She arrived in London at the age of 21 with just 10 pounds in her pocket to take a taxi to one of the side gates of Buckingham Palace. Jane Andrews entered the realm of the British monarchy's old glamour as she was hired as a personal stylist for Sarah Ferguson (65). However, in a few years, she went from mingling with the Windsors and London's social elite to being sentenced to life in prison for murdering her boyfriend. Her story is so fascinating that it will be turned into a four-episode true crime series titled The Lady, produced by one of the creators of The Crown, to be aired on ITV.
To understand how a member of the Windsor staff ended up behind bars, we need to go back to Jane's adolescence, when a psychiatrist diagnosed her with a borderline personality disorder. She was born in 1967 into a humble and unhappy marriage. The situation was so dire that Jane still remembered searching for coins in the sofa cushions to buy a simple loaf of bread.
At 15, she made her first suicide attempt, and two years later, she dropped out of school and experienced a traumatic miscarriage that influenced her depressive state. While working at the department store Marks & Spencer, she saw an anonymous job ad in The Lady magazine seeking a personal assistant. She applied, and six months later, she got a response. Sarah Ferguson had hired her!
It was the year 1988. Everything seemed to be going smoothly. The commoner and the Duchess of York hit it off right away, traveling to different continents, attending social events, being part of some of the family's most intimate moments, and Jane even met Lady Di before her divorce from Prince Charles.
In 1990, she married Christopher Dunn-Butler, an IBM executive 20 years her senior, whom she soon divorced because she had been unfaithful on multiple occasions. This event only strengthened her bond with Fergie even more, as the Duke and Duchess of York had decided to separate in 1992, a fateful year that Queen Elizabeth II called the annus horribilis because her daughter, Princess Anne, also separated, and part of her beloved Windsor Castle caught fire.
Gradually, the employee became so obsessed with her boss that she imitated her way of dressing, speaking, and even dyeing her hair. It is said that Fergie started jokingly calling her Lady Jane. At a charity event organized by the Duchess of York in 1996, Jane met Dimitri Horne, stepson of a wealthy Greek shipping magnate whose mother was close to Princess Michael of Kent. When he wanted to end the relationship a few months later, the young woman went crazy, destroying part of her apartment in South Kensington and stealing thousands of pounds from him. This ordeal led her to attempt suicide again.
Under the pretext of a budget cut, Jane was dismissed in November 1997. However, she claimed that the main reason was that Count Gaddo della Gherardesca, then a "special friend" of Fergie, was making advances towards her. In 1998, Jane saw a new opportunity when she started dating Thomas Cressman, a wealthy former stockbroker whose father had been the president of the Aston Villa football club. But in the year 2000, she once again felt abandoned and completely frustrated when Thomas informed her at the family mansion on the French Riviera that he did not wish to marry or have children.
Upon returning to London, their argument escalated. That night, Thomas decided to go to bed, and Jane killed him by stabbing him and hitting him with a cricket bat. When she was arrested, she had attempted suicide by overdosing on pills. She was sentenced to life in prison, escaped in 2009, and was re-incarcerated until her release in 2019.