Did Rupert Campbell-Black whisk Lord Lucan to the Continent?
Fifty years ago today, Lord Lucan disappeared having been accused of bludgeoning his family’s nanny, Sandra Rivett, to death, and a long and knotted mystery began to unspool.
In the half a century since, theories have abounded on the whereabouts of Lucan, who quickly became the world’s most famous missing person. There have been unverified “sightings” from India to Australia. The fascination with his case is so enduring, in fact, that even friends from Lucan’s former inner circle continue to speculate on his fate.
But now, according to one former associate, the truth can finally be revealed. Lord Richard John Bingham, the 7th Earl of Lucan, was hurried overseas in 1974 by the then Earl of Suffolk, Michael Suffolk, the source says: “I have it on 100 per cent authority that Lucan was whisked out of the country on that little plane of Mickey Suffolk’s.”
The claim that Suffolk – who died in 2022 and was the muse for Rupert Campbell-Black, the hero of Dame Jilly Cooper’s novel Rivals, recently adapted by Disney+ – was involved adds a fresh layer of intrigue to a case that has perplexed the public for decades.
Certainly, the pair were close, says another source. “Mickey … had an airstrip in the early 1970s, and was a very great friend of Lucky’s,” recounts an old friend of the late Earl.
But doubt remains, they add. “Although Mickey was certainly a daredevil and hell-raiser back then, murderer smuggling might be a little extreme even for him.” Or, as Cooper herself has previously put it, Suffolk was blessed with “blue-eyed beauty” and had “all the best of Rupert, without the awful parts”.
Suffolk’s widow, Linda, who married the Earl nine years after Lucan’s disappearance, is tight-lipped on the rumour.
“While Lady Suffolk would love to have helped, she never met Lord Lucan and everything happened long before she met her husband. She has nothing to add,” says a spokesman for Charlton Park, the estate owned by the Suffolks for hundreds of years.
With the man himself absent, on the run since November 7 1974, perhaps it was inevitable that Lord Lucan’s fate would lend itself to rumour. But his case captured the public imagination like few others – continuing to attract attention despite him being officially declared dead in 1999. This week, a new BBC series, Lucan, sees Rivett’s son Neil Berriman continue to investigate Lucan’s disappearance.
The saga first began to unravel when Rivett was found brutally murdered, dumped in a mail sack in the basement of Lord Lucan’s Belgravia mansion. Police identified the Eton-educated gambler as the chief suspect after Veronica, the Dowager Countess of Lucan, burst into a nearby pub, announcing her husband had confessed to the crime and attacked her when she attempted to access the basement to check on Rivett. Lucan, then 39, was last heard from a few hours after the murder, when he phoned his mother, claiming a stranger had assaulted his wife and asking her to collect the couple’s three children. His car – a Ford Corsair – was later found abandoned at the port of Newhaven.
Lucan’s son, George Bingham, the 8th Earl of Lucan, is adamant that he long ago abandoned any hope of seeing his father again. But he says he will never be sure of either his innocence or guilt, despite Lucan being convicted of murder and attempted murder in absentia.
“Whether my father had some hand in the carnage that night [in November 1974] or himself became a victim of it, I will never know and I doubt anyone else will either,” Bingham says as he reveals a previously unseen picture of his father to The Telegraph. “In my own memories he was a kind, gentle and loving father.”
Lucan’s friends, who appeared to close ranks in the wake of Rivett’s death, now appear keen to address his legacy too.
“He wasn’t talkative. Quite silent and reserved – but he wasn’t haughty, quite endearing in fact,” says Anne Somerset, a historian and sister of the current Duke of Beaufort, who frequently saw Lucan at the Earl of Suffolk’s house at the weekend in the months leading up to his disappearance. Others remember him as “rather dim but certainly not in the least sinister”.
One person who demurs from this line, however, is Algy Cluff, a former oil executive who knew Lucan through private London clubs at which they were both members, and remembers him as an abuser of dogs. “I wasn’t really a friend of his so I was astonished when the police came and searched my house in Dover after he went missing,” says Cluff. “Because I had known him from a bit of power boating on the Solent I suppose. I once had to intervene as I caught him giving massive electric shocks to his dog. The poor thing was in very great distress and leaping about a foot in the air.”
But what do his former affiliates think happened to Lucan? Inside his family and former social set, as outside of it, the theories vary wildly.
Somerset is of the opinion that Lucan, who would be 90 next month, pitched himself off a ferry that left from Newhaven, having abandoned his car beforehand. “As a man who ate a lunch of lamb cutlets at the same table in the same place in the winter and jellied lamb cutlets in the summer, to be eating bush meat in a jungle is implausible,” she says.
The current Lord Lucan is equally sceptical that his father ever made it overseas, to carve out a life in hiding in some far-flung corner of the world. Bingham is resentful, he says, of “any absurd narrative set in the backstreets of Bangkok or Adelaide or Rio” spun out “with carefree abandon”.
But others offer up lurid suggestions. A one time friend of Lucan’s, Philippe Marcq, claims he made it to a zoo in Kent where he shot himself before being fed to the tigers having fled from London on the night of Rivett’s killing.
Perhaps the most convincing theory is that of Lucan expert James Fox, who covered the case for The Sunday Times. Fox believes Lucan had borrowed a boat and “scuttled” it off the south coast, sending himself under the water.
“There is no doubt in my mind that Lucan had an accomplice of some sort,” he says.
But the mystery of whether Lucan successfully fled British shores, and if he had help or not, be it from the then-Earl of Suffolk or otherwise, endures. And with even those who knew him divided on the saga, it seems likely to do so for at least another 50 years yet.
“I think he might have got to France then turned around and got a ferry home, but was pushed overboard by one of his fed-up friends,” says Emma Soames, a granddaughter of Winston Churchill’s and a former Tatler editor who knew Lucan and his wife.
“Though thinking about it, there’s a chance I might have seen that in a film.”