'We Should've Looked After Her Better': Princess Diana's Private Letters Revealed by Former Butler Paul Burrell

Diana, Princess of Wales, who died at the age of 36, on August 31, 1997, was a "complex person," by nearly all accounts, who came to predict a frightening fact about herself in late 1996.

"I have never shown them before, and I’m a bit reluctant to show them to you now because they’re my little personal treasures, and it’s her thoughts to me," Diana's former butler Paul Burrell shared about his former boss' private letters in 2017.

"This particular phase in my life is the most dangerous; my husband is planning an accident in my car, brake failure, and serious head injury in order to make the path clear for him to marry," Diana penned during the autumn of 1996 while mentioning her ex-spouse the then-Prince Charles.

Much has been written about this revelation since it came to light, with the iconic princess' love of psychics and astrology playing a factor in many interpretations of the note.

"Some of these thoughts did come from mystics and psychics but you can’t get away from the fact that she actually wrote it, she actually took time and bothered to write down what her fears and feelings were," Burrell dished.

On that fateful late summer's night in 1997, Lady Di and her romantic partner at the time, Dodi Al-Fayed, were staying at The Ritz Hotel before the playboy movie executive decided to take the princess to his apartment close to the Champs-Elysées in a bid to escape swarming paparazzi at the hotel. He asked his father, the late Mohamed Al Fayed, if the couple could use the wealthy retail executive's security detail to escape the hotel, which he allowed.

While on the road, and with the paparazzi's pursuit of the pair slowly turning into a frenzy, Al Fayed allegedly told driver Henri Paul to take a detour that turned out to be the route he, Diana, and Paul would lose their lives on. Diana and Al Fayed's bodyguard, Trevor Rees-Jones, was the sole survivor of the crash, and to this day, has no memory of the accident.

"No, that is not true, that’s not happened, why are you telling me this?" Burrell disclosed when discussing how he initially reacted to hearing of Diana's death.

About flying to Paris to accompany her casket to London, the ex-aide wrote: "The princess was lying on a bed and she was covered by a white sheet to the neck and to the ankles and I approached the bed and I held her hand and she was warm, so I thought, 'she’s sleeping, she is not dead, this isn’t a dead person in front of me.'"

He concluded: "So I kept telling her to wake up and I started to shake her hand, 'wake up, come on, wake up'… and I realized that she wasn’t going to wake up and then the flood gates opened because I realized that I lost my friend."

Sunday Night reported on Burrell's remarks.