In Saturday’s Mail, STEPHEN WRIGHT reported a sensational claim by the fourth wife of the late British peer Baron (Tony) Moynihan that Lord Lucan had stayed with the couple for two days, ten years after he vanished.
He followed up that world exclusive with a fascinating insight into the extraordinary world of Moynihan, the aristocrat known as ‘Baron Scoundrel’, who it is claimed provided a fake passport to Lucan.
Here, in the third part of his gripping series on the legendary fugitive, he examines a range of other sightings.
There have been countless supposed sightings of Lucan around the world over the last five decades.
In the months that followed the horrifying murder of Sandra Rivett, the 29-year-old nanny to his children, on November 7, 1974, the hunt for the prime suspect moved quickly from Britain to the United States and beyond – to South America, the Caribbean, France and Germany.
As the more credible leads dried up, far-fetched reports emerged that the Eton-educated earl had spent his last days as a hippy nicknamed Jungly Barry in Goa, or that he was living with a pet possum in an old Range Rover in New Zealand. More recently there was a claim that the 7th Earl of Lucan is living as a Buddhist in a suburb of Brisbane, Australia.
Yet until the Mail’s revelations last week relating to the Philippines, one part of the planet has remained a consistent focus for detectives investigating Lucan’s disappearance: the continent of Africa.
And as to how he got there, one theory remains foremost in their minds: the Earl, they believe, was spirited out of Britain by a tight-knit circle of friends and fellow gamblers – the so-called Lucan Set – many of whom were regulars at the Clermont Club in Mayfair, where Lord Lucan was a founding member.
There have been countless supposed sightings of Lord Lucan around the world over the last five decades. He is pictured in 1971, three years before the murder of Sandra Rivett
The Mail has spent many months investigating the mystery of his disappearance afresh. We have interviewed key witnesses, spoken to retired police officers, reassessed old leads and investigated new ones to establish what is likely to have happened after Lucan sensationally vanished on that terrible November night.
The Mail’s inquiries started last year when we unearthed a never-before-seen Scotland Yard report. Published earlier this year in the Mail, this confidential 60-page document from 1975 chronicles in compelling detail what would have been the Crown’s case against the missing peer (who is suspected of not only bludgeoning his children’s nanny to death but also attempting to kill his estranged wife, Veronica) if he’d ever been brought to justice.
Our work has been the basis of a ground-breaking new true crime podcast, The Trial Of Lord Lucan, in which two eminent barristers argue the case for Lucan’s innocent or guilt using the newly disclosed police document and other evidence. At the conclusion, listeners were asked to become jurors and give their verdicts to Mail Online.
Today, we look in more detail at the overwhelming question in the case: where is Lord Lucan? And at the tantalising clues that the Earl might indeed have fled to Africa via Portugal, a country with strong links to its former colonies, Angola and Mozambique.
Portugal is where a female witness told investigators she had seen the fugitive at a ‘celebration’ party hosted by his friends.
It took place within weeks of what, 50 years on, still ranks among the most notorious killings of our time.
Few people are better qualified to comment on the Lucan mystery than retired deputy chief constable Lewis Benjamin, a respected career detective who led Scotland Yard’s last review of the case in 2004.
Benjamin had access to dozens of police documents, intelligence reports, statements and other evidence.
He is in little doubt that the peer was smuggled out of the United Kingdom by his influential friends.
Benjamin is dismissive of claims Lucan jumped to his death in the sea as many have suggested over the years.
Sandra Rivett, the 29-year-old nanny to the Earl’s children, was bludgeoned to death in the Lucans’ home on November 7, 1974
‘If you look at the whole murder and the way that Lucan approached it, he must have planned not just what was going to occur at the house and the murder of his wife, but where he would have been afterwards, and any alibis that he might have set up,’ Benjamin said.
‘[Lucan] would have been looking for help. He, in my view, undoubtedly left the country. He must have had help to do that. So who helped him? He had no money. All his money and his wallet were left in his flat. I think that he was assisted by others or at least one other and I think he was put up in a safe house somewhere.
‘There are a number of different strands throughout the investigation, not just the review that I did, that suggest that that was the case.
‘And the country that crops up most and seems to have an association with him is Portugal. And indeed, one of the fresh lines of inquiry from my review was an escort girl who said she’d seen him at a party in Portugal, in a villa.
‘It was some sort of celebration… I think it was described as a pool party.
‘You don’t have to think about it for very long to work out that, at the time, Angola and Mozambique were still Portuguese territories and there were regular flights from Portugal to those places in Southern Africa.
‘So, my view would be that, from Portugal, he may have gone to somewhere in Southern Africa, possibly one of those two colonial territories.
‘Shortly after that period, Mozambique and Angola were plunged into civil war. So, [it was] very difficult to get to and very easy for somebody who was on the run to hide.’
