In light of the Royal Wedding, it seems appropriate to hearken back to the insistence, nay, assurance that Princess Diana was murdered.
The problem with debunking the Di murder conspiracies is that there are just so many of them. Most share the same central concept: Princess Di was murdered at the behest of the British Royal Family, the mechanisms and specific motivations are plentiful; not quite as varied as the JFK murder theories, but enough.
Operation Paget was established specifically to address the rampant theories about her death. The resultant investigation demonstrated that none of them could be verified, and most had significant (and often conclusive) evidence contradicting the theories.
Still the allegations continue. There are good (and not good) reasons.
First is the conviction of a grieving parent that there must be a reason beyond simple error for the death of their child. That seems to be the motivation behind Mohamed el-Fayed’s insistence that Princess Di was pregnant with his son’s child. From Reuters:
Mohamed al-Fayed, whose son Dodi also died in the crash after a brief but high-profile summer romance with Diana, said the couple were killed on the orders of Queen Elizabeth’s husband, Diana’s former father-in-law.
In a string of accusations listed in court by the judge, the owner of London’s luxury Harrods store said the royal family could not bear the idea of Diana marrying a Muslim.
Diana has publicly announced that she was on the verge of releasing “a big surprise”. Mohamed said that his son and Di were about to announce an engagement and that she was pregnant. The comprehensive post-mortem indicated no signs of a pregnancy and interviews with her closest confidantes and the servants indicated that she was using contraception. Conveniently, no mention was made as to whether the confidantes had been informed of a potential engagement. It seems plausible – although unverifiable – that the couple told Mohamed of their intent to marry and he extrapolated the existence of a baby from that information.
Also adding to the concern was Princess Di’s fear that the Royal Family was looking to kill or maim her. Her butler provided evidence toward that, in the form of a private letter. From the Telegraph:
She wrote: “I am sitting here at my desk today in October, longing for someone to hug me and encourage me to keep strong and hold my head high.
“This particular phase in my life is the most dangerous – my husband is planning ‘an accident’ in my car, brake failure and serious head injury in order to make the path clear for him to marry Tiggy. Camilla is nothing but a decoy, so we are all being used by the man in every sense of the word.”
The car accident aspect lends itself to curiousity… but that curiosity isn’t satisfied. She wasn’t hurt by brake failure, and Charles is still married to Camilla. Granting her the most lenient interpretation of events, she may indeed have been targeted for a convenient brake failure, but she died in an actual accident before it could happen.
Also lending itself to conspiracy theory was the fact that Diana’s personal bodyguard had recently died and she believed he had been intentionally killed. That dovetails nicely with the letter, above, but it proves nothing beyond the fact that Diana was concerned about conspiracies to kill her and her associates. In fact, the death of her bodyguard may have been the galvanizing incident which pushed her to embrace those theories. The death of her bodyguard by a mysterious car crash fueled those theories.
The car crash wasn’t mysterious, though. The driver who had pulled out in front of the motorcycle immediately stopped, attempted to render aid, and gave a full report to the police on the scene. It was only deemed mysterious because it had been called so by the tabloids, both in the U.K. and the United States. Those papers conveniently excluded known facts in order to generate an air of mystery that would enable them to sell more copies.
Some conspiracies point to the differing accounts of car speed by witnesses. It is posited that the car was being remotely accellerated, and in some cases that it wasn’t even the same car. However, there’s an easy test anyone can do that would put this in perspective. Stand on the side of a street with three or four friends. Let a few cars pass. As each car passes, let each person secretly write down the speed at which it was travelling. Then compare. You will see a variety of speeds, all by witnesses who have no reason or inclination to lie.
Meanwhile, accident investigators found nothing out of place about the car.
The final group of accusations lie at the feet of the driver and the paparazzi. The driver wasn’t truly drunk (although he had been seen drinking heavily shortly before driving) because he wasn’t acting drunk. This theory borders on the offensive to everyone who’s lost a family member or friend to drunk driving. “Good enough to drive” is a lie that has resulted in the deaths of thousands, and the evidence in support of that assertion is mountainous.
Or, whether he was drunk or not, he was willing to die to fulfill the desires of the Royal Family. To that end, it is hard to conceive of a more irrational course of action by a driver. In any car accident, the driver is most likely to die. Princess Di and Dodi were in the passenger compartment, giving them a solid chance of survival. If they survived, his death was in vain… and most assassins aren’t both suicidal and eager to endanger their mission. A truly homicidal driver would have brought them to a location where he could have killed them and then, if required, taken his own life. That is not remotely what happened.
One of the rare instances where the Royals aren’t blamed is the one where the paparazzi are responsible. Not in a vague “partly culpable for making them run” sort of way, but directly responsible in a “they arranged the accident for the photos” way. Even if one believes that freelance photographers are merely murderers behind a lens, it produces another question: why have the paparazzi not acted this way before? It beggars the imagination to say these people were willing to stage a single high-profile death, but not take similar actions in the past nor to do so afterward despite the money made off of the Princess Di crash photos.
From all indications, Prince Harry missed his somewhat-paranoid mom at the wedding today not because of some grand puppeteering but because a drunk driver tried to get away from irritating photographers and lost control of his car.
Here is a clip of the news conference given to explain the Operation Paget results :
Here’s a link to the BBC stored Operation Paget report: https://downloads.bbc.co.uk/news/nol/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/14_12_06_diana_report.pdf
