Duchess helped catch former aide

The Duchess of York played an important part in helping police capture her former aide Jane Andrews, who was today convicted of murder.

As Andrews contemplates the prospect of life behind bars, details emerged of the Duchess’s involvement in the dramatic events which lead to the arrest of her former dresser.

Andrews, 34, went on the run after stabbing boyfriend Tommy Cressman in the bedroom at the home they shared in Fulham, south-west London, on September 17, last year.

As she drove from London to the West Country, police contacted her family, friends and acquaintances, including the Duchess, to see if they could contact Andrews on her mobile phone.

Sarah left two voicemail messages urging Andrews to give herself up, telling her: ‘‘You must come forward and help the police.’’

But Andrews sent back two text messages saying she did not know why people were leaving messages for her, and that ‘‘everything was fine’’ when she left the house.

The exchange was one of a series of messages which Andrews sent to friends in which she pretended that she did not know Mr Cressman, 39, was dead.

Four days after the killing, Andrews realised she had nowhere to run and told a friend where she was in Cornwall after taking an overdose of painkillers.

The Duchess agreed to help after Mr Cressman’s body was found on his blood-soaked bed.

Sarah later gave a witness statement to police - but it was not included in Andrews’s four week trial at the Old Bailey.

Andrews, who worked for Sarah as a dresser and personal assistant for nine years until 1997, looked a pale shadow of herself when she appeared in the dock.

The woman who was always described as ‘‘glamorous’’ and ‘‘very well dressed’’, appeared in court in more or less the same, drab black outfit everyday and without make-up.

Her long, fair hair was cut short and looked unkempt. The only exceptions were when she tied it back with a bow and wore a pair of glasses in the closing stages of the trial.

Her thin frame contrasted with the suntanned curvaceous figure seen in holiday photographs taken days before Mr Cressman’s death.

Andrews spoke in calm controlled tones but lapsed into bouts of sobbing as she claimed Mr Cressman had fallen on the knife after raping her and threatening to kill her.

The prosecution said that was a lie and that she had deliberately hit him on the head with a cricket bat and then stabbed him through the chest after he refused to marry her.

The eight-inch blade of the kitchen knife was pushed into the body up to the hilt and ‘‘skewered’’ the sac around Mr Cressman’s heart, the jury was told.

Mr Cressman was found in the blood-spattered bedroom, having taken several minutes to die as he made a desperate attempt to save his own life by pulling the knife out.

He had cut marks on his hands where he had touched the knife.

Police believe that Mr Cressman, who was wearing only a pair of blue boxer shorts and a Rolex watch, might have been asleep when the attack began.

Friends and work colleagues became worried when Mr Cressman failed to turn up for work on Monday having arrived back from an ‘‘idyllic’’ holiday in France and Italy with Andrews on Friday.

His body was discovered by employee Tim Kent, who went to the house having found lights and computers at the office, a few doors away in The Maltings, Fulham, west London, still switched on after the weekend.

Bruce Houlder QC, prosecuting, said Andrews had tried ‘‘rigging the scene’’ to make a ‘‘half-hearted attempt to make it appear she was frightened of this man’’.

She had tied a bathrobe cord from bannisters to the bedroom door to make it seem as though she thought Mr Cressman was not dead and might go after her.

Before leaving the house, Andrews had left two small notes on a kitchen worktop.

One read: ‘‘My dearest parents, I am so sorry. No more hurt inside me any more.’’

The second said: ‘‘Tom hurt me so much. He was so cruel to me.’’

Police found a torn up letter from Mr Cressman to Andrews saying he could not cope with her unpredictable and jealous behaviour any more.

Mr Houlder said the killing was a ‘‘classic case of a jilted woman wanting revenge’’.

Hours before his death, Mr Cressman had dialled 999 and asked police for help because the couple were rowing and he was worried someone would get hurt.

He told the police operator: ‘‘We are rowing, someone is going to get hurt unless ... I would like the police to come and split us up.’’

But Mr Cressman ended the call after being told the police could not act unless a crime had been committed.

Mr Houlder said Andrews deliberately stabbed Mr Cressman when he was in bed or about to go to bed.

He said: ‘‘She did so when she realised that their relationship was simply not going to last and her hopes of marriage to him were evaporating.

‘‘As the hope went out of the relationship, so the anger and jealousy rose up in her and led her to take a terrible revenge on the man she loved.’’

Mr Houlder added: ‘‘Here we have a normally friendly and decent woman who was so transformed and burnt up inside by her anger that she killed.

‘‘This killing was not, as might first appear, a crime born simply out of the passion of the moment.’’

After being found in her VW Polo car, Andrews spent three days in hospital before being released into police custody.

Andrews - dubbed Lady Jane by the Duchess of York - was remanded in custody to Holloway prison, where she was given a hard time by her fellow inmates.

She complained that she was made to mop up toilets and bathrooms for £6 a week.

But in December, she was granted bail on condition that she lived with her parents in Grimsby and did not travel within the M25 which surrounds London, except to see her lawyer.

Her parents, David and June Andrews, were in court each day and watched her deny that she had wanted to hurt her lover of two years.

She denied he had refused to marry her and said she had not put pressure on him.

The prosecution said the couple had argued over e-mails between Mr Cressman and a woman named Deborah in the United States, which Andrews had found.

Andrews denied she had gone into a rage after finding references to her being like ‘‘a pair of old slippers I can’t get rid of’’ in the sexually explicit e-mails.

Instead, she told the court that after a row, Mr Cressman had tied her to their bed with his ties and raped her anally.

She had left the house but returned later - and Mr Cressman had tried to rape her again, she claimed.

She said she took the cricket bat and knife into the bedroom to protect herself.

After getting into bed naked with Mr Cressman, she claimed he woke her and threatened to kill her.

She said she hit him with the bat and then panicked. He fell on the knife when they were struggling but she did not really realise what was happening.