The Murder of Princess Diana (18 page)
Read The Murder of Princess Diana Online
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
The princess was only semiconscious but talking, although the doctor said he could not understand what she was saying. “While I was inside the car giving assistance to Princess Diana, I was aware of a lot of flashes, a lot of people taking a lot of pictures of myself and the princess.”
The first police arrived at 12:30
A.M.
, just before the fire brigade, and they too had to push their way through the paparazzi who were snapping the car from every angle, including taking pictures of the doctor treating Diana. Experts who examined the photographs later revealed that several had been taken with the lenses less than four-and-a-half-feet from the princess’s face. One, by Serge Arnal, was taken just four feet away while Dr. Mailliez was treating her. One observer, Mark Butt, said, “They were going for close shots, and then back out. They did get rather close and that’s what bothered me. To see how close they were getting with their huge lenses, right on top of them, within fifty or sixty centimeters.”
A.M.
, just before the fire brigade, and they too had to push their way through the paparazzi who were snapping the car from every angle, including taking pictures of the doctor treating Diana. Experts who examined the photographs later revealed that several had been taken with the lenses less than four-and-a-half-feet from the princess’s face. One, by Serge Arnal, was taken just four feet away while Dr. Mailliez was treating her. One observer, Mark Butt, said, “They were going for close shots, and then back out. They did get rather close and that’s what bothered me. To see how close they were getting with their huge lenses, right on top of them, within fifty or sixty centimeters.”
Officers Lino Gagliardone and Sebastian Dorzee were patroling along the Cours Albert I
er
when they were told of the accident by passers-by. They parked their patrol car at the entrance to the tunnel and used their radio to summon reinforcements.
er
when they were told of the accident by passers-by. They parked their patrol car at the entrance to the tunnel and used their radio to summon reinforcements.
Gagliardone tried, with little success, to hold back the paparazzi while Dorzee checked the condition of the car’s occupants and reported back to the local station. He was able to tell them that the princess was still alive, but bleeding from the nose and from a substantial wound on her forehead. She was still talking—mumbling rather—and he thought she said, “My God” when she saw Dodi’s body. “She was moving slightly and her eyes were open. She was in pain, I think. She turned her head toward the front of the car and saw the driver. I think she understood better, then, what had happened. She became quite agitated. Then she looked at me and closed her eyes and let her head rest back.”
By the time Eric Petel walked into the local police station and was talking to the desk officer, his information had already preceded him. Said Petel, “I told the policeman on the desk, ‘Quick, quick. You have to call the emergency services. Lady Di has had a crash. She’s had an accident, and you must call for an ambulance straight away.’
“The cop said, ‘Are you joking?’
“I told him no, and that I was serious. I grabbed one of the files from his desk and threw it on the floor, to try and get his full attention, and told him, ‘You’ve got to do something.’
“He called another cop and they tried to calm me. But the more they tried to calm me the more upset I became. They didn’t seem to understand. ‘You must do something,’ I shouted. So they did. They put me in handcuffs.”
At the Alma tunnel the situation was still chaotic. Said officer Gagliardone, “The photographers were virulent, objectionable and pushy, continuing to take photos and willfully obstructing an officer from assisting the victims.”
Clifford Gooroovadoo, a limousine driver who had been waiting for his clients in the Place de l’Alma, had rushed to the crash scene. “Four or five men were already taking photographs around the wrecked Mercedes,” he said. “It was obvious the four occupants were wounded. There was blood; their bodies were sprawled every which way inside the Mercedes. Yet these men photographed the car and the wounded from every angle. Seeing this spectacle I shouted, ‘Is that all you can do instead of calling for help?’
“The passenger in front, who was trying to move, seemed to have had his mouth and tongue ripped off. I held up his head and told him not to move, to await help.
“I saw a blonde head moving in the back and someone said, ‘That’s Lady Di.’ So I repeated the same words to this young woman in English. Lady Di tried to speak. She opened her mouth to tell me something, but no sound came out. She was bleeding from the forehead and was trying to get up. The photographers never stopped taking pictures. Romuald Rat was particularly manic at that time, moving around in all directions and arguing with Christian Martinez.”
These scenes, ugly as they were, would soon become even worse. Two teams of firemen had arrived in vehicles 94 and 100 at 12:32
A.M.
, and the officer in charge, Sergeant Xavier Gourmelon, had evaluated the position. His main priority, he decided, was to cut the roof wreckage from the Mercedes to permit them to extract Trevor Rees-Jones, who appeared to everyone to be the most severely injured of the two casualties. He was standing next to Princess Diana and heard her say, “My God, what’s happened,” and saw her move her left arm and legs.
