to finish killing her if she went to sleep, so when he went into the bathroom to get water from the sink, she ran out of the room and out of the house. This is when she made her way to the pub down the street, the Plumber’s Arms, around 9:50 p.m. The bartender said she was covered in blood. She later found out that after she had fled the house, Lord Lucan had come out of the bathroom and called out for her, “Where are you, Veronica?” By the time the police got to the house, he was long gone.

Around 11:30 p.m., Lord Lucan showed up at a friend’s house. Susan Maxwell Scott would be the last person to see him alive, and the only person to ever hear his version of what had happened that night in person. Surprised to see him show up unannounced at such a late hour, Susan, whose husband wasn’t home, was worried Lord Lucan had come to tell her something bad had happened to her husband. But when she answered the door, he asked if her husband was home. She told him no and invited him inside. She described him as being calm but in shock. He told her that he had been walking past his estranged wife’s house on his way to change for dinner, and as he was passing by he saw a struggle in the basement. He claimed it appeared to be someone attacking Lady Lucan. Instead of calling the police or going to get help, he let himself in the front door with a key that he had. According to his story, when he got down to the basement he slipped in a pool of blood, and when he got up the attacker had run off. Susan asked him where the attacker had run off to, and Lord Lucan said “into the back somewhere”. She then asked him if he had seen the attacker enough to be able to recognize him if he saw him again, and Lord Lucan said no, that all he could say about the attacker was that he was large.

He said that Lady Lucan told him “He’s murdered the nanny” and pointed to a sack. In Lady Lucan’s version, she hadn’t made it into the basement to see the nanny, and hadn’t known she was dead until her attacker told her so. Lord Lucan told Susan Maxwell Scott that he had assumed the body of Sandra Rivett was in the sack, but hadn’t looked to see for sure. In one interview, Susan said that Lord Lucan told her his wife had mistaken him for the attacker, but in another she said he told her Lady Lucan accused him of hiring the attacker to murder her. I’ve never seen an explanation for this discrepancy. But either way, Susan believed him. He told her he had panicked and fled.

Lord Lucan called his mother from Susan’s house. He told her that the nanny was hurt at the Lower Belgraves house, and he wanted his mother to go and collect the children. He said Lady Lucan was hurt and to call “Bill”. I assume here that he was referring to his brother- in- law. Lord Lucan’s mother would later testify that he told her he saw a fight in the basement while passing the house and said he’d interrupted a fight, but she did not mention this part of the conversation in her original statement given to the police.

Susan Maxwell Scott did not call the police. She claimed later that she had not been aware that anyone was looking for him. I find this to be odd, if he had just described a murder happening in his home, and an attack on his wife, and his wife accusing him of both, at which point he had panicked and fled- how would she not assume that the police would at the very least be wanting to speak to him? He had basically just declared he was accused of murder. The logical thought following that would be that police would be looking for him.

Before he left Susan Maxwell Scott’s house, Lord Lucan wrote two letters to his brother- in- law, Bill Shand-Kitt. One of the letters was about finances, and the other was more personal. In this second letter what he wrote confirmed the part of Lady Lucan’s story about her leaving and fleeing the house while Lord Lucan was in the bathroom. He also wrote that circumstantial evidence against him was strong and that people would think that he had done it, that he was the attacker. He expressed that he wanted his children to live with his brother- in- law, and not Lady Lucan. He wrote that Lady Lucan hated him and would accuse him.

Even though Lord Lucan described slipping in a pool of blood, and therefore by his own story should have had blood on him, Susan Maxwell Scott says she doesn’t remember seeing any blood on him. Frances, his daughter who had been in the bedroom when he came upstairs with Lady Lucan, also couldn’t recall seeing any blood on him. The chair that he sat in to write the letters to his brother in law while at Susan’s house apparently had no blood on it, though I’m not sure if this declaration is a statement Susan made, or if police had later gone to check it out after finding out he’d been there.

But… both of the letters he wrote to his brother-in-law Bill had bloodstains- blood on the back of the envelopes, smeared.

He also wrote a letter to his friend Michael Stoop. I’ll go more into detail about that later, but Michael Stoop considered this letter to be a suicide note.

Lord Lucan told Susan that he had to go back and sort things out, and that he would let her know how it went. She says he then left her house, and was never seen again.

This is the point where Lord Lucan disappeared into thin air. Since he left Susan’s home after midnight, his date of disappearance is recorded as November 8, 1974. He left without his passport, checkbook, or license, and his bank accounts were never touched again.The car he left in was a Ford Corsaire that he had borrowed from his friend Michael Stoop before the murder ever happened. Stoop said that during a game of bridge, about two weeks before the murder, Lord Lucan had asked specifically to borrow the Corsaire. Stoop had two cars, and one was much nicer than the Corsaire. He offered Lord Lucan the better car, but Lucan wanted the Corsaire. The police alleged that he chose this one because it was not the type of car that would normally be associated with him, and that he probably planned to use it to dispose of a body or bodies. They believed the borrowing of the car showed premeditation. Lord Lucan had a Mercedes, and had no reason to need to borrow his friend’s car.

The Ford Corsaire was found three days later, abandoned at a port in New Haven. Lord Lucan was very familiar with boating. He had competed in boating races. Police speculated that the car being left at a port brought forth a high possibility that he had used a boat as his means of transportation to escape from the area. The harbor was searched, as well as the buildings around in and the areas around the coast. No further sign of Lord Lucan was found. But inside the car, there were bloodstains. Fibers in the car matched fibers found at Lady Lucan’s house. Fingerprints in the Corsaire matched the fingerprints in Lord Lucan’s flat where he was living. In the trunk, they found his hat and a length of lead piping. The lead piping was wrapped up in a bandage. Remember the piece of metal Lady Lucan had described feeling in the basement covered in her hair after her attack? That turned out to be a length of lead piping, also. It was most likely the weapon used to murder Sandra Rivett- and it was also wrapped in bandaging just like the one in the trunk of the Corsaire. Lord Lucan became a suspect.

