It’s been nearly 41 years since Princess Grace of Monaco died in a car wreck, but questions still remain: Was it an accident? Or was it a cold-blooded mob murder?
Grace’s fairy-tale life, from Hollywood queen to Mediterranean princess, ended when her Rover P6 3500 shot off a beautiful but treacherous Riviera mountain road – the same road she drove along in her 1955 movie To Catch a Thief.
The official Monaco Palace version is that on the sunny morning of September 13, 1982, Grace Kelly, 52 – who became a princess when she wed Prince Rainier of Monaco in 1956 – decided to drive herself and daughter Stephanie, now 55, down from their weekend farm in the lower French Alps back to the palace.
Halfway down the mountainside filled with treacherous hairpin curves, a truck following Grace’s car saw it suddenly swerve out of control, zigzagging across the tiny road.
“I blew my horn,” said the driver. “The car seemed to pull back into control. But then I realized it was picking up speed, going faster and faster toward a hairpin bend a couple of hundred yards in front.”
The car never made any attempt to slow down around the bend. It simply shot off the edge, disappeared through trees and tumbled down the mountainside into farmer Sesto Lequio’s flower garden, perched on the hillside below.
driver’s door. Grace was unconscious, bleeding from a large forehead wound. Within minutes, police and an ambulance arrived, and that’s when the mystery thickened.
“Princess Grace’s death was covered up,” declared Jacques Bidalou, a former French judge, who spent more than two years and thousands of dollars of his own money investigating the case. “Her car was immediately covered with plastic sheets so no one could take close-up photos of it. Police photographers and crash experts never got a chance to examine the car and its crash path at the scene. The car was whisked away from the scene within half an hour.”
But that’s not all. “Though the accident happened on French territory, Grace was taken to a Monaco hospital, which was nowhere near as well-equipped as nearby hospitals,” added Bidalou. “I was stunned to discover that there was never any investigation into Grace’s accident.”
Grace died on September 14, 1982, 15 minutes after Prince Rainier and their children Princess Caroline and Prince Albert authorized doctors to shut off her life-support system.
“Even more alarming, no autopsy was ever carried out,” stated Bidalou. “The authorities and [Grace’s] husband, Prince Rainier, wanted to bury the case. I would have thought it was in Prince Rainier’s interest to get to the bottom of the accident – unless he has something to hide.
PROC. BY MOVIES
