Lord Lucan: Tragedy, mystery, comedy, farce – and still no finale

The Rangitikei township of Marton is a bit of a stride from Belgravia. Which is why, I suppose, if you were the 7th Earl of Lucan and you'd done a bunk after bumping off your children's nanny, it is precisely the sort of place you might come to.

It's out of the way, even by New Zealand standards; and it's certainly out of the way as far as British fugitives are concerned, being literally the other end of the Earth from the unwelcome attentions of the Metropolitan Police. To its younger inhabitants, the backwoods location of this North Island settlement is something of a drawback. But to an errant aristocrat, debtor, wife-beater, murderer, and cad-on-the-run, it is comfortingly remote.

But the trouble with such places is that strangers do rather stick out. Locals take a long time to accept them. They don't take kindly to incomers; and someone, especially, didn't take kindly to an Englishman calling himself Roger Woodgate who arrived in Marton five years ago. "He's a strange one, that Woodgate bloke," went the mutters. "Thinks he can come down here and do as he likes."

What he liked, this Woodgate, was to keep himself to himself. Lived on a ramshackled property on the edge of town, with a house in such a state that he slept in the back of an old Land-Rover with his pet possum Redfern, Smoky the cat, and a goat called Camilla. "You should see his property," continued the mutters. "Place is a bloody disgrace."

And, since things move slower here than, say, at the baccarat tables of London's Clermont Club, it took until last week for feelings to boil over, fingers to be pointed, and accusations to be made. "Y'know that Woodgate fella?" whispered someone in the ear of a reporter. "Reckon he's that Lord Lucan." Soon, word had reached the ears of Rangitikei mayor, Bob Buchanan. "Because of the mystery surrounding this man," said His Worship, "I wouldn't be surprised to learn he is Lord Lucan. There's quite a resemblance. And although he lives only about 10 minutes out of Marton, his mail goes to a PO box in Palmerston North." In Rangitikei, you can't get much more suspicious than that.

And so it came to pass a few days ago that Mr Woodgate, who emigrated from London in 1974, woke up to find himself the subject of headlines not only in the Wanganui Chronicle, but newspapers and websites around the world: "'Lord Lucan' living in an old car with pet possum" (The Scotsman), "New hunt for fugitive earl" (Sydney Morning Herald), and: "Has Lord Lucan been found living rough in New Zealand?" (Daily Mail).

The answer to that question was, of course, no. Despite descriptions of Mr Woodgate that referred to his "upper-class accent" and "military bearing" (Lucan was an ex-Guards officer), it was soon obvious that the chap sleeping in the Land Rover was not an Old Etonian, and especially not one who had run up huge debts at London gaming houses, bludgeoned nanny Sandra Rivett to death, brutalised his wife, and scarpered. After all, this "Lord Lucan" was 10 years younger than the real one, five inches shorter, and left England months before the murder. All in all, something of an alibi.

What he was – unusually, in the half-baked world of Lucanology – was exactly who he said he was: Roger Woodgate, a man whose contacts with the higher reaches of the British Establishment were limited to the odd brass hat he had run into while working as a photographer for the Ministry of Defence three decades ago. This was good news for him – it is, after all, always nice to know you're who you think you are – and it was good news for the continuing prosperity of the likes of LordLucan.com (proprietor, according to our researches, "Lord Lucan Associates" of Angola).

It was, however, bad news for the New Zealand neighbours two pastures away, whose dispute with Mr Woodgate will not now be resolved by him being carted off to chokey. Bad news, too, for the Lucan family. Once again, they will be denied "closure", as the simpering columnists say, or "a death certificate" as the rest of us call it. None can be issued until a body is produced, and one 10 years too young, five inches too short, and still alive is unlikely to satisfy the Westminster coroner.

So clan Lucan must continue to wait for the denouement, as they have done these 33 years. The events of November 1974 are one reason – but not, one suspects, the only one – why the family is not as other families are. Take Lucan's widow, a woman deserving our sympathy in every respect, but who, unlike most countesses, now has a website to air her considerable feelings. Its contents are proof that, for all the way in which the Lucan case has morphed from crime into comedian's punch-line, the blows that rained down on the nanny's head are still inflicting pain on others, three and a half decades on.

Here is the Countess on her in-laws: "It was, however, to be expected that my late husband's rather uncivilised blood relations would make futile attempts to clear his name." On etiquette: "At Mrs Rivett's inquest I wore a hat because of my rank as a Peeress of the Realm and I wore the same outfit on each of the four days it lasted as it is vulgar to use a tragic and grave matter such as an inquest as an opportunity to display one's wardrobe." And on her daughter's "bad manners": "She failed to invite me to her wedding held at a church a stone's throw from my house in Eaton Square...". She also claimed to have been the victim of misdiagnosis by the medical profession, and to have subsequently been "involuntarily addicted to benzodiazepines". She writes: "My children who knew of the medical abuse remained silent and my house was looted in my absence when both property and documents were removed."

What, then, of the root of all these miseries: the Earl himself? Here, with regular sightings of broken-down old Brits on some exotic shore, we are back to the Lucan Affair as comedy-mystery. And, wherever and in whatever desiccated state he is, the old gambler (who probably threw himself, or fell drunkenly, into the Channel the night of the killing) continues to have the last laugh. He did escape his debts, creditors, arrest and trial; he did get out before the roulette wheel stopped turning and he ran out of chips. Somewhere – in this world or the next – his Edwardian features are creasing into one of his self-satisfied London clubland chuckles at the sightings of him as a waiter in San Francisco, in a hotel in Madagascar (and five dozen other places), at the midnight disinterment of some colonial old soak's grave in South Africa, and – a throwing back of his patrician head for a full-throated roar of laughter at this one – at a Scotland Yard detective mistaking him for a cirrhotic old banjo player from Bolton.

And now, a man with a possum. They might play dead, but Lucan couldn't. Not for this long.

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