An understanding of the relationship and marriage between Lord and Lady Lucan is necessary to see what led up to the events of November 7, 1974. Before he was the Earl, he was born John Bingham, the second of four children, on December 18, 1934. He married Veronica Duncan, the future Lady Lucan, on November 20, 1963. She was 26 and he was 29. At the time that they met, he was a professional gambler, which his family did not approve of. His family also did not understand why he married Veronica. They said they didn’t even know about her until the engagement came along. Veronica mentioned not having many people at her wedding because the couple was not very “popular”. After they were married, Lord Lucan began gambling more and with higher stakes. The couple traveled a lot, and liked to film much of their lives with a video camera they owned. They had three children, Frances, George, and Camilla. Lady Lucan described him as a distant husband. She quotes him as saying “That’s the point of being married. You don’t have to talk to the person.” She said he had a need to appear richer than he was and to project a certain image.

People who knew the Lord and Lady describe them as being happy in the beginning of the marriage. Lady Lucan is described as an undemanding wife who was very happy to be Lady Lucan, and so she tolerated his lifestyle, which was a lot of gambling and living more like a bachelor than a husband. Lady Lucan went frequently with him to gambling clubs. After a while, Lord Lucan began to lose more and more money, and people began to see them having fights and disagreements, as Lady Lucan did not approve. Friends describe seeing Lord Lucan lose his temper with Veronica, and also seeing Veronica have outbursts. They seemed to drift further apart each time they had a child. At one point Lady Lucan developed a close friendship with a man whom she began to have feelings for, but Lord Lucan found out and threatened the man away. Lady Lucan became depressed, and Lord Lucan tried to commit her to a mental hospital. She began to take medication at home. He later tried to claim she was mentally unstable. He would tell doctors that she was psychotic to keep her on medication. Lady Lucan says her husband just stopped being nice to her, and he also began to beat her. She describes him telling her “I’m going to beat these mad ideas out of your head.” She said he would make her bend over a chair and give her ten strokes at a time with a cane, then afterwards he would be nicer and act remorseful. This sounds very much like what we know today as the typical cycle of domestic violence.

Lady Lucan believed he derived pleasure from beating her because he would have intercourse with her after he did it. His cane, which he would beat her with, was bandaged up at the end, wrapped in sticking plaster- the same way the lead piping found in the basement and the trunk of the Corsaire were. During her marriage, Lady Lucan thought he must have bandaged up his cane to make it hurt less, or cause less physical damage, but she also thought it meant it must have been something he had thought of or fantasized about for a while.

Ten years into their marriage, one day Lord Lucan called a doctor and asked if Lady Lucan was fit to be left with the children. When the doctor told him she was, Lord Lucan packed up his things and left, and never moved back in with his wife. Lady Lucan got a lawyer and sued for support. Lord Lucan also got a lawyer and took custody of the children, claiming his wife was mentally unfit. Nevermind that a doctor had told him otherwise and that it seemed Lord Lucan had only left after being assured she was fit to keep the children. Lady Lucan went to court to fight him for custody. She says he would provoke her into getting angry and having outbursts and he would secretly record them to use against her. This is all, again, part of what we know today is a cycle of domestic abuse.

Lady Lucan did get custody of her children back but was required to have a nanny. Lord Lucan was given visitation on every other weekend and half of the holidays, and he was required to pay support. He began to gamble more.

His friends say that he never liked any of the nannies before Sandra Rivett, although he reportedly had taken Sandra to dinner and liked her. He was having a private investigator follow Lady Lucan around and still trying to provoke her to have outbursts. Friends say he was bitter when Lady Lucan won custody, and that it seemed to be mostly because of the money he would have to pay. He was having money problems. His friends say this point was the angriest they had ever seen him, and that he quit fighting in court because it was costing too much money. Shortly after came the attack on Lady Lucan and the murder of Sandra Rivett.

Police did look into Sandra Rivett’s life and came to the conclusion that they couldn’t find anyone who would mean her harm. She had a husband that she was separated from, and at one point had a child she had given up for adoption. Her estranged husband had an alibi. Police gave a press conference announcing that anyone aiding or harboring Lord Lucan would be arrested. His friends all claimed that they did not know where he was, although one did say in an interview with press that even if he did know he would not tell police.

Now let’s get into the evidence from the scene of the crime. There was blood everywhere, on the walls around the basement and the stairs. There were bloody footprints leading to the garden, on leaves in the garden, and on the bandaged lead piping. The footprints were large and clearly from a man. Police determined that it was not possible to see a struggle in the basement of the house from the street where Lord Lucan had claimed he was passing by. There were venetian blinds and no clear line of sight into the lower basement level from the street. A lightbulb had been unscrewed and set on a chair, which explained the darkness Lady Lucan described as she descended to the basement. Lady Lucan said the attacker must have been the one to take the light bulb out, and that she and Sandra did not usually change the lightbulbs themselves because they were both too short.

Sandra Rivett’s body was found “doubled over”, bundled into the sack with her head and feet in the outermost position. A pool of Sandra’s blood was found right behind her body and also at the bottom of the stairs. Her blood has splashed across the breakfast room to the left of the stairs, onto a rosebowl, a book on the piano, and on pictures and portraits. On the right side there was more of the same blood type, Sandra’s type B, against the stair wall and trickling down to the skirting board. This was consistent with directional blood spatter coming from a wound that was already bleeding. The ceiling had blood spatter from repeated blows. There were foot marks in blood leading to a room behind the staircase that had a boiler in it. There was a blood smear on the staircase halfway up which appeared to have come from fabric, possibly smeared on there by the attacker, or by the sack. The sack was described as hard to carry up the stairs and likely brushed against a wall or stairwell. Sandra’s shoes were off and placed beside her, or beside the sack. The mail sack was of American origin and pulled together by a cord with the top folded over. Sandra’s left arm had fallen out still had her gold watch on it. This was one detail that made robbery seem unlikely.

