Nothing draws in people quite like a true crime story – and ITV’s The Lady is certainly that.
Airing last night, the show stars Natalie Dormer as none other than Sarah Ferguson, and Mia Mckenna-Bruce as Jane Andrews, a working class woman who found herself elevated to becoming Fergie’s royal ‘dresser’ – before being tried and convicted for murdering her boyfriend, Thomas Cressman.
The story became a sensation in the early Noughties, and had all the hallmarks of a salacious story: the royals, a brutal death and a tabloid press fuelling it all.
The Lady has been described by its showrunner, Debbie O’Malley, as a “toxic fairytale”, and it certainly is that. Jane Andrews’ fall from grace, from Buckingham Palace all the way to the Old Bailey – is tragic and compelling. But how much of it really happened? We dive into Andrews’ life, with the help of court reports and interviews.
A working-class background
Andrews was born in April 1967 in Cleethorpes, Lincolnshire. Her family was working class: her father worked as a joiner, and her mother as a social worker. Jane was bright and got a place at the local grammar school, before the family’s debts forced them to move to Grimsby.
“I remember one day we didn’t have enough to buy a loaf of bread and Mum had us looking down the sides of the settee and in our coats for money to scrape together,” she said in a 2003 interview. Around this time, she also started to struggle with her mental health, with depression, panic attacks and an eating disorder; she tried to take her own life for the first time at the age of 15.
She also began the pattern that would haunt her life, of seeking unhealthy relationships for validation. “I would sleep with someone, possibly on the first date, because I was frightened if I didn't they would go,” she told the Guardian. “I allowed men to do anything they wanted to me."
At Grimsby, the young Andrews enrolled at Hereford Secondary School – but her continual truancy affected her grades, and an abortion she had at the age of 17 traumatised her further. Eventually, after receiving only her O-levels, she abandoned A-levels to study fashion at the Grimsby College of Art.
Irene Smith, one of her lecturers, told the Telegraph later that she remembered her as somebody whose primary motivation was "to get out of Grimsby".
“I had no doubt when I was teaching her that she would move on quickly. She knew what she wanted in life, and she had a particular style,” she said. “She desperately wanted to get on. She was really, really determined to succeed.”
Life after Grimsby
After graduating, the young Andrews worked as a sales assistant for Marks & Spencer in Grimsby, when she saw an advertisement for a personal dresser in The Lady magazine. She applied, and six months later got an interview with the Duchess of York, Sarah Ferguson, who at that point was pregnant with Princess Beatrice.
The pair got on well, and Andrews ended up with the job, starting in July 1988.
“I was running away from all the horrible things in my past that Grimsby represented,” she said later. “I arrived at King’s Cross with a suitcase and £10 in my pocket. I got in a taxi and said, ‘Side door of Buckingham Palace’ and the driver made a joke.” Upon arrival, she found flowers waiting for her, along with a card saying ‘Welcome to the team’, signed, ‘The Boss.’
Andrews quickly learned to fit in, dropping her northern accent so fast that Fergie later jokingly called her ‘Lady Jane’. She also loved the job – although she found it demanding, and newspaper reports later labelled her a grasping social climber for her attempts to fit in.
"I was a country bumpkin," she told the Guardian. "Suddenly, I was at Balmoral mixing with the royals, having long chats with Princess Diana. I was 21 years old and of course I enjoyed it. If my accent changed it was only because people made fun of the way I said 'bath' and 'grass'. Fergie was headstrong, but she was good to me.”
She also fell in love: in April 1989, Andrews met IBM executive Christopher Dunn-Butler. He was 21 years her senior, but that didn’t seem to matter: Andrews called him “happy-go-lucky”, and within three months, he had proposed, and the pair married in August 1990.
After a few years, though, the marriage struggled. Andrews had a few affairs, and described the pair as being “more like good friends” rather than a couple. But soon after, she met Greek shipping magnate Dimitri Horne.
They fell in love, and she moved in with him – to a flat the Duchess had rented for her. At this time, the pair were closer than ever, bonding over their failed marriages (hers to Andrew was foundering around the same time) and travelling around the world together. In an introduction to one of her books, the Duchess included a tribute to Andrews, “whose loyalty and kindness knows no bounds.”
