Detectives Reopen Lord Lucan Murder Mystery Case 30 Years After the Crime

AP ^ | Oct. 15, 2004

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Detectives Reopen Lord Lucan Murder Mystery Case 30 Years After the Crime

By Jane Wardell/Associated Press

LONDON (AP) - Detectives have reopened an investigation into one of Britain's most famous murder mysteries: the disappearance 30 years ago of the dashing Lord Lucan days after his children's nanny was bludgeoned to death and his wife beaten with a lead pipe. Debate on Lucan's fate has been a popular national pastime since he vanished, leaving behind a bloodstained car near the English coast.

Some say the aristocrat drowned himself in the English Channel, others believe he fled abroad to live under an assumed identity.

Now, despite a 1999 declaration by the High Court that Lucan is officially dead, Scotland Yard is reopening the case.

Detectives said Saturday they plan to employ techniques not in use when the case was last reviewed 10 years ago, like DNA profiling and computer imaging.

Experts already have generated an image of how Lucan might look as a 69-year-old man using "age-progression" software.

Scotland Yard said the case is being reviewed "just to ensure all the potential lines of inquiry have been followed and pursued, and to see if any new ones come up as a result of DNA techniques."

It said detectives still receive regular calls from the public providing information about the case.

Richard John Bingham, the Seventh Earl of Lucan, has not been seen since the night of Nov. 7, 1974, when nanny Sandra Rivett was battered to death in the family's home in London's wealthy Belgravia district.

Lucan's wife, Veronica, was hit in the back of the head repeatedly when she ran downstairs to investigate. She later told police her attacker was her husband. She fully recovered from the attack.

Detectives believe Lucan intended to murder his wife - his marriage has been described as "grimly unhappy" - and killed the nanny by mistake.

Warrants for Lucan's arrest on charges of murdering Rivett and attempting to murder his wife have never been served.

Lucan's friends and family have long maintained he drowned himself in the English Channel. Inside the car he left behind, police found a length of lead pipe and bloodstains matching the types of both Lucan and the nanny Sandra Rivett.

But at least 70 Lucan "sightings" have been reported since his disappearance, in such far-flung places as Melbourne, Australia, and Johannesburg, South Africa.

Some conspiracy theorists speculated Lucan might be tempted to sneak an up-close peek at his daughter's London wedding in 1998, but even the most avid watchers failed to spot him. He was declared dead the following year.

There was another flurry of interest last year when a former senior Scotland Yard detective claimed pictures of a gaunt, bearded man taken in the Indian state of Goa in the early 1990s were of Lucan.

Former policeman Duncan MacLaughlin claimed in his book, "Dead Lucky," that Lucan lived undetected in India under the name Barry Halpin in India from 1975 until his death in 1996.

Friends of Barry Halpin later came forward to insist the dead man was not Lord Lucan and was in fact a former teacher from the town of St. Helens in northern England.

Another retired detective, Superintendent Alec Edwards, who was in charge of the Lucan files between 1990 and 1995, welcomed the reopening of the inquiry.

"I very much believe that Lucan is still alive," Edwards told the Daily Mail newspaper. "I believe he was not the sort of man to take his own life. His actions after the incident were not consistent with someone planning to kill himself."

Edwards said it was likely that Lucan had fled to Africa, where he had many contacts.

[Oztrich Boy]

Experts already have generated an image of how Lucan might look as a 69-year-old man using "age-progression" software.

And we all know how well that works

Michael Jackson "at age 44"

[RebelTex]

LOL - gotta love it.