OUR SEARCH FOR SOPHIE’S KILLER
The murder of Sophie Toscan du Plantier 21 years ago shook the nation and led to journalist Ian Bailey being named as the chief suspect. The fascination with the case remains and a new podcast has brought it back to life. Here, the couple who made it expl
The first time we saw Sophie Toscan du Plantier’s house, we were in a small hire car at the end of the lane that leads up to it, with Ian Bailey in the passenger seat. It was March 2015, and Bailey’s civil action against the guards — the longest-running civil trial ever heard by an Irish jury — was finally nearing an end.
He was suing An Garda Síochána, and the State, for wrongful arrest and conspiracy to pervert the court of justice. The gardaí had arrested him twice for Sophie Toscan du Plantier’s murder, but both times he was released without charge due a lack of evidence.
We had sat in on the trial at the High Court in Dublin and had quickly become fascinated by the case. Bailey’s lawyers argued that his life as a prime suspect in West Cork had become a nightmare. One day we approached Bailey and his partner Jules Thomas as they walked briskly down the quays in their smart court attire, arm in arm, after a day on the stand.
He was curious to know our backgrounds and asked how we’d heard about the case. Sam mentioned that he’d worked with an American
publisher. Bailey picked up on that, reflecting that his case had received relatively little attention in the US.
He agreed to meet us in West Cork, but warned that he couldn’t really talk while his case was running.
So the trip was a long shot. We had a few questions to put to him if he’d go on the record but we were here for whatever we could get. Yet here we were, just a few hours after we’d arrived, with Bailey giving us a tour of the murder scene. He said if we were planning to report on it, it might help us to know where it was.
We drove to the same spot that Bailey says he and Jules stopped at some 18 years earlier, on the morning of December 23, 1996, when they came — he as journalist, she as photographer — to investigate reports of a body.
A narrow boreen stretched out ahead of us and wound up a hillside on the right towards three houses. Sophie’s white farmhouse stood in the middle. Over to the far right was a holiday home owned by a family who were in London at the time of the murder.
The couple in the house just behind Sophie’s lived there year-round. But Sophie didn’t run in their direction, and they told the police they’d heard nothing during the night.
These were some of the first questions we had — why Sophie hadn’t run to her neighbours as she was chased by someone from her back door, and whether it was likely such a brutal attack could have happened so quietly as not to wake a couple sleeping a few hundred feet away?
As we sat there, idling in a spot not far from where it all happened — a place where we could see the lay of the land and understand its geography — we wanted to ask these questions and so many others. But Bailey did not want to sit and talk about such things.
Perhaps understandably, he didn’t want to hang around. ‘I’m a bit nervous only because of the connotations... I don’t want to be seen.’
So after just a few moments we turned back along the winding lane, pulling in to let a passing car squeeze by, and it wasn’t until we’re back on the coast road that our passenger relaxed.
Offering to guide a pair of journalists around the murder site is just one of many seemingly strange decisions Bailey has made during his years as a suspect in the Sophie Toscan du Plantier murder.
There are those in West Cork who view his behaviour as so peculiar that — guilt or innocence aside — they struggle to sympathise with his position. They see him relishing the attention as a murder suspect, of behaving in a way that was hard to relate to, that seemed suspicious and that so distracted the gardaí during the investigation.
We knew we wanted to explore this question further — how is an accused person supposed to act? In one way or another, we’re all familiar with watching and judging the faces of those on trial as they walk in and out of a courtroom during a trial — they’re too emotional, not emotional enough, they’ve dressed too smartly, not smartly enough.
But these people are experiencing something very few of us will go through. How would we behave? What’s the right way to act in such an unfamiliar situation?
Our first move had been to contact Sophie’s family in Paris. They were easy to find — several years ago they set up an organisation called ASSOPH, or the Association for the Truth about the Murder of Sophie Toscan du Plantier.
We travelled to Paris where we met with JeanAntoine Bloc and his wife Marie-Paul. They are close family friends of Sophie’s parents, and ever since Sophie’s uncle Jean-Pierre Gazeau set up the association, Bloc has been acting as a sort of official translator. He’s responsible for translating the Irish and British press into French — over the years, he has converted hundreds if not thousands of articles.
