Fifty years ago this week, on 7 November 1974, Lord Lucan disappeared following a murder at his estranged wife's home

Who was Lord Lucan?
Richard John Bingham was the seventh Earl of Lucan, the scion of an Anglo-Irish aristocratic family whose great-great-grandfather ordered the Charge of the Light Brigade, and whose father was a socialist peer who served in Clement Attlee's government. Born in 1934, Lucan went to Eton, did National Service in the Coldstream Guards, and briefly worked at Brandt's merchant bank in London; he failed to progress there, and a spectacular win at chemin de fer (worth £26,000, when his annual salary was only £500) convinced him to become a professional gambler. He did not thrive: his nickname, "Lucky", was ironic. Even so, he lived a ritzy lifestyle, driving powerboats, racing bobsleighs and owning racehorses; his suave demeanour led to him apparently being considered for the screen role of James Bond.

How did he become estranged from his wife?
Although he was a snob who reportedly refused to talk to people who "didn't have proper shoelaces", Lucan had married a middle-class woman, Veronica Duncan, in 1963; she was the sister-in-law of his friend Bill Shand-Kydd. Soon after, his father died and he succeeded to the earldom. The couple had three children, but Lady Lucan suffered from postnatal depression and the marriage gradually fell apart. Lucan spent much of his life at the tables at the Clermont Club in Berkeley Square, owned by his friend John Aspinall, running up large debts and drinking heavily, while his wife sat in the area known as the "widow's bench". He tried to have her committed to a psychiatric hospital, and they separated in 1973. A bitter custody battle ensued; Lucan became obsessed with the idea that she was incapable of raising his children, but he lost the court case, running up huge legal fees in the process.

What happened on the night of Thursday 7 October 1974?
At around 9:45pm, Lady Lucan stumbled into the Plumber's Arms on Lower Belgrave Street, where she lived, drenched in blood and screaming: "Help me, help me, help me! I have just escaped from being murdered! He's in the house! He's murdered the nanny!" At around 9pm, she had asked her nanny, Sandra Rivett, 29, to make a cup of tea. Rivett had gone down to the basement kitchen. When she did not reappear, Lady Lucan had gone down to investigate, and had been attacked by a man whose voice she said she recognised as her husband's. She had fought with him, and convinced him to stop the attack; she said that he admitted to having killed Rivett (by mistake). After he had taken her up to her bedroom, she managed to escape. When the police arrived, they found Rivett's body in a sack, with a bloody lead pipe that had been used to beat her to death.

What did Lucan do then?
He left London and arrived at his friend Ian Maxwell-Scott's home, in Uckfield in Sussex, at 11:30pm. Maxwell-Scott was away, but his wife, Susan, was there. To her, and in two letters that he wrote to friends, he gave his version of events. He said he had had a "traumatic night of unbelievable coincidence": he had been passing the family house and had seen an intruder struggling with his wife in the basement. He had run in to help, and the man had run off. Realising that his wife would accuse him of being responsible and that the evidence looked damning, he said he had decided to "lie doggo for a while". He left Uckfield in the early hours of Friday, his last confirmed sighting. The car he was using was found near the harbour in Newhaven, 16 miles away; it had been parked between 5am and 8am.

Is the evidence against him damning?
Very: after just 31 minutes, the jury at the coroner's court in June 1975 found that Lucan had murdered Rivett. This was based on Lady Lucan's testimony, and on a wealth of other details. The car Lucan was using, a Ford Corsair, was found splattered with blood types matching both Rivett and Lady Lucan, along with another length of pipe, similar to the murder weapon. There was also much circumstantial evidence that Lucan had planned to kill his wife. He had borrowed a car, perhaps because it was less conspicuous than his Mercedes, and had found out from his daughter that the nanny's night off was on Thursdays, though she in fact swapped her days that week. He knew that his wife made a cup of tea at 9pm; a light bulb had been removed in the basement. Lucan's friend Greville Howard later told police Lucan had told him that killing his wife would save him from bankruptcy, because he would reclaim his house, and that he could dump her body in the Solent; she "would never be found".

So what did happen to him?
Roy Ranson, the policeman who led the murder inquiry, became convinced that Lord Lucan had fled to Africa. Some speculated that the peer's wealthy friends, dubbed "the Clermont set", had helped spirit him away, and perhaps killed him because he had become an embarrassment, or at least encouraged him to shoot himself before his body was fed to tigers owned by John Aspinall at Howletts, his private zoo in Kent. ("The last I heard, he was being fed to the tigers at my son's zoo," said Aspinall's mother, Lady Osborne.) The most plausible theory remains that he died by suicide in 1974. Lady Lucan believed that he took a ferry from Newhaven and threw himself into the Channel.