Some blood on ivy leaves in the garden was determined to be Sandra’s, and the back door leading out into the garden at the rear of the basement was unlocked. It seemed this was the way the attacker had left the house. It would have been a good way to exit under some cover if the attacker had blood on him, and also smart to go this way if he was expecting the police to enter the house through the front door. There was hair and blood from two blood groups in the sink in a the cloakroom. Perhaps the attacker had hastily tried to wash it off before leaving. There were no prints on Sandra’s body or the mail sack. Lady Lucan said her attacker wore gloves. Fingerprints on the lead piping weren’t likely to be found because of the bandaging. The piping was consistent with Sandra’s injuries and likely the murder weapon. The pipe did not have any of Sandra’s hair on it. but it did have Lady Lucan’s hair on it, and it had blood of both types A and B on it. The fact that they didn’t find Sandra’s hair on it could suggest that it was what the attacker was washing off in the sink of the cloakroom, perhaps after attacking Sandra but before Lady Lucan had come down the stairs, so it was partially washed and then used to attack Lady Lucan. We must also keep in mind that forensic testing in 1974 was nothing like it is today, and evidence in microscopic amounts could have been harder to find. The piping has gone missing in the years since the murder and is no longer in police custody.

Seven months after Lord Lucan disappeared, a coroner’s jury was assembled to to determine if he was responsible for the murder. The coroner was Dr. Gavin Thurston. Lady Lucan testified to her statement of what happened. A DS Forsyth with the police testified that you could not see into the basement while passing by on the street. Sandra’s autopsy showed that she had she had six splits to the scalp from heavy blunt injury. She had three areas of heavy bruising. The first was in her face around her eyes and mouth. The second was on top of her shoulders where she was bruised without splitting the skin. The third area was the front of her upper right arm, where she had a series of four inline bruises as if fingers had been gripping her arm tight enough to leave marks. Sandra also had defensive wounds on her right hand and lesser injuries to her face that were probably caused not by a weapon but by a hand. She was likely knocked unconscious and was inhaling blood. Her brain was bruised. This combination of injuries was her cause of death.

Forensics confirmed Lady Lucan’s account of the attack. Blood typing was used to distinguish whose blood was where and therefore reconstruct how and where each victim’s attack probably happened. Sandra’s attack had begun at the foot of the stairs, and after being struck she had slumped down onto the ground by the piano and the rest of the blows were inflicted upon her as she lay there. Lady Lucan’s attack was in the hall and her blood was not found in the basement because she never made it that far. This was clear and hard forensic blood evidence that directly contradicted Lord Lucan’s story that he somehow saw his wife fighting or being attacked by someone in the basement as he innocently strolled by the house at coincidentally the same moment this attack was happening.

Lady Lucan’s blood had flicked off onto the wall to the left along with some of her hair. Blood spatter showed repeated blows trajected backwards onto the ceiling, a lampshade, and the cloakroom door behind. There was a total of six instances of mixed blood types found in the crime scene area. There was a mix of blood types on Lady Lucan’s clothing. Lord Lucan’s blood type is unknown. Lady Lucan had blood on her shoes, but she said she didn’t step into the basement. The forensic doctor testified that the blood on her shoes could have come from Lord Lucan as transfer.

Other evidence presented that was more circumstantial included Lord Lucan borrowing the car, and the fact that the weekend before the murder he had questioned his daughter Frances about which days the nanny usually had off. The night of November 7, 1974 would normally have been her night off. This would point to Sandra Rivett not being the intentional target of the murder, and police posited that Lord Lucan had planned to kill his wife and was inquiring to find out when the nanny wouldn’t be at the house. They theorized he had killed the nanny by mistake, that when she came down into the dark basement to make the tea, he had thought it was his wife Lady Lucan. While I see this as a valid possibility, I don’t think a case of mistaken identity is the only possibility. Given Lord Lucan’s motive and state of mind he was described to be in, I think if he had decided to kill his wife, and the nanny just happened to get in the way, he probably would have gone forward with killing her. By his own admission he still had a key to the house, and the police believe he had let himself in and was hiding in wait in the basement. Sandra could have come down to make tea and caught him waiting there, and he had to kill her. Or she could have come down and he realized she was there when she wasn’t supposed to be, and knew that if he was going to kill his wife he was probably going to have to kill the other adult in the house as well- the nanny. If he was in the state of mind to murder his wife, it’s not a stretch to say he was capable of killing Sandra too.

Other circumstantial evidence was that on the night of the murder, around 8:45 p.m., Lord Lucan had stopped by the Clermont Club, the gambling club Lucan attended, but only stopped for a moment to ask if his friends were there. When he was told they were not, he drove off. The man he spoke to at the club thought this was out of character for Lucan’s behavior, and so did the police. They believed he did this to try and establish some form of an alibi, then went to the house and hid in the basement. As I mentioned before, their most prominent theory was that he took the light bulb out to make it dark, but in the darkness mistook Sandra for his wife, killed her, folded her body into the mail sack, went to wash himself and the weapon off, and then heard Lady Lucan calling for Sandra and realized he had killed the wrong person.

Lady Lucan testified that she had seen Lord Lucan watching her at the house in his Mercedes, and police surmised this was one of the reasons he needed to borrow a different car- so that Lady Lucan wouldn’t know he was parked near the house if she saw it. The drive from the Clermont club to the house was ten minutes so he could have been at the house by 8:55 p.m., which fits right into Lady Lucan’s timeline of events in her statement. He wouldn’t have even had to be hiding in wait, he could have been entering the basement about this time, and Sandra coming down to make tea at the same time would have caused her to run right into him or catch him coming in, which circles back to the possibility of him killing her just because she caught him and would have alerted Lady Lucan. If he was waiting in the basement, I also think it’s highly possible he was waiting for Lady Lucan to go to sleep and was then planning on attacking her, but when someone entered the basement, he either thought it was her and thought he’d found a lucky opportunity, or we circle back to him realizing the nanny was there and would foil his plans.

