CHAPTER ELEVEN

Sex was central to Diana’s death—and not only her own sex life.

Put bluntly, some sources have wildly claimed there was evidence that Diana could have been killed to cover up the seedy sex secrets of the royals—including the truth of Prince Charles’s sexuality and a shocking gay rape involving the royal.

For this is the shocking belief of informants who say Diana quietly made a record of her knowledge of scandals that could finish Britain’s monarchy on ten never-before-seen videocassette tapes and a series of audiocassettes, and stashed them in a box called the “Crown Jewels,” under lock and key in her Kensington Palace apartment. (A signet ring belonging to Diana’s lover James Hewitt was also reputedly in the box.) She is also believed to have stashed photographs that show Prince Charles romping naked with a male lover.

As far-fetched as it sounds, the claims were central to the 2008 inquest into her death when her sister, Lady Sarah McCorquodale, strenuously denied she destroyed the box of secrets. Instead, Lady Sarah insisted she gave them to Paul Burrell for safekeeping, adding pointedly, “I trusted him, then.”

The princess’s former butler maintains, however, that the papers were taken to the Spencer family seat at Althorp, where they are hidden.

Richard Keen QC, counsel for the family of driver Henri Paul, asked Lady Sarah at the inquest, “You opened Pandora’s box. Once Pandora’s box was opened, all the evils of the world came out and you claim that you gave them to the butler; is that right?

“Are you seriously saying that you took all of these sensitive materials with their obvious capacity to embarrass and cause distress…and handed them over to the butler?”

The answer was a terse, “Yes.”

Lady Sarah, who was an executor of Diana’s estate, confirmed that in March 1998—six months after her sister died in the Paris crash—she and Burrell found the key to the mahogany box hidden inside the cover of a tennis racket. They sat down together to go through it. Its contents were “highly sensitive,” she said, and, as she was traveling home to Lincolnshire by train, she gave them to Burrell for “safekeeping.”

She said she subsequently asked Burrell “two or three times” for the return of the papers but was given various excuses, including that they were stored in packing cases at his Cheshire residence.

“I asked Paul Burrell to take it home, the evening we opened the box, for safekeeping and he did and that’s the last I ever saw of it despite asking him to give it back to me on several occasions,” she told the inquest.

Were these recordings compiled intentionally, perhaps as a defense against reprisals the royal family might have been tempted to take based on Diana’s other misbehavior? Or did they fall into her hands unexpectedly? Did Charles leave them where Diana could find them, as part of some personal indiscretion?

However they may have come to her, the recordings and images that would potentially shatter the Windsors were squirreled away by Diana in a spot in Kensington Palace known only to Burrell.

Diana’s videos had been recorded by her voice coach Peter Settelen.

Only six of the videos were used in the famous bombshell Channel 4 documentary, but the remaining ten have never been seen. Diana also recorded her most intimate secrets on twelve C90 cassette tapes, we can also reveal for this book.

When Burrell collected hundreds of Diana’s possessions in the wake of her death, the secret stash of recordings and photographs were among the 342 items he took to the attic of his home near Runcorn near Cheshire, northwest England.

That is what police were looking for when they hammered on his door at 6:50 a.m. on January 18, 2001. They were also the reason Paul Burrell’s trial for allegedly stealing the items from Diana never went ahead. As everyone knows, the queen herself stepped in at the eleventh hour to state she had suddenly recalled giving Burrell permission to take keepsakes from Diana’s apartment—something Burrell had claimed all along. It was only an intervention of this magnitude that could stop the world hearing the butler reveal exactly was among the items he had lifted.

Afterward, Burrell was summoned for a three-hour meeting with the queen, during which she chillingly told him “dark forces” were at work and that his life may be in danger from knowing too much about the royal family. Charles—panicked a supposed bisexual affair would emerge—also battled behind the scenes to have the trial stopped and Burrell silenced.

