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With an international wanted poster on his name and face that could be seen in newsagents around the world, Lord Lucan couldn’t hide forever, Scotland Yard investigators think in late 1974. On December 24, a miracle Christmas, they get one exciting call from her Australian colleagues.
A British national with a sophisticated accent and a tall, elegant build was arrested in Melbourne. The local police are convinced that the gentleman denounced by his landlord, who openly found him suspicious, is in fact the murderer on the run. The man flinches under the pressure and admits he staged his own death.
He’s in debt, has a similar build to the man he’s looking for, and is also a Member of the British Parliament. But he is not Richard John Bingham, seventh Earl of Lucan. His name is John Stonehouse, a minister in Harold Wilson’s government. Believed to have drowned on November 20 of that same year (two weeks after the murder of Sandra Rivett), he had fled, leaving his wife and their three children to imagine himself dead to start a new life with his young secretary .
Impressive attention to detail
It is reading Frederick Forsyth’s novel The Day of the Jackal (Chacal, in French) – or watching the film released in 1973, even if he found it more glorious to pretend he had read it – whose hero is an Englishman , which was commissioned to kill General de Gaulle, whom John Stonehouse imagines his coup.
Like the “Jackal”, he assumes the identity of a deceased man whose year of birth he shares. And he takes his attention to detail far: after selecting two men for his constituency’s electoral lists, he tracks down their widows, sympathizes with them and withdraws the information needed to complete the forged passports. Two are better than one.
For the record, the fate of John Stonehouse following his arrest is unexpected: Prime Minister Harold Wilson prefers not to impeach him in order to keep the Labor Party a slim majority in Parliament. The minister was not convicted until August 1976.
Three years later, while serving a prison sentence, Margaret Thatcher, upon learning that he had been a paid agent of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic’s military intelligence, decided that there was insufficient evidence to charge him. These were later supplied by the Czechs and their existence confirmed by MI5 in a book, The Defense of the Realm. John Stonehouse died in 1988, married to his secretary.
Lucan against the white queen
Suspects whom the police are hounding with as much excitement as Guy Joao in the Dupont de Ligonnès affair, there will be others; also missed appointments. In June 1975, a French woman claimed to have seen Lucan at her father’s restaurant in Cherbourg. We would have seen him play at the casino in Saint-Malo that same week. But the police raid on the Grand Hotel de Cherbourg is useless.
Would Lucan have been stupid enough to hide in the middle of the casino, just across the Channel? “I don’t believe it for a second,” his wife assured the press, who wanted to question him. “How do you want him to pretend to be French?”
“Journalists and photographers invented Lucan performances in the most remote corners of the planet to sink a few sunny days in five-star hotels.”
Roy Greenslade, Guardian journalist
The African track is more believable. Also in 1975, tells the author Laura Thompson, a Welsh doctor in Mozambique meets an Englishman who drowns his despair in beer – Lucan would have fallen very deeply. He would have told him that he dreamed of finding his motherland but was prevented from doing so because “he is Lord Lucan, wanted for murder”.
The investigation comes to nothing, but is revived five years later when a member of the Clermont Club is killed in a car accident. The police found an interesting entry in his address book: “Lord Lucan, c/o Hotel Les Ambassadeurs, Beira, Mozambique”. No Lucan in the hotel directory. However, if we go back to 1975, we discover a familiar name: that of Maxwell-Scott. As was Susan, the last person to officially see him alive. Susan and Ian Maxwell-Scott deny having set foot there. But could her boyfriend have used her name?
The following year, an acquaintance said he met him in South Africa, “his hair bleached blonde, with bangs and no moustache”. Then we see it in Zimbabwe and again in Zambia, but also in Macau, Hong Kong, the Bahamas… The myth of Lord Lucan becomes as popular as that of the white lady.
Happy Days: Veronica Bingham, a young Lady Lucan, and her first child, Frances, in 1964. | Screenshot by David O’Neill via YouTube
Part of the fault lies with the press. For Guardian journalist Roy Greenslade, “Thus was born one of Fleet Street’s toughest myths [quartier historique de la presse à Londres, ndlr]: Journalists and photographers who invent Lucan performances in the farthest corners of the planet to ensure they travel in first class and sink a few sunny days into five-star hotels”. It must have been a very nice time.
He quotes John Junior, editor of the Sunday Express tabloid, as advocating in a very British parable: ‘Never kill the fox. When the fox is dead, you have nothing left to hunt.” A maxim that some police officers have also adopted: there are countless books by former investigators that promise to reveal their truth, their whole truth about the case unfortunate Lucan made many others happy.