The coroner’s jury found Lord Lucan guilty. It was the last time in England that a jury was allowed to find someone guilty in absentia- in other words, without him being there to defend himself.

Some people who knew the Lucans or Sandra Rivett have proposed the idea of Lord Lucan hiring a hitman to kill his wife, and that maybe he wasn’t the actual attacker. To believe this theory, though, you have to decide that you don’t believe Lady Lucan’s version of what happened. She says she knew it was her husband, that she knew it from the time he spoke in the dark basement, and the person who spoke was also assaulting her- face to face, as he shoved his hand down her throat and then squeezed her neck. Even in the dark, this close she could probably recognize her husband. When you have spent a lot of time close to a person, especially intimately, you can recognize things like the way his hands feel, the smell of his breath, the smell of his skin. Lady Lucan had lived with Lord Lucan as her husband for ten years before he left and moved out. It seems nearly impossible that another man committed the actual physical attack on her, during which she was certain it was her husband, and then somehow without her noticing escaped out the back door as her husband barged in to save her, not running after the attacker but replacing him so quickly next to Lady Lucan that she somehow mistook them as being one and the same person. After which, she went upstairs with her husband, out of the darkness and into her bedroom where there was no mistaking that it was him, and Lord Lucan never denied that this was him. He admits he was there, he admits he was in the bedroom and bathroom with Lady Lucan after her attack, and his daughter says she saw him. He even admits to being in the basement, with his claims that he intervened and scared off the attacker. He puts himself at the scene.

One could argue that maybe Lord Lucan had hired someone to kill his wife, and then changed his mind and gone to the house to intervene and stop the attack from being carried out. In this scenario he would have known ahead of time that an attack would be happening, which makes more sense than him passing by the house at the same time his wife was being attacked and somehow being able to see it in the basement even though by all accounts that view wasn’t possible. But there are a couple of problems with this idea. A hired hitman sent to the house wouldn’t have known ahead of time that someone would be coming down into the basement at that exact time. He would probably have been hiding and waiting for the right opportunity. So how would Lord Lucan have known when to rush into the basement to intervene? Or even that the basement would be where the attack would end up taking place? And even if he did hire a hitman, Lord Lucan would still be guilty of murder.

The biggest mystery in this whole case is what became of Lord Lucan. Did he escape to a different place and continue to live out his life under a new identity? Did one of his friends, who all seemed to champion his innocence, help him? Or did he commit suicide? And if suicide was his ending, how did he do it in a way where his body has never been found?

The abandoned car was the last sign ever found of him. As I mentioned before, since it was left at a harbor, the prevalent theory was that he used a boat to leave the area, especially since he was an experienced boater. Police did consider, though, that someone who was helping him get away could have driven the car to that spot and left it there as a diversionary tactic. Both Lady Lucan and some of his friends have stated in interviews that they believe he did commit suicide. Others think he has been alive all this time, including some members of the police. In an interview in 1980, Lady Lucan said she was convinced her husband was still alive because his body had never washed up anywhere- note that for some reason she used the words “washed up”. But later in life she said she had been heavily drugged in the early eighties and had since decided he had committed suicide. She was very specific in her theory about this. She said she thought he had written his last letter to his friend Michael Stoop as a suicide note, then gotten on the ferry, and had jumped off into the channel, directly into the propellers of the ferry so that it would destroy his body and his remains would not be found. I’m not sure where such a specific idea came from, though I’ve seen this same idea spoken in an interview of Michael Stoop. I’m not certain but I believe his interview predated Lady Lucan’s, so I wonder if he gave her this idea. But if that had happened, would the propellers of a ferry boat have completely destroyed all bits and pieces of his body without any trace left behind? Would the people on the boat or steering the boat not have noticed anything? Wouldn’t it have caused blood in the water at the very least?

Michael Stoop, the friend who had loaned Lucan his car, believes the letter Lord Lucan wrote to him before disappearing was a suicide letter. This is what the letter said:

“My Dear Michael,

I have had a traumatic night of unbelievable coincidences. However I won’t bore you with anything or involve you except to say when you come across my children, which I hope you will, please tell them that you knew me, and that all I cared about was them. The fact that a crooked solicitor and a rotten psychiatrist destroyed me between them will be of no importance to the children. I gave Bill Shand-Kitt my account of what actually happened, but judging by my last effort in court no one, let alone a 67 year old judge, would believe it, and I no longer care, except that my children would be protected. Yours Ever, John.”

This letter does seem to portray a sense that Lord Lucan had given up, and he does mention that he “no longer cares”. But it also shows bitterness and anger about his custody case and the legal battles with his wife. He seems put the blame on others, specifically a lawyer, a psychiatrist and even the judge. His choice of words suggests he is angry at them. What I see when I read this is a lack of taking any responsibility for anything that had happened, and no remorse about anything besides the fact that he lost in court and lost his children. Some people have also suggested that the manner the letter was addressed to his friend- “My Dear Michael”, and “Yours Ever, John”- seems intimate. There had been unconfirmed rumors throughout his marriage that Lord Lucan was actually homosexual, and that this caused many of the problems in his relationship.

The family and friends of Lord Lucan have always maintained that he never communicated with them after November 8, 1974. They have all denied ever knowing where he was. His sister said in an interview that the family had thought that he would come back one day for his children, but that he never did. They then began to consider that he’d committed suicide, but still had their doubts because of the difficulty of hiding your own body after dying. It’s been mentioned they considered the possibility that he’d been murdered.