The man who will be the next King of England is rumored to have kept a string of boys on the side during his marriages to both Diana and his second wife Camilla.

In 2003, the future king was embroiled in another well-documented gay scandal when his former manservant George Smith claimed he was raped by a member of Charles’s staff, Michael Fawcett. Smith—who worked for Charles for eleven years, until 1997—also said Fawcett was in a homosexual relationship with the prince. He also claimed that one morning while delivering breakfast in bed to Charles, he had walked in on the pair having sex in the prince’s bedroom. Charles was forced to issue a statement on the rape story. It did not name Smith as the man behind the story, but said the accuser had suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder and alcoholism after service in the Falklands War. The smear-filled statement said, “He has, in the past, made other unrelated allegations, which the police have fully investigated and found to be unsubstantiated.”

Nevertheless, the British tabloids shrieked “SEX, SECRETS, BETRAYAL and SHAME.” The Mail on Sunday splashed on its front page with the ghastly headline “I WAS RAPED BY CHARLES’ SERVANT.”

This scandal would never have emerged if Diana had not sat at the end of Smith’s bed after he was hospitalized following the alleged rape—and recorded his damning attack on Charles, along with other secrets about her husband.

Diana took her recorder to Smith’s bedside in 1990 after Charles told his wife the allegations were “downstairs gossip”—before the footman was given $48,000 as a payoff before he left royal service.

Being an old soldier and loyal to the crown, Smith kept quiet about the incident—even when the trauma forced him to enter a psychiatric rehab center and contributed to the breakup of his marriage. It was while he was in the Priory Clinic that Diana perched on the end of his bed, supposedly to listen to his problems. Yet her real motivation was to capture Charles’s most shameful secrets on the whirring tape recorder in her handbag.

Understanding that knowledge was power, the princess—paranoid even in 1990 about her safety—kept the tape with her other eleven cassettes containing royal secrets, locked away. Also among her treasure trove were vicious letters sent to her from her father-in-law, Prince Philip, which have also never been seen. It was her stash of secrets that drove the queen and Philip to stop the Burrell trial. The royal family was said to be “petrified” Burrell would reveal the allegations squirreled away on tape recordings.

But their conspiracy did not stop there—insiders believe Diana may have been killed to cover up the secrets they never thought would emerge.

One aide, who believes Diana was offed (and only spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of recriminations) said, “There’s one reason Diana was killed—she knew too much. The royals knew she had been collecting information on them for years, and wanted her out of the way. They just couldn’t have their trail of affairs and seedy secrets coming out in the open. She was bumped off, and they thought that was the risk removed. What they never betted on was that she had taped their most intimate secrets—and had photographic evidence Charles was gay. They were stunned when it emerged they were being kept in Paul Burrell’s attic, and did everything they could to stop the contents being made public at court.”

After Diana’s death, Lady Sarah was asked by the coroner’s inquest to search the Spencer family’s home for a variety of sensitive documents and materials that could have included these tapes. The inquest jury had heard claims that Philip had ordered the killing of Diana, and these claims could not be dismissed outright. However, neither could they be given credence without proof. The tapes and other sensitive materials were never found. Lady Sarah and a police officer who had previously investigated Paul Burrell gave conflicting accounts of what had happened to the secret items. Both Lady Sarah and the police officer were in agreement that the missing items might be inside a wooden box that Diana often kept in her sitting room.

Yet Lady Sarah claimed that the box had been taken into Burrell’s possession—for at least some period of time—following Diana’s death. Lady Sarah said that she had looked in the box but found it did not contain any of the sought-after letters or recordings. She believed that this was because they had already been taken by Burrell.

At the same time, the police officer claimed that Lady Sarah had previously claimed that the material had been in the box, but that a search of Burrell’s home revealed they were not there.

Again, Lady Sarah has denied that she destroyed these materials herself.

At the time Diana made her “rape tape,” her marriage to the heir was already in its death throes, with Diana repeatedly telling friends she suspected he may have only married her in 1981 to cover up his homosexuality.

