Welcome to criminalize a production of scandal and audio in partnership with I Heart Radio. Hello and welcome to the second season of criminality. This season, we're exploring the lives and motivations of some of the most notorious stalkers throughout history. I'm Maria Aramaki. And I'm Holly Fry. And while our first season was all about women poisoners, season two, all about stalkers.

And today we we're going to talk about a teenage stalker who stole the young Queen Victoria's underwear.

And as that intro suggests, especially because we are laughing about it, this particular stalker story has the distinction of being definitely more odd than it does scary.

Absolutely. So first, let's set our scene. So this is 19th century England during the Victorian era, which is generally considered to be about 1837 to 1991, which is the life of Queen Victoria, but give or take a few years on it. And it was a period of time when there was rapid development and change happening. Victoria came to the throne in 1837 at the age of 18 as queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. All accounts say that she was stout and considered dowdy, and although she wasn't actually even five feet tall, she succeeded in projecting herself to be much larger.

Her reign lasted 63 years and seven months.

She was the record holder until current Queen Elizabeth second in Victoria's reign began at a time of the world's first industrial revolution. This was a time of great change for obviously the industrial, but also the political, scientific and military sectors within the United Kingdom. This is also a time when the British Empire became the first global industrial power and produced much of the world's coal, iron, steel and textiles. During this time, the UK changed from an agricultural country to an industrialised one.

And while that was good for the middle class, a lot of people continued to suffer from deep poverty. This is also a time that gets a lot of valid discussion about colonization and the expanding of empire by taking over other people's lands. It's a strange time where development is going on and a lot of bad things are happening in the name of that development.

There were harsh factory conditions. There was unsafe housing. There was really bad sanitation in along with all of this, of course, was excessive drinking. Women were also in the workplace, which some people saw as a moral problem. So, yes, this was a problem. There was also a decline in religious fervor at this time.

Right. So in 1840, two to three years after her reign began, Victoria married Prince Albert, who happened to be her first cousin. I'm going to leave it at that. Victoria, who was deeply in love, was the one who proposed to Albert. And during their 17 years of marriage, they had nine children, in fact, also at this time in Great Britain, as well as elsewhere in Europe and in the United States, the idea that marriage should be based in romantic love rather than for money or another strategic reason that you can come up with romantic love was gaining popularity.

Victoria also helped cement that idea, right? She was in many ways a trendsetter. Right. The idea of the white wedding dress kind of goes back to her. Yep. We should also point out that she in terms of social and royal mores at the time, she had to be the one to propose. Albert could not propose to her because she was of higher station than him, which would have been just not OK at all.

So it was the time of things that were more exciting than marrying for money in royal babies, though it was also the time of Charles Dickens and Charles Darwin and Florence Nightingale and the steam powered locomotive and the first telegraph and telephone. This was a really exciting time to be alive. We talk about our technological age and things moving so quickly that felt like this to a lot of people where they were just like, do you mean I can talk to somebody who is far away?

Absolutely. Absolutely.

I mean, like, I think it was at the Penny Black. Is that what it was called? The very first black penny postage stamp also happened during Victoria's reign. Like you could you could connect with people in ways that you could never have connected before. And it's in this time period that Edward Jones or as the newspapers nicknamed him, the boy Jones was born in London sometime around 1824.

His father was a tailor and his family was very poor. By the time that Edward Jones was 14 years old, he had become the first celebrity stalker.

So this all started in 1838 when Jones was overheard bragging to his employer about walking through Buckingham Palace. But no one believed that he had done this or that he would do this, the very thought of a commoner just strolling through the palace was absolutely absurd. It would be like me going, Maria, yesterday I was on the moon, like it was that level of just ridiculous to the hearer. Right.

I'm going to go back this weekend, like, yeah, I got to do it all the time. I don't know about you, but here's the thing.

As absurd as it sounded between 1830 eight and 1840 one, Jones did break into Buckingham Palace way more than once.

He was good at it more than what it was like. He just walked in the front door at the end of his like, hey, I'm here. Oh, that kid's back. Right? Right. We know him. He's been here a hundred and two times. So we're going to start at the beginning. The story of the boy Jones has been over the years basically pieced together using newspaper reports from the first years of Victoria's reign and the first time that he entered Buckingham Palace in 1838.

