The Murder of Princess Diana (17 page)

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Authors: Noel Botham

Tags: #Biographies & Memoirs, #Leaders & Notable People, #Royalty, #Princess Diana, #True Accounts, #Murder & Mayhem, #True Crime, #History, #Europe, #England, #Modern (16th-21st Centuries), #20th Century, #Politics & Social Sciences, #Social Sciences, #Communication & Media Studies, #Media Studies

BOOK: The Murder of Princess Diana
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I am convinced that, had it not been for the intervention of the Fiat Uno and the bright light being directed through the windshield and dazzling Henri Paul, he would almost certainly not have crashed the car that night.
One other extremely disturbing fact which emerged during my investigation is the existence, in the official judicial file, of a photograph—not the one taken by the Alma tunnel speed camera—but one that is taken from the same level as the Mercedes, and directly from the front, showing all four of its occupants.
It must have been taken either from the Fiat Uno, which I will later show was driven by a French paparazzo, working for British intelligence—a man who boasted to friends of having been there “at the death,” or from the motorcycle from which the flash was fired.
According to a Paris lawyer with access to the official files, it was taken inside the Alma Tunnel, and can only have been snatched a second or two before the crash. That certainly makes it the last photograph taken of Princess Diana, Dodi Fayed and Henri Paul alive.
TWELVE
One hour after the crash that killed Diana, senior French police, judicial and political figures who were already conferring at the spot—and being counseled from the shadows by telephone—came up with a simple answer to the carnage in the Alma tunnel, and one that would be popularly acceptable to the public: the wretched paparazzi were responsible.
Those photographers still on the spot, who had already been detained and corralled to one side of the crash scene by police, were loaded roughly into a police bus and taken to the cells, where they were given a humiliating strip search and internal examination in the hunt for hidden film. The beasts that had killed the beauty were under lock and key, and others would be rounded up in the next twenty-four hours to join them, said the authorities.
Unfortunately, there was a major flaw in this solution. A flaw that occurred again in the subsequent “solution” adopted by the police and judiciary: none of the real facts supported their case. Not that such mundane things as facts and truth would be permitted to deter the commander of the Criminal Brigade, Jean-Claude Mules, who was charged with investigating the night’s events. Six years later this smugly arrogant functionary claims to have conducted the perfect investigation, but he patently supervised one of the most slipshod, tunnel-visioned and disturbing criminal investigations in the history of the French gendarmerie. Important evidence was rejected out of hand, and obvious leads were deliberately ignored.
From the outset, Commander Mules and his Criminal Brigade’s reaction to any witness who disagreed with their version of events was uniform. They ignored the evidence and discredited the witness. First to fall foul of this bizarre official policy was a young motorcyclist called Eric Petel, who was driving along the Cours Albert I
er
after midnight when he was overtaken by Diana’s Mercedes. “The car was going quite fast, and after it passed me I heard a sort of implosion,” said Petel. “As I had just bought the motorbike, I thought the noise may have come from my exhaust and that I had a problem there. So I slowed down, thinking the bike had gone funny. Then I heard a much louder noise: the sound of a car crashing at speed.
“Ahead I saw the Mercedes which had exploded head-on into a heavy concrete pillar in the center of the dual freeway. It had spun around and was facing back the way it had come. The horn was still blaring. I went to the car and saw a woman in the back. She had fallen against the seat in front and was bent over. I tried to ease her back and her head flopped back and I saw a little blood was coming from her nose and ear. That’s weird, I thought. I know this person.”
Petel said his first instinct was to call for help. “But I didn’t have a mobile. I don’t like them.” He went instead to a public telephone, off the Place de l’Alma, and called the emergency services from there. Of the remarkable number of eyewitnesses, he was one of the very few who even attempted to raise the alarm.
François Levistre from Rouen in Normandy was interviewed by the Reuters Paris office four days after the crash. He and his wife Valerie were in Paris for a night out, and were driving into the Alma tunnel when he noticed lights approaching from behind in his rearview mirror. “I said to my wife that there must be a big shot behind us with a police escort. Then I went down into the tunnel and again in my rearview mirror I saw the car in the middle of the tunnel with a motorcycle on its left with two people on it which then swerved to the right directly in front of the car.
