Before starting on The King Who Never Was Ending Explained, I should mention that it will be full of spoilers since we will be talking in detail about all that happened. The amount of research that has gone into making the docu-series just shows the lengths to which the makers went to cover as many angles as they could about the incident, what led to it, and what followed it.
Netflix’s Italian docu-series The King Who Never Was (Il Principe) is a detailed analysis of the death of a German teenager in 1978 that involved the Italian Royal family. Directed by Beatrice Borromeo Casiraghi, the show includes interviews, footage from the archives, news reports, and police reports to give us the different angles of the case that shook the world.
The name of the deceased is Dirk Hamer, 19 years old. There are two main characters, namely Vittorio Emanuele of Savoy and Birgit Hamer from whom we hear their respective versions. As for the secondary characters, we have the prince’s son Emanuele Filiberto, the prince’s wife Marina, Birgit’s brother Bernd, prime witness Nicky Pende, along with other witnesses including police officials, journalists, and lawyers who were involved in the case.
The King Who Never Was Ending Explained
What Happened to Dirk Hamer?
Dirk Hamer was asleep in a boat on the night of August 18th, 1978 when a bullet hit him in the stomach. He succumbed to his injury on December 7th. It was believed that the bullet was one of the two that were fired by Vittorio Emanuele. He was upset with the bunch of Italian people who had been partying on his property (Cavallo Island, near Corsica, France) and had gone to bring back his son’s dinghy. He got into a quarrel with Nicky Pende. That’s when the shots were heard.
Dirk’s death was unfortunate because he wasn’t even supposed to be at the party. He was only accompanying his elder sister, the beautiful Birgit Hamer who had been invited by Nicky and his friends to the party. Their mother didn’t want Birgit to come to the party alone and told her to take Dirk along.
Did Birgit Hamer Find the Truth?
It’s complicated. At first, it does seem that she had found the truth but as time passed, things got more and more twisted. Vittorio was arrested the day after the shooting and granted provisional release on October 6th. Probation granted to him on December 6th, a day before Dirk’s death, was thus in question. No investigation followed and journalists who tried to cover the story were threatened with physical harm. The guy’s wife Marina files an extortion complaint that the Hamers are asking for money.
On top of all this, the bullet casing recovered from the ocean bed and a revolver recovered from the boat on which Dirk was sleeping raised the question of whether it even was Vittorio’s gun from which the bullets were fired. As per Marina, the doctor who examined Dirk said that he had been shot at point-blank range.
It took 12 years after the death of Dirk for Birgit to finally find a lawyer who was ready to represent the Hamer family, Sabine Puagam. On November 13, 1991, Vittorio was tried was involuntary manslaughter by the French judiciary at the Assize Court of Paris but again acquitted with 6 months on parole. Then on June 16, 2006, he was arrested for criminal conspiracy in bribery and sex trafficking and sent to prison. It was during this period that he confessed to one of his prison mates about tricking the French judges and getting away with killing Dirk Hamer. Wiretapping enabled officials to claim this but it wasn’t enough.
It took Birgit 5 years (2006 to 2011) to get hold of the videotape of the confession that revealed Vittorio accepting his crime. Even after that, the guy filed a defamation lawsuit against Birgit that was overruled by the Court of Appeal. But we do not know what happened after that. The King Who Never Was doesn’t tell us whether he was tried again based on the new evidence. The Hamer family had found the truth and finally found closure after more than 3 decades. He still claims that he doesn’t remember saying the things that the world heard him say.
Is the truth enough? Shouldn’t the guilty be punished? The King Who Never Was ends on this existential cliffhanger of a question.
The three-part The King Who Never Was docu-series is now streaming on Netflix.