Overview
Richard John Bingham, seventh Earl of Lucan, was a professional gambler with a Mayfair club membership, a Aston Martin, and by 1974 very little money. His marriage had collapsed, he had lost a bitter custody battle for his three children, and he had been reduced to watching his former home from a parked car.
On the evening of 7 November 1974, Sandra Rivett — the family's nanny, twenty-nine years old — went down to the basement kitchen of 46 Lower Belgrave Street to make tea. It was her night off, but she had swapped it. She was beaten to death with a length of lead piping.
When Lady Lucan came down to look for her she was attacked in the dark. She fought, escaped, and ran to the Plumbers Arms along the street, bleeding from head wounds, saying her husband had tried to kill her and that he had murdered the nanny.
The Night After
Lucan's own account exists, in letters he wrote that night to his brother-in-law. In them he described passing the house, seeing a struggle through the basement window, letting himself in and interrupting an intruder, and being blamed for what he had found. He wrote of lying doggo for a while.
He drove to a friend's house in Uckfield, Sussex, arriving around midnight, and told a version of the story there. He left before dawn. The borrowed Ford Corsair he had been driving was found three days later at Newhaven, on the coast, with a length of lead piping in the boot similar to the weapon from the kitchen.
And that is the last of him. A missing-person case became one of the most sustained manhunts in British history — Interpol notices, reported sightings from South Africa to Australia to Goa, and a press appetite that never entirely subsided.
The Inquest
In June 1975 an inquest jury took thirty-one minutes to return a verdict of murder by Lord Lucan. It was the last time an English coroner's court would do such a thing: the outcry over a body naming a man who could not defend himself contributed directly to the Criminal Law Act 1977, which removed the power of inquests to name individuals as murderers.
That procedural detail matters to how the case is read. The only formal determination of guilt was made by a body that Parliament then decided should never have had the authority to make it, and no criminal court has examined the evidence.
The Theories
Three readings have circulated more or less continuously.
The first is the simplest and is what the inquest concluded: that he went to the house intending to kill his wife in the dark basement, mistook Rivett for her — the two women were of similar build, and it was not Rivett's usual night — and killed the wrong person.
The second is his own: an intruder, an interruption, and a man who understood immediately how it would look.
The third concerns what happened afterwards, and it is where the establishment element enters. Lucan's circle was wealthy, well connected and intensely loyal. John Aspinall and James Goldsmith were friends; the Clermont Club set had money and, it has long been alleged, both the means and the inclination to move a man out of the country or to arrange his end. Claims that he was smuggled abroad, kept for years, or fed to the tigers at Aspinall's zoo have all had their circulation, none with evidence. Police files released later showed how much attention the investigation gave to precisely this possibility, and how little it produced.
The Ending
Lady Lucan maintained until her death in 2017 that her husband killed himself that night, most likely on the Channel — a view that fits the abandoned car at a ferry port and the tone of the letters.
In 2016, under the Presumption of Death Act 2013, a death certificate was issued and his son George Bingham assumed the earldom. Reported sightings continued for decades after any plausible survival, and a hardy strand of the story still has him alive.
What is not disputed, and what tends to get lost in the aristocratic glamour of the case, is that a twenty-nine-year-old woman was killed in a basement on someone else's night off, and that her son has spent his life pointing out that the mystery everyone enjoys is about the man who vanished rather than the person who died.