‘I told him I knew he killed Sophie. He didn’t reply’

BY NICK FOSTER

I DIDN'T always believe that Ian Bailey was guilty of the murder of Sophie Toscan du Plantier.

Back in 2014, when Ian Bailey was in the midst of a civil action against the State and An Garda Síochána, I flew to Dublin to see Bailey take the stand.

I was immediately hooked by the case – Bailey was eloquent, humorous, and (mostly) plausible. He could make the public gallery laugh.

But I couldn’t get one thing out of my head: Bailey appeared to be enjoying himself – a little too much. Conversely, when others were taking the stand, including his then-partner Jules Thomas, Bailey appeared bored. He would even yawn from time to time.

My objective on that first trip to Ireland was to see if the unsolved murder of Frenchwoman Sophie could be the subject of a true crime book. And the only way of doing that was to befriend Bailey at the Dublin courthouse and score an invitation to the cottage he and Thomas shared outside Schull.

When, a few months into my investigation, Bailey copied the Garda file to my memory stick, I realised that I had part of the key to the case right under my nose.

Bailey might have dismissed the Garda file as ‘2,000 pages of rumours’, and the office of the DPP might have found fault with it and decided there were insufficient grounds to put the Englishman on trial for Sophie’s murder. But I sensed the myriad witness statements – many from people in West Cork who were neighbours of Bailey’s – would provide a comprehensive picture pointing to what happened on that night in 1996, two days before Christmas.

One small regret is that, up to now, I have not found a way to publish the entire Garda file without fear of reprisal.

In this emblematic and notorious case – which did not result in the trial in this country which I feel was wholly warranted – ordinary Irish women and men should have the chance to read the evidence against Ian Bailey and decide for themselves if the DPP was right not to order a trial.

In the end, it was the Garda file and my own long conversations with Bailey, many at the handsome pine dining table in his rather claustrophobic country kitchen, that convinced me of Bailey’s guilt.

I’m glad I took the chance, in the late autumn of 2020, to tell Bailey directly that I knew he was Sophie’s killer. He didn’t reply. It was the last thing I ever said to him.

Which brings me to Ian Bailey’s death. I have been asked how I reacted when I heard the news. The answer is that I immediately thought of Sophie’s son, Pierre-Louis.

It was a moment in the trial of Ian Bailey in France, that the Englishman chose not to attend, which came back to me. I thought of how this young man stood up, back perfectly straight, in the hushed courthouse in Paris to hear the judge deliver the verdict: that Ian Bailey was guilty of the murder of his mother.

In my mind’s eye, I relived how Pierre-Louis’ father (Sophie’s first husband) looked at his son from a few seats away, his heart no doubt bursting with pride.

I thought of Sophie’s elderly parents distraught and in tears. I thought of their suffering over thousands and thousands of days, days in which many of the rest of us enjoyed the simple gift of being able to get on with our lives.

They could not, and they still can’t. Pierre-Louis told me the savage killing of his mother, and his long quest for justice, was like a ‘handicap’.

Pierre-Louis’ quest for justice is now effectively over because – in the Ireland Sophie loved, and among Irish people she loved even more – Ian Bailey got away with murder.

Nick Foster is the author of Murder At Roaringwater: The Inside Story of the Death of Sophie Toscan Du Plantier.