Lord Lucan stayed with us in the Philippines ten years after vanishing

In a mansion high up in the Alabang Hills – the ‘Beverly Hills’ of the Philippines where tycoons, celebrities, diplomats and the odd crime baron rub shoulders – a raucous evening was drawing to a close.

The three British peers present had enjoyed a convivial reunion with a splendid gourmet dinner washed down by Chateau Margaux and Chateau Lafite Rothschild as they reminisced about their glory days back in London.

Later, over glasses of the finest brandy, they played Trivial Pursuit in a room overlooking the pool.

The public school-educated aristocrats were bonded by their love of the good things in life and as former members of the military and British society, the trio had a shared – some might say warped – interpretation of the meaning of ‘honour’.

They knew they were in safe company, that they could trust each other to be discreet at all times.

But there was another person present that evening in the mid-Eighties who was not bound by the omerta of the Old Boy network. Editha, a young Filipina woman, was the fourth wife of the host, the infamous 3rd Baron (Tony) Moynihan of Leeds – aka ‘Baron Scoundrel’ – fugitive, suspected fraudster, brothel keeper and alleged murderer and sex and drugs trafficker.

She knew one of the guests to be the 6th Marquess of Headfort, Michael Taylour, another Manila-based aristocrat with a shady past. But she had met the third peer – a tall, softly spoken, dashing man with impeccable manners – only hours before.

Later, in a moment she has never forgotten, her husband Tony would reveal the identity of the mystery guest. It was, he told her, Lord Lucan – the murder suspect who had disappeared ten years earlier after killing his children’s nanny in the basement of their Belgravia home.

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Many believed that the 39-year-old Old Etonian had jumped to his death from a ferry in the Channel after bludgeoning Sandra Rivett to death with a piece of lead pipe and attempting to murder his estranged wife Veronica on the evening of November 7, 1974.

His blood-smeared Ford Corsair was found abandoned in the port of Newhaven on the Sussex coast, a few days later.

But his body was never found and over the years a number of knowledgeable ex-Met officers, including the top detective who carried out an exhaustive review of the Lucan case in 2004, have concluded that Lord Lucan was spirited out of the country by his well-connected and wealthy friends – the so-called ‘Clermont Set’, named after the Mayfair gambling club they frequented – to start a new life abroad.

Since then, there have been dozens of alleged sightings, bizarre theories and wild reports relating to his fate. Much of the speculation as to his whereabouts has centred on Africa, but there have been claims he was fed to tigers, ended up as a hippy in Goa or lived as a Buddhist in Australia.

But today, ‘Baron Scoundrel’s’ widow Editha, Lady Moynihan, now in her early 60s and a successful businesswoman based in Manila, breaks her long silence to sensationally claim that she and her husband entertained the 7th Earl of Lucan, Richard John Bingham, at their home one night in 1984/85 – a decade after he had vanished.

In doing so, she is the first person to give a credible account of meeting the rogue peer who was declared dead in 1999. In a series of revelations that could rewrite the history book on an enduring crime mystery, Editha says Lucan came to the Philippines, from Thailand, to pick up a false passport that had been arranged for him by her husband Tony Moynihan.

Moynihan used the services of a corrupt society lawyer based in London to create bogus travel documents for himself and criminal associates (including the notorious British drugs baron, Howard ‘Mr Nice’ Marks).

She describes Lucan as having a distinctive fake mole on his left cheek which she believes he’d acquired in Thailand as part of his ‘disguise’. His hair was no longer jet black as it appeared in newspaper images but salt and pepper grey. He had shaved off his luxuriant moustache and put on weight.

Editha is in no doubt it was Lord Lucan, one of several friends of her husband who passed through Manila in the 1980s when the city was a haven for those on the run from the authorities. And she claims she has physical evidence – a lock of his hair – to prove it.

Lucan was introduced to Editha as ‘Richard’ (his first name, although he was known to friends in London by his middle name John) and he stayed with them for two days.

Editha was married to Tony Moynihan for most of the 1980s and met many of his inner circle. The couple had no secrets, she said, and insists her husband, who died aged 55 in 1991, had no reason to mislead her about Lucan’s identity.

‘Why would Tony lie to me…. And why would Michael tell me [it was Lucan] too? What is there to gain, lying to me?’ said Editha, who did not seek payment for this interview.

When I showed Editha a picture of Lucan taken years before he disappeared, she studied it closely, before confirming that – despite the ageing process and that ‘fake’ mole – it was the man she met.

‘He was a bit bigger than that, but still very pleasant, very clean looking, and he was very well dressed. I was impressed with the way he was carrying his clothes, you know, because he was a tall man.’

