Diana: Case Solved: The Definitive Account and Evidence That Proves What Really Happened

CHAPTER ONE

Had she lived, Princess Diana would have toasted her fifty-eighth birthday on July 1, 2019. If she hadn’t succumbed to the catastrophic internal injuries suffered in her 1997 crash, the world’s most photographed woman would have hosted a glamorous party to celebrate heading toward her big 6–0.

Flute of champagne in hand and wearing her Hermès 24, Faubourg perfume, she’d have been clad in a gown designed to cover up the pink scar that ribboned down her chest—a raised pink remnant of having her chest cracked open by surgeons so her heart could be massaged back to life.

She would have laughed with A-list guests, bonded with her sons’ wives, Kate and Meghan, and used the latest iPhone to video her four grandkids playing.

It’s the kind of alternative reality that the millions who adored and idolized Diana can’t help but dwell on—twenty-two years after she died, literally brokenhearted, on a bloody surgical table at the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital. A rip in the left pulmonary vein of Diana’s heart was the fatal injury that ended her short and tormented life, leaving her declared dead by exhausted medics at 4 a.m. on August 31, 1997.

She survived her black Mercedes S280, registration 688 LTV 75, hurtling into the thirteenth pillar of Paris’s Pont de l’Alma tunnel at a devastating 121 mph. But she suffered two heart attacks and, on the way to the hospital, was in such distress that she yanked out drips pumping drugs eighty times more powerful than morphine into her veins while mumbling indecipherable last words.

***

Many of the millions who wish England’s rose was still alive have spent decades haunted by the unsettling mysteries that shroud her life and death.

For many, there is the feeling that there must be something more to the events of that night. That the official story cannot truly be the whole story, and what happened to Diana has the feeling of something deeper and more harrowing.

In this unprecedented investigation, and through groundbreaking forensic testimony, we confirm that these feelings are indeed correct—so correct that the findings of Diana: Case Solved will renew calls for a fresh inquiry into the car crash that left three people dead and the entire world reeling.

More specifically, we expose an almost unbelievable list of interconnected players who, in their own ways, had a hand in Diana’s demise. And we show that the truly remarkable thing about late August 1997 was that Diana survived until that date in the first place. Because if many in the circles of power had had their way, she would have been dead long before that.

To help establish the real story of August 30 and 31, 1997, I partnered with Colin McLaren, famed for his work on the assassination of John F. Kennedy (disproving Lee Harvey Oswald’s lone-gunman involvement) and facing down the underbelly of Australian crime and the Mafia.

Most recently, I had presented a case in Fatal Voyage: The Mysterious Death of Natalie Wood—a podcast series that broke new ground on one of Hollywood’s most enduring murder mysteries, one involving showbiz icons Robert Wagner and Christopher Walken. All was not as police made you believe. I was humbled that Colin, with his decades of law enforcement experience, found my investigation into how Natalie, the A-list Hollywood actress, vanished from a yacht following a brutal argument on November 29, 1981, so compelling that he wanted to join me on another crusade.

***

When Diana was pronounced dead at 4 a.m. on August 31, 1997, Colin began investigating the case and undertook his own independent investigations, uncovering startling new facts on the streets of Paris where Diana met her fate.

Luckily for us, we still live in a world where a determined, honest investigator—willing to go to places where others fear to venture and to ask the questions others won’t—has the ability to make the kind of powerful, meaningful discoveries that finally shed light on the mysterious dark places that have captivated the world for years. That is exactly what we did, traveling to Paris and London in June 2019, our last trip to the City of Light, to finalize research on Diana: Case Solved.

As we go chapter by chapter, you’ll read the dual narratives about what we established and how we found it, particularly in Colin’s own inimitable voice.

Here, then, is the definitive inside story of Diana’s death, life, and superhuman heartbreaks, told in her own words and by those who knew her most intimately. This book reveals the hidden aspects of Diana’s life, from her first introduction to the world as a painfully shy nineteen-year-old—a character trait that was later overcome during her groundbreaking charity work that positively impacted the lives of some of the world’s most vulnerable people—to the ill-fated royal slide into addiction. In the end, she found herself corrupted and twisted by those who walk the corridors of power.

What’s more, Diana: Case Solved prints Diana’s shocking final conversations that reveal her most personal thoughts at the end of her life…and what they reveal about the mystery of her fate.

Diana died convinced the firm was plotting to have her murdered.

Heartbreakingly, she also went to her death knowing her last love, Dodi, was cheating on her with an American model. She died with multiple actors, agencies, and even nations working against her. (Perhaps alone, perhaps not.)

