She’s been shot at by a crazed high-school psycho whose only mission in life was to murder her.
Another teenager wanted her dead for the only reason that he wanted to be famous. But perhaps
the most astounding assassination attempt was when a mystery figure tried to derail her train,
a plot that was subsequently covered up by the government.
The way Old Lizzie has survived three assassination attempts will blow your mind.
We’re going to start with the most recent assassination attempt on Queen Elizabeth.
The year was 1981 and she was in New Zealand fulfilling her duties as a traveling monarch.
The perpetrator of the crime was a 17-year old kid named Christopher John Lewis.
You might wonder why a teen would want to blast the Queen to kingdom come,
but you only need to look at his background to understand that his proverbial screw was loose.
According to news reports, this boy lived in a house with a tyrannical father.
Life was so chaotic for the kid that he couldn’t even read or write until
he was eight years old. After assaulting another kid, he was expelled from school.
He cut the heads off birds. His favorite man in the world was none other than Charles Manson.
He got into petty crime while still young, culminating with his gang taking just over
$5000 from a post office after holding two workers at gunpoint. That was a lot of cash in the 1970s,
especially for a teenager, but for Lewis, the thrill from the violence was more
important than the money. But he didn’t stop there.
He and his mates put together what they called a guerilla army. They gave the outfit the name
“The National Imperial Gurelia Army”, spelling guerilla wrong. With Lewis at the helm,
they terrorized the neighborhood. Those that were close to him knew him as a Bonafide psycho.
As an adult he wouldn’t disagree. We know that from his memoirs, aptly titled, “Last Words.”
It was during these tumultuous years of getting beaten by his stepdad that he concocted a plan to
do something to the queen that would put his name in the history books. He later said that living
with his father was a “living hell” which rendered him feeling in a “constant state of terror.”
It’s hard to say why he wanted to go as far as killing the Queen, but he blamed what
he later called the “twisted wreckage” of his life and the fact that he very dearly wanted to become
an outlaw. He was close to it already, feared in his town for many reasons, such as when he held up
an elderly woman in her car and demanded a ride. And so on October 14, 1981, this troubled boy
decided that he would take out his problems on the British monarch. At the time, she was visiting a
museum in Dunedin, the town where Lewis lived. That day he hid his .22 caliber rifle – stolen
earlier from a gun shop – in a pair of old jeans and walked into a seven-story building from where
he would set up his shot. His getaway vehicle, a 10-speed bicycle, he left outside the building.
Inside, he sneaked into a toilet cubicle and unwrapped his gun. He was seething with anger
when he put on his gloves and readied his rifle. The queen, he knew, would soon pass by in the
street in her Rolls Royce. As the motorcade got closer his hands trembled as he heard the
cheers of the many people in the street. He stood up by the window and waited,
his gun pointing towards the road. Suddenly, a loud crack was heard by many people in the crowd.
The queen had just stepped out of her car. She wasn’t hurt; the shot wasn’t very close.
If Lewis actually meant to kill her is not certain. He later said he didn’t actually
want her dead, stating, “I felt that giving her a scare somehow, that the issues and problems
that were evident in New Zealand might be finally brought into the public attention
and as a bonus, if the Queen would look at these issues - she might well take notice.”
That’s not what the New Zealand Security Intelligence Service said after he’d been
picked up by cops eight days later. They believed that this kid had tried and failed.
All this was actually hush-hush and led to a cover-up because it wasn’t a good look
for New Zealand. But this coverup doesn't even come close to what you'll see later.
When he was charged, all the public heard was that his crime was illegally possessing a firearm and
illegally discharging one, not that he had tried to kill the queen!. As we said, people in the
crowd that day had heard the gunshots, but cops later assured them and some curious journalists
that it was nothing but an unrelated racket.. When Lewis heard the charges in court,
his words were, “Only two charges, what!? Had the bullet hit her, would it be treason?”
But the whole story remained classified until February 2018, when a media company found out the
truth. By this time, Lewis was long since dead. His death is a grim story if ever there was one.
After the incident, he was sent to a psychiatric hospital. There, he once pulled a knife on a guard
and in his spare time he concocted another plan to take out Prince Charles. After his release,
he wrote those memoirs and while he did try to stay away from crime, intelligence services
never let him out of their sights. They thought he was still dangerous,
knowing that if he’d had a more powerful gun that day he could well have killed the queen.
That’s why in 1995 when the queen was visiting New Zealand again, they exiled him to Great Barrier
Island for an expenses paid 14-day vacation. As a friend of his once said, “He always wanted
to know what it would be like to take someone's life.” The next year, Lewis was accused of doing
just that after a mother of three named Tania Furlan was found dead in her house,
her head smashed in by a hammer. Lewis was accused of the murder and
of kidnapping her child in an effort to secure a ransom, but the evidence
against him was weak to say the least. Cops had listened to an informant, a friend of Lewis’s,
and he’d told them Lewis had killed that woman. From his jail cell, Lewis wrote, “I stand firm
in my convictions that the present nightmare will soon be over. I know in my heart that I
didn't commit these crimes, so this is all the hope I need for myself.”
It’s very likely he wasn’t guilty, and the culprit was probably that informant, a man who
later committed a similar murder. But Lewis didn’t get to clear his name. He was electrocuted in his
prison cell before the case went to trial. What’s amazing about that story is the fact
that Lewis really could have killed the queen, there’s no doubt about it. It’s
also fascinating that no one but the royals and some chosen authorities knew about it.
With this next young chap, his assassination attempt was never going to hurt the Queen much,
but it was spectacular in itself. It actually happened in the same year,
on June 13, 1981. This time the Queen was on home turf, and again, her would-be
assassin was just 17 years old. His name was Marcus Sarjeant.
