The trail of Lord Lucan

The haggard face peering out through the straggly beard looks hauntingly familiar. Could this really be the 7th Earl of Lucan, who stood accused of beating his children's nanny to death on a blustery winter's night in 1974 before vanishing into the mists of legend?

Has the mystery of the missing peer that has so tantalised for the best part of three decades finally been solved?

Is this how the world's most famous fugitive ended his days - living in squalor in a hippie commune on a beach in Goa on the west coast of India, an emaciated wreck eking out a pathetic existence playing backgammon for another glass of cheap brandy, calling himself Jungly Barry and waiting for either the law or death to claim him?

The first piece of evidence is in the photographs. They show a dishevelled ruin in a pair of grimy shorts asleep in a rickety chair.

This is certainly not the way those of us who knew him remember 'Lucky' Lucan. He was always clean-shaven and well-groomed, his thick mop of dark hair trimmed, his moustache neatly clipped, his clothes immaculately cut and pressed.

If anyone at the old Clermont gambling club in Berkeley Square, where I used to meet him, so much as suggested that his tie was askew, he would decamp to the loo to make the appropriate sartorial adjustment.

He lunched only on lamb cutlets (hot in winter, en gelee in summer), detested any food he regarded as 'foreign muck', and regarded with contempt anyone from a different background to his own. The notion that the Old Etonian former Coldstream Guards officer, even on the run for his life, could have adjusted to a diet of hooch and rice in a faraway land stretches the bounds of probability.

Yet the likeness between the aristocratic gambler and the beachcomber is striking indeed. Put the photographs of the two side by side and it is quite possible to conclude that they are one and the same man.

Duncan MacLaughlin, a former senior Scotland Yard detective, certainly believes so.

'The basic features are all there,' he says. 'The broad, aristocratic forehead. The thick black hair springing up from its parting on the left. The distinctive eyebrows and the crease that stood out between them.'

To back his claim, published in a book, named Dead Lucky, he cites the opinion of Dr Sue Black, OBE, Honorary Lecturer in Forensic Medicine and Science at Dundee University, with 22 years' experience in solving questions of identity.

She compared photographs of Lucan in his prime and the pictures of Jungly Barry, taken in Goa in 1991 by a travelling hippie named Mark Winch. She matched hairlines and forehead, hands and eyes.

She concluded: 'Whilst in my professional opinion there are no clear areas of dissimilarity between these two men, there are equally no unequivocal indicators of positive identity.

'Therefore while it is possible that they may indeed be one and the same man, it is not possible to confirm this with any conviction based on the current photographs.'

By layman's standards that hardly adds up to a ringing endorsement but it was enough to convince MacLaughlin, a policeman of 20 years' experience who served in the Central Drugs Squad and the Regional Crime Squad.

He says: 'From my years of experience at Scotland Yard I knew that this was as close as any pathologist dared to go in confirming, "That's him!".'

MacLaughlin had visited Goa in December 1991, in pursuit of Winch, who was wanted for drugs offences. Winch managed to slip away from him, though, and MacLaughlin retired from the police force in 1998 with the case unfinished.

LAST year they finally met up when Winch, any warrants against him now expired, contacted the detective because he remembered his name from the drug case and showed him the photographs he had taken.

He explained that only after he had returned to England and seen a television documentary about Lucan did he realise the possible significance of the pictures of the man he knew as Jungly Barry.

Armed with those photographs, Winch's account of what Barry had hinted about himself, and the opinion of Dr Black, MacLaughlin returned to Goa to check out Winch's claims. 'I was still a cynic when I travelled to India,' he says.

His scepticism was not misplaced. There have been regular sightings of Lord Lucan ever since he disappeared 29 years ago.

But strip away the mythology and all that remains - up until now, that is - are the bare facts. They are as follows.

Around 9pm on the night of Thursday, November 7, 1974, an intruder forced his way into Lucan's family home at 46 Lower Belgrave Street two hundred yards from Buckingham Palace.

Lucan has been placed at the scene. So was his highly-strung wife, Veronica, from whom he was estranged. A few minutes later Lady Lucan ran screaming into the Plumber's Arms pub six doors away, covered in blood.

In the basement of Number 46 police found the body of Sandra Rivett, 29-year- old nanny of the Lucans' three children, trussed up in a U.S. mailbag. Lucan, ironically nicknamed 'Lucky' after gambling away his inheritance, had fled the scene.

HOURS after the killing he wrote three letters to friends, absolving himself of the murder, and then disappeared. Five days later the police issued a warrant for his arrest on the charge of murdering Miss Rivett with a lead pipe, having mistaken him for the wife he had come to detest.

It is what did or did not happen next that forms the basis of the most enduring mystery in modern British criminal history.

Did the upper-class wastrel, faced with such a catastrophe of his own making, finally do the decent thing and 'fall on his sword?'

His car was found abandoned at the Sussex port of Newhaven, giving rise to the speculation, shared by Veronica Lucan, that he had taken a boat and drowned himself in the Channel.

Or was he spirited away into hiding by his well-heeled and well-connected friends, led by the late buccaneering financier Sir James Goldsmith and John Aspinall, the zookeeper who founded the Clermont club?

I have always suscribed to the former hypothesis. The Lucan I knew was not imaginative enough to assume a new identity and make a new life for himself.

Better his own hand than the modern equivalent of a silken noose, which would have been a lifetime's imprisonment.

