“I haven’t found him successfully in more exotic places than anyone else,” he said. “I spent three glorious weeks without him in Cape Town, magical days and nights without him in the Black Mountains of Wales and wonderful and successful short breaks without him in Macau, Hong Kong or even the Green Turtle Kay. in the Bahamas where you can find anyone.” Now, once again, the hunt is on for the man who murdered his family’s nanny, Sandra Rivett, in Belgravia, London, on November 7, 1974 and then disappeared. It is now claimed he could be an 87-year-old man living in a Buddhist community in Australia. The evidence comes from facial recognition expert Professor Hassan Ugail of the University of Bradford. “It’s him,” he reportedly told the Daily Mirror. “That’s not an opinion, it’s a fact.” Neil Berriman, Rivett’s son, had asked Ugail to analyze photos of the man in Australia along with photos of Lucan or John Bingham through an artificial intelligence algorithm. The 87-year-old man approached by the paper denied, through his carers, that he was Lucan. Berriman is posting details of the search on his website, which currently includes Ugail’s report. “My mission is to keep my mother’s memory very alive and to seek justice,” he states on the website. “She is not ‘just the nanny’, she is the victim of a violent crime made secondary because her killer was a lord, a lord who was protected and who disappeared abroad with the help of his rich and powerful friends rather than face justice. “ Contacted by the Guardian, Ugail said: “I cannot confirm 100% that it is Lord Lucan. It looks uncannily like him – worth investigating further.” He said he did not know when he conducted the investigation that it was related to the Lucan case. A Silicon Valley company has produced similar results to Ugail’s. In response to an inquiry by the Guardian, the Metropolitan Police said they were made aware in December 2020 of information about an Australian citizen in connection with the case. “In April 2021, following extensive investigations and inquiries conducted by the Australian Federal Police on behalf of the Metropolitan Police, the individual was permanently cleared from the investigation.” They said the investigation into Rivett’s death remained open “as is the case with all unsolved murders. Any significant new information will be taken into account.” The Met conducted a cold case review in 2004 without reaching a conclusion about what happened to Lucan. The new claims, published on Monday, the 48th anniversary of the murder, came as the Daily Mail reported that “cryptic new clues to the Lord Lucan mystery can be revealed … in the form of Cluedo cards found by detectives at the time: the Colonel Mustard, the lead pipe and the hall.” The Mail added: “Nearly 50 years after his family’s nanny was found beaten to death by a lead pipe, it can be revealed that these three cards from the aristocrat’s board game were discovered in his abandoned car. The trio of Cluedo cards appear to chillingly represent the gruesome murder of Sandra Rivett – raising the question of whether her death was planned.’ Officially, Lucan has been dead for over five years. In 2016, a death certificate was issued in the supreme court allowing his son, George Bingham, to finally inherit the family title. At the time, Bingham said, “I’m very pleased with the court’s decision in this matter … It’s been a long time coming.” The latest story is one of thousands over the years about the case. Lucan’s sightings were one of the regular stories broadcast to the media by the late prankster, Rocky Ryan. This was much appreciated by journalists when Fleet Street newsrooms were more relaxed about sending staff out on speculative intelligence, especially in the winter months if they ‘spotted’ him somewhere warm. Reports placed him everywhere from Botswana to Guam and Mozambique to Melbourne. In 2003, it was supposedly spotted in Goa, India. The man identified was actually a folk singer from St Helena. In a letter to the Guardian, fellow singer and comedian Mike Harding told how he laughed until he cried when he saw a picture in the Sunday Telegraph of the “missing Lord Lucan”. “To think that someone could mistake my old friend Barry Halpin for Lord Lucan,” he said. Lucan’s wife Victoria told Sky News at the time: ‘It’s incredibly boring. I could never imagine my husband looking so pathetic.” Lady Lucan committed suicide in 2017. Garth Gibbs, when recounting his career in not finding Lucan, noted: “As that brilliantly bigoted and gruff old columnist, John Junor, once remarked: ‘Madam, you never want to shoot the fox. Once the fox is dead, there’s nothing left to hunt.’ The fox, unlike Lucan, shows no signs of death yet, and with the 50th anniversary of the killing approaching, there could be many more such sightings.
