The Murder of Princess Diana (24 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 location was suspicious in itself. The car had traveled two miles up a potholed cart track, across empty countryside, bumped a further mile uphill across cow pastures, and then forced its way through dense forest to a clearing which few locals even knew existed.
The inquest judge declared that Andanson had committed suicide—400 miles from his luxurious farmhouse and without leaving a note. But she did say that if any further evidence or new information could be offered then she would be prepared to reopen the investigation into Andanson’s death.
There had been a suggestion from one of his colleagues at the SIPA agency that Andanson had killed himself because of marital problems. But his wife Elizabeth completely dismissed this idea, and she and his son totally rejected the verdict of suicide. They were convinced James Andanson had been murdered and pressed French officials to keep a murder investigation running. Senior policemen, however, rejected the idea out of hand. They say the suggestion of it being murder is sheer fantasy. The favored police version is that he took his own life by dousing himself and the car with petrol, and then setting a light to it. No one has attempted to explain the missing key to the locked car.
At her house, Le Manoir de la Bergerie, Mrs. Andanson spoke of the last time her husband came home from Paris on May 4, 2000. “He left almost at once for another job. During our marriage I had become used to his dashing in and out without saying where he had been or where he was going. There were periods when we hardly saw each other. I assumed he had gone back to Paris, but a gendarme came the next day to say they thought James’s body had been found inside a car in Nant.
“There had been nothing unusual about James before he left. Everything had seemed normal. He had been stressed for a while, but I had put that down to the normal pressure of being a journalist. I didn’t know of any enemies, but in his line of work anything is possible.”
One obvious possibility, and the version favored in the intelligence community, is that Andanson had been talking too much and someone had decided to silence him before he revealed further telltale details. Or had he threatened to come clean about what really happened that infamous night, and offered photographic evidence?
Andanson’s friend François Dard said, “He told us that he was there. He was behind them. He was following behind. He saw the accident and all but he wasn’t stopped by the police. He left. It is impossible that he committed suicide. We are convinced of it. To be burned alive in a car—we don’t believe it at all.”
Said ex-MI5 officer David Shayler, “The white Fiat was traced to James Andanson. Other paparazzi have reported his connections to MI6, which has a long record of using journalists and photographers as agents. When interviewed by police, Andanson claimed not to be in Paris that night. Yet forensics indicated that the Fiat had been in the tunnel and had been sold after the crash.
“It is far more likely that the crash was the work of MI6 agents—as opposed to serving officers. Known as ‘surrogates’ or ‘cut-offs’, they are otherwise unconnected to the service so MI6 can drop the operation should the agents be caught.
“As part of the recruitment, agents are asked if they are prepared to be ‘ethically flexible’. If the answer is no, they are not recruited.”
In Paris, even though the police there knew of the strong links between the paparazzo and Princess Diana, none thought it worthwhile mentioning Andanson’s bizarre alleged suicide to Judge Stephan. None of these facts was taken into account in the official inquiry.
John McNamara said, “I am personally convinced he was killed to stop him talking about Princess Diana’s murder. He was a part-time intelligence agent, and therefore expendable. He had obviously become a liability and had to be got rid of.”
As in the case of President Kennedy’s assassination, could people close to the center of the investigation be targeted by the killers?
What happened in Paris the week after Andanson’s death became public, did prompt the suggestion, in several quarters, that there might have been a threat to reveal photographic evidence which showed what happened on the night of the crash, and that this brought about his murder. In June 2000, an armed robbery took place at the SIPA photo agency where Andanson had worked. Three armed men, wearing balaclavas or ski masks, shot a security guard in the foot and held dozens of employees hostage for three hours. Despite phone calls from staff to the police, the Paris gendarmerie failed to respond, convincing observers that the raiders themselves were members of the French security service. “They seemed to know exactly what they were looking for and were confident enough to remain in a busy building for several hours, though they stole nothing of real value,” said one SIPA employee.
The raiders dismantled all the security cameras in the offices and did not seem at all concerned about police rescuers arriving at the scene. Many of the staff believed the raid was related to Andanson’s death, as the gang targeted specific offices where Andanson’s royal pictures were stored. They removed cameras, laptop computers and computer hard drives where pictures were stored. It was very reminiscent of the two raids mounted on the London photo agencies on the night after the crash.
Was there evidence of Andanson’s presence in the tunnel? What, and whom did his photographs reveal that made a daylight raid by French secret service officers so imperative? It is now doubtful we will ever know. But if Diana’s death was a simple accident why was this raid necessary at all?
Some of the answers about the Fiat Uno may have been revealed, but the whereabouts of the motorcycle and its driver and passenger remain a complete mystery.
