Thelma Jean Williams, a Nashville woman claiming to be Princess Jean von Hohenzollern, was arrested in December 1979 in New Jersey for allegedly stealing an Avis rental car while living off her royal title. Born likely in 1926 or 1930, she married Prince Carol of Romania in 1960 after he was legitimized by a Portuguese court, accumulating debt in England before drifting through the US social scene. Williams sued Avis for wrongful arrest and defamation, refusing depositions, and died in 1988 with her death certificate listing her as HRH Princess Jean von Hohenzollern, born November 15, 1930, while her husband's sons now compete for the Romanian throne. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, Qwen/Qwen3-ForcedAligner-0.6B, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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The Bachelor Scandal00:04:17
This is an iHeart podcast.
Guaranteed human.
In 2023, Bachelor star Clayton Eckard was accused of fathering twins, but the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax.
You doctored this particular test twice, Ms. Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing Greg Gillespie and Michael Mancini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trapped.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens.
Finally, faces consequences.
Listen to Love Trapped Podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He is not going to get away with this.
He's going to get what he deserves.
We always say that trust your girlfriends.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Vodem.
My next guest is Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
He goes, Just give it a shot.
But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on.
A calendar of, you know, the cat just hanging there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot in life.
Listen to ThinkStat on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Readers, Katie's finalists, publicists, we have an incredible new episode this week for you guys.
We have our girl Hillary Duff in here, and we can't wait for you to hear this episode.
They put on Lizzie McGuire at 2 a.m., video on demand.
This guy's.
2 a.m., video on demand.
2 a.m., whatever the time it is.
Lizzie McGuire, and I'm watching.
That wild batch you were with.
It was like a first closet moment for me where I was like, You're like, I don't feel like she's hot like the rest of them.
No, no, no.
I was like, She's beautiful, but I'm appreciating her in a different way than these boys are.
I'm not like, But listen to Las Coltristas on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
It was an ordinary Wednesday afternoon in December of 1979 when an employee at a shopping center in New Jersey called the police to report a pair of suspicious vehicles in the parking lot.
There was nothing specifically suspicious about them, I don't think.
Photos of the vehicles show they were perfectly ordinary cars.
And the cashier who called the police couldn't possibly have known that one of those cars had been reported stolen in Connecticut.
But something felt off, so an officer was sent out to take a look.
Through the windows, the officer could see a teenage boy asleep in the back seat of the station wagon.
A middle aged woman was slumped over, asleep in the driver's seat.
And maybe they could have been sent on their way with just a warning not to nap in department store parking lots.
But this pretty ordinary call to check on someone asleep in their car.
Very quickly became something of a strange situation.
Once roused from her nap, the woman sought to clear things up.
She got out of the station wagon and pulled open the door of a Cadillac limousine in the next parking spot over.
According to the documents she fished out of the glove box of the Cadillac, driven by a man she referred to as her aide de camp, she was Princess Jean von Hohenzollern, wife of Prince Carol, the son of King Carol II and brother of King Michael I.
A Strange Situation00:05:50
The last king of Romania.
I'm Molly Conger, and this is Weird Little Guys.
This is a side story, a full on side quest, a tangent that had me so far out on a limb that the branch broke off.
But I can do that if I want to, because I'm the captain of this ship and you're just along for the ride.
Truthfully, I am still sick.
I mean, I'm getting better and I'm sorry that you had to endure a rerun last week, but I just can't seem to shake whatever this is.
I mean, physically, it's like, A bad cold, and it's not the flu, and it's not COVID.
I don't know what it is, but I've been so tired, I can't think straight.
And that's not really great because my job mostly consists of thinking really hard.
But my voice is back, and I'm well enough to work, so here we are.
But the last chapter of the story of Jack Kershaw, the man who made the world's ugliest Confederate statue, is one that I wanted to get right because it involves the founding of the League of the South.
One of the white supremacist groups that organized the Unite the Right rally here in Charlottesville in 2017.
So instead of half assing that episode, the one I meant to write last week, I'm gonna whole ass this episode a funny little side story about a beauty queen con artist from Nashville who ended up getting the final word on whether or not she was ever a real Romanian princess by having her son printed on her death certificate.