But she also suspected Charles was bisexual, as he also had a disgraceful track record for bedding friends’ wives.

Camilla was wed to his friend Brigadier Andrew Parker Bowles, who turned a blind eye to their twenty-two-year affair before they divorced in 1995. The prince of Wales also bedded very-married Lady Kanga Tryon—and cheekily agreed to be godfather to one of her husband’s children.

A source for this book said, “There may be hundreds of theories about why Diana could have been killed, but knowing too much is the real reason.”

This idea that Diana “knew too much” emerges as a theme in any study of the princess’s death. It also begins to suggest the ways in which the “dark forces” that sought to end her once and for all may have found ways to collude.

It is now believed the twelve tapes in question have been destroyed. How and by whom is not precisely known.

* * *

Biographer Tom Bower—who has published a book on Mohamed Al-Fayed and Prince Charles titled Rebel Prince—spoke to many involved in the Burrell theft case.

Bower’s research reveals just how the royals stopped the court hearing that may have brought down a monarchy.

This time line, constructed from Bower’s work, is instructive in understanding the devastating power with which the crown can punch when it so chooses:

January 18, 2001. The doorbell rang at 6:50 in the morning.

Paul Burrell, who was asleep, was awakened by his wife.

Standing at the door was Detective Chief Inspector Maxine de Brunner and three other police officers.

“Do you have any items from Kensington Palace in this house?” Princess Diana’s former butler was asked.

“No,” he initially lied.

He was told he was being placed under arrest, and then the predawn raid on his home near Runcorn in Cheshire began in earnest.

What the detectives found next was far beyond their expectations.

The rooms were filled with paintings, drawings, china, and photographs that clearly belonged to Diana (who’d died three and a half years before) and her children William and Harry.

“Oh my God,” de Brunner is said to have exclaimed.

In Burrell’s study, she’d just spotted an expensive inlaid mahogany desk inscribed “Her Royal Highness.”

“How did you get all this?” she asked the butler.

“The princess gave it to me,” he said, collapsing into a chair and beginning to weep.

As the search continued, the police discovered two thousand negatives.

A cursory look revealed Charles in the bath with his children, and many others showing the young princes naked.

Other finds included thirty signed photographs of Diana, many empty silver frames, a box containing the princess’s daily personal notes to William at school, and another box of Diana’s more intimate letters to William.

As Burrell’s sobs intensified, an officer shouted from the attic, “It’s full of boxes, wall to wall!”

The boxes were wrenched open: inside were bags, blouses, dresses, nightgowns, underwear, shoes, jumpers, suits, and hats that had belonged to Diana, including a blue-ribboned hat she’d worn during her visit with Prince Charles to South Korea in 1992.

Her perfume, de Brunner noticed, lingered on the fabric.

Late that afternoon, officers filled a truck sent from London with two thousand items that de Brunner judged had been illegally removed.

The princess, she believed, would never have given away such personal material, and certainly not in such quantities.

Nevertheless, a large number of Diana’s possessions remained in the house.

But without orders from Scotland Yard to either seize everything that had belonged to the family or to seal the house as a crime scene, there was no more to be done.

“I want white lilies on my coffin,” wailed Burrell as he was escorted to the waiting police car.

There can be few people unaware of the subsequent 2002 trial of Paul Burrell, but it appears that a great deal went on behind the scenes that was never revealed to the public.

News of his former employee’s arrest reached Charles about a week after the police raid.

Unaware of the scale of the alleged theft, but knowing that low-paid staff occasionally pilfered small items, he told his assistant private secretary Mark Bolland that Burrell probably did steal some things “because they all do.”

Within hours, however, Charles had become more alarmed. After all, police probes into murky palace habits could produce unexpected difficulties.

