There WAS something disquieting about my eccentric old colleague. But do I believe he battered a beautiful socialite to death? I don’t think so...
THE Ian Bailey I knew in the 1980s was an oldschool Fleet Street newshound straight from central casting.
Ruthlessly ambitious, with an air of arrogance, he boasted of his spy contacts inside the government intelligence agency GCHQ and, with his 6 ft 4 in frame and good looks, he thought himself God’s gift to women.
Listening to some of his maudlin last words this week — in a valedictory voicemail message played back to me by one of his few friends — it became clear how low he had sunk when he collapsed and died, last Sunday, outside his shabby digs, in Bantry, County Cork.
According to his former partner, artist Jules Thomas, who later told me his poignant story in a four-hour exclusive interview, Bailey, 66, had been ‘hounded to his grave’.
For he had spent almost half his lifetime under the shadow of suspicion, accused — and in France convicted — of committing one of the most shocking and perplexing murders in Irish criminal history.
After suffering a series of heart attacks, Thomas said, Bailey succumbed to ‘the stress from the persecution’ and the constant fear that he might be extradited — or even kidnapped by his supposed victim’s family — and made to serve a 25-year sentence handed down by a Paris court in 2019.
Relatives of Sophie Toscan du Plantier — an alluring French film producer and socialite, brutally dispatched in the prime of her life, aged 39 — view Bailey’s demise rather differently.
Though Irish police couldn’t bring him to trial for lack of evidence, they are utterly convinced it was he who descended on her remote holiday home, on the southwestern tip of County Cork, in 1996, and — perhaps because she rejected his amorous advances — frenziedly battered her with a poker- like instrument before crushing her skull with a concrete block. Angered by the bungled Irish murder investigation and frustrated that the Dublin police refused to hand him over to France, even after the Paris court found him guilty, her family regard death as his final escape.
To add to their frustration, the Manchester-born journalist died before the completion of a coldcase review which, they hoped, would end their 28-year fight to establish his culpability beyond doubt in both countries.
‘We were expecting Bailey to die because we knew his health was exceptionally fragile in the last weeks, but we hoped he would live long enough to see justice,’ Sophie’s uncle, physicist JeanPierre Gazeau, told me.
What, then, is the truth behind this tortuous affair? As Bailey might have put it, when penning a racy news report: scapegoat or psycho — how should he be remembered?
There was certainly something disquieting about the freelance reporter I occasionally worked with. A Gloucestershire news agency sacked him for staging a drug-fuelled party in the office and bunking off a court case he was supposed to cover to attend Cheltenham races.
But could he have become a coldblooded murderer? Not according to Jules Thomas, who lived with him for more than 30 years and — to her lasting astonishment — was twice arrested for alleged complicity in the murder but never charged.
Sensationally, she insists police ‘stitched him up’ to protect the real killer — a rogue detective within their own ranks. More of this astonishing allegation later.
However, if as Thomas maintains, Bailey became ‘the perfect patsy’ for the Irish police — an English outsider in an area still pervaded by Republican hostility — then he hardly helped his own cause.
Back in his Fleet Street days, he relished being at the centre of intrigue (the Geoffrey Prime spy scandal at GCHQ was a Bailey speciality), and when he became the chief suspect in Sophie’s murder he seemed to enjoy the attention.
This sense of importance was much in evidence when I met him again, five years ago, at the smallholding he then shared with Thomas. He was desperately keen for our interview to be filmed by a true-crime TV crew encamped in the garden.
When I asked whether he was afraid, with the French court’s inevitable guilty verdict imminent, he claimed to be facing his ‘false’ conviction stoically, saying, with a wave of his nicotine-stained hand, that he was ‘in a John Wayne state of mind’.
Gazing at this ageing eccentric, who had swapped the sharp suits of his youth for a shawl and a battered straw hat, I saw how the former reporter had become the arch villain of his own grisly story.
Declaring news reporting to be ‘trivial’, Bailey left Fleet Street behind in the early 1990s, decamping to West Cork to connect with his Irish roots and reinvent himself as a poet.
Struggling to make ends meet, he found work in a herring processing factory. It was there that he met Thomas.
Also divorced, with three teenage daughters, she was collecting scraps of fish for her cats. Within a year he moved into her yellowpainted cottage, close to the coastal town of Schull.