This story does take place within the broader narrative about Jack Kershaw, but you don't need to have heard the first two parts of that story to enjoy this one.
If you have been following along in that ongoing story, in the last episode, we talked about the only famous case of his legal career.
Jack Kershaw lived to be almost 100 years old.
And when he died in 2010, just about any article about his life could be boiled down.
To three main points.
First, most recently and perhaps most famously, he was the sculptor of the bizarrely hideous Nathan Bedford Forest statue that used to stand next to the highway south of Nashville.
That was the subject of the first episode I did on Jack.
Second, he was a lawyer.
Every obituary says he was a lawyer, and the only client anyone ever mentions.
Is that he briefly represented James Earl Wray, the man who confessed to and was convicted of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.?
That was the subject of last week's episode.
The third fact about his life included in all those obituaries was that he was a co founder of the neo Confederate, pro secession hate group, the League of the South.
And that's a story I want to tell you when I have a clearer head, and for my editor Rory's sake, maybe clearer sinuses.
But while I was fleshing out my timeline, if you're a longtime listener, you know I always start with an unnecessarily detailed timeline.
I was sort of surprised by his legal career.
Or lack thereof.
Because before I started writing about him, I knew those three facts the ones from his obituaries.
He made an ugly statue, he started a hate group, and he was a lawyer.
Those are the three things that define him.
So I figured sure, his representation of James Earl Ray is a headline grabber, but I bet he had a lot of clients like that.
I mean, if he was the kind of guy.
Who had a client like that at all?
He probably had others.
But he didn't really.
I mean, not that I could find, I don't have access to those fancy databases lawyers use to look up every case an attorney ever entered an appearance in.
But I did a pretty thorough search of old newspapers and old racist newsletters.
And his legal career comes up in both, but it was a short career.
And we'll get into more detail about that when we get back to the main storyline with Jack next week.
But as I was working out what kind of cases he worked on during his career as an attorney, I found one that did not fit.
It did not fit at all.
It didn't make sense in the context of the rest of his career because it was mostly segregation stuff.
I mean, pretty much exclusively, he worked on cases that had some connection to preventing progress on integration in the state of Tennessee.
Making schools worse, some land use and tax stuff, some Confederate flag related matters.
And he only practiced law for about 15 years.
Aside from that one famous murderer he spent six months promoting in the press, there's just not a lot there that isn't about segregation in Tennessee.
The Romanian Princess Case00:10:52
So, what was his name doing in a newspaper story about a Romanian princess with a stolen rental car in North Brunswick, New Jersey?
Why was that his client?
I mean, first of all, it took him six years to graduate from an unaccredited night law school at the YMCA that wouldn't have allowed him to practice law outside of the state of Tennessee.
But maybe the more obvious question here is what was a Romanian princess doing asleep in a station wagon in a parking lot off Route 1?
My first guess was well, that's not a real princess.
Obviously, that's a liar or someone having a break with reality.
But I was wrong.
Princess Jean was kind of a real princess, in the sense that she really had once been married to Mircea.
Grigori Carolambrino, the formerly illegitimate son of the Romanian King Carol II, who abdicated the throne in 1940.
If she was a real Romanian princess, then why was her first phone call from the Middlesex County Adult Detention Center in North Brunswick, New Jersey, to a Nashville based attorney who'd mostly retired after public schools had been successfully integrated?
It was a tangent worth pursuing.
On December 5th, 1979, the police were called to check on a sleeping motorist in a shopping center parking lot.
Cop cars didn't have computers in them back then, so things worked a little bit differently.
These days, cops can check things pretty quickly.
When you hand them your license and registration, they're going to their little computer and they're running your name and your plates and they're calling into dispatch.
And if you aren't who you say you are, if you have an expired license, if you have warrants, if your plates don't match the car's registration, if those plates come back stolen, They'll know all of that pretty much immediately.
The National Crime Information Center, a central database maintained by the FBI, was established in 1967.
And by the late 70s, there was what you would technically call computerized information storage, but it wasn't instant.
It took some time to send a fax to the NCIC and have a records analyst sort through the giant magnetic computer tapes.
