by Fifty years ago today, Lord Leamhcán disappeared after being accused of murdering his family’s mistress, Sandra Rivett, and a long, knotted mystery began to unravel.
In the half century since, theories have proliferated as to the whereabouts of Lemchán, who quickly became the world’s most famous missing person. There are unverified “sightings” from India to Australia. There is so much interest in his case, in fact, that even friends from Leamhcán’s former inner circle continue to speculate about his fate.
But now, according to one former associate, the truth can finally be revealed. Lord Richard John Bingham, 7th Earl of Lancashire, was rushed abroad in 1974 by the then Earl of Suffolk, Michael Suffolk, the source says: “I have it on 100 per cent authority that Lancashire was sent out of the country that little . plane of Mickey Suffolk.
The claim that Suffolk – who died in 2022 and was the subject of speculation for Rupert Campbell-Black, the hero of Dame Jilly Cooper’s novel Competitorsrecently adapted by Disney+ – adds a new layer of intrigue to a case that has troubled the public for decades.
Certainly, the pair were close, says another source. “Mickey had an airstrip … in the early 1970s, and he was a great friend of Lucky’s,” says an old friend of the late Earl.
But doubts remain, they add. “While Mickey was certainly a daredevil and hell-bent on back then, smuggling a murderer might have been a bit much even for him.” Or, as Cooper herself once put it, Suffolk was blessed with “blue-eyed beauty” and was “the best of Rupert, without the awful parts”.
Linda, a Suffolk widow, who married the Earl nine years after Lemchán’s disappearance, is closely associated with the rumour.
“Although Lady Suffolk would have loved to help, she had never met Lord Lemcon and everything happened long before she met her husband. There is nothing to add,” says a spokesman for Charlton Park, the estate owned by the Suffolks for centuries.
With the man himself absent, on the run since 7 November 1974, it was perhaps inevitable that the fate of Lord Lemcháin would lend itself to rumours. But his case captured the public imagination like little else – he continued to attract attention despite being officially pronounced dead in 1999. This week, a new BBC series, Lemcansees Rivett’s son, Neil Berriman, still investigating the disappearance of Lemchkin.
The saga first began to unravel when Rivett was found brutally murdered, dumped in a mailbag in the basement of Lord Lucan’s Belgravia mansion. Police identified the Eton-educated gambler as the prime suspect after Veronica, the Dowager Countess of Lemcon, burst into a nearby pub, announcing that her husband had confessed to the crime and attacked she was when she tried to access the basement to check on Rivett. Lemchán, who was 39 at the time, was heard from a few hours after the murder, when he called his mother, claiming that a stranger had attacked his wife and asking her to collect the couple’s three children . His car – a Ford Corsair – was later found abandoned at Newhaven port.
Lemkin’s son, George Bingham, 8th Earl of Lemkin, is convinced that he long ago abandoned any hope of ever seeing his father again. But he says he will never be sure of his innocence or guilt, despite Lemchán being convicted of murder and attempted murder in absentia.
“Whether my father had a hand in the murder that night [in November 1974] or whether he himself was a victim of it, I’ll never know and I doubt anyone else will,” Bingham says as he reveals a never-before-seen picture of his father. The Telegraph. “In my own memories he was a kind, gentle and loving father.”
It seems that Lemkin’s friends, who appeared to be pulling together after Rivett’s death, are also keen to address his legacy.
“He was not talkative. Quite quiet and reserved – but not ghostly, haunting in fact,” says Anne Somerset, historian and sister of the current Duke of Beaufort, who saw Lemcan often at the Earl of Suffolk’s house at weekends over the next few months. up to his disappearance. Others remember him as “quite small but certainly not sinister”.
There is Algy Cluff, a former oil executive who knew Lemcan through the London private clubs of which the two were members, and who remembers him as a dog abuser. “I wasn’t really friends with him so I was surprised when the police came and searched my house in Dover after he went missing,” says Cluff. “Because I knew him from power boating on the Solent I guess. I had to intervene once when I was caught giving his dog massive electric shocks. The poor thing was in dire straits and a leg jumped in the air.”
But what do his former affiliates think happened to Lemchán? Within his former family and social circle, as outside, the theories vary wildly.
Somerset believes that Lemcon, who would have been 90 next month, went out on a ferry that left Newhaven, having abandoned his car beforehand. “As a man who ate a lunch of lamb chops at the same table in the same place in the winter and jellied lamb chops in the summer, eating bush meat in a jungle is unbelievable,” she says.
The current Lord of Lemchán is equally doubtful that his father ever made it abroad, to achieve a life hidden in some distant corner of the world. Bingham, he says, resents “any absurd story set in the back streets of Bangkok or Adelaide or Rio” spun out “with careless abandon”.
But others post lurid suggestions. A friend of Lemchán, Philippe Marcq, claims he went to a zoo in Kent where he shot himself before being handed over to the tigers after fleeing London on the night Rivett was killed.
Perhaps the most convincing theory is that of expert James Fox of Lemcon, who covered the case for The Sunday Times. Fox believes that Leamcán borrowed a boat and “scuttled” it off the south coast, putting himself under the water.
“There is no doubt in my mind that Lemchán had some sort of accomplice,” he says.
But the mystery remains as to when Lemchan escaped from the shores of Britain, and whether he had help or not, whether from the Earl of Suffolk at the time or otherwise. And even those who knew him are divided on the saga, which seems likely to do so for at least another 50 years.
“I think he could have gone to France and then turned around and got a ferry home, only to be pushed overboard by one of his brilliant friends,” says Emma Soames, Winston Churchill’s granddaughter and former granddaughter Tatler an editor who knew Lemchán and his wife.
“Come to think of it, I might have seen that in a movie.”
