Lucan in all the wrong places

48 years after he disappeared, the tabloids still can't let go of Lord Lucan stories.

Lucan, John Bingham, 7th Earl of Lucan (1934 - ?), gambler and murderer. Apart from an unhealthy, and for their nanny fatal, affection for his children. Lucan’s only interest in life was gambling… on the death of his father, he inherited a quarter of a million pounds. By 1974, he was virtually bankrupt, having squandered his fortune playing games of chance at John Aspinall’s Clermont Club

On the night of 7 November 1974, Lord Lucan killed Sandra Rivett, the nanny of his two children, in the mistaken belief that she was his wife Veronica… some social commentators have pointed out that to papers such as the Daily Mail common criminals are on the run, while Lord Lucan is merely missing.

— Brewer’s Rogues, Villains, Eccentrics, William Donaldson (2002)

Twenty years after Willie Donaldson wrote that entry in his compendium of complete bastards, Lord Lucan is still “missing” in the pages of the Daily Mail and the Daily Mirror. On Saturday, the Mail splashed on a “world exclusive” Lucan left 3 Cluedo Cards In Car He Dumped while the Mirror’s front page today marks the 48th anniversary of Sandra Rivett’s murder and Lucan’s disappearance with a front page that screams Pic of Aussie OAP exact match for Lucan.

The Mail’s story has a distinct whiff of the Hitler Diaries about it; nearly 50 years after the crime, titillating and almost-too-good-to-be-true evidence is revealed. It claims three Cluedo cards from the Lucan family’s set — Colonel Mustard, The lead Pipe, and The Hallway — were found in the borrowed Ford Corsair that he abandoned.

The paper says this revelation is due to a “Daily Mail investigation”, but the presence of former Scotland Yard detectives as anonymous sources suggests another explanation: Cops topping up their pensions with fees from Associated Newspapers. How feasible is it for evidence that on-the-nose, related to one of the most infamous unsolved crimes in UK history, to go unreported for so long?

When the Mail writes…

Chillingly, this trio of cards appears to represent the killing of the nanny, Sandra Rivett, who was bludgeoned to death with a lead pipe. Blood was found on the basement stairs leading to the hall.

… it is with the credulous voice of someone who wants to believe. There is a complete absence of scepticism. Would the even more corrupt Met of the 1970s not have leaked or sold that story at the time if there was any truth to it? It’s a possibility that the evidence was not considered until the cold case review in 2004 but it’s such a slim one that it could slip through railings without breathing in.

The Mail attempted to pad out its story by continuing:

A separate preliminary report was written by a detective in the Met's Serious Crime Group in January 2002, and a copy of this has also fallen into the hands of Neil Berriman. Its forensic account of his mother's murder and what Lucan did afterwards has never been published in the mainstream media. Dispassionate, detailed, it is both disturbing and compelling.

The phrase "has never been published in the mainstream media” is key; Neil Berriman published the report on his website some time ago. But the Mail wants to give the impression here that it has done significant digging rather than being handed all of the ‘evidence’ it is cobbling together.

It’s understandable that Berriman, who only discovered Sandra Rivett was his mother in 2007, should be so desperate for answers, but the Mail and Mirror are engaged in unethical indulgence of his theories. In previous Mirror exclusives, Berriman said he “didn’t know” who killed his mother (2015) and that Lucan hired a hitman (2016).

Lucan has been a Fleet Street obsession since he first disappeared. Aside from the runaway MP John Stonehouse, who was caught after faking his own death in 1974 because people suspected he was Lucan, other phantom Lucans have included a double for Saddam Hussein (1976), a car thief in the outback (1979), a moustachioed man in Venezuela (1982), Jungly Barry in Goa (2003), and a man ten years younger and five inches shorter living in New Zealand (2007).

The Daily Mirror’s current ‘suspect’ was put in the frame in 2020 when Berriman told the paper that he had given evidence to the police that Lucan was “alive and living in a Buddhist commune in Australia”. That report said that the Metropolitan Police’s cold case unit was investigating the claim. A follow-up in 2021 — Cops: Mystery Brit in Oz is not Lucan — is archived on PressReader but is no longer on The Mirror website despite many other earlier Lucan-related stories still being accessible there.

Today’s splash is by The Mirror’s chief reporter, Andy Lines, who was bylined on both of the previous stories. The ‘new’ angle is that “a facial recognition expert says an elderly man living in Australia is a definite match for runaway murderer Lord Lucan”. Only, it’s not entirely new; a news story from the i newspaper on the claims in 2020 included this line:

Berriman also cites a facial recognition test which showed a similarity of 85 per cent between the man and Lord Lucan.

In the Mirror’s story, Dr Hassan Ugail, Professor of Visual Computing at the University of Bradford, makes even bolder claims, saying his algorithm is “never wrong” and that:

This isn’t an opinion, it’s science and mathematical fact.

Shades of Doctor Fox — neither a doctor, nor a fox, but keen on rooting around in bins — asserting with absolute confidence on BrassEye that:

There’s no evidence, but it is scientific fact.

Anyone who claims to have developed an infallible algorithm should be treated with extreme scepticism. Additionally, it’s highly unlikely that an ethics board would clear this use of facial recognition in a research context, despite Bradford University press office’s obvious glee at the front page publicity Ugail has bagged.

The journalistic ethics of this story are extremely dubious; while the paper has blurred the face of the man it accuses of being Lucan, it previously claimed he was “seriously ill, awaiting major surgery and virtually housebound”. Today, it says:

The Mirror tracked him down to a house in the suburbs of Brisbane.

When approached, he became stressed and agitated and declined to see us. He told his carers to tell us: “No, I’m not Lord Lucan.”

Now, this man might be “stressed and agitated” because he is Lord Lucan and the jig is finally up or he might just be an ailing octogenarian who is understandably disturbed by the arrival of hacks accusing him of being a notorious murderer.

That “just asking questions” tone is continued throughout the reporting:

He has been looked after by members of a Buddhist community and two young Englishmen have been acting as his carers.

But when they have attended open Buddhist prayer meetings with him, they have been surprised by the sudden appearance of two mystery men.

The Aussie-based OAP carries his birth certificate with him - wherever he goes and often looks at it.

Notice how these details are presented by an omnipotent reportorial voice that doesn’t provide any indication of how they were acquired. See also the repeated use of the weasel phrase “The Mirror understands” when introducing claims about the man’s past. The following paragraph in particular belongs to the category Quotes That Are Just A Little Too Perfect:

The Mirror understands that he told one friend: “I used to live in Belgravia and knew members of the Royal Family. In particular, I knew Princess Margaret. But some bad things happened in London and I had to leave.”

Meanwhile, there are lines like “Despite not working, he never seemed short of money,” which may prompt the less conspiratorially minded to grab Occam’s razor and cut through the thick fur of supposition; perhaps the old man has a pension.

Is it possible that Lord Lucan is alive? Yes. He would be 87. But to remain on the run and undetected for almost 50 years would require extraordinary luck, commitment, and resources. The Lucan that emerges from the biographies and interviews about him was not extraordinary at all but more of a mediocrity with the advantages of class on his side. The Daily Mirror is making an extraordinary claim and, to borrow from Carl Sagan, it requires extraordinary evidence to back that up.

An appeal to a magic algorithm is not enough and does not justify the harassment of a vulnerable old man. Using facial recognition to ‘solve’ a historical curiosity is another step towards making it a normal tool for the state to use against any of us.

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