One of the defendants, Michael Jones, cased the palace twice in the weeks leading up to the theft — once before the toilet went on display at Blenheim Palace and up close and personal once it was installed and fully functional as an exhibit, Christopher said.
Attorney Julian Christopher said in his opening statement in Oxford Crown Court that it was an “audacious raid.” One of three men on trial in the case of the purloined potty was involved in stealing it and the other two helped to sell the spoils.
But Jones was also probably among the group of five men who crashed through the wooden gates of the palace before dawn the next morning in two stolen vehicles, Christopher said.
The one-of-a-kind 18-carat gold toilet was swiped in under five minutes from Blenheim Palace, the sprawling English country mansion where British wartime leader Winston Churchill was born, in the predawn hours of Sept. 14, 2019, a prosecutor told jurors Monday.
Jones was in cahoots with James Sheen, a builder he worked for who was part of both the burglary and the effort to sell the gold, Christopher said.