I think that if he had escaped, he wouldn’t have cared enough about coming back for his children to risk being captured. His letter to his brother-in-law containing his wishes for the children to be taken care of by the Shand-Kitts hints at finality in his concern for the kids and their future. And if he’d committed murder in the house with his children upstairs, that shows a lack of parental concern in the first place. It obviously wouldn’t have bothered him that his children might have gotten up to find their mother and then found her dead, or that it was always possible any of the children could have walked in on the attack or murder as it was happening. Lady Lucan always believed his motive for what he did was financial, because he had money troubles and a gambling problem and didn’t want to pay support for the children. He could have seen the children as a burden, and trying to get custody of them could have been more about punishing his wife than an actual desire to have his children with him. Lord Lucan seems to display signs of narcissism, and I don’t think he would have had any qualms about leaving his children behind to save his own skin. It’s even possible he could have been planning to kill the children that night as well, but that didn’t happen when his attack on Lady Lucan was never completed and she escaped, at which point he knew he had only moments to get away.

Over the next seven months after his disappearance, there were many alleged sightings of Lord Lucan from all over the world. Eventually those dissipated to only a few sightings over the years. There was rumor that he had been hiding out at his friend John’s zoo, and had ended up eaten by a tiger after shooting himself. This friend John once said that Lucan had weighted himself down with stone and jumped into the English channel. In 2004, a retired Metropolitan police officer allegedly told someone that they knew exactly where Lord Lucan’s body was- that it was in a cave in Sussex not far from where the abandoned Corsaire had been found. Tips have been reported of him being spotted alive in Ireland, Greece, Australia, Botswana, and New Zealand, and even rumors of his children having been flown to Africa so that he could look at them from a distance without ever speaking to them.

At one point, not long after the murders had happened in 1974, the police even arrested a man in Melbourne, Australia thinking that he was Lord Lucan. This became another odd twist in the story of the Earl’s disappearance, because the man they arrested turned out to be John Stonehouse, a former government minister and Labour MP in England who had faked his own death by staging a drowning on a Florida beach.

In 2003, an ex-Scotland Yard policeman claimed he had found that Lord Lucan had been living in Goa up until his death in 1996. He had a grainy photograph of a bearded man that was known as “Jungly Barry”. This was quickly discredited when a newspaper disclosed that the man in question was Barry Halpin, a known folk singer. People who had known him long before Lord Lucan disappeared and had even grown up with him confirmed this.

In 2007, locals in Marton, New Zealand were convinced a man living there was Lord Lucan in hiding. The man was living in a 1974 model Land Rover with his pet cat, goat, and possum, and had an upper-class English accent and a moustache. The man’s name was Roger Woodgate, and he denied being the missing Earl. He was ten years younger than Lord Lucan and five inches shorter.

In 1999, Lord Lucan’s son George Bingham had his father declared dead by the High Court. In 2016 a presumption of death certificate was finally issued. This allowed George Bingham to then become the new Lord Lucan.

After the murder of Sandra Rivett, Lady Lucan became more dependant on drugs, and the children did indeed end up being raised by the Shand-Kitts. Lady Lucan lost contact with her children and never re-established it before she died. In September of 2018, she was found dead in her home, lying on rop of a bottle of pills that was nearly empty. A drug overdose had caused respiratory failure. She had written previously about suicide in her journal and had discussed assisted suicide with a friend. She had said that if she ever became terminally ill or was diagnosed with a degenerative disease, she would prefer the option of suicide. In the time leading up to her death, she had become convinced she had Parkinson’s disease, but she was never actually diagnosed with it. She had financial troubles and was in need of money, and had recently finished her autobiography. The verdict of the coroner was suicide. Her autopsy showed no signs of Parkinson’s disease. She had never met her five grandchildren.

This is a story that is full of tragedy and mystery. If Lord Lucan is alive, he would be 85 now, and he would have outlived his estranged wife. It’s doubtful he would ever return of his own accord, given that he has already been found guilty of the murder of Sandra Rivett. The Disappearance of Lord Lucan may be one mystery that will never be solved.

#crime #true crime #lord lucan #lady lucan #missing #disappearance #disappeared #vanished #earl of lucan #missing earl #true crime community #mystery #bf unsolved #unsolved mysteries #murder

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cctruecrime · 5 years

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The Disappearance of Tara Grinstead

Tara Grinstead: The Missing Teacher

Tara Grinstead went missing on October 22, 2005 in Ocilla, Georgia. She was thirty years old, and she taught eleventh grade history at Irwin County High School. She was a former beauty pageant contestant and had once competed in the Miss Georgia pageant as the reigning Miss Tifton, which was a nearby Georgia town. For years when people spoke of Tara and her disappearance, she was often referred to as the Missing Beauty Queen.

Shortly after Tara had seemingly vanished without a trace, I moved to a town not too far from Tifton. In fact, the exit off the interstate for Tifton was only a few exits up from the one you’d take to get to my house. I was a paralegal and investigator for a criminal defense law firm there, and the college Tara attended was only a block from where I worked. I quickly became aware of Tara’s missing person case because the concern for her was widespread in Georgia. Everyone wanted to know where she was, what had happened to her, and most of all everyone hoped she would be found safe.

The day that Tara had disappeared was a Saturday, and she had spent a good part of the day helping some young women get ready for the Miss Sweet Potato pageant that was held that evening. Tara was generous with her pageant experience, and one of the things she was loved for was that she helped young pageant contestants like this whenever she could. She had some girls over at her home preparing for the pageant during the day, and she left to go watch the pageant at the Fitzgerald Grand Theater about 5 p.m. that afternoon. She left the pageant around 7 p.m. and stopped by a friend’s house briefly. By approximately 8 p.m. she was at a party being held at another friend’s house. It was a BBQ or cookout, and if you’ve lived in Georgia or other parts of the south, you know that’s a common occasion. While she was at this cookout, Tara received a phone call, or as some sources say, more than one phone call. At about 11 p.m., the host of the party walked Tara to her car and she drove off to go home. This was the last sighting of Tara.

