It was 12:07 a.m. on August 31, 1997. In the softly lit Imperial Suite of the Hôtel Ritz Paris, the laughter had died down, the champagne flutes stood half-empty, and Princess Diana was preparing to leave forever.

Now, for the first time, a former Ritz security guard who was stationed that night inside the suite has come forward with a detail never disclosed to French investigators, the 2008 British inquest, or Mohamed Al-Fayed’s private inquiry team: in the final minutes before Diana descended the service stairs to the rear exit, she deliberately took a small, cream-colored note, folded twice into a tight square, and slipped it into the innermost zippered pocket of her black Lady Dior handbag.

“I watched her do it,” says François Lacroix (name changed at his request), 61, who spent 34 years with the Ritz’s internal security service before retiring in 2022. Speaking exclusively from his apartment in the Paris suburbs, Lacroix’s voice still drops to a whisper when he recalls the moment. “She thought no one was looking. She turned slightly away from Dodi, away from Trevor Rees-Jones, and with both hands she opened the bag, placed the note very carefully inside, then closed the zip as if sealing a vault. Her face… it was not the face of someone going to dinner. It was the face of someone hiding evidence.”

The black Lady Dior handbag, made iconic by Diana herself, was recovered from the wreckage of the Mercedes in the Pont de l’Alma tunnel. Its contents were photographed, catalogued, and returned to the Spencer family in 1998. Lipstick, breath mints, a compact mirror, her mobile phone, and a small amount of cash were all accounted for. Conspicuously absent from every official inventory: any folded note.

Lacroix is adamant. “I saw it with my own eyes. It was thick writing paper, Ritz stationery, folded small enough to disappear in a palm. She had been writing earlier in the evening; I noticed the blotter on the desk had been used. Then, just before they left, she did that deliberate motion. I have never forgotten it.”

Why speak now? Lacroix says the recent wave of revelations (Elton John’s private testimony about Diana’s fears of a “hidden threat” inside the Palace, and firefighter Xavier Gourmelon’s account of the mysteriously rerouted ambulance) finally broke his silence. “Too many people who were there that night are starting to tell the truth,” he says, eyes welling. “I am tired of carrying this alone.”

The missing note has long been a ghost in the margins of Diana conspiracy research. In October 1997, Paul Burrell, Diana’s butler, dramatically revealed the existence of a separate letter kept in a mahogany box at Kensington Palace, in which Diana accused unnamed persons of planning “an accident in my car, brake failure and serious head injury” to clear the path for Charles to remarry. That letter, dated October 1996, was produced at the 2008 inquest. But researchers have always asked: if Diana was still writing warnings in the final weeks of her life, might she have carried an updated version, something too explosive to leave behind in London?

Lacroix’s testimony suggests exactly that. He recalls that at approximately 9:45 p.m., while Dodi was on the phone arguing with his father about the decoy plan, Diana sat alone at the Louis XVI desk in the suite’s salon. “She wrote quickly, maybe three or four lines,” he says. “She folded the page once, then again, then held it in her hand for a long time, staring at it. Later, when they decided to leave via the back, she slipped it into the bag. I remember thinking: whatever is on that paper, she does not trust anyone in this hotel to see it.”

The handbag’s journey after the crash is itself shrouded in confusion. French judicial police took possession of it at Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital at 4:30 a.m. on August 31. Photographs entered as evidence at the 1999 investigation show the bag open on a metal table, contents scattered. Yet no investigator ever mentioned a folded note. When the Spencer family reclaimed Diana’s personal effects in early 1998, Earl Spencer reportedly asked French authorities whether “any letters or documents” had been found inside. The official reply, preserved in the British inquest files, was negative.

So where did the note go?

Three possibilities now dominate heated discussion on X and specialist forums:

It was removed at the hospital by a member of the French or British security services before the official inventory.
It was taken from the wreckage in the tunnel during the 1 hour 43 minutes before French police fully secured the scene, a period when several unidentified individuals were photographed near the Mercedes.
Diana herself removed it in the ambulance during moments of lucidity and destroyed or hid it, an act of final defiance.

Lacroix leans toward the first explanation. “The Ritz was crawling with plainclothes officers that night, French DST, British too. Everyone knew who she was. If that note named names, Camilla, Charles, courtiers, anyone, do you think they would let it reach an autopsy table?”

The former guard’s account has ignited a firestorm online. Within hours of this story breaking, the hashtag #DianaNote trended worldwide, with users posting side-by-side images of the handbag inventory and Ritz cream stationery. One widely shared thread by @ParisMatchArchive unearthed a 1997 statement from Ritz receptionist Sophie Rodriguez, who claimed she saw Diana “writing something urgently” around 10 p.m. and asking for an envelope that was never used. “She changed her mind,” Rodriguez had said. “She kept the paper.”

As of this evening, Kensington Palace has declined to comment on whether the Spencer family was ever made aware of a missing document. The French Ministry of the Interior issued a terse statement: “All items recovered from the vehicle were catalogued in the presence of judicial officers. No additional papers were found.”

Yet François Lacroix is not sleeping any easier. “Every year on the 31st of August, I see her hands folding that note,” he says. “I see the way she looked around first, like a hunted animal protecting her last secret. If that paper still exists, someone out there knows exactly what Princess Diana was trying to tell the world in her final minutes alive.”

Somewhere tonight, in a forgotten evidence box, a safe in London, or the lining of a handbag long buried with its owner, a small square of Ritz stationery may still carry the last words Diana intended the world to read.

The question is no longer whether the note existed.

It is who made it disappear, and why.