Come along, then—if you dare—into a world of money, sex, and power, and see how one woman’s elevation into the glamorous universe of royal, celebrity, and unimaginable wealth became a meat grinder that destroyed the young woman who was truly the darling of the world.

CHAPTER TWO

Prince Harry appeared to wipe away tears as he and his bride, the American-born Suits actress Meghan Markle, along with the six hundred guests packed into St. George’s Chapel on the grounds of Windsor Castle on May 19, 2018, sang the last bars of Guide Me, O Thou Great Redeemer.

The hymn was his mother’s favorite, and thirty-three-year-old Harry chose to include it as part of the ceremony as a tribute to Diana, twenty-two years after it was sung at her funeral in Westminster Abbey in 1997. It was thought he cried at his wedding to Meghan purely because of the emotions stirred up by hearing the hymn again.

But we can—now, here—reveal he welled up because he was recalling his mother’s warning to her sons’ future brides to not be eaten by the British monarchy and their Mafia-like secret wealth streams and strict stranglehold over their members, according to a palace aide.

Harry and William knew their mum died tortured by the treatment she received at the hands of the royal family, and the last thing Harry wants is for Meghan to endure the same thing, the source said.

Thirty-six years, nine months, and twenty days before Harry said I do to Meghan in an unconventionally nonroyal ceremony that would have made his mum proud, Lady Diana walked up the aisle of the ancient St. Paul’s Cathedral in London and became Princess Diana. It had all the hallmarks of a fairy-tale wedding—but the problems were there almost from the start.

Diana had no experience and was thrust into that world as a nineteen-year-old, remembered Ken Wharfe, the man who served as her Scotland Yard police protection officer.

Richard Kay was royal correspondent for the Daily Mail newspaper at that time—and gained a unique insight into the royal marriage.

Diana, I think, was in love, madly in love with Charles, he said. He added:

But for her, the scales fell from her eyes fairly quickly when she realized that he was very much set in his ways and he wasn’t going to change.

It was an unhappy marriage. They were ill-suited. They barely knew each other when they married. They’d only met on a dozen occasions before they got engaged. In the early days of their relationship, she had to call him, Sir. I mean all these things seem utterly laughable, but we’re only talking about twenty-five years or so ago.

The other thing you got to remember, she had married a man who was twelve years older than herself who had vastly different interests. Diana was an extremely young woman when she got married. She never had the kind of normal relationships that young couples have before they marry.

I feel there’s sympathy on both sides. It’s hard not to have sympathy for Prince Charles. He’s married this beautiful young woman. He felt under huge pressure to marry her, not just from the public, but also from his own father. He made a terrible mistake. The real courageous thing he should have done was to have called it off. But he couldn’t do that and he didn’t do that and he’s had to live with the consequences ever since.

Diana had found herself in a gilded cage. Her dashing prince had turned out to be a rather set-in-his-ways older man with whom she shared almost nothing in common. Worse, she was not only living with him, but with a whole palace full of similarly stuck-in-the-mud people, too.

Recalled Ken Warfe:

She was unhappy, and a young woman unable to deal with the fact of being a princess, without any help from anybody within Buckingham Palace. There was no manual of how to be a princess, there were no training courses; she was thrust into this situation and literally had to get on with it.

There must have been moments that must have been horrific for her. People had imagined that Buckingham Palace, Kensington Palace is alive with fire-eaters, jugglers, musicians, but it isn’t.

It’s a very lonely place…it’s a pretty lonely existence and I’m sure there’s a lot went through Diana’s mind that said, What am I going to do? What’s happening to me? Where am I going to go? Where will I end up?

But one thing you are giving up is actually your freedom, your right to do what you want when you want, but that’s the price you pay—or they pay—for being royal.

To millions, Diana was living a dream-come-true life—but behind the palace walls, her loneliness was becoming all-consuming. Half the royal family, it seemed, resented her, and the other half actively disliked her.

In November 1981, it was announced that Diana was pregnant. Less than a year after she married Charles, she bore him a son, Prince William. Two years after that, she gave birth again, to Prince Harry. Charles had done his duty; the succession was assured. Now that Diana had provided the so-called heir and a spare, her usefulness was effectively over. What followed were to be the darkest days of Diana’s life.

Noted Richard Kay, She did turn to psychics and alternative healers. They in a way sort of filled the void, vacuum, of her empty social life. She didn’t have that many friends and the people who helped her deal with the stresses and strains in her life. It’s kind of sad really, when you think this beautiful young woman who was adored by the world should have no real close friends. It told you a lot about her and it told you a lot about her situation.

