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Ex-Royal aide found guilty over sexy email murder

Life sentence for Jane Andrews

The former aide to the Duchess of York, Jane Andrews, has been found guilty of murdering her fiance and sentenced to life imprisonment.

Ms Andrews, 34, had denied murdering her fiance Tom Cressman, 39, last year. He had been hit over the head with a cricket bat and stabbed in the chest with a kitchen knife.

At the start of the trial, the High Court heard that Ms Andrews was infuriated by Cressman's refusal to marry her and by the discovery of sexually explicit emails between him and a woman in Las Vegas. In one email Ms Andrews was referred to as "an old pair of slippers" Cressman couldn't get rid of.

Ms Andrews claimed in her defence that she had taken the knife with her to bed to protect herself after he had raped her and beaten her up. When she was woken by Mr Cressman attacking her in the middle of the night, she claimed she wielded the knife to protect herself and he fell on it.

Ms Cressman sent numerous text messages building herself an alibi in the days after the murder and was finally found in a lay-by near Plymouth, having taken an overdose of painkillers.

Judge Michael Hyam told Ms Andrews in his summary that she had killed an unarmed man without remorse and so he had to hand down a life sentence. "In killing the man you loved you ended his life and ruined your own," he said. "It is evident that you made your attack on him when you were consumed with anger and bitterness. Nothing could justify what you did. After you had struck him, first with a cricket bat and then stabbed him with a knife, you left him to die without remorse. It is true that your flight was obviously unprepared and that the attack took place, perhaps only with a few minutes premeditation. [But] there is only one sentence which I can place upon you and that is one of life imprisonment." ®

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