Latest / Crime Night / Diana Predicted Her Own Brake Failure
Transcript
- 0:00Speaker 1: I want you to just put yourself there for a second.
- 0:01Speaker 1: It's Paris August thirtieth, nineteen ninety seven. That late summer
- 0:06Speaker 1: heat is still hanging over the city. It's just past midnight,
- 0:10Speaker 1: so we're technically into the early hours of the thirty first,
- 0:13Speaker 1: and the streets still have that you know that Parisian energy, tourists, locals, traffic.
- 0:18Speaker 1: But then you go underground.
- 0:20Speaker 2: Into the Pondalama tunnel, right.
- 0:21Speaker 1: And everything changes. The light is artificial yellow orange, The
- 0:24Speaker 1: sound bounces off the walls, and then at twelve point
- 0:27Speaker 1: t three am you hear it, a violent sound that
- 0:31Speaker 1: just rips through the city.
- 0:32Speaker 2: Noise, it creaching tires.
- 0:33Speaker 1: A huge deafening impact, an echo, and then just a
- 0:38Speaker 1: car horn stuck blaring into silence.
- 0:41Speaker 2: It's a moment that really splits modern history into When
- 0:44Speaker 2: first responders get to the scene, they describe it as difficult,
- 0:47Speaker 2: which is, you know, the polite police term for absolute carnage.
- 0:51Speaker 1: In the middle of this tunnel is a Mercedes S
- 0:52Speaker 1: two eighty.
- 0:53Speaker 2: And why should pause on that? This is a German
- 0:54Speaker 2: engineered car. It's basically a tank on wheels, famous for
- 0:57Speaker 2: its safety.
- 0:58Speaker 1: Exactly, But this car isn't just damaged. It's obliterated, a
- 1:03Speaker 1: twisted mess of metal, just wrapped around a concrete pillar.
- 1:07Speaker 2: And inside they find four people. Two are dead on impact,
- 1:11Speaker 2: the driver, a man named Henri Paul, and Dodi al Fade.
- 1:15Speaker 1: The third passenger. She's in the backseat and she's conscious,
- 1:19Speaker 1: barely murmuring a few words. But within a couple of
- 1:23Speaker 1: hours at the Pitie Salpetrier hospital, she's pronounced dead.
- 1:27Speaker 2: Princess Diana, the most famous woman on the planet.
- 1:30Speaker 1: Just gone. The official story gets written almost immediately, A
- 1:34Speaker 1: tragic traffic accident.
- 1:35Speaker 2: High speed, a drunk driver, a paparazzi chase gone wrong,
- 1:39Speaker 2: case close.
- 1:39Speaker 1: And for most people, that's where the story ends. It
- 1:41Speaker 1: was tragic, it was senseless, but it's an accident. But
- 1:44Speaker 1: that's not why we're here. The material we've been going through,
- 1:48Speaker 1: inquiry reports, internal documents, it tells a very different story.
- 1:52Speaker 2: A story that suggests this wasn't an accident at all.
- 1:54Speaker 2: I mean, when you actually deep dive into the forensics,
- 1:56Speaker 2: the witness statements, the intelligence reports, that accident theory, it
- 2:01Speaker 2: just starts to crumble.
- 2:02Speaker 1: We're talking about anomalies that defy all statistical probability. Swap
- 2:05Speaker 1: blood sample security cameras that just happened to.
- 2:07Speaker 2: Go dark, intelligence officers who appear and disappear, and a
- 2:11Speaker 2: strange technology called Boston Breaks, and.
- 2:14Speaker 1: Maybe the most chilling part, a letter, a letter written
- 2:17Speaker 1: by Diana herself where she seems to predict the exact
- 2:21Speaker 1: way she was going to die.
- 2:22Speaker 2: So, yeah, let's unpack it. To understand the crash, you
- 2:25Speaker 2: have to understand the context. Why would a princess be
- 2:28Speaker 2: a target? I mean, she was the princess of hearts.
- 2:31Speaker 2: Everybody loved her.
- 2:32Speaker 1: The public loved her, the establishment that is a very
- 2:36Speaker 1: very different story.