A.M.
, and the officer in charge, Sergeant Xavier Gourmelon, had evaluated the position. His main priority, he decided, was to cut the roof wreckage from the Mercedes to permit them to extract Trevor Rees-Jones, who appeared to everyone to be the most severely injured of the two casualties. He was standing next to Princess Diana and heard her say, “My God, what’s happened,” and saw her move her left arm and legs.
Gagliardone was, meanwhile, coming under increasingly hostile abuse from the paparazzi, who resented being told to move away to give the firemen room to work. One photographer told him, “If you had been in Bosnia you would not take it so tragically.”
Christian Martinez snarled, “You make me sick. Let me do my job. In Sarajevo the police at least let us work.”
One of the first senior officials to be dispatched to the scene was Madame Maude Coujard, the duty prosecutor. When someone dies violently in France, the first to be informed is the prosecution office, which in Paris is in the Palais de Justice. They, in turn, dispatch a prosecutor to the scene. Wearing a black leather jacket and jeans, Maude Coujard, a woman in her early thirties, was driven to the crash scene by her husband on their BMW motorcycle. She would oversee the French investigation into the crash, and appoint other officials and judges.
Her first on-the-spot decision was to place the case in the hands of the Criminal Brigade, the judicial police who investigate criminal and terrorist cases as well as sudden and inexplicable death. Its chief, Commander Jean-Claude Mules, placed his most trusted senior officer, Martine Monteil, in command. She was the first female head of the Brigade, having been appointed in 1996.
The duty judge, Hervé Stephan, had also been ordered to the scene that night, but it would be two full days before Madame Coujard would appoint him the senior judge to conduct the full investigation into the crash.
Paris chief of police Philippe Massoni had been informed and was on his way to the crash site. He had already conferred with minister of the interior Jean-Pierre Chevènement who was in touch with the British ambassador Sir Michael Jay. The foreign minister and the Elysée Palace had also been fully briefed.
From Commander Mules’s subsequent comments, leaked accounts at the time and since, and from the British government’s absolute refusal then to initiate an inquest or official inquiry into the deaths, the uppermost requirement at the very outset, by all parties involved, was that the crash be declared an accident; more specifically, nobody should believe that it had been deliberately engineered. The police and politicians were looking for an easily acceptable, uncomplicated explanation; fortunately for them, one readily and forcefully presented itself to anyone arriving at the Alma tunnel: the outrageous and unpalatable behavior of the paparazzi.
Soon after Martine Monteil’s arrival, and following consultation with prosecutor Maude Coujard and a radio discussion with Commander Mules and the interior minister, it was decided at this very early stage of the investigation to place the sole blame for the accident on the paparazzi. They had clearly harassed the princess and her driver to the extent of forcing them off the road, it was said. That the evidence from virtually all the available eyewitnesses contradicted this version did not deter them from pursuing this official, and convenient, snap judgment. Romuald Rat, Stéphane Darmon, Christian Martinez, Jacques Langevin, Serge Arnol, Laslo Veres and Nikola Arsov were herded away from the crash by police reinforcements and taken into custody.
The Paris prosecution department would ask for an inquiry to be opened against the above named, and others arrested later, for failing to give assistance to persons in danger, and against unnamed persons for homicide and involuntary injury. The inquiry would clarify the context in which the photographers had followed the Mercedes in which Dodi and Diana were traveling, and the effect of their presence on the behavior of the driver of the vehicle immediately before the accident. In addition, the preliminary investigation file had to identify and examine the attitude adopted by these same photographers in the moments which immediately preceded the accident.
Sergeant Gourmelon had designated one of his ninety-five-strong team, Philippe Boyer, to take over from Dr. Mailliez and look after Princess Diana until the emergency service
Service d’Aide Médicale Urgente
(SAMU) arrived. Boyer attached a surgical collar around her neck. He would stay with her until the SAMU physicians took over. Two other firemen were assigned to help Trevor Rees-Jones. They held his head up from the dashboard to free his breathing, and administered oxygen before they also attached a cervical collar to his neck in case of spinal damage.
Service d’Aide Médicale Urgente
(SAMU) arrived. Boyer attached a surgical collar around her neck. He would stay with her until the SAMU physicians took over. Two other firemen were assigned to help Trevor Rees-Jones. They held his head up from the dashboard to free his breathing, and administered oxygen before they also attached a cervical collar to his neck in case of spinal damage.
At 12:44
A.M.
the “can opener” or
camion de désincarcération
arrived, under the command of Armand Forge. Within moments, on Gourmelon’s instructions, he had spotlights focused on the wreckage and began cutting the roof away.
