Word: dianas
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Everyone was expecting fireworks, but all they got was a damp squib. On Monday, the inquest into the deaths of Princess Diana and Dodi Al Fayed adjourned with her former butler Paul Burrell reluctantly agreeing to bring in a letter she had written to him just before she died. The letter, which is partly quoted in one of his books, referred to a special upcoming weekend and a "secret" the two of them shared - a secret that Burrell had refused on Monday to disclose, before the judge demanded the letter. Was Diana going to announce her pregnancy that weekend...
...quite. On Tuesday afternoon, the butler was back and he had a letter - just not the one Diana had written. Instead, Burrell wrote his own letter, a "private and confidential" one to the judge, Lord Justice Scott Baker who, in turn, paraphrased it for the court. Burrell had made a mistake: the Diana letter wasn't in his Cheshire home, but actually at his house in Florida. He would send it to the court once he retrieved it; in the meantime, Burrell would let the judge in on the secret - as long as he didn't tell. But Baker said...
...revelations? First, that Princess Diana was thinking about buying a house in the U.S., either in Malibu or Cape Cod. And second, that she was also looking at a place in South Africa. Hardly earth-shattering. But all was not lost - Burrell had brought something back from Cheshire, a small pile of papers and photos he had used to write his two tell-all books. Along with the "secret" letter and a few other letters he had in Florida, these, Burrell said, were the last bits of physical proof of his time with the Princess. After the publication...
...surviving snippets of Burrell's life as butler to the world's most famous woman include six notes that Diana had written to him, a box of holiday snapshots from trips their families had taken together, and a lavender-colored spiral notebook in which he had jotted down descriptions of people and events and that "as far as I can see, adds nothing to the inquiry," Baker said as he admitted it all into evidence. Michael Mansfield, who represents Dodi's father, Harrods owner Mohamed Al-Fayed, wasn't so sure: "It may be what it doesn't disclose...
Like in any good soap opera, this episode ended on a cliffhanger. In an attempt to show that Burrell knew something significant about Dodi and Diana that he wasn't telling, Mansfield read out the last page in Burrell's 2003 book A Royal Duty. It quotes a letter Diana had written to the butler not long before she died. In it, she refers to "the coming weekend" being an important one. Then she goes on to say, "I wanted to write on paper how enormously touched I am that you share this excitement with me as well. What...