Death of a Princess by Tom Sancton & Tom Sancton

Author:Tom Sancton & Tom Sancton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2017-07-11T04:00:00+00:00

10

The Driver

Henri Paul’s body still lay on a slab in the Paris morgue, but he knew no peace. His blood, hair, eye fluid, and organ tissues were being examined under microscopes, shaken up in test tubes and centrifuges, and combined with chemical reagents to see what they contained. The first results, announced on the afternoon of September 1, showed that his blood carried nearly three times the legal driving limit of 0.5 g/l. One analysis, done by the police lab, showed 1.87 g/l; the other, given out to a private firm as a control, revealed 1.74 g/l. The news had the effect of a bombshell.

“This changes everything!” declared Gilbert Collard, a lawyer for photographer Christian Martinez. “We are now told that [Paul] was driving extremely fast, in a vehicle he did not master, in a state of drunkenness punished by criminal law. He was endangering people’s lives.” William Bourdon, attorney for the Sipa agency’s Nikola Arsov, chimed in that the photographers had been made “sacrificial lambs” in a frenzy of “showbiz justice” and demanded that the case against them be dropped.

Sensing that the tide had suddenly shifted against them, Ritz lawyers and representatives of the Fayed family launched a vigorous counterattack. First, they flatly rejected the validity of the test results. Fayed spokesman Michael Cole, at a September 5 press conference in London, called Paul an “exemplary employee” and screened portions of a Ritz security camera video to prove that he had been behaving normally on the night of the accident. * “We have as much as possible identified Henri Paul’s movements for the two hours or so that he was actually at the hotel and we are satisfied we can account for all of them both with videotape and people giving very detailed statements of his movements and actions that night,” said Cole. “We are satisfied and happy that their accounts of his demeanor are accurate, and those accounts are that he was sober, he didn’t smell of alcohol, his gait was steady, and no suggestion or indication that he was anything other than completely sober. We’re just trying to demonstrate that this man didn’t have 175 ml of alcohol in his blood or he would have been lurching about.”

To back up his skepticism about the test results, Cole trotted out an expert witness, Dr. Peter Vanezis, Regis Professor of Forensic Medicine at the University of Glasgow. Vanezis said he had gone to Paris at the request of the Fayeds in order to verify the test results. He was not given access to Paul’s body, he said, but was allowed to see the test results. He questioned the handling of the blood samples, saying the parallel tests were actually performed on one blood batch that had been divided into two parts, thus both results would be compromised in the event of a contamination. Though he had absolutely no concrete grounds to indicate that this had been the case, Vanezis stated that, given the “violent” nature of the death, “the possibility of contamination of the blood is real and must be seriously considered.

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