Conspiracy Theories

Princess Diana

Not too long after the death of Princess Diana in the car crash in a Paris tunnel, I happened to be working on a documentary film about bridges for a PBS television series entitled Building Big. We were in New York City to film the Brooklyn and Williamsburg Bridges and were meeting in a downtown office with the chief of civil engineering for the city. When he started to explain what causes a major structure like a suspension bridge to fail, he stated that it is almost never one thing going catastrophically wrong. It is more often a series of unpredictable events that together cause the tragic result.

I think there is a lesson here, and it applies to the news that Scotland Yard is once again looking into Diana’s death.

Metropolitan Police officials have emphasized that they are not reopening the probe or coroner’s inquest that concluded the crash that killed the princess, her companion of the time Dodi Fayed and their driver was an accident. What they are looking into is a claim by the former parents-in-law of a British Special Air Services sniper that he had bragged to their daughter, his then-wife, that an SAS commando unit was behind the “accident.”

I will be shocked if this allegation turns out to be true.

First of all, conspiracies involving “big” operations and/or government agencies are nearly impossible to keep hushed up. Look how easy it was for Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden, computer guys in low level defense and intelligence positions, to dump thousands of files into the public domain. In this digital age, virtually nothing is secret and almost everything is memorialized on paper or in an email.

Also, the people who would have had to have been behind a conspiracy against Diana would know how risky their venture was. If any word got out, the personal and national consequences would have been huge. It would have been like the defense-alleged police conspiracy against O.J. Simpson. John Douglas and I traced it out and demonstrated in our book Journey Into Darkness that for there to have been a police conspiracy to plant evidence against Simpson, more than a dozen L.A. cops who did not previously know each other or each other’s feelings about race and did not know if O.J. had an iron-clad alibi for the evening, would have had to work together, knowing that if any of them talked or anyone else found out, they would not only have lost their precious pensions, but would have spent a good deal of their remaining lives contemplating the view of San Francisco from the windows of San Quentin.

In the same manner, anyone in British government, intelligence, or military circles stupid enough to think that assassination was the way to rid the nation of the potential “embarrassment” of having the former wife of the Prince of Wales and mother of a future king consorting with a Muslim still would have considered the risks. First, there are many more efficient ways to assassinate someone than to try to stage a car wreck. For one thing, you can’t be confident it will be fatal. In this case, Diana’s bodyguard, who was wearing a seatbelt, survived. Second, anyone powerful enough to order something like this would also have to be fairly insane, a combination that doesn’t come up all that often. Because anyone contemplating such an order would have to know that if it failed and word got out, which would be overwhelmingly likely, it would bring down the government and create a political firestorm of worldwide proportions.

The sad fact is that the most likely scenario for Diana’s death involves an unpredictable series of events – a late-night ride, a driver who had been drinking, pursuit by obsessed paparazzi, a high rate of speed, unbuckled seat belt, a French emergency medical protocol calling for stabilizing the victim at the scene before transport to the hospital, even the decision of which route to take – all came together to cause the tragedy. If you could take away one link in the chain of causality, you could probably avoid the outcome.

If, by some chance, this does turn out to be the kind of conspiracy I just described as being nearly impossible to pull off, I will gladly and publicly examine the reasons why I was wrong. Because that would be one of the stories of the millennium.

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