On 7 November 1974, Lord Lucan vanished without a trace. Overnight, he abandoned his home in the lavish, white-pillared buildings of Belgravia, London, leaving behind a savage secret: in the basement, the 29-year-old family nanny, Sandra Rivett, had been bludgeoned to death. The barbaric murder he committed, and Lucan’s subsequent disappearance, made headlines around the world – and interest in the case has barely abated since.
The murder continues to horrify the nation, even 50 years since it took place. But, now, at the heart of this story lies another, lesser-known protagonist – a builder from Hampshire, named Neil Berriman. While the world knows Sandra Rivett as the Lucan family nanny, to Berriman, she’s his mother.
Berriman has dedicated the last 17 years to tracking down Lucan, putting his own life on hold in his determination. His search – the reams of research kept in a giant freight container in his builder’s lock-up – has taken him around the world, and he now believes he is close to accomplishing his goal. Berriman’s remorseless pursuit is chronicled in Lucan, a gripping new three-part documentary that begins on BBC2 on 6 November. In it, we see him travel to Australia to investigate the man he believes was responsible for his mother’s death – and perhaps finally reap justice for his mother.
“She is not ‘just the nanny’,” Berriman, 57, says. “She is the victim of a violent crime who became secondary because her killer was a Lord – a Lord who vanished with the aid of his rich and powerful friends, rather than face justice. “My motto is simple,” he tells me from his home, which he shares with his partner, Kim.
Berriman is a likeable, humorous man – but underestimate his terrier-like tenacity at your peril. “Sandra was my mum. How far would you go if it had been yours?” Yet, Berriman almost never discovered that he was Rivett’s son. Having been adopted as a child, it was only when he was 40 that his adoptive mother, Audrey, handed him a brown envelope to be opened at a time of his choosing. He seriously considered tossing it on a bonfire. “I thought, life seems to be OK. Why would I go disturbing it?”
Of course, curiosity got the better of him. Inside the envelope was a newspaper article about Rivett, and Berriman quickly pieced together the connection. Everything he had ever known until that moment crumbled in an instant. “It’s almost like you have to pinch yourself because this doesn’t happen, does it? What are the chances of you being the son of Sandra Rivett?
“Your real mother has been brutally murdered by an aristocrat who has gone on the run. So it was a real shock and took a lot of my emotional energy. It was very upsetting.”
The details of the murder are gruesome. Rivett was found in a mail sack in a huge pool of blood. Nearby lay a bloodstained lead pipe. Most people believe she was the very unfortunate victim of mistaken identity – Lucan and his wife had split acrimoniously and he had recently lost a bitter custody battle. The belief is that Lady Lucan, who was also viciously beaten at the top of the basement while her three children slept upstairs, may well have been the intended target.
Lady Lucan battled her assailant courageously and succeeded in fighting him off by biting his fingers and squeezing his testicles. She then managed to flee, soaked in blood, to a nearby pub, the Plumbers Arms, where she called the police. Lucan’s Ford Corsair was found abandoned in Newhaven, East Sussex. Its interior was drenched in blood; in the boot lay another length of lead pipe.
In 1975, an inquest jury concluded that Lucan had murdered Rivett. The police continued to scour the globe following leads. For example, in 2003, a former Scotland Yard detective believed that he had located Lucan in Goa, India, but the man turned out to be Barry Halpin, a folk singer from Merseyside. Lucan was never found and an official death certificate was issued in 2016.
However, the legend of Lucan has lived on in numerous books, films, dramas and documentaries which speculate about his fate. Many websites are dedicated to conspiracy theories about how the murderer got away. A whole industry of “Lucan-ology” has sprung up.
The earl’s friends and supporters maintain that he met his end in the English Channel soon after Rivett’s death. His friend Lord Aspinall claimed in 2000 that Lucan, “Had tied a stone around his body and scuttled the powerboat he kept at Newhaven and down he went.” He added that Lucan was now lying “250ft under the Channel.”