“As it swerved there was a flash of light. It was an explosion of light. Like a searchlight. But then I was heading out of the tunnel and heard, but did not see, the impact. I immediately pulled my car over to the curb but my wife said, ‘Let’s get out of here. It’s a terrorist attack.’ ”
Lamentably, Levistre’s evidence became tainted when he changed his story in a bid to make money. He claimed, in a story used by the
Sunday People
, that it was he who was responsible for the crash. He had swerved in front of the motorcycle, he said, and forced it into the path of the Mercedes. From the other evidence available, this version of events was just not possible, said police, who showed no hesitation in using this to discredit both Levistre’s accounts of what happened—in spite of Valerie Levistre’s assurance that the original version, given to the judiciary and the police, had been the true account, and could be trusted. It is certainly an account which ties in with various other witness statements, but does not complement the official version of events.
Brian Anderson, an American businessman from California, was traveling in a taxi and saw a motorcycle with two riders aboard pass the Mercedes on the left. “My attention was then drawn away until the cab came to a sudden stop and I saw an object in front of us, crossing over. Sparks were flying, there was dust, there was a lot of noise and it happened very quickly and the car came down and rested on its tires. In that instant the horn went off.”
A forty-year-old British secretary, Brenda Wells, was returning home after a party and told police that as she neared the Alma tunnel she had been forced off the road by a motorcycle with two men on board traveling at high speed. “It was following a big car. After, in the tunnel, there were very strong lights, like flashes. I saw the big car had come off the road and I stopped. After that, five or six motorcycles arrived and people started taking photographs.”
Thierry H., a fifty-nine-year-old Parisian engineer, who wished to remain anonymous, and Eric Lee, a chauffeur, also reported having seen the two-rider motorcycle aggressively and dangerously pursuing the Mercedes, at high speed, as it approached the tunnel.
One witness, who said he had not realized the significance of what he had seen until much later after reading reports of the Fiat Uno, was off-duty French policeman David Laurent. In June 1998 he made an official statement that he was driving toward the Alma tunnel when a white car sped past him. As Laurent neared the tunnel he again saw the car, which he recognized as a Fiat Uno, now creeping along very slowly. It had no reason to slow down but had come to a near standstill in the inside lane just before the tunnel entrance.
At that point there was no Mercedes in sight.
Laurent had driven past, leaving the Fiat Uno inching toward the tunnel. He said he believed the Fiat was waiting for another car. In retrospect, he said in his statement, it was quite possibly Princess Diana’s Mercedes that it was waiting for.
A witness known as Gaelle L., who also wished to remain anonymous, told police that as she entered the tunnel from the opposite direction she heard a loud noise of screeching tires. “At that moment in the opposite lane, I saw a large car approaching at high speed. The car swerved to the left and to the right and crashed into the wall with its horn blaring. I should note that in front of this car there was another, smaller car. I think the vehicle was black, but I’m not sure.” It must be pointed out that, under the dim French street lighting, it is sometimes difficult to differentiate between dark and light colors of cars.
Gaelle parked outside the tunnel and, joined by her boyfriend Benoit, who was traveling with her, jumped out of her car to flag down oncoming vehicles. Her call to the French fire department emergency number on a borrowed mobile phone was one of the first to be received.
Eyewitness Gary Dean stated that the Mercedes was traveling very fast before the tunnel, and gave off a whooshing noise as it entered the tunnel “as if the driver had hit the clutch but failed to change gear.”
Two other witnesses, interviewed in the
Journal de Dimanche
on September 7, preferred to remain anonymous. One is quoted as saying, “The Mercedes was driving on the right hand, shortly before the entry to the tunnel, preceded by a dark-colored automobile, of which make I cannot say. This car clearly was attempting to force the Mercedes to brake. The driver of the Mercedes veered into the left-hand lane and then entered the tunnel.”
The other witness, who was walking by the Seine, said he saw a Mercedes traveling behind another automobile. “I believe the reason why the Mercedes accelerated so suddenly was to try to veer into the left lane and pass that car.”
These eleven witnesses between them provide all the available non-technical evidence on the actual crash, and the powerful thread of convincing circumstantial and hard evidence running through them is that a Fiat Uno and a two-passenger motorcycle combined to force the Mercedes off the road deliberately. Yet at no time during their two-year investigation did the police or judiciary consider this as a possible scenario. The fact that both the vehicles were driven from the scene immediately following the crash, and that the occupants of neither vehicle made an attempt to report the incident, offer assistance or subsequently turn to the Ritz Hotel for damages, did not, apparently, rouse police suspicions at all. That they were both in hiding could have suggested they had played a material role in the crash. But not to the Paris police.
