From the moment a distraught, blood-splattered woman screamed, “Help me – he’s killed the nanny!” and burst through the doors of the Plumbers Arms, a Victorian pub around the corner from Buckingham Palace, the case of Lord Lucan has never faded from popular imagination. “It’s the Loch Ness Monster of unsolved murders,” says Bill Coles, author of one of several books about the case. “We all want to know what really happened to Lord Lucan and where he is now.”
Indeed, Lady Veronica Lucan, whose dramatic pub entrance triggered one of the biggest manhunts in history, once drily told me, “I have come to quite enjoy keeping up with the sightings of my late husband.”
The police and most of Lucan’s family agree that he most likely died soon after bludgeoning the family’s nanny, 29-year-old Sandra Rivett, to death, then attempting to kill Veronica. Yet in the 48 years since his disappearance, on the night of November 7, 1974, the 7th Earl of Lucan has been “found” in dozens of places, including the Kiwi township of Marton, a backpacker hostel in Peru, a remote Indian ashram, a Moscow road gang, a beachfront bar in the Bahamas and living in an abandoned Land Rover in a Mozambique safari park.
The latest sighting places the fugitive earl living in seclusion at a Buddhist convent near Brisbane. According to Professor Hassan Ugail, a British specialist in
