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History’s Greatest Crime Sprees

Khalid Elhassan April 15, 2021 36 min

Italian mafiosi rounded up by the Fascists. Okruchy Historii

12. Stalkers Had an Easy Time Getting Into Queen Victoria’s Palace

Those guilty of the crime of stalking Queen Victoria included a silversmith named Thomas Flower. One of Victoria’s more persistent admirers, Flower was found sleeping in a chair near the queen’s bedroom in the summer of 1838. He had managed to get into the palace, then wandered around for hours trying to find the queen – Buckingham Palace was and remains a big building. Finally, after tiring of the search, he fell asleep. He was arrested and imprisoned until friends raised £50 to bail him out.

Thomas Flower’s stalking of Queen Victoria was creepy, but it paled in comparison to that of Edward Jones, a kid dubbed “Boy Jones” by palace staff. Around 5 AM on December 14^th, 1838, a palace servant saw a gargoyle of a face in a window, that appeared to be smudged with soot. It belonged to an ugly youth who was impishly grinning at him. Investigation revealed that a palace room had been ransacked, so the alarm was sounded, and the hunt for the intruder was on.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.