Pierrette was Lord Lucan’s first nanny and saw the hatred at the heart of the peer’s marriage. Now in her first ever interview she says: I’m haunted by the belief my sacking led to Britain’s most notorious fugitive blugeoning his next nanny to death

Rarely has a murder been the ­subject of so much conjecture and enduring mystery. On the night of November 7, 1974, Lord Lucan allegedly lay in wait at the family’s London home to kill his estranged wife and mother of his three children. In error, he bludgeoned to death the nanny Sandra Rivett before trying to kill Lady Lucan, who escaped despite serious injury. Last week’s Daily Mail revealed an official Scotland Yard document, written ahead of an inquest in 1975 which saw the fugitive peer named as the nanny’s killer. It is a definitive account of events surrounding the murder, with testimony of witnesses including the ‘Lucan Set’ of socialites who protected him. The report was written by Detective Chief Superintendent Roy Ranson, the case’s senior officer, and sent to the Director of Public Prosecutions for a trial which never took place. The document is the basis of the Mail’s exclusive True Crime podcast, The Trial Of Lord Lucan. Here, as part of our compelling series, we tell the intriguing story of Sandra Rivett’s predecessor as nanny…

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Pierrette Goletto had been in London just a few months when she spotted an advertisement in The Lady, a magazine beloved of the upper classes seeking domestic help.

It was for a nanny to look after three children in fashionable Belgravia. The year was 1973 and Pierrette, 27, had come to Britain from France to improve her English. A position with the aristocratic Lucan family seemed ideal. 

Instead, she found herself plunged into a dysfunctional household with a largely absent father and deeply troubled mother – Lord and Lady Lucan were by then estranged.

Richard John Bingham, the 7th Earl of Lucan, was an Old Etonian from a well-known aristocratic family

Lord Lucan bludgeoned to death their nanny Sandra Rivett on the night of November 7, 1974

Neither showed much affection to Frances, nine, George, six, and Camilla, three, she says.

Pierrette witnessed first-hand the animosity between the warring couple that would ultimately cost the life of her successor as nanny, Sandra Rivett.

As we revisit one of the most sensational unsolved crime cases of the last century, Pierrette, now 78, is uniquely placed to provide a ‘through the keyhole’ account of life in the Lucan household in the run-up to the murder.

Had Lucan ever faced trial, she would undoubtedly have been a key prosecution witness.

She was the family’s nanny for about a year, leaving a couple of months before the murder in November 1974, and she was exposed to the extraordinary tensions in the house, the bizarre behaviour of the mother, the charm of the peer who was a professional gambler, and their growing financial problems. She also met Sandra Rivett.

In addition to this interview with The Mail on Sunday, she has provided gripping testimony for our exclusive True Crime podcast, the Trial Of Lord Lucan.

Pierrette’s upbringing had been simple – she’d grown up on a small farm in Grasse, near Nice in the south of France. Now back living in the area, the widowed mother-of-two remembers her first impressions of life with the Lucans.

‘Coming from a humble background, it struck me what a big house it was. The first person I met was Lady Lucan. She said to me: ‘You look after the children but no more contact.’ I was the only employee and I also had to clean. I was used to hard work.

‘My role was the substitute mother. I washed the children’s clothes, I took them to school, to the swimming pool, to sports matches, to the park, I took them to feed the ducks. I loved painting with them. They weren’t used to having cuddles. We would eat together, play together, do everything together.

‘I used to cook for them, French and Italian, the way I had learned. Frances said to me: ‘That is different, it tastes different.’ I asked her if she liked it and she said: ‘It’s not bad.’

‘Frances was too reserved for a nine-year-old kid. George [then six] was a bit different. He wasn’t a happy child.

‘The parents were going through divorce and the children were like tennis balls being hit backwards and forwards.’

Pierrete Goletto was the family’s nanny for about a year, leaving a couple of months before the murder in November 1974, and she was exposed to the extraordinary tensions in the house, the bizarre behaviour of the mother, the charm of the peer who was a professional gambler, and their growing financial problems

‘The first thing I felt was guilt. I still do now. It is strange, but if I had stayed, this woman could be alive,’ Pierrette reveals

Pierrette met Lord Lucan for the first time when he called at the house one day while the children were at school.

‘I opened the door and I saw a very well-dressed, handsome man. He introduced himself. He said to me: ‘You look after my children?’ and I said yes, I did, seven days a week. He said: ‘Thank you’ – he was the only one who said that.

