Mystiskt försvunnen lord dödförklarad efter 41 år

Richard John Bingham, 7th Earl of Lucan (born 18 December 1934; presumed dead in 1981), commonly known as Lord Lucan, was a British peer suspected of murder who disappeared without trace in 1974. He was declared dead in 1999 and his death certificate issued in 2016. He was born into an Anglo-Irish aristocratic family in Marylebone, the eldest son of the 6th Earl of Lucan by his marriage to Kaitlin Elizabeth Anne Dawson. Evacuated during the Second World War, Lucan returned to attend Eton, then from 1953 to 1955 served with the Coldstream Guards in West Germany. He developed a taste for gambling and, skilled at backgammon and bridge, became an early member of the Clermont Club. Although his losses often exceeded his winnings, he left his job at a London-based merchant bank and became a professional gambler. He was known as Lord Bingham from April 1949 until January 1964. Once considered for the role of James Bond, Lucan was a charismatic man with expensive tastes; he raced power boats and drove an Aston Martin. In 1963 he married Veronica Duncan, with whom he had three children. When the marriage collapsed late in 1972, he moved out of the family home at 46 Lower Belgrave Street, in London's Belgravia, to a property nearby. A bitter custody battle ensued, which Lucan lost. He began to spy on his wife and to record their telephone conversations, apparently obsessed with regaining custody of the children. This fixation, combined with his gambling losses, had a dramatic effect on his life and personal finances. On the evening of 7 November 1974, the children's nanny, Sandra Rivett, was bludgeoned to death in the basement of the Lucan family home. Lady Lucan was also attacked; she later identified Lucan as her assailant. As the police began their murder investigation, Lucan telephoned his mother, asking her to collect the children, and then drove a borrowed Ford Corsair to a friend's house in Uckfield, East Sussex. Hours later, he left the property and was never seen again. The Corsair was later found abandoned in Newhaven, its interior stained with blood and its boot containing a piece of bandaged lead pipe similar to one found at the crime scene. A warrant for Lucan's arrest was issued a few days later, and in his absence the inquest into Rivett's death named him as her murderer. With the passage of the Criminal Law Act of 1977, the inquest into Rivett's death marked the last occasion in Britain when a coroner's court was allowed to make such a determination. Lucan's fate remains a fascinating mystery for the British public. Since Rivett's murder, hundreds of reports of sightings of him have been made in various countries around the world, although none has been substantiated. Despite a police investigation and huge press interest, Lucan has never been found, and is presumed, for legal purposes, to have died in 1981.