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Posted: 01-03-2002 02:53 Post subject: Whatever happened to Lord Lucan

Well guys, whaddya reckon?! Very Happy

Posted: 01-03-2002 03:01 Post subject:

He went off to South Africa
That's what I heard
either that or he's running Pickwick Papers, a newsagents here in Oxford...

Niles "Not Vanishing" Calder

Posted: 01-03-2002 04:25 Post subject:

Clearly, he's in an exclusive bridge club with Judge Crater, Ambrose Bierce, and Bela Kiss.

Posted: 01-03-2002 09:19 Post subject:

As I see it there are two main possibilities. He killed himself or he was spirited out of the country by his coterie of wealthy and influential friends.
Either way, he was officially declared dead in 1999 which allowed his son to succeed to the title and estate.

Posted: 01-03-2002 09:56 Post subject:

It took that long for him to be declared dead? Is this usual, or did many think him alive?

In America, you need seven years of "non-activity" for you to be declared dead.

Posted: 01-03-2002 10:10 Post subject:

If I remember correctly it is seven years in the UK too.Don't really know why it took so long in the case of Lucan though, some sort of legal entanglements. I think the family wanted to do it sooner

Posted: 01-03-2002 10:13 Post subject:

I heard he rode off into the sunset on Shergar. roll eyes (sarcastic)

How old would he be now? Is it likley he is still alive? I don't think he is. He probably went on the run and eventually topped himself. Otherwise one of our exclusive hungry journalists would have tracked him down by now.

Is it still the theory that he killed the maid because he thought it was his wife?

Posted: 01-03-2002 10:29 Post subject:

He chucked himself off the cross-channel ferry and is probably floating on the same lilo as Maxwell!!

Posted: 01-03-2002 10:53 Post subject:

A strange turn of events happened when David Hardy, a young Grenadier Guards officer, was killed in a road accident in Essex in 1980.

Whilst flicking through the young man's address book, an entry caught the police's attention :

Lord Lucan,
c/o Hotel Les Ambassadeurs,
Beira,
Mozambique.

Since then, it has been widely speculated that Lucan has been hiding out in Mozambique/Botswana, possibly on one of the large privately-owned game estates there, or under a new identity in South Africa.

The mystery deepened when staff at the Hotel referred the police to another hotel nearby, where an entry in the register showed that a Mr and Mrs Maxwell-Scott had stayed there. Susan Maxwell-Scott was visited by Lord Lucan on the night of the murder, but denied ever visiting Mozambique when quizzed by police.

Posted: 01-03-2002 11:15 Post subject:

If you have the kind of cash and contacts that Lucan had, 'disappearing' would be no problem at all, investigative journalists notwithstanding. Bin Laden, Radovan Karadic, various high-ranking Nazi's... the list is endless.
It would seem highly unlikely that he would use his own name, even as a source of misdirection,not least because it would start people looking again. Letting the trail go cold would be the only sensible option.

Posted: 01-03-2002 11:52 Post subject:

It was the childrens' nanny he killed, not the maid. And I think it's pretty obvious he was trying to kill his wife; as I remember, he jumped out and banged her over the head in a poorly-lit corridor, and the two women were of broadly similiar appearance. He had influential friends (and certainly got help from one or two of them straight afterwards), but I'm not sure he would have had enough ready cash available for a lifetime on the run - he gambled heavily, remember. Was there an insurance policy out on his wife?
Personally, I think he topped himself soon after, probably throwing himself off the Channel ferry.

Posted: 01-03-2002 11:54 Post subject:

He's living on a farm with Shergar

Posted: 01-03-2002 12:54 Post subject:

The problem being that the channel currents tend to deposit bodies quite well - eventually bodies will bloat with gas caused by decomposition and become quite bouyant, floating about and eventually ending up on a beach somewhere.

It's been estimated that you'd need a 300kg weight to keep a body down at the bottom of the channel for any length of time. No one person would be capable of lifting this themselves, so he'd have to be chained to the apocryphal "speedboat".

Posted: 01-03-2002 13:20 Post subject:

Posted: 01-03-2002 13:30 Post subject:

Lucan is still alive.
I remember My father telling me of a wealthy English Gent named Lewis Caan. My father travels in quite high circles and has worked for the government in various parts of the world. He talked about Hotels and shooting parties. The name stuck in my mind because at the time I was reading the Jungle book. It must have been some 12 years ago now.