The Murder of Princess Diana Read Online Free PDF

Staverton in Wiltshire, where the prince had been entertaining Duchy of Cornwall officials, and sneaked aboard the royal train which was parked overnight in a siding. She and Charles, it suggested, had secretly spent the night together as lovers.
    Six people knew for certain the story was untrue: Diana and her three flatmates who were in their Chelsea apartment watching television; Charles, who, the official train telephone log showed, had made a late-night call to the Parker Bowles home—and Camilla, the blonde-haired woman in the Sunday Mirror story, who had immediately dashed across country to be with her lover.
    Charles displayed his fury to the Sunday Mirror and its then editor, Bob Edwards, and ordered the palace press secretary, Michael Shea, to denounce the story as a complete fabrication. This deliberate lie, not the first and certainly not the last he would tell about his relationship with Camilla, was hardly the conduct to be expected from a future king.
    Diana, anxious not to be labeled a hussy, but stopping short of revealing the mystery blonde’s real identity—of which she had no doubts at all—for the first time telephoned a royal correspondent, James Whitaker of the Daily Mirror , and told him, “It isn’t true. I stayed in all night with my friends. We never left the flat. Believe me. I am not a liar.”
    At Charles’s insistence a complaint was made to the Press Council, but the palace press office—made aware by the security services of the real facts—said they would not proceed with the matter.
    The one man to suffer from the deception was Bob Edwards, a decent editor whose integrity and judgment had been seriously undermined by the prince’s actions. It was months before he learned the truth and six years before the palace “apologized” by awarding him a CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) for outstanding services to journalism.
    Diana never did receive an explanation from the prince. In fact she didn’t see Charles again for several weeks. On New Year’s Day 1981 she was invited to Sandringham. Had she expected his proposal at the Queen’s Norfolk home then she was to be disappointed. Despite Prince Philip’s obvious frustration at his son’s reluctance to take his growled advice—“For God’s sake, bloody well get on with it”—Charles let the moment pass by. He already had a most enviable lifestyle and the perfect mistress, so why change things?
    It was only at Camilla’s urging that the reluctant prince unenthusiastically agreed to propose on his return from a skiing trip in February. But it was not until three days after his return from the ski slopes of Klosters that Charles finally sent for Diana.
    He had chosen Windsor Castle as the best setting, historically, for his proposal. Considering the purpose of the meeting, it was arranged in a rather old-fashioned, heavy-handed, master-to-servant fashion. The order to attend was not presented as an invitation, Diana recalled later. “It was a royal command.” And what should have been a joyous occasion was made tense and unnatural by Prince Charles’s inability to relax. He was stiffly formal throughout, she remembered, and did not kiss her or hug her or acknowledge her arrival with a touch of any kind. He asked her so suddenly, “Will you marry me?” that she burst out laughing.
    “Yeah, OK,” she replied, still giggling—not completely sure that it wasn’t all some bizarre kind of joke.
    Charles was not laughing. “You do realize that one day you will be queen?” he rebuked her.
    “Yes,” she said again, this time more meekly and not laughing at all.
    It seemed enough for Charles, and he went straight off to another room in the castle to telephone his mother with the news. Diana was not required to speak to her future mother-in-law. To the prince it was “done and dusted,” and he made no attempt to speak to her again for some time, even when she flew off to Australia to “get her breath back”