We met Sophie’s son, her brother, her uncle. We travelled to Venice to meet her aunt. A warm and dedicated group of people all devoted to finding justice for Sophie. It was vital to us embarking on this project to have their permission to tell Sophie’s story.
They were cautious, but ultimately cooperative, they felt they could trust us to share their story and struggle more widely.
This openness and willingness to talk was something we encountered again and again. When
“THERE’S AN UNRESOLVEDNESS THAT PEOPLE FEEL HAS LET DOWN NOT JUST SOPHIE BUT EVERYONE ELSE WHO’S BEEN CAUGHT UP IN IT”
“THIS ISN’T OUR STORY TO TELL, IT BELONGS TO THE PEOPLE WHO HAVE LIVED THROUGH IT”
we first spoke about doing this story to friends in Dublin, they wondered how we, with our plummy English accents, would be received down in West Cork. One friend even suggested taking an Irish person with us, as some sort of ‘guide’ — a suggestion that made us question whether we’d get anyone in West Cork to go on tape.
We needn’t have worried, not just because the people of West Cork are clearly no strangers to English interlopers, but because there’s something about Sophie’s murder that gets people going.
There’s an unresolvedness that people feel has let down not just Sophie and her family but everyone else who’s been caught up in it — suspects and witnesses alike. And so, instead of a closed shop, we found a readiness from almost everyone to talk about the case, a willingness to try and help unstick things.
We’d be lying if we said we didn’t secretly hope to solve it — to find some missing piece of the puzzle that had somehow evaded Irish and French investigators’ expert gaze. But we knew the chances of that were slim. So we thought about what else we could hope to achieve. Over the past 20 years there has been a series of shocking revelations in the case — about the suspect, a key witness, the gardaí.
None of them have moved us closer to the truth about what happened, but all have affected how people feel about the case. It’s hard to keep it all straight in your head, 20 years of allegation and counter-allegation, with just enough quiet in between to forget the precise details.
We thought, if nothing else, we could lay it all out, take listeners back to the point at which Sophie’s body was found, and trace the investigation step-by-step from there. We wanted to go through Bailey’s role as reporter in the early days, the reasons the police found him suspicious, his timeline for the weekend of the murder, the much talked about scratches on his hands, the revelations about his and Jules’s home life, Marie Farrell’s varying accounts, the scandals around garda misconduct.
As we worked, we became committed to unpacking the rumours that have dogged the case since the start, clouding the picture. We exhausted as many avenues as we could, working methodically to see if any theories had been overlooked, bringing together a timeline of the facts to help provide some clarity.
When we started working together with Audible on the series, we thought the series would take about eight months to report. We blew way past that deadline. In large part that was down to how open people were, how generous they were with their time.
We started off with a sort of ‘wish list’ of all the people we felt were important to speak to. It was a long list, and we never realistically expected to be able to tick off even half of the names on it. But in the end we got to at least speak to, if not meet, almost everyone on it.
This isn’t our story to tell, it belongs to the people who have lived through it, to the people whose lives have been turned upside down by it. So we spent a winter in West Cork, and then a summer there, and by the time we’d stitched together everyone’s testimony, three years had gone by and we’d even had a baby seven months previously.
It was a momentous moment, deciding on an end point, finally drawing our series to a close so we could share it with listeners. We thought that we’d taken it as far as we could but we’re already finding ourselves drawn back in, by niggling questions we had that listeners are now sharing, by the prospect of following new threads.
Many of the people we met in the course of our research — retired detectives, journalists, witnesses — have been involved in the case since the start, and talked about how even now, years later, they still feel bound up in it.
It’s rarely out of the news and it’s easy to be distracted by the drama that unfolded in this troubled investigation.
But the tragedy at the heart of it all makes it hard to let go of: the horrible story of a woman losing her life, and her ageing parents, brother and son still waiting for answers. THE West Cork podcast is available now at audible.com