On the last night of his life, at 8:45 p.m., Dodi Fayed called his stepuncle Hassaan Yasseen at the Ritz Hotel to ask him out to coffee later in the evening. Yes, he would be with Diana, Fayed said, and "yes, we are going to get married."
It may not have been as short a love story as it appeared. Fayed had probably started falling for Diana the same time the rest of the world did. On July 29, 1981, Fayed left a yacht on the Mediterranean and booked a suite at a luxury hotel in Monte Carlo to watch television--the wedding of Charles and Diana. "I got bored," says a friend with him at the time, but "Dodi watched the whole thing, from beginning to end." And now, suddenly, Diana was in his life, at a time when he needed her. "I don't think he would have given Diana up for anything," says the friend. "She put him in a different light with his father."
The domineering Mohammed al Fayed was, says Dodi's friend,"someone who tells you whom you can hang out with, what you can do and not do." Even if the elder Fayed had ordered his son to squire the princess around, the younger Fayed saw the rebel royal as a way out from under his father's thumb. "Dodi," says his friend, "started finding his legs." And on that Saturday night, it seemed as if an engagement was almost certain, even though, as the French police now say, the fabled Repossi diamond ring was never found in the car or on Diana's finger. For the princess apparently had one more thing to do before she could make a public commitment. She had to talk to her sons.
That conversation would never happen, and there would be no tomorrows for Dodi and Diana. That night their lives would be in the hands of a third person. While paparazzi may have hovered around the fatal event, the car was under the command of Henri Paul, al Fayed's trusted deputy security chief at the Ritz. It was a misplaced trust: a series of autopsy results showed not only that Paul was drunk, his blood alcohol nearly four times the legal driving limit, but also that he had ingested a troubling combination of prescription drugs. In reconstructing the last hours of Diana and Fayed, TIME and CNN have uncovered the wanderings of the man who drove them to their death. And while the details shed light on the tragedy, they raise new mysteries and deepen the senselessness of the loss.