Ian Ball, who attempted to kidnap Princess Anne over five decades ago and injured several people in the process, claims to be “innocent.”
On March 20, 1974, a vehicle blocking the route forced Anne’s chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce to come to a stop. The vehicle’s driver, Ball, began firing shots, injuring both Anne’s chauffeur, Alex Callender, and private detective James Beaton, before climbing into the front seat and ordering the princess to exit before being stopped by a passerby.
Ball, who had planned to kidnap Anne, then 23, for a ransom of nearly $4 million, according to a letter he wrote for Queen Elizabeth, was charged with Beaton’s attempted murder and sentenced to life in a psychiatric hospital. However, he was quietly released in 2019, according to the Daily Mail, and he recently stated that he is “innocent.”
“I’m an innocent, sane man because I had good reason to believe the gunpowder had been taken out of the bullets and another girl had been substituted for Princess Anne,” Ball said in the new interview, which was published on August 1.
In the Daily Mail interview, Ball not only maintained his innocence, but also reaffirmed a claim he first made after pleading guilty decades ago: The attempted kidnapping was intended to be a “hoax” carried out with the assistance of a “friend” on the police force who he only knew as “Frank.”
“The whole idea of performing the hoax was to get the publicity so I could write my autobiography, and I expected to get £10,000 in royalties,” Ball told the newspaper.
“To prove my innocence I need to prove the existence of Frank,” according to him. “That will prove I had reason to believe it was all a hoax.”
Ball also claimed in the new interview that Anne, 74, was not afraid of him. The royal, who had refused to move even after Ball grabbed her arm and tackled her to the floor of the car, “wasn’t bothered on the night,” he told the outlet. “I did not scare her.” “I was more afraid than she was.”
He also told the Daily Mail that apologizing to the men he shot during the alleged “hoax” would be a “waste of time”—and denied that Anne said “Not bloody likely,” her now-iconic alleged response to his attempts to remove her from the car.
Actually, Ball claimed, “She said, ‘You just go away and nobody will think any more about it’, which fuelled the belief that I thought it was a hoax.”
“At the time I thought it wasn’t Princess Anne in the car,” he recalls. “She didn’t look like Princess Anne. “The personality was nothing like Princess Anne.”
In a 1980 interview with British talk show host Michael Parkinson, Princess Anne spoke about her refusal to budge. “We had a sort of discussion about where or not we were going to go,” she deadpanned.
Ultimately, it was a passerby named Ronnie Russell, not Anne or her first husband, Captain Mark Phillips (who was also in the car during the attempted kidnapping), who stopped Ball in 1974.
Russell punched Ball in the head several times before tackling him to the ground. Ball fled the scene, but was apprehended by a nearby police officer shortly after.
Queen Elizabeth later awarded Beaton the George’s Cross, Britain’s highest civilian award for gallantry, for his role in saving her daughter’s life, as well as honors to Callender and the other police officers and bystanders who intervened.