In despair, Diana turned her unhappiness on herself: she developed eating disorders, starving herself, forcing herself to throw up…and, in one incident, even endangering the life of her then-unborn baby.

So, what might have been? How would the royal family—and, indeed, the world—have been different if Diana had been able to be physically present and unburdened of the crown at the weddings of her sons? What updated advice might she have given their brides-to-be?

We will never know the answers to these questions with any precision. We are forced to conjecture. Yet, in a way, the circumstances of Diana’s death speak volumes. Perhaps they speak more loudly than we think.

To understand what might have happened at Diana’s end, we have to go back to the beginning of the mystery for most people. We have to go back to the news of the horrible accident itself that snuffed out the lives of three people.

There is no better guide to take us than Detective McLaren, whose experience with the case is unmatched—at least by any investigator who has talked to the press honestly and openly.

Here, Colin begins by taking us intimately close to his very first encounter with the mystery of the princess and her passing. The horrible emotions Colin felt upon learning of Diana’s death are, for many of us, all too relatable. Yet did Colin’s arch-investigator’s eye see things that the rest of us did not see—or could not bring ourselves to see?

***

DETECTIVE’S NOTEBOOK

DATELINE: Sunday, August 31, 1997, Melbourne, Australia

The rain spat on the tin roof of my partially converted warehouse abode as I languished alone in bed. The night before and far too many boutique beers had me feeling foggier than a Scottish moor, and my bedraggled body had aches in places I didn’t think possible. A combination of renovation and celebration had me reeling. Peeping my head over the duvet, I assessed the waiting morning, the last of what had been a bleak winter in Melbourne, Australia. What little daylight crept through the sheet I’d tacked over the window offered nothing to inspire, so I rolled over for another five minutes.

I was under the weather after a late function the previous night with work colleagues, for I was a detective with the fifteen-thousand-strong Victoria police department. I’d lived a life of detectives and squads, major crimes, kidnappings, drug traffickers, undercover work, violence, and way too many homicides. Last night had been a pat on the back with fifty handshakes and too many investigators recalling crime scenes in between mouthfuls of tapas.

The trip down memory lane had transported me back to my early days, cutting my teeth on Melbourne’s underworld and embracing the camaraderie, as cops do. I’d had a good career, worked some of the country’s worst crimes, and locked away my fair share of rabble. It was what I knew, what I did—and I’d been good at it, so they said, between beers: investigating and analyzing, unraveling the charcoal mysteries of wrongdoings, working my way up the promotional ladder by hard slog. Finally, I’d been handpicked to head up a national probe into the Mafia and the bombing of the National Crime Authority, a defiant act by the Mafia. By now I stood proud of the number of times I had served as the team leader of task forces, a tally that was greater than that of any detective nationwide.

I mustered my strength, propped myself up on a mountain of pillows, and surveyed the room. Stacked up, as if waiting my rising, were lengths of timber, plasterboard, trestles, piles of glass bricks, and kilometers of electrical flex conduits. So, I padded to the bathroom, suffered a bracing shower, and donned my overalls. After working up a sweat hammering the last of the main structural items into place, I parked myself on an upturned milk crate and flicked the remote control to my television.

Much-liked morning television anchorman Jim Waley flashed to the forefront looking earnest and reading an announcement. News footage followed of an underpass and a twisted Mercedes-Benz being hoisted onto a flatbed tow truck. An image of Princess Diana was superimposed. I watched, bemused, as the flatbed tow truck bounced along cobblestone streets.

I moved closer to the screen, flicked the remote volume up, and listened open-mouthed to the words that accompanied the images. A tragedy of extraordinary proportions, Jim announced, had just transpired in the other hemisphere. I focused on the television images and began to recognize telltale signs of one of the world’s most important diplomatic cities. The flatbed tow truck kept bouncing along, as the Mercedes-Benz it carried disappeared into the French darkness.

Lady Diana Spencer had been holidaying in Paris, I recalled, trying to make the link. Recent paparazzi snaps of her in a fetching swimsuit had been splashed all over the weekly women’s magazines. Like many others, I admired Diana immensely. And as a man, I thought she was a doll, and a champion of causes close to my own heart. I paced, unsettled, as the studio backdrop reappeared and the announcer continued. Two of her male companions in the twisted and mangled Mercedes wreckage were dead; a third, a mess. Diana, the only female, had been pulled out barely alive and was now fighting desperately for her life.

Somehow my hangover didn’t seem all that important anymore.

