Murder by Mistake Read Online Free PDF

team quickly demolished that possibility. Even if no cars were parked outside Number 46, a passing vehicle, even traveling very slowly, would not have had a view into the basement. Lucan would have had to have been standing on the pavement in order to see what he claimed.

    Lord Lucan
Portrait
    According to John Lucan, he dashed into the house. He still had a front-door key and did not comment on the fact that a safety chain was usually stretched across the inside, but was not in place that night. Once in the hall, Lucan would have turned a sharp left down the basement stairs. The first anomaly in his story occurs at once. The police had found the light bulb out of its socket, so Lucan must have hurtled down there in the total darkness at break-neck speed. It explains why his footprint should have been found in the blood on the floor and why he could only describe Veronica’s attacker as a “large” man. It doesn’t explain, however, how he could have seen
anything
in the basement from pavement level just by the aid of a street lamp.
    Lucan and the intruder presumably struggled, but he skipped over that and merely said that the man got away. Because the basement door led to a garden from which there was no apparent escape, he must have gone back up the stairs he had just come down and out of the front door. At this point, Lucan claimed that Veronica, covered in blood and hysterical, was so disoriented that she assumed
he
was her attacker, and the two of them fought.
    After the struggle, as they both calmed down, she accused him of hiring a hit man to kill her. This accusation made a certain amount of sense; after all, Veronica knew about the private detectives. If they could spy on her and help kidnap her children, what else might they be persuaded to do?
    Lucan could not handle this situation. Having helped Veronica onto the bed and having gone to get towels to tend her wounds, as a distraught but loving husband would, she had panicked and rushed out of the house. She would raise hell, get sympathy on her side. No one would believe him. He would end up charged with attempted murder. No one, in Lucan’s version of events, mentioned the dead nanny, Sandra Rivett. Already, it was as though she didn’t exist.
    The two versions of events at Number 46 stand in stark contrast to each other. In a way, they are a gruesome extension of the custody war that the Lucans had fought in court back in July, except that now it was for real. And it was about murder.
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Chapter 9: Friends
    News of the murder spread like wildfire. Lucan’s friend Stephen Raphael was telephoned by another friend who had seen the police breaking into 5 Eaton Row soon after 11 PM. He phoned Charles Benson, who had been to school with Lucan, and he in turn phoned the Gerald Road police station to find out what was going on.
    Within hours, a wall of silence had been built around the missing John Lucan. A Chelsea resident told the police, “Murder is not the sort of thing we do.” Whether she knew it or not, the last aristocrat to be executed was Lord Lovat (for the unlikely combination of treason and rape), and that was back in 1747! Britain had officially abolished the death penalty in 1969, so there was no risk of death for Lucan. Even so, he faced life imprisonment. “Such a pity,” said another, whose name was found in Lucan’s address book. “Nannies are
so
hard to find these days.” Detective Chief Superintendent Roy Ranson, who would be kinder in his book on the case, was furious at the time. He called it “the horse-play of the upper classes.” Another (anonymous) detective said, “You know how the Mafia work? They all stick together. And this lot stick together like shit to a blanket.” In the eyes of many members of the aristocratic clique around Lucan, the police were decidedly working-class and little better than servants.
    Some time later, Susan Maxwell-Scott wrote a defense of their position to the
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