The next day, Sunday October 23, Tara’s family and friends were unable to get in touch with her. When Monday morning came around, she didn’t show up at the high school to teach. She had not called in sick, and she hadn’t arranged for a substitute teacher. I was also a substitute teacher for a period of time there in Georgia. I never taught at Tara’s school, but I do know that the system set up for getting a sub to cover a class for you was so simple that it only took a few minutes to do. You could either do it online or through an automated system via phone. It wasn’t uncommon to get a request from a teacher to cover their class not long before school started for the day. Even if Tara had been sick, she should have been able to easily get a substitute teacher and by all accounts it was very much out of character for her not to do so. So her co-workers at the school were rightfully concerned right away, and they called the police.

Tara’s house was locked and her car was still parked under the carport. There was not any obvious evidence of a break-in. The car was actually unlocked, and inside it was an envelope with one hundred dollars in cash, which struck some of her friends as out of the ordinary. Also unusual was the fact that the driver’s seat was pushed back all the way, and Tara was only 5'3" tall. Again, people who knew her thought it seemed the seat was pushed too far back for her to have been driving it. What was even more strange was that her dog was in the yard, and her friends didn’t think she would have left the dog out all for all that time.

Stuck into Tara’s front door was a business card, which belonged to a police officer in Perry, Georgia. A latex glove was found in her yard.

Inside Tara’s house, her room still bore the signs of all of the girls who had been there getting ready for the pageant Saturday. The clothes Tara had worn to the pageant were there. Her cell phone was also there, charging. A lamp by her bed was broken, her house phone was on the bathroom floor, and her alarm clock was underneath her bed and blinking, as if it had been unplugged or reset, or possibly broken. There was also a small amount of blood found on her comforter. Nothing appeared to be missing other than her purse and keys. Since there were no signs of break-in, investigators immediately wondered if she had let someone she knew into the house, or if she had left willingly and locked the house up, but left her cell phone behind. She couldn’t have left her in her own car, since it was still there, but she could have left with someone else. Without much missing from the home, and the cash still there in the unlocked car, robbery didn’t seem obvious or even very likely.

The police began searches to find Tara, but to no avail. The glove found in her yard did have some DNA and fingerprints. The DNA belonged to two people- one was Tara, the other was an unknown male. The blood on her comforter was such a small amount that it couldn’t conclusively be attributed to a struggle, because it could have come from something like a nosebleed or menstruation. At least one friend said she had multiple locks on her door, which would theoretically have made a break-in more difficult or at least would have made it take longer, and Tara’s dog should have barked at an intruder, especially if it was taking a while to get into the door. If she was sleeping, would the dog have awakened her by barking at someone trying to break in? Did she wake up and try to call for help, but an intruder succeeded in getting inside before she could, and this is why the phone was in the bathroom floor? Why didn’t the neighbors hear the dog barking, especially if there was a violent struggle inside the house?

The possibility of Tara deciding to disappear on her own just didn’t seem to hold much water. She’d left her car behind, she’d left her pets behind, she’d left cash behind- and it appeared she hadn’t taken anything from the house, aside from the missing purse. If for some reason she had wanted to run away and start a new life without a word to any of her friends and family, at the very least she would have taken any cash on hand, and would have at least made sure her pets wouldn’t be left abandoned to die alone at the house. The theory of suicide was considered, because she had recently been upset about a breakup with a boyfriend. But her loved ones didn’t think she would do that, and again wouldn’t she have at least made sure her pets would be okay? Since she hadn’t taken her car to get anywhere, she would have had to walk out of her house, locked it up, and walked somewhere to commit suicide- yet no body or trace of her was found. That’s relatively hard to do, and why would she care about hiding her own body if she were committing suicide anyway? Would she do that to her friends and family- commit suicide in such a way that she would disappear without a trace of what happened, and leave her loved ones in the limbo of not knowing? Those who knew her thought not.

The prevailing theory for investigators was foul play. They began to interview her acquaintances as well as get DNA samples from males she knew. They chose certain evidence to withhold from the public to help later in the investigation, for corroborating statements, tips, and confessions.

The police officer who had left his business card in Tara’s door was married. He was interviewed and tested against the DNA from the glove. He had an alibi and was ruled out as a suspect. He was a family friend, and Tara’s stepmother had asked him to go and check on her when she couldn’t get in touch with Tara. He had been by Tara’s house Sunday night, and had called her about twenty times during that weekend with no response. Even though Tara didn’t answer her door when he went to her house, he didn’t go inside to check on her. Her neighbor did have a key to the house, so theoretically he could have. He had also been one of the people who had called her while she was at her friend’s cookout. If he was there around midnight, though, this seemed to point at something happening to Tara very soon after she left the cookout, since she had reportedly left there about 11 p.m.

The ex-boyfriend Tara had been upset about breaking up with was also interviewed by police, and tested against the DNA. He, too, had an alibi and was ruled out as a suspect.

Another person who was brought to the attention of the police was a former student of Tara’s who had been said to be obsessed with her. This student had been arrested at Tara’s house for disorderly conduct when he had shown up and made a scene banging on her door. When this incident happened, the police officer who had left his card in her door had actually been at Tara’s house. This student later claimed in an interview that he had a relationship with Tara for a year or two. But the student gave his DNA and took a polygraph exam and was ruled out as a suspect.

The case was featured on several television shows, and became the largest case file and missing person case in Georgia history. In 2016 it became the subject of a podcast, and around this time new activity began to flurry.

A woman brought a tip to the GBI (Georgia Bureau of Investigation) that her boyfriend had told her he had helped get rid of Tara’s body. The woman’s boyfriend was named Bo Dukes, and he had once been a student of Tara’s. His girlfriend told the GBI that Bo had said his friend and roommate Ryan Duke had killed Tara, and that Bo had helped Ryan burn Tara’s body afterward. Ryan Duke had also been a student of Tara’s. Both men were subsequently interviewed by investigators, and both gave statements which seemed to admit to their involvement.

