Investigator Recalls Princess Diana’s Death, Says 'Time for the Story to Be Told': "Fake Documents..."

A quarter century after Princess Diana's tragic death, Lord John Stevens revealed many details about the investigation that captured the world's attention. The former Metropolitan Police Commissioner, who headed the far-reaching inquiry into Diana's fatal car accident, told for the very first time unimaginable details about the probe, including a stunning revelation involving the interrogation of King Charles.

The 79-year-old Lord Stevens made an unusually candid appearance on This Morning to discuss the Channel 4 documentary series Investigating Diana: Death in Paris. His decision to speak up about the matter stemmed from a desire for transparency. "Well it's transparency, [we want] people to understand what we did and why we did it and what the conclusions were," he said ruefully, adding thoughtfully, "Maybe they will come to the same conclusions the jury did at the coroner's court." The investigation was codenamed Operation Paget and involved more than 100 witnesses, as per The Express. "I just hope, at the end of the day, people understand we did a really good job and worked very hard under immense pressure. I think it is time for the story to be told," Stevens added.

One of the more bombshell revelations came when Lord Stevens acknowledged indeed having to discuss with King Charles a somewhat disturbing note written by Diana in 1995. The note, discovered in the pantry at Kensington Palace, showed Diana's eerie prediction of how she would die due to "brake failure and serious head injury," supposedly to enable Charles to marry Tiggy Legge-Bourke, his son's former nanny, as per Daily Mail.

When asked about the note during a closed-door interview at St. James's Palace in 2005, King Charles was cooperative but perplexed. "I did not know anything about [the note] until it was published in the media," the King said during the hearing, insisting that he never discussed it with Diana. Lord Stevens reflected on the immense pressure surrounding the investigation, given that 85 percent of the public didn't believe Diana's death was an accident. "You have to keep in the middle of it and not go one way or the other, and as I said, go where the evidence takes you," he reiterated. This was the defining nature of the whole investigation.

The former police chief did have one major regret: not investigating Martin Bashir, the BBC journalist who interviewed Diana for her famous Panorama interview. "If there'd been an allegation then that Bashir had produced allegedly fake documents to Princess Diana, which is a criminal offense, we'd have investigated it. My goodness me, we would have done," he said. Revelations in recent times about the methods employed by Bashir have made many question whether he could have influenced Diana's state of mind on the date she wrote that note.

The investigation's conclusion came in 2008, when a jury of six women and five men reached a decisive verdict after 22 hours of deliberation. They determined Diana had been "unlawfully killed by the grossly negligent driving of the following vehicles [the paparazzi] and of the Mercedes driver Henri Paul." The crash also claimed the lives of Diana's companion, Dodi Fayed, and driver Henri Paul.