A Different Class of Murder Read online

  The report in The Times continued:

  The CORONER: And you went?

  Witness: Yes, I went and fetched some one from 36 South-Street. When I got back with ----- (the witness here dropped her voice – she was thought to say ‘friend’ – and the question was not repeated) I heard of the discovery that had been made.

  The census from 1871 confirms that 36 South Street, off Park Lane, was the home of the 3rd Earl of Lucan. At the age of seventy-two he was still in the market for ‘friendship’: his regime of one meal a day, which he insisted was all a man needed to keep himself vigorous, was clearly working some sort of magic. Lord Lucan was called as a witness at the Dixblanc trial, where he testified that having cashed a cheque for £80 (a huge sum, equivalent to some £10,000), he had given half the money to Madame Riel.

  Lucan’s evidence has a repressive air, as one who does not wish to give away too much. In answer to a question about Riel’s character, he said: ‘Like a good many French ladies, she was a little vive. I hardly know an English word that would describe her better. She was hasty. I don’t go beyond that.’ One can see him standing there, grand but not entirely at his ease. The 3rd Earl was a man accustomed to uncomfortable public speaking; almost addicted, in fact, to going head-to-head with adversaries. In 1847 he had faced the House of Lords and stridently defended his conduct towards his starving Irish tenants. In 1856 he spoke at great length before the inquiry into the ill-conducted Crimean War, explaining his actions and shouting down censure. Nevertheless this was rather different, to have one’s lady friend throttled by a servant and be obliged to discuss her in public: a bizarre situation.

  Marguerite Dixblanc was sentenced to death, despite the fact that the jury found premeditation not proven. Her foreignness had created its own prejudice, as had her appearance. She was described as resembling ‘the class of Irish coster-monger women who are almost daily charged with drunkenness and assault’. Away from the hothouse of the Old Bailey, however, justice prevailed: the sentence was commuted to penal servitude for life.

  Of course the most fascinating aspect of the case was not, as the arguments in court had it, whether or not Dixblanc’s intention had been to commit murder. It was the fact that this grim crime had taken place in Park Lane, of all places, in one of London’s sacred postcodes. Death in a pantry, in W1: how was it possible?

  Murder in such a setting was rare, almost as rare as murder committed by the aristocracy. The natural home of domestic murder was the suburb. Sex murderers operated in what were then the wilder frontiers of Whitechapel and Soho.

  Yet in the mid-twentieth century a handful of murders took place on upmarket territory. They were domestic, in their way, although no mystery lurked within the human dynamic. In 1923 Marguerite Fahmy, a sumptuously upmarket adventuress whose ex-lovers included the future Edward VIII, was acquitted of shooting her husband, Prince Ali Kamel Bey Fahmy, in their bedroom suite at the Savoy Hotel. Her defence was that she had been subjected to violence and sadistic practices: the prejudice, in this instance, was fiercely against the domineering man. Whatever the truth of her story that she had fired in self-defence, Madame Fahmy played the feminine part of victim to perfection.

  In 1932 Elvira Barney, the daughter of a rich baronet, shot her unfaithful boyfriend at her Knightsbridge mews. There are parallels with the Ruth Ellis case in 1955. Mrs Ellis had also been played for a fool by her lover, to the point where she eventually snapped and killed him; the extenuating circumstances were powerful, but she was hanged all the same. By contrast, Mrs Barney had an expensive and caring defence. She made a pitiful figure in court – ‘Knight’s Daughter Collapses’, blared the headlines – and she commanded public sympathy. It was as though nobody could quite believe that a woman who appeared in Tatler, and whose family home was in Belgrave Square, was capable of murder.

  There was no such difficulty in the case of Arthur Robert Boyce, tried in 1946. The setting for this crime was 45 Chester Square, at the calm white heart of Belgravia, in a house rented by King George II of Greece. A housekeeper, Elizabeth McLindon, had been engaged; somewhat astonishingly, given the status of her employer, she was a former prostitute, but had got the job on the strength of some splendid references forged by her fiancé, Arthur Boyce. What Miss McLindon did not know was that the man she hoped to marry had a wife already, and had served time for bigamy.