Police later made much of Bailey’s violence towards Thomas. When she attempted to stop him driving while drunk, he hit her so hard that she had a ‘grapefruit-sized’ swelling over her eye, a court heard. He also attacked her ferociously after a row in bed. Though she describes him as ‘narcissistic’, Thomas, the public school-educated daughter of an eminent psychiatrist, plays down these incidents, saying Bailey could be ‘gentlemanly’ and turned nasty only on rare occasions after bingeing on spirits.
They enjoyed five largely happy years together — living off the land and visiting raucous pubs where Bailey would bang a bodhran (a traditional goatskin drum) and interview the musicians for newspapers — before the murder accusation ‘destroyed’ their lives.
Yet, as police discovered when searching the cottage, there was a sordid side to Bailey. His diaries contained lurid accounts of his perverse sexual encounters and, unless his Twitter account was hacked, his lewdness continued
‘We hoped he would live to see justice’
‘Sophie was full of vital energy and untamed’
until he died. Thomas makes light of this. ‘ He may have fantasised about stuff like that, but he knew it wouldn’t work with me, so he didn’t try it on. I would have kicked him up the backside,’ she said airily.
What, then, brought Sophie, who had young son and was married to the French film producer Daniel Toscan du Plantier, into Bailey’s orbit? Ironically, they were drawn to this far-flung outpost for much the same reason.
Described by her family as ‘untamed’ and ‘full of vital energy’, her affinity for rural Ireland began on student visits, and in 1993 she bought a cottage a few miles from the one Bailey and Thomas shared.
She stayed there four or five times a year, writing, walking along the rugged cliffs and relishing her escape from the arty Parisian salons. When detectives probed her private life, they also discovered that Sophie, who had an open marriage, enjoyed trysts at the white-painted cottage with at least one of her lovers, French artist Bruno Carbonnet.
On December 20, 1996, after attending a glittering party with her husband, Sophie flew from Paris to Cork for the last time, intending to stay until Christmas Eve.
Three days later, however, at 10.38am on December 23, a neighbour found her body at the foot of the winding lane leading to her house. Though it was evident, from her broken fingers, that she fought her attacker, she had been viciously battered more than 50 times and was barely recognisable.
The handling of the case was farcical from the outset. Since Ireland’s only available pathologist was otherwise engaged in Dublin (some say at a Christmas party) Sophie’s remains were covered with tarpaulin and left for more than 24 hours. By the time she was examined, it was difficult to establish when she had died, though a half- digested meal of fruit and nuts suggested she had probably eaten breakfast before going outside, for reasons never explained. Two rinsed wine glasses on the draining board suggested she’d had recent company.
Among the first people to arrive on the scene were Bailey and Thomas. When the Cork Examiner heard that a woman’s body had been found, they sent him to look into the story. His girlfriend, Jules Thomas, a keen photographer, came along to take pictures.
A witness later claimed Bailey knew of Sophie’s death before the newspaper called, but whether that’s true is among the innumerable unresolved questions.
Over the ensuing days, however, when he began sending uncannily well-informed reports to newspapers in France and Ireland, giving details apparently known only to the police, he fell under suspicion. Police interest intensified when a cut was noticed on his forehead and scratches on his arms; wounds which were not there before the murder.
Meanwhile, a procession of witnesses began to point the finger at him. A Schull shopkeeper named Marie Farrell claimed to have seen a man she believed to be Bailey staggering down a lane near the murder scene in the early hours of December 23, then washing his boots in a stream.
Farrell later retracted this damning statement, claiming it had been made under duress from the police. Bailey’s lawyer, Frank Buttimer, tells me she messaged him to express her remorse this week for contributing to Bailey’s downfall.
Then, after his first arrest, on February 10, 1997, several of Bailey’s acquaintances came forward to claim he had admitted the murder to them. It also emerged in police questioning that he had left his bed for a considerable time in the early hours of December 23.
And in France, a friend of Sophie alleged she had been in contact with Bailey by phone a month before the murder, though he swore he didn’t know her and claimed to have seen her only once, from a distance, while gardening at a neighbour’s house.
Was Bailey bedevilled by a strange series of coincidences which, when pieced together, appeared to incriminate him? Or was he the killer? In Schull, many folks believed the latter — and still do. However, after listening to Jules Thomas’s defence of Bailey — which will form the basis of a book she plans to publish — I’m less sure.
She began with some simple observations: ‘I knew Ian better than anyone and he was an emotional person. If he had done this, he would have been in bits the next morning, but when he brought me coffee he was completely normal.
