Jules Thomas: ‘Death was on cards for creature of excess’
IAN Bailey’s former partner has said his death from a heart attack was ‘on the cards’ as he was a ‘creature of excess’. Jules Thomas said she had not been surprised when she heard he had died on Sunday after collapsing in Bantry, Co. Cork, where he lived. However, she continued to insist that she believed he had been innocent of the murder of filmmaker Sophie Toscan du Plantier.
The 74-year-old Welsh-born artist said: ‘I know he didn’t do it; he is such a messy person there would be blood everywhere, and also, he could never keep a secret. He was just one of those people who talked and talked.
‘He would never, ever have done something like that for a story or any other reason.’
Speaking from the remote village home the couple shared in West Cork for almost three decades, Ms Thomas told RTÉ News she had not been surprised to hear about his fatal collapse.
‘He was a creature of excess and I suppose that’s the result,’ she said.
‘He had had a heart attack and then a double heart attack and they couldn’t operate because they knew his heart was too bad, so it was on the cards really to happen quite soon.’
She admitted that when they separated as a couple in 2021, she was emotionally burnt out.
‘I just didn’t have any feelings for him at the end, that’s why I got him out. He was impossible to live with,’ Ms Thomas said.
Bailey was convicted of assaulting Ms Thomas in 2001 and received a three-month suspended sentence.
She said that despite their chequered past, she had once felt sorry for him.
Ms Thomas explained: ‘Well, I felt sorry for him a while back, but you give up feeling anything for somebody who is just so hopeless with themselves. You know, he wasn’t helping himself at all, from
what I could see, anyway.’
She said she had not had contact with him for a very long time before his death and is unaware of any instructions concerning his burial.
Ms Thomas also said that before the news of his death arrived at the weekend, she had begun drawing together notes to prepare a draft outline for a book about the last 25 years of her life.
She said she was doing it ‘to get it out of my system, like self-analysis’.
Asked what it was about Bailey she once loved, Ms Thomas said: ‘I am not sure now looking back on it, but when people click together and make each other laugh, and get on, I suppose that’s what it was really.’
On Sunday, Ms Thomas said she believed the speculation and legal cases around Bailey’s alleged involvement in Ms Toscan du Plantier’s murder had contributed to his heart condition.
She said: ‘Some people get convinced of all sorts of rubbish and I’m not really interested in anything that doesn’t affect me. It isn’t about believing he did it or not – I know he was innocent.’