It was 50 years ago this week, on 7 November 1974, that Lord Lucan fled what was destined to become the most talked about crime scene of the 20th century. A coroner’s inquest jury named him as the killer of Sandra Rivett, his children’s nanny, but his disappearance ensured that he was never convicted of the crime – or of the attempted murder of his wife, Veronica.
Stripping away the sensationalism of the story needn’t render it boring
Understandably, given the mystery that still envelops his precise actions and whereabouts, Radio 4 has chosen to mark the anniversary with a soft question rather than to provide answers. Soft, but also ironic: what is it about this case that continues to obsess us? Listeners may well rehash this as: why are we trawling through this story yet again?
Thankfully, the ten-part series has a brilliant narrator in the shape of historian Alex von Tunzelmann, who ponders the case like a latter-day Agatha Christie. She doesn’t glamorise it but interrogates it with intelligence. Her characters are friends and former acquaintances of the couple; authors and journalists who were there at the time. She shows that stripping away the sensationalism needn’t render the story boring.
The incidents she describes came following the breakdown of Lord and Lady Lucan’s marriage and a bitter custody battle over their three children. The couple were living in straitened times owing to Lord Lucan’s gambling habit. They could barely afford to pay the milkman.
The third episode does a great hatchet job on the peer’s character. It appears that he frittered away much of his time and money at the Clermont Club, John Aspinall’s casino, having first caught the gambling bug at Eton. And he drank to such excess that one of the people interviewed wagers that Aspinall’s tigers would have found Lucan too saturated with booze to swallow. Powerboats, Aston Martins, horses, toboggans – he lived life in the fast lane.
Lady Lucan doesn’t get away lightly either. She is remembered by Algy Cluff – who liked her – for her ‘acerbic wit’, and by others for her baseless snobbery. A countess by marriage, she once lobbed a cup of urine at a journalist. Could she have been the real murderer? ‘I don’t have a very high opinion of the value of human life,’ she was recorded as saying in one of several disturbing clips.
Yet, at the crucial moment, Lady Lucan put up a tremendous fight for her own life. One has to wonder, as Tunzelmann does, why her killer chose to attack her as he did – by trying to strangle her: ‘It would have been a lot easier to put poison in her tea.’ It’s usually assumed that Lord Lucan killed Rivett by mistake, believing her to be his wife. But Lady Lucan was tiny; Rivett wasn’t. You’d think a man would know his own wife in the dark.
From one moustachioed monster to another, Extrasensory, a podcast from Apple, tells the peculiar story of a milkman who believed in reincarnation. John Pollock lived in Hexham near Newcastle in the 1950s, where he liked to wear a cravat and three-piece suit and listen to classical music. A Walter Mitty character and late convert to Roman Catholicism, he was, in the words of someone who remembers him, ‘a peculiar fella’.
Tragically, he lost his two daughters when they were walking to church with a friend. A depressive mother of two mounted the kerb while driving under the influence of barbiturates and killed all three children. While most of Hexham went into mourning, Pollock became fixated with the idea that his daughters were about to be reborn. The birth of twin girls to his wife Florence the following year provided grist to his mill.
Pollock sought similarities between the two girls and their deceased siblings. One had a birthmark in nearly the same place as her late sister. When they were a little older, or so Pollock said, the twins spoke of having ‘memories’ of their sisters’ past lives. Perhaps there was something in this, but the way Pollock broadcast it, inviting in television journalists, limits his credibility.
The gripping eight-part series, narrated splendidly by Will Sharpe of White Lotus fame, was released in time for Halloween. Be warned, though: what begins as spooky becomes increasingly sinister. While Pollock is defended by some of his relatives as a genuine believer in life after death, he is damned by others as a cruel confidence trickster and sexual predator. His quest to prove the immortality of the soul proved costly to everyone but himself.
Comments