Jane Andrews, a former dresser to the Duchess of York, recently filed an appeal of her murder conviction claiming that she has recovered memories of early childhood sexual abuse that diminished her responsibility for killing her boyfriend.

Andrews, 35, was convicted in 2001 of murdering her lover, Tom Cressman. She hit Cressman with a bat and then stabbed him to death.

At trial Andrews offered a number of claims, including that Cressman was abusive and that she had suffered sexual abuse as a child, but a jury convicted her and she was sentenced to life.

While in prison, Andrews underwent psychiatric therapy and now claims that she has recovered repressed memories of sexual assault by her brother when she was aged 8 to 12. The brother denies the accusations.

Andrews now claims that Cressman had sexual assaulted her, that she feared he would do it again, and that her repressed fears of childhood sexual abuse boiled up and led her to kill him.

Government attorney Bruce Houlder, however, said that Andrews “has consistently lied, has changed her accounts and now seeks to get a new trial on the basis of something she could perfectly reasonably have run at the time of the trial.”

Source:

Ex-royal dresser tells appeal of ‘unlocked’ abuse. John Steele, Daily Telegraph, September 24, 2003.

The Woman in UK Appeals Murder Conviction Citing Recovered Memories by Brian Carnell, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.

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