Son of nanny murdered by Lord Lucan wants face-to-face talks with missing aristocrat’s family to handover evidence that he believes could prove he’s alive and living in Australia
- Lord Lucan vanished in 1974 after being accused of brutally murdering nanny
- Sandra Rivett’s son Neil wants to meet family face-to-face to show new evidence
- Neil believes an 87-year-old living in Australia could secretly be Lord Lucan
- Some experts looking into the claims said the man is definitely not the aristocrat
- Lucan has never been found and remains one of British crime’s biggest mysteries
The son of the nanny allegedly murdered by missing Lord Lucan wants to meet the vanished peer’s relatives to show them why he thinks an elderly man in Australia – who police have ruled out – is the notorious aristocrat.
Neil Berriman is convinced a British expat aged 87 is actually Lord Lucan and the killer of his mother Sandra Rivett.
He believes two facial recognition technique experts who told him a photograph of the man is a ‘match’ for pictures of Lucan before he vanished aged 39.
It is despite MailOnline seeing an analysis of the same man’s pictures, compared with Lucan’s, prepared by a Home Office-approved team of facial recognition experts which ruled him out as Lucan.
The nanny’s surviving son Neil Berriman, left, blasted police in 2020 for not arresting a man living in an Australian Buddhist commune who he claimed is her killer. Right, Eton-educated Lord Lucan
Nanny Sandra Rivett was beaten to death with a lead pipe in 1974. Her body was found in the basement kitchen of Lord Lucan’s Belgravia house
The man has also made categorical denials that he was Lucan, issued by his carers at a Buddhist retreat in Brisbane.
And the Met police say Australian officers had probed the identity of the pensioner and ruled out he was Lucan.
Mr Berriman said he is going to contact Lord Lucan’s son George Bingham to ask for for face-to-face talks.
Lord Lucan, who is accused of murdering nanny Ms Rivett with a lead pipe in the basement kitchen of his Belgravia home, is believed to have died after evading authorities for years, and theories that he may be living in Australia have previously been touted, then debunked.
George Bingham, 48, Lord Bingham, son of Lord Lucan arriving at the High Court in London in 2016
An elderly British Buddhist living in Australia is not the missing fugitive peer Lord Lucan, who disappeared in 1974 after murdering his family’s nanny, facial recognition experts have told MailOnline
What happened to Lord Lucan, and is he still alive? The four most likely theories about his disappearance
Theory one: Lucan drowned himself off Newhaven after murdering the nanny
Lord Lucan’s friend James Wilson, who gambled with him at London’s Clermont Club, said five years ago he believes Lucan killed himself after murdering Ms Rivet.
Mr Wilson said he filled his pockets with rocks and stones before jumping off his scuppered speedboat in Newhaven Harbour just hours after the killing.
He told the Telegraph in 2015: ‘I believe that when he realised he had killed the nanny, the remorse, guilt and panic led him to commit suicide. He must have realised he only had two options open to him; hand himself in or kill himself. Having lost the gamble he chose the latter’.
In an ITV documentary before her death in 2017, Lady Lucan said she believed Lord Lucan had jumped off a ferry shortly after the killing.
‘I would say he got on the ferry and jumped off in the middle of the Channel in the way of the propellers so that his remains wouldn’t be found’.
Theory 2: Lucan fled to Africa – and lived there quietly until he died in 2000
Shirley Robey, who worked for Lucan’s casion owner John Aspinall claimed in 2012 she overheard conversations with Lucan’s friend Sir James Goldsmith, father of Zac Goldsmith in the early 1980s.
She said the pair said Lucan was in Africa, adding: ‘ I knew he was hiding, I knew he was in Africa, I knew we were hushing it up. I knew he’d fallen out with his wife and I knew it was a major secret but for whatever reason I didn’t appreciate there had been a murder until some years later. If I’d have known, I think I would have handled things quite differently. In fact I know I would have done’. She claims she heard he died in 2000, in his mid-60s.
Theory 3: Lucan shot himself and was fed to a tiger called Zorra in a Kent zoo
Philippe Marcq, another of Lucan’s casino friends, told MailOnline previously that friends of the Earl disposed of his body at Howletts zoo near Canterbury, set up as a private zoo in 1957 by John Aspinall, another friend of Lucan’s.