What explains the fascination?
"The facts are just enough to make a narrative while leaving hugely tantalising areas of doubt," suggests the author Rosemary Hill. The Times's obituary – published in 2016, after Lord Lucan's death certificate was finally issued – described the case as a "national game of Cluedo". But there was, of course, a real human cost. "Out of politeness, one says it's very hard on the nanny," Aspinall remarked at the time, "although I don't, of course, feel a personal sense of loss." Lady Lucan was estranged from her children and lived as a recluse, before killing herself in 2017.

An elusive peer
The first "sighting" of Lord Lucan was in Melbourne, Australia in December 1974; a bank clerk reported a suspicious British man that he thought was the missing peer. Police arrested him: it was actually John Stonehouse, the Labour MP who had staged his own death in Miami to start a new life. Subsequently, sightings of Lucan were reported in France, Guam, Mozambique, India and New Zealand. He has been spotted at a colony of former Nazis in Paraguay, at a sheep station in the Australian outback, backpacking on Mount Etna and working as a waiter in San Francisco.

In 2003, a retired detective claimed to have tracked Lucan to Goa. In fact it was "Jungle Barry" Halpin, a folk singer from St Helens. In 2012, the earl was reported to be drinking in a bar in Botswana. In 2022, he was said to be living in a Buddhist community in Australia. Lord Lucan stories became a Fleet Street staple: the late Daily Mirror journalist Garth Gibbs said that his "most spectacular success" in journalism was not finding Lord Lucan: "I have successfully not found him in more exotic spots than anybody else." In 2016, his son George Bingham said he believed his father had been dead since 1974, and that it was time to find "another Loch Ness monster out there".

It took 25 days to act, said Arash Azizi in The Atlantic, but last Saturday Israel finally responded to the salvo of missiles fired at it by Iran. The operation – named "Days of Repentance" – involved more than 100 Israeli fighter jets, and targeted air-defence systems, radars, military bases and missile production factories across Iran, including on the outskirts of Tehran. It was the "most significant attack on Iran by any country since the 1980s", but fell a long way short of the apocalyptic strike some had feared. Israel didn't target Iran's nuclear or energy infrastructure, nor did it assassinate any political or military leaders. According to insiders, Israel even used intermediaries to give Tehran a day's warning, to avoid mass casualties (Iran said four soldiers died in the strikes). Given the limited nature of the attack, Iran has an opportunity to de-escalate the conflict by calling it quits.

What this strike shows, said Yossi Melman in Haaretz, is that, for all his bluster, Israel's PM, Benjamin Netanyahu, is "well aware of the limitation of Israel's power and its dependence on the US". He knew better than to push his luck days before America's election. Still, the attacks were a devastating display of Israel's aerial and intelligence superiority, showing it has the capacity to attack any Iranian site it wishes.

The strikes were far from cosmetic, said Arieh Kovler in The Spectator. According to the Israeli journalist Barak Ravid, Israel targeted all of Iran's rocket-fuel mixers. Destroying them could cripple Iran's missile production "for months or years". That's bad for Tehran, and for Russia, which wants to use some of those missiles in Ukraine.

The question now is how Iran's humiliated leaders will respond, said The Economist. Israel's attack signals the failure of Tehran's national-security doctrine, which was based on outsourcing the job of fighting Israel to local proxies such as Hamas and Hezbollah. Iran's options are now limited. To regain a measure of deterrence, it could try to rebuild those militias, but that would mean "doubling down on a failed strategy". It could seek to boost its own military capabilities, but it lacks money. As for racing to create a nuclear bomb, that would invite further Israeli attacks that Iran, following the destruction of several of its air-defence batteries, is in no position to fend off. Another option, of course, would be to "pursue a less ideological foreign policy". But while most Iranians would welcome that, their 85-year-old supreme leader, Ali Khamenei (pictured), would never countenance it. We'll have to wait to see if his successor is more "pragmatic".

In 2021, the dialect coach Joan Washington died from lung cancer, leaving her husband, the actor Richard E. Grant, utterly bereft. Three years on, the actor is not convinced by the old adage that "time heals", he told Alex Moshakis in The Observer. "I don't think it does. I think you navigate your way around it. You never get over it. And I'm not actively trying to get over it, either."

What he does, though, is write to his wife: every night, he sits down and tells her everything that happened that he thinks would interest or amuse her. He is not spiritual: he does not for a moment expect to get a reply. "But after 38 years of marriage, I can hear what her response would be. It feels as close a connection as I can have."

It is, he says, a way of carrying on the conversation that was the bedrock of their long and happy marriage. "The physical intimacy… even if you're in five hours of tantric sex with someone, [that time is] relative to the amount of time in your day – it's a very small amount of time. Most of your life with somebody is spent in the intimacy of conversation. When you share absolutely everything with another human being – who sees you completely for who you are – to me that is unquantifiable… What a thing to have."