A violent brute? Yes... A killer? Who knows

THERE are a few things we know with absolute certainty about Ian Bailey. We know he was a raging narcissist, to a pathological degree – his need for attention and publicity was at the level of an addiction.

The fact that his ‘fame’, as he saw it, was entirely based on the widespread suspicion that he had smashed in a woman’s head with 50 blows of a concrete block was totally immaterial, just as the most desperate of addicts don’t care what they have to do to get their next ‘hit’; his ‘hit’ was national notoriety, his ‘high’ was watching the reactions of visitors to the town as they recognised him and did a double take, his ‘buzz’ was the nervy, illicit, fascinated reverence of the women who circled him like flies on manure at his poetry readings at markets around West Cork.

Macabre

When he appeared at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival a few years ago he was billed as ‘the renowned and legendary West Cork poet Ian Kenneth Bailey’, but it was not for his poetry that he was known or mythologised.

Nobody bought or listened to his poetry for his singular insights or his deathless lyricism; a book or an audience with Bailey was a sort of macabre memento, just as sick souvenir-hunters swarmed the home of Fred and Rose West, Soham killer Ian Huntley’s cottage or even the grounds of Sandy Hook Elementary School until these places had to be levelled to keep the ghoulish ‘tomb raiders’ away.

People bought Bailey’s poetry or his pizzas to prove they’d seen him, to tell their friends they’d experienced his hulking, intimidating presence and, perhaps, to validate their own theories on his guilt. Because theories are all anybody’s got, even the French, for all their outrage at the Irish judicial system; there was never enough evidence to convict him beyond a reasonable doubt for the murder of Sophie Toscan du Plantier and, now that he’s dead and without a confession, there probably never will be.

The other thing we know for sure about Bailey, though, is that he was a man with a ferocious temper who had a history of extreme violence against women. There were allegations put to him in his libel action against several newspapers, almost 20 years ago, that he’d tried to strangle his first wife. He denied them, but conceded their marriage had been ‘stormy’.

But there was no denying the attacks on his former partner, Jules Thomas, who stood by him right up until their split in 2021 and who still believes he was innocent of Sophie’s murder. He admitted to several serious assaults on Ms Thomas during their tempestuous relationship.

The first was in 1993, when he woke up with a nosebleed and lashed out at her. In 1996, she kicked him out and got a protection order against him after another attack. They got back together every time, though, and a few years later she was driving them home from a night of socialising when, he told the court during that libel case, she grabbed him and he lost his temper.

He beat her around the face and body, pulling out a 4cm clump of her hair. Her top lip was torn away from her gum and needed eight stitches to repair it, and she almost lost an eye from a savage punch. She was hospitalised for a night and they separated, but only briefly. In 2001, he beat her black and blue with a crutch when she woke him from a nap. He pleaded guilty to an assault charge, after that incident, and was given a suspended sentence.

He admitted he was known by his neighbours in Schull to be violent but, asked if this was what led to him being shunned in the town, he denied it, and said: ‘Unfortunately, as we know, domestic violence is very commonplace and in that area there are lots of cases of domestic violence. I wasn’t the only person in West Cork who was guilty of domestic violence when drink was taken.’

And that may just be the truest thing Bailey ever said. It’s estimated that one in four women suffers domestic violence in her lifetime, but anecdotal evidence suggests it may even be higher still – most women will tell you that, at some point in their lives, they were put in fear of physical harm by a male partner. And very few of these men have Bailey’s air of simmering menace – often they’re the street angels, the hail-fellow-well-met popular lads who are careful to maintain their niceguy public persona.

They’re found in all strata of society, rich and poor, privileged and disadvantaged, and they may well be the last person friends or extended family would suspect of battering and coercing their partners behind closed doors.

Curious

And while most murdered women are killed by a man known to them, clearly not all domestic abusers go on to murder anyone, let alone a total stranger.

And though a neighbour thinks he may have introduced them, there is no solid evidence that Bailey knew Sophie Toscan du Plantier, which makes it all the more curious that she would have risen from her bed, come downstairs and opened the door to him in the small hours of that December morning.

We know Bailey was a towering narcissist, who thrived on the attention that his position as selfadmitted chief suspect in the most sensational, unsolved murder of a generation brought; he must have seen himself as a Moriarty-type figure with ‘a brain of the first order’, as Sherlock Holmes described his nemesis, the spider in the centre of the web he’s woven, pulling all the skeins at will, running rings around the local cops, pleading with them to solve Sophie’s murder. And we know he had no problem beating women to a pulp.

But until advanced forensic techniques, perhaps years in the future, can put him in Sophie’s house that night, nobody can know for certain that he was actually her killer.