So they might not have even bothered with a records check.
If the napping driver had seemed more normal.
But she claimed to be a princess, and that was a little out of the ordinary.
So they ran the plates on both vehicles.
Now, before you email me about what it was like to have a traffic stop in 1979, one of the articles about this incident goes out of its way to describe running the plates as a standard procedure, which makes it sound like this was a relatively new thing that may not have been standard.
And some of the local news coverage does make it seem like they would have let her go with a warning if her behavior hadn't been strange.
And it turned out whatever instinct made them probe this a little bit further was a good one.
The license plates on the Cadillac weren't real, but the station wagon did have a definitive owner the Avis Rental Car Company.
And they had reported it stolen in Connecticut several months earlier.
Her two traveling companions, her 18 year old son Alexander, and her aide de camp, a man named Eugene Gafton, were released without charges.
But the princess was charged with receiving a stolen motor vehicle, taken into custody, and booked into the county jail.
The local paper reported that the princess declined to speak with them because she did not want her friends back home to hear about her embarrassing predicament.
The Central New Jersey Home News did speak with two people who claimed to be her close friends, and they both vouched for the princess.
Georgia Paul of Del Rio, Texas, the daughter of a wealthy rancher, said she'd been dear friends with the princess for years, ever since Princess Jean had presided over her daughter's debutante ball.
Jack Kershaw, claiming to be the princess's attorney, said they'd met years ago in New York City when the princess bought one of his paintings.
The local paper reported that the police seemed inclined to believe her story, but the director of the county jail thought it was nonsense.
Regardless of who she really was, a judge set her bail at $15,000.
She didn't pay it.
Through her attorney, Jack Kershaw, they told reporters that she had access to assets worth over half a million dollars artwork, properties, things of that nature.
But she was refusing to post bond out of principle, preferring to sit in the Middlesex County Detention Center with the common people until she could clear her name.
Her attorney, Jack Kershaw, called the arrest the most absurd thing he'd ever seen in his career, just a terrible mistake.
The princess was visiting the United States from her home in England, where she lived with her husband, the prince, and she was touring the United States in her Cadillac, but she'd rented the station wagon for her teenage son.
Her aide de camp had extended the rental agreement with the company, Kershaw claimed, but it was a mix up with the computers, and the rental company was mistaken.
This was just a terrible mistake caused by these newfangled computerized records.
A judge reduced her bail, cutting it in half to $7,500.
She still didn't pay it.
And curious reporters were starting to dig.
A real European princess sitting in the county jail was a pretty exciting story.
And they started to find a little more information about the princess.
It seemed like maybe she wasn't refusing to post her own bail money so much as she couldn't afford it.
There were rumors of huge debts.
After a week in custody, the princess was bailed out by her friend in Texas, the cattle heiress, Georgia Paul.
A few months later, a grand jury in New Jersey declined to indict the princess on the charge of receiving a stolen motor vehicle.
They seemed to agree that it had been a misunderstanding with the rental company rather than an intentional theft.
And when the princess did appear in court in New Jersey, it wasn't Jack Kershaw at her side as her attorney.
She'd hired someone local to actually handle the case.
Much like his representation of James Earl Ray, this famous client of his didn't really benefit much from their association.
He gave a few statements to the press, but.
He never actually appeared with her in court on the criminal matter or her subsequent lawsuit over it.
He just grabbed a few headlines and then faded out of the story.
His name doesn't appear at all in connection with the lawsuit that dragged on for several more years.
She filed a $50 million lawsuit against Avis, the rental car company, as well as several newspapers, their publishers, Rupert Murdoch personally, several individual reporters.
And one police officer with the North Brunswick, New Jersey Police Department.
She alleged that the wrongful arrest had caused her severe psychic trauma and emotional distress, as well as greatly injuring her good name and reputation.
Avis, in turn, alleged that she owed them nearly $9,000 by the time the police recovered the stolen rental car, and she'd put over 10,000 miles on the vehicle during the 174 days that she drove it without paying.
The suit was eventually thrown out, due in large part to her refusal to sit for depositions.