- 2:37Speaker 2: By nineteen ninety seven, Diana wasn't just a celebrity anymore.
- 2:41Speaker 2: She was, for all intents and purposes, a defector. She
- 2:45Speaker 2: was a loose cannon who had basically declared war on
- 2:48Speaker 2: the royal family.
- 2:49Speaker 1: She didn't start out that way though.
- 2:50Speaker 2: No, not at all. She was the perfect candidate at first.
- 2:53Speaker 2: Diana Spencer born in sixty one, good aristocratic stock. She
- 2:57Speaker 2: was young, naive, and had a pretty traumatic childhood.
- 3:00Speaker 1: The well felt made her vulnerable right.
- 3:03Speaker 2: The material mentions her father was abusive, her mother left.
- 3:07Speaker 2: She was really just looking for some kind of stability.
- 3:09Speaker 1: And Prince Charles needed a bride. I mean, the pressure
- 3:11Speaker 1: on him to marry was immense. He'd actually dated Diana's
- 3:14Speaker 1: older sister Sarah for a bit.
- 3:16Speaker 2: Yeah, but Sarah was too assertive. She wouldn't play the game.
- 3:20Speaker 2: Then he meets Diana, She's shy, calls him sir. She
- 3:23Speaker 2: seemed manageable.
- 3:24Speaker 1: So she gets the job. And let's be real, it
- 3:26Speaker 1: was a job.
- 3:27Speaker 2: It absolutely was. But she went off script that fairytale
- 3:30Speaker 2: wedding in nineteen eighty one. Behind the scenes, it was
- 3:33Speaker 2: a nightmare, depression, bulimia, and she knew Charles was still
- 3:38Speaker 2: in love with Camilla Parker Bowles.
- 3:40Speaker 1: For ten years. She just suffered in silence. Yeah. But
- 3:43Speaker 1: then comes nineteen ninety two.
- 3:45Speaker 2: Andrew Morton's book, Diana Her True Story. This is where
- 3:50Speaker 2: it goes from a royal drama to something more like
- 3:52Speaker 2: a spy thriller. How that book was made is just
- 3:54Speaker 2: it's insane.
- 3:55Speaker 1: I was reading about that. She was at her constant
- 3:57Speaker 1: surveillance right Kensington Palace.
- 3:59Speaker 2: Two and twenty seve Her phones were bugged, the staff
- 4:02Speaker 2: were reporting back to the Prince. It was a glass cage.
- 4:04Speaker 1: So how does she get her story out?
- 4:06Speaker 2: Tradecraft, pure and simple. She had a trusted friend, a
- 4:09Speaker 2: doctor James Colthurst Morton, would write down questions, give them
- 4:13Speaker 2: to the doctor. The doctor would then smuggle the questions
- 4:15Speaker 2: into the palace in his medical bag. Diana would record
- 4:19Speaker 2: her answers onto cassette tapes, I mean, just pouring her
- 4:22Speaker 2: heart out, and he'd smuggle the tapes back out.
- 4:24Speaker 1: The tension of that just imagine sitting there recording what
- 4:27Speaker 1: is essentially treason against the crown, and any second a
- 4:31Speaker 1: footman could just walk in.
- 4:32Speaker 2: And those tapes were explosive. She talked about the suicide attempts,
- 4:37Speaker 2: She confirmed the affair. When that book came out, it
- 4:40Speaker 2: shattered the whole mystique of the monarchy, humiliated Charles, and
- 4:44Speaker 2: it led directly to their separation and then the divorce
- 4:47Speaker 2: in ninety six.
- 4:48Speaker 1: So by the summer of ninety seven, she's free. She
- 4:50Speaker 1: loses her Royal Highness title, but she keeps the fame, which.
- 4:54Speaker 2: Makes her even more dangerous. She's outside their control, but
- 4:56Speaker 2: she knows where every single skeleton is buried. And then
- 5:00Speaker 2: that summer she does something that complicates things even more.
- 5:03Speaker 1: She starts dating Dodiel Fade right.
