On the evening of Thursday, November 7, 1974, in the Belgravia district of London, Sandra Rivett, who lived in the household of the estranged wife and children of the 7th Earl of Lucan, was killed. The earl's wife was injured the same night and told police that her husband was responsible. By the early hours of the next morning he had left London, and he was never found. In June 1975 a coroner's jury at Westminster found that he had murdered the victim. He was never arrested, never charged before a criminal court and never tried. That finding, reached in his absence, is the only verdict any court has given on the death.
Every later stage of the case has been a legal proceeding about a man who was not there. Scotland Yard took out a warrant it could never serve. An inquest exercised a power that Parliament had already been advised to abolish, and did abolish two years later. A quarter century on, the High Court let his family deal with his estate but could not let his son take his title. In February 2016, under a statute that had come into force sixteen months earlier, a High Court judge declared him presumed dead. The murder inquiry itself has never been closed.
Richard John Bingham was born in 1934, heir to an Irish earldom created in 1691. He was educated at Eton, did his National Service as an officer in the Coldstream Guards and went to work for Brandt's, a merchant bank in the City of London. Banking did not hold him. A single win of £26,000 at chemin de fer, against a salary of about £500 a year, persuaded him that he could live by the tables, and he left the bank to gamble for a living. He became a fixture at a private gaming club in Mayfair. The early luck did not last, and the losses that followed were heavy.
He succeeded to the earldom in the 1960s. His marriage broke down, and in 1973 the earl and his wife separated. By the autumn of 1974 they were living apart in London.
The victim died in Belgravia on the evening of November 7, 1974. In letters he sent to friends and relatives after he left London, the earl protested his innocence of any killing and gave his own account of the night, which no court ever tested.
He left London that night. A car he had been using was found at Newhaven, the Channel port on the East Sussex coast, a few days later. Within days of the death Scotland Yard obtained a warrant for his arrest, and the Metropolitan Police opened a murder inquiry with the earl as the man it wished to find.
The inquiry moved to the coast. In the last week of November 1974 police, some of them with tracker dogs, worked through Newhaven and the country around it, and by then the earl was formally wanted for murder. Nothing they did in Newhaven brought him in. No officer ever served the warrant.
There the case stopped short of a courtroom. The man the police wished to question was absent, there was no defendant to bring before a court, and there was no plea to take. What remained open to the system in 1975 was the coroner's inquest into the death, which still carried a power to name the person responsible and to send him for trial.
The inquiry did not end when the inquest did. In 2004 Scotland Yard carried out a cold case review of the file. It brought no charge.
The inquest into the death opened before the Westminster coroner and a jury in June 1975, after a delay of more than seven months. The jury heard the evidence gathered by the Metropolitan Police, together with that of the earl's wife.
Under the law of the time, an inquest jury that returned a verdict of murder had a duty to name the person it found responsible, and the coroner had a duty to commit that person for trial. The jury in this case took 31 minutes. It found that the 7th Earl of Lucan had murdered the victim.
That finding was not a conviction. An inquest is not a trial. The man it named was not present to answer it, had no counsel to test the evidence on his behalf and never appeared before any court afterward. No criminal court has ever heard the case.
The power the Westminster jury used had been under sentence for four years. In 1971 the Committee on Death Certification and Coroners, known by its chairman's name as the Brodrick Committee, published its report as Command Paper 4810. Among its recommendations was that the duty of a coroner's jury, when its verdict was murder or manslaughter, to name the person responsible should be abolished, together with the coroner's duty to commit that person for trial.
In July 1975, a few weeks after the verdict, the government told both Houses of Parliament that it would act on that recommendation, and in October it said it meant to deal with the problem in advance of wider legislation.
The opportunity came with the Criminal Law Bill. The bill became the Criminal Law Act 1977. Section 56(1) provided that at an inquest into a death by murder, manslaughter or infanticide, "the purpose of the proceedings shall not include the finding of any person guilty" of those offenses.
The rule outlived the section that created it. Section 56 was repealed and its rule carried into section 11(6) of the Coroners Act 1988, which added that "a coroner's inquisition shall in no case charge a person with any of those offences." The law now in force, section 10(2) of the Coroners and Justice Act 2009, provides that an inquest's determination "may not be framed in such a way as to appear to determine any question of" criminal liability "on the part of a named person." From 1977 onward, no inquest in England and Wales could do what the Westminster jury did in 1975.
For more than two decades the earl's legal position did not change. He had been named by an inquest jury, the warrant for his arrest was still outstanding, and he was not known to be alive. Scotland Yard did not close its file. In 1998 the Metropolitan Police said again that the case was "open" and that he was still a suspect.
In 1999 the High Court declared the earl dead for probate purposes. The order allowed his personal representatives to deal with his property and his estate. It did not permit succession to a hereditary title, and it did not end his marriage.
The limit came from the law of the time. Without a death certificate a person was treated in English law as alive, and the ownership and control of a vanished person's property did not change because he had vanished. A family needed one proceeding to obtain a grant of probate and another, under different rules, to end a marriage. No single order settled the fact of death for every purpose.
That gap mattered at once. Later in 1999 the earl's son asked to take up his father's title and his father's seat in the House of Lords, and the request was refused. The same year Parliament reformed the membership of the House of Lords, and the earldom was among the hereditary titles that no longer carried a seat.
The law changed with the Presumption of Death Act 2013, which came into force on October 1, 2014. Under section 1, any person may apply to the High Court for a declaration that someone who is thought to have died, or who "has not been known to be alive for a period of at least 7 years," is presumed to be dead. The court must refuse an applicant who is not a spouse, civil partner, parent, child or sibling unless it finds that the applicant has "a sufficient interest" in the outcome. The court has jurisdiction where the person was domiciled in England and Wales on the last day he was known to be alive, or had been habitually resident there for the year before.
