Extraordinary tale of the fugitive brothel madam and her dominatrix lover who conned their way into British high society - and even met the Queen

By KATHRYN KNIGHT, FEATURE WRITER Published: 00:59, 19 July 2026 | Updated: 01:13, 19 July 2026 It could scarcely have been a more exclusive occasion. The royal enclosure at the Royal Windsor Horse Show in 1997, and a couple of flamboyantly dressed ladies were talking to the Queen herself. ‘We spoke about horses and the country estate we were hoping to buy,’ Laila Andre – one of those ladies – recalls of their intimate chat. ‘The Queen knew it well. She told us she and her younger sister used to play there.’ It was, by any measure, an extraordinary encounter – and more extraordinary given the identity of the women enjoying it. For these apparent millionaire horse enthusiasts had not inherited vast fortunes, nor made them in business. They were, in fact, Australian fugitives whose lavish lifestyle was built on smoke and mirrors and who possessed a remarkable ability to bluff their way into the highest reaches of British society. Among those left out of pocket from their cons was Michael Bullen, a former equerry to the Queen, who lost £60,000. Nor was their scamming the only surprise lurking in the past of this brazen Australian duo. For long before they started charming aristocrats, rubbing shoulders with royalty and gliding between London’s smartest hotels in a gold Rolls-Royce, Andre and her lover Evelyn Burton had run a string of brothels in their native Melbourne. Andre had also enjoyed a successful second career as a dominatrix by the name of Madame Xaviera, catering to a discreet but wealthy clientele. Eventually, however, the couple’s lies caught up with them, landing them with jail sentences for fraud and deception. Now, 25 years after both women were sentenced, their astonishing rise and spectacular fall is the subject of a new podcast, Royal Swindle, which features many of those caught up in their extraordinary story, as well as Andre herself – today, a silvery-haired 77-year-old with mobility issues living quietly in social housing on the outskirts of Melbourne and cutting a very different image from the glamorous redhead who once captivated Britain’s equestrian set. Only one thing remains unchanged: she still insists she knew next to nothing. For despite pleading guilty to offences of deception and being sentenced to three years and eight months in prison, Andre maintains that her lover was the architect of everything that unfolded and that she merely drifted through events as an adoring companion. Evelyn Burton, left, and Laila Andre, right, outside the London court that jailed them ‘She was the sort of person who’d say, “What you don’t know won’t hurt you – don’t ask,”’ she insists, in a chat over Zoom. ‘That was our whole relationship. She kept things from me. Besides being her lover, I was really more her secretary than anything else. I was Little Miss Tagalong.’ Whether others will find that explanation particularly convincing is another matter. Either way, theirs was an extraordinary partnership. The two women met in Melbourne in the early 1980s, where both happened to be running brothels. Andre was married at the time, but says she fell hopelessly in love almost instantly – despite the rather stout and baggy-trouser-wearing Burton hardly being an obvious femme fatale. ‘The first time I saw her, I thought, “This is my woman,”’ Andre says. ‘She was everything. She was domineering and difficult, but she had such charisma and she made me laugh. She was the love of my life.’ By the middle of the decade they had set up home together and, having both endured impoverished and harsh childhoods, Burton was determined they never would go without again. ‘She wanted to look after me,’ recalls Andre. ‘Nothing was too good for me.’ Burton certainly wasn’t lacking in ambition. Alongside the brothels she ran, she held a stake in a lesbian magazine and a soft-porn franchise and established a finance company called Leveraged Equity Investments International, which promised to arrange loans in return for an upfront fee. There was just one snag: according to investigators, borrowers paid their fees but never received the loans they had been promised. Laila Andre enjoyed something of a reputation back home in Australia under another name: Madame Xaviera, working as a dominatrix And so, by the mid-1990s, Australian police had been alerted to an alleged fraud worth millions of Australian dollars, along with a trail of unpaid debts. As she always did, Burton had a solution. ‘She told me she’d met a fellow in Melbourne who worked in finance and wanted her to go to the US,’ Andre recalls. ‘So it was a case of, “We’re going to America.” ‘I didn’t really want to go, but I went because it was what she wanted.’ The plan, according to Andre, was to rent an apartment in New York after a short stay at the Hilton – but instead, there was an unwelcome interruption. One morning, immigration officials knocked on their hotel room door and asked her to accompany them for questioning. Today, Andre says she cannot remember exactly why her lover was released, only that she announced it was time to move on once again – and Britain offered fresh opportunities. The pair arrived in London in the autumn of 1996 and checked into an opulent suite at the Berkeley Hotel, paying in cash – at first. From there, Burton instructed some of Britain’s most prestigious estate agents to find her a substantial country estate suitable for breeding racehorses. And if anyone wondered where the money came from, Burton had an answer ready. She explained she was a successful banker who had made a fortune investing with an US company called Westgate Development Corporation. Better still, she was happy to let friends share in the opportunity. The proposition certainly sounded irresistible. According to Burton, investors just had to provide a lump sum to insure corporate bonds, which would then generate returns of up to 25 per cent a month. There was just one rather significant problem. Westgate Development Corporation was a mere front. Yet, somehow, people believed her – including, she insists, Andre. ‘I believed she was investing, absolutely,’ she says now. It was a posture also apparently accepted by her new friends in the UK’s close-knit equestrian world. Claiming she intended to establish a world-class stud farm, Burton immersed herself in elite horse circles, attending prestigious events including the Olympia Horse Show and the Arab Horse Show. Evelyn Burton immersed herself in elite horse circles, attending prestigious events including the Olympia Horse Show and the Arab Horse Show (pictured far right) And for all their unorthodox dress sense – Burton often sported a bomber jacket, Andre long, multi-coloured nails – they otherwise looked the part. When they swept into top-flight equestrian events, they did so in a stretch limousine or their unmistakable gold Rolls-Royce, often accompanied by three ‘servants’. Today, Andre remembers the period as one long whirlwind of glamorous dinners, horse shows and property viewings – among them that sprawling country estate near Newmarket in Suffolk which Burton was so set on purchasing. She even hired a high-end recruiter to sort out a retinue of butlers and maids to be installed when the time came. As she announced to anyone who would listen, she intended to transform it into one of Britain’s premier stud farms – a proposition that looked to have received the royal seal of approval when, in May 1997, having offered to sponsor the Royal Windsor Horse Show to the tune of £170,000, Burton and Andre were invited into the royal enclosure. For Andre, it remains one of the defining memories of her life. ‘I was pretty nervous,’ she recalls. ‘But the Queen was a really sweet person. I liked her.’ Yet as the late Queen chatted warmly about the Newmarket estate she believed the women were about to buy, the cheque that had gained them entry bounced. ‘Cash-flow problems,’ as Burton would always retort whenever she was challenged. Nor was the Royal Windsor Horse Show the only place where ‘cash-flow problems’ had begun to catch up with the pair. The Berkeley, where the pair had first established themselves in London society, eventually lost patience after they ran up an unpaid bill reportedly equivalent to around £65,000 in today’s money. ‘Evelyn kept saying she was waiting for a very large sum of money from America,’ Andre recalls. ‘It was always on its way.’ When Burton developed dementia in 2010 after several years of ill health, Andre became her carer. She nursed the woman she still describes as the love of her life until her death in 2020 Either way, the women simply moved on. After drifting through a succession of London’s smartest hotels, they eventually arrived at a Hertfordshire hotel called Sopwell House, sweeping into the driveway in their now familiar Rolls-Royce. It was not long however, before the manager of Sopwell House also grew tired of waiting for payment – and this time their departure would prove rather more costly. Lured from their room under the pretext of a fire alarm, they were then refused re-entry. Burton was forced to leave behind one possession she would later have given almost anything to recover: a battered tan leather briefcase. Inside was a small mountain of paperwork: contracts, financial documents and names. Enough, as it turned out, to begin unravelling the elaborate fantasy she had spent years constructing. Fate then intervened. The police officer who happened to attend the hotel that day was a detective who had previously served on the fraud squad. His name was Jim Frost, and while most people might not have given the clutch of papers a second glance, to him they looked deeply suspicious. ‘There were contracts for millions of dollars lying around,’ he recalls in the podcast. ‘I thought, “This doesn’t look right.” ’ His instincts proved sound. As he began contacting some of the names contained in the documents, a remarkably similar picture emerged. ‘People said, “Yes, I’ve invested