He did it with a disguise. He disguised himself as a chimney sweeper in history, tells us that Jones was not a particularly good looking gent. He's described as having a wide mouth and a low brow and not really super good about bathing regularly. Not some good hygiene there. Right. So word is that he thought he wouldn't stand out dressed as a chimney sweep, and that apparently worked because he got in. But the visit ended for the fictitious chimney sweep when he was seen by a porter and chased out and then was captured by the authorities.

And when they captured him, they found that he had the queen's underwear hidden in his pants. I have questions because if you look at Pantelides from this era, right, it's not like a pair of underwear today. Right. It's like he had, like Blumer shut down his pants like fabric. Even the way they're cut is not straight. Cut the way we would have pants today. They had a lot of extra fabric at the back to allow movement, but it would have been probably a very, very delicate, thin, really beautiful material.

So he may have been able to wash it up quite tiny.

But could it have been like a silk or something? No, not for her, probably not.

It probably would have been a really, really nice high grade cotton or even maybe linen. Don't quote me on this. I didn't prep.

I mean, maybe they knew that he had them in his pants because there was a large bulge coming from around his knees. Right.

But I mean, keep in mind, the whole reason for undergarments, it was to keep your clothes from getting soiled and to keep them beautiful. So they had to be things that could be washed. That's why something like a silk would probably not have been it. Right. Right.

So this trial, the well after the debacle of the underpants, was kind of treated like a joke because it is as silly as it sounds, the debacle of the year, that's going to be the movie that we make up, whether it's the dog.

And his defense referred to the event as, quote, youthful folly and not for any felonious purpose. And it was kind of laughed at just as we are. And so Jones was ultimately acquitted because no one took it seriously.

Sure, they had a fourteen year old boy who scaled the wall and came into the palace for one time. But single time I can see taking it as a joke. But problem became that Jones kept going back to the palace.

He stole food from the kitchen.

He was caught sitting on the throne twice. He slept in the servants bed.

He read the queen's private letters and at some point, Jones also managed to make off with a portrait of the queen regimental sword, a letter, three pairs of trousers and a collection of linens.

Big pants, like maybe this is the answer to look for a portrait, a portrait.

He was actually a tiny, tiny person that was disguised as a six foot tall person. So he had lots of space. All right. You just walked out with it over his own face.

He's like, this is my face portrait. Yeah, sure.

But with all of these amazing feats of break ins and theft, the boy Jones became a media celebrity.

So with that, we're going to take a quick break for a word from our sponsor. And when we come back, we're going to talk about what was up with palace security at this time.

Welcome back to Criminal. All right, let's get to talking about just how easy it was to scale the walls of Buckingham Palace in the 19th century.

Today, the Queen's Guard is responsible for guarding Buckingham Palace and St. James Palace in London. There are heat sensors that surround the palace as well as CCTV. The grounds are patrolled 24 hours a day by armed guards. And yet people still attempt to break in or scale the gates, and occasionally they do. But security at the time we're talking about was nothing like it is now, it was not at that level, it was notoriously loose and unorganized. During Victoria's reign, she was the first royal to live in Buckingham Palace and no one headed up palace security at the time.

Part of the problem was that in many cases, each task of the household was managed by a separate entity. And in cases where those tasks overlapped, they were not always under the same supervisory umbrella. Marie and I had been talking earlier about sort of the infamous problem of the people who wash the outside of the windows and the people who watch the inside of the windows would not coordinate their schedules. So there was never really a clean window. So it wasn't just security, but it was a lot of things in the palace that were operating in this sort of strange, genteel sort of chaos.

And anyone and everyone from vagrants to the casually curious were known to jump the walls in the Victorian era and pretty easily so.

And there was a great deal of fascination when it came to the new queen when her uncle, King William the Fourth, died, he left her as a new monarch and she was less than a month past her 18th birthday. She had been raised in a very, very sheltered and protected manner by her mother, the Duchess Kent, and her mother's advisor, Sir John Conroy. Victoria's entire childhood and the years leading up to her reign were spent under Conroy and the duchess's system of very strict rules, which they called the Kensington system.

Public appearances of the princess had been carefully managed by the adult duo, and as a consequence, the general excitement over a new monarch was overlaid with intense curiosity about the teenager who was on the throne.

You know, people really didn't feel like they knew that much about her because even though there had been things published about her, she was still this sort of weird enigma that had been kept away from them.

