Julie BINDEL
Ahead of another documentary about Jane Andrews, her friend Julie Bindel reveals a woman who lives in dread
When has a convicted murderer paid their dues? Aside from child or serial killers, the majority of those who have served a life sentence quietly re-enter society. Not Jane Andrews. She has been relentlessly pursued ever since she was arrested for murder in September 2000, and this Wednesday, a fifth sensational documentary telling her story, Fergie’s Killer Dresser, will be broadcast on ITV.
In May 2001, Jane, then 33, was convicted of the murder of her partner, 39-year-old Tom Cressman. The story was huge because, between 1988 and 1997, Jane had worked as a dresser for Sarah Ferguson, the Duchess of York, to whom she had become a trusted friend.
The prosecution claimed that Jane had killed Cressman, a car accessories salesman with whom she had been in a relationship for almost three years, with a cricket bat because he had refused to marry her. The defence argued it was manslaughter on grounds of diminished responsibility due to a mental health diagnosis. In the press, she was painted as a woman from humble beginnings who had become a manipulative gold-digger.
I have known Jane for two decades. We first met shortly after she had been sentenced to life, when she contacted Justice for Women, the law reform
‘I begged the prison to let me write to the Cressmans to tell them how sorry I was’
‘I deserve to live the rest of my life without always looking over my shoulder’
group I co-founded. With an appeal in mind, we began to build a file of evidence that had not been submitted at trial, including new psychiatric reports showing that early memories of child abuse had been triggered by the sexual abuse Jane alleged she had sustained at Cressman’s hands.
He threatened her with knives, battered her, and would regularly anally rape her, she claimed. “I was scared of him, but I was desperate for him to love me, so I would go back,” she told me.
I visited her in October 2001, in Bullwood Hall prison in Essex, shortly before the transmission of Dressed to Kill on Channel 4, the first documentary focusing on her case. Jane was “absolutely terrified” about the publicity, thinking it would lead to more harassment of her family. “I don’t think Mum and Dad can take much more,” she said. aid.
During her 15 years behind bars, Jane struggled to escape her r notoriety. Any perceived ed attempt at the “high life” was seized upon by the tabloid press as evidence of her social climbing. In 2001, inmates on her wing were instructed to attend a Marti Pellow concert on behalf of a rehabilitation charity. “Fifteen days ago, she got life for murder, now Janey gets a jolly” read one headline.
Every time we spoke, e, she would tell me how she wished she could turn back the clock, not for herself, but for Cressman. “I I wish it h had never happene happened,” she would say. “He wo would still be alive…” If I v visited with her lawye lawyer, Jane would sit for forward keenly, ha hanging on our e every word, and s saying over and over that she was not a murderer; that she deserved to be punished but that she did not kill in cold b blood.
“I begged the th prison to le let me write to th the Cressmans to tell them how so sorry I was, but Iw I was refused perm permission,” she says.
She constantly worried about her parents and, in 2009, fled East Sutton Park open prison in Kent to see them. She was arrested for absconding and sent to Holloway; a psychiatric report found that she had been in a psychogenic fugue state (a sort of dissociative amnesia) at the time. During her four days on the run, headlines suggested that the Duchess of York was in a state of “terror”.
Jane was released in August 2019. After six months of trying to find work, she secured two part-time jobs stacking shelves for the minimum wage in Tesco and Morrisons. “I am feeling a little more settled,” she told me at the time, “but I’m always looking over my shoulder in case a journalist is following me.”
She was right to worry. In August 2020, Martin Bashir posted a letter by hand to Jane at her home address, writing that he was producing “a detailed and evidence-based television documentary” and asking for an interview. Until then, no one in the town had known her real identity; Jane had changed her name and was living under the radar. “I was horrified,” she says. “I knew it would drag everything up again, just as my life was settling down into something like normality.”
When she did not respond, Bashir repeatedly doorstepped her over a twohour period. She could see from her window that he was talking to others, who she feared were his camera crew. “I didn’t answer,” says Jane. “I was sick to my stomach and could see him over the road, half-hiding.” News of Bashir’s visit was reported in the local newspaper, in an article which included comments from Cressman’s brother, Rick: “She’s no key worker. She’s a murderer. Shoppers should remember her deviousness and shocking crime,” he said. One national paper then published a snapshot of Jane by her car.
As a result of her outing, she was fired from both jobs. “Is that what people want? Me to not even be allowed to earn my own money and pay tax?” she asked.
The Jane Andrews I know is an unassuming woman who has shown deep remorse for her crime. She has served her time, kept her head down and is a danger to no one.
The Cressman family’s anger is, of course, completely understandable. But the hounding she has experienced is unprecedented. In my work, I have seen how men who murder their female partners are usually treated more sympathetically, even if they cite reasons such as her “nagging” or “the pressures of lockdown” for their “crime of passion”. The attention on Jane is all the more disturbing when considered alongside a recent CWJ report, which found that there are likely dozens of women convicted of murder in similar circumstances to Jane, who shouldn’t have been.
Were she on trial today, Jane would probably have succeeded with a manslaughter defence. The case of Sally Challen – who spent nine years in prison for killing her husband after decades of abuse, and had her murder conviction quashed in 2019 under the new coercive control law – has shone a light on the impact that mental torture can have.
The publicity for the new documentary asks whether Jane is a “danger to all men”.
Whenever she has attempted to request corrections for such falsehoods, she has failed. If she is libelled, she is told she has “no reputation” to ruin. The Parole Board has ruled that Jane is no danger to the public, but still the allegations continue.
Solicitor Sally Middleton says that her client has made every effort to rehabilitate: “Having represented Jane since
2008, I have seen first-hand how that effort is threatened each time she becomes the focus of sensationalist and unsophisticated media attention, presenting her as jealous and obsessive and a danger to men.”
In fact, on the one occasion that Jane was accused of harassing a married man, with whom she had been briefly involved after being released on parole in 2015, a police investigation found no substance to the allegations. Nonetheless, she was ordered back to prison in July 2018 and remained there for a year, awaiting a new parole hearing. It was painful to watch. But Jane was mostly concerned for her father; her mother died the year before. “He went downhill fast because of that,” she says. She is “wracked with dread” about the new documentary, seeing it as cheap entertainment. When she saw the trailer, she called me in tears, and was clearly in the midst of another panic attack. “The consequences for me could be dire,” she told me. ITV has told The Sunday Telegraph the documentary will be a fair and balanced piece of journalism, examining in good faith whether the trial would have been heard in the same way if it happened now. They deny doorstepping Andrews or revealing her whereabouts. But for Jane, any attention is unwelcome. “I will always regret what I did – it was a terrible thing to do,” she says. “But I deserve to live the rest of my life without always looking over my shoulder.”