The previous November, the 23-year-old princess had married a commoner – Mark Phillips, a Captain in the British army. In aiming to kidnap Anne, Ian Ball was targeting the celebrity royal of Britain’s day. From six feet away, the assailant shot the officer in his right shoulder. Inspector Beaton, 31, assumed that the man was a disgruntled driver and stepped out to meet him. A bearded man with light red hair exited the car and, holding two handguns, charged towards the rear of the limo. As the chauffeur drove down the Mall, a road that runs between London’s Trafalgar Square and Buckingham Palace, a white Ford Escort overtook and forced him to stop about 200 yards away from the palace. Anne’s lady-in-waiting sat across from the couple in the back of a maroon Austin Princess Vandem Plas limousine marked with the royal insignia, and in the passenger seat rode her bodyguard: Inspector James Wallace Beaton, a member of SO14, Scotland Yard’s special operations branch charged with royalty protection. on a March 20, 1974, Princess Anne and her husband of four months were heading towards Buckingham Palace after attending a charity film screening. A tabloid journalist, a former boxer, two chauffeurs and three policemen all faced off against Ball, but it was the princess herself, a force to be reckoned with in her own right, who kept Ball distracted from his goal.Īround 8 p.m. There were seven men in total who tried to stop Ian Ball, an unemployed laborer from north London, from kidnapping Princess Anne, Queen Elizabeth’s only daughter.
0 kommentar(er)