- 5:05Speaker 2: And you have to look at who Dody was son
- 5:07Speaker 2: of Muhammad Alphe, the billionaire owner of Herod's. A bit
- 5:10Speaker 2: of a playboy, sure, but in the eyes of the
- 5:12Speaker 2: British establishment, he had one fatal flaw. I mean, guess
- 5:16Speaker 2: it wasn't his money, No, it was his religion.
- 5:20Speaker 1: He was a Muslim, and looking at this through the
- 5:22Speaker 1: lens of nineteen ninety seven, that was a huge deal,
- 5:26Speaker 1: a catastrophe.
- 5:27Speaker 2: The material we have is very clear on this. The
- 5:29Speaker 2: mother of the future King of England, Prince William, marrying
- 5:33Speaker 2: a muslim man for the Church of England, for the crown.
- 5:37Speaker 2: That was just unthinkable.
- 5:39Speaker 1: Okay, so the motive is there. The tension is at
- 5:42Speaker 1: an all time high. Let's zoom in on the night itself,
- 5:46Speaker 1: August thirtieth. Diana and Dodi are in Paris having dinner
- 5:50Speaker 1: at the Ritz, which his father owns.
- 5:51Speaker 2: But it's not a romantic dinner. It's a siege. The
- 5:54Speaker 2: hotel is completely surrounded by paparazzi. It is a mob.
- 5:57Speaker 2: They can't even leave through the front door.
- 5:59Speaker 1: So Dodie makes it to decision. He changes the plan.
- 6:01Speaker 2: He comes up with this decoy maneuver. They'll send their
- 6:03Speaker 2: usual car, a range drover in their usual driver out
- 6:06Speaker 2: the front to create a distraction, and while that's happening,
- 6:09Speaker 2: Dody and Diana slip out the back the service.
- 6:11Speaker 1: Exit, and this is the critical part. They leave their
- 6:13Speaker 1: security detail behind.
- 6:15Speaker 2: Dodie wanted to keep a low profile. He tells his
- 6:17Speaker 2: bodyguards to wait. Only one goes with them, Trevor Reese Jones.
- 6:21Speaker 2: And crucially, they don't take their own car. They get
- 6:25Speaker 2: into a hotel car, a Mercedes S two to eighty,
- 6:28Speaker 2: driven by the hotel's acting head of security, On Repol, a.
- 6:32Speaker 1: Last minute car, a last minute driver exactly.
- 6:34Speaker 2: They get out the back, but the plan immediately fails.
- 6:38Speaker 2: A single journalist spots them, He whistles, and suddenly the
- 6:42Speaker 2: entire pack is on them.
- 6:44Speaker 1: Motorbike scooters, flashes going off.
- 6:46Speaker 2: Everywhere, and on Repol just floors it, tries to outrun them,
- 6:50Speaker 2: and they head straight for the tunnel.
- 6:51Speaker 1: And we know what happens next the crash. But this
- 6:54Speaker 1: is where we have to stop reading the headlines and
- 6:56Speaker 1: start looking at the evidence. The official inquiry says on
- 6:59Speaker 1: Repol was drunk.
- 7:00Speaker 2: Three times the legal limit and on anti presence. That
- 7:03Speaker 2: was the story.
- 7:03Speaker 1: But the toxicology report is strange.
- 7:07Speaker 2: It's more than strange. Yes, the report claimed a staggeringly
- 7:09Speaker 2: high level of alcohol in his blood, but it also
- 7:12Speaker 2: had something else, an incredibly high level of carbon monoxide.
- 7:16Speaker 1: Carbon monoxide like from car exhaust.
- 7:20Speaker 2: Exactly, Saraturo. The saturation level in that blood sample was
- 7:24Speaker 2: over twenty percent.
- 7:25Speaker 1: Wait, hold on, if you have twenty percent carbon monoxide poisoning,
- 7:30Speaker 1: aren't you basically incapacitating.
- 7:33Speaker 2: You're barely conscious. You are absolutely not walking around a
- 7:37Speaker 2: hotel lobby tying your shoes and then getting into a
- 7:40Speaker 2: high speed chase through Paris. It's biologically impossible. Also, Unrepaul
- 7:45Speaker 2: died on impact. Carbon monoxide takes time to be inhaled
- 7:48Speaker 2: to bind to the blood cells. You don't get twenty
- 7:50Speaker 2: percent saturation in the split second of a crash.