Still, his body has never been found. Like many others, Berriman is convinced that the aristocratic killer, who would now be 89, is still alive and that his powerful allies enabled him to escape.
His search has led him to Africa and then Australia, where he believes Lucan has evaded the police for several decades.
The investigation really opened up in 2010, when Berriman teamed up with a former BBC investigative journalist Glen Campbell, who had discovered a secret Scotland Yard intelligence file from 2002. The file revealed that police had credible information that Lucan was alive and living abroad under an assumed identity in the late 1990s. Berriman redoubled his efforts. First of all, he examined the theory that Lucan was living in Mozambique under the alias of “John Crawford”. Then, out of the blue, in 2017 Berriman got an entirely new steer.
He received a letter from someone in Perth, Western Australia claiming that an old man he believed to be Lucan was living under the false identity of a Buddhist monk out there and had confessed to Rivett’s murder. The correspondent had tracked Berriman down after reading about his campaign to locate Lucan. That proved to be a key turning point.
Berriman obtained photos of this elderly man and in 2022 gave them to facial recognition expert Professor Hassan Ugail. The professor declared that in his view they were a match for the fugitive peer. This was another event of enormous significance, Berriman remembers. “It was an incredible moment when Ugail actually said, ‘It’s the same individual.’”
His quest has had a further purpose. “There’s more to this than merely asking, ‘Where did Lucan go?’ It’s about family, isn’t it?”
Lucan was undoubtedly connected and had influential friends. It has been suggested that powerful forces helped him disappear. Was Berriman ever scared that they might try to shut him up? “No, I don’t feel frightened at all,” he replies. “ If I’d been worried, I’d never have taken it this far.”
“This is about me going on a mission and not giving up as I try to get justice and track down the man who murdered my mother. So even if you took Lord Lucan out of the equation, the story is still incredible in terms of a son trying to find the person who killed his mother.”
Looking back on all the upheavals of the last 17 years, is there any part of Berriman that wishes he had simply chucked that brown envelope on the fire and not unleashed all this emotional tumult? “A lot of people, not just journalists, but also friends, ask me that question.
“There are certainly occasions where I wished I had thrown the envelope on the fire, especially thinking about all the distress this investigation has caused. When family life becomes a bit difficult, then, of course, Kim is more than happy to say, ‘I wish you had thrown the envelope on the fire.’ She has always wanted me to give it up. She says, ‘Can we just have a normal life? And I can understand that.”
He adds, “People say to me, ‘Why are you doing this? You never knew her.’ But she’s still my mum.”
That family dimension is certainly central to the entire narrative. Soon after launching his investigation, Berriman began communicating with Lady Veronica Lucan via email. He found their correspondence heartening as Lady Lucan, who died in 2017, informed him what a special woman his mother was. “Veronica was very helpful in telling me what Sandra was like.
“Veronica and Sandra got on like a house on fire. Sandra came into the house as a bubbly, lovely person and brought Veronica out of her shell because Veronica was depressed and treated like shit, basically. It got to the point where Sandra was taking Veronica out to the pub.”
He continues, “Sandra was the sort of person who didn’t mess around. She’d say to Veronica, ‘Come on, we’re not having any of this. We’re going out tonight.’ The manager of the local pub says that Sandra managed to get Veronica behind the bar pulling pints for the clients. Isn’t that brilliant?
“You’ve got this lady who has just been hounded pretty much all her life and been told that she’s mad. She probably was very depressed, but Sandra managed to bring her out of herself. I think she lightened up the whole house.”
Berriman says that what he has found most rewarding about this turbulent, long-running saga is the opportunity, he hopes, to make his late mothers proud.
“I’ve taken on almost an impossible task to get justice.
“And I’m hoping that Sandra and Audrey would be really proud of what I’ve managed to do.”
‘Lucan’, a three-part documentary on the mystery, begins on 6 November on BBC2
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