WHAT’S THE STORY?

YET another claim has been made that Lord Lucan, the aristocrat who fled after the murder of his children’s nanny Sandra Rivett in London in 1974, has been found. This time the AWOL peer has apparently turned up in Australia, living as a Buddhist.

What makes this claim more believable than most is that the man who claims to have found “Lucky” Lucan is Neil Berriman, 52, the son of the murdered nanny.

According to the Daily Mirror, Berriman has spent £30,000 of his own money trying to track down Lucan. He claims that his mother’s alleged murderer – real name Richard John Bingham, 7th Earl Lucan – escaped with a false passport provided by powerful friends, and that he has had six different identities in the intervening years.

Lucan would now be 85 and according to the Daily Mirror, Berriman says “Lucan” is in poor health. He has been to Scotland Yard’s Cold Case Unit with his findings, telling them: “I believe I have tracked down the man, Lord Lucan, who murdered my mother.”

NOT THAT OLD CHESTNUT ...

ONE of the most sensational cases of the 1970s, the fact that a peer of the realm seemed to have murdered a young woman in dreadful fashion – he bludgeoned her to death with a piece of lead piping – caused international shock. That he then escaped and was allegedly sighted in hundreds of places worldwide in subsequent decades has ensured that the name of Lucan is never far away from the newspapers.

Dominic Lawson, former editor of The Sunday Telegraph, told the Daily Mail yesterday that it is the case that there is an obsession about Lucan. His paper once carried a “Lucan found” allegation about an Englishman living in a hippy commune in Goa with the assumed name Barry Halpin, only for “Barry Halpin” to be identified by his friends as the real Halpin and not the so-called Lord Lucan.

Lawson said his paper put on thousands of sales due to their story and no one complained about it not being true – a foretaste of things to come, perhaps.

The most likely explanation of his vanishing is that “Lucky” Lucan, who was a gambler with masses of debts, threw himself from a cross-channel ferry a few days after the murder. Yet his body has never been found.

ANY OTHER FAMOUS MISSING PEOPLE?

PROBABLY the most famous globally is Amelia Earhart, the pioneering American woman pilot who disappeared on July 2, 1937, along with her navigator Fred Noonan while flying across the Pacific Ocean. No trace of them has ever been found, leading to numerous “sightings” and bizarre theories.

The US still obsesses about DB Cooper, which is the pseudonym of a man who hijacked a Boeing 727 aircraft over the north-western states and having extorted a $200,000 ransom from the airline, parachuted from the jet, never to be seen again.

Also in America, the tough and very controversial teamsters union leader Jimmy Hoffa went missing from a restaurant in Detroit in July, 1975. He was due to have met two men with Mafia connections but they denied seeing him. Hoffa was presumed murdered and was declared dead in 1982, but again there has been no sighting of his body. In the UK, the best-known disappearance is that of Madeleine McCann, the three-year-old daughter of Scottish doctor Gerry McCann and his wife Kate who went missing during a family holiday in Portugal in May, 2007. Despite extensive searches and police inquiries, Maddy McCann has never been found, and none of the conspiracy theories surrounding her supposed kidnapping and death has ever been proven.

ANY OTHER MISSING SCOTS?

SADLY there are thousands of Scots who are officially missing persons. On average, each year Police Scotland handles around 23,000 cases of a person or persons being reported as missing.

The majority of them are found within a couple of days but a significant number are not found for months and years and some are never found at all. That is the case with several famous Scottish people who went missing and who are all presumed dead.

The Flannan Isles mystery involved three lighthouse keepers who mysteriously disappeared from Eilan Mor island in December, 1900. It was presumed they had been swept away in a fierce storm but no trace of them was ever found.

The same can be said of Renee MacRae and her son Andrew who went missing from near Inverness in 1976 and were presumed to have been murdered. As there has been an arrest in the case, due to legal restrictions there is not much more we can report at this point.

The mysterious case of Christina “Licorice” McKechnie is often forgotten because it was never a huge story both here and in the US.

McKechnie was a member of the popular Incredible String Band at the start of the 1970s. The Edinburgh-born singer and percussionist left the band after breaking up with founding member Robin Williamson. She disappeared either in 1987 or 1990, and according to various reports she was crossing the Arizona desert. Despite social media claims to the contrary, she has not been positively identified since.

WHAT ABOUT THE ‘MISSING’ MP?

JOHN Stonehouse was a Labour MP who faked his death by drowning in Miami in November 1974. Five weeks later police in Australia searching for Lucky Lucan were tipped off that an Englishman, Joe Markham, might be Lucan in disguise. It was Unlucky Stonehouse.