  In June 1946 the King of Greece paid a visit to Chester Square, and was surprised to find no housekeeper there to greet him. The police were called. They broke down a locked door on the ground floor, and found the body of Elizabeth McLindon seated at a table. She had been shot in the back of the head. Presumably she had discovered rather too much about Boyce’s past, and become a nuisance. By a quite extraordinary oversight, Boyce had left some of his letters among her belongings. He was quickly arrested, found guilty at the Old Bailey, and hanged.

  Chester Square leads directly off Lower Belgrave Street, where the murder of Sandra Rivett was committed on 7 November 1974. In fact Chester Square may have played its part in the events of that night. Although very little of what happened is corroborated fact, it is likely that the 7th Earl of Lucan rang the doorbell of 51 Chester Square at around 10pm, an hour or so after the murder. He had then – again this is only probability – telephoned the house and tried to speak to Madeleine Florman, an acquaintance, who lived there with her husband. ‘Madeleine?’ he said. ‘I know you...’ Then he hung up.

  Just a couple of minutes’ walk from what was then the Florman house stands 46 Lower Belgrave Street: the setting for the most famous of those rare murders committed behind London’s serene frontages, in the postcodes of the rich. The house gives nothing away. It is tall, slender, restrained. To its left is Eaton Square, where the 7th Earl of Lucan lived as a boy. Behind is Eaton Row, the mews built for the horses and carriages used by the Lower Belgrave Street families, where Lucan’s wife has lived since 1976. Everywhere is seemliness and symmetry: the clean lineaments of money. Belgravia is a place of order and grace, created in the late Georgian era when Thomas Cubitt laid the groundwork on some marshy meadows owned by Robert Grosvenor, later the 1st Marquess of Westminster. Once known as the Five Fields, the land had been a haunt of thieves, ‘beloved by bull-baiters, badger-drawers, and dog-fighters’.4 But this bloody history was subsumed into Cubitt’s glorious dream of stucco. It became the home of prime ministers, of the aristocracy, of Alfred Lord Tennyson and Vivien Leigh: a white island untouched by the lapping tide of London.

  Yet in the midst of it all is a house that stands not just between its similarly stately neighbours, but alongside 39 Hilldrop Crescent, in whose cellar Crippen buried his wife, and 85 Claverton Street, where Adelaide Bartlett’s husband was filled with liquid chloroform. Like these, 46 Lower Belgrave Street is a totemic address in the history of English murder. The imagination seeks to penetrate the façade of these homes, to conjure the moment when the confusion of violence spilled over a lace counterpane or a kitchen floor. But what tantalizes is that the façade is maintained. Mayhem is screened behind the polite formality of door, brick and window. This is the paradox that enlivens English murder, and makes it the stuff of Agatha Christie and the Cluedo board: Lord Lucan, in the kitchen, with the lead piping.

  And 46 Lower Belgrave Street has added totemic value, because its façade is all the more impenetrable, because it stands within the white island of London, because earls do not commit domestic murder. It is the place where the domestic murder became magnified, by contact with a world in which it did not belong.

  Earl Ferrers, hanged in 1760, had killed with the open disregard for consequence that characterized the aristocrat. Nevertheless his crime had aspects of something more recognizable. At its roots lay two of the classic motives of domestic murder: a catastrophic marriage, and money.

  The earl, who like Lord Lucan was aged thirty-nine at the time of the killing, was a gambler and a heavy drinker: also like Lucan. To some degree, Ferrers was mentally unbalanced; yet it was his
countess, Mary, who was treated as a madwoman. This, it is generally claimed, was the situation in the Lucan marriage. Mary Ferrers had sought to escape her husband, and accordingly Ferrers held her prisoner at the family home in Leicestershire.

  This situation was quite familiar in the eighteenth century, particularly among the titled classes, where pride and inheritances were at stake. While some husbands went down the ‘criminal conversation’ route, others took a different kind of vengeance. In 1700 the Earl of Anglesey tried to arrest his wife, as she went to and from the House of Lords in pursuit of a legal separation; in 1744 Lord Bellfield, suspecting his wife of adultery, held her at a house in Ireland for thirty years until her death. It could be dangerous to crave autonomy, or equality.

