Princess Anne’s Attempted Kidnapper Claims He Is ‘Innocent’: ‘I Was More Scared Than She Was’ By Bailey Richards

Ian Ball, who attempted to kidnap Princess Anne more than five decades ago, injuring several people in the process, claims he is “innocent.”

On March 20, 1974, Anne’s chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce was forced to stop by a vehicle blocking the route. The driver of the vehicle, Ball, began firing shots — injuring both Anne’s chauffeur, Alex Callender, and private detective, James Beaton — before climbing in the front seat and ordering the princess to get out before he was stopped by a passerby. 

Ball — who had intended to kidnap Anne, then 23 years old, to hold her ransom for almost $4 million, a letter he wrote for Queen Elizabeth later revealed — was prosecuted for the attempted murder of Beaton and sentenced to life imprisonment in a psychiatric hospital. But he was quietly released in 2019, according to the Daily Mail, whom he recently told 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 claimed in the new interview, published on Aug. 1.

In the Daily Mail interview, Ball not only maintained his innocence, but also doubled down on a claim he first raised after pleading guilty decades ago: The attempted kidnapping was meant to be a “hoax” staged with the help of a “friend” on the police force whom 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 outlet.

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“To prove my innocence I need to prove the existence of Frank,” he added. “That will prove I had reason to believe it was all a hoax.”

Ball also claimed in the new interview that Anne, now 74, was not scared of him. The royal — who had refused to budge, even as Ball grabbed her arm and tackled her to the floor of the car — “wasn’t bothered on the night,” he told the outlet. “I didn’t scare her. I was more scared than she was.”

He also told the Daily Mail that it would be a “waste of time” to apologize to the men that he shot during the alleged “hoax” — and denied that Anne said “Not bloody likely,” her now-iconic alleged reply to his attempts to remove her from the car.

Rather, 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 said. “She looked nothing like Princess Anne. The personality was nothing like Princess Anne.”

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Princess Anne recalled her refusal to budge in a 1980 interview with British talk show host Michael Parkinson. “We had a sort of discussion about where or where not we were going to go,” she deadpanned at the time.

Ultimately, however, it was not Anne or her first husband, Captain Mark Phillips (who was also in the car during the attempted kidnapping), who stopped Ball back in 1974, but a passerby named Ronnie Russell.

Russell punched Ball in the head several times and eventually tackled him to the ground. Ball fled the scene, but was arrested by a nearby police officer shortly afterwards.

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, and bestowed honors on Callender, as well as the other policemen and onlookers who intervened.