Respected journalist and author Bob Strange was actually inside the court room exactly 50 years ago when an inquest jury foreman named Lord Lucan as Sandra Rivett’s murderer
Respected author and journalist Bob Strange was inside the courtroom exactly 50 years ago when the historic verdict was returned. Here Bob remembers the details of the day:
I remember the courtroom was deathly silent as the jury foreman stood to give the verdict. There was a gasp from everybody when Lord Lucan was named as the killer. The coroner struggled to restore order as Lucan’s friends protested that he was NOT a murderer and reporters scrambled for the exit to file the story.
I spoke to Lucan’s mother later outside the court that day she told me: ‘It’s unjust… the jury heard only one side of the story. ‘John (Lucan) never had the chance to tell them what really happened so how could they come to such a one-sided verdict.’ What was truly amazing was the legal knots in which the Coroner became entangled as the hearing went on.
He did EVERYTHING possible to steer the jury away from naming Lucan as the killer. He and the police were terrified that the hearing would prejudice any future murder court case at the Old Bailey. The naming of the killer was the jury’s “f***-off” message to the coroner after they repeatedly told him that they did not believe they had been allowed to hear the full story from Lady Lucan.
Every time she spoke, the coroner kept ruling that wives could not give evidence against their husbands – as was the case at the time – so the jury realised they were never going to hear the truth.
But they correctly read between the lines that Lucan was the only possible killer. At the moment of the verdict, the astonishment in court made it one of the most dramatic pieces of courtroom theatre I ever saw.
It was in the days when reporters genuinely rushed out to the bank of telephones nearby in London’s Horseferry Road. There were no mobile phones in those days! There was a punch-up in the street as a girl reporter from an evening paper, in Coventry I think, was physically pulled out of a telephone box by a reporter from the Daily Telegraph. She was kicking the box and screaming at him – which added to the sense of chaos!
One funny little incident I can recall now. The police officer leading the investigation – Roy Ranson – told me that he always believed that killers could not resist returning to the scene of a crime.
So, just in case Lucan did the next best thing, and was loitering near the inquest hearing Roy arranged to have two plain clothes officers watching in a car outside. They NEVER of course saw Lucan – but they got very excited by one well-dressed man in a suit who seemed to take an unusual interest in watching the door of the court from a side street.
The officers grabbed him to check if he was Lucan, minus his trademark moustache, but he turned out to be a clergyman from Westminster Abbey who was just taking a stroll on his lunch break and ended up sitting in the back of a police car until they checked out his ID.