Bo said that the night Tara had gone missing, he was asleep at home, where Ryan Duke was also living at the time. He said the next day Ryan told him that he had gotten high, broken into Tara’s house to steal money for drugs, and had hit her, accidentally killing her. Then he had used Bo’s truck to take Tara’s body to a pecan orchard that was owned by Bo’s family. Bo claimed he didn’t believe Ryan at first, until he say Tara was reported missing on Monday. Later that week, on Wednesday, Bo says Ryan took him to the pecan orchard and showed him Tara’s body. Bo described what her body looked like. He said she was nude, and he saw no jewelry other than a belly button ring. He said she was covered in ants. This paints a grizzly and heartbreaking picture. He said he saw no blood or wounds on her body other than marks around her neck. He thought the marks looked more like they were caused by hands than by a ligature.

At this point, Bo says, he helped Ryan move Tara’s body into the back of Bo’s truck so they could take it to a more hidden place in the orchard. He said he grabbed Tara’s body by her arms, and Ryan grabbed her legs, and this is how they carried her. They moved her elsewhere in the pecan orchard, then Bo says it was his idea to get wood and cover the body and burn it. He said they hauled four or five truckloads worth of wood to the body site and covered her up so much that you could no longer see any part of her body underneath. They then began to burn it. Bo said it took two days to burn the body, and that they checked on it the next day, Thursday, and it had been burned down to bones. He describes seeing nothing but bones by then, no flesh, and that it might have been rib bones.

Bo said that Ryan had never given him a reason for killing Tara, but that even though part of Ryan’s story was that he had broken into Tara’s home to rob her by using a plastic card to slide into the door and shift the locks open, he also told Bo he had gotten into bed with Tara and had ended up strangling her. Bo also made a statement that Ryan told him he hadn’t worn gloves, yet the latex glove was found in Tara’s yard.

Bo went to the pecan orchard with investigators to try and point out the location they had burned the body. At some point Ryan was also taken to the orchard and allegedly pointed out the same general area that Bo had. Though they did not tell the public until the first trial began, investigators did find bone fragments at the pecan orchard. The bone fragments they found were hand fragments, skull fragments, spine fragments and a tooth. These remains showed signs of being burned.

Ryan gave a statement which seemed to be a confession as well. He said he had been high and drunk at the time and was trying to steal money for drugs, and he broke into Tara’s house but she caught him, and he hit her. He said he then left Tara’s house and went to a pay phone and called her- which means he knew her phone number prior to this all happening. She didn’t answer and he then assumed she must be dead. He claimed he went back to her house in Bo’s truck with gloves and a quilt, wrapped up her body, and drove it to the pecan orchard to dump it.

One of the details about this case that the police had withheld from the public was the fact that there was a phone call made to Tara’s house that night from a pay phone. This seemed to be evidence to corroborate Ryan’s statement. In Georgia, corroboration is required along with a confession in order to prosecute. In this case, the corroboration would be the phone call and also the bone fragments they found- and one other huge piece of evidence: the DNA on the glove matched Ryan Duke.

The DNA wasn’t all that matched Ryan- the fingerprints from the glove also matched his. It seemed law enforcement had finally found their culprits, and these men were arrested in 2017. Ryan was charged with felony murder, as well as the destruction of Tara’s body. Bo was charged with destruction of her body too, plus two counts of giving false statements, one count of concealing the death of another, and one count of hindering the apprehension of a criminal.

Ryan Duke hadn’t had much of a criminal history aside from this. He had once gotten a DUI on Tifton highway, pulled over for speeding, and also charged with driving without a license. Bo Dukes, on the other hand, had more of a criminal past. He had served two years in a federal prison for theft. He’d stolen from the Army in 2013 when he was a unit supply specialist. He was released in 2015.

As his trial in Tara’s case began to approach, Bo Dukes found trouble with the law yet again. On New Year’s Day of 2019, two women allege that they were sexually assaulted and held against their will by Bo in his home in Warner Robins, Georgia. The women said he assaulted them at gunpoint under threats of physical violence. A warrant for his arrest was issued for rape, aggravated sodomy, false imprisonment, and possession of a firearm by a convicted felon. Bo fled and went into hiding. After a four day manhunt, he was caught at a relative’s house in Ocilla. His $16,700.00 bond for the charges in Tara’s case was revoked.

Bo’s first trial began on March 18, 2019. His girlfriend who had called in the tip to the GBI testified about what Bo had told her. The interview of the statement Bo gave to investigators was played in the courtroom. His defense argued there was no direct physical evidence linking Bo to the crime since the fingerprints and DNA matched Ryan, that the prosecution’s case relied on witness testimony and Bo’s own statements, and that his statements weren’t reliable due to how much time had passed by the time he gave them. A friend who knew Bo from his time in the military testified that Bo had told him about helping Ryan burn Tara’s body. An acquaintance who had known Bo and Ryan in 2005 testified that not long after Tara had gone missing, Bo and Ryan were at a party he attended at the orchard, and that he had heard them speaking about burning Tara’s body. Jake Dukes, Bo’s brother, testified that Bo had told him about Ryan killing Tara, and that Bo had said he’d helped cover it up out of fear because Ryan had used Bo’s truck to move the body and the pecan orchard belonged to Bo’s family, and that because of this Ryan had threatened to pin the whole murder on him. Which is exactly what Ryan Duke is now doing. Ryan is now saying that his confession was given under the influence of drugs and isn’t reliable, and that Bo is the one who actually killed Tara.

Ryan’s story is that the night Tara went missing, he was the one who stayed at home asleep, along with his brother. He says Bo and a friend named Ben McMahan are the ones who left the house that night. Ben McMahan died in 2014, so he can’t confirm or deny that, or defend himself against any accusations Ryan may try to shift onto him. This alibi for Ryan, however, seems to be falling apart, as his brother Stephen says that he can’t verify for certain that Ryan was at home all night long and never left the house on the night in question.

