Neil Berriman has no doubt he’s solved one of the biggest murder mysteries in British history. His reasons for doing so are deeply personal. ‘I believe that man in Australia is Lord Lucan and he murdered my mother,’ says Neil firmly, well aware of what a huge story this is if it’s true.
A new three-part BBC documentary called Lucan shows him tracking down, then coming face-to-face with, a pensioner he’s convinced is now hiding under a false name in a suburb of Brisbane, having once apparently confessed to a friend that he was the killer. ‘Even now, at nearly 90 years old he’s an arrogant, powerful, horrible old man who’s ripped off people over Australia, upset a lot of people, and he’s full of lies and deceit,’ says Neil. ‘I’m confident, full stop, that man is Lord Lucan.’
His fury is evident in the documentary as he walks away from the house and says to his investigative partner, journalist Glen Campbell, ‘I’d f****** murder him, wouldn’t you?’ Instead, we see them go on gathering evidence, hoping to persuade the police to make an arrest. The man they know by a Buddhist name, who is also called Chris by his carer, has denied confessing to being the murderer and has previously said, ‘I’m not Lord Lucan.’ The Australian police have said they do not believe it is him, but Neil is determined to prove them wrong and get justice for his mother.
Sandra Rivett, the nanny to Lord Lucan’s children, was bludgeoned to death at the family home in Belgravia in 1974. The 50th anniversary of the crime is on 7 November. Sandra was only 29. Neil was seven, though he wasn’t living with her and didn’t even know she was his mother at the time. He had been adopted as a baby but did not discover this – and the connection to Sandra – until his adoptive mother died 17 years ago, by which time he was in middle age.
Lord Lucan and his wife Veronica. Lord Lucan fled after the murder of the couple’s nanny and was never seen again
Lord Lucan fled after the murder and was never seen again. His car was found abandoned by the port in Newhaven, East Sussex and one idea is that he boarded a ferry or got hold of a boat and jumped overboard at sea, ending his own life. Another theory, supported by a Scotland Yard report leaked to Neil and Glen, is that he got away to Africa with the help of friends in high places. At the inquest in June 1975 a jury of three women and six men ruled in his absence that Lord Lucan had killed Sandra.
The new documentary includes a rare interview with the peer’s brother Hugh, who believes he was innocent but knew ‘the dice was loaded against him’ so he escaped and ‘found a sanctuary somewhere’.
The disappearance of John Bingham, the seventh Earl of Lucan, triggered a huge manhunt at the time and there have been potential sightings all over the world ever since. His son and heir persuaded the High Court to declare Lord Lucan dead in 2016, but that only spurred Neil Berriman on to intensify his efforts. Nobody has looked with more determination than this quiet 57-year-old builder from Liphook in Hampshire. The series follows Neil and Glen Campbell all the way to Australia to follow up a lead, meeting another Buddhist who claims to have once been told by an aristocratic Englishman that he had murdered two women, Sandra and Veronica. The latter is the name of Lady Lucan, who escaped on the night of the killing. Neil believes this is the man he has been looking for.
He emails Chris under a false identity of his own, claiming to be someone called Bezza whom the Buddhist once helped during a panic attack in a coffee shop and who wants to say thank you.
Isn’t that a bit underhand? Neil tells Weekend, ‘I’m happy to say that to get to where we’ve got I’ve had to lie all through this. I’ve been different names, I’ve had different employment. I said I was in a coffee shop in Perth, which I never was. And it’s got us to where we are today. A lot of it is done through lying and deceit, which is exactly what the old man spent his last 50 years doing. So all I was doing was copying him.’
Sandra Rivett, the nanny to Lord Lucan’s children, was bludgeoned to death at the family home in Belgravia in 1974
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Neil and Glen trace the pensioner to a house on the outskirts of Brisbane. They turn up posing as friends of the now deceased Bezza. Then comes the extraordinary moment when Neil finds himself in the presence of the man he’s sought for so long.
‘I’m now inside the house. Glen is doing all this secret filming,’ he tells me. ‘I was fine up until I was looking down the corridor. The old man comes out of his office. I can see him just sort of shuffling towards me and I’m just looking straight at him. I thought, “Bloody hell, what am I doing? That man has murdered my mother, potentially.”’ How did he feel? ‘I was really nervous, worried and angry, the whole emotional side of what anybody could have felt was coming out. A bit of everything.’
Was Neil really totally convinced that the man was Lord Lucan? ‘Nearly. It was the way he walked with his arms behind his back.’ The footage shows he had an aristocratic bearing, hands clasped behind him. ‘As soon as he got closer I could see his face. I’d been looking at pictures on the internet.’ The man was about the same age as Lord Lucan would be and had the same colour eyes. ‘Some of the things he was saying made me even more convinced.’
With Neil’s encouragement, the old man said he was originally from Belgravia in London and had known Princess Margaret. He mentioned that his father had worked in the kitchens at Buckingham Palace. He also said, ‘I was brought up by the Theosophical movement.’ Lord Lucan’s brother was a Theosophist, so that seemed like further evidence to Neil, as did the voice. ‘He hadn’t taken on Australian twang. He was still quite upper class.’
Neil felt his anger rising, but kept his cover somehow. ‘I did want to challenge him towards the end. Glen cottoned on that if we’d stayed in there much longer I’d have said, “I believe you’re Lord Lucan, you murdered my mother and you’ve been on the run.”’
