On August 31^st, 1997, Princess Diana died in a car crash in Paris, France. Ever since that devastating day there’s been a lot of unnerving claims surrounding Princess Diana’s death. Claims of which are called “conspiracies”, a dirty little word that titillates Jesse Ventura, stimulates elaborate discussions (as well as doubts), and conjures images of paranoid tin foil hat wearers. On one side, you have official reports that conclude that Henri Paul, the chauffeur for Diana, lost control of the vehicle while driving 121 mph with a blood alcohol level of between 0.173 and 0.187. On the other side, you have Mohamed Al-Fayed (the owner of Hôtel Ritz, for which Paul worked) claiming that the crash was orchestrated by MI6 on orders by the Royal Family.

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Flash forward to 2013, and you have a Wikipedia page with 6156 words and 70 sources all dedicated to conspiracy theories surrounding Princess Diana’s death. Some of the debunked and archived conspiracies say:

• Paul was in pay of a national security service and was working for MI6.
• That Paul was not drunk, and that blood samples proving his intoxication were falsified.
• Richard Tomlinson, a former MI6 agent who was arrested for breaching the Official Secrets Act of 1989, said that the MI6 used a strobe light to blind Paul, causing the crash.
• One of the motives to murder Diana was that she was possibly pregnant with Dodi Fayed’s child, and that they were about to get engaged.

In August and October of this year, two new books were released surrounding the purported plots and pacts to pulverize the princess.

Alan Power’s The Princess Diana Conspiracy claims that Paul had been secretly in cahoots with MI6. Powers goes on in his book saying that Paul was double crossed, and MI6 conspired with an SAS hit squad to wipe out both him and the princess

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An even newer booked titled The Assassination of Princess Diana by John Morgan touches up on how someone “tampered with” Princess Diana’s vehicle, resulting in brake failure. Morgan says in his book that even Diana believed there was a plot to kill her based off notes and phone calls she made with friends and lawyers. Princess Diana allegedly said to her friend Simone Simmons that she was being stalked by “the men in grey suits”, a conclave of killers who cut the brakes of her soft-top green Audi in November of 1995. According to the book, what followed next was that Diana experienced brake failure when driving back to Kensington Palace from a doctor’s appoint in Marylebone; the princess winded up coasting through red traffic lights after putting her foot on the brake.

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Above you’ll see a letter written by Princess Diana sent to her butler Paul Burrell. Burrell kept it secret until after the car crash in Paris in 1997 which killed Diana. The letter has been questioned for its validity. Lucia Flecha de Lima, a close friend of the princess, said that Burrell was “perfectly capable of imitating” her handwriting.

(Pictures via CNN, WikiCommons, Amazon (1), (2), Telegraph.co.uk)