Lord Lucan and the death of the nanny
London, England, 1974
This case is a work of fiction. The characters, names, places and events in the game do not portray real people. The account below is a factual summary, based on public sources, of the case that served as inspiration.
On the night of Thursday, November 7, 1974, Sandra Rivett, 29, nanny to the Earl of Lucan's three children, was beaten to death in the basement kitchen of the countess's house at 46 Lower Belgrave Street, in Belgravia, London. The body was found in a canvas sack, near a bloodstained lead pipe, and the bulb on the basement stairs had been taken out of its socket and left on a chair. Sandra usually had Thursdays off, but that week she had swapped her night off.
Shortly afterwards, Countess Veronica was attacked at the top of the basement stairs, fought the attacker, bit his fingers and managed to flee to the pub on the corner, the Plumbers Arms, covered in blood, screaming that he had killed the nanny. The couple had been separated since January 1973; the earl, Richard John Bingham, a professional gambler drowning in debt, had lost custody of the children. That night he phoned his mother, went to the house of friends in Uckfield, in Sussex, and wrote bloodstained letters saying he had interrupted an intruder's fight with his wife. On November 10, the Ford Corsair he had been using, borrowed from a friend, was found in Newhaven, with another piece of lead pipe wrapped in surgical tape in the boot.
Sources
In the game
Swapped Day Off
London, Friday, November 8, 1974, 11 pm. Last night, shortly after 9 pm, the nanny Brenda Hulme, 29, was beaten to death in the dark basement kitchen of a terraced house in Belgravia. The body was stuffed into a canvas sack.
Lucan was never seen again after leaving Uckfield in the early hours of November 8. In June 1975, the jury at the inquest into Sandra Rivett's death named him as the murderer, the first time since 1760 that a member of the House of Lords had been so accused; since the nanny did not usually work on Thursdays, the most widely accepted theory is that the target was the countess. He was declared legally dead in 1999, and the death certificate was only issued in 2016. His fate remains unknown.
