The Search for My Mother's Murderer

On 7th November 1974, at just after 9.30pm Richard John Bingham, the 7th Earl of Lucan, vanished into the night leaving in his wake a scene of chaos and carnage. Stuffed into a mail sack in the basement of his Belgravia townhouse, the battered and lifeless body of his children's nanny, a working-class domestic servant. Her name was Sandra Eleanor Rivett. She was my mother and I was just six years old.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of her murder and Lord Lucan's disappearance, but unlike other books written about what remains Britain's biggest unsolved murder mystery, this is the inside story of my personal quest to smash down the wall of secrecy erected to protect my Mum's killer that allowed him to live out a privileged, secret life abroad. The discovery of who I am and what happened to Sandra ignite a deep sense of injustice in me and after more than a decade of research and travels abroad, I have finally confronted the man, I believe bludgeoned my mother to death in the basement of that Belgravia townhouse five decades ago.

The old man I've found is now 89 years old and lives under a false identity in Australia. He's moved around a lot and changed names many times, always one step ahead. As I talked to him, I manged to secretly film and photograph him. At the end of 2022, three university departments conducted independent tests comparing these new images of this now elderly, well-spoken Englishman with historic photographs of Lucan using artificial intelligence algorithms. They all came back with a very high percentage match in the mid to high 80s. The verdict: Lucan is still alive.

Intertwined with personal anecdotes, new interviews and photographs, The Search for My Mother's Murderer is the extraordinary journey of a son's search for truth and justice for his mother.

Neil Berriman is the son of Sandra Rivett, the children's nanny who was murdered on the night of November 7th 1974 in the basement of the town house on Lower Belgrave Street. He speaks to the press regularly about Lord Lucan and runs the website /.

Glen Campbell is a veteran investigative journalist of BBC documentaries including Panorama.

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