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The story of a former royal aide to Fergie who killed her millionaire boyfriend when he refused to marry her is to be explored in a new ITV documentary tonight.
Jane Andrews was a former dresser to Sarah Ferguson, the Duchess of York, and ended up with a life sentence in 2001 for the murder of Tom Cressman.
At the time of the killing, she was dubbed the Fatal Attraction Killer as tales emerged of her rage at previous boyfriends.
So who is Jane Andrews and where is she now?
Now aged 53, she has recently spotted food shopping in Lincolnshire, where she was brought up and later returned to live. The Daily Mail reports that friends of Andrews say she is terrified of the effect the new documentary will have.
In November 2020, she was seen working as a store assistant stacking shelves at a branch of Morrisons in the same area and is thought to still be doing the same job.
It’s a mighty fall from her glamorous life as dresser for the Duchess of York from 1988 to 1997.
That role among the upper echelons of the royal household had seemed like an astonishing rise to success from her early years.
Andrews had been born in Cleethorpes, Lincolnshire, and moved with her family to nearby Grimsby. As a teenager, she suffered from depression, panic attacks and an eating disorder. At 15 she tried to take her own life and at 17 she had an abortion.
Despite her troubles, she went on to study fashion at Grimsby College of Art and became a designer of children’s clothes for Marks and Spencer.
Andrews was 21 when she replied to an anonymous ad in The Lady magazine for a personal dresser, and after an interview with Fergie six months later she started work at Buckingham Palace where she was responsible for the duchess’s wardrobe.
She dropped her Grimsby accent and adapted so well to the high-society role that Fergie herself nicknamed her Lady Jane.
Earning a salary of £18,000 – equivalent to £42,000 in today’s money – she lived in a flat in Battersea Park. She had a number of relationships and married an IBM executive in 1990. They divorced five years later.
However, in 1997, Andrews lost her job in a cost-cutting exercise at the palace and although said to be heartbroken over this unexpected dismissal she stayed close friends with Fergie.
The following year she was introduced to Solihull-born former stockbroker Thomas Cressman. She moved into his home in Fulham and had hoped to marry him. On a holiday to Italy and the French Riviera, she was expecting a proposal but Mr Cressman told her he had no such intentions.
There was a heated argument when they returned from the holiday and while Cressman slept she hit him with a cricket bat and stabbed him with a knife before going on the run.
Andrews was caught four days later after Fergie left two voicemail messages on her phone pleading with her to hand herself in to the police.
Found by police in Cornwall, where she had tried once again to take her own life, she was charged with Mr Cressman’s murder. She was convicted and sent to prison in 2001.
In 2009, Andrews escaped from an open prison in Kent and met with her parents in a graveyard during the night. After three days she was captured in a hotel room six miles from the prison.
She was eventually released on licence in 2015 but jailed again in 2018 amid claims she harassed a married man.
Between the two prison spells, she was flogging royal memorabilia on a stall at an antiques centre.
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The events before and after the murder are to be re-examined tonight in Fergie’s Killer Dresser: The Jane Andrews Story, on ITV at 9pm.
Andrews was portrayed as a jealous obsessive – a “bunny boiler” who couldn’t take the rejection of her wealthy lovers.
Twenty years on society has changed and with Britain’s first murder conviction overturned on the basis of domestic violence, ITV says this is the definitive account of Jane’s rise and fall, all the way to the present day.
With never-seen-before interviews with Jane’s family and psychiatrist as well as all of the key players in the police investigation and prosecution, the film asks whether any lingering doubts about the case are justified. Could it have been a case of manslaughter, not murder? Or are the prosecution and Tom’s family right to consider her “a danger to all men”?
His brother Rick Cressman insists: “She never once said sorry for what she did, she’s just tried to get out of what she has done, any way she could.”
This new film explores whether lead investigator Jim Dickie is correct when he proclaims: “She is a cold-blooded murderer. Any man who gets into a relationship with her needs his head tested.”