- 7:53Speaker 1: So the science in the timeline just don't match up.
- 7:55Speaker 2: It's impossible unless he was sitting in a garage with
- 7:57Speaker 2: a hose in his mouth just before he picked them up,
- 7:59Speaker 2: which we have CCTV of him minutes before, looking perfectly fine.
- 8:03Speaker 1: So if the blood sample says he was poisoned by
- 8:06Speaker 1: gas but the video shows he wasn't, whose blood was it?
- 8:10Speaker 2: That is the million dollar question. The theory laid out
- 8:12Speaker 2: in these files is that the samples were.
- 8:14Speaker 1: Swapped and swapped of who's well.
- 8:15Speaker 2: Coincidentally, the records show that a suicide victim was brought
- 8:19Speaker 2: into the same morgue that night, someone who had died
- 8:22Speaker 2: from carbon monoxide poisoning in a car.
- 8:24Speaker 1: You're kidding me, So they could have just taken that
- 8:26Speaker 1: victim's blood, put on Repaul's label on it, and boom.
- 8:29Speaker 2: Look the driver was impaired. It's what the evidence suggests,
- 8:33Speaker 2: because if you take away that blood test, the grunk
- 8:35Speaker 2: driver theory completely evaporates, and what you're left with is
- 8:39Speaker 2: a sober driver mysteriously losing control of a high performance.
- 8:43Speaker 1: Car, which brings us to the car itself. Yeah, and
- 8:46Speaker 1: this Boston breaks theory. I have to admit this sounds
- 8:49Speaker 1: This sounds like something from a bad spy movie. Remote
- 8:53Speaker 1: control cars in nineteen ninety seven. Was that even real?
- 8:57Speaker 2: It's a fair question. It sounds like science fiction, But
- 9:00Speaker 2: the materials are very specific. We're not talking about driving
- 9:03Speaker 2: the car like a remote control toy. We're talking about
- 9:06Speaker 2: overriding specific electronic systems. That Mercedes S two eighty was
- 9:11Speaker 2: one of the first production cars to be heavily computerized.
- 9:13Speaker 1: Okay, so it had the chips.
- 9:15Speaker 2: It had electronic control units for steering and braking. The
- 9:18Speaker 2: Boston brakes technique refers to a method known in intelligence circles,
- 9:22Speaker 2: where a microchip receiver is installed into the car's management system,
- 9:27Speaker 2: installed when well, remember they took a last minute hotel car.
- 9:30Speaker 2: It turns out that this specific car had been stolen
- 9:33Speaker 2: and returned a few weeks earlier, and more importantly, it
- 9:36Speaker 2: had undergone maintenance for some mysterious electrical problem just two
- 9:41Speaker 2: days before the crash.
- 9:42Speaker 1: Two days.
- 9:42Speaker 2: The theory is that this ship allows a remote operator
- 9:45Speaker 2: to seize control, blip the brakes or lock the steering,
- 9:49Speaker 2: and as the car entered the tunnel, which blocks most
- 9:52Speaker 2: cell signals but traps radio frequencies, control was hijacked.
- 9:56Speaker 1: So Henri Paul is fighting with the wheel, but the
- 9:59Speaker 1: car is basically driving itself into that pillar.
- 10:02Speaker 2: It would explain why there were no skid marks until
- 10:05Speaker 2: the final moment. It explains the sheer violence of it.
- 10:07Speaker 2: It wasn't a drift into the pillar. It was a hard,
- 10:10Speaker 2: sudden turn.
- 10:11Speaker 1: That's terrifying. But if it was an operation, someone had
- 10:13Speaker 1: to be there too to push the.
- 10:15Speaker 2: Button, which brings us to the witnesses, or really the
- 10:19Speaker 2: lack of them.
- 10:20Speaker 1: The cameras.
- 10:20Speaker 2: Paris is one of the most survowed cities on Earth.
- 10:23Speaker 2: The pont A Llama Tunnel had multiple security cameras, traffic cameras,
- 10:27Speaker 2: zero footage, not a single frame on that night, at
- 10:31Speaker 2: that time, every camera in that tunnel was either down
- 10:35Speaker 2: from maintenance or malfunctioning.
