'One of the greatest unsolved mysteries in British history': The earl who vanished after murdering his children's nanny

Lord Lucan was found guilty of killing Sandra Rivett on 19 June 1975 – but by then he had already disappeared. His wife was interviewed by the BBC in 1980.

The Lord Lucan affair is a bizarre and horrific one, but on the face of it, there seems to be little doubt about the sequence of events. During the night of 7 November 1974, it appears, the British aristocrat Lord Lucan hid in the dark in the basement kitchen of his house in Belgravia, London. Planning to murder his estranged wife, instead he bludgeoned to death their 29-year-old nanny Sandra Rivett in a case of mistaken identity, before then attacking Lady Lucan.

She managed to escape and raise the alarm, and in the meantime, Lord Lucan fled, presumed by many to have jumped into the sea near Newhaven and drowned. He has never been found, although there have since been reported sightings of him across the globe, on every continent except Antarctica.

According to evidence – and the fact that the earl went on the run – the case appears to be damning. On 19 June 1975, at Rivett's inquest, a coroner's court took just 31 minutes to find Lord Lucan guilty of murder. Yet dig a little deeper, and there are more questions than answers.

Why would someone who was apparently squeamish about blood choose such a brutal and violent method? How could he have mistaken Rivett for his wife during a prolonged attack? And why did Lady Lucan take so long before running to a nearby pub and shouting "he's murdered the nanny, help me"? It all adds up to one of the greatest unsolved crime mysteries in British history.

Both Lord and Lady Lucan's stories about what happened that night are "questionable", according to the historian Alex von Tunzelmann, presenter of The Lucan Obsession podcast. "It feels like there's almost nothing solid at the centre of it that you can go on, and it's then very open to people's theories… It's one of those mysteries that is unsolved, and I think, is probably unsolvable."

It also reveals much about the British attitude to class. Richard John Bingham, the seventh Earl of Lucan, married Veronica, a former model and secretary, in 1963. He was an Eton-educated professional gambler, who despite his "Lucky" nickname had run up debts and was facing bankruptcy at the time of the murder. When he disappeared, there were suggestions that he had been helped by wealthy friends, dubbed "the Clermont Set" after the casino they frequented in Berkeley Square. One of the more outlandish theories about Lucan's fate claimed that he shot himself, asking that his body be fed to the lions in the private zoo of his friend, the Clermont Club owner John Aspinall.

A marriage gone horribly wrong

The public obsession with the case is sustained by ambiguities. "The facts are just enough to make a narrative while leaving hugely tantalising areas of doubt," suggests the historian Rosemary Hill. If there were a murder trial today, the verdict "wouldn't necessarily be a done deal", argues Von Tunzelmann. 

One of the reasons the case captured........

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