  It was not until 1891 that the practice of wife-confinement (by then very rare) was ruled unequivocally illegal. Mary Ferrers was only released after a writ of habeas corpus was obtained on her behalf. She was examined by doctors and found to be sane. Eventually Mary was able to use her confinement as evidence of cruelty but, as was usual in these cases, Ferrers was not charged. The man whom he would later shoot, the steward John Johnson, had given evidence in Mary’s favour.

  There were no children from the Ferrers marriage; had there been, this would have meant another fight, since until 1839 the presumption under law was that the father got custody. There was then the question of money. Without a properly drawn-up separation deed, a wife was financially at the mercy of her husband, but the Ferrers estate, which was in trust and restricted the earl’s hitherto hysterical spending, granted Mary an income. Johnson collected property rents for her.

  Ferrers therefore seethed with resentment against his wife on two counts: her success in the case, and her claim upon money that he wanted for himself. She had won the day, in fact. An earl would behave like a gentleman if he lost to his friends at cards, but losing to a wife was another thing altogether. Perhaps Ferrers would have killed Mary, if he could have got his hands on her. Instead he did the next best thing, and attacked the servant who had taken her part.

  The 7th Earl of Lucan, whom it is generally accepted had sought to kill his estranged wife, had similarly lost a court case: for custody of the three children from his marriage. He had also been preoccupied with money. His estate was held in trust, and supplied him with an income that had become grotesquely inadequate. After the Lucans separated, his wife had possession of the family home at Lower Belgrave Street, which he was obliged to maintain. He gave her an allowance, while also paying rent on a flat for his own use. He received around £12,000 a year from trusts, and at the time of the murder had debts of some £65,000.

  Thus was set up a classic scenario for domestic murder: emotional motive, financial cause. If Lord Lucan had wanted to get rid of his wife, he could not, as his ancestors had done, simply throw money at the problem. He had none to throw. As with Dr Crippen and his class in the years before divorce on demand, so with a debt-ridden earl in the year of 98 per cent top rate taxation. Murder would have presented itself as the only option that would remove the disruptive element, and restore the status quo.

  Nor could Lord Lucan claim any kind of privilege of peerage. Those days were over. Indeed one of the most striking things about the aftermath of Sandra Rivett’s murder was that, in the court of public opinion, an earl was the worst thing that a murder suspect could be.

  The Earl of Pembroke had got away with killing two men, simply because of who he was. He had sailed along in a world peopled only by his own kind, and if the lower orders raged or even knew about his doings, it was a matter of no importance whatsoever. Three hundred years later an earl no longer bestrode the airy spaces of his own life. The world had come to meet him. Lord Lucan was seen as representing the old ways of the aristocracy, and was judged according to the new mores of egalitarianism. Thus while justice was appallingly easy on Pembroke, it was especially severe on Lucan; for what he was, as much as for what he was perceived to have done. Prejudice, that inescapable irrationality, was against him.

  The fact that the victim was a nanny – a servant – merely emphasized the lordly image. Sandra Rivett may have been murdered by mistake, but the connection was still there with those who had slaughtered the lower orders like so much vermin. What added a layer of murky paradox was the manner of Mrs Rivett’s death. An earl, a man who thought himself better than the rest of us, hadn’t even had the style to shoot or brandish like his swaggering forebears. He had killed, in fact, in a way strongly reminiscent of Marguerite Dixblanc: in a basement kitchen, with vicious blows. A master killing a servant, in the way that a servant had killed a mistress: it is hardly surprising that people should have been so shocked, mesmerized, sanctimonious and gleeful. Do earls commit murder? Damn right they do.

  In 1974 the case was called ‘The Upstairs, Downstairs Murder’,5 in easy reference to the then wildly popular television drama, set in the early years of the century, describing the lives of a Belgravia family and its staff. The series compelled millions, and forty years on nothing has changed: Upstairs, Downstairs has simply been replaced with Downton Abbey. Class does not go away. It is as though the British, or perhaps the English, feel that if they let go of their obsession they will have nothing with which to replace it. The sweetly naive may have believed that class was abolished in the 1960s, when Lord Lichfield became a photographer and rock stars pulled posh girls at Annabel’s. Of course what really happened was that a pseudo-aristocracy began to grow, that of the rich and famous, while towards the old aristocracy deference segued into resentment. But the fascination remained, potent as ever.