She also never completed a court ordered psychiatric evaluation.
The case is too old to have been digitized, so I can't read the filings.
But it sounds like she wanted to be able to say she sued for defamation, but she knew damn well she'd make things much, much worse.
by actually allowing any additional information to come to light.
So she stopped participating after the initial complaint was filed.
So, Jack Kershaw is largely irrelevant here.
Remember, that was my entry point into the story I was writing about Jack.
And he showed up in a handful of newspaper articles about this incident, and then he is no longer part of the story.
But now I find myself just wanting to know more about this princess in the parking lot.
The stories surrounding this incident in December of 1979 are also curiously vague.
She gave the police a home address in Del Rio, Texas, but the address she gave them wasn't one that actually exists.
And a lot of the news stories confidently assert that the princess was a resident of Del Rio, Texas, while others are quite sure that Del Rio, Texas had just been a recent stop for a brief visit on her cross country tour.
Most newspapers reported that she lived in England with her husband, the Prince.
But none of these stories seemed to note that she'd been separated from Prince Carol for nearly a decade and properly divorced for about two years.
Their custody battle over their teenage son had made international headlines because both parents had, in separate incidents, abducted the boy from one another on either side of the Atlantic.
And after this arrest, American newspapers describe her.
British accent, but almost never mentioned that she wasn't British.
Nashville Not Romania00:04:25
She was also not Romanian.
She was from Nashville, Tennessee.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say that trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends, oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, Oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, former Bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.
You doctored this particular test twice, Ms. Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant.
They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing Greg Wesby and Michael Maranchini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trap.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news out of Maricopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
Listen to Love Trapped Podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up everyone?
I'm Ego Woden.
My next guest, you know from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network, it's Will Ferrell.
Woo, woo, woo, woo.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through it.
I know it's a place they come look for up-and-coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you.
Which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah.
It would not be.
Right.
It wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Yeah.
Listen to ThanksDad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
This season on Dear Chelsea with me, Chelsea Handler, we have some fantastic guests like Amelia Clark.
When young people come up to me and they want to be an actor or whatever, my first thing is always can you think of anything else that you can do?
Rather be disappointed in.
Do that.
Dennis Leary.
I wake up and I'm hitting him in the head with a water bottle.
And Bruce Jenner is on the aisle in a karate stance, like he's about to attack me, like making karate noises.
And here's the time, the Kardashian family over there.
Everybody's going, and the air marshal's trying to grab my arms and screaming.
I immediately know that I've been sleepwalking.
David Oyelowo.
I love this podcast, whether it's therapy or relationships or religion or sex or addiction, or you just go straight for the guts.
Guy Branham.
So, anyway, Nicole Kidman broke up with Keith Thurban.
Royal Drama Unveiled00:15:10
Being half of a country couple was always a hat she was going to wear, not like a life she was going to lead.
Oh, interesting.
I like that.
Did you practice that on your way over?
Gayton Madurazo from Stranger Things, Tana Monju, Camilla Marone, Carrie Kenny Silver, and more.
Listen to these episodes of Dear Chelsea on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
But really, the thing that sounded most like a lie wasn't.
She was kind of telling the truth.
She was a princess.
In accordance with a ruling from a Portuguese court that retroactively legitimized her ex husband as the eldest son of the Romanian King Carol II, she did technically have some legal right at that time to call herself Jean de Honzollern.
Honestly, I think the story would be a lot less weird if she had been lying about being a Romanian princess.
Thelma Jean Williams became a princess in 1960 when she married Mircea Gregori Carol Lambrino.
Prince Carol.
Carol de Honzollern, Prince of Romania.
And for consistency's sake, I'll call him Prince Carol throughout because his father's name was also Carol.
Prince Carol was the eldest son of Carol II, King of Romania from 1930 until his forced abdication in 1940.
But little Carol didn't grow up as a prince during his father's reign.
He never actually knew his father at all and wasn't legally a prince at any point during the existence of the Romanian monarchy.
I'm way outside my wheelhouse talking about royal drama, but King Carol II seems like he was a little bit of a mess.