Mr Marcq said he was told story by Lucan’s friend Stephen Raphael. It is claimed a pistol was offered to Lucan who took it, went into a room on his own and shot himself dead and the friends removed his body.
Mr Marcq said: ‘I was stunned when Stephen told me this. But I believed what he told me 100 per cent’.
Aspinall’s mother, Lady Osborne, the grandmother of former Chancellor George Osborne, apparently told police: ‘The last I heard of him, he was being fed to the tigers at my son’s zoo.’
Police are said to have subsequently descended on Howletts, where a contemptuous John Aspinall told them: ‘My tigers are only fed the choicest cuts — do you really think they’re going to eat stringy old Lucky?’
Theory 4: Lucan didn’t commit the murder – and was helped to flee by his circle
Lucan’s brother, Hugh Bingham defended the peer’s innocence until he died in South Africa.
He always claimed he in fact went into hiding after Rivett’s death, which he was innocent. He said: ‘I have always believed he didn’t commit murder/ He had no choice but to flee in the face of cruel allegations. The police inquiry was compromised from the start. There is significant evidence of the existence of an unknown man at the scene – is he known to police?’
Mr Berriman told the Mirror Earl Bingham must be delighted at the possibility his dad was secretly alive.
He said: ‘This could cause him some issues legally perhaps as Lord Lucan was confirmed dead a few years back.
The man suspected by Mr Berriman to be Lord Lucan lived in Nepal before moving to Australia in the 1980s.
He is understood to have used various names, including Derek and Adam, and apparently always carries his birth certificate with him.
At first he lived in Fremantle, near Perth, Western Australia. He then moved to the South Australian capital Adelaide and then onto a new home near Brisbane, Queensland.
There, he has been looked after by members of a Buddhist community and two young Englishmen are understood to act as his carers.
The elderly Buddhist was once a regular customer at a sushi restaurant in Brisbane.
Despite not working, he was reportedly never short of money.
The peer’s wife Veronica, who was also beaten in the brutal attack — at the hands of her husband, she claimed — died aged 80 after taking a cocktail of drink and drugs in 2017.
Mr Berriman claimed in January 2020 that Lord Lucan was alive and well and living as a Buddhist in Australia — claims that were dismissed as outlandish, despite police launching a probe into the matter.
A death certificate was issued by a High Court judge for Lord Lucan in 2016 following decades of speculation over the aristocrat’s whereabouts.
It comes after a Mail investigation revealed how three Cluedo cards – including Colonel Mustard – were found in Lord Lucan’s abandoned car in the port town of Newhaven, East Sussex.
The Scotland Yard cold case review took place in 2004 when detectives examined sets of crime exhibits from the original murder investigation which had been hidden in a police storage facility. Its findings were not made public until recently.
Crucially, it found three cards were missing from a Cluedo set recovered from Lord Lucan’s home by murder squad officers in the wake of the attack — the same cards that were found in the peer’s abandoned car.
An intriguing new line of inquiry was pursued by police 18 years ago – an alleged sighting of Lord Lucan at a party in the Algarve weeks after the Rivett murder.
If Lord Lucan did indeed attend a party in Portugal, as a female witness tracked down and interviewed by the Met insisted, it would torpedo the theory that the gambling addict jumped to his death in the sea after dumping his borrowed car at Newhaven.
A former Scotland Yard detective said it was impossible to be definitive about many of the questions that still hang over the case.
But he added: ‘In my experience, the bodies of deceased people – including those who have drowned – almost always turn up. It is very difficult to conceal a body.
‘Of all the facts in the case, the one I am most certain of is that he didn’t die in this country.
‘I think he left or was helped to leave the country. If I was to put money on it, and given what I know, I think he went to Portugal alone or was helped to get there, and then transported to one of the Portuguese colonies such as Angola and Mozambique.’
Before the Met launched its last major review of the Lucan case in 2004, a senior detective penned a confidential report into the murder – a copy of which has been handed to Miss Rivett’s son Mr Berriman.
It declares that the police did not have a single set of Lord Lucan’s fingerprints, nor any of his DNA for a profile.
A separate preliminary report was written by a detective in the Met’s Serious Crime Group in January 2002, and a copy of this has also fallen into the hands of Mr Berriman.
Its forensic account of his mother’s murder and what Lord Lucan did afterwards has never been published in the mainstream media.
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