The Drunk Driver Hoax
From the moment the French authorities began leaking the purported forensic findings (that Paul had been driving the Mercedes high on booze and prescription drugs), his family began demanding that a separate, independent autopsy be conducted.
The French authorities refused to allow the Paul family to hire their own forensic pathologist to conduct an independent set of tests. In fact, the French authorities only would release Paul's body to his family, for proper burial, if they agreed that the body would be cremated or buried without any further tests.
Ultimately, the French officials agreed to release a copy of the written results of the original post-mortem to the families of the deceased. Two independent teams of noted forensic pathologists reviewed the written report, and their conclusions were astonishing.
Dr. Peter Vanezis conducted one of the reviews with a colleague from Lausanne. Dr. Vanezis is a noted British pathologist who holds the Regis Chair of Forensic Medicine at Glasgow University. He was used by the United Nations in both Bosnia and Rwanda, to determine whether genocide had occurred, following the discovery of mass graves. He was the forensic pathologist who established that the woman who had been the pretender to the Romanov throne, was a phony.
Dr. Vanezis and his colleague spent 12 hours, reviewing the first post-mortem report. They found, first, that the report established that there was no deterioration of Paul's liver, in itself evidence that the "chronic alcoholic" line was a lie. The rest of the report was a horror story of bungling, violation of standard procedures and protocols, and unanswered questions. The personnel who performed the test clearly treated it as a "garden variety" car crash.
The report did not identify the temperature at which the body was stored, from the time it was removed from the car to when the tests were performed. There was no chain of custody provided.
Henri Paul's body had been crushed in the crash. His stomach, heart, and liver had been crushed and burst open. Thus, the entire chest cavity was badly contaminated by other body fluids, flood residues, and so on, mixed together with the blood. Under such circumstances, it is standard practice to take blood samples from other parts of the body, particularly the limbs, which are from the contaminated chest cavity. But, the first post-mortem report was only conducted on the blood taken from the contaminated chest cavity.
French authorities had leaked to the press that there had been two "independent" post-mortems conducted, and both had revealed the same presence of large amounts of alcohol in Paul's blood. The report provided to the families revealed that the so-called independent tests had been performed on the identical contaminated blood sample from the chest, which had been divided in half and given to two separate laboratories to test. Furthermore, French officials claimed that a urine sample had been taken as well. But the report showed no results of urine tests.
Dr. Vanezis and his associate prepared a detailed memorandum, raising all of their concerns about the forensic report. Their memorandum was passed along to the magistrates in charge of the investigation, Herve Stephan and Marie-Christine Devidal. Dr. Vanezis's report demanded answers to a dozen or more disturbing questions he had posed.The family of Paul and other victims of the crash demanded that they be authorized to have an independent, outside autopsy done on Paul's body. The French authorities would only allow a French doctor to perform such an outside test; and, not surprisingly, not one qualified French forensic pathologist was willing to get involved with such an independent test.
A second team of prominent forensic pathologists in Lausanne, Switzerland, in the meantime, had been sent the original forensic report. They drew almost identical conclusions to those in the Vanezis report. They, too, were horrified over the outright incompetence and violation of the most elementary procedures by the French government personnel. A third independent audit of the first post-mortem was conducted by a team at St. Georges Hospital in London, and their results were the same.
So, at best, the only forensic evidence - the only evidence
period - that showed Henri Paul to have been drunk on the night
of Aug. 30-31, was incompetent, insofar as it was thoroughly unreliable.
At worst, it was another instance of willful sabotage and cover-up by the
French government. And, this was not the last of the French misconduct
and lying.