In the 19 teens, his family tried to marry him off to Olga Nikolaevna, the eldest daughter of the Russian Tsar Nicholas II, and his cousin of some degree half a dozen times over.
But he thought Olga was unattractive, and she didn't want to move to Romania, so it didn't work out.
Instead, he deserted from the army during World War I to marry a woman with no royal blood at all, which was a bit of a scandal.
It was this brief marriage to a woman named Zizi Lambrino that produced his eldest son, Prince Carol.
This marriage was annulled almost immediately before the child was even born.
So, our Prince Carol was not born with his father's name, and he wasn't legally recognized as his father's son until 1955, after his father's death.
But after our little Prince Carol's birth in 1920, His father married a second time, this time to his second wife, who was also his second cousin, Princess Helen of Greece and Denmark, with whom he had a second son, his only legitimate son, King Michael.
King Carol's first wife, Zizi Lambrino, and their son, Prince Carol, were exiled from Romania.
And Prince Carol never knew his father and never lived in the country of his birth.
So, up until this point, it's the mid 1920s, the King of Romania is still Ferdinand I, Prince Carol's grandfather.
Carol Sr. was forced to renounce his place in the line of succession because of the ongoing scandal of his very public affair with his mistress, Magda Lupescu.
It was five year old Michael who became king.
In 1930, Carol Sr. cooed his own eight year old son to take the throne, becoming at that point King Carol II.
Skipping a lot of rather unimportant Romanian history, King Carol II was forced by future dictator Ion Antonescu to abdicate in 1940.
Young Michael was king again for a few years before he too was forced to abdicate in 1947, this time by the Communist Party.
Thus, marking the end of the Romanian monarchy.
There's a lot of history in those years, but that's not our business right now.
It's just background for our story.
Our Prince Carol wasn't there for any of it, he'd been exiled as a child with his mother.
Zizi Lambrino raised her son in Paris, and they received an allowance from the boy's father even after Carol II abdicated the throne.
The money didn't dry up until the Communist Party took control of the Romanian government in 1945, and by that time, young Carol was an adult.
Both his mother, Zizi Lambrino, and then his estranged father, King Carol II, died in 1953.
I couldn't possibly begin to understand the finer points of law governing European monarchy, but in order to claim some inheritance from his father, he needed to prove the legitimacy of his birth.
And in 1955, a court in Portugal ruled that he was the legitimate son of King Carol II and thus had the legal right.
To call himself a Romanian prince.
Again, there's some strange stuff going on here.
I'm not sure what interest the Portuguese dictatorship under Salazar had in decreeing him to be a Romanian prince.
I didn't have time to find that out.
But having the legal right to use this title was very important to him.
There is no Romanian monarchy anymore, so he could call himself a prince, but there's no throne to claim.
The country abolished the monarchy nearly a decade earlier and.
Even if they brought back the monarchy, his half brother King Michael I is still very much alive at this point.
But the title opened doors.
Not doors to royal palaces, not any doors in Romania which he could not legally enter, but doors to banks and parties.
You can get a pretty good line of credit on a name alone.
People invited you to country clubs.
You could really coast on a title, which was very good for him because by the mid 1950s, he was an unemployed bookbinder living in Paris.
According to the society pages at the time, that's where he met his second wife, an American woman named Thelma Jean Williams.
He was at this time still married to his first wife, a French opera singer.
Carol and Jean married in a small ceremony in France just before Christmas of 1960.
Newspapers at the time describe her as in her 20s and say she was a former model living in Paris as a columnist for the New York Herald Tribune.
And she's the niece of New York banking millionaire Woodland Collar.
And not a word of that is true.
Of all the articles about this relationship, only a handful mention her having any parents at all.
His parentage is, of course, front and center.
He's a prince.
But there's just a few mentions of the woman's mother, a Mrs. Joe E. Belcher in Nashville.
And Mrs. Belcher told the Associated Press When my Jean was young, I told her, my little angel is good enough for kings and queens.
Now she's a real princess, and I'm so happy for her.
Mrs. Belcher told the reporter from the Associated Press, she hadn't actually seen her daughter in at least five years.
But this article seems to be the source for the claims that the princess had worked as a model in New York and California before moving to Paris to be a newspaper columnist.
