Princess Diana’s predictions of her death by car crash dismissed by investigator

The Daily Beast’s Marlow Stern recently did an interview with John Stevens, also known as Lord Stevens. Lord Stevens was the Scotland Yard investigator who headed Operation Paget, the multi-year inquiry into the death of Princess Diana. He was hired in 2004 and it took three years for Stevens and his team to come to the conclusion that there was nothing to see here, folks. Operation Paget found no criminal conspiracy to murder Diana, no plot by British intelligence to monitor Diana’s divorced life, no evidence that Prince Philip or Prince Charles had ordered a hit on Diana. The details uncovered (or not uncovered) by Operation Paget are now part of a Discovery docuseries called The Diana Investigations. Various people associated with the investigation and with Diana are interviewed as part of the series, and Lord Stevens had a lot to say to the Daily Beast. Some notable highlights, especially about the two instances where Princess Diana predicted that she would die in a car crash.

Stevens never questioned Prince Philip, but they did have some idea about the white Fiat: “We put certain questions in writing to Prince Philip and had our answers to those, and the Fiat owner, we do know by circumstantial evidence—and so do the French Brigade criminelle—who drove that car. He actually disappeared from the scene. He wasn’t the reason for the accident—the actual car smacked into him going down that ramp at 75 mph and it was a speed limit of 40 mph. This is all in the 832 pages of the report that we did that came out during the six months of the inquest, and that’s why I can be certain that we got it right. We looked into 104 allegations made by various people of conspiracy and murder.

The owner of the white Fiat, who clipped the Fayed Mercedes: “As I’ve said before we had circumstantial evidence. The problem with that was the French held the inquiry, and we weren’t allowed to re-investigate that part of the inquiry. They came to the same conclusion: He had left the scene because there isn’t a criminal offense in France if you leave a scene where someone is dying or badly injured. I think the thing is, he’s been a bit of a victim in this as well. He’s had to live with this. But there are certain aspects of the car: The car was changed in color the following day, he was a security officer, the description fits him, he has a big dog which someone saw in the back of the car, it goes on…”

The Paul Burrell Letter, the letter from Diana where she wrote that Prince Charles is “planning ‘an accident’ in my car, brake failure or serious head injury…”: “It was just one of the issues that had to be looked at. Recently in the High Court, that letter has passed through the legal system and Tiggy Legge-Bourke has received substantial damages, so I don’t want to go into that in any way, shape, or form. But it was just one of those issues that had to be looked at. The Burrell letter… what can one say? It’s a bit like the [Martin] Bashir mess, where he hoodwinked Princess Diana into an interview, which obviously affected her mental state as well. So I don’t want to say much more about that other than that.

The Mishcon Note. (Stern: It’s a big scene in the doc concerning a contemporaneous note Lord Mishcon made from a meeting with Diana in 1995 wherein she said she was informed by “reliable sources” that there was a plot to “get rid of her” via car accident. At a minimum, it was a quite eerie premonition.) Stevens: “It was—you’re exactly right. The letter was given by Lord Mishcon to my predecessor, Paul Condon, and he put it in his safe. I was only made aware of that when I was made commissioner myself. And I had been made aware Lord Mishcon said that he hadn’t actually attached much importance to it. However, when the coroner announced his inquest, I made sure that letter was immediately given to the royal coroner, who at that time was Michael Burgess and then subsequently became Lord Justice Scott Baker.

Following up on Mishcon Letter: “The Mishcon letter, we followed that up. I interviewed Lord Mishcon on three occasions and took further statements on that letter, because it’s something that caused me great concern. I saw Lord Mishcon about a month before he died, in about the spring of 2005, and he held course to the fact that he thought she was paranoid, and he hadn’t held much credence to it. He was her solicitor, and remember, a solicitor has legal obligations to their clients. He was kind enough to make no mistake about it.

[From The Daily Beast]

Stevens also claims that Diana believed that her protection officers were spying on her and selling stories about her to the press, and that in his opinion, “I don’t think that was the case at all.” He says he investigated the claims that the US Secret Service were listening to Diana’s calls but they weren’t, and that MI5 and MI6 were not listening to Diana or spying on her either. Again, this has all become really common after Diana’s death, for the establishment figures (like Lord Stevens) to simply shrug off or obfuscate certain details. Stevens says flat-out that they found zero evidence that the press was spying on Diana, that British intelligence was spying on Diana or that American intelligence was spying on Diana. This was the 1990s – of course the press was spying on her! Those phone call recordings didn’t just happen accidentally. Diana knew she was being spied on!

As for the Mishcon note and the Burrell letter – again, Diana had very specific premonitions that she was going to be assassinated and she TOLD PEOPLE. She wrote it down and gave it to her butler. She told her lawyer. And then Lord Stevens comes in and he’s like “well, who cares about what the butler says” and “her lawyer thought she was paranoid, case closed!” Like, y’all wanna investigate why Diana was convinced that she would die in a car crash right before she died in a car crash?

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red.