Bo Dukes was found guilty of all four charges that he went to trial for in March 2019- two counts of making false statements, one count of hindering the apprehension of a criminal, and one count of concealing the death of another. He still has a charge to face in a different county- the charge of the destruction of Tara’s body. Because the orchard was located in a different county than Tara’s house, he has to be tried separately in a different court. Tara’s stepmother asked for the maximum sentence to be imposed, and it was. Bo received a 25 year sentence. Ryan Duke has not yet been to trial.

In a phone call recorded by someone who knew Ryan, Ryan claims that he had been having a sexual relationship with Tara on and off since high school. If this were true, it would explain why Tara would let him into her home at such a late hour, and why there were no clear signs of a break in. Bo had said in one statement that Ryan told him he’d gotten into bed with Tara, and he describes her as being nude when he saw her body, which suggests she either slept in the nude, undressed herself, or someone had undressed her at some point. Bo also mentioned in a statement that though Ryan had told him nothing sexual happened that evening between him and Tara, Bo wasn’t sure he believed that.

I mentioned before that since Tara vanished in 2005, this case has been featured heavily in the media. During that time, there have been some people who have had negative things to say about Tara and her personal life. It appears that she may have had an active social and romantic life, and I’ve seen people be judgmental about that. I wanted to take a moment here and say that I find that to be repulsive. I’m completely against blaming or villainizing the victim. What Tara chose to do in her personal life was completely her business, and absolutely her right. I have to say it, if it was a man who may have been seeing more than one woman, or dating someone younger, or having casual physical relationships, I don’t believe this kind of negative judgment would be reigned down on him. Tara did not deserve what happened to her but she does deserve justice and respect. Period.

With that being said, let’s examine a few of the possibilities- without any judgment whatsoever. If Tara had been involved in any sort of romantic or physical relationship with Ryan, it would fall in line with the idea of her letting him in so late at night and not having been dressed. If her dog was familiar with him, perhaps it would explain why he may not have barked enough to cause alarm with neighbors. It would fit with Bo’s statement that Ryan had mentioned getting into bed with Tara. But remember, Bo was convicted of giving false statements, and Ryan’s statement had been that he’d broken in to steal money and she had caught him. So let’s look at that. He allegedly used a plastic card to get into the door, something like a credit card. I’ve already mentioned that it seems likely the dog would have barked if someone was trying to break into the door this way, especially if she had multiple locks, and even if the dog’s barking wouldn’t have alerted neighbors, it should have at least awakened Tara. Maybe this is what happened, and Ryan’s statement is true. It’s possible she woke up and tried to call for help, but he managed to get inside the house and stop her, and the struggle ensued. Maybe she was sleeping nude, or maybe Ryan undressed her later. But a few things don’t seem to fit the robbery story. The lack of things taken from the house, for example, or the cash left in the car. Did Ryan actually go there with the intention to rob her but not check the car before attempting to get into the house? If he had checked the car, he would have found it unlocked and the cash inside. If robbery was truly the motive, and he had checked the car out first, the death of Tara may have never happened. Perhaps 100.00 in cash would have been enough drug money for him and he would have left without ever going into the house.

If Ryan Duke really did go to Tara’s house to rob her, it’s highly unlikely he did so randomly. The house he shared with Bo Dukes was at least five miles from Tara’s home. If he set out to randomly rob a house for drug money, surely there were other places along that five miles that he had to drive to get to Tara’s that he could have chosen as his target. Tara did not live in an isolated area, she had neighbors. Whatever his reasons or intentions, it seems likely Ryan chose Tara’s house deliberately. Tara was a teacher, she wasn’t an extremely wealthy target that a criminal would assume to have lots of cash and valuables lying around the house. He was obviously familiar enough to know where her house was, and if he made the phone call from the pay phone after assaulting her, then he was also familiar enough to know her phone number. This suggests they knew each other on at least some level.

There’s the possibility that they did know each other but it was not anything romantic or physical, as Ryan once claimed to a friend. She could have known him enough to feel comfortable opening her door for him. But I’m inclined to think that if she went to answer the door for someone she wasn’t expecting, she wouldn’t have done so without being dressed, so in that scenario her nude state that Bo describes when he talks about seeing her body could only be explained by Ryan undressing her at some point. And even if she was expecting him, it’s doubtful she would answer the door undressed if they were not involved in a physical relationship. I also think she would have found it odd for him to randomly show up at her door in this late hour if they weren’t very familiar or he wasn’t expected. The two possibilities that make the most sense are that Ryan really did break into her house to rob her, or that they were involved in the way that he claimed and she let him in.

Of course, there are also theories that question the true level of involvement of Bo Dukes. Ryan and Bo are pointing at each other, both saying the other one did it. One thing that raises speculation is the fact that it’s much harder for one person to move a corpse alone than for two people to do it together. The latex gloves points to Ryan being there either way, but was Bo also there that night? It was Bo’s truck that was used, and the place the body was taken belong to Bo’s family. Remember when Bo described the way they picked up Tara’s body to move it into his truck and take it to a different place in the pecan orchard? He said he grabbed her by the arms, and Ryan grabbed her by the legs. The body of a deceased person weighs more than that same body does when the person is still alive. According to Bo’s story, Ryan carried Tara’s body from her house out to Bo’s truck by himself, yet later when they moved her body it was difficult enough that they had to do it together, each carrying one end. There is also the fact that Bo has more of a criminal history, and it includes violence against women.

It seems probable that investigators have found the people who are responsible for Tara’s disappearance, and they have at least an idea of what happened to her. Ryan Duke should be going to trial in the not-too-distant future. I just hope that it brings some resolution to those who knew and loved Tara Grinstead.

Here is a link to my companion video:

https://youtu.be/AbZDJHfC9EU

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