She was a delicate beauty, her husband attractive. Both kept the sick side of their bizarre marriage a secret until the enraged Lord Lucan killed the nanny. He disappeared without a trace, Lady Lucan never got over the murder
Lord and Lady Lucan kept Britain in suspense for decades. The couple were at the center of a bloodthirsty murder. Sex and violence in the very best of company always fascinates the public – this was compounded by the fact that the killer, Lord Lucan, disappeared after the crime and was not seen for 43 years.
In 2017 his wife, Lady Veronica Lucan, died at the age of 80. In 1974, she survived her husband’s uncontrolled outbreak of violence, which killed the nanny, Sandra Rivett. She died alone in her home. It’s in the same neighborhood as the house where police found Sandra Rivett’s bloodied body. The murder also held her spatially under its spell.
Lady Lucan was the last person to see the lord named John Bingham after he attacked her and slew Rivett. The bloody deed not only concerned the press. The whole life of Veronica, Dowager Countess of Lucan, was overshadowed by it. She lived estranged from her family and children. She accused the family of blaming her for her husband’s actions.
The nanny died in the basement
© mugshot
Lifelong regrets over the girl’s death
Only in the last few years before her lonely death did Lady Lucan try to come to terms with the events publicly. In a TV documentary “My Husband, the Truth” she recalled the events. The desperate lady never seems to have gotten over the death of the nanny.
Sandra Rivett, the young nanny to the three Lucan children, was beaten to death in the basement with an old lead water pipe on the night of November 1974. When she accepted work in the Lucan household, Sandra Rivett unsuspectingly fell into the maelstrom of an abusive, destructive relationship. “I deeply regret that my marriage was to blame for Sandra Rivett’s stab,” Lady Lucan said in the documentary, offering an explanation of her own life after the murder. “I’m very sorry, but I can’t change it, the only thing I can do is not forget her – and I don’t forget Sandra.”
Twiggy
The style icon of the “Swinging Sixties”
In an act of violence, Lord Lucan – a professional gambler and heavy drinker – had killed the nanny. In fact, the madman is said to have been so out of touch that he should have mistaken Rivett for his wife.
She suffered from depression, he from delusions and violent fantasies – they kept this side of their marriage secret.
© Erry Fincher/Daily Express/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
On the outside, the couple looked glamorous, but in their house they led a bizarre life. Lady Lucan confessed that her husband regularly punished her with a cane. But this is not to be compared with his wild outburst with the water pipe. “He could have hit me harder,” she said. “They were measured beatings. He must have felt pleasure from it. After that he slept with me.”
In her memoirs, she wrote: “One day, just after my 34th birthday, I opened my closet and found a cane – the end wrapped in bandages. When I went to ask my husband about it, I realized that he grinned. At that moment I was like, ‘Oh my god, he’s crazy.’ It wasn’t the first time I’ve felt like my husband wasn’t quite there — but it was the first time I’ve questioned his sanity Before I could ask him about the stick in my closet, he said : ‘I’ll beat those crazy ideas out of your head.’
He then ordered me to undress and lean over the back of a chair with my hands on the seat while he gave me ten spanks on the butt.”
After that they had sex. “When we were done, he examined the injuries he had inflicted on me and kissed me very tenderly. Why did I allow him all this? All I can say is that I was very weak at the time.”
In a TV documentary shortly before her death, Lady Lucan spoke to broadcaster ITV.
© ITV
A fit of wild frenzy
It was a destructive, but also intimate love affair – whose most intimate moments were always connected to the most hurtful situations. One can’t escape the impression that Lord Lucan was the love of her life, despite everything. In the book, she also recalled the attack, writing, “I was standing in front of the cloakroom when someone hit me on the head with something hard. I screamed. A voice said, ‘Shut up!’ I had just realized the attacker was my own husband when he stuck three fingers down my throat.
At this point I started to fight back in earnest, now he switched tactics – he tried to strangle me and then put my eyes out. I gasped, ‘Please don’t kill me, John!'”
Her husband must have regained consciousness somehow. She recalled, “He then said to me, ‘I’m going to Broadmoor for that’ (a notorious penitentiary, ed.). George and Camilla were seven and three years old when it happened, and they were asleep in their beds.”
After persuading her husband to fetch her a glass of water, Lady Lucan escaped to the Plumbers Arms pub. The barman, Derrick Whithouse, told the press at the time that Lady Lucan came through the door and yelled, “I think my neck is broken. He was trying to strangle me.”
She was not of sound mind and thought she was dying. The lady was extremely concerned about her children. “She kept talking about the children. ‘My children, my children,’ she screamed.” Lady Lucan was herself badly injured in the head. “She was covered in blood. She was bleeding really bad when she came in.”
The Victim: Sandra Rivett died because Lord Lucan mistook her for his wife.
© Private
A “brave” man
In the time of her depression, before the murder, Lady Lucan had been using “super-potent” drugs, “most of which are now banned,” she recalled. Her relationship with her husband “reached a new low” at the time. She was afraid that he could lock her up in the “loony bin”. However, they would have had a “normal” sex life – alongside episodes of shocking violence, humiliation and her husband’s need for control.
There have been a variety of theories over the years about the disappearance of her husband without a trace. Countless hiding places were discussed. Even that possibility has been considered: because of the shame he brought on the family, relatives are said to have killed him and fed the body to a tiger they kept as a pet at the time.
Lady Duncan does not believe in such theories. Lucan’s car was later found in Newhaven, East Sussex – abandoned and covered in blood. In her own statement, her fascination with her violent husband shines through: “I think he went on a ferry and jumped into the water in the middle of the English Channel right over the propellers so that no remains could be found. He was quite brave , I think.”
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