The Murder of Princess Diana by Noel Botham Read Free Book Online

constantly accused him, even without evidence, of betraying her.
    After one particularly vocal and unpleasant row at Sandringham where they were celebrating their first New Year as a married couple, Diana, now three months pregnant and suffering the most appalling morning sickness, was heard to scream that she intended to kill herself. When Charles called her bluff, she hurled herself down a shallow flight of wooden stairs, landing in a bundle at the bottom, where she was found by a horrified Queen Mother. Incredibly, even though a local doctor and Diana’s gynecologist had been urgently summoned, Charles simply walked away from his bruised and sobbing wife and went riding. It was to become his pattern of behavior for similar future incidents, of which there were to be several.
    These “suicide bids” occurred over the next few years. They were never serious attempts to take her own life, but were rather cries for help from an increasingly desperate and isolated young woman. They were cries that went unheeded because Charles refused to take them seriously. He treated each attempt with either scorn or indifference, or a mixture of the two, even though on one occasion she slashed her wrists with a razor blade and on another cut her breast and thighs with a penknife, drawing blood. He simply chose to ignore her, as he did when she made enormous efforts to do the right thing in public. She told a friend that she was trying so damn hard and all she needed was a pat on the back, like a dutiful horse. But it was not forthcoming.
    It was immensely stressful for such a naturally shy person as Diana to thrust herself onto the center stage, and if Charles seemed oblivious to the pains she was taking over her royal duties, Diana soon recognized, with growing satisfaction, that the public more than appreciated her efforts. It soon became apparent that it was her, and not Charles, whom the crowds had turned out to see.
    After William’s birth, which briefly gave them one joint achievement they could celebrate together, the couple were rarely in accord, and less than a year after their wedding the royal couple found their marriage inexorably disintegrating. Postnatal depression and a new outbreak of bulimia had Diana in their grip and were eroding what few reserves of strength she had left. Perversely, what little energy remained to her she used to attack her husband, whom she had finally caught declaring his everlasting love for Camilla in a late-night telephone call from his bath. They had stopped sharing their four-poster marital bed even before William was born, and Charles slept in the spare bed in his dressing room. The staff knew this to be true because the prince’s threadbare Teddy now lived there when he was in Highgrove—Teddy was his companion everywhere he went, as housekeeper Wendy Berry remembered. The only person who was allowed to repair the ancient, patched-up cuddly toy was Charles’s nanny, Mabel Anderson.
    Diana’s spirits briefly rallied after Andrew Parker Bowles was promoted to commanding officer of the Household Cavalry, and she learned that the Parker Bowleses were moving; but they sank as quickly when they bought Middlewick House near Corsham, even closer to Highgrove than before, and Charles became a frequent traveler along the twelve miles of roads separating the two homes.
    His conjugal life with Diana was not quite over, however. She had given him an heir, but to be safe he still needed “a spare,” as Diana was later to describe their second-born. But after Harry was born in September 1984, the royal couple ceased making love together. Charles’s affair with Camilla Parker Bowles continued to be the major cause of their frequent, stormy confrontations, but although getting rid of Camilla was a very tall order for Diana, another task she was determined not to shirk was her planned purge of the Prince of Wales’s “Pink Mafia,” as she had dubbed his predominantly homosexual staff.
    Lord