Charles’s senior private secretary, Stephen Lamport, looking beaten and downhearted, confessed to a colleague, “We’ve got a terrible problem with this man Burrell…the prince of Wales is distraught. The prince will say he gave the things to the butler and that Burrell’s actions were all right.”

Lamport’s confidant was unimpressed. Even Charles had to allow justice to take its course, came the reply.

Indeed, the investigation was now well under way.

During his second police interview, Burrell was asked, “Did you tell anyone that you had the property?”

“No,” he admitted, still insisting that the items—including all Diana’s school reports—were gifts.

Burrell’s solicitor Andrew Shaw, for his part, appeared to think the case would never come to trial.

“You’re making a terrible mistake,” he told Maxine de Brunner. “They won’t let Burrell’s secrets be splashed in the public domain. They’ll never let this come to trial.”

In light of what happened subsequently, his comments were not quite as farfetched as they first seemed to many who heard them.

***

April 3, 2001

Along with a crown prosecution lawyer, Maxine de Brunner arrived at St. James’s Palace for a meeting. There was no alternative but to prosecute, they told the royal family’s senior officials.

Also present was Charles’s divorce lawyer, Fiona Shackleton.

Shackleton revealed that Paul Burrell had sent the prince a handwritten letter in which he offered to return some of the items, provided Charles agreed not to support any prosecution.

The CPS lawyer explained that the case could be closed only if Prince William and Diana’s sister Lady Sarah McCorquodale, who together inherited Diana’s property, signed statements to drop their complaints.

Shackleton’s view was that Charles could not be party to undermining the legal system.

Agreeing to accept the return of some property in exchange for dropping the investigation, she said, would make it look as if Buckingham Palace were participating in a cover-up.

“It needs to be all or nothing,” she said.

Sir Robin Janvrin, the queen’s private secretary, agreed to tell the monarch what had been discussed, and almost certainly did so.

This, of course, would have been the ideal moment for the queen to recall that she’d allowed the butler to take some of Diana’s possessions for safekeeping. But apparently, she didn’t say a word.

As for Charles, he was upset when his own private secretary told him the police intended to prosecute.

He could already see the writing on the wall. For who knew what Burrell might say in the witness box? In effect, he was a time bomb, having witnessed the prince’s secret meetings and phone calls with Camilla while he was married, and Diana’s many rendezvous with her boyfriends.

He told his spin doctor Mark Bolland to try to navigate a way out of a prosecution.

***

May 2

The case against Burrell strengthened.

The police had had time to watch six videos found in Burrell’s home, featuring Diana talking about the most intimate details of her relationship with the royal family, her sex life with Charles, and her affair with police protection officer Barry Mannakee. The tapes had been recorded by Peter Settelen, the princess’s voice coach, who, soon after her death, had asked her private secretary for the return of not six but sixteen tapes.

Yet he was told, “I am advised by Mr. Burrell that he has been unable to trace them.”

What had happened, the police wondered, to the missing ten tapes? (Material from Settelen’s six recovered tapes was, again, used in a Channel 4 documentary in 2017.)

And there was another tape that worried Charles…

Kept in a box of Diana’s and now, he believed, in Burrell’s possession, it described the alleged rape of one member of his staff by another of his staff.

* * *

July 19

Burrell’s lawyers now issued a warning to Shackleton.

If Burrell were prosecuted, they said, he would have to describe from the witness box not only details of Diana’s sex life, he might also read out quotes from letters in which Prince Philip had allegedly threatened her.

Burrell’s lawyers later explained that this was not a threat—the defense was seeking only to protect the royal family.

At this point, the CPS and the police asked for a “victims’ consultation meeting” in order to obtain the direct approval of Princes Charles and William to prosecute Burrell.

In anticipation of a police visit to Highgrove, Charles appealed to Bolland, reportedly saying, “Mark, this is crazy. You must do something.”

The prince was now apparently keen to do anything to avert a trial, especially with William a potential witness.

