Where did Lord Lucan end up?

International police forces, the public and journalists have never found Lord Lucan.

There have well been over 30 books written about the death of Sandra Rivett and Lord Lucan’s subsequent disappearance.

Most of the books about Lucan tend to start with the moment of high drama - with the murder. The authors love to go into the detail about how Sandra was hit six, seven times over the head with a lead pipe before being bundled up into a US mailbag.

After that they describe Lucan’s drive to the home of Susan Maxwell-Scott, his ever more frantic phone calls, his last scribbled letters. And that’s the last they know. To all intents and purposes, that two hour meeting with Susan was the last time on earth that a human being was prepared to admit to seeing the 7th Earl of Lucan.

And after that - well, for the authors and the journalists, not to mention the general public, Lucan’s life and my story has been a blank canvas.

There was of course the car and the missing boat. But you could paint any picture you wanted. Take your pick: Drowned at sea as his scuppered boat sank to the bottom of the Channel; whisked abroad by his cronies at the Clermont Club; or even suicide and being fed to the tigers at John Aspinall’s zoo.

Most of the writers have been utterly certain that they have managed to track Lucan down. (And invariably they use the expression “lying doggo”. Lucan happened to use the excruciating expression 'lying doggo' in one of the last letters that he ever wrote as Lord Lucan, and since then it has cropped up in every single book about him.)

Along with the books, there have been hundreds, if not thousands, of sightings. He’s been spotted in Africa, the Orkneys and even as far afield as the Antarctic, where he’s apparently been whiling away my lonely life on top of an ice floe.

Most of these sightings have usually ended up in the papers, along with a grainy photo of Lucan - though for all their use, they might as well have used the pictures to prove the existence of the Abominable Snowman.

The truth, though, is that despite all their myriad claims that Lucan’s been hunted down to India, Africa, or South America, not a single person has managed to lay a glove on him.

The story of Lord Lucan can be found in William Coles' brilliantly edited
Lord Lucan: My Story