Neil Berriman has no doubt he’s solved one of the biggest murder mysteries in British history
Instead of doing that and compromising the evidence they’d gathered, Glen persuaded Neil to keep his cover and leave. ‘I think he was right,’ says Neil reluctantly. ‘I wished I’d gone off on one, but we weren’t quite there with the evidence. We didn’t have enough.’ Episode two of Lucan ends with this encounter followed by a statement that Chris ‘denies ever confessing to the murder of Sandra Rivett’.
There’s more to come, says Neil, who confronts the man directly in episode three and promises more revelations. ‘You’ll be sitting there going, “Blimey!”’
Weekend magazine is aware of the identity of the man, but we have chosen not to name him. His identity will be revealed in the documentary.
Neil says he has new evidence to show the police, even though The Met issued the following statement in 2020: ‘Following extensive inquiries and investigations by the Australia Federal Police on behalf of the Metropolitan Police, the person was conclusively eliminated from the investigation.’
Neil is unimpressed. ‘Scotland Yard never went over there. The Australian Federal Police ruled him out. They saw his birth certificate, he was slightly shorter than he should be for his age and he answered all the questions put to him correctly. That’s not really doing a really thorough job, is it? We’ve done a better job.’
He believes a scar seen in photos Glen took in Brisbane match those acquired by the peer in a speedboat accident in 1963. ‘That convinced me even more that the facial features of Lucan and the old man were a match.’
Neil was encouraged in this two years ago by the evidence of Professor Hassan Ugail, whose pioneering AI algorithm correctly identified the Russian agents behind the Salisbury poisonings. He found a match between pictures of the peer and the pensioner, saying, ‘This isn’t an opinion, it’s science and mathematical fact.’
But around the same time, a Home Office-approved facial recognition company, Acumé Forensics, said they were not the same person. Again, Neil has an answer to that. ‘It was very rudimentary. In my opinion it was rubbish.’
He remains adamant. ‘I’ve never changed my mind. That man in Australia has stolen somebody else’s identity and that man is Lord Lucan. No doubt about it. The interesting thing would be if ever he decided to sue me, because he’d be digging his own grave, wouldn’t he? He’s not going to do that in a million years, because he knows who he is.’
There’s no doubting Neil’s passion. ‘Am I obsessed with it? Maybe. Everything has revolved around Lucan for the last seven or eight years. That has put a lot of strain on us.’ Neil has two children in their early 30s. Kim has been his partner for the last 24 years and says in the documentary that he thinks of little else, around the clock. Neil admits, ‘It’s been a massive stress because it’s been going on so long. You’ve got to take your hat off to Kim for putting up with me, because most people would have left. This is a personal and emotional matter, I tend to forget about other people around me.’
Neil was ten years old when his parents Ivan and Audrey told him he’d been adopted as a baby. In later years his adoptive mother repeatedly offered a brown envelope containing information about his past, but Neil refused to open it while she was alive.
That changed when Audrey died of cancer 17 years ago. ‘I almost didn’t open the envelope. I thought, “Everything’s OK. Should I just throw this on the fire and carry on with life?”’ Instead, he opened the envelope and found adoption papers, along with the surprising addition of a newspaper cutting about the crime. ‘I eventually realised my real mother was Sandra Rivett, the nanny who was murdered by Lord Lucan.’
This was hard to come to terms with. ‘If you decide to search for your real mother you might end up having to accept that she’s died, but not that she’s been involved in one of the biggest murder mysteries the country has ever seen and the chap that fled the country has never been found.’
He read everything he could about the case, then got in touch with Glen, whose contacts in the police arranged for Neil to see the case notes – including shocking images of his mother’s body. ‘I’ve been on antidepressants twice, the second time after seeing the crime scene photos.’ Neil realised that the second from last person to see his mother alive was Lady Lucan, so he wrote to her in 2012 (she died in 2017). She replied, to his surprise, saying, ‘Your mother had only been with me for eight weeks before she was murdered. She was kind, loyal and a dignified woman. She was the best nanny we had. You should be reminded than in the 1960s to have a child out of wedlock was still frowned upon and contraception often failed. I say this to assure you that your mother was not promiscuous. If you have any further questions, do not hesitate to put them.’
He was touched and grateful for the reply and wrote again, expressing sadness at what had happened but admitting he felt anger and hatred towards her husband. These days, he says on camera, those feelings are more intense than ever. ‘It’s a lot worse. My anger is… I sort of have to control it, I suppose.’
Lady Lucan wrote again and said he should focus on the idea her ‘late husband’ had killed his mum by mistake, as the victim was meant to be her. Looking at a photo of her body bundled up in a mail sack, with an arm hanging out, Neil tells the documentary cameras, ‘That’s no mistake. I can’t let him get away with this. If he’s alive, I’ll find him.’
Media have paid him for stories in the years since, but Neil says the search has still cost him tens of thousands of pounds. ‘Money-wise, I dread to think. Loss of income, taxis and trains to London. I’ve been to Australia four times and funded it twice myself.’
Is it worth it? ‘Getting justice for Sandra will probably never happen. He’s too old. I also think he’s a protected individual, for whatever reason. So I think it might not happen, but it’d be amazing, wouldn’t it?’
His suspect is now in his ninth decade. ‘If he died tomorrow it would be a real nuisance, because I’m working on other information I can take to the press and the police. I’d like him to stay alive. But that would draw a line under it, wouldn’t it? I’d have nowhere to go, so that would be it.’
That might give Neil some relief at least, but not nearly as much as an arrest. He has no memory of his birth mother and only a few photographs to go on, but what does Neil think she’d say about all this? ‘I suspect the conversation would start, “Bloody hell you stupid fool, what have you gone and got yourself into?” But I think she’d be ridiculously proud.’
- Lucan will air on BBC2 and BBC iPlayer early next month