Original subtitles

She used to come here every time she came.

First port of call.

It was a still, calm night like now.

Flat calm and cold.

If you coughed, you could hear it across the harbour.

Just like literally like this.

Gardaí are treating as suspicious

the death of a woman whose body has been found

in a remote area in County Cork on the southern coast.

It's one of the most idyllic hideaways in the mountains of West Cork.

There is very little crime of any type.

It's a vast area with many isolated locations.

The murder is the first here in living memory.

She'd sit up there, have her tea and scones.

The funny thing was, I speak a bit of French,

and any French person I see, I'd be out there talking to them,

'cause if you don't use it, you lose it.

And she felt the same about English.

She'd try and speak English to me.

And I'd insist...

I wouldn't insist.

And practice my French with her.

Don't let people into your home. Ring the Gardaí immediately.

The brutal murder has shocked the public.

The international dimension gives it an added mystique.

France has been gripped by this case.

Just how a woman could be murdered

in probably the safest place in Ireland beggars belief.

Around Christmas time, we'd have a night for the locals in the pub, you know?

Sandwiches and sausage rolls

or finger food type thing.

And I asked her would she come, and she said she would.

But then, no, she left

and didn't come, obviously.

She was a beautiful French lady that came off-season,

and she doesn't come anymore.

The murder has attracted scrutiny from France.

I think that justice will be done.

It has become a modern Irish murder mystery.

The government set up a special inquiry.

...she walked out of court, refusing to answer questions.

What's important now is the truth.

It would not be appropriate for the government to comment.

We have made mistakes.

All of this has implications for all of us.

It was the case that goes to the heart of our democracy.

This is a murder, which unless solved, won't be forgotten.

The only reason I'm involved

is because I was the last person spoke to her.

Except whoever saw her after me.

Two days before Christmas

at the Garda station, police station,

I got a phone call from West Cork.

A local lady had discovered a body,

and a team was required to go to the scene.

It was definitely unusual.

We were unsure of what we were travelling down to.

To get down to West Cork,

all the major towns we travelled through had Christmas traffic.

It would have taken four and a half to five hours.

It was in a very remote area.

Very, very difficult to get to.

A town which was called Schull.

I remember when we learned about it.

I was working with a news agency here in Cork.

A call came in at ten to two from one of our contacts.

I jumped in my Fiesta and headed to West Cork.

Even though I'm from Cork, I took the wrong route.

I went through Bandon, Clonakilty, and Skibbereen,

so I met every traffic jam in the place.

Gardaí in County Cork are treating as suspicious

the death of a woman whose partly clothed body was found this morning

in a remote area near Schull.

I arrived in Schull.

Even when I was given directions how to find it,

it took me half an hour to 40 minutes to find the house.

It's really isolated.

The road leading to Sophie's house, it's a side road

off a small country road.

It is quite sinuous around bends,

then you clear one shoulder of rock and see the house in the distance.

I got as far as that.

The area was cordoned off well back from the murder scene.

There was a local journalist, Ian Bailey,

who'd cover crime, familiar with forensics and so forth.

He'd done some work for The Southern Star, a local paper in West Cork.

I'd never heard of him. He was the first journalist at the scene.

I, as the local correspondent or stringer,

I was known to various papers, and I had a call from The Cork Examiner,

and they gave me basic details

and asked me to go out and make some inquiries.

I was talking to the neighbours up there, "Have you heard anything?"

There was obviously a huge amount of interest in this.

I'm joined by John Farrelly of the Garda Press Office.

What can you tell us about the death of this woman?

She was discovered this morning around 10:00 a.m.

At the moment, the Gardaí are at the scene.

The body is still there, so details are quite sketchy at this moment.

We're still waiting for the arrival of our ballistics and forensics people

from Garda Headquarters to examine the scene.

We arrived in Schull at about 10 p.m.,

found the local Garda station,

and it was closed.

They were out at the scene.

We went to a local telephone box.

The phone had been vandalised,

so I had to rewire the phone,

contact the local guard

to show us where it was.

It was a full moon,

it was a clear sky.

Cold, just slightly above freezing.

When we got to the scene,

the body was lying in the grass verge,

dressed in white night attire,

attached to barbed wire

at the edge of the field.

The body had been on the roadside a long time,

a minimum of 12 hours.

I can still see it now.

It's as clear today.

She had defence wounds from holding her hands up.

Possibly, a lot of the wounds could have happened from the vegetation,

the briars or from the loose gravel on the roadway.