- 10:37Speaker 1: Oh, come on at a failure rate at the exact
- 10:40Speaker 1: same time.
- 10:41Speaker 2: The odds are astronomical. And then you have the paparazzi.
- 10:44Speaker 2: We know there was a swarm chasing them. Reports say
- 10:47Speaker 2: at least fifteen photographers.
- 10:49Speaker 1: The police rounded them up, though.
- 10:51Speaker 2: Are they caught eleven of them? Four just vanished, disappeared
- 10:55Speaker 2: into the night, never identified, never questioned.
- 10:57Speaker 1: Four guys on motorcycles just evaporate from a major crime
- 11:01Speaker 1: scene surrounded by police.
- 11:02Speaker 2: Unless they weren't poparazzi. The files point out that intelligence
- 11:05Speaker 2: operatives often use the press's cover. You carry a camera,
- 11:09Speaker 2: you blend in, you get close to your target without
- 11:11Speaker 2: raising suspicion. The theory is that those four riders weren't
- 11:14Speaker 2: there to take a picture.
- 11:15Speaker 1: They were the operators or the cleanup crew.
- 11:18Speaker 2: And speaking of operators. The files drop some very serious names. Yeah,
- 11:22Speaker 2: they place senior British intelligence officers in Paris that weekend,
- 11:25Speaker 2: specifically Richard Dearlove and Richard Sparant.
- 11:29Speaker 1: And for anyone who doesn't follow six office politics, who
- 11:33Speaker 1: is Richard Dearlove.
- 11:34Speaker 2: At the time, he was a senior director. He would
- 11:37Speaker 2: later go on to become the head of I six,
- 11:39Speaker 2: the big Boss.
- 11:40Speaker 1: See the big Boss.
- 11:42Speaker 2: Someone at that level doesn't just pop over to Paris
- 11:44Speaker 2: for a weekend trip while the Princess of Wales is
- 11:46Speaker 2: in town. In the intelligence world, that's called operational presence.
- 11:51Speaker 2: They arrived shortly before the crash and they left immediately after.
- 11:55Speaker 1: So we have the mechanism, the car, the opportunity, the tunnel,
- 11:59Speaker 1: the cover up, blood, the cameras. But we keep coming
- 12:02Speaker 1: back to the why you mentioned the Muslim marriage issue,
- 12:06Speaker 1: But the files point to something even more specific, a pregnancy.
- 12:10Speaker 2: This is the rumor that has never gone away that
- 12:13Speaker 2: Diana was pregnant with Dodi's child, a Muslim half sibling
- 12:16Speaker 2: to the future King of England.
- 12:18Speaker 1: But the official autopsy said she wasn't pregnant.
- 12:20Speaker 2: The autopsy conducted in London said that. But here's the
- 12:23Speaker 2: crucial forensic detail. Diana's body was embalmed in Paris. Okay,
- 12:27Speaker 2: isn't that standard procedure, Absolutely not before an autopsy. It's
- 12:31Speaker 2: actually illegal in France to embalm a body before a
- 12:34Speaker 2: forensic investigation and a suspicious death. The embalming fluid formaldehyde.
- 12:40Speaker 2: It destroys all topschological evidence and crucially, it makes a
- 12:45Speaker 2: pregnancy test impossible to conduct. And they did it anyway,
- 12:49Speaker 2: within hours of her death, while she was still in
- 12:51Speaker 2: the hospital room. By the time her body got to
- 12:53Speaker 2: London for the official tests, any proof was chemically erased.
- 12:57Speaker 1: That feels rushed, like they were cleaning the scene.
- 13:00Speaker 2: It certainly prevented any definitive answer on the pregnancy. Mohammed
- 13:03Speaker 2: Alfaied believed until the day he died, that she was
- 13:05Speaker 2: pregnant and they were killed to stop that child from
- 13:08Speaker 2: being born.
- 13:08Speaker 1: It's just it's a lot you want to believe it
- 13:11Speaker 1: was a simple tragedy, but the pattern of these coincidences
- 13:14Speaker 1: is so tight.
