I suspect not only Prince Charles but Prince Philip, who is a racist. It is absolutely black-and-white, horrendous murder.
Princess Grace of Monaco. James Dean. Jackson Pollock. Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes. Harry Chapin. Steve Allen. Isadora Duncan. Sam Kinison. Jayne Mansfield.
Princess Diana.
That’s just a partial list of 20th-century pop figures that died in automobile accidents. It stands to reason that a number of celebrities would be killed in car wrecks simply because a lot of people die that way. Some 43,000 Americans die each year in vehicle accidents— more than the total number of deaths from firearms, falls, suffocation, fires, drowning, poisoning, and plane crashes put together.
Let’s put it this way: Ask any 10 people you know if they knew someone who was killed in a car accident, and 8 or 9 will say yes. But perhaps only 1 of those 10 will say they knew somebody who was killed in a fire or a plane crash.
When someone is killed in a car wreck, of course it’s a terrible tragedy—but it’s certainly not unusual, and it rarely means there was foul play involved. Accidents happen every day, every hour, virtually every minute.
Yet more than a decade after Princess Diana and two men were killed in one of the most public and publicly chronicled auto accidents in history, there are those who swear she was murdered by a coalition of evil forces who conspired to snuff her out for any number of reasons.
The conspiracy theories began to mushroom before the crash scene was cleared.
“Our website, Conspire.com, received its first e-mail on the subject—asserting that Di was killed by MI-5 [sic]—within minutes of the initial news bulletins of the car crash on Aug. 31” is the claim of one conspiracy site.
That’s amazing, given that those first news bulletins didn’t even have solid information on Diana’s condition, let alone whether she had died. And of course if you have evidence that one of the world’s most famous women has been assassinated, you don’t contact the authorities or the mainstream media—you e-mail a conspiracy Web site. That’ll blow the lid off the whole thing!
According to Time magazine, on the day after Diana died, Egyptian writer Mohammad Hassanein Haykal pondered, “A conspiracy-type question arises here . . . was something arranged to kill the most famous lovers of the closing years of the 20th century?”
“A day or two later,” according to the Time article, “Libyan strongman Muammar Gaddafi weighed in during an official broadcast, claiming: ‘British and Secret Services mounted and executed the assassination of the Princess of Wales and the Arab citizen who were planning to get married.’” Gaddafi provided no evidence to back up this assertion.
A good percentage of the public has remained skeptical about the official version of events.
In 1998 a London newspaper poll found that 27 percent believed Diana had been murdered. A year later, a BBC poll found that 31 percent of the British population thought Diana’s death was not an accident.
On the sixth anniversary of Diana’s death, the Sunday Express published a poll that found 49 percent of Brits believed there was some kind of “cover-up” in the case.
In a CBS news poll in 2004, some 76 percent of Americans said they believe “we will never know the whole truth” about Diana’s death.
Noel Botham’s The Murder of Princess Diana, which was turned into a Lifetime Original Movie in August 2007, purports to blow the lid off “The cover-up of the century!” but does little more than ask wildly speculative questions such as “Did Diana’s international campaign against landmines create a deadly conflict within the CIA?”
I don’t know, pal—you tell me.
Leading the conspiracy charge is Mohammed al Fayed, the billionaire father of Dodi Fayed, the man who was seeing Diana at the time and was also killed in the wreck. Although some reports say the Di-Dodi romance was a fling that was already flickering out, al Fayed is convinced not only that was his son going to marry Di, but also that she was pregnant with his child.
Over the last 10 years, the grieving father has devoted much of his life and a considerable chunk of his fortune to proving the so-called accident was orchestrated by the royal family—yet despite all that money and clout, he hasn’t come close to proving a thing.
Here’s al Fayed’s version of the chain of events that led to the fatal crash—a version echoed, with some variations, by many conspiracy Web sites.
Prince Philip and Prince Charles were supposedly horrified at the notion of the mother of the future king of England marrying a Muslim and giving her sons a half-brother who also would be Muslim.
The only solution: murder.
Henri Paul, the acting security chief for the Ritz-Carlton in Paris, who was behind the wheel of Di’s car that fateful night, was secretly working for the MI6—the British foreign Secret Intelligence Service. He was in on the plan.
When Paul entered the Pont de l’Alma tunnel, a Fiat Uno driven by a hired hit man deliberately crashed into the Mercedes, setting off the deadly crash. Ah, but what Henri Paul didn’t know was that he, too, was supposed to be killed in the crash. Turns out he was nothing but a patsy for the conspirators. (Bodyguard Trevor Rees-Jones, who apparently was not in on the plot, survived the crash.)
Some conspiracy theorists claim that Diana faked her own death. Others say the paparazzi were paid off to chase the Mercedes into the tunnel and facilitate the crash. There’s even a theory that says Dodi was the real target, and the death of Diana was only the greatest diversionary tactic ever.
My theory is even crazier than any of the above.
I think it was an accident.
Those who fixate on the supposed scandal of Diana marrying Dodi and having a child with him seem to be forgetting some important points:
Yes, I’m aware of the letter Diana wrote to her brother expressing fears that she might be done in via a suspicious car accident. When the conspiracy theorists pounce on that letter as proof of a plot— which of course it is not—they conveniently avoid mentioning that months prior to receiving that letter in 1996, the Earl of Spencer had written to Diana, expressing hopes and prayers that she was getting help for her “mental problems.”
Diana was a troubled soul. She once made the unsubstantiated claim that someone had tried to take a shot at her in London. Another time, she expressed fears that she would be killed in a helicopter crash that would look like an accident but would really be murder. Just because she entertained a paranoid fantasy about her ex-husband killing her (not because of Dodi, whom she had yet to meet when she wrote the letter, but because it would “clear the way” for Charles to marry Camilla Parker Bowles) doesn’t mean such a plot was ever hatched or carried out.
From the French police to Scotland Yard, the investigation into the death of Princess Diana is perhaps the most extensive and thorough probe of its kind. Because this was one of the world’s most famous and beloved figures, investigators have spared no expense on this case. Literally hundreds of law enforcement authorities, medical experts, and witnesses have participated in one investigation or another.
And yet we still have not a single substantial piece of evidence that anyone, let alone the royals and the British Secret Intelligence Service, conspired to kill Diana and Dodi.