A.M.
the “can opener” or
camion de désincarcération
arrived, under the command of Armand Forge. Within moments, on Gourmelon’s instructions, he had spotlights focused on the wreckage and began cutting the roof away.
By now Dr. Jean-Marc Martino, a resuscitation specialist with the SAMU rescue team, had taken over attending to Diana. A completely separate team, led by Dr. Le Hote, was concentrating on Trevor Rees-Jones, who was still believed to be the more seriously injured of the two casualties. Dr. Martino attached a drip to Diana’s arm to sedate her, as she was still agitated and crying out. He said she was confused and incoherent. When the roof had been removed, he personally supervised the firemen and medics who hoisted her slim body from the rear of the Mercedes onto a stretcher. They took great care lifting her out as she was partly wedged on the floor, between the back seat and the passenger seat in front.
Dr. Martino judged her state as “severe but not critical” and he noted that she was still speaking, though not clearly. But as she was being transferred onto the stretcher, the princess went into cardiac arrest, and immediately the full seriousness of her condition started to become apparent. Dr. Martino gave her respiratory ventilation by inserting a narrow tracheal tube down her throat, and administered heart massage. All this took place on the stretcher by the roadside. Eventually he managed to revive her and immediately instructed ambulance driver Michel Massebeuf to transfer her stretcher to one of the waiting ambulances, where he continued to treat her. The interior of the ambulance was like a miniature emergency center—designed to be far more capable of treating patients and dealing with emergencies than their British equivalent.
It was then nearly 1:30
A.M.
A.M.
The bodies of Henri Paul and Dodi Fayed had already been removed and laid on the road. Medics worked for thirty minutes, giving external heart massage in an attempt to resuscitate Dodi, but it was hopeless. The two corpses were eventually covered with blue plastic sheets, though they would not be declared dead until later.
Dr. Marc Le Jay, in charge of the unit’s radio and telephone communications, had been told very soon after his arrival that the princess and her bodyguard were to be sent to the Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital. It was not the closest hospital, but the best equipped unit for this kind of trauma, he had been advised. This in itself was odd, as no one at this stage was aware of the full extent of their injuries. But in the end it would not make much difference to Diana. Astonishingly the ambulance in which she was traveling would not reach the emergency gates of the hospital—four miles away—until 2:06
A.M.
, one hour and forty-six minutes after the crash. By that time it was too late to save her; at 1:30
A.M.
there still seemed to be hope.
A.M.
, one hour and forty-six minutes after the crash. By that time it was too late to save her; at 1:30
A.M.
there still seemed to be hope.
There was not much hope, though, for Eric Petel. He was now being interviewed by a third policeman. “I tried to tell him what I had seen, but he kept asking about paparazzi,” he said. This would seem to indicate that in the police station there was sufficient information being radioed in for them to know how the paparazzi were behaving, and even to know that charges against them were being considered. “I told him that there were no paparazzi present when the car crashed, but it didn’t seem to be the right story. Soon after this I was bundled into a police van, still in handcuffs, and taken to Criminal Brigade headquarters on the Quai des Orfèvres.
“I couldn’t work out what was happening. All I had done was come to warn them about a car accident involving a famous person, and now they were taking me away in handcuffs. I told them again and again exactly what I had seen and heard, and a very senior police officer in brigade headquarters told me, ‘That’s not how it happened.’
“‘But I was there,’ I told him.
“It would be best, he said, if I did not make myself known to the press. It felt and sounded very much like a threat. He kept telling me that the crash could not have happened in the way I had described. What they wanted, exactly, they didn’t say. It was as if I hadn’t been there and had seen nothing.”
That day the police briefed the press that Eric Petel could not be trusted. He was a liar, they said. Jean Durrieux, chief reporter of
Paris Match
, said, “I spoke to Petel three days later. I know he went to the police station and that he was interrogated by the Criminal Brigade. By suppressing Petel’s evidence the French police could blame the photographers.”
Paris Match
, said, “I spoke to Petel three days later. I know he went to the police station and that he was interrogated by the Criminal Brigade. By suppressing Petel’s evidence the French police could blame the photographers.”
The investigating judge did not interview Petel until seven months after the crash, and asked the Criminal Brigade for a copy of the original statement he had made to the police. The Brigade reported that they could not find the original statement, and it has never been produced. Initially they claimed that he had never even attempted to call the emergency services. Then they admitted that he had made the call, but had not spoken clearly enough. The recording showed that Petel had told the emergency operator that he was speaking from Armand Marceau and not Alma Marceau, the subway station next to the tunnel, they said. No such place as Armand Marceau exists.
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