26/10/2009

The mystery of Lord Lucan's plastic surgeon

It's one of the most infamous murder mysteries of all time - the disappearance of Lord Lucan in 1974. Thirty five years on, Scotland Yard detectives are still trying to solve the case.

Now BBC Inside Out can reveal a new development in the investigation. Earlier this year Carolyn Watson contacted our web team with a new theory about Lucan:

"I am in possession of Lord Lucan's medical records. He had an operation which I believe will identify him. The record is of an operation performed by John Watson FRCS at East Grinstead in 1963… I am the daughter of John Watson.

"The police were watching my father and his daughters. The police stormed my father's Harley Street practice after Lord Lucan disappeared asking for medical records but my father did not give them up but took the records home and tucked them away for 41 years. I now have these in a safety deposit."

The medical record reveal details of a plastic surgery operation performed by her father in 1963 on a man called Richard John Bingham - better known as Lord Lucan.

THE MYSTERY OF LUCAN

Back in the 1960’s, Lucan was part of Britain’s aristocratic ruling class with a close circle of society friends. On 7 November 1974, Lucan fled London after police found his children’s nanny, Sandra Rivet bludgeoned to death in the basement of the family home in London’s Belgravia.

As well as the body in the cellar, Lord Lucan left his estranged wife, Lady Lucan bleeding from head wounds he’d inflicted after a fierce struggle. Throughout the whole bloody episode the couple’s three children lay asleep upstairs.

After fleeing London in a friend’s car, Lucan sought refuge at a house owned by friends Susan and Ian Maxwell-Scott in Uckfield, Sussex. It was late into the night when he arrived, covered in blood.

That was the last time Lord Lucan was ever seen or heard from again. Several days later police found Lucan’s car, a Ford Corsair, abandoned in Newhaven.

One theory is that Lucan threw himself into the English Channel, but no body was ever washed up. There was also speculation he’d been given a new identity and secretly whisked abroad.

NEW LIGHT ON LUCAN?

Carolyn Watson's theory provides the first new lead on the Lucan case for years.

Her father's records describe an operation performed on Lucan to reconstruct his nose after a serious power boat accident in 1963. She thinks that this could provide a clue to an ongoing doctor/patient relationship between the two men.

John Watson was a man of many secrets, who worked for M15 and had connections to the rich and powerful. He also knew many of Lucan's close circle of friends.

Lucan’s disappearance took place in 1974. A few weeks after he vanished, Scotland Yard detectives descended on Watson’s Harley Street practice asking questions about her father's relationship with the missing Lord.

We asked Carolyn if she thought her father had operated on Lucan after the murder. She said, "I have no way of knowing… I suspect that my father may have helped… He was the kind of man who would help somebody." In her last conversation about Lucan with her father he said that it was obviously "very clever the way his friends had clubbed together and secretly removed him".

Inside Out also spoke to Lucan's babysitter, Mandy Parks, who believes she saw him the day after he disappeared. But how sure is she that man was Lord Lucan? She says, "I’d say I am 95% cent sure that is the man I saw". After the Lucan story hit the headlines, Mandy received a note from her employer suggesting she hadn’t really seen what she’d seen but she stands by her story.

The theory that Lord Lucan had plastic surgery and was secretly whisked away to a new life abroad is just a theory. But it is a theory backed up with some amazing coincidences and a good deal of circumstantial evidence.