Burrell simply knew too much. Would he, for instance, dare to describe Diana’s reported use of cocaine to the court? The best way to avoid a prosecution, Bolland agreed, was for Burrell to return all the property he’d taken.

***

July 24

A top-secret meeting was now arranged between Bolland and Burrell. Over coffee, the butler said, “I’m sorry.”

He wanted to let Charles know that he’d return all the property, but insisted on telling him so in person.

Throughout the twenty-five-minute meeting, the spin doctor reported that he had been appalled by Burrell’s “creepy manner.” The royals’ staff, he thought, were “a slimy, weird group with odd relationships.”

Later, he reported back to Charles that the butler wanted “a big hug and an offer of a job at Balmoral. He doesn’t want to be cast out.”

The prince repeated the words thoughtfully, “He doesn’t want to be cast out.”

A truth occurred to Bolland then about the royals. Something that revealed just what was at stake, and hinted at what might be happening behind the scenes.

“No one cares whether Burrell is guilty or not.”

***

August 3

The police were expected at Highgrove in the afternoon.

What they didn’t know, Bolland hoped, was that secret arrangements had been made for Prince Charles to meet Burrell a few hours later.

But before the police arrived, the spin doctor became suspicious that the plan had been leaked to the police, probably by one of Charles’s own protection officers.

The meeting with Burrell must be canceled, he advised. Charles agreed.

Next, the prince discussed the approach he planned to take with the police.

He intended to ask, “Does this really matter? Yes, some items may have been pilfered, but just how serious is it? Not very.”

In the moment, however, Charles didn’t get around to saying any of this. Instead, he was palpably shocked when the police told him two thousand items had been seized at Burrell’s home.

It was the first time he’d heard the actual number.

“He’s taken the lot!” Charles exclaimed.

After listening to more evidence against the butler, the prince was asked if he supported a prosecution.

“We’ve got no alternative,” he sighed. Before leaving, the police asked Charles not to have any contact with Burrell.

The prince was now in a fix, to say the least. Officially, he had to support the CPS’s charge that Burrell had stolen the items. But, privately, he still wanted the prosecution halted.

Another big sticking point was that Diana’s sister and coexecutor, Lady Sarah McCorquodale, was adamant that the butler should be brought to trial.

Meanwhile, the police confronted Bolland to ask if he’d talked to Burrell. Yes, replied the spin doctor.

This admission confirmed police suspicions.

***

August 18

Now, in an attempt to avert prosecution, Burrell’s lawyer handed the police a thirty-nine-page statement signed by his client.

Among other things, it described the butler’s close relationship with Diana—how he would smuggle her boyfriends into Kensington Palace, cancel public engagements so she could be with her lovers, and provide meals for the princess and her man of the moment.

In addition, Burrell hinted that he’d tell what he knew about Diana’s nocturnal visits around Paddington, where she tried to persuade prostitutes to give up their trade by plying them with gifts.

Even the police could see that if Burrell gave detailed testimony about Diana’s sex life in court, the monarchy would be seriously harmed.

Still, there was nothing in the butler’s statement that undermined the charge of theft. So Burrell was once again interviewed.

This time, he claimed that the items found in his house should be seen either as gifts, taken by mistake, or handed over to him to be destroyed. He didn’t offer to return anything.

At 2:40 p.m., Burrell was charged with theft.

A month later, Burrell’s lawyer wrote to Charles, asking for an audience so he could explain “the extreme delicacy of the situation” if his client had to testify. This was, obviously, pregnant with meaning.

Charles, who’d taken legal advice, did not reply.

The lawyer then sent further warnings about Burrell’s intention to speak about events of “extreme delicacy” and “matters of a very private nature.”

Again Charles did not reply. This provoked Burrell’s lawyer to threaten to summon the prince as a witness.

The nuclear option had been placed on the table.

***

February 13, 2002

Yet another statement from Burrell was delivered to the police—this time about a meeting with the queen.

