It’s here, the British-made 13-part podcast into the murder of du Plantier
THE first episode of a 13-part podcast documentary about the murder of French film maker Sophie Toscan du Plantier will be released next Thursday.
It will be broadcast on Amazon’s Audible channel and its release comes just a week after a French court ruled that English-born journalist Ian Bailey – who lives in West Cork – could be put on trial in his absence for the murder of the 39-year-old mother of one.
The makers of the podcast spent three years working on the series and 18 months ago the Irish Mail on Sunday first revealed how they were investigating the unsolved case.
Programme makers Sam Bungey and Jennifer Forde travelled to West Cork where they spoke to Mr Bailey, 61, several locals, as well as investigating gardaí. They also spent time with Sophie’s family in France.
Mr Bugney explained: ‘We tried to talk to everyone involved in the case.
‘Three years for these people is a small chapter. We’ve told the story chronologically from the 20th of December 1996 when Sophie arrived in Ireland, and we proceeded from that point.
‘There is a small bit of Ian in the first episodes but he is not identified as the suspect until the end of the fourth episode.’
The series is called West Cork: Every Countryside and will be broadcast in one-hour programmes.
It will be similar in style to the hit podcast Serial and the Netflix programme Making A Murderer.
Serial first aired in 2014 and it proved to be a sensation with the first series recording 80million downloads. It investigated the 1991 murder of 18-year-old American school girl Hae Min Lee.
Ms Du Plantier’s battered body was found outside her holiday home in Schull on the morning of December 23, 1996, and Mr Bailey was twice arrested by gardaí in connection with her death.
However, he was never charged in connection with her murder and requests to have him extradited to France have been rejected by the Irish courts.
Meanwhile, Mr Bailey has repeatedly protested his innocence and his legal advisors are considering appealing last week’s court decision to a higher court in France.