Grace: Her Lives - Her Loves (56 page)

Captain Roger Bencze was heading north on a drugs investigation when the call came over his radio phone. Bencze was the thirty-five-year-old commander of the gendarmerie company at Men ton, which had responsibility for the French towns and countryside around Monaco. As such, Bencze was the liaison officer between the local French police authorities and the police force of Monaco itself, and that was why headquarters had called him on the phone. Gendarme Frederic Mouniama had radioed in the news that this fairly routine mountain road crash involved two very non-routine people. The captain had better hurry and get there himself.

Bencze arrived at the scene of the accident at ten-thirty a.m.— about thirty-five minutes after the crash, and five minutes after Prince Rainier. The fact that Rainier went to the site of the crash was not revealed at the time, and has not been known since. The Monaco police routinely monitor the radio frequencies of their

French colleagues, and when they picked up the radio reports of Gendarme Mouniama, they got straight on to the palace. Rainier was rushed along the coast road to Cap d’Ail with his private secretary, the chief of his palace guard, and the chief of the Monaco police in a cavalcade of sirens and flashing lights. They arrived just in time to see the Monaco fire department loading Grace into their ambulance and taking her back to Monaco and to the hospital that bore her name. Confused, bruised, and still sobbing hysterically, Stephanie was taken there at the same time.

Newspaper reports at the time suggested there was something improper in the fact that Grace and Stephanie should have been whisked away so rapidly to Monaco after an accident on French soil, but the same would have happened to any crash victim who got hurt at that spot. The protocols between France and Monaco mandate that all medical victims should be taken to the nearest possible hospital, irrespective of territory or nationality, and the nearest medical facility to Cap d’Ail is the Princess Grace Hospital in Monaco.

Bencze was unable to make out what condition Grace might be in. As he got out of his car, she was being carried away, an inert body lying on a stretcher. The police captain, a tall, lean man who would have been well cast as the detective in
The Fugitive,
was intent on discovering how this crash had occurred, and he started by interviewing the people who had found Grace and had first summoned help. Jacques Provence and his wife Josétte had been having coffee with Jean-Claude Corneveau, a friend who was staying with them, when they heard the Rover come crashing down the hill outside. They ran out at once into the garden, where they were joined by Michel Pierre, a neighbor. Pierre took a sledgehammer to the only door of the car that was not wrecked beyond measure—the front, driver’s door on the left-hand side. Stephanie came staggering out, and while Madame Provence was comforting her and ringing the police, Jacques Provence and Corneveau were pouring water on the engine to extinguish a few sparks they had seen.

It was at this point that the Provences’ landlord appeared on the scene. Sesto Lequio was a flower seller of Italian origin, sixty-two years old, rotund, ill-shaven, and fond of a good story. When reporters reached the scene of the crash around lunch time, Monsieur and Madame Provence were nowhere to be seen. They had told the police all that they knew, but they wished to steer clear of the press. Jacques Provence was a senior manager at the Loew’s Hotel in Monte Carlo. He had friends at the palace, and he did not want his name splashed all over the papers.

Sesto Lequio, however, had no such inhibitions. When the reporters found him tidying up his garden, he was only too happy to provide them with a story, and to take some money for it as well. He sold interviews to various papers at a brisk pace through the afternoon, culminating with a generous and exclusive contract to talk only to the local representative of the
National Enquirer.

Much of what Lequio said was not borne out by other witnesses. He claimed to have extinguished a fire in the engine of the Rover with his fire extinguisher, though Provence, Corneveau, and Michel Pierre all said they saw no fire in the engine beyond a few sparks. When the police forensic expert went over the car that afternoon, he found no trace of extinguisher foam or chemicals. Lequio also claimed to have been the hero who rescued Stephanie—”I carried Stephanie in my arms”—though everyone else thought she had staggered out by herself once the door was broken down. But the flower seller’s greatest flight of fancy, which hit the newspapers next day and which continues to haunt the story of Grace’s death, was that it was not Grace but her seventeen-year-old daughter who was driving—and thus breaking the law. In France you must be eighteen years old to hold a driver’s license.

