Does Bailey’s death mean truth about Sophie is now lost?
THE sudden death of Ian Bailey won’t bring any closure to the murder case that he will be forever associated with.
If anything, it simply means we will never know what happened, barring some incredible revelation.
That remote part of West Cork, between Schull and the little village of Goleen is very well known to me and the terrible murder of Sophie Toscan du Plantier is a story I’ve worked on, in different ways, since that awful Christmas in 1996.
Coming from Cork and working in newspapers since the early 1990s, I’ve been asked many times about Ian Bailey, with lots of variations of ‘well, did he do it’.
I even had a conversation with the late Sinead O’connor a few years ago, after she had travelled to West Cork to meet Bailey and ask him directly about his guilt or innocence.
I talked to Sophie’s son Pierre Louis about his mother’s death.
He was always convinced that Bailey should be placed in front of a French Court.
The truth is, there may be nobody left alive now who could answer the question. Bailey always protested his innocence, many believed him, some did not, but nobody (as far as we
know) could say for certain. Bailey was always a very visible presence in that part of West Cork.
He never hid away, he was a familiar sight at farmers’ markets, in pubs and shops and even in the tiny village of Crookhaven, where Sophie had her last meal and her last known conversation.
The murder, which has somehow become even more notorious as the decades pass, still casts a long shadow over West Cork, a place where violent crime was virtually unknown, where the locals have always had a welcome for visitors and blow-ins.
In his final years, there was definitely a sense that the case had come to dominate Bailey’s life. In many ways, he courted the notoriety, even putting his personal mobile phone number on his Facebook page so that anybody who wanted to talk to him, could.
Speaking to him, you got the strong sense that he was a troubled, angry man and that those troubles started long before that fateful December day in 1996.
Bailey is beyond notoriety now and the case will surely start to fade away from the high profile it has had in recent years.
There is no sense of closure, there never can be while we do not know what happened.
But the best that
West Cork and all of us can do now is remember that bright, friendly and talented mother who was murdered just short of her 40th birthday.