As part of our inquiries, the Mail has also spoken to Liz Brewer, the well-known socialite credited with almost single-handedly opening up the Algarve and Portugal itself to the British holiday market from the mid-1960s onwards.
She speaks with authority about Lucan’s love of the country.
Brewer first met the Earl through her then-boyfriend and the three dined together on several occasions at the Clermont Club in Berkeley Square.
‘When I came back to the UK in the winters, I was running a marketing and promotions company in Knightsbridge and Lucan would pop in to see me. He was always asking about where he should go in Portugal,’ she recalled.
Many believe Lucan was spirited out of Britain by a circle of friends and fellow gamblers – the so-called Lucan Set – many of whom were regulars at the Clermont Club, pictured in 1999
‘Things were really taking off in the Algarve then. They asked me to open the new airport, Lew Grade [the television executive and impresario] bought a string of properties and anyone who was anyone was heading down there… Paul McCartney, Lulu, Cilla Black…
‘Lucan was adamant he wanted to take me with him on a family holiday in 1973 to act as a sort of unofficial guide. He wanted to be shown all the best beaches and he did a lot of horse riding.
‘I thought: ”Why not?”
‘He wanted it to be special for the children and to say thank you to the Shand Kydds [Christina and Bill, Lady Lucan’s elder sister and her husband] for their support through some difficult times.
‘Their [the Shand Kydds’] niece and nephew, a young Diana Spencer, 13, and her brother Charles were there too.’
Lucan arrived in Portugal the following year on July 19, 1974, and stayed at a villa in Estoril. Within a few months, he would be one of the most wanted men in the world.
Businessman Peter West is the figure who pulls several of the threads in the Lucan saga together. He paid for Lord Lucan and his entourage to fly to Estoril and it was his villa where they stayed.
West, a founding member of the Clermont Club, was a regular at the chemin de fer (a version of Baccarat) tables with the Earl often by his side.
But the most striking line of enquiry concerned the death of West’s close friend and Clermont regular, an ex-Grenadier Guardsman called David Hardy, which – in turn – suggests a clear connection between Lucan and Africa.
Ian Maxwell-Scott was a high-stakes gambler at the Clermont while his wife, Susan, was thought by the police to have been ‘infatuated’ with Lucan
Hardy was killed in a road accident in Essex in 1980 and when police searched his belongings, they found a pocketbook dating from 1976 onwards and a list of contacts.
There was an entry for Lucan – and an address for him in Africa: c/o Hotel Les Ambassadeurs, Beira, Mozambique.
Staff at the hotel later told journalists they recognised pictures of the Earl from an earlier stay.
In an amazing coincidence, a search of the registers at the hotel revealed the name of a couple called Maxwell-Scott, who had stayed for a week in April 1975.
Ian Maxwell-Scott was a fellow high-stakes gambler at the Clermont while his wife, Susan, was thought by the police to have been ‘infatuated’ with Lucan and had not told them the ‘whole truth’.
She was also the last person known to see the Earl alive when he visited their home in Uckfield, East Sussex, on the night of the Rivett murder. They were close friends.
Yet the Christian names listed for the Maxwell-Scotts were not Ian and Susan, but John and Davina.
When approached for comment, Susan Maxwell-Scott (now deceased) denied she had ever been to Mozambique and said she knew of no one in her family with those first names.
Former deputy chief constable Benjamin is of the firm opinion that the man listed as ‘John Maxwell-Scott’ was in fact John Bingham, the 7th Earl of Lucan.
The Mozambique connection has been given particular credibility by a woman called Marianne (previously known as Shirley) Robey, who worked as a personal assistant to Lucan’s friend and gambling associate John Aspinall.
Lucan’s Mozambique connection has been given credibility by Marianne Robey, who worked as a personal assistant to the Earl’s gambling associate John Aspinall, pictured with his wife
She claims that she helped the Earl live a secret life in Africa.
The Mail spoke to Robey in May this year and she confirmed that she had worked for Aspinall between 1979 and 1981 and had been asked to book flights to Africa for Lucan’s eldest children, George and Frances.
There, she claimed, they would take a holiday but be observed from a distance by their father, who was devoted to them and had been devastated when he lost custody in a bitter High Court battle with his estranged wife, Veronica.
Robey said the children had been taken to the Treetops Hotel in Kenya (famous as the place where, in 1952, the late Queen Elizabeth II learned that her father, King George VI, had died).
Her claims were given little credence when she first made them in 2012 – until a startling intervention from Lucan’s son, George Bingham, now the 8th Earl of Lucan.
In a statement that year, he admitted that he had visited Africa in the 1980s with his younger sisters Frances and Camilla, that they had travelled to Kenya when he was nearly 18 and that the trip ‘probably did involve Treetops’.
He said: ‘Both my sisters were present, as were two other families, neither of whom had any connection to John Aspinall. The airline tickets were paid for by my family trust.’
