Has BBC’s Inside Out tracked down Lord Lucan?

BBC South East’s Inside Out claims to have uncovered evidence about the whereabouts of Lord Lucan – who has been missing since 1974.

Lord Lucan (Richard Bingham), once the most wanted man in Britain, was charged in his absence with the murder of his children’s nanny, 29-year-old Sandra Rivett.

Rivett was bludgeoned to death in her employer’s London home and it is thought that Lucan escaped from England shortly afterwards. Since then generations of journalists have been on his Lordship’s trail.

Tonight’s Inside Out programme (broadcast on BBC One – South East at 7.30pm), reports claims that Lucan ended up in Gabon, West Africa.

According to an anonymous source referred to as Jill, as late as 1981Lucan’s friends Sir John Aspinall and Sir James Goldsmith knew exactly where he was and would arrange for Lucan to see his oldest children.

Jill detailed how she had booked flights in 1979 and 1981, for Frances and George to visit Kenya. The children believed they were going on a safari holiday, and unbeknownst to them their father could see them and ‘see how they were growing up”. The source believed that the most likely place for these sightings would have occurred in Gabon, without Lord Lucan ever making himself known to his children.

The mere thought of catching Lord Lucan has spurred on a great many journalists including the late Garth Gibbs, who said: ‘I regard not finding Lord Lucan as my most spectacular success in journalism… many of my colleagues have also been fairly successful in not finding Lord Lucan. But I have successfully not found him in more exotic spots than anybody else.”

Rumours have circulated for decades over the whereabouts of Lucan, from all over Africa to the Bahamas.