There's no actual proof of any of those things, just the excited praise of a mother who hadn't actually seen her daughter in years.
But Mrs. Belcher did give one concrete detail her daughter had been a contestant in the Miss Nashville beauty pageant.
In 1948.
And that I can prove because it was in the newspaper.
The name and age of every young woman competing to be Miss Nashville 1948 was printed in the local paper.
And Miss Jean Williams of Madison, a Nashville suburb, was 22 years old in 1948, meaning she was born in 1926, which at the time of her wedding in 1960 would make her 34, not in her 20s.
It seemed odd, too, that her mother is.
Only described as Mrs. Joe Belcher.
I mean, it's 1960.
Women didn't really get their own names, but she's not Mrs. Williams.
And there's no Mr. Williams.
The only mention at all that the princess ever had a father is in an article about the wedding in the Tennessean.
Mrs. Joe Belcher said her daughter's father died when she was just six months old.
So I scoured records looking for this father.
Census records, birth records, death records, cemetery records, newspapers.
I didn't find anything.
Princess Jean's own death certificate lists her parents as Richard Williams and Josephine Unknown, as reported to the coroner by the decident's son, Alexander von Honzollern.
So, Josephine, maiden name unknown, is her mother.
That's Mrs. Joe E. Belcher.
In 1960, Joe Eason Belcher of Nashville was married to his second wife.
A woman named Josephine.
And they're buried next to each other, which is how I know her name was Josephine Emmeline Belcher.
And in his obituary, her maiden name is listed as Owens.
Josephine Owens was born in 1913.
That's what's on her tombstone, and it matches census records I was able to find from her childhood.
So I think I know where this lie comes from.
It's not all con artistry.
A lot of what Jean will say about her life was part of a con.
But Mrs. Jo Belcher doesn't want to talk about her daughter's father for the same reason neither of them is telling the truth about what year Jean was born.
They're only 13 years apart.
But honestly, I can't promise you Thelma Jean Williams is her real name.
Aside from the 1948 Miss Nashville competition, I had trouble nailing Jean down anywhere before 1956.
The name Thelma only appears in those newspaper articles from 1960.
It's not that weird to exclusively go by your middle name, but I did think it was interesting that Thelma is her stepfather's dead first wife's name.
And that's something you do sometimes see in con artistry.
It's easy to borrow a dead person's name if you need a fake name for a con.
There are a lot of unknowns here.
I wish I could find her in any government record that predates her marriage or.
Some kind of concrete proof of what her name was when she was born.
But I couldn't.
I'm not saying I can't or that it's impossible.
I'm just saying I didn't find it through my usual means.
I would love to know how she met a Romanian prince in Paris in the mid 1950s and convinced him to leave his first wife for her.
But I don't really know the whole story there.
I mean, you can't deny the woman had drive.
A fatherless daughter of a teen mom from Nashville.
Really did marry a recently legally legitimized prince who she met in Paris.
And that's kind of romantic.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say that trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends, oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, former Bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.
You doctored this particular test twice in Soins, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant.
They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Gillespie and Michael Maranchini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trap.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news out of Maricopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
Listen to Love Trapped Podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Cracking the Pattern00:02:03
What's up everyone?
I'm Ego Woden.
My next guest, you know from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network, it's Will Ferrell.
Woo, My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through, and I know it's a place they come look for up-and-coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you.
which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat.
Just hang in there.
Yeah.
It would not be.
Right.
It wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to ThanksDad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
This season on Dear Chelsea with me, Chelsea Handler, we have some fantastic guests like Amelia Clark.
When young people come up to me and they want to be an actor or whatever, my first thing is always can you think of anything else that you can do?
Rather be.
Because.
Do that.
Dennis Leary.
I wake up and I'm hitting him in the head with a water bottle.
And Bruce Jenner is on the aisle in a karate stance, like he's about to attack me.
Like.
Making karate noises.
And here's the entire Kardashian family over there.
Everybody's going.
And the air marshal is trying to grab my arms and screaming.
I immediately know that I've been sleepwalking.
David Oyelowo.
