![]() “Immediately he became more affable and replied: ‘Yes, please, I’ll have a scotch.’”įagan confirmed this account in his own colorful way: “The footman came and said, ‘Cor, fucking hell mate, you look like you need a drink,’” Fagan told The Independent. “The man seemed very tense and I said: ‘Would you like a drink?’” the footman later recalled. The footman stalled by telling Fagan, “All right, but let her get dressed first.” Eventually, he tried another tactic. The footman later told the court that Fagan was adamant that he speak more to the queen. The queen’s footman served Fagan a scotch. When the queen discovered Fagan in her bedchamber, during Fagan’s second break-in, she buzzed and phoned for help multiple times-but those SOS messages went, incredibly, unheeded.įagan was able to enter the queen’s bedroom undetected at about 7:15 a.m on July 9 because the police sergeant tasked with safeguarding the queen’s corridor had gone off duty at about 6 a.m., the queen’s footman was outside exercising the monarch’s dogs, and the queen’s maid was cleaning another room behind closed doors.īecause the queen’s immediate staff members were either off duty or out of earshot, no one heard her alarms. Fagan had also set off an alarm in the stamp room that was ignored. Scotland Yard later determined that Fagan had also been seen “by a police officer who passed a message via another police officer to the control room inside the palace”-but the response was communicated too inefficiently to stop Fagan. But according to the Scotland Yard report published by the New York Times, Fagan’s “behavior was not sufficiently suspicious to cause her to raise the alarm.” ![]() Even though a royal housemaid witnessed Fagan-wearing a sweatshirt, jeans, and no shoes-break into the palace, the security team’s reaction time was so slow that Fagan was able to wander the halls of the queen’s home undeterred.ĭuring the second visit, after Fagan gained entry through an unlocked window, a palace staff member spotted the trespasser. Ultimately, the unemployed decorator felt so comfortable in the queen’s home that he helped himself to half a bottle of wine and sat down, waiting for authorities to find him.įagan was spotted by palace staffers on both occasions-but communication failures were so catastrophic that Fagan was not caught until his second visit, when the queen finally flagged down a maid to help her.ĭuring his inaugural break-in, Fagan hopped a fence and climbed up a drainpipe to enter the palace through a third-floor window. ![]() “There was one right next to it, so I tried another.”) And he shuffled through piles of paperwork. ![]() (“I tried one throne and was like, This one’s too soft,” he recalled. He sat in various thrones, later likening the experience to his own royal version of Goldilocks and the Three Bears. (“I decided not to disturb ,” he later explained.) He walked through a room containing the public’s gifts for Prince Charles and Princess Diana’s firstborn child. He quietly crept past what he believed to be Princess Anne’s bedroom-showing surprising reverence for a trespasser. The most unbelievable thing about Michael Fagan’s 1982 Buckingham Palace break-in, which climaxed with Fagan’s infamous bedroom meeting with Queen Elizabeth, is that the trespassing was actually the second time Fagan managed to breach the palace that summer.įagan testified that he had broken into Buckingham Palace about a month before the July incident, roaming the 775-room palace on a sort of self-guided tour.
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