Right now, you could see her. Yes, she is real. She was described as being frightened as a young queen because of Joan's. And Victoria actually wrote in her journal after the time that the boy Jones was removed from underneath a piece of furniture, quote, If he had come into my bedroom, how frightened I would have been.

But honestly, with the number of times that he got in, it kind of doesn't necessarily seem like he was stalking the queen, but more like he was stalking the palace. But then he kept taking her stuff.

So, yeah, you know, there's that.

And we should also point out, like, he was not the only one throughout Victoria's reign. There were, of course, more stalkers. We don't know a certain number. There have been various ones bandied about. There were also attempts on her life. It was kind of all of the unfortunate side of what it meant to be a monarch.

Also, it wasn't the missing linens that the palace was so worried about initially. They were they were more fearful that Jones might hurt or even assassinate the queen or maybe kidnap the princess royal.

The monarchy wanted to get rid of Jones at any cost. So with the palace was really, really worried about was that the boy Jones may have seen things when he roamed the halls and he may have overheard things. They weren't sure if he was privy to the secrets of the throne or the government. They were determined to keep him quiet and to create a large distance between him and the palace.

Yet still, he kept coming and he became a little bit of a folk hero in his palace. Keepers became the subject of songs and poems. They were also written up all the time and salacious newspapers. There was so much speculation about what he had really seen inside the palace and exactly what the palace was trying to avoid was all of this. Whether those stories were true or not, they did not want it to be in the press. They did not want speculation about what might be going on.

Here's the thing. It does not appear that the boy Jones ever gossiped about what he saw on these little escapades, even though he claimed early on during his break ins when he would be taken into custody that he had intended to tell the world what he saw, but he never really did. He just kind of mucked about quietly and often dozed off.

So, again, this time in December, 1840, the boy Jones was discovered in the palace.

This time he was discovered underneath a sofa in the room that was adjacent to the queen's private bedroom. And this time he was arrested and this time he was sentenced to three months in a house of correction. Here's the thing about Jones in the palace. Just ten days after he was released, he went back to the palace and he was found wandering. And one of the royal apartments, he was eventually caught by palace guards and.

Found himself back in front of the jury, and this time he was sentenced to three months of hard labor at Tothill Field Prison, The Leiser Herald reported, quote, It would appear that there is now no doubt, but the account given by Jones, difficult as it is to believe anything he says as to his having affected his entrance into the palace by scaling the garden wall from Constitution Hill and then passing through one of the French windows which opens onto the lawn is correct.

It is said that some of the windows were broken and that other marks of suspicious nature were observable near the spot. Having once gained the inside of the building, the lad, from his recollection of the various staircases and passages, would find perhaps but little difficulty in reaching the apartment in which he was afterwards arrested.

So after his release from hard labour in prison, Jones was yet again caught wandering around Buckingham Palace.

Yes, I feel like every paragraph from now on, let's just start with that.

So this time back at the palace, actually, instead of a charge or trial, he was sent to do duty as a sailor in the Royal Navy, which he did for, they say, more than five years.

Jones served on the HMS War, Spight, the HMS Inconstant and the HMS Harlequin. A year later, he finally got a chance to escape from his ship in Portsmouth and got himself to London.

However, no longer to anyone's surprise, you can guess where he was caught loitering in the vicinity of Buckingham Palace and he was immediately sent back to his ship.

The last mention of the boy Jones in the media was in 1844, and that was when he was rescued after going overboard, presumably to swim back to London and get to the palace in the waters between Tunis and Algiers.

You know, I wouldn't be surprised if he was planning to swim because there was one account that said that he walked himself to London after he got the ship. Now, it was not a good source, you know, but still, the idea of the walking swimming to get back to London would not surprise me.

It it fits right in your defence. So there's actually another version that we should talk about. The second version of this story regarding Jones's time in the Navy actually doesn't have the Navy in it whatsoever.

There's a version of the story that suggests he was invited to join the Royal Navy in an effort to get him at sea and far away from the palace.

And in this version, Jones refused to deploy, so the monarchy kidnapped him and deported him to Brazil. And in this scenario, he was kept on board a prison ship for about five to six years without any official charge or trial and never getting close enough to the shore to plan an escape.

We're going to have a quick break now. And when we get back, we're going to talk about how Jones ended up in Australia.

