Nearly three decades after Princess Diana's death, the questions surrounding her final weeks are refusing to disappear.
A new FOX special, Celebrity Crime Scene: Princess Diana, is digging back into one of the more explosive theories surrounding the Aug. 31, 1997 Paris crash: whether Diana's increasingly outspoken campaign against landmines had made her enemies among people with enormous political and financial interests at stake.
There is no established evidence that arms dealers-or anyone else-ordered Diana's death. Extensive investigations did not substantiate an assassination conspiracy. But one part of the story is very real: during the final months of her life, Diana had thrown her enormous celebrity behind a campaign challenging the international landmine trade.
And she wasn't doing it quietly.
In January 1997, Diana traveled to Angola and produced some of the most unforgettable photographs of her humanitarian career when she walked through a cleared section of a minefield wearing protective equipment. The images traveled around the world and suddenly turned the campaign against anti-personnel mines into headline news.
Her intervention wasn't universally welcomed. Diana's advocacy became politically controversial in Britain, where the Conservative government had not adopted the comprehensive ban being sought by campaigners. Conservative minister Peter Viggers famously described her as a "loose cannon," demonstrating just how politically sensitive her intervention had become.
Diana didn't retreat.
In August 1997, she traveled to Bosnia to meet landmine survivors and bring further international attention to the devastating injuries the weapons continued causing long after wars had ended.
Just weeks later, she was dead.
Diana, 36, was killed following the catastrophic crash of a Mercedes-Benz in Paris' Pont de l'Alma tunnel in the early hours of Aug. 31. Her companion Dodi Fayed and driver Henri Paul also died, while bodyguard Trevor Rees-Jones survived.
That startling timeline-Diana campaigning against landmines in Bosnia and dying before the month was over-has provided fertile ground for conspiracy theories ever since.
Now Celebrity Crime Scene is putting one of those theories back under the microscope.
According to TMZ, the program examines the possibility that Diana's anti-landmine advocacy angered international arms interests that potentially stood to lose enormous amounts of money if governments moved toward banning the weapons. The special also focuses on vehicles reportedly connected with events surrounding the crash and uses AI technology to recreate the collision from several perspectives, including an approximation of Diana's position inside the Mercedes.
It's sensational material, but there's a crucial distinction: the program is examining a theory, not revealing an established assassination plot.
British authorities spent years investigating allegations that Diana and Dodi had been deliberately killed. Operation Paget, launched by London's Metropolitan Police, investigated numerous conspiracy claims surrounding the crash and found no evidence supporting an organized murder plot.
The subsequent British inquest also did not conclude that Diana was assassinated. In 2008, the jury determined that Diana and Dodi were unlawfully killed through the grossly negligent driving of Henri Paul and the pursuing paparazzi. Their failure to wear seatbelts was identified as a contributing factor.
Still, the facts surrounding Diana's final humanitarian campaign are dramatic enough without turning speculation into certainty.
During the last year of her life, the former Princess of Wales had become one of the world's most recognizable advocates for banning anti-personnel landmines. Wherever Diana went, cameras followed-and she used that extraordinary attention to put landmine victims before an audience numbering in the millions.
The campaign continued after her death. Later in 1997, the International Campaign to Ban Landmines and its coordinator Jody Williams received the Nobel Peace Prize, while more than 100 countries signed the Ottawa Treaty prohibiting anti-personnel mines.
Diana never lived to see it.
That is what gives the renewed controversy its haunting edge. There is no proof that Diana's landmine campaign caused her death, but there is ample evidence that she had become an unusually powerful voice on an issue involving governments, militaries and considerable commercial interests.
She spent some of her final weeks confronting that world.
Then, on Aug. 31, 1997, everything stopped.
Nearly 29 years later, television is once again asking whether there was more to the story-even though the official investigations remain clear that the evidence did not establish the assassination conspiracy that has haunted Diana's death ever since.
Celebrity Crime Scene: Princess Diana aired Aug. 20 on FOX and is available to stream the following day on Hulu, according to TMZ.
