Arrested multiple times, Ian Bailey was never actually charged with the murder of Sophie Toscan du Plantier, writes Michael Clifford
She was wearing her nightclothes when she was battered to death. White leggings and a cotton T-shirt. A navy dressing gown lay near the body, as if it had been ripped from her as she fled, or perhaps she had attempted to discard it lest it impede her progress.
One way or the other, it appears she was running for her life in the middle of the night. Whoever murdered Sophie Tuscan du Plantier most likely surprised her with his arrival (assuming it was a man) at her holiday home in Toormore, a few kilometres outside Schull. There was no sign of forced entry. Two chairs were pulled out from the kitchen table, but that may have been down to a tendency of Sophie’s to put her feet up on an adjoining chair as she sat and read.
Whatever happened, whomever showed up, at some point she felt compelled to flee into the night, down the lane in front of the house. She never made it. Her body was covered in blood, her face unrecognisable. Two of her fingers were broken, her scratched hands suggesting resistance. A cavity block found near the body may have been dropped on her head. Her freckled face was unrecognisable.
Three days previously, on December 20, 1996, the 39-year-old film producer had arrived at Cork Airport for a flying visit from her home in Paris. A CCTV camera captured her at 2.30pm, at the Avis car rental desk, hiring a silver Ford Fiesta to take her to Schull, just over an hour away.
She was scheduled to catch a return flight on Christmas Eve, to be with her husband for the festive period. Her 15-year-old son from a previous marriage was spending Christmas with his father. Instead, her family in Paris began to receive phone calls sometime after midday on Monday, December 23. Something awful had happened in the beautiful sanctuary where Sophie Tuscan du Plantier loved to retreat from the hustle and high life she lived in Paris. She wouldn’t be coming home.
THE SUSPECT
In the days that followed, Ian Bailey came onto the investigators’ radar. He was a 39-year-old Englishman who had been living in the area for five years. A journalist by trade, he had been reporting on the murder since first showing up at the scene on the afternoon of December 23. He was regarded as a local source by the national and French media organisations that were following up on the story.
Bailey is the kind of character who stands out. He considered himself something of a poet, and had immersed himself in local culture. He was known to play the bodhrán the odd time. On Christmas Day that year, he was filmed at an event on Schull pier reciting poetry. Physically, he cuts a striking figure, standing at 6ft 2in and exuding confidence.
Soon after arriving in West Cork, he had met Jules Thomas, a Welsh artist and mother of three who had settled in the area. Bailey moved into a lodge on the property owned by Thomas. Their relationship blossomed and Bailey took up residence in the main house. By 1996, they had all the appearances of partners for life.
There was, however, a darkness at the heart of their relationship. On at least two occasions, Bailey had assaulted Thomas. One of the assaults, in May 1996, was particularly vicious.
Seven years later, during a libel trial, a former friend of the couple gave a description of encountering Thomas in the aftermath of the assault.
“Jules was curled up nearly in a foetal position, moaning,” Peter Bielecki told the court.
“Her hair was tousled, large clumps of hair in her hands. Her eye was purple, her mouth swollen, her face had gouges in it. Her right hand had teeth marks. It was as if somebody had their soul ripped out, their spirit gone.”
Bailey would, in time, ascribe the violence towards a bad reaction to drinking spirits.
There would be one more serious assault in 2001, for which he would receive a suspended jail sentence. Despite all that, the couple are still together, more than 20 years after they met.
The history of domestic violence suggested a major character flaw in Bailey, but in the aftermath of the murder, the cops interpreted this as a propensity for violence towards women.
THE EVIDENCE
The crime scene was contaminated. It emerged later that neighbours were allowed to walk across it in order to enter and exit their homes. The State pathologist was late in arriving to examine the body.
John Harbison had a terrifying workload. While violent death was relatively infrequent in those times, there was more than enough work for two pathologists. He had petitioned on a number of occasions for an assistant, but his pleas fell on deaf ears.
Harbison finally arrived in West Cork on Christmas Eve. The first 24 hours in any murder investigation are regarded as the vital period. Already, the hunt for the killer was in trouble.
From early on, the gardaí believed that Bailey could be their man. There were suggestions, recently aired by Bailey himself in the High Court, that a French connection could be possible. This would have required somebody to ghost into the area and leave nearly directly after the murder. That avenue of inquiry was shut down pretty quickly.
What followed, according to Bailey’s case, was a modus operadi that has informed various miscarriage-of-justice cases down through the years. The gardaí had allegedly decided who did it and thereafter it was a question of getting the evidence to fit the theory.
Putting the cart before the horse in this manner leaves open the possibility that the wrong person has been fingered, and that any evidence uncovered is not gathered in a neutral manner. Such a course of action also shuts down any other lines of inquiry, allowing alternative trails to go cold.
The circumstantial evidence was threadbare. Bailey had scratches on his hands, which he explained had been inflicted when he was killing turkeys and cutting a Christmas tree on the weekend of the murder.
