On the night of 7 November 1974, Sandra Rivett, the 29-year-old nanny to the Lucan children, was beaten to death in the basement of a Belgravia townhouse. Minutes later, Veronica, Countess of Lucan, ran bloodied into a nearby pub saying her husband had tried to kill her. By morning, Richard John Bingham, 7th Earl of Lucan, had vanished.

In this episode we reconstruct that night, follow the police manhunt from London to Newhaven, and test the theories that have outlived almost everyone involved: suicide in the Channel, a quiet death abroad, or an escape helped along by wealthy friends. We also look at what the case left behind: a family split apart, a son still pursuing justice for his mother, and a missing-persons law that let the courts finally declare Lucan dead in 2016.

A story about class, loyalty and silence, and about the woman too often left out of her own story.

In this episode of Case UK: Buried in Silence, we investigate the haunting disappearance of Mary Flanagan, Scotland Yard’s longest-running missing persons case.

On 31 December 1959, Mary left her family home in West Ham claiming she was heading to a New Year’s Eve work party at the Tate & Lyle refinery in Silvertown. But she never arrived. What investigators uncovered next revealed a hidden double life, a mysterious older boyfriend using a possible false identity, and a trail that disappeared into the shadows of post-war London.

Was Mary fleeing shame, secrecy, or danger?

Did she leave voluntarily, or was she silenced before she ever had the chance?

More than sixty years later, despite DNA technology, database searches, and renewed police investigations, nobody knows what happened to the sixteen-year-old girl who vanished into the East London winter.

This episode explores:

• Mary’s final known movements
• The mystery of “Tom McGinty”
• The hidden two-week disappearance before she vanished
• Irish Catholic social stigma in 1950s Britain
• Scotland Yard’s lost case files
• Modern forensic efforts to solve the case

Some mysteries fade with time. Others grow louder in silence.

June 27, 1946. Twelve-year-old Muriel Drinkwater was walking home from school through woodland near Penllergaer, South Wales. Her mother watched her enter the trees. She never came out. The following day, her body was found. She had been raped, bludgeoned, and shot twice in the chest with a World War I-era Colt .45.

July 7, 1946. Eleven-year-old Sheila Martin was playing on a swing behind her home in Fawkham Green, Kent. She was strangled with her own hair ribbon and left half-buried under nettles in the woods. The coroner called it a diabolical assault.

250 miles. Ten days. Both girls. Both woods. Both within half a mile of home. Both sexually assaulted.

In 2009, South Wales Police formally requested Sheila Martin's case file from Kent to examine whether the same man killed them both. In 2008, scientists had extracted a DNA profile from a semen stain on Muriel's coat, circled in yellow crayon by the original investigators and then stored, unseen, for sixty years. The profile ruled out the man who had lived under suspicion since 1946. In 2019, it ruled out the man theorised as the killer for over a decade.

Nobody has been charged with either murder.

Muriel Drinkwater's file is closed until 2037. Sheila Martin's until 2045. Both cite health and safety. Both cite third-party personal information.

Someone in those files is still considered worth protecting.