THE MURDER OF PRINCESS DIANA

In 1997, a year after she and Prince Charles divorced, Princess Diana was in the back seat of a Mercedes S-class sedan speeding through the streets of Paris, tailed by paparazzi. Next to her was Dodi Al-fayed, son of the billionaire who owned Harrods at the time, Mohamed Al-fayed.

In the front were Henri Paul, a security chief at the Ritz Paris, and Trevor Reesjones, Dodi’s bodyguard. None wore a seat belt. Paul, the driver, was drunk.

Entering an underpass tunnel at 60 mph, Paul grazed a slower-moving white Fiat Uno and lost control. The Mercedes slammed into a concrete pillar head-on and split nearly in half.

Dodi and Paul were killed outright. Rees-jones was conscious with severe injuries. Diana lay fatally injured on the floor in the back. She died in a hospital three and a half hours later. Her body was embalmed that same day.

Soon after, Dodi’s bereaved father revealed that the couple were engaged that the and embalming expecting made a baby impossible (a claim to verify). He began asking pointed questions: Why were there no security videos of what happened? Why was her body embalmed if not to hide her pregnancy by a Muslim? And where was the mysterious white Fiat? THE FACTS: The United Kingdom’s Metropolitan Police Service looked into the matter. They found that there was, in fact, a traffic-monitoring camera mounted above the entrance to the underpass that would have captured the collision between the two cars. But this camera only monitored live traffic and didn’t record the feed. Because the traffic unit’s office closed an hour before the accident, nobody witnessed whatever might have been

visible on the screen.

The embalming of Diana’s body was problematic because the fluid can contaminate a postmortem examination’s toxicology reports. However, the French police and the British consulgeneral had authorized the hospital to do so because Diana’s family would be viewing the body. And what about that white Fiat? Authorities investigated the paint it left on the Mercedes wreck. The color was called Bianco Corfu and had been used only on Fiat Uno cars manufactured between 1983 and 1987. A massive dragnet by French police examined roughly 2,000 cars with the paint—none was a match. But even if the British government had chosen to kill Diana, as Dodi’s father insinuated, death by Fiat Uno was a horrible plan. Using a lightweight Fiat to bump a much heavier Mercedes S-class is not exactly a sure-thing assassination.

Diana’s was a tragic death but an accidental one. Henri Paul was drunk and driving too fast, which is precisely what the British police found.