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man who had hanged himself from a tree and the corpse had been there for three years. The Downs is a large area for the kind of thorough search required. Despite the cameras, the technology and the dogs, investigators found nothing. Eventually, because of the cost in manpower and ever-draining resources, the search there was scaled down and finally called off.
    The police reasoned that if any of Lucan’s friends was hiding him, they all had large country estates miles from the glare of London publicity, and white police patrol cars began turning up on the carriage drives of stately homes. Holkham Hall, an 18th-century house in Norfolk, was checked; so was Warwick Castle, which belonged to Lucan’s cousin. One of the more grisly rumors circulating was that Lucan had killed himself and arranged for his body to be fed to the tigers at Howlett’s, John Aspinall’s private zoo in Kent. Aspinall was less than helpful: “Don’t come that line with me, because if she’d been my wife I’d have bashed her to death five years earlier and so would you.”
    On the Monday following the murder, Michael Stoop received a letter from Lucan—the last communication, as far as is known, that anyone received from him. He took it to the police the next day, but the letter had been addressed to him at the St. James’ club. By throwing away the envelope, he threw away the all-important postmark, which would have told Gerring and Ranson where the letter had been sent from.
    “My dear Michael,
    I have had a traumatic night of unbelievable coincidences. However, I won’t bore you with anything or involve you [he already had, by borrowing the Corsair] except to say that if you come across my children—which I hope you will—please tell them that you knew me and that all I cared about was them. The fact that a crooked psychiatrist and a rotten solicitor [lawyer] destroyed me between them will be of no importance to the children. I gave Bill Shand Kydd an account of what actually happened, but judging by my last efforts in court no one—let alone a sixty-seven-year old judge—would believe me and I no longer care except that my children should be protected.
    Yours ever
    John”
    Most writers on the case have seen this as a sort of suicide note, Lucan’s farewell to the world. Perhaps it was…
    … except that in 2004, Lucan’s old school friend James Fox revealed to the world that Stoop had received a
second
note from Lucan. He couldn’t quite remember details, but he did remember the phrase “keys in glove compartment… in Norman St.… please forget you ever lent it to me… burn envelope.”
    www.crimescape.com

Chapter 10: Sandra

    Nanny Sandra Rivett
Victim
    The Earl of Lucan may have gone missing on the night of Thursday 7/Friday 8 November, but there is someone else missing from the case—the murdered nanny, Sandra Rivett. The media, then and now, refers to her death as the Lucan case, and her distraught parents back in 1974 were appalled that their daughter should be sidelined by the lord-loving English obsession with their aristocracy.
    She was born Sandra Hensby in the little town of Basingstoke, Hampshire, to a factory worker, Albert Hensby, and his wife, Eunice. The couple was too upset to identify their daughter in the morgue, but they told the police the story of an ordinary girl with an ordinary upbringing who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. One day, a novelist is going to rewrite the Lucan story with Sandra Rivett as the real target, and everything else, including the attack on Veronica, as a byproduct of that murder. That would be pure fiction. If the police ever considered it as a real possibility, that possibility vanished as soon as they had spoken to the Hensbys.
    Sandra had the usual string of boyfriends as a teenager. She was a pretty girl with a mass of dark brown hair and had married Roger Rivett, a security guard at Gatwick Airport, a few years before the murder. The marriage was not