I've loved this podcast, whether it's therapy or relationships or religion or sex or addiction, or you just go straight for the guts.
Guy Branham.
So, anyway, Nicole Kidman broke up with Keith Thurban.
Official Government Documents00:09:31
Being half of a country couple, Was always a hat she was going to wear, not like a life she was going to lead.
Oh, interesting.
I like that.
Did you practice that on your way over?
Gayton Madurazo from Stranger Things, Tana Monju, Camilla Marone, Carrie Kenny Silver, and more.
Listen to these episodes of Dear Chelsea on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
After the wedding, the couple moved to Poole, a town on the south coast of England.
There, trading on their royal titles, they racked up an enormous amount of debt.
Again, this is before computers, you know?
You can just make things up.
Oh, I don't have the cash today, but of course I'm good for it.
I'm a prince.
Oh, it's so crass to even discuss money.
Of course the bill will be paid.
She's a princess.
They were very active in charitable work and they went to lots of fancy parties.
But eventually the bills came due.
They owed a lot of people a lot of money, and their lives in Poole fell apart.
By 1970, they were living apart.
She pops up in the society pages in American newspapers pretty frequently, and it's almost always claimed that, well, she lives full time in England with her husband, the prince.
But it doesn't seem that she goes to England very often, and it's never mentioned that they're separated.
She's just drifting around the United States coasting on this title.
And Americans love the idea of a princess.
We want to be fooled, we crave it.
A newspaper photographer in Orlando snapped a paparazzi style photo of her having lunch at a fancy hotel in 1970, and the Orlando Sentinel called her an exiled Romanian princess.
She's never been to Romania.
She's from Nashville.
Her name pops up frequently as the mistress of ceremonies, the patroness, or the guest of honor at a debutante ball.
Those big fancy affairs for the teenage daughters of very rich men.
Having a bona fide European princess at your daughter's debut held a certain kind of cachet in high society, so her services were in high demand.
In 1971, newspapers in Miami describe a terribly fancy affair.
The International Fine Arts Debutante Association of the Order of the Unicorn had managed to secure several very high profile patronesses.
One paper described it as Miami's own little nest of royalty.
The princesses will all be there, including Princess Jean Marie de Chabri, the Baroness Vladimir Kuhn von Puschenthal, Grandmistress Lady Porter, and Her Royal Highness Jean of Romania and Hohenzollern.
I mean, how very royal.
I don't think a single one of these women was being entirely honest about who she was.
The Baroness was the wife of a Russian immigrant, Vladimir Kun.
He's always described as the son of a Russian baron who served as a general in the Tsar's army, and his mother was a Greek princess.
But neither the general nor the princess are ever named or described in any further detail.
I mean, I didn't spend enough time researching this to call this man a liar.
I won't say that he's a liar.
I just think it's weird that his mom was a princess and no one ever says which princess.
I couldn't find anything at all about the possible identity of someone called Mistress Lady Porter.
But Princess Jean Marie de Chabri was no princess.
She was an actress from Wisconsin named Jan Jackson.
Who was married to a French Canadian con artist whose real name was George Marx?
And in the early 1970s, they tricked a lot of people into thinking he was a temporarily embarrassed French prince.
Americans are just so readily fooled into believing someone with a slight accent and fancy manners is actually the long lost rightful heir to some foreign throne.
I guess we just don't know or understand a lot about hereditary monarchy.
But we go crazy for it.
It's just so exciting to us.
I found articles every few months throughout the 1970s listing Princess Jean as the temporary guest of some rich couple or another.
A few months in a guest house in Boca Raton, a few weeks on a rich couple's yacht, a stay at a fancy club in Miami while she shops for a pied terre in South Florida.
She's always being hosted and feted and celebrated as a visiting princess who, of course, has a home in England with her husband, the prince.
But she never seemed to go there.
Because I don't think she had a home anymore.
Her lawsuit against the rental car company seems to mark the end of her life as a socialite.
After the arrest in 1979, there aren't very many more mentions in the society pages.
She still attended the occasional party, a funeral for a Massachusetts native who called himself a German baron because he married the niece of Hitler's minister of war.
Some nonprofit gala in Idaho, but no more debutante balls.