MacLaughlin is of the opposite opinion. He is all but certain that Jungly Barry, the Robinson Crusoe lookalike who spent his mornings in a run-down bar drinking himself into a stupor on a local firewater made out of distilled coconut milk called feni, is the same Lord Lucan whose nights were spent sipping champagne at the backgammon tables of Mayfair.

He says: 'In Asia, bits of the jigsaw fell into place. We spent five weeks there and we toured through the community speaking to locals and managed to build up a portfolio of conclusive evidence.'

The first clues were provided by Winch, who arrived in Goa in 1991 when it was a remote former Portuguese colony far off the tourist track. MacLaughlin defends his using a petty criminal to build his case, saying: 'He was being brave, coming out of the woodwork. He laid his cards on the table.'

Winch took up residence at Connie's, an enclave of shacks run by Constanza Silveira. He recounts: 'She ran a hippie commune with a dozen rooms in low stone huts, which she rented out for next to nothing. Nobody cared who or what you were or asked awkward questions.'

It was there that he met Jungly Barry, who claimed he had walked in from the jungle several years before. 'I first set eyes on him when he challenged me to a game of backgammon. I was sitting by myself with my magnetic set in front of me, when this tall man with long hair and a beard, very tanned and wearing only a pair of shorts and sandals, appeared from nowhere.

'He was carrying a bottle of local Honey Bee brandy and looked like a tramp. The first thing he said was, "I'll play you for a drink! Beer money."

'I told him, "OK, let's play." From then on we played three or four times a week.'

Winch soon started probing into his opponent's puzzling past. Jungly Barry spoke with an educated, upper-class accent and spoke knowledgeably about Bentley and Bugatti cars. When Winch inquired where he

came from, Jungly Barry told him Ireland, which is where the Lucan family have their ancestral holdings.

Asked about his family, Barry replied: 'I don't have a family.' Winch persisted. 'Barry, have you been married?' He answered: 'I do have a wife,

but I've got a problem with her and I don't want to talk about it.'

Winch adds: 'It was the same with his children. He had children, he said, and he loved them very much, but he wouldn't say any more. We never spoke about his family again.'

One day Winch came straight out and asked: 'Are you on the run?' Barry paused, then replied: 'Isn't everybody?'

He claimed to be a historian and qualified that by stating: 'I am part of history!'

When Winch tried to take a photograph of him, he shouted: 'Put that bloody camera away, will you?'

It was only after he had passed out with drink that Winch got the shot that set MacLaughlin on the trail.

The evidence, the detective acknowledges, was circumstantial. His own inquiries, however, have led him to the conclusion that he really has traced the missing Lord Lucan.

WHEN he showed locals his pictures of Lucan, they unerringly said it was Jungly Barry. And Constanza Silveira added the intriguing information that her seemingly impoverished guest was not short of friends to turn to for financial support.

Connie, he recalls, told him: 'People would arrive to visit him, all foreigners. They came from England, from Germany, from Switzerland and gave him money to support himself.'

Pradip Lawande, who ran Bob's Inn which Jungly Barry called 'my second home', confirmed: 'Friends who came from England would laugh and joke with him and several times I saw them give him large wads of rupees.

'I heard the name Lucan a couple of times, late at night after they had been drinking, but it meant nothing to me then. One of them called him "Lord L" once but he just laughed it off.'

Barry had arrived in Goa in 1975, a few months after Sandra Rivett was bludgeoned to death. According to MacLaughlin, he had made his way to the sub- continent via Portugal and Mozambique.

The detective says: 'He had found the perfect place to go. He did not know it was going to become a tourist resort. But that was typical of Lucan's luck. He had no passport. Once he was in Goa he was stuck.'

At one point Lucan ran his own tours through the jungle and his fellow dropouts recall that, even in his drunken dotage, women were still attracted to him. At one time he had a German girlfriend named June.

But then the friends stopped coming, the money ran out and his excess caught up with him. He died of cirrhosis of the liver.

On January 13, 1996, he was doused in feni and cremated. His former drinking partner Vernon Rodriguez was at his funeral. He recalls: 'The flames roared eight feet into the air and we had to stand back because of the heat.

But then something terrible happened. There was an almighty bang, as loud as a shotgun blast, and Barry's head exploded in front of of us.'

What ashes remained were scattered in the jungle. But was it really Lord Lucan consigned to the flames?

There is the matter of the birthdate. Lucan was born on December 18, 1934. In the death notice in the local paper in Goa his name was given as 'Barry Thomas Halpin (Jungly Barry)' and his birthdate as January 11, 1938.

Lucan's son, George Bingham, now 36, has his own reasons for believing that his father is dead. As he pointed out to me: 'If he is guilty and if he was still alive, you have to explain why a man who murdered out of obsession for his children made absolutely no contact with them afterwards.'

Scotland Yard, too, is sceptical. The case, it confirms, is still open. A spokesman says: 'There are a few reports of interest received by the Metropolitan Police each year. We deal with each one on an individual basis and, if appropriate, they will be investigated.' It is most unlikely, the spokesman added, that the police will follow up this latest sighting.

Duncan MacLaughlin, however, is standing by his claim to have discovered really what happened to the elusive earl.

'What I am not claiming is that we have absolute proof because we cannot do that when there is no body,' he says. 'We are claiming that we have overwhelming evidence.'

And in the absence of any overwhelming evidence to the contrary, he might well be right. Either way, it will not disperse the mists of mystery that have shrouded the 7th Earl of Lucan since that fateful night 29 years ago when an innocent girl was murdered and a peer of the realm vanished into thin air.