The author carried out a detailed examination of all the evidence from the French inquiry, the Operation Paget ‘investigation’ and the 2007 Lord Justice Scott Baker inquest. On 7 April 2008, five days after the Coroner concluded his summing up, the jury returned their verdict of ‘unlawful killing’, blaming the ‘grossly negligent’ driving of Henri Paul and the drivers of the following vehicles. The complete inquest transcript of evidence filled 30 lever-arch files. The author interviewed key expert witnesses and studied media reports and other books, including those by Australian writer John Morgan. He also used his Photoshop expertise to forensically analyse all the available photographs and discovered disturbing anomalies. The mountain of evidence was described as a jigsaw and the coroner himself pointed out that it was impossible to visualise the evidence of hundreds of witnesses and experts. The author decided that there had to be a way to achieve that. There was, but it would take more than two years to produce an animation that plotted the evidence of eyewitnesses, the French police and the paparazzi. The other huge problem that required solving was the question of Henri Paul’s blood test results. This had always been a contentious subject, especially as so many experts in that field vigourously contested the results and concluded that the blood tested for alcohol could not have belonged to Henri Paul.

To solve that problem, I made various spreadsheets of the blood samples and testing procedures. This is the only version that accommodated all the evidence. Operation Paget apparently gave up trying to untangle the chain of custody.

THE INVESTIGATION