Will Sophie ever get justice now that Bailey is dead...?
THE utterly horrific murder of French woman Sophie Toscan du Plantier, her captivating natural beauty and the somewhat aristocratic life she appeared to lead led to a decades’ long string of high-profile judicial cases and a diplomatic stand-off between two EU countries.
The intrigue surrounding her death, subsequent arrests, criminal and civil court cases – both in Ireland and in France – as well as the public interviews with the mother-of-one’s family and with Mr Bailey himself have captivated the public ever since.
The blonde-haired, blue-eyed French woman, who was widely liked in Schull, arrived in Ireland alone for a few days’ break before Christmas – but she never returned home to Paris.
She was beaten to death on the night of December 22, 1996, outside her holiday home, in Toormore, on the outskirts of Schull, Co. Cork. The 39-year-old’s body was found the next day lying along the boreen that led to her isolated home. The mother was dressed in her nightclothes and just 100 yards away from her front door. The degree of violence used in her murder was horrifying. She was beaten with a rock and sustained 50 blows to her head before a concrete block was dropped onto her skull.
The Garda investigation was mired in controversy amid claims the scene had not been preserved
‘Do justice to Sophie’s memory’
adequately and the delay of then chief state pathologist, the late Dr John Harbison, attending the location. In 2005, key witness Marie Farrell astonishingly withdrew vital evidence claiming she saw self-confessed main suspect Ian Bailey near the victim’s home the night she was murdered. Ms Farrell later claimed she only made the statement because she felt under pressure from gardaí.
Yet Ms Farrell repeated her statement in a libel case taken by Mr Bailey over media reports surrounding the murder.
Gardaí reacted angrily to the allegations, claiming Ms Farrell had perjured herself. They described the u-turn as ‘a joke’ and insisted at the time that the Garda murder investigation had followed the ‘highest professional standards.’
The dramatic development, almost nine years after the gruesome murder, prompted Mr Bailey to ask then justice minister Michael McDowell to set up an inquiry. Ms Farrell from Schull, Co Cork, was the central witness at the two-week Cork Circuit Civil Court libel action, taken in 2003, by Mr Bailey against eight Irish and British newspapers.
He claimed the newspapers had blackened his name by portraying him as Ms du Plantier’s killer.
Ms Farrell testified she had seen the British-born reporter at a bridge near the French mother’s Toormore home, in Goleen, west Cork, in the early hours of December 23, 1996, hours prior to Ms du Plantier’s body being found.
She gave a statement to gardaí in January 1997, just weeks after the killing, and gave the same evidence during the libel hearing.
At that court case, she also claimed Mr Bailey had tried to intimidate her from standing over her first statement to gardaí. Several years ago a second DNA sample was found on her boot laces by a French forensics team and that too remains unidentified.
The Irish legal authorities continually refused attempts by France to extradite Bailey. Gardaí arrested Bailey twice but he was released on both occasions without charge after the DPP ruled there was insufficient evidence to charge him. Two Garda probes, the McNally review, in 2002, and the McAndrew review, in 2005, found no evidence of a conspiracy to frame Mr Bailey, and he described the 2018 GSOC review of the Garda handling of the case, which also found no evidence that gardaí falsified evidence, as ‘an investigation lite’. According to French law, Paris can claim criminal law jurisdiction anywhere in the world. If the French had been able to execute their arrest and extradition warrant, then Mr Bailey would have faced another full trial in Paris.
No one turned up for the 2019 trial, leading to prosecutor Jean Pierre Bonthoux portraying Mr Bailey as a murderous coward who committed the ‘barbaric and atrocious crime’ but failed to face the consequences.
Referring to Ms Toscan du Plantier, Mr Bonthoux said in 2019: ‘We must not reduce her name to just a court case. I ask you to do justice to her memory.’
Barrister Laurent Pettiti said the ‘methods used in Ireland were a judicial farce in five acts’ – ranging from an early mishandling of possible forensics evidence, right up to continually refusing to prosecute Ian Bailey.
Ms Toscan du Plantier’s surviving relatives in court included her son Pierre-Louis Baudey-Vignaud, who was 15 when she was killed. In 2021, Bailey asked then taoiseach Micheál Martin, Justice Minister Helen McEntee and Commissioner Drew Harris to conduct another probe into the garda handling of the case. Bailey liked Jim Sheridan’s Murder At The Cottage series but was worried an upcoming Netflix documentary, supported by Ms du Plantier’s family would be ‘a demonising piece of propaganda’.
‘Ireland’s judicial farce in five acts’