The French inquiry seems to have made no attempt to track them down.
The importance of the motorcycle and its riders was highlighted by Anthony Scriver QC, a former chairman of the Bar Council, in an ITV documentary as long ago as September 1999, after the French inquiry findings were first published. He said that under French law “there is certainly enough evidence to charge that missing motorcyclist with manslaughter.”
In his truncated final report Judge Stephan does not refer to the motorcycle at all, and in referring to the Fiat Uno, uses phrases such as “its role could only have been a passive one” and “contact only consisted of a simple scrape.” He concludes that the Mercedes was rendered difficult to control “all the more so because of the presence of the Fiat Uno at the entrance to the tunnel.”
SEVENTEEN
The blame may have been laid on the gravestone of Henri Paul, but there are those among the British Establishment who know the real truth. They are the same men who, when the public demanded a Westminster Abbey burial for Diana, found it “delightful” that she should be buried on an unknown island at the estate of her family’s stately home. They hoped the public’s memory of the princess would be allowed to fade quickly.
Fat chance. The public, cheated out of a place where she could be mourned by the nation and cheated out of a proper, official investigation into her death, deserve after all these years to be told, honestly, the real facts.
Like the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, everyone remembers where they were when they heard of the death of Princess Diana. While Britain wept, and bewildered Londoners gathered outside the black, iron railings at Buckingham Palace, not everyone shared the same sense of grief. Among the highest echelons of the British Establishment, smiles were being exchanged at the news of the death of Diana. At last, they thought, the woman who had become a thorn in the side of the royal family would no longer plague them with her tantrums and indiscretions. No longer would the woman whose son would one day sit on the throne of England be photographed openly and wantonly kissing the Egyptian son of the owner of Harrods.
They were glad that the princess was dead. But these were the same people who had been too stupid to realize that, in life, Diana had been the jewel in the royal family’s crown.
It was more than forty-eight hours before the royal family returned to London, bringing with them princes William and Harry. By then, the bewilderment of the people had turned to anger. They could not understand why this dysfunctional family had not returned to the capital where the Princess of Wales’s body was lying in state. Or why, as they thronged the railings at Buckingham Palace, nobody was at home. Why was no flag flying at half staff? It was as if they had been abandoned; as if the royal family could not have cared less about the princess the public adored.
During those fateful hours, the royal family inflicted enormous damage upon itself from which it has never entirely recovered, because even the loyalist subjects of the Queen felt that, in some way they found hard to articulate, the memory of the princess had been betrayed. But there were some among the British Establishment who felt that it would be highly convenient if the public’s memory of Princess Diana were allowed to fade as soon as possible.
While his mistress lay in the chapel at St. James’s Palace, butler Paul Burrell, who had served Diana for ten years, was determined that he was going to preserve her memory—and the time bomb he knew she had left ticking away somewhere. The vultures had already begun to gather when Burrell, who was later charged with stealing 300 artifacts and bits and pieces belonging to Princess Diana, walked into her apartment at Kensington Palace to find her mother, Frances Shand-Kydd, rummaging through her belongings and shredding precious pieces of correspondence.
With her were Diana’s sisters, Lady Jane Fellowes and Lady Sarah McCorquodale. Burrell and other Kensington Palace servants nicknamed Diana’s sister Sarah “Mrs Crocodile.” The women, according to Burrell, were systematically destroying all evidence of Diana’s private life.
At Diana’s funeral service, Earl Spencer, her foul-tempered, self-righteous brother, addressed the congregation, and tried to exorcise his guilt by verbally lashing the royal family for its indifference toward his sister. Sitting in near obscurity, in the “cheaper seats” at the Abbey, were Al Fayed and his beautiful, devoted, Finnish-born wife, Heini. Though they had lost their son, the Al Fayeds’ presence was studiously ignored by the great and the good. There were no kind words of condolence for them. No arms placed sympathetically around their shoulders. They might as well have not existed. As they listened to the cant and the hypocrisy from Earl Spencer and then from that thwarted thespian Tony Blair, Mohamed Al Fayed whispered to his wife, “I’ll get the murdering bastards. Whoever they are, I’ll get them.”
The Al Fayeds knew that Diana detested her brother and disliked her mother. She had not been on friendly terms with Earl Spencer since the time he had flatly refused her anguished pleas to allow her to have a small house in the grounds of Althorp. They also knew, because over dinner one night Princess Diana had told them, that she had not spoken to her mother since receiving a telephone call in which Frances Shand-Kydd had berated her daughter, telling her that she must “stop going out with fucking niggers.” Burrell also knew of the family feuds, and of the cruel lack of support from her mother, her sisters and her brother after her failed marriage to Prince Charles.