The Mail has spent some months investigating her intriguing claims, which are supported by compelling circumstantial evidence about her late husband’s connections to Lucan and his circle of wealthy gamblers in London.

Immaculately dressed, supremely composed and with impeccable English, Editha has an impressive memory for names and detail as she gives a vivid account of meeting with Lucan.

It will, she tells me, be a chapter in the memoir she is writing aided by letters, diaries, and mementoes from the 1980s. These include a personal ‘gift’ from Lucan and, astonishingly, that physical proof of his identity.

Editha Ruben was just 18 and still at school when she met Antony Moynihan. She was struggling to escape from a tough district of Manila where she grew up by working as a fashion model.

Then aged 44, Moynihan was Britain’s most outrageous peer, a banjo and bongo-playing self-publicist whose debauched lifestyle had earned him a host of derogatory nicknames.

By contrast, his half-brother Colin was an up-and-coming Tory politician, who would later become Sports Minister under Margaret Thatcher and ultimately the 4th Baron Moynihan.

Married three times, first to an actress, then to two belly-dancers, Tony Moynihan had four daughters and had been living in enforced exile in the Philippines since fleeing an arrest warrant issued by magistrates in 1970 for a series of fraud offences.

He had, over the years, frittered away much of his modest fortune in the hedonist hotspots of the Far East and was now running ‘a massage parlour’ from the MacArthur Hotel in a seedy district of the Philippine capital to keep him in the style which he boasted ‘was my God-given birthright’.

Moynihan first spotted Editha modelling at a society fashion show and wooed her relentlessly, she recalls. ‘Every morning, Tony’s driver would come round to my house with my breakfast, ham, fruits, ready to take me to school. Then in the afternoon, he’d send his driver to pick me up and drop me off at work, and at night he would call and make sure that I had my dinner, and at the weekend, he was at my house with all sorts of goodies for me to eat.’

She says he was branded a ‘cradle snatcher’ when, after a brief courtship, they sealed their union at Ellinwood Protestant Church in Manila.

There followed, she says, a period of happiness in which her ‘father figure’ husband introduced her to his bizarre social circle of politicians, showbusiness figures, senior police officers and visiting criminals.

It was at the MacArthur Hotel that she says she first set eyes on Lord Lucan – although she did not learn who he was until later that night.

She said Moynihan had told her that ‘a very special person is coming over’.

‘We were at the hotel at that time, and he walked in. I was quite surprised because …. the way he was dressed and the way he spoke, it was very much like Tony, and his mole here [was] quite big, actually. Looking at that mole, you forgot the whole face, you just sort of concentrated looking on this mole.’

Editha says her husband and Lucan, who’d flown in from Thailand that day, ‘hugged each other like long-lost friends’, as did ‘the old chap’ Michael [Lord Headfort].

‘They sort of all knew each other,’ she said. ‘Tony and Michael were quite close.’ Indeed, both had been pupils at Stowe.

‘There were parties on Michael’s Island in Lubang [south-west of Manila], there were parties in our house or at the yacht club, because Michael used to own a beautiful yacht,’ Editha continued.

The group – which also included a showbiz impresario called Keith Snell – were driven from the hotel to Moynihan’s mansion where he and Editha lived, an eight-bedroom former ambassadorial home in the Alabang Hills. Dinner was prepared by ‘Baron Scoundrel’ himself – an accomplished cook and member of the Philippine Food And Wine Society.

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‘Whilst Tony was cooking, they were all standing inside the kitchen. I didn’t go in, it was Michael, Keith, and “Richard”,’ Editha said.

Then her English stepfather happened to phone.

‘I said to my him: “Look we’re having a little party at home, just a couple of people and Tony has introduced us to this person, for the first time ever, he looks a lot like Tony”.

‘I said: “It’s Michael and Richard….My stepfather knew Michael, I’d introduced them [before]. Anyway, I was talking [then] to my mother and she said [about the mystery guest] “What’s his name, does he have a crush on you?” I said his name is Richard Bingham and my stepfather … the tone in his voice changed after that and he said that he’s a murderer.

‘So, that night when I went to bed, I asked Tony [about Richard’s identity] “because my stepfather said that he’s a murderer”. He said: “Look, there is no proof to that, unless the man admits that he’s actually done it, there is no proof”.’

It was then, she says, that Moynihan confirmed that Richard was in fact the missing Lord Lucan.

‘He said: “Yes, actually, he’s Lord Lucan… don’t call him Lord Lucan.” I said OK, so I never did call him Lord Lucan.’

Editha says that a courier had picked up a fake British passport for Lucan, organised by her husband, from London and returned with it to the Philippines for collection.

