Questions on truth follow death of Ian

SOPHIE Toscan du Plantier was murdered at her remote holiday home and no-one has ever been brought to justice. Will we ever know the truth? Or did it die with Ian Bailey?

Was Bailey her killer? Did he leave his partner Jules’ bed that night, kill the Frenchwoman, returning the next morning with a head injury? Did he get a perverse thrill from the media circus he attracted ever since? Podcasts, poetry, books, Netflix documentaries, endless interviews. Or was he also a victim? A handy villain – tall, bohemian, English – wrongly accused? Gardai decided he was their man, and appeared to piece evidence around this theory, as opposed to working the other way around. The self-confessed chief suspect always protested his innocence.

Before I am dead and gone, I hope the truth will come out

IAN BAILEY ON MURDER INVESTIGATION

FAILURES

He was arrested twice in relation to the crime – and released without charge both times – and was convicted in absentia in France of her murder.

His life since the awful murder of Sophie 27 years ago has been dogged by the general belief that he did it.

But no one actually knows.

The fault for this ongoing charade – an insult to Sophie’s memory – lies with failures in the original Garda investigation.

I have often thought he would have had an easier time if he’d confessed to the killing – he’d have been out in a few years. So why did he stay in the limelight, forever attached to Sophie?

“Before I am dead and gone, I hope the truth will come out. I had nothing to do with this terrible crime” he said recently. As long as he was placed in the frame, the real culprit would never be identified, he maintained.

Did the stress of it kill him off? Innocent or guilty, it seems so.

He died yesterday in the very public, sensational manner he had lived for the past few decades. His solicitor Frank Buttimer said: “In my opinion, being wrongly associated with the death of Sophie Toscan Du Plantier was a major factor in his ill health and the State has a burden of responsibility in that.”

A woman murdered, a man accused. Both now dead, so it seems unlikely we will ever know the truth.