  The perception is still cherished that a posh accent is the voice of complete command; that David Cameron and his public school cabinet are, beneath their Boden, the representatives of the mad officer class who ordered the Charge of the Light Brigade. Possibly this is a safer belief than the admission that power today lies with the supranational class of the super-rich. The Duke of Westminster, who received an estimated £1,000 a day in rents in the 1870s, still owns much of Belgravia, but rows of stucco houses stand like so many bank-vaulted Picassos, the uninhabited acquisitions of foreign money. The only privately owned house on Belgrave Square belongs to the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska. The Clermont Club, where Lord Lucan gambled, is owned by a Malaysian conglomerate. Berkeley Square, where the club stands, belongs to a Middle Eastern sovereign wealth fund. Coutts and Co., which handled the Lucan family trust, is part of the Royal Bank of Scotland, whose hapless fiddlings in the global financial markets were revealed in 2008.

  By 1974, the year of the Lucan murder case, it was perfectly clear that Britain no longer belonged to the aristocracy. It had been clear for years, in fact, but now the signs were positively blazing, to those who wished to see them. Oil money gushed freely over London, in what was described as an invasion by ‘the white gowns of a new and suddenly universal priesthood of pure money’.6 Crockfords gambling club established an ‘Arab Room’, for the people who were actually spending proper money. The Victoria and Albert Museum staged an exhibition entitled ‘The Destruction of the Country House’. Union leaders, who had the upper hand in their death struggle with the government, were known as ‘barons’. Len Murray, who ran the Trade Union Congress, had more power in his little finger than Lord Lucan ever wielded in his entire life.

  And the murder of Sandra Rivett symbolized, with an absolute clarity, the collision of worlds. If Lord Lucan were guilty then he had killed with an aristocratic contemptuousness, but also with a desperate, secretive brutishness. If he had indeed made a failed attempt at domestic wife-murder, he had done so through lack of money. An earl without means, like the 7th Earl of Lucan, was a peculiarly vulnerable creature, naked beneath his ermine. But in the public consciousness his background became a confirmation of guilt.

  For he had lived like a lord, even in 1974, traversing the terrain of Belgravia and Berkeley Square with all the old casual grandeur of his forebears. He had looked like a lord, although the pockets of his
Savile Row suits were filled only with IOUs. Perhaps the difference between then and now is that, today, even the luxury of his aristocratic delusions would be impossible. He was the last of his kind. The murder of Sandra Rivett made that clear, too.

  *1 For further details of these eleven titled murderers, see Appendix I (page 377).

  *2 For further details of these cases, see Appendix II (page 380).

  PART I

  The Lucan Myth

  ‘I met Murder on the way – He had a mask like Castlereagh – Very smooth he looked, yet grim…’

  SHELLEY, The Mask of Anarchy, 1819

  The famous murders all become myths, and that myth is not necessarily a distillation of truth. It is, more precisely, a distillation of our perceptions. It has a different kind of truth, symbolic rather than factual.

  The myth of the Lucan case is a parable about class: a tale of aristocratic hubris. Every element in the story has been seen through that prism. The myth contains some truth, of course, but it is not the whole truth. Indeed it is not above telling lies. This book will go on to tell a different story, because the myth can’t be allowed to have things all its own way. Nevertheless there is nothing to be done with it. You can’t kill a myth. It is the way that a story settles, and however much you shake it up it will always fall back into position. It is the favoured version, the one that people have decided upon.

  Moreover, this particular myth has a tremendous power. Lucan symbolized the old and terrible ways, so casting him into hell was, and continues to be, a peculiarly satisfying act of national catharsis.

  Forty years of newspaper articles prove as much. One can pick out the phrases at random, from any point between then and now: Lord Lucan was a ‘murderous hooray Henry’, the ‘unacceptable face of privilege’ who ‘after a jolly night’s gambling, bludgeoned his kids’ nanny to death’. His ‘eyes are arrogant and exude a dull-witted authority’. His victim, ‘the Little Miss Nobody, was firmly kept in her lowly place’. His friends were ‘an ugly bunch of right-wing boobies’. ‘If that’s how members of the “higher human strain” behave, thank God for the humble vermin.’1