They’d talked for three hours, he’d said, sitting on her sofa together shortly after Princess Diana’s death.

The queen had told him, he said, that his relationship with Diana was unprecedented.

She had spoken about how much she herself had tried to help the princess, and also warned him to be careful—so many people were against Princess Diana, and he had—seemingly—sided with her.

However, the CPS lawyers decided that since Burrell’s statement made no mention of Diana’s property, it was irrelevant to the case. (Whether the statements were relevant to Diana’s ultimate fate, and the plots against her, is, of course, another matter entirely.)

***

August 27

Burrell’s lawyer again approached the police, insisting that a message be passed on to Charles.

His client, he said, was offering to return all the royal items in his possession if the prosecution was dropped.

The message was never delivered but, somehow, the prince nonetheless became aware of the butler’s offer—and hoped it would stop the trial going ahead.

Legally, however, that was impossible: the CPS now had sole responsibility for the prosecution. Nevertheless, Charles ordered his new private secretary, Sir Michael Peat, to express his concern about continuing with the prosecution if it was a lost cause.

***

October 14

Paul Burrell, then aged forty-four, stood in the dock of Court One at the Old Bailey, and was officially accused of stealing 310 items from Diana’s private chambers, together worth $5.9 million.

Other items taken from his house were not listed because they allegedly belonged to either Charles or William, and neither wished to appear in court as witnesses.

The day’s proceedings made blazing headlines in all the media, raising increasing concern at St. James’s Palace.

***

October 28

Just after 8:30 that Monday morning, eleven days into the trial, Crown Prosecutor William Boyce was reading his papers in a small room adjacent to the court when he was unexpectedly joined by Commander Yates.

“I’ve just had a conversation with Michael Peat,” said Yates, then repeated the private secretary’s exact words: “Her Majesty has had a recollection.”

Rarely has a six-word sentence meant so very much to a man’s fate, or to a royal family.

On the previous Friday, Peat explained, the queen had recalled a meeting five years earlier, soon after Diana’s death.

Burrell had come to the palace to tell her about preserving some of the princess’s papers.

“The queen agreed that he should care for them,” said Peat.

Boyce visibly paled. Taking off his wig, he seemed to shrink.

Only by questioning the queen in court could Burrell’s version of the conversation be rebutted, and that was constitutionally impossible.

No reigning monarch could appear in “Her Majesty’s court.”

“That’s the end of the trial,” was Boyce’s view. Later in the day, Peat told CPS lawyers more about the queen’s recollection.

On the previous Friday, she, Charles, and Philip had driven together to St. Paul’s for a memorial service for the victims of the Bali bombing.

Driving past the Old Bailey, she asked why a crowd was standing outside. Charles answered that Paul Burrell was on trial. The queen was apparently unaware that he was being prosecuted.

Then she mentioned that, some years before, Burrell had sought an audience with her to explain that he was caring for some of Diana’s papers, and she’d agreed that he should do so.

To some in the prosecution and to police at the Old Bailey, the circumstances of the recollection described by Peat lacked credibility.

But “an act of genius,” was the judgment of one Whitehall observer who said, “Only a golden bullet could have stopped the trial.”

***

November 1

Crown Prosecutor Boyce announced in the courtroom that the trial was over. Charles and Peat breathed sighs of relief.

The danger to them—for the moment, at least—had passed.

What did the royal family fear? What was so harrowing that they were willing to call off the trial? What would have been revealed in open court? Any lawyer can tell you that trials do not always unfold as you expect them to. Anything can happen.

Some chose to believe that, quite simply, the idea of the queen herself being called to testify—and to be challenged openly by a lawyer—was too much for hang-wringing royals to bear. Others believe the queen might have been forced to lie in court. Or—most terrifying of all to those involved in the plot against Diana—that the queen might have grown a conscience in the dock, and chosen to speak the truth about what actually happened and which forces were truly at play in matters regarding the life and death of her former daughter-in-law.