- 13:15Speaker 2: And we haven't even talked about the biggest piece of
- 13:17Speaker 2: evidence yet, the one that didn't come from a spy
- 13:19Speaker 2: or a lab, the letter, the note from the grave.
- 13:22Speaker 1: Let's spit a minute on this because this isn't a rumor.
- 13:25Speaker 1: This is a physical piece of paper that exists.
- 13:27Speaker 2: It does. Ten months before the crash, in October nineteen
- 13:31Speaker 2: ninety six, Diana sat at her desk in Kensington Palace.
- 13:35Speaker 2: She wrote a letter, sealed it and gave it to
- 13:37Speaker 2: her butler, Paul Burrell. She told him keep this just
- 13:41Speaker 2: in case.
- 13:41Speaker 1: What did it say?
- 13:42Speaker 2: It's chilling. I'm going to read the key part for batim.
- 13:45Speaker 2: She wrote, I am sitting here at my desk today
- 13:48Speaker 2: in October, longing for someone to hug me and encourage
- 13:51Speaker 2: me to keep strong and hold my head high. This
- 13:53Speaker 2: particular phase in my life is the.
- 13:55Speaker 1: Most dangerous, the most dangerous. Yeah, And then she gets
- 13:57Speaker 1: specific she does.
- 13:59Speaker 2: She continues, my husband is planning an accident in my car,
- 14:02Speaker 2: break failure and serious head injury in order to make
- 14:05Speaker 2: the path clear for him to marry. She named someone
- 14:08Speaker 2: else at the time before Camello was the main focus.
- 14:11Speaker 2: But look at the words she chows.
- 14:12Speaker 1: Break, failure, serious head injury.
- 14:15Speaker 2: She didn't predict a shooting or a poisoning. She predicted
- 14:19Speaker 2: a car crash caused by sabotaged breaks that would result
- 14:23Speaker 2: in head trauma. Ten months before it happened, exactly as
- 14:26Speaker 2: it happened.
- 14:26Speaker 1: That's not a coincidence. That sounds like foreknowledge. She knew
- 14:29Speaker 1: she was being hunted, She.
- 14:30Speaker 2: Knew the capabilities of the people she was up against.
- 14:32Speaker 2: She had been on the inside of the machine. She
- 14:34Speaker 2: knew exactly how they operated.
- 14:36Speaker 1: It just gives you goosebumps. She basically wrote the scripts
- 14:39Speaker 1: for her own death.
- 14:40Speaker 2: And when you lay that letter on top of the
- 14:42Speaker 2: Boston Breaks theory, the swapped blood, the missing cameras, the
- 14:46Speaker 2: spies in Paris, the official accident narrative just becomes harder
- 14:51Speaker 2: and harder to believe.
- 14:53Speaker 1: It forces you to ask the question, in a world
- 14:55Speaker 1: of such high stakes, with the reputation and future of
- 14:59Speaker 1: the monarchy hanging in the balance, how far would the
- 15:02Speaker 1: establishment go to protect itself.
- 15:04Speaker 2: There's a saying in intelligence work. Once is an accident,
- 15:07Speaker 2: twice is a coincidence, three times is enemy action. Here
- 15:12Speaker 2: we're looking at what ten ten distinct coincidences, all converging
- 15:16Speaker 2: on one single minute in a dark tunnel.
- 15:19Speaker 1: The official verdict is still accidental death. The case is closed.
- 15:23Speaker 1: But for anyone who looks at these files, the question
- 15:25Speaker 1: marks are still there, blinking.
- 15:27Speaker 2: And they likely always will be, because sometimes the perfect
- 15:30Speaker 2: crime isn't the one nobody sees. It's the one that
- 15:33Speaker 2: everyone sees but is too afraid to call by its
- 15:35Speaker 2: real name.
- 15:36Speaker 1: That's a heavy thought to leave you with. When you
- 15:39Speaker 1: look at the whole pattern, do you see a tragedy
- 15:42Speaker 1: or do you see a hit. That's for you to decide.
- 15:45Speaker 1: Thanks for joining us on Deep Dive. Stay curious.