‘He came about every two weeks to collect the children. I would see him secretly taking photos of them when they were outside in the garden. I knew I should not let Lady Lucan know. When they came back [from their father’s], they were very happy. They’d had ice cream, ­special milkshakes, chocolate.

‘They never once refused to see him. They had a good time. They never had a good time with their mother.’

She recalls the extraordinary ‘coldness’ of Lady Lucan (the daughter of a Major who had won the Military Cross in World War I), who died in 2017, aged 80. An inquest heard she took a cocktail of drink and drugs after diagnosing herself with ­Parkinson’s Disease.

Who was Lord Lucan?

Richard John Bingham, the 7th Earl of Lucan, was not your archetypal murder suspect.

An Old Etonian from a well-known aristocratic family, he developed a taste for the high life after finishing National Service in 1955. He raced power boats, drove an Aston Martin and flamboyantly left his job in a merchant bank to become a professional gambler.

But as his losses mounted in the gambling clubs of Mayfair and Belgravia, the playboy peer a father-of-three found himself mired in debt and his marriage doomed.

It was against this background of deepening financial and domestic strife that the handsome 39-year-old is alleged to murdered his children’s nanny Sandra Rivett, mistaking her for his estranged wife, who he also allegedly attacked on November 7, 1974 before going on the run.

The Rivett murder – at the Lucan family’s home in central London ¿ came to light after Lady Lucan ran to the local pub, the Plumbers Arms, collapsed on the floor and screamed: ‘He’s murdered the nanny and he’s after the children.’ Mrs Rivett’s body was found in a canvas US mailbag in the basement of the five-storey house at 146 Lower Belgrave Street.

But Lucan was nowhere to be seen. Although he rang his mother later that evening, and turned up at the address of a family friend in Sussex ¿ where he had a whiskey and water and spent less than two hours – there have been no confirmed sightings of him since.

The cause of Mrs Rivett’s death was ‘blunt head injuries’. Police concluded that the lead piping found at the murder scene probably caused her injuries.

Lady Lucan had five lacerations of the skull and forehead. They were deep and jagged and if she had received these wounds to the rear of her head, they may have been fatal. She also had lacerations on the inside of her mouth.

By any standards, it was a brutal murder and could easily have been a double killing.

An inquest into the death of Mrs Rivett was held in 1975. In his absence, the jury returned the verdict: ‘Murder by Lord Lucan.’

In the five decades since, there have been dozens of supposed sightings of him in various locations in the UK and around the world – all documented in statement form and followed up by the Met. Yet Lucan has never been found and still remains wanted for murder.

Officially the case remains ‘open’, but plans for a full-scale new investigation were blocked in 2004 by senior Yard commanders, who questioned what it would achieve and at what cost. If still alive, he would be 89.

Pierrette says: ‘When I arrived, she spoke to me for about two seconds. She didn’t ask where I was from, what I made of London. I was not important.

‘I was a piece of something to be picked up and put down, a useful object, to look after the children.

‘I don’t think I had one conversation with her except for the day she lost a diamond necklace and accused me of stealing it. I said I could not take something like that. I’d never even been in her bedroom. I was not allowed access to her floor.

‘We found it in her bed. I said: ‘I told you I didn’t take it,’ and she just said: ‘Get out.’ That was it. She didn’t apologise. I thought that was the way upper-class English people behaved.

‘Otherwise, I hardly saw her. Sometimes when I was coming or going with the children, I’d see her in the dining room dancing around the table with a bottle of vodka, drinking. She would just look at you – not with nastiness but like she was lost. Sometimes she would stay in her room for two or three days with the curtains closed. The room was a mess. Sometimes I wouldn’t see her for a week.

‘She was a very, very lonely lady. She did nothing with the kids. She would just eat, then leave us.

‘In a way I felt sorry for her. She had no heart. To me, she seemed more than depressed. I think she was suffering manic depression.’ The worst times, she says, were when Lord and Lady Lucan clashed. ‘When Lord Lucan came [to the family house], they would go into the room that I called the ‘argument room’,’ Pierrette says.

‘I heard them shout and the words they spoke. It was not nice. He would say to her: ‘You married me for my title, you married me for my money,’ and she would say: ‘You waste your money in the club every night.’ Then he would say: ‘You are not a mother. You never let me see the children.’ Who was wrong, who was right? I don’t know. But I know that when two people don’t get on, it is best to think about the children. This wasn’t the case; it was always a fight. Sometimes I would take the children outside so that they wouldn’t hear.’

