Eighth November 1974. Norman Road is not the kind of street where an aristocrat would normally park their car. Prim, respectable but hardly regal, the residents of this row of modest, red-brick, late-Victorian homes in the quiet port town of Newhaven would still have been asleep when a Ford Corsair parked up at around 5am.  

The driver, spruce but a little more bedraggled than usual, wasn’t too concerned about the car; he usually drove a Mercedes but had borrowed the rather dowdy-looking Ford from a friend a few weeks previously. That friend was Michael Stoop. And neither he nor anyone else would ever see the Corsair’s driver, Lord Lucan, again.

What happened after Richard John Bingham, 7^th Earl of Lucan, closed the door of Stoop’s car and walked away down Norman Road is a question that’s frustrated and beguiled police, the general public, and myriad film and documentary makers for exactly half a century.

The Lucan case is one of the most enduring crime mysteries of all time; one that carries with it the tobacco and single malt odour of London gentlemen’s clubs, Belgravia townhouses, clipped accents and trimmed moustaches. Should you cast your eye over the grainy photographs from the time there’s also a deeper, more elegiac aroma of London’s pre-war aristocracy slowly ossifying in the austere bleakness of the capital in the early 1970s.

This was the environment inhabited by Lucan, a compulsive drinker and gambler whose life had long been in freefall before he murdered his children’s nanny, Sandra Rivett, and savagely attacked his estranged wife, Veronica Duncan.

Yet there is a different scent that is no less vital to the mystery. Far from the rich and indulgent bouquets of Lucan’s gambling club, Aspinall’s, is the redolence of sea spray, rotting groynes and petrol that permeates the town where the world’s most famous missing person was last seen alive.

By the time Lady Lucan had dragged herself to the Plumbers Arms [sic] pub in Belgravia, covered in blood and screaming that her estranged husband was going to attack their three children on the night of 7 November, Lord Lucan had vanished from London. Yet he would emerge, one final time, a few hours later, at the home of a woman who friends claimed had long held a flame for the soon-to-be fugitive.

Susan Maxwell-Scott was married to a gambling friend of Lord Lucan. On the night of the murder, she was already in bed at her home in Uckfield, East Sussex, when she was awakened in the small hours by a knock on the door.

Pouring Lucan a whisky and water, Susan gave him some writing paper and a pen. In his slanted, rather childish handwriting, he scrawled two notes; the first to his brother-in-law, Bill Shand Kydd, which contained the now infamous line that he needed to ‘lie doggo’ for a while after, ‘the most ghastly circumstances’ occurred.

A police officer outside 46 Lower Belgrave Street, SW1, the home of Lucan's estranged wife and their children

Lord and Lady Lucan on their wedding day

Claiming his innocence to Bill, the epistle reads as a final missive from an emotional and strained man that could easily be interpreted as a suicide note. His second letter, however, was infinitely more pragmatic, suggestive of an individual who intended to flee, rather than take his own life.

Detailing his dire financial situation, the second letter, signed ‘Lucky’, stated, ‘there is a sale coming up at Christie's 27 Nov which will satisfy bank overdrafts… The other creditors can get lost for the time being.’

The letters were blood stained, yet Maxwell-Scott proceeded to post them after pleading, in vain, that ‘Lucky’ should stay for the night and go to the police in the morning.

Lucan was adamant about leaving, and made the 16-mile drive to Newhaven in the Corsair; the boot of which contained items which continue to baffle investigators into the case. The car lay undisturbed for three days. By the time police located it, the story of the murder of Sandra Rivett and the missing Lord was making headlines around the world.

The contents of the boot seemed to indicate that Lucan was leaving clues for the authorities; perhaps a cryptic answer to the myriad questions as to what had occurred in his Belgravia townhouse. Kept secret until 2022, when a Scotland Yard cold case review of the Lucan mystery, which itself took place in 2004, discovered that three cards from the board game Cluedo, missing from the set Lucan owned in Belgravia, were found in the vehicle.

The cards were of Colonel Mustard (who Lucan bared an uncanny resemblance to), plus the lead piping murder weapon card (the tool Sandra was fatally struck with) and the hall location card, matching the area of Lady Lucan’s home where Rivett was killed.

Were these cards left by Lucan as some sort of murder confession? Or did someone plant them there? If Lucan was modelling his life on a murder-based board game, then he had no intention of staying around to face the consequences. The quiet, darkened, damp and narrow streets of Newhaven lead to a small port which today, as in 1974, is one of the lesser-known ferry crossing routes to France.

And yet there were no scheduled passenger crossings to the continent on the night that Lucan disappeared, a fact that only added to the mystery. Fresh light was only shed on the Newhaven element of the Lucan mystery in 2022 when a local councillor revealed that his father-in-law, a night watchman at the harbour, had noted the sighting of an ‘unlit boat’ departing from the harbour just before sunrise on 8 November 1974.

Graham Amy, who has also served as mayor of Newhaven, stated that Sid Clark (who died in 1980) told his son-in-law that he informed the police back in 1974 about his sighting of the vessel. But the page of his logbook which contained the information was ripped out by the police and never returned. 

Going on to serve as a Liberal Democrat member of Lewes Town Council, Graham stated that Sid ‘…was the watchman in the harbour at the time, in the west pier lighthouse, and he was there the same night the car was found. He told me about the boat when it came out that Lucan had been to Newhaven.’

Living on Norman Road at the time, Amy claimed that the police used his house to monitor Lucan’s Corsair in the coming days to see if the fugitive Lord returned.

If Lucan is ever found, then he would now be almost 90 years old. Sightings of him in the Algarve, India, Australia and Mozambique have all proved to be red herrings. Today, it’s not even possible to stand at the lighthouse where Sid Clark logged the blacked-out boat vanishing over the horizon. The west pier lighthouse was demolished two years after Lucan vanished; the Newhaven Port Authority, which now operates the harbour, has reported that all logbooks from the time were lost when the port was privatised in the 1980s.

Whether Lucan really did murder Sandra Rivett is a question that is still in doubt for many, despite the law ruling, in his absence, that he was the attacker in Belgravia that night. Lucan was legally declared dead by the High Court in 1999, but the circumstances surrounding the case remain a mystery.

Like the spume-flecked waters of Newhaven, it’s a story that ebbs and flows and never seems to settle to provide any sense of clarity.

The first episode of a new documentary on the case, Lucan, airs at 9pm on BBC2 on Wednesday 6 November 2024.

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