As Commander Mules so succinctly explained, “If you start off with an investigation into an accident, one cannot add things that would only complicate the original hypothesis.”
The first people to approach the Mercedes, after Eric Petel, were paparazzo Romuald Rat and his driver Stephane Darmon. They went ten meters past the wreckage, parked their motorcycle, a Honda 650, in the road and walked back. Darmon hung back because, he said later, he felt queasy. Romuald Rat seemed immune to such feelings. In a scene straight out of a Mad Max movie the hulking Rat, who had earlier frightened Diana outside Dodi’s apartment, reached into the wreckage and touched her.
“She was alive,” he said, “and rubbing her stomach. She was speaking English.”
Possibly because of the Anglo-Saxon connotation of his name, a wave of revulsion swept around the world when he revealed that he had taken Diana’s pulse by placing his fingers on her neck. He said later he had told her, in English, to stay cool and hold on, and that help would come. He claimed not to have taken pictures until the emergency services arrived, but this was a lie. Police, who confiscated his film, found his first four frames of the crash scene showed no other person or vehicle in the picture.
The next to arrive, Christian Martinez, had an even worse reputation than Rat. It is virtually impossible to find any of the paparazzi who have a good word to say for him. He is ruthless, meanspirited and violent, they say. Martinez and Rat were to be central figures in some of the worst scrimmages and exchanges of abuse around the death scene, to the extent of preventing the first police to arrive from reaching the victims.
The first tussle involving the two of them took place outside the rear door of the Mercedes after Rat discovered Diana was still alive. Several photographers took part in the struggle with one another in an attempt to get the best vantage point from which to take pictures of the princess. Serge Arnal, David Odekerken and Serge Banamou were only seconds behind the early arrivals. They popped their flashguns at the broken bodies, and at the barely conscious princess, poking their cameras through the shattered windows and buckled doors. A couple contented themselves with photographing the wreckage.
By the time the paparazzi had begun their frenzy of picture-taking, Eric Petel had contacted the emergency services but was not certain they had understood the seriousness of the crash or the importance of its victim. He decided to go personally to the nearest police station to give them the full facts, face-to-face, so they would appreciate the gravity of the situation.
The emergency services say the first call they received was from photographer Serge Arnal, who called 112 at 12:32
A.M.
He says he made the call before phoning his senior editor and dashing into the tunnel to take sixteen pictures. What is certain is that when Dr. Frédéric Mailliez, a doctor with SOS Médécin, arrived, the paparazzi were in full spate and shooting the car and its occupants from all angles. He had been driving in the opposite direction, on the way home from a party, when he saw the crash. He was the first to try to help the injured.
Said Mailliez, “The driver was dead and the back, male passenger was also dead. The front passenger had been hurled against the dashboard and windshield and the left side of his face had sustained most of the damage. It was ripped off and hanging loose. Even to a doctor it was a gruesome sight. The woman in the back seemed to be in the best shape. She looked pretty fine. I thought this woman had a chance.” Amazingly, the doctor said that he did not recognize the princess.
Dr. Mailliez forced his way out, past the paparazzi, “who seemed to have taken all leave of their senses,” and ran back to his car. Using his mobile phone he made two calls: one to confirm that two ambulances were on their way—“I told them there were two severely injured people”—and another to request the heavy cutting gear which would be needed to free Trevor Rees-Jones from the wreckage. Collecting what meager medical equipment he carried with him in his car, Dr. Mailliez ran back to the Mercedes to give first aid to the injured woman.
In the time he had been away, two off-duty volunteer firemen who had also been driving in the opposite direction had stopped to help. Damien Dalby and Sébastien Pennequin had gone to the aid of the trapped bodyguard, holding his bloody head in their hands to help him breathe.
Dr. Mailliez said there was very little he could do for Diana. Through the open back door he was able to tilt her head back slightly and clear her upper respiratory passage and put an oxygen mask over her nose and mouth. “I sought to unblock her trachea and stop her tongue blocking the esophagus. This seemed to ease her breathing and made her more animated,” he said.

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