Bingham also stated that none of the children had spoken to their father since the day he vanished in November 1974.
A man called Dr Barry Hill could prove to be another vital piece in the Lord Lucan puzzle.
Hill had been held on remand in Cardiff Prison accused of mortgage fraud when, in June 1975, he related a fascinating story to his cellmate. This was shortly after the conclusion of the inquest into the death of Sandra Rivett, the nanny found bludgeoned at the Lucans’ home in Belgravia.
Hill knew Africa. He had recently spent time working in Swaziland and had then travelled by road across Mozambique to catch a boat back home to Britain.
A man called Dr Barry Hill claimed to have spent two days with Lucan in Mozambique in June 1975. Lucan is pictured in the Isle of Wight in 1963
According to Hill, he had spent two days and nights with Lucan, who was calling himself ‘James’, and a Portuguese girlfriend, Maria, in April of that year.
He told his cellmate he had come down for dinner on this first night, sat at a table alone and ordered a bottle of wine.
Shortly afterwards, a couple staying locally sat down at an adjoining table and the three struck up a conversation.
They went on to visit a series of bars together. As the evening drew to a close, ‘James’ became highly emotional and spoke about his three children back in England whom he could never see again. According to Hill, ‘James’ then claimed to be Lord Lucan.
Hill’s cellmate reported back to the prison governor and in turn the Lucan inquiry team were alerted. But there were no diplomatic relations with Mozambique and the lead was never followed up.
It was when this paper serialised ex-detective chief superintendent Roy Ranson’s bestselling 1994 book, Looking For Lucan – The Final Verdict, that the Mail put up a £100,000 reward for information about the peer’s whereabouts or fate. Ranson had been the lead detective on the case from the night of the killing.
The move generated huge publicity and the Mail’s then most senior reporter, the award-winning David Williams, was secretly tasked with working alongside the police.
Williams said: ‘We received more than 200 letters from all over the world from readers who claimed they knew or suspected Lord Lucan to be living locally.’
Ranson and Scotland Yard agreed to sort through the letters and pick out those with the greatest potential.
The correspondence came from around the globe, including South America, the US, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Canada – and Africa, which the Yard had long thought to be the mostly likely hiding place.
Detective chief superintendent Roy Ranson, left, the lead detective on the case from the night of the killing, is pictured with detective chief inspector David Geering
‘I did not see all the letters but the Yard selected ”six of the mostly likely”. All were in South Africa. I was aware of three others that interested me – one in Kenya, one in Botswana and one in Zimbabwe,’ said Williams.
‘I argued strongly that all should be checked but was told the Yard’s focus was South Africa and so should mine be.’
At the time, he said, there was a strong belief among the detectives that, after leaving the home of Susan Maxwell-Scott, Lucan had crossed into France by ferry or plane, then travelled to Portugal. And that there he was picked up by a boat which took him to the port of Beira in Mozambique.
A yacht was known to have travelled from Portugal to Mozambique at the right time and there was paperwork to prove it.
Williams, who spent several weeks in Africa investigating potential suspects, continued: ‘What gave it additional weight at the time was the work of [the Mail’s legendary foreign correspondent] Peter Younghusband, who had investigated years earlier and, I was told, had established the boat’s arrival and the fact a well-spoken, tall Englishman had disembarked in Beira, stayed in a hotel, and not returned to the boat.
‘We were obviously aware that Lucan’s brother Hugh, who he was said to be close to and [who] claimed he was innocent, lived in Johannesburg. Hugh had moved there shortly after Lucan vanished and kept a low profile.
‘I always believed Kenya was as likely as South Africa as a place to build a new life and identity with the strong links to the UK Establishment, the UK military and so on.’
Lucan’s younger brother Hugh Bingham passed away in 2018. But before his death, he gave an intriguing set of interviews stating he believed that his brother was an innocent man and had lived until 2004.
Lucan’s younger brother Hugh Bingham, who passed away in 2018, said the Earl had fled with the help of wealthy friends because he felt there was no prospect of a fair trial
Bingham said his brother had fled with the help of wealthy friends because he felt there was no prospect of a fair trial – and possibly because violent gangsters were chasing him over unpaid debts.
Somewhat bizarrely, Bingham claimed he was writing a fictional autobiography in which he imagined himself as Lucan and gave a detailed description of his escape and his whereabouts.
He was asked by a Mail journalist when he had last seen his brother, to which Bingham replied they had not met for many years – but refused to elaborate.
Speaking in 2016, he said: ‘John had no option but to flee. He would have considered his chances of a fair trial to be very slim. I knew he was innocent. I did not believe anything Veronica [Lady Lucan] said.’
On an earlier occasion, he had said: ‘I know for a fact that my brother died in 2004 and that his grave is in Africa.’
- Special reporting: Simon Trump