Welcome back to Criminalist. So now let's talk about Edward Jones in Australia.

Yeah, so during this time in the Victorian era, I think it's fairly common knowledge that convicts and other people deemed unsavory were frequently deported from Great Britain to the penal colony that was then Australia. And after his time in the Navy or aboard that prison ship, whichever you believe, Jones was deported to Australia. And there he is said to have sold pies and generally kind of just tried to keep a low profile lead, something akin to a normal life in four years in both the UK and Australia.

People are said to have followed him around shouting There's the boy who went to visit the queen.

Well, he did. Yeah, it's a true statement.

So in the eighteen eighties, as a grown man who wished to return to being an unknown man, Edward Jones changed his name to Thomas Jones. Jones did eventually become an alcoholic and possibly also a burglar.

When he decided he'd return to England, his brother persuaded him to go back to Australia, which he did, and he became the town crier in Perth.

He died in 1893 in Australia when he was drunk and he had fallen off the Mitchell River Bridge and he landed, unfortunately, on his head. So unlike what the stalker profile that today's FBI suggests, Jones never thought that he and the queen were destined to be together. He didn't want to kill her. He's been described by modern historians as a, quote, very weird character and a very solitary man who, apart from his visits to Queen Victoria's palace, wasn't particularly interested in women.

But what he did want to do was he wanted to sit on the throne. He wanted to read her books. He wanted to go through her things. And in general, he wanted to enter the palace, but really not to see Victoria or her new baby or anyone who worked or lived there. And that's what he did. Mostly, he gained access through some pretty simple methods, including security breaches like unlocked doors or unshattered windows on the ground floor.

And once he got inside, he did things like sit on the throne. He hid under the queen's sofa and he stole her underwear.

I would give a million dollars to just find out what he was thinking during any of this.

As he's laying under the sofa, he's like, how am I going to get out of here? Right. Like, it's like, yeah, I'm in the palace are like, why do I keep doing this?

If he was caught on the premises three times and he admitted that he had been in the palace a fourth time. And today, historians believe that he likely entered Buckingham Palace many other times, that he just never got caught.

And the thing is, he didn't always feel compelled to steal things every time he made a visit. So it's really hard to track him because the records of like, oh, something's missing might not always reflect whether or not he had been there. Right.

Sometimes you just need to sit on the throne, like, what are you doing this afternoon?

I'm going to sit on the throne, going to the moon. So this all makes the boy Jones, the first celebrity stalker on record. But he was certainly not the only potential threat to Queen Victoria at this time and certainly not the only intruder to Buckingham Palace.

In fact, unwelcome guests still to this day try to break into the palace, probably on a daily basis, I would say.

I mean, they've got a lot of security during the summer of 1838, for example, to look at some of these historical other instances that puts this right at the same time as when the boy Jones started his series of forays into the palace, there was a silversmith named Thomas Flower who was found sleeping in a chair outside Queen Victoria's bedroom. He was known about Buckingham Palace as one of the queen's unrelenting admirers, and he ended up being sent to prison for gaining entry into the palace.

See the boy, John doesn't know how good he has it, right?

So there's one more interesting Buckingham Palace intrusion story. But it's not during the Victorian period. It's during a more modern era. It's it's 1982. In fact, there was a man named Michael Fagan who was found inside Buckingham Palace. And like the boy Jones, the visits happened on more than one occasion. He roamed rooms that were used by Princess Diana as well as the queen. He looked around the palace allegedly. He sat on the throne for a bit.

I think if you break into Buckingham Palace, it's like you're you aren't you committed to sitting on the throne? Like I'm already in too deep is well dressed now these days it's a selfie on the throne.

But yeah, not then. But in 1982, breaking into Buckingham Palace was actually a civil rather than a criminal offence. So he was actually charged with something rather hilarious.

Rather than being in the palace, he was charged with the theft of a snack of cheese and crackers and the wine he had drunk while he was in the palace. Which I love, he's like, how much for a square of cheese? OK, I got it. I got. So, Holly, speaking of drinking at the palace, yes, I hear you have some drinks for us so that we won't be drinking at the palace.

No, you're wherever you are in the palace. Yes.