money... but I’ve never had any return,” ’ he says. One by one, witness statements began piling up – although while Frost painstakingly assembled the case, Burton and Andre were once again several steps ahead. Having briefly hidden away in a cottage in the Cambridgeshire village of Snailwell, they slipped out of the country, travelling across Europe before eventually boarding a flight to New Zealand. Despite Burton’s convictions and the judge’s excoriating verdict, Andre cannot quite accept the portrait of the woman she loved as a hardened criminal Even then, Andre insists, she believed they were simply waiting for Burton’s finances to recover. ‘Evelyn always said it would all come good,’ she says with characteristic certainty. The pair rented a comfortable cottage in Auckland’s affluent seaside suburb of Herne Bay and tried, once again, to begin anew. Money, however, was becoming increasingly scarce – although happily Andre had a solution. For long before Britain knew her as the impeccably dressed companion of an apparent millionaire investor, she had enjoyed something of a reputation back home under another name: Madame Xaviera. Operating discreetly from her suburban home, she resumed work as a dominatrix, charging around 150 Australian dollars an hour to businessmen seeking the services of Melbourne’s former mistress of discipline. ‘I loved it,’ she says now with a chuckle. ‘I’d still be doing it now if I could stand up.’ Meanwhile, Burton returned to what she knew best. Presenting herself once more as a sophisticated investment broker, she persuaded another acquaintance to hand over a substantial sum of money. This time, though, things ended differently. The victim went straight to the police and early one morning in February 1999, officers arrived at the couple’s home. The game was finally up. By January the following year, both women had been extradited to Britain at the request of the Serious Fraud Office, arriving not at another luxury hotel but at the less glamorous surroundings of St Albans police station. Here, Burton faced 95 counts of fraud and conspiracy while Andre was charged with three offences relating to cheque fraud. The pair were remanded to a bail hostel until their hearing at Wood Green Crown Court in January 2001. Andre was convinced she at least would walk free, even though she pleaded guilty to one charge of retaining a wrongful credit and two counts of evading liability by deception on the advice of her legal team – a decision she insists to this day was born not of guilt but fear. ‘My barrister said if I fought it I’d get a much bigger sentence, so I just did what he told me.’ In court, her counsel painted a strikingly different portrait from that of a calculating fraudster. Far from masterminding an international scam, he argued, Andre was essentially a housewife who had at one point enjoyed considerable success in a rather different arena – ‘high-class prostitution’. The judge was unimpressed. Having learned that Burton had persuaded at least eight acquaintances to part with sums ranging from £93,000 to £185,000 on the promise of spectacular investment returns that never materialised (the losses proved in court totalled £557,000, although prosecutors suggested the true figure was likely to have been considerably higher), he sentenced Burton to five years’ imprisonment for what he called a ‘well-planned and executed fraud’. Andre received three years and eight months, a sentence which came as a profound shock. ‘I honestly thought I was going back to the bail hostel,’ she recalls now. Instead, she found herself beginning a prison sentence at HMP Holloway. ‘I spent most of my time trying to keep Evelyn out of trouble,’ Andre recalls now of her time behind bars. ‘She was always arguing with people.’ Released at the end of 2001, Andre was deported to Australia, where she settled into a modest flat in Melbourne. Two years later, after completing her own sentence, Evelyn joined her. And for all the extraordinary twists in their story, perhaps the most remarkable constant was the relationship itself. When Burton developed dementia in 2010 after several years of ill health, Andre became her carer. She nursed the woman she still describes as the love of her life until her death in 2020. Even now, six years on, the grief is palpable. ‘We were together more than 30 years,’ she says quietly. ‘That’s a long time. I still talk to her.’ Moreover, her loyalty remains undimmed. Despite Burton’s convictions and the judge’s excoriating verdict, Andre cannot quite accept the portrait of the woman she loved as a hardened criminal. ‘She wasn’t a scandalous sort of person,’ she insists. ‘She just used to get herself into situations she couldn’t get out of. ‘She never really meant to hurt anybody. She never took anything too seriously. I suppose, in a way, that was her downfall.’ Whether others share that view is, of course, another question. The Royal Swindle podcast will be released on July 23 by Blanchard House. See rare photos from the story at @exactlyright on Instagram.