After her lawsuit was dismissed for the final time in 1983, she seems to have moved to Vermont with her adult son, Alexander.
By 1985, she'd been diagnosed with uterine cancer.
On her death certificate, the name Jean von Hohenzollern is written with a typewriter, but there's a handwritten correction.
Just before her first name, someone has written in pen, HRH Princess.
Her Royal Highness Princess Jean von Hohenzollern.
Mother's maiden name unknown.
Date of birth November 15th, 1930.
It's an official government document, a death certificate.
It's the only actual official government document with her name on it that I could get my hands on this week.
So I guess legally speaking, that's who she is.
It's who she was.
Princess Jean, born 1930.
It's almost true.
It's all kind of true.
She really did marry a prince.
She died in Vermont in 1988.
She was 57 years old, or maybe she was 61.
Her son Alexander, a ski instructor and a prep cook in Rutland, Vermont, wrote a letter to the editor of the Rutland Daily Herald.
Thanking the staff at the oncology ward and the hospice for the care they'd provided to his mother in the three years she spent fighting cancer.
Prince Carol died in 2006, shortly after visiting Romania for the first time in nearly 70 years.
He'd won the legal right to his own name in Romanian courts before his death, something his half brother King Michael had tried to prevent.
Carol's son Alexander, Princess Jean's son, Won his own legal battle in Romania to be recognized as King Carol II's grandson in 2012.
That same court decision also recognized Prince Carol's son from his first marriage, Paul, as an heir of the king.
Prince Paul is, at least as of 2025, under supervision of the French courts as he fights extradition to Romania where he's already been convicted of influence peddling, bribery, and money laundering.
Since the death of King Michael in 2017, Prince Carol's sons, Alexander and Paul have competing claims to the title of head of the Royal House of Romania, a country that has not had a monarchy since 1947.
So, I guess if you think back to that debutante ball in Miami in 1971, Princess Jean of Romania was the closest thing to a real princess who was there that night.
They were mostly outright frauds, liars, charlatans, fakers, con artists, and she was too.
She was a con artist and a fraud, but she really did marry a prince.
Competing Royal Claims00:03:58
And besides, she might have been a con artist from Nashville who never paid her debts, but I think that just makes her a real American princess.
I mean, what other kind of princess would have a retired Tennessee segregationist on speed dial?
Weird Little Guys is a production of Cool Zone Media and iHeartRadio.
It's researched, written, and recorded by me, Molly Conger.
Our executive producers are Sophie Lichterman and Robert Evans.
The show is edited by the wildly talented Rory Gagan.
The theme music was composed by Brad Dickert.
You can email me at WeirdLittleGuysPodcast at gmail.com.
I will definitely read it, but I probably won't answer it.
It's nothing personal.
You can exchange conspiracy theories about the show with other listeners on the Weird Little Guys subreddit.
And if you're listening to this the week it came out, It's not too late to submit your questions for the next QA episode, either by email or on the subreddit.
As always, just don't post anything that's going to make you one of my weird little guys.
In 2023, Bachelor star Clayton Eckard was accused of fathering twins, but the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax.
You doctored this particular test twice, Ms. Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Gillespie and Michael Mancini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trapped.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
Finally, faces consequences.
Listen to Love Trapped Podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He is not going to get away with this.
He's going to get what he deserves.
We always say that trust your girlfriends.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Vodem.
My next guest is Will Ferrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
He goes, Just give it a shot.
But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on.
A calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of life.
Yeah.
Listen to ThinkStat on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Readers, Katie's finalists, publicists, we have an incredible new episode this week for you guys.
We have our girl Hillary Duff in here, and we can't wait for you to hear this episode.
They put on Lizzie McGuire at 2 a.m., video on demand.
This guy's.
2 a.m., video on demand.
2 a.m., whatever the time it is.
Lizzie McGuire, and I'm like.
That wild batch you were with.
It was like a first closet moment for me where I was like, I don't feel like she's hot like the rest of them.
No, no, no.
I was like, she's beautiful, but I'm appreciating her in a different way than these boys are.
I'm not like, listen to Las Culturistas on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.