Let's think of it. This it is time for The Chaser. So one of the things I wanted to do since we were talking about the Victorian era, one of my favorites was actually to look up and make a cocktail from that era. And so what I ended up finding was the cocktail, which was a drink that was written down in 1833. Let me tell you a thing about this. I read this and I said this is going to be foul.

I'll tell you what actually happened. So it's a really simple recipe. I mean, you can see that this is like where it starts where people start mixing things. This recipe is a teaspoon of fine sugar or simple syrup, two ounces of rye, whiskey, rum, gin or brandy. Your choice? I went with brandy for mine, three ounces of water, four dashes of bitters. You mix all that together and then you sprinkle it with nutmeg on top.

I was like, this is just watered down booze.

Gross. What's the sugar? And it's watered down booze that you've dressed up. You've watered it down and you put some pants on it right back. But here's the thing. I actually thought it was delightful. Yeah, I mean, I, I really I expected to be like, OK, that's. Yeah. Me drinking watered down booze and being chagrined about it. But in fact just that little bit of syrup and nutmeg like you can see where someone was like, I want to make someone a drink that they can actually drink instead of just chugging straight alcohol.

I will water it down, but then we have to add some other things to make it a little fancier. And, you know, it was just fine. I would make it again. Excellent. Is it going to become my go to. It is not. Yeah, but because I was doing that one, I also had this moment as I was making that one where I was like, I have missed my opportunity. I want to make another drink.

Really though, this is inspired by the boy Jones. And it's not a real recipe though. It is a DIY. It's like a mad lib of a recipe. It's so simple.

I love when you do choose your own adventure beverages like it's my favorite thing when you're like this, this or this.

And I'm like, oh, I got to make all those versions. I've tried them all. This is really like so simple and basic that it is like a good way for people who have an experiment that much with making cocktails to start playing a little bit in a really easy, hard to mess up way. It is more of a category of cocktails that I call in honor of Boy Jones, mostly harmless.

Oh, I can't I can't recall the quote from from the trial. Like, know there's no felonious activity going on. No, it's mostly harmless.

Five ounces of any mixer. So a juice if you want it. Soda if you prefer it. And just one ounce of a liquor. That seems like a good match. I made one that was orange juice with triple sec. So an orange liqueur. And it kind of is a little just a very orange drink. It's not heavy. You're not going to be like stumbling a drunk by any means. I mean, you can do at that point like a pineapple juice and a vanilla liquor.

You can do a lime juice and a rose liquor. You can also do something like a lemon lime soda, like a seven up or a spritz, and then put something like a violet liquor in there. And it's from, my God, pretty. And it makes it like it feels a little fancy, but it's also mostly harmless. So that would be that would be fantastic. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You're like, of course. Yeah, of course I am. I specify liquor because for the most part it is not 100 percent true to say this, but most liquors are a little bit lower in alcohol content than than other spirits, than a liquor. Not always. There are exceptions to that rule, but it also just like it's the softest if you mess it up, it's no big deal. It's mostly harmless.

Have you tried this drink using any sort of pumpkin spice flavored anything? Yeah, sort of.

I found it is called pumpkin spice. Sipan cream. It's basically cream liqueur that's that has pumpkin flavor in it. They also do a butter pecan one. That's amazing. Those are great. In a little bit of coffee.

Right. I bet. I bet. Yeah. And it is like a nice especially as we are currently in the Northern Hemisphere at least in winter. So it's a nice little warm up to just put a dash. You don't need much liquor in there. Griebel warm coffee enemies, mostly harmless, mostly harmless. Don't drink a million. It stops being harmless, but mostly harmless, just like the boy Jones.

It's like the starter kit to make you think about. How to create cocktails that you might enjoy? I think that's great. I think a lot of people might want to, you know, do the kitchen science experiments like you do, but but aren't necessary, especially because you inspire them to do that, but aren't necessarily sure where to try because they've done that before.

I'm a big fan of, like, pecan liqueur that you really like and then play with it with a bunch of different mixers and see what works and what doesn't. Thank you again. Now I'm just going to go make myself a cocktail.

We could just sit here and talk about changes all day long.

Maybe. But instead, what we will do is let you go about your business. And thank you so much for joining us here in where Maria and I love to talk about not just the chasers, but also all of these strange criminals. We will see you back here next week. Criminality is a production of QandA Land Audio in partnership with I Heart Radio for more podcasts from Shandley and Audio. Please visit the I Heart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.