With hungry journalists sniffing around each and every corner, it did not make sense to risk even giving them the slightest scent.

At the time, most qualified observers believed that her sudden recollection stemmed from Burrell’s ability to confirm that Charles was not entirely heterosexual. Keeping this kind of information quiet was not without precedent.

Charles’s beloved great-uncle Lord Louis Mountbatten was bisexual and famously rumored to have had an affair with Edward VIII when he accompanied the young prince of Wales on his empire tours.

Charles clearly modeled after him. Charles thought of Mountbatten as his grandfather and wept at his funeral after the lord was killed by the IRA.

Another “close friend” of Mountbatten’s was an Irish student whom he met at Cambridge, Peter Murphy, who became his close and constant companion until the end of his life.

Lord Louis, who would go on to become governor of India, married Edwina, a fabulously wealthy socialite, who was to have a torrid affair with Panditji Nehru, Prime Minister of India.

Before his marriage to Marina of Greece, the duke of Kent is supposed to have enjoyed the company of thin blond men. He was once even arrested for engaging in homosexual activity but released when his identity was confirmed.

The papers may not have reported on his indiscretions, but all of high society knew about them. To this day his papers are sealed at Windsor Castle, and no researchers are allowed to look at them.

Yet in the weeks and months that followed the trial’s abrupt end, journalists involved began to dig a bit deeper. Was there something more than the concealment of bisexuality at play? It felt as though the trail’s handling confirmed that the royals were certainly hiding something…but what? The possibilities seemed endless.

However, the inability of anyone to ever recover the “Crown Jewels” suggests the pursuit might all have been a red herring—as it is now believed everything hoarded by Diana has been destroyed after the items taken by Burrell from Diana’s apartment were seized in their 2001 dawn raid on his home.

A trunk of royal secrets Diana had entrusted to Dodi’s dad is also said to have vanished in the chaotic period following her death—and is now suspected by many experts to have been taken by British operatives.

The tycoon’s suspicions Diana and his son were killed to prevent the royal family from being “polluted” by his Muslim family further forced British police to investigate 175 conspiracy theories into her death. And his campaign to prove Diana’s crash was no accident was driven largely by a hoard of secrets she handed him before her death; they were locked in a box with her initials on the lid that she said contained the reasons she would be assassinated.

Mohamed Al-Fayed has insisted Britain’s MI6 spy agency was behind the crash, after which he went to retrieve the box—but he found it was empty.

Private investigators believe British government agents beat him to it and destroyed the contents. Mohamed Al-Fayed now insists Philip and the royals couldn’t bear the prospect of Diana marrying a Muslim and having his baby, once ranting to US shock jock Howard Stern, “Do you think this bloody racist family would have allowed that to happen?”

He also told the 2008 inquest into Diana’s death, “I will not rest until I die—even if I lose everything to find the truth. Diana suffered for twenty years from this Dracula family.”

He also insists Diana was pregnant with Dodi’s child and said the couple was preparing to announce their shock engagement the day after they died in Paris.

There is corroboration that files and dossiers related to Diana and the circumstances of her death have—without out a doubt—been destroyed…but perhaps not in the way you might first expect.

For example, Diana’s personal psychic confirmed that she torched a thick dossier on land mines given to her by the royal—as she feared it would lead to her being killed.

Simone Simmons, the psychic recruited by Diana to give her “energy healing,” also revealed the duke of Edinburgh wrote “cruel and disparaging” letters to Princess Diana—that she hinted at having seen firsthand—which have also since mysteriously vanished.

Simone said Diana had given her a copy of a dossier about the land mine industry she had compiled during her campaign against the weapons. The psychic said she had hidden this under her mattress, along with other documents from the princess.

Simone added that the land mine dossier was several inches thick but that she had burnt it after Diana’s death because she was afraid of what might happen to her.

She said, “I believed that if they could bump Diana off, then they could bump anyone off—and I value my life.”