My brain ticked over, struggling to process what I had seen. I made myself a strong macchiato as I surfed other stations for bulletins but found nothing new. I carried my small bedroom television into the main room to join its larger cousin. With both television sets tuned to different channels, I picked up my bag of nails and attempted to refocus on the tasks at hand. But any further work done was lackadaisical at best; for the most part I couldn’t take my eyes off what the cameras were showing.

Sometime that afternoon came the news that Princess Diana had lost her fight. It was then that a seed was sown in my mind, as the television spent time showing reflective footage of her tumultuous life. As a parent, I shuddered at the dreadful shock this would deliver to her two young sons. As a detective, I started to wonder, to think.

I stayed up for the rest of the night watching the telecast, trying to make sense of the now-death of Princess Diana. Images of a nondescript support pillar in a nondescript tunnel on the Place de l’Alma where the Mercedes had come to rest were being televised from every conceivable angle. Television reporters were camped on the asphalt nearby theorizing everything from a multiple-car collision to a possible terrorist attack; even the sounds of shots were debated. This crime scene was busier than a discounted retail sale and I feared that it was rapidly falling into a state of virtual ruination. The French gendarmes were treating it as they would have any other traffic accident—nothing more, nothing less. No sooner had rescue workers removed the dead and injured than street sweepers got busy with their hunched backs and piled up vital clues, only to dispatch them to the municipal dump. Within hours the thoroughfare was back to being a major carriageway with thousands of commuters an hour driving over the surface, driving over evidence. I wondered what was going through the minds of the officers who attended the scene to allow such contamination. Who was in charge? Who made the decision to clear the debris? Broom-swinging workers and emergency service trucks don’t just arrive at 4 a.m. I shook my head, time and again.

One thing I knew was that a crime scene should be treated like a new baby, with great care, a fine touch, and meticulous concentration. At the Victoria police department’s detective training school, I lectured trainee detectives on how to approach a crime scene, how to take charge, and how to work through the clues. There are tried-and-true procedures to follow, principles to be applied when working a scene; there rarely is a second chance. Any detective worth his salt knows the perils of trying to garner conclusions from a scene that’s been tampered with, stepped on, swept away, lost, or replaced. I’d taken pride in teaching what to do and what not to do at a crime scene, and the French were giving a global show-and-tell of how to fuck it up. Frustrated, I switched off both televisions, carried the smaller back to the bedroom, and turned in. I pulled the bedcovers up over my head to counter the horror I had watched and attempted a few hours’ sleep.

Next morning I made a conscious decision to absent myself from the miseries of the world. But inherent curiosity won over; I gave in and turned on the box. A silent vigil of mourners stood where only twenty-four hours ago there had been a cacophony of noisy media, cameras, and emergency crews. Gardens of bouquets bloomed around the support pillar, forever to be known as number thirteen, only to be scattered by fast-moving passing cars. Above this exact spot, on the overhead roadway atop the tunnel, a shrine was set up by teary pilgrims who had come from far and near to mourn a dead Lady. On the news, crosscuts to the princess’s home in London showed tearful citizens gently laying small bunches of handpicked roses among large floral wreaths, colorful notes, and cards of sorrow and despair. Night in both cities failed to succumb to darkness, bathed as they were in a glow of candles honoring one of the world’s brightest lights now extinguished. I couldn’t help but be impressed by such compassion, sadness, decency.

Over subsequent days I kept waiting for the gendarmes to get down to the business of investigating. But as each successive day came and went with the crime scene still unvisited by the investigating magistrate, the chances of finding any conclusive answers continued to diminish exponentially with the number of vehicles that passed through the tunnel. No one seemed to search for answers to this tragedy. The French seemed to just ignore it. And with the major exhibit, the crippled Mercedes, having been jolted a distance of twenty kilometers through the streets of Paris without a thought for what might have dislodged along its path, I speculated on whether anything could still be found intact, if someone qualified and forensically experienced were to go looking.

I mused on this idea and then picked up the phone and began to dial my travel agent to cost an airfare to Paris. With the best deal available spelt out and my hand reaching for my Visa card, I stopped short and took stock of what I was contemplating. Somehow I had found myself in the process of planning a trip to France. I placed my ticket on hold and put the phone down. I paced the walls of my apartment checking my sanity, wondering if I was a fool or just a frustrated detective in need of one more hit, one more crime scene. I resolved to give it a couple of days and, if nothing improved, if the French detectives didn’t turn out with their measuring tapes, their cameras, and their notebooks, then I would.