Millions of people lined the streets of London to say their own goodbyes; ordinary, decent people who believed she should have been buried in Westminster Abbey. But again this would not have suited the Establishment. They feared that her tomb would become a point of pilgrimage for the millions who had loved and admired her. And that was the last thing they needed. So none of them objected when they discovered that immediately after the service in the Abbey, Earl Spencer intended to hijack the body of his sister and bury her in a lonely, sodden grave in the middle of an island in a little lake on the Spencer estate.
Though many people were puzzled and dismayed, not one member of the royal family raised a finger in objection. For them it meant that if Diana’s tomb was out of sight, the public’s memory of her would dim all the faster.
And there she lies, with the swans for company, except for certain days a year when her greedy brother throws open the double iron gates of the estate and the public pour through to get a glimpse of the princess’s grave from the lakeside—for a £10 a head admittance fee. The hypocrisy is that after so churlishly refusing his sister sanctuary on the family estate when she was alive, he now encourages the masses and the press to flood through the gates of his home to view the site of her grave. Outside interference in his family home no longer seems an issue.
He has also converted a few rooms in his stately pile into a museum to the memory of Diana. Since her death, the sister he betrayed in life has become a money raiser for the earl, which is why, I believe, he appeared so desperate to get his hands on the artifacts Paul Burrell claimed to have taken “for safe keeping.”
POSTSCRIPT
The examining judge’s report, in the end, ran to 7,000 pages, but only a truncated, 70-page version has ever been released by the French government. Hopefully, now that the British royal coroner has asked the Metropolitan Police to investigate Diana’s death, they will be given the opportunity to examine the entire report in detail. It is well known that there was relentless political pressure for the judge to shut down his inquiry before it had pursued all the leads which it might have explored. It is to be hoped that similar pressure is not exerted on the British police or coroner.
Even the truncated version of Judge Stephan’s report raised more questions than it was capable of answering, and this, more than anything else, is responsible for the great majority of people believing that her death was no accident.
One of the world’s leading crime writers, Patricia Cornwell, recently spent six months in England and France investigating the Alma tunnel crash on behalf of America’s ABC television. Her intention had been to put together a program on what she believed to be an accident. Her conclusion echoes that of many other investigative writers and journalists. “The more I look into it, the more I have to say that I, personally, cannot dismiss the possibility of premeditated homicide,” she said.
Personally, following my own two-year investigation, I am utterly convinced that Diana, Princess of Wales was murdered, and equally confident that the evidence to prove it lies in the files of the British Secret Intelligence Service and the CIA.
In 2003, Lord Hutton’s inquiry into the death of weapons expert Dr. David Kelly managed to extract some answers from intelligence-agency records. Now the government should go a step further and order the intelligence service to make itself fully accountable. The complete archives should be opened up and made available to the Scotland Yard team appointed to probe Diana’s death.
Anyone who looks at the facts of Diana’s death, even stripped down to their bare essentials, cannot emerge without at least a suspicion that she was murdered. More than eighty-five-percent of British people believe that she was. The British authorities owe it to them and to Princess Diana herself to provide all of the evidence, and for once dispense with the Official Secrets Act. Otherwise this inquiry will be as much a cover-up as the one in France, and just as ineffectual.
In June 2004, as this book was undergoing its final edit, it was announced that the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams, had dropped his objections to a marriage between Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles. He had cleared the way for them to marry, it was said, after secret talks with the prince the previous year.
This followed a statement from his equally forgiving predecessor, former Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Carey of Clifton, that by an amazing coincidence he too now felt it was natural that the couple should marry.
This must have come as devastating news for all of Diana’s tens of millions of admirers and supporters worldwide.
I fully believe, as I have stated in this book, that one of the main contributory reasons for Diana’s murder was to clear the way for Charles and Camilla to marry. It would seem after the years of purgatory to which this pair subjected the princess that they can ultimately anticipate not punishment for their wickedness, but the reward of a church wedding—together with the Church’s blessing.
Should they really be allowed to benefit from their appalling deceit and betrayal? Should crime, if you’re a royal, be allowed to pay? One can only hope not, and that the Queen, with whom the final decision rests, shows more moral courage than her toadying church leaders, and, as a powerful example to her people, forbids the marriage from ever taking place.
The People’s Princess seems just as much in need of a champion in death as she ever did when she was alive. What better way could there be of showing the real depth of her admiration for her late daughter-in-law than for Queen Elizabeth to take up the gauntlet, as champion to the Princess, and do the right thing by Diana?
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