Beyond that, there were his character flaws. There were also alleged admissions. When the news editor of the Sunday Tribune suggested to him that the gardaí regarded him as a suspect, he said, “yeah, I did it”.
Another alleged admission was to a 14-year-old local boy, who says Bailey told him: “I went up there with a rock and bashed her fucking brains in.”
That and other admissions were subsequently dismissed in a report compiled in the DPP’s office as words that “reek of sarcasm, not veracity”.
On January 11, 1997, the gardaí got a solid lead. A confidential call was received from a woman identifying herself as “Fiona”. She claimed to have seen a man in an overcoat stumbling at Kealfadda Bridge at 3am on the night of the murder. The location is about 2km from where du Plantier’s body was found.
The gardaí eventually traced the woman. Her name was Marie Farrell. She owned a shop in Schull, and told the gardaí that the man in question was about 5ft10in and of thin build. Bailey is well built and over 6ft2in. The bridge is on a road that is not the direct route between the du Plantier home and where Bailey lived.
Yet the gardaí believed this was another piece of the jigsaw. On January 31, a number of gardaí, including Superintendent Dermot Dwyer, visited Bailey at his home. Bailey clams that Dwyer asked him whether he played poker, and then told Bailey that he had placed him at Kealfadda Bridge on the night of the murder. Dwyer denies this.
On February 10, Bailey was arrested and brought to Bandon Garda Station. His arrival at the station was met by a waiting media contingent which had obviously been tipped off.
He was subsequently released without charge.
Immediately after that arrest, the gardaí sent an urgent message to the DPP, saying it was imperative that Bailey be charged. “Witnesses living close to him are in imminent danger of attack,” the communique said. The DPP studied the file and recommended no prosecution.
Nearly a year later, on January 27, 1998, Bailey was arrested again on suspicion of murder. Following his detention, a file was once again sent to the DPP, which again recommended no prosecution.
Irrespective of what the gardaí felt, it was quite obvious that the DPP’s office was of the opinion that the evidence presented simply did not merit a prosecution for murder.
STRANGE GOINGS ON
In the wake of Bailey’s first arrest, the whole case lapsed into sometimes surreal fare. Marie Farrell claimed initially that she had been intimidated by Bailey on a number of occasions. “He was torturing me,” she said during a court case in 2003.
“My life was a living nightmare because I couldn’t even stay in my shop. I had to pay three girls to stay there all the time because I couldn’t be there, and in the end I just ended up in debt because I was so afraid to stay there because of Ian Bailey.”
She subsequently recanted these allegation and claimed that she was put under inordinate pressure by the gardaí.
In the High Court case just heard, Farrell made allegations of sexual advances by members of the force. This was the first time she had aired these allegations, which were vehemently rejected by the officers. Making such serious allegations 16 years down the line raised many eyebrows.
Another allegation came from a former British soldier who was an acquaintance of Bailey in West Cork. Martin Graham claimed the gardaí urged him to get close to Bailey and see if he could extract some admission as to the suspect’s guilt. He claimed that in pursuit of this, members of the force supplied him with drugs. The gardaí denied this also.
Then there was the State solicitor for the area, Malcolm Boohig. He claimed one of the senior gardaí involved in the case approached him and asked him to put pressure on the then justice minister, John O’Donoghue, whom Boohig knew from college, to in turn pressurise the DPP to bring a charge against Bailey.
In a 2001 review of the case, a report from the DPP’s office was scathing of the investigation by gardaí into Bailey, noting a number of “unsafe practices” that had taken place.
What emerges from all the evidence is that the gardaí were convinced of Bailey’s guilt, and were desperate to pursue a prosecution. Despite this absolute conviction, the evidence simply did not stack up to a standard that would be required in a court of law.
THE LIBEL TRIAL
In 2003, Bailey’s libel action against seven newspapers opened in Cork Circuit Court. His decision to bring the action at circuit court level was notable. The court’s jurisdiction at the time was only €38,000 and the case is heard by a judge. This meant that any award he would receive — for what were allegedly grievous reputational damages — would be limited.
However, the case would be decided on narrow legal grounds rather than thrown to the mercy of a jury, which may well decide based on emotion, rather than law.
At the time, Bailey was still regarded in large parts of the media and public as a pariah.
(By contrast, Bailey opted for a jury trial in the recent High Court action. More than a decade on from the libel trial, the public’s attitudes towards him had shifted somewhat, due to a number of revelations in the interim that suggested he may have been the victim of Garda malpractice — which has always been denied by the force. Also, in recent years, juries in non-personal injuries cases have made awards that legal observers have found astonishingly large.)
The libel trial took on the character of a de facto murder trial. The papers’ lawyer, Paul Gallagher, was torrid and scathing in his cross-examination of Bailey. In the end, Bailey was awarded €14,000 against two of the seven publications.
An appeal to the High Court three years later was a different ball game. After Bailey had given evidence, and before Gallagher had a chance to get stuck into him, the case was settled.