Section 2 obliges the court to make the declaration if it is satisfied that the person has died or has not been known to be alive for at least seven years, and to include a finding on the date and time of death. Section 3 gives the declaration its force: it is "conclusive of" the presumed death and of "the date and time of the death," and it is "effective against all persons and for all purposes," including the acquisition of property and the ending of a marriage. The court may later vary or revoke a declaration if the person is found to be alive.
The procedure is set out in the civil procedure rules. The claim is brought in the Chancery Division or the Family Division of the High Court and must describe the claimant, the absent person, the circumstances of the disappearance and the steps taken to trace him. It must be served on close relatives and advertised in at least one newspaper circulating near the person's last known address. Anyone with an interest may oppose the claim by filing a notice of intervention, and a directions hearing follows between 28 and 56 days after the claim is issued.
In October 2015 the earl's son applied to the High Court under the 2013 Act for a declaration that his father was presumed dead. The public notice of the claim appeared that month in a local London newspaper.
The court first considered the application on Tuesday, December 8, 2015. A full hearing was set for early 2016.
The full hearing took place at the High Court in London on Wednesday, February 3, 2016. It was short, and by the time it ended it was unopposed. The judge found that the earl "had not been known to be alive for a period of at least seven years".
The court declared the 7th Earl of Lucan "presumed to have died on or after 8 November 1974." A death certificate followed. Under section 3 of the Act the declaration became conclusive for all purposes, and the earl's only son succeeded to the title as the 8th Earl of Lucan.
The declaration settled the earl's legal status. It said nothing about guilt. The 1975 inquest finding stood as it had stood for forty years, untested by any criminal court.
The civil declaration did not end the criminal inquiry. In February 2018 the Metropolitan Police said that the murder investigation was still open. In January 2020 the force's cold case unit confirmed again that the case was "open."
The police file has also been tested, more than once, under the Freedom of Information Act 2000. In September 2014, June 2016 and February 2018 the Information Commissioner decided complaints from people who had asked the Metropolitan Police for its material on the death and the earl's disappearance. Each time the force confirmed that it held the information and withheld it under section 30(1), the exemption for investigations and proceedings, and section 40(2), the exemption for personal information. Each time the Commissioner found that the force was entitled to rely on section 30(1), and in 2014 and 2018 he held expressly that the public interest favored keeping the material back.
The force then changed its approach. Facing a fresh request, it declined even to confirm or deny that it held any information, relying on sections 30(3) and 40(5) of the Act, and in October 2022 the Commissioner upheld that stance. A further complaint was decided in June 2024. The force had again begun by neither confirming nor denying, then changed course and withheld the material under sections 30(1) and 40(2). The Commissioner held that section 30(1) applied and that the public interest favored maintaining it, while finding that the force had breached sections 1(1) and 10(1) of the Act by answering late. No step was ordered in any of the five decisions.
No charge has been brought. The warrant of 1974 was never served, and the only legal finding of guilt is still the one the inquest jury made in June 1975.
The 1975 inquest found that the earl had murdered the victim. That finding was never tested in a criminal trial, and in law he was never convicted of any offense. In letters he wrote after leaving London he denied responsibility.
Whether the earl died in November 1974, or later, is unknown. The 2016 declaration fixed his presumed death "on or after 8 November 1974" as a legal finding under the seven-year rule, not a finding of fact about how or where he died.
1934: Richard John Bingham is born.
1960s: He succeeds to the earldom as the 7th Earl of Lucan.
1971: The Brodrick Committee report (Cmnd. 4810) recommends ending a coroner's jury's duty to name the person responsible for a murder.
1973: The earl and his wife separate.
November 7, 1974: The victim dies in Belgravia, London; the earl's wife is injured and names her husband.
November 8, 1974: The earl is gone from London by the early hours.
November 1974: A car he had been using is found at Newhaven; Scotland Yard obtains a warrant for his arrest; police work through the Newhaven area in the last week of the month.
June 1975: An inquest jury at Westminster finds, after 31 minutes, that the earl murdered the victim.
July 7, 1975: A Home Office minister tells the Commons the Brodrick recommendation will be acted on "when legislative opportunity affords."
July 23, 1975: In the House of Lords, a government minister says the coroner's jury's duty to name a guilty person will be removed.
October 13, 1975: A Home Office minister tells the Lords the government means to act in advance of wider legislation.
1977: Section 56 of the Criminal Law Act 1977 bars inquests from finding any person guilty of murder.
1988: The Coroners Act 1988, section 11(6), carries the bar forward.
1998: The Metropolitan Police say the case is "open" and the earl is still a suspect.
1999: The High Court declares the earl dead for probate purposes; his son's request to take the title is refused.
2004: Scotland Yard carries out a cold case review of the file.
September 17, 2014: The Information Commissioner upholds the Metropolitan Police's refusal to release its file under section 30(1).
October 1, 2014: The Presumption of Death Act 2013 comes into force.
October 2015: The earl's son applies for a declaration of presumed death.
December 8, 2015: First High Court hearing; the objection to the orders sought is withdrawn.
February 3, 2016: The High Court declares the earl "presumed to have died on or after 8 November 1974"; his son becomes the 8th Earl of Lucan.
June 20, 2016: The Commissioner again upholds the refusal under section 30(1).
February 1, 2018: A third decision of the Commissioner upholds the refusal.
February 2018: The Metropolitan Police say the murder investigation is still open.
January 2020: The Metropolitan Police cold case unit confirms the case is still "open."
October 25, 2022: The Commissioner upholds the force's refusal to confirm or deny holding information.
June 17, 2024: The Commissioner upholds the force's reliance on section 30(1) and finds its reply was late.