Each morning I would drive to the largest newsdealer in town, McGills Newsagency, and purchase a copy of every international paper they had for sale. I was lucky; they carried a fine range of respectable press, including the London Times, Telegraph, and the New York Times, among others. They were journals I could rely on for the accuracy of their content.

By midweek I had amassed a small library of newspapers that I had laid out on the floor of my lounge room. Trestles had been dismantled and pushed aside to gain more floor space and plasterboard scraps had become tables. My entire day was devoted to poring over the latest copy, making notes, studying the printed image, and channel surfing the news services. The world’s foremost correspondents kept feeding me tidbits, acting as my briefing paper, keeping me abreast of the latest developments. I had put my head fat in the middle of this riddle and, truth be told, I was enjoying every minute. I ached for more.

Having gotten a good handle on the collision and deaths, I started to ponder what had actually occurred. At the least, it was a most serious road accident; at worst, a multiple homicide. On every level this inquiry screamed to be approached with the utmost professionalism. With a proliferation of consulates and embassies, one would expect Paris to boast a police force poised to deal promptly and proficiently with a situation resulting in misfortune to a visiting dignitary, government head, or official guest. The world was watching, more intently than for any other televised event in history. This level of global scrutiny should have had a police department rallying, pulling out all stops to showcase their detecting skills. My initial outrage at the inaction of the French constabulary was mellowing into an unsettled reality.

I scanned my sea of newspapers, fine-tuning my mind’s eye. Stepping, metaphorically speaking, back into the tunnel, I revisited pillar thirteen as it would have appeared that night. I put myself in the shoes of the investigators on site to consider what they confronted. The first in attendance at the crash would have been uniformed officers whose principal duty was to render assistance to the injured and call for ambulances. The magnitude of this particular incident would certainly have directed a second call to police headquarters, requesting the attendance of more cops and investigators. As in any major city in the world, a team of skilled detectives, well-versed in issues of diplomacy and protocol, would have been working late shift. It goes without saying that when these officers reached the entrance to the tunnel they would have sensed a challenge. In those initial few seconds, when you approach something really dire, you take a deep breath. You breathe it in and let it out as you walk forward to take charge.

A large crowd had already gathered, and the first police at the scene confirmed two persons were dead and two others gravely injured. Dauntingly, one of the injured occupants had been identified as the princess of Wales, and one of her dead companions was Dodi, the only son of Egyptian billionaire Mohamed Al-Fayed, the owner of Harrods of London and the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Paris.

Flashbulbs dazzled as half a dozen paparazzi frantically snapped shutter triggers while standing over still trapped victims. Verbal and physical confrontations had erupted with onlookers as photographers jostling for vantage positions, greedily satisfying their need for sensation, hampered paramedics attempting to free the injured. Motorcycles and cars parked haphazardly nearby made it clear that the paparazzi had been close by when the collision occurred. And at the center of the melee the tortured wreck of a Mercedes-Benz sat, the damage to the crashed vehicle so extensive that every panel including the roof was misshapen.

Even seasoned minds would have been racing as they attempted to get a handle on this scene. Distancing themselves from the surrounding mayhem would be the only way for investigators to consider an approach. Although the incident bore all the initial hallmarks of a high-speed accident, professional objectivity needed to kick in, questions needed to be posed.

What caused this tragedy?

Were other vehicles involved?

Was there negligence or other factors?

Could it have been foul play?

Could mechanical interference be a contributor, or criminal interference? Could this be murder?"

The word murder triggered a recollection. I snapped out of my fantasy and began hunting through a pile of newspapers that I had stacked in the laundry to await my paintbrushes.

Toward the bottom of the pile and dated several days before the crash, a feature article wrote that the French police were monitoring threats made by a Turkish terrorist group on Paris. I brought the paper out to join those archived on the floor and paged through my work address book. Following a few well-placed phone calls to a contact in the department of foreign affairs, I was armed with the knowledge that all consulates and diplomats had been on high alert.

Could this then have been an act of terrorism? Had the Turkish group selected the princess of Wales as their target?

I couldn’t ignore this proposition, yet the French had seemed to be doing just that. I picked up a well-thumbed newspaper and thumbed again. Anxious to be of help, some witnesses had offered comments of hearing a noise like a gunshot, others an explosion and a loud bang. Alarm bells began ringing in my head.

These salient points drove it home to me; the tunnel and the Mercedes-Benz should have been treated as a crime scene. Not just another accident scene.

Surely the anti-terrorism squads should have been called in to inspect the scene and undertake preliminary investigations to confirm or eliminate this