On the day, he managed to get off six bullets as the Queen was riding
a horse through central London for what’s called the Trooping the Color ceremony.
That day crowds filled the street as the soon-to-be married Diana Spencer
rode in a carriage with Prince Andrew. Her lover and future husband, Prince Charles,
like the queen, rode on horseback. Sarjeant didn’t have anything near the
psychological problems that our first assassin had. He was a boy scout who’d done pretty well
in school and as a youth he’d won awards for marksmanship at the Air Training Corps,
a kind of cadet school for young folks. But then at the age of 16, things started to go
wrong for him. He joined the British Royal Marines but left after a few months for what he later said
was bullying. He then joined the army and only managed to get through two days of induction.
To add to this list of failures, he was also turned down by the police and the fire brigade.
Angry and disappointed in himself, he ended working at a zoo. At age 17 he was out of
work again and he’d taken it upon himself to become a member of an anti-royalist group.
Things could have gone really badly for the queen if this young lad hadn’t failed in finding
ammunition for his pop’s 455 Webley revolver. He tried in vain to get his hands on another gun,
but as you know, that’s not easy in England, even though Sarjeant joined
a gun club to get himself a license. It seems he gave up on trying to buy a
real gun and instead paid about $80 for two blank-firing replica Colt Python revolvers
that were sent to him via mail. If he couldn’t kill her, he was damn well going to scare her.
Not long before he did the deed he actually sent a letter to Buckingham Palace, stating,
“Your Majesty. Don't go to the Trooping the Color ceremony because there is an assassin set up to
kill you, waiting just outside the palace.” The letter arrived three days after the ceremony.
As she rode on her horse, Sarjeant seemed to appear from nowhere and fired off six shots.
Needless to say, this shocked and scared onlookers. No bullets came out of the gun
of course, but the noise frightened the Queen’s horse, named Burmese, and it reared up a little.
Like a champ, she steadied the beast. Guardsmen and cops were on Sarjeant like a flash, and the
Queen, according to one of her bodyguards, rode on “as cool as a cucumber.” He told the press,
“She looked shaken by the episode but soon recovered her composure.”
Sarjeant was charged with the 1848 Treason Act and sentenced to five years in prison.
It turned out that this failure of a kid had been obsessed with the assassinations of John
Lennon and John F. Kennedy. When investigators unearthed his diary, one of the entries read,
“I am going to stun and mystify the whole world with nothing more than a gun – I will
become the most famous teenager in the world.” He didn’t deny it later, telling cops to their
face, “I wanted to be famous. I wanted to be a somebody.” Psychiatrists didn’t think
he had any kind of severe mental health issues, saying he was merely a messed up, insecure kid,
who’d studied the Lennon assassination and couldn’t believe how easy that had been.
He then thought, why not, “I would like to be the first one to take a pot shot at the Queen.”
He was released from prison at the age of 20 and due to him being disliked by a lot
of royal-loving Brits, he gave himself a new identity. All the time he’d been locked up, he
apparently sent letters to the Queen apologizing for what he’d done. She didn’t reply once.
We can’t tell you what happened in the end to his boy that was called by the media a “traitor” and
a “fantasy assassin” but we reckon he sure would have looked on with interest had the truth about
the Queen’s later visit to New Zealand been told. And that brings us to another cover up,
easily the strangest tale of the three assassination attempts.
Like the New Zealand attempt on her life, this story only became
public knowledge many years after the event. In 1970, she was on a royal tour of Australia.
On 29 April she was riding a train with her husband, Prince Philip, heading from Sydney
to the city of Orange, a distance of about 161 miles (259 km). The incident happened
close to the town of Lithgow, population 13,000. We now know that prior to her boarding that train,
someone had laid down a large log on the tracks. At around seven feet long and about 8 inches in
diameter, it was big enough to derail the train. Someone had obviously left it there
in the dark and they’d wedged it in enough so that it would do some serious damage.
In fact, the train did hit the log and was momentarily shaken,
but it just happened that at that moment the train had been going much slower than
usual. Had it been traveling at the usual speed there is every chance it could have derailed,
and the Queen been seriously injured or killed. A report written many years later said,
“The train continued on under brakes for about 200 meters with the log still wedged under the
front wheels before finally coming to a halt at the level crossing near Bowenfels station.”
As things turned out, the Queen didn’t know a thing about it. The Australian cops didn’t report
the matter and a local newspaper that knew what had happened had made a so-called “gentleman’s
agreement” with the cops not to publish the story and so embarrass them and the country.
The newspaper, The Lithgow Mercury, kept hold of the story for close to 40 years.
One of the investigators later admitted he’d pulled the editor to the side and
told him not to publish the story. He said, “I took him for a drive, and I told him the
story and I said I want your assurance that you don't print it. And he didn't print it.”
In 2009, it was finally published. For many years Australian cops investigated the plot
but nothing came of it. One of the reasons for that was because they couldn’t actually talk to
many people about what had happened. The lead investigator later recalled, “We never came up
with any decent suspects because if we interviewed people we seemed to be talking in riddles.”
Who was behind the plot remains a mystery, with IRA sympathizers being high on the list
of suspects. Still, it could have been another kid trying to make a name for
himself or just a regular run-of-the-mill loon. It seems Buckingham Palace had also been kept in
the dark all those years, although it’s possible the British authorities also kept the story under
wraps. In 2009, the palace issued a statement saying it didn’t want to comment on the matter
but in the royal diary there was no mention of anything strange happening on the train that day.
Now you need to see how the Queen lives in “An Average Day in the Life of Queen Elizabeth II.”
Or, get some insider secrets with “The Weird Secret Rules The Royal Family Has To Follow.”