When the newspaper stories started appearing next morning, Captain Bencze had already arrived at his preliminary findings. Based on the testimony of Yves Phily, the Provences, and Sesto Lequio himself—who had made no mention of his theories in his sworn statement to the police—Bencze had concluded that Grace had lost control of the car through illness or some mental lapse, and had slumped her foot on the accelerator, half in and out of consciousness, possibly in the process of trying to hit the brake.

Bencze had not been impressed with Sesto Lequio as a witness. The man had not been able to read his own statement or to sign his name to it—he had had to place his mark in the form of an X. Some of his claims to the newspapers were clear fantasy. “I heard Princess Grace say,” he told James Whitaker of the
Daily Mirror,
“‘I want you to believe that I was driving the car,’” though all the other witnesses, including the gendarmes who first arrived at the scene, were adamant that Grace was unconscious all the time and could have said nothing. The only evidence for Lequio’s allegation that Stephanie was driving, and the starting point of his entire theory, was the fact that Stephanie had emerged through the driver’s door, when that was, in fact, the only possible door through which she could have escaped from the wreck.

Just the same, Bencze felt he had to investigate the allegation. He was answerable to the Procureur General in Nice who, like all district attorneys, had to take account of what was being said in the press. Passing the fingerprint brush over the steering wheel revealed nothing. “That is usual on steering wheels,” says Bencze. “There are hundreds of prints.”

Working out a timetable from Fred Mouniama’s La Turbie sighting of Grace behind the wheel at 9:45 and the time of the crash—the clock of the Rover was stopped at 9:54—it was clear that if Grace did indeed stop the car and change places with Stephanie, she must have been very quick about it. It was nearly a mile and a half of narrow, twisting road from the village down to the crash. From what Bencze knew about Grace, it did not seem likely that she would willingly have broken French law, but it was just possible that she had felt faint and had asked her daughter to take over for the last stretch of the road.

Bencze and his colleagues therefore embarked on a slow drive down the road from La Turbie, looking for a spot where it was possible to pull off to the side. Stopping in the road itself to change places would have blocked following traffic and would have caught the attention of someone driving by. The only possible spot was at the last corner but one, beside the site of the model car racing track. There was a gravel shoulder where cars could pull off and park. Yves
Phily, the truck driver, had testified that he was already following the brown Rover at that point, but to make doubly sure, Bencze asked Phily to meet him for a second time, and drove down the CD 37 yet again with him.

The truck driver had no doubt. He had been following the Rover well before the radio-control circuit bend, he said, and the car had gone right around the corner smoothly without stopping. There was no possible way that the princesses could have switched.

Bencze dispatched a report to this effect to Nice, and said as much to reporters who took the trouble to track him down. But no one seemed very interested. The story that Stephanie was driving had already become the folkloric explanation of an event that many people found troubling. If Princess Grace could be snuffed out for no special reason one sunny morning in a car, it could happen to anyone. The reality of Grace crushed and twisted on the hillside was the opposite of the fantasy that princesses exist to foster.

The mystery might have been dispelled then, or at any time since, if Stephanie, her father, or any of their spokesmen, had issued a clear and convincing account of what actually happened inside the car. Rainier once said that Stephanie had tried to pull on the emergency brake, but the police report on the car is definite that the emergency brake had not been engaged. Some of the family’s closest friends feel quite certain that Stephanie and her mother were arguing as the car went down the hill, but none will say this for the record, since, if true, it would mean that Stephanie’s quarrel with her mother was, indirectly, an instrument in Grace’s death.

