(ot) Oh Noooo! Anticipated Lord Lucan custard pie already thrown at book author
channel4.com
Lord Lucan claim rebuffed
Crime
Published: 08-Sep-2003
By: Jane Dodge
Just when we thought it was all over, 30-years on - this particular murder mystery refuses to go quietly.
Following the claim by a former Scotland Yard detective that he's solved the mystery of the disappearance of Lord Lucan, more's emerged about "Jungly Barry".
He's the man said to have been the missing peer.
A new book claimed Lord Lucan had fled to India in 1974 following the murder of his children's nanny Sandra Rivett.
We were told he'd undergone a radical life style change - and popped up in Goa as a hippy - known as Jungle Barry.
Much has been made of facial similarities, illustrated above. But forensic experts remain unconvinced.
And a birth certificate confirms Mr Halpin's modest roots in St Helens - this was no English aristocrat.
One old friend - Christy MacHale - emailed Channel 4 News to explain that:
"Barry Halpin is most emphatically not Lucky Lucan.... but a musician well known in folk circles."
Mr MacHale did however admit Jungle Barry was:
"Certainly not averse to stringing a few Fleet Street hacks along by failing to deny he was Lucan."
Full email
We showed the new evidence to one of the authors of the book. Perhaps unsurprisingly he refuses to budge.
So the only thing's that certain - is that this particular story will continue to run and run.
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FULL EMAIL:
Sir:
Much as I hate to spoil a good story, the man in the photos from Goa (Sunday Telegraph 7 September 2003 P1, etc. ad nauseam) is Barry Halpin and is most emphatically not “Lucky” Lucan. Barry, who was from St Helens, was well known in the world of traditional music and song both in Merseyside and up and down the west of Ireland, where the elder inhabitants of small communities from Donegal to West Cork, remembering his frequent visits in the 1960s, are likely even now to greet a visitor from this part of the world with “Liverpool, is it? Do ye know Barry Halpin?”.
Barry was certainly not averse to stringing a few Fleet Street hacks along by failing to deny that he was Lucan, especially if they kept plying him with drinks the while! However, about all that he and Lucan had in common, apart from their love of backgammon and their lack of earlobes, was their Irish ancestry.
Though Barry spent most of the last couple of decades of his life in Goa, he returned home on one or two occasions, and on the last of these, a year or so before his death, passed a pleasant couple of days at our house. I can vouch for the fact that it was indeed he, and I am far from a lone voice crying in the wilderness – he was a gregarious man with literally hundreds of friends and acquaintances.
We had all thought that the hoary old canard was a dead duck long since, but it is truly amazing how gullible some people can be. I hope that Messrs. MacLaughlin and Hall don’t feel too silly when the trickle of refutations turns into a flood tide.
Respectfully yours,
Christy MacHale |