‘And Ian was such a messy person. My youngest daughter said, “Mum, he was so messy that [if he had committed a murder] there would have been blood everywhere!” ’
What was more, Thomas said, Bailey ‘had verbal diarrhoea’ and regaled her about every detail of his life. As the weeks and months passed, he would have felt compelled to confess to her.
Convincingly, it must be said, she also attempted to dismantle the evidence against Bailey. Yes, he had got up in the night, but he was writing to a deadline — a newspaper story about the area’s first internet cafe — and needed to fax it the following morning. Her daughter had seen him writing at the kitchen table when she got up to go to the loo.
Yes, his arms were slightly scratched, but that was because he had climbed up a tall Christmas tree and used a bent saw to cut it down. As for the cut on his forehead — a hairline nick, not the sort of wound that would surely have been inflicted by a woman fighting for her life — that was caused when he killed a turkey. The police had drawn up a list of 50 possible suspects, she said, discounting all but Ian with inordinate haste.
Among them was a German man who lived locally and killed himself soon after the murder, apparently because he was tormented by a guilty secret.
Then there was Sophie’s lover, Carbonnet, who was said to have been so distraught when she jilted him that he burnt some of his paintings. He had a cast-iron alibi, as did her husband (though, given the nature of their marriage, there were unfounded early suggestions that he might have sent someone to kill her).
However, Thomas claimed, one theory that has never been disproved is that Sophie’s murderer was a police officer. Incredible as it may sound, she says she had heard rumours to this effect for years and Bailey convinced her it was true.
It stems from one of many strands of evidence which, Thomas claims, police conveniently brushed under the carpet.
This came to light only in 2019, when Bailey’s lawyer was given sight of a weighty file on the case sent to French prosecutors by the Irish. It contained the statement of a driver who was dangerously overtaken on a bend by a speeding blue Ford car at about 7.30am on the morning of the murder.
Suspecting it could have been Sophie’s killer, he reported the incident, but it appears police did not follow it up.
The speeding Ford was first revealed in 2020 by an Irish investigative journalist who found that a local detective drove a similar model.
The journalist also wrote that the married officer, ‘ a notoriously violent person and sexual predator infamous for having affairs’, was believed to have had ‘a sexual encounter’ with Sophie after meeting her while investigating drug dealing near her holiday
‘ The next day he was completely normal’
Her lover ‘ burnt paintings when she jilted him’
home. During our interview, however, Thomas went further, claiming the detective confessed to one of his nurses before dying of cancer several years ago.
Though he swore the nurse to secrecy, his alleged deathbed admission eventually came to Bailey’s attention. if true, she says, it would explain everything that had happened to them subsequently.
Their ‘wrongful’ arrests, in 1997 and again in 2000, the deliberately flawed investigation, the mislaid evidence (police even ‘lost’ the bloodspattered five-bar gate beside which Sophie was found), and the fact that Bailey continued to be targeted even after forensic tests proved his innocence.
Despite the fierce struggle, there was no match between specimens of blood and hair that Thomas and Bailey provided and those found on Sophie’s body.
Thomas doubts that this shocking ‘cover-up’, as she calls it, will ever be investigated. ‘if it were proved it would bring the whole Gardai [irish police] system down,’ she said. ‘People would have no truck with them, or belief.’
Though Thomas is sure of Bailey’s innocence, she wearied of his obsession with the case and his heavy drinking. Two years ago she asked him to leave the house.
when he refused, her daughters wrote him a letter saying he was putting her through mental ‘torture’ and so, reluctantly, he moved to the nearby town of Bantry, finding a room above an off-licence.
Knowing he had a dangerously diseased heart, he refused to change his junkfood diet and spent his welfare benefits in local pubs. in his misery, he ‘ate, drank and smoked himself to death’, Thomas told me. when she heard of his passing, on January 21, she ‘tried to cry but nothing came’, for she no longer had any feelings for him. nevertheless, she intends to keep fighting to clear his name because there is ‘no one else left to defend him’.
Given that nobody attended his cremation in cork, last week, it would appear not.
So, was my old colleague shamefully vilified? or was he a cold-hearted killer, perhaps driven into a frenzied rage when Sophie rejected his advances?
Frustratingly, i still don’t know — and i suspect we will never have a conclusive answer. But i am erring on the side of innocence.