Lord Lucan set to be declared 'presumed dead' as deadline for objections to death certificate passes

Lord Lucan is set to be officially declared “presumed dead” after a deadline passed for objections to a procedure which would allow his son to inherit his title.

George Bingham, whose father disappeared in 1974 hours after his children’s nanny was found murdered at the family’s London home, last month placed a low-profile notice in a local newspaper announcing he was seeking a death certificate for Lord Lucan.

The 21-day deadline for any objections to the move has expired and Mr Bingham is now expected to make a formal application to the High Court next month under the Presumption of Death Act. The legislation passed last year is aimed at simplifying the process of having someone who has been missing for years to be declared dead.

Mr Bingham, 47, who was seven when his father vanished, told the West End Extra newspaper that he hoped the process would bring “closure”. It will also enable him to be named the 8th Earl of Lucan and pass on the family title in the event that he becomes a father. The financier, who lives in central London, announced this summer that he is to marry the daughter of a wealthy Danish industrialist.

While the whereabouts of Lord Lucan has been a source of public fascination ever since his disappearance, his family have made several attempts to try to draw a line under the tragedy.

The moustachioed peer was legally declared dead by the courts in 1999 to allow his will to be settled but the law at the time prevented the issuing of a formal death certificate, meaning that his heir was barred from taking on the hereditary title.

The disappearance of Lord “Lucky” Lucan is one of the enduring mysteries of recent criminal history. The family’s nanny, Sandra Rivett, was found battered to death with a lead pipe in the basement of their house in Belgravia, west London, in November 1974.

The peer’s marriage to Mr Bingham’s mother, Veronica Duncan, had broken down two years earlier and he had moved out of the family home. One theory pursued by police was that whoever had killed the nanny had in fact mistaken her for Ms Duncan.

Lucan, an habitué of London’s high society gambling dens, was last seen hours after the killing at a friend’s house in Sussex. His blood-splattered Ford Corsair was found abandoned in the cross-Channel port of Newhaven and an inquest into Ms Rivett’s death later made a finding of the fact that the aristocrat had murdered her.

Theories about his subsequent actions fate have abounded ever since, with supposed sightings across southern Africa amid reports that he was being sheltered by wealthy friends or indeed may have been killed by them after he became too much of a liability.

Mr Bingham, who had declined to talk about his father until recent years, came forward in 2013 to say that he is not convinced that Lord Lucan was responsible for Ms Rivett’s death.

He believes, nonetheless, that far from hiding for decades, his father killed himself within hours of the killing by taking a small boat into the English Channel and sinking it after consuming a cocktail of sleeping pills and whisky.

Asked last month why he was taking the legal action to obtain his father’s death certificate, Mr Bingham said: “Call it closure.”