His family was granted probate over his estate in 1999, but no death certificate was issued.

This is yet another of the abiding mysteries about the Lucan affair — especially as she had fought so hard to keep them when they were young. With blood streaming from several wounds on her head, she cried: ‘Help me, help me, help me! 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. 'At this point, I started fighting back in earnest, but he switched tactics — trying to strangle me and then to gouge out my eyes. Mr Berriman says the upper-crust killer has now hooked up with two fellow Brits he met at Buddhist retreat 11 years ago. Extravagant theories as to Lord Lucan's whereabouts persisted for years: one posited the idea that he had been eaten by a lion in his friend John Aspinall's zoo; another that he became a hippie in Goa; yet another that he'd disappeared into the Australian Outback. Neither did it help that in their teens, the children opted to live in the country with their maternal aunt, rather than their mother. Any significant new information will be considered. 'I don't fear dying alone — not at all,' she said. Other sightings include Lucan working as a waiter in San Francisco, at an alcoholics centre in Brisbane and at a hotel in Madagascar.

Part of the Daily Mail, The Mail on Sunday & Metro Media Group. Some leads have been followed up with fingerprints from a beer glass in Cape Town checked by cops, as well as bank accounts in South America. When Lucan found out, the man was warned off and she fell into a profound depression and was prescribed powerful anti-psychotic drugs, the dire side-effects of which convinced her, and her family, that she was losing her mind. Following publication of the interview in the Mail, we kept up a short correspondence.

Lying about it to his new friends. There have been many theories about his fate as well as alleged sightings but it remains a mystery. 'He got on a ferry and jumped off mid-Channel, and was then chopped up by the propeller — which is why his body was never found,' Lady Lucan told me. But surely it is part of this family's abiding tragedy that it was a love never returned while she was still alive. How she was then set upon herself with a metal pipe before she managed to flee and raise the alarm, while her children slept in their beds. Lady Lucan, pictured with a portrait of her husband in 1976, had previously discussed assisted suicide if she had a terminal illness or a degenerative disease. I don't really know to whom, because I have no contact with them at all.'. Actually, I believe not. 'The people he lives with know he has a mystery past and what he tells them does not add up. There was lacerating honesty, too, in Lady Lucan's admission that she had taunted her husband about his ineptitude as a lover and in the humiliating confession that he beat her for his own sexual gratification. 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. "The Sun", "Sun", "Sun Online" are registered trademarks or trade names of News Group Newspapers Limited. Lord Lucan, right, with his friend Sir James Goldsmith, father of Zac Goldsmith, in a rare colour photo of the fugitive. Lord Lucan fled the murder scene in a car he had borrowed. To inquire about a licence to reproduce material, visit our Syndication site.