CHANGING NARRATIVE
In the aftermath of the libel trial, Marie Farrell gave a number of media interviews in which she alleged that Bailey had attempted to intimidate her. As a result, Bailey’s solicitor Frank Buttimer wrote to her threatening legal action.
In April 2005, Farrell contacted the solicitor to say that she wished to retract her statements placing Bailey at Kealfadda bridge on the night of the murder. She claimed that she had been coerced into making the statements, and consistently harassed by members of the Garda about the matter.
Farrell’s change of heart changed the nature of the conflict between Bailey and the State. It was a major boost to Bailey’s case for damages that had been initiated earlier that year.
An internal Garda inquiry, under assistant commissioner Ray McAndrew, was ordered to examine how exactly the force had conducted itself in the murder investigation.
Two years later, McAndrew’s report was forwarded to the DPP.
In July 2008, the DPP decided that no prosecutions against members of the force or the public were warranted. Despite repeated attempts by Bailey’s legal team, the McAndrew report has never been published or handed over to Bailey on discovery.
FRENCH CONNECTION
The shambles of an investigation, and the failure to prosecute anybody for the murder, prompted outrage in some French circles. The du Plantier family were well got in the French establishment and pressure was applied to have the matter investigated.
In 2008, magistrate Patrick Gachon was appointed by the French government to investigate the murder. There is provision in French law to investigate the death of a French citizen in a foreign jurisdiction.
The investigation was facilitated on this side of the water. Garda and pathology files were handed over. It’s difficult to imagine that the same level of co-operation would be agreed were the gardaí to attempt to investigate, for instance, the murder of an Irish citizen in Paris or London.
On April 24, 2010, Bailey was arrested at his home for the third time in connection with the murder. This time it was on foot of a European arrest warrant to extradite him to France, where Gachon wanted to question him. He was detained overnight and released on bail the following day.
Effectively the French felt his extradition was warranted on foot of evidence compiled in this jurisdiction but which the DPP had felt was inadequate to pursue a prosecution.
The Irish government supported the request. If Bailey were to be extradited, and jailed in France, that would have put paid to his civil action in this State, in the short term at least. Whether that was a consideration in supporting the request, there was major unease in some legal circles that the government was going down this route in dealing with a long-time resident of the country who had never been charged with the crime in question.
In March 2011, the High Court ruled that Bailey could be extradited. An appeal to the Supreme Court was lodged. The following October, the stormtroopers of justice arrived in Cork airport.
A consignment of French detectives were here to investigate the 15-year-old murder on Irish soil. Their arrival was met with RTÉ cameras.
They proceeded with their investigation over the following weeks, interviewing up to 30 people and receiving full co-operation from the gardaí.
It was a surreal exercise, the French attempting to build a case on the quicksand foundations that had sunk their Irish colleagues.
THE PAST AWAKENS
Before the detectives departed, the saga had another twist.
Former DPP Eamonn Barnes wrote to his old office to relate the incident back in 1998 when he had received notice that gardaí had made the improper approach to the State solicitor’s office about getting the then justice minister involved in the case.
A few days later, the 2001 review of the case compiled in the DPP’s office emerged into the public domain.
The 44-page document repeatedly referenced indications of Bailey’s “innocence” and noted that the investigation had “destroyed” the quality of life for Bailey and Jules Thomas.
It also contained a reference to neighbours who heard dogs barking for hours on the night in question, with some witnesses putting the commencement of the barking at 10pm, a time when Bailey was known to be in a pub in Schull.
In the round, the document went further than just explaining why there was not sufficient evidence to prosecute, by actually criticising the efforts to pin the crime on Bailey.
The Supreme Court appeal on Bailey’s extradition began in early November, and the following February the court ruled to overturn the High Court’s decision to hand him over to the French. The documents emerging from the DPP’s office were only noted in passing in the ruling, and not considered central to the judges’ decisions.
Despite the Supreme Court ruling and the long-buried documents from the DPP’s office, the European arrest warrant remains in place, largely confining Bailey’s movement to this jurisdiction.
In court last November, he described the cruellest effect of the warrant was that it prevented him from travelling to see his mother in England before she died, as well as from attending her funeral.
Despite all that has emerged, the French remain undeterred. The investigation under Patrick Gachon continues, with Bailey still the main focus of their inquiries.
Sophie’s husband Daniel Toscan du Plantier died in 2003. Sophie’s parents are still looking for justice, and most years since their daughter’s brutal killing, they travel to West Cork to remember a woman who died in what remains mysterious circumstances.
Ian Bailey and Jules Thomas continue to live in West Cork, despite what they claim has been the complete ruination of the life they knew prior to the murder and investigation.
Bailey is sometimes seen in Schull and other towns in the West Cork area selling vegetables in open air markets. In 2010, he graduated with a law degree from University College Cork. The publicitiy surrounding the murder of Ms Toscan du Plantier put paid to his career in journalism.
Michael Clifford
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