“Farewell to Mom”
One of the most disturbing developments in the Lucan case comes exactly ten years after he was found guilty of murder in absentia.
In early 1985, a rumor spread: Lucan’s body was about to be found, and excavations were underway in London. Mackenzie Moulton, a diver with the London Metropolitan Police, recounts the episode in a book, London Police Divers Log Book. Called in to survey part of the Thames, he and his team spend many hours recovering human remains. But they are not Lucan’s.
The day before, a man had come to a police station to confess to a crime. We hadn’t taken him seriously. When he returned, flanked by a lawyer, he had told his story: After an argument with his wife, he had hit her in anger. His head then hit a hard surface. She was dead. Nicholas Boyce would then have panicked – his children were in the apartment and he had to act quickly. He dragged the body into the bathroom, lifted it into the tub and cut it up.
“Before this terrible event, you were a hard working man of good character. You just couldn’t stand your wife.”
Judge James Miskin during the trial of Nicholas Boyce
Mackenzie Moulton found the 32-year-old woman’s hands, breasts and some other parts. The arms and legs were filleted and then cooked by Nicholas Boyce “to make them look like leftovers from Sunday dinner,” reports the New York Times. He then scattered them in various trash cans around town, including at a McDonald’s restaurant. At home he stuck his head in a bag, packed the kids in the car and drove a few miles before parking at the docks. Accompanied by the children, he walked to the middle of a bridge: “Say Mama goodbye,” he would have suggested before throwing his head in the water.
Mackenzie Moulton actually finds it in a supermarket bag under the bridge. A few minutes later she would have been swept away by the tide and the chances of finding her would have diminished. This is a crucial piece of evidence: the results of his analysis do not agree with Nicholas Boyce’s version. Although he tried to cover the tracks by cutting the victim’s neck at a specific point, Christabel’s body bears the marks of the vacuum cleaner cord that was used to strangle her.
Violent Disputes and Books on Criminal Law
Christabel Boyce, née Martin, was one of the Lucan couple’s young nannies ten years earlier. She should have replaced Sandra Rivett on the evening of November 7, 1975. She occasionally helped Veronica look after Frances, George, and Camilla, as she did during the trial. At the time, at the age of 22, she was Lady Lucan’s confidant. Christabel had also testified in court, referring to the anonymous telephone calls that regularly came in at the home on Lower Belgrave Street.
Little George Lucan, younger brother and future heir to the title, surrounded by his
Parents. | Screenshot by David O’Neill via YouTube
She later married Nicholas, a student at the prestigious London School of Economics. Journalist Maureen Cleave interviewed the couple’s relatives to understand what might have happened. Christabel worked and supported her family: two young children, a husband whom she had encouraged to pursue his PhD even after his scholarship had ended (he was always late or in conflict with his thesis director).
But her arguments had won out and Christabel had decided to leave him. Fearing for her life, she had opened up to an aunt and friends. She had even hidden items she cared about in her house because he had developed a habit of breaking those he cared about and had confided in them her concerns when he saw Nicholas reading textbooks on criminal law.
In her 1989 book Misogynies, journalist Joan Smith discusses the outcome of the trial: Defended by a young lawyer (whose website now boasts of his exceptional success in murder cases), Nicholas Boyce was sentenced to six years in prison.
Female perpetrator and male victim
“Before this terrible event, you were a hard working man of good character. [un good character, ndlr]. You just couldn’t stand your wife,” judge James Miskin said. “Any sane, self-possessed man could have acted like that if provoked like you.” The New York Times points out that Nicholas Boyce’s defense simply exploited a tradition of British law: the famous good character that allowed a man without precedent to prove that the violence he displayed was his partner’s fault, since she had done it, she deliberately increased the tension.
In the case of Nicholas Boyce, his wife allegedly broke his pipe and laughed at his manhood. It’s impossible not to make the connection with the Lucans, their toxic relationship, and Veronica’s insults provoked and then recorded by her husband. Could Christabel have been influenced by her former employer? Or by sharing his memories with Nicholas and instilling the idea in him?
Another question springs to mind: was Lucan hoping, by pushing his wife over the edge and calling her loved ones to witness his erratic behavior, to give himself a valid reason to, in the eyes of the law, be his own murder woman? Christabel’s diary is scrutinized. We find there all the confidences that Veronica, Lady Lucan, made him. They are mainly the result of a conversation of about eighteen hours between the two women in the months after the murder, when Christabel returned to babysit the couple’s three children.
Her description of the night of the crime corresponds in every respect to the version that Veronica gave the police on November 8, 1975. But is Veronica believable?
Episode 8 coming soon.