However, more trouble was on the horizon. Her relationship with Horne was struggling; when he told her he wanted to end their affair, she reportedly started breaking things around the flat, leading him to give a statement to police.
“On the mantelpiece in the living room was a cup and saucer that I knew was very special to him and I smashed it. I went through his journal with a black marker pen and blanked out all the references to myself. I picked up his telephone and smashed that as well,” she told the Guardian. “I'm ashamed of what I did. I've never done that to anyone else's possessions.”
She attempted suicide again, but survived. In November 1997, she was made redundant from her job at the palace.
Thomas Cressman
After this news (apparently the result of cost-cutting exercises on the part of the palace), Andrews sank into a deep depression. She felt she had been badly treated by Fergie, her employer, who had apparently told her weeks ago that, “I’ll never get rid of you”, and didn’t tell her about the redundancy in person.
After some difficulty finding a job, she eventually got one with Knightsbridge jewellers Theo Fennell (father of Emerald) and Annabel Jones, which was where she eventually met Thomas Cressman in 1998.
He was a successful businessman: his father was the former director of Aston Villa, and he himself had worked as a stockbroker. The pair fell head over heels; later reports claimed that Andrews saw a life with him as a means to get back into high society, and became obsessed with the idea of a proposal.
"It was such a complex relationship that we had," Andrews told the Guardian. "I was the ultimate in insecurity. He was the ultimate in commitment-phobia. I would threaten to leave. He would tell me to leave. Then he would reel me back in. He knew which carrots to dangle. He knew which strings to pull."
It was volatile, too, with Andrews alleging that Cressman had an interest in kink and BDSM, and enjoyed humiliating and hurting her.
In the summer of 2000, the pair went on holiday to the south of France, but things ended in disaster. Reports suggested that Andrews had been expecting a proposal, only for Cressman to tell her he wasn’t planning on proposing at all – though Andrews herself disputes this.
Things escalated on their return to Cressman’s flat in Fulham. At one point, he phoned the police, telling the operator that, “we are rowing, someone is going to get hurt unless… I would like [the] police to come and split us up.”
Nobody did, and later, his body was found. Andrews had beaten him with a cricket bat and stabbed him with a kitchen knife, before going on the run. She was later found in a car in Cornwall, having taken an overdose.
The trial
Andrews went on trial for the murder in 2001, amid a storm of tabloid interest. At the trial, Andrews’ defence reiterated her claim that Cressman had been sexually and physically violent towards her – and added that her depression “would have heightened her sense of fear and helplessness.”
Cressman’s family hit back, describing them as a “whole tissue of lies,” and eventually the jury convicted Andrews of murder rather than manslaughter.
“In killing the man you loved, you ended his life and ruined your own,” the judge told her during the sentencing.
Ultimately, Andrews was sentenced to life in prison, starting her sentence in HMP Bullwood Hall in Essex. There was an escape in 2009, where she jumped the walls after being transferred to an open prison, and holed up in a nearby Premier Inn with her family, until she was caught and brought back.
Despite repeated attempts to appeal the sentence, Andrews remained incarcerated until her release in 2019. Upon her release, she found work in a supermarket, but lost the job when her identity was discovered. Now 57, she apparently works as a charity-funded animal hospital: a quiet life, for a woman whose tragic story has been dragged through the media yet again.
Harriet Wistrich, CEO of Centre for Women’s Justice, who represented Jane Andrews at her appeal in 2003, added that “she long ago served her prison sentence and has attempted to move on, but due to her past employment with the now discredited section of the Royal family, she continues to be the subject of media interest, intensified each time when yet another one-sided TV programme is made about her case.
“Jane has not contributed to ‘The Lady’ despite it purportedly being about her life, nor has she contributed to any of the previous multiple TV documentaries made about her. The public are thus presented with a one-sided view that fails to explore why a vulnerable woman in her circumstances may have been driven to kill.”
The Lady is currently streaming on ITVX
