The sharp 1980s suits are long gone, along with her name.
In fact, there is nothing to connect the anonymous, middle-aged figure in a bobble hat and quilted jacket, pottering around a garden centre in a Lincolnshire seaside town last week, with the woman once known as Jane Andrews.
For nine years, between 1988 and 1997, Andrews, now 58 and going by the name Jane Lamb, worked for Sarah Ferguson, the then Duchess of York, as her personal dresser and trusted confidante.
Sometimes, their ‘look’ was so similar that Ferguson – currently embroiled in travails of her own – dubbed her ‘Lady Jane’.
Yet in September 2000, this nicely spoken, impeccably tailored blonde became famous for an entirely different reason when she battered and stabbed her boyfriend, Thomas Cressman, to death – a man she’d professed to love but who had incited her fury when he refused to marry her.
Tomorrow night her life will be depicted in the first episode of a four-part drama called The Lady on ITV. In the show, the role of Andrews is played by rising star Mia McKenna-Bruce, recently seen as Lady Eileen ‘Bundle’ Brent in Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials on Netflix, while Ferguson is played by Game Of Thrones actress Natalie Dormer.
It’s billed as a ‘partly fictionalised’ chronicle of the life of Andrews, who was released from prison in 2015, 14 years after she was convicted of murdering Cressman, 39, a handsome, wealthy and well-connected businessman.
There have been numerous programmes made about the killing over the years (a 12th, by Disney, is still in the making), each one opening old wounds for the Cressman family.
As Cressman’s older brother, Rick, 75, told The Mail on Sunday: ‘I’ve lived with my brother’s murder for some 25 years and it’s not just a story; for me and all of my family this is our real life and I think sometimes that people lose sight of that.’
Nobody – Fergie and the Cressmans included – had any hint of what Jane Andrews would become. Raised in a solidly working-class family in the Lincolnshire port town of Grimsby, she attended fashion college and was designing children’s clothes for Marks & Spencer when, in 1988, she replied to an advertisement for a personal dresser in The Lady magazine.
After receiving a summons from the Duchess, she found herself on the staff at Buckingham Palace within four days.
So began the transformation of Andrews, then aged 21. For the next nine years she played the part perfectly, dropping her Grimsby accent and buying herself a flat in an exclusive block overlooking Battersea Park, south London. There were a few romances, too, and even a brief marriage, to a man 20 years her senior, that ended after five years due to her repeated infidelities.
But by 1997 it was all over. Sarah and the then Duke of York had divorced and Andrews found herself being made redundant. She thought she’d found the answer to her problems when she met Cressman at a New Year’s Eve party in 1998.
Jane had high hopes for the relationship and longed for a proposal, but the businessman told her this was not to be.
A terrible row broke out at his Fulham flat on September 18, 2000, and, later that night, as he slept, Andrews beat him over the head with a cricket bat and stabbed him in the chest with an eight-inch kitchen knife, before going on the run.
Amid a national manhunt, police asked for the Duchess’s help, and she left Andrews two answerphone messages, imploring her to contact the police. Four days after the murder, Andrews was discovered in her car in a lay-by in Cornwall, having taken an overdose of painkillers.
The murder trial the following year at the Old Bailey held the nation transfixed, and she was dubbed the ‘Fatal Attraction killer’.
Despite pleading self-defence, she was convicted of murder, and ordered to serve at least 15 years in prison.
However, there was a further twist, in 2009, when she managed to abscond from HMP East Sutton Park, in Kent, before being picked up two days later at a Premier Inn, six miles away, with her parents and brother.
They were questioned by police but later released.
In the run-up to her release from New Hall jail in Wakefield, West Yorkshire in 2015, Andrews bought a £228,000 four-bedroom character cottage in the north of England, a purchase made possible by the substantial profit on the sale of her Battersea flat.
But just three years later she was back in jail after being accused of breaching the terms of her release by harassing a married man.
The claims were investigated but no further action was taken. Andrews, who was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder by a psychiatrist in 2002, was freed again in 2019, returning to her seaside bolthole in pursuit of quiet anonymity.
An animal lover and an avid gardener, she is a member of the Royal Horticultural Society, and a holder of at least one ‘best in show’ award.
For a short period, before she was recalled to prison, she even had her own thriving business selling furniture and memorabilia in an antiques centre.
Her speciality? Royal keepsakes. Perhaps mindful that she could be recognised, she never sold direct – and always as Jane Lamb, not Andrews.
If Andrews has attempted to escape the past, the same cannot be said for the family of Thomas Cressman. The pain they feel lingers today.
‘At a very personal level, I feel like I don’t feel like I’ve ever really been allowed to grieve for my brother in a normal way,’ his brother Rick told The Mail on Sunday.
He still has a close bond with former detective chief inspector Jim Dickie, who led the investigation into his brother’s murder.
Time has done nothing to diminish the retired detective’s own feelings about Andrews.
He said: ‘I still think that she’s a liar; her stance [in custody, being interviewed by police] from the very beginning was ‘What am I doing here? I’m the victim in all this’.
‘It was poor old Jane. She has never shown any remorse for the murder of Tom Cressman. Ever.’
Additional reporting: Tracey Kandohla
