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 royal family’s security may have seemed lax by American standards, The New York Times said, stating, “Traditionally, the royal family has preferred a minimum of security so as to limit the disruption to their lives and the barriers from the people.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. On June 19, 1981, three Germans made it into the gardens by climbing a wall, thinking they were going into Hyde Park on August 5, 1981, a 24-year-old man was found on the palace grounds and taken into psychiatric care and on June 17, 1982, a 25-year-old showed a knife to bypass two guards. Palace break-ins were not entirely uncommon, especially during that time.
But ultimately it was the “inadequate” response to the Queen’s calls that truly posed the biggest risk, according to the Scotland Yards report. An alarm in the first Stamp Room also went unanswered. One officer had seen Fagan climbing the railings and passed along the message, but no action was taken.
With a generally relaxed security protocol, palace break-ins were not uncommon.Ī complete investigation was launched, concluding that a failure in communication between police officers may have been the cause. Eventually, the police did show up and removed him from the palace.įagan remembers the incident differently, telling The Independent UK that as soon as the Queen saw him, “She went past me and ran out of the room her little bare feet running across the floor.” During this time, the footman returned from walking the dogs and helped occupy Fagan while the queen tended to her beloved corgis.
While she continued to wait, the Queen was able to catch the eye of a maid - and two worked together to lead Fagan into a pantry by offering him a cigarette. Six minutes later, no help had arrived, so she called again. The police lodge received the call at 7:18 a.m.
She then used the telephone by her bed, telling the palace’s telephonist to send police to her room. The Queen pushed her night alarm bell, but since it was after the night police’s shift and no one was in the corridor or the pantry where it rings, it went unanswered. Her nightie was one of those Liberty prints and it was down to her knees.” Decades later, he told The Independent UK, “It was a double bed but a single room, definitely – she was sleeping in there on her own. With a piece of the broken ashtray in his hand, Fagan entered Her Majesty’s bedroom and opened the curtains of her bed.
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