The statements of the palace press office during these admittedly hectic and tragic days only served to deepen the mystery. The first communiqué, issued soon after midday on Monday, September 13, stated categorically that the cause of the accident was brake failure, and the palace phoned Roger Bencze, requesting him to back up this explanation when he spoke to the press. The Frenchman refused. He had found nothing to indicate brake failure, and the forensic examination of the car at four-thirty that afternoon—which determined, among other things, that neither princess had been wearing a seat belt—could find no evidence that either the brakes or the brake lights had failed. A few days later the Rover car company sent a pair of engineers to examine the wrecked car in even more detail. They came to the same conclusion, and concerned for its reputation, the company insisted that the palace formally withdraw the accusation about the brakes failing, which was done in a statement dated September 20.

If the crash had involved almost anyone else, French or Monégasque, the French gendarmerie would have been able to interview the surviving passenger to find out what had happened in the car. They would have tested Grace’s blood for alcohol, drugs, or illness as a matter of course, and her death would have been followed by an autopsy and an analysis of the contents of her stomach.

But all these channels were closed to Roger Bencze around six o’clock on the evening of the crash. A handwritten note from Monaco’s chief law officer was delivered to the police station in La Turbie, where Bencze had established his investigation headquarters. The note drew attention to the protocol between France and Monaco which exempted members of the princely family from being questioned or examined by French police officers, and accompanying the note was a photocopy of the relevant clauses from the treaty. It would be impossible for Bencze to interview either princess.

This need not have been the end of the matter. In the event of a Grimaldi being involved in a serious crime on French soil—either as witness or suspect—a writ of extradition could be sought, and Bencze looked into the process that Monday night. He contacted his Procureur General in Nice, who, in turn, contacted the French Foreign Office in Paris. The answer came back that extradition was, of course, always a possibility, but that this process should only be launched if Bencze felt that he had good reason.

Captain Bencze decided that he did not. By the afternoon of Tuesday, September 14, he had established to his satisfaction that Stephanie had not been driving the car, which was the only issue that had any criminal or legal implications. The girl and her mother may or may not have been quarreling, but French law did not consider that possibility relevant to the driver error—or illness—which, the detective had come to feel, were the most probable causes of the crash.

The only last wrinkle was the possibility of sabotage. This was raised several years later by some of the same newspapers who had given credence to the statements of Sesto Lequio, and a scenario was created in which Grace was said to have tried, in some unspecified fashion, to cleanse the principality of gangster elements, who then retaliated by sabotaging the brakes or steering on her car. As with all theories about the Mafia, this theory had the virtue of not requiring any evidence. Indeed, the very absence of evidence was taken as proof that the Mafia must have done the dirty deed.

Roger Bencze did, in fact, specifically investigate the possibility of sabotage on the day of the crash. It was one of the issues examined in the mechanical postmortem of the Rover, which he supervised at four-thirty that afternoon. The Procureur General had come over in person from Nice, and the investigation was conducted by Noel Anton, a professional accident investigator who conducted all such local car autopsies for insurance companies and for the Menton gendarmerie.

Printed out on its blue-and-white police inquiry form, the report is a precise document, rather sad in its cataloging of the details of a life cut short: “1972 Rover 3500. License Plate 6359MC. Insurance Company: UAP [a major French company]. Coverage: all risks. . . . Front windshield: broken. Rear windshield: broken. Ignition key: broken. Tires: good condition on all surfaces, none burst. Hand brake: functioning, not engaged. Automatic gear: set in ‘Drive.’ Odometer: 25,540 kilometers. Radio: switched off. Steering wheel: twisted, no control. Foot brake: no control possible. . . . ”

“The engineer investigated these last two very carefully,” Bencze explains. “The brakes and the steering mechanisms had been damaged badly by the crash, but there was no sign of tampering—no lines cut, no connections that had been artificially loosened. It was also clear that the prince’s garage had serviced and maintained the car in very good condition.” When Rover’s engineers arrived from Britain to carry out their own analysis of the car, sabotage was one of the possibilities that they examined. It would not have been a welcome discovery, but it would have helped remove the suspicion that their car had been to blame. They concluded that there was no evidence of sabotage.