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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

Contemporary cartoon depicting the return of Boy Jones to Buckingham Palace. British Museum

9. Boy Jones Could Not Get Enough of Stalking Queen Victoria

Edward Jones soon went back to stalking Queen Victoria. On December 3^rd, 1840, less than two years after his acquittal and two weeks after Queen Victoria had given birth to her first child, Jones was found hiding beneath a sofa in a room next to Her Majesty’s boudoir. Whatever the public’s perception of Boy Jones as a lovable tramp, the queen was not amused. As she put it in her journal: “Supposing he had come into the Bedroom, how frightened I should have been!” Jones was rearrested, retried, and got three months’ probation. He was arrested again soon thereafter while trying to break into the palace.

For this latest crime, Jones got three months of hard labor. The authorities were stumped. Jones’ crimes were not felonies, so a long prison sentence was not an option. After he was arrested for a fourth, and then a fifth time, when caught loitering near the palace, he was finally shipped him to Brazil, where he was kept in an offshore prison ship for six years. He returned to Britain, and was deported to Australia, but snuck back to London. He finally returned to Australia, where he became Perth’s town crier. He died in 1893, after falling off a bridge while drunk.

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.