Lady Lucan went through many nannies and Pierrette was one of the longer serving ones. In her final months of employment, she witnessed the mounting financial difficulties that were putting even greater strain on the couple.

She says she even spent her own money to pay for the children’s food. Their shopping was delivered by Harrods but she felt she could not ask Lady Lucan for the money to pay the bills.

Pierrette, who teaches English and works as a police and court interpreter, becomes emotional as she remembers the period leading up to the tragic events of 1974.

‘I didn’t leave of my own free will. I was told that somebody was coming to replace me because she was English,’ she says.

‘If they had done this to me when I arrived, when my English was not very good, I would have accepted it. But to be told this after 12 months when I spoke better English and I was reading to the children every day…’

‘It was September 1974 when I was dismissed and Sandra Rivett replaced me. I met her a couple of times. The first time I said to her: ‘Please take care of the children,’ and then I left.

‘Then I realised I’d forgotten some books, so I returned.

‘She opened the door and I asked to see the children. ‘She said: ‘No, you can’t,’ and I said: ‘Fair enough.’ I asked her if she was OK and she said yes and just slammed the door. She wasn’t very friendly, but I presumed she was doing what she was told to do.’

Pierrette has all too vivid memories of what happened after Mrs Rivett was murdered.

‘I found out in a telephone call from the police. The police inspector said to me: ‘The lady who replaced you with Lord Lucan has been murdered.’ He said she was bludgeoned to death.

‘He asked me a million questions. What was I doing? I told him I was working at Chelsea Rendezvous, a Chinese restaurant, and I was also doing the washing and ironing for the owners of San Frediano, an Italian restaurant in Fulham. ­

After hearing the tragic news, she says: ‘The first thing I felt was guilt. I still do now. It is strange, but if I had stayed, this woman could be alive. If it had happened to me, I would perhaps have spoken out and my accent might have saved me. The murderer would have known I was not an English person and would not have murdered me.’

Lord and Lady Lucan were estranged by the time Pierrette came to work for them

In June 1975, an inquest jury concluded that Lord Lucan had delivered the fatal blow, while the bombshell Scotland Yard report on the case – published by the Mail last week – names him as the ‘author’ of the crime.

But Pierrette is not convinced. ‘I don’t think it was Lord Lucan,’ she says. ‘I don’t think he was a violent man. Yes, he could shout, but Lady Lucan would shout as well. I can shout, but it doesn’t mean I’m going to take a piece of lead and smash you over the head with it.

‘It was an Inspector Jones who I spoke to. He wanted to find out if I knew something was going to happen. I remember him because he later asked me to go out to dinner with him. He told me: ‘Stay at our disposal.’ I didn’t. I went back to France. I was afraid they were going to accuse me of doing something wrong.

‘I did go back to England a few weeks later and I was called again by the police and asked the same questions. They were convinced Lord Lucan was the killer. Lady Lucan was saying he was violent. Other people didn’t come straight to his defence, so he disappeared. I think if he didn’t do it, he should have stayed; and if he did, he should have faced up to it. I would have told him: ‘Please, think about your children. Their lives are going to be destroyed, they will suffer.’

‘I don’t understand how he could have done it and not recognised Sandra. Why would he have wanted to kill her?

A fragment of Lord Lucan’s AA membership card that he left behind before driving off and disappearing

‘Where do I think he is now? I hope he didn’t kill himself. My message for him, if he is still alive [he would be 89], is to still come back and fight. People will understand why you were mad, upset, because you wanted your children. If you didn’t do it, say that. If you sent somebody to do it, say it.

‘I don’t think he was the type of guy who would kill himself. You must be very courageous, very strong to do that. He loved himself, he loved the way he looked, he loved his son George and he loved his daughters.’

Pierrette, who worked for a time as a ‘Penthouse Pet’ – a waitress at the Penthouse Club in central London – after her dismissal, describes the episode in her life as ‘worse than a bad dream’.

‘Talking about it now, the feeling of guilt still comes back … I was told: ‘Never let the children go close to Lord Lucan.’ They made me think he was a kidnapper or something. But you can tell if someone is like that. No, I would never have said he was a kidnapper. He was a coward more than a killer. He was a weak person. He ran away. He didn’t face the consequences.’