‘Richard at that time was living in Thailand and we were operating a business [massage parlour] in Thailand too at that time, and Tony was always in Thailand,’ Editha added.

She said that Lucan gave her a gift that night – a necklace with a precious stone from Thailand – and signed a card as a thank you for her hospitality. She still has it, she tells me, before continuing with the story.

‘And then after that, there was something funny, because I think they were already smashed by that time. He [Lucan] said to me: “You know, one day, Lady Moynihan, this is going to be of use for you”. I didn’t know what [he] meant by that, but the feeling is I was a baby, I was a tiny little girl who took care of them.

‘Tony said that [me] being the youngest, I’ll be the one who’s going to need these things that were given, the necklace and the card….’

Editha also claims that Lucan cut off a lock of his hair for her to keep, and that her husband told her to one day tell Scotland Yard that this is ‘not a product of our imagination, it’s a product of their own incompetence’.

Moynihan and Lucan, who had both served in the Coldstream Guards, shared an intense dislike of the police and the suggestion that they might wish to humiliate detectives from beyond the grave is not implausible.

Explaining her husband’s loyalty to his guest, Editha said that Moynihan often spoken about the importance of the old boys’ school or old boys’ something, [it was] just the terminology Tony used, and [his friend] Michael did too’.

It is worth noting here that Lucan’s great friend John Aspinall, owner of the Clermont gambling club, said in the aftermath of the Sandra Rivett murder that the fugitive earl ‘could call on more friends than anyone else he knows’, which might explain why he could rely on a fellow peer to provide him with a false passport – albeit at a cost.

Moynihan had started selling false British and Irish passports for upwards of £3,000 each, using someone from his inner circle as a courier to collect them from London.

Editha said that the London lawyer who oversaw the production of passports, Jimmy Newton, who died in London in 2009, would obtain details of a very young child who died without a passport being issued and, mirroring the plotline in the 1970s thriller The Day Of The Jackal, then get a copy of birth certificate to apply for a fake travel document.

In relation to Lucan, she said: ‘He didn’t look broke. He had the money to spend for a new passport.’

The man she is convinced was Lord Lucan left the Philippines after two days, she assumes to return to Thailand, and she never saw him again.

By the late 1980s, her marriage to Moynihan was in trouble after the serial philanderer resumed his old ways and they had a disagreement over the sale of the MacArthur Hotel, which she’d hoped to build into a successful business. She left him but, a few weeks later, agreed to meet him in a city plaza. ‘Tony knelt in front of me, begging me to come back, with all the waiters watching,’ she said.

Despite the sour end to their relationship, Editha – who has been interviewed for a new two-part BBC documentary on the drug dealer Howard Marks now available in iPlayer - defends much of her late husband’s conduct.

She strongly refutes he dealt in drugs, although he certainly became close to Marks before turning on him in a plea deal with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration in 1988.

‘If there is such a thing as guilty by association, then he probably is guilty of that,’ she said. ‘[Tony] was associated with people that were doing that business.

‘Murderer? The man couldn’t even kill a fly. It’s not his mindset. Tony [was] not that kind of a person. Brothel owner? He must be quite guilty of that, I would say.’

None of the others whom she says were present at the Manila mansion that night in the 1980s are still alive and some people will, no doubt, question why she has waited 40 years to tell her story.

As for the card signed by Lucan and his lock of hair, Editha says she still has them in a box with other mementoes relating to her husband, but circumstances prevented her showing them to us.

However, we discussed the possibility of the hair being subjected to DNA testing. Scotland Yard doesn’t have Lucan’s DNA, sources have told us, so any tests on a hair sample would have to be compared with a sample from a Lucan family member.

Editha's testimony prompts myriad questions, including the role of the so-called ‘Clermont Set’ of wealthy, society friends who might, allegedly, have facilitated Lucan’s ‘escape’ from the UK on the night of the murder; how Lucan might have been funding his life and where exactly he went after allegedly visiting the Philippines. If still alive, Lucan would be 89 now.

I have spent three decades covering the Lucan story for the Mail, including debunking several supposed sightings or false leads, and – more recently – obtained a never-before-seen copy of the original Scotland Yard report on the Crown’s case against the peer – published in the Mail in May this year – which was sent to the Director of Public Prosecutions in 1975.

But I believe there is something compelling about Editha’s account of her encounter with Lucan. She is a credible witness in a case which has been incredible from day one – and which 50 years on still captivates the world.

Listen to two real-life, eminent barristers argue the case for and against Lucan in the Mail’s No 1 True Crime podcast The Trial of Lord Lucan, available wherever you get your podcasts now.