She had severe head and facial injuries,

a severe brain injury,

and crushed skull...

from a heavy object.

There was a concrete block at the scene, yes.

I can still see it.

Let's get the hell out of here.

Any idea roughly how long this woman has been dead?

Absolutely not.

That's one of the aspects the pathologist will be looking at

and the formal identification, which...

We'll have to wait until that takes place before we can release any more details.

John, thank you.

John Farrelly of the Garda Press Office on the discovery of a body...

At that time, we would have known her identity,

which included that she was French.

In Ireland, the body of a young French woman in her thirties

was discovered today in County Cork.

The victim, partially clothed and suffering head wounds...

We are a very close family, yes.

That's true.

Very close, yes.

I said, "It can't be Sophie

because she spoke to her husband the night before."

We were asking, "Have you heard from Sophie?"

"No, I know she's in Ireland."

"She left on Friday."

"I don't have any news, but that's not unusual."

I called Sophie's house,

and no one answered.

Of course, then things got tense.

Could it be Sophie?

We were 90% sure that it couldn't be her.

"Please, it's not Sophie."

And then we had some more information on the location,

that it was in West Cork.

Naturally, then we started to worry.

We were listening to the TV news,

and they didn't give the name of the place where it happened

or the... the victim's name,

and we... we didn't know,

but Marguerite said, "Oh, it's Sophie."

"But, Marguerite,

how many women visit from France at Christmas?"

Immediately, she feels it's Sophie.

I called Josephine, Sophie's neighbour.

I tried ten, 15 times, but she was always busy...

...until I managed to get hold of her,

and I still remember vividly

Josephine screaming in my ear.

I didn't understand anything she was saying

between her accent, the shouting,

and... and maybe the emotion.

Uh, until I cut her off by asking her, "Is it Sophie or not Sophie?"

That's when she said, "It's Sophie."

And there, your world turns upside down.

We were stunned, all of us.

A bit lost.

We had to tell Pierre-Louis,

who was on holiday with his dad.

I was 15 years old on 23rd December 1996.

We were preparing for Christmas.

My dad came and told me

in the middle of the night.

He woke me up to tell me.

And, well, the... the shock, uh...

it's like an electric shock, very powerful.

I was a little boy, an only child.

I was extremely close to Mum

because my parents divorced when I was one.

So for a very long time,

I lived with my mum during the week.

We were very close. Yes, very close.

It was a sudden transformation

from childhood to adulthood.

When she died,

a little part of all of us crumbled.

It's trying to make contact with her family in France

to... to break the news.

That's right. That was done.

Uh, it's particularly gruesome at this time of year,

coming up to Christmas,

that we have to give this kind of news to anybody.

It is a kind of blot on the landscape.

People are wondering whether the region's first murder in living memory

has meant that life there has changed forever.

My great-grandfather came to Schull to be the station master

in the 1800s.

You're Schull through and through.

Yes, I would consider myself so, yeah.

This area is very open-minded.

In coastal communities,

there's always an ebb and flow of new people coming in.

I think anything near the water keeps you fresh.

You can't become stagnant where there's an ocean outside your door.

My parents used to bring us down here going back to the mid '50s.

I'm from Cork City originally.

We came down here with my wife and kids

and have been here ever since.

Bought this place in 1982,

the Courtyard,

and we sold 2004,

and many magical moments over the years.

The countryside is so ancient.

And West Cork is overlooked by Mount Gabriel.

All kinds of rumours, um, swirled around that.

We're the last house on Mount Gabriel.

There's about three ruins up the mountain, they're Famine houses, you know,

where people used to live years ago.

You can just see the old ridges where they grew the spuds and stuff.

There were people living further up the mountain,

but there's no roads going up to the ones above.

There's a legend that the last wolf in Ireland lived there.

The local people grew up with the local legends and myths and lore.

It was mother's milk to them.

There's lots of standing stones and stone circles.

Great places, you know.

A lot of mythology.

A lot of the expat community had a very romantic feeling about Ireland.

West Cork has provided a peaceful, beautiful,

and relatively anonymous escape for people of all nationalities

for almost 30 years.

Every third or fourth house would be a foreigner of some kind.

German or English or Dutch or French or...

You know? It's not your regular parish community.

In fact, West Cork is regarded as an international

rather than an Irish region.

Yet the locals,

the people from the old families who were very traditional...

- Morning. - Good morning!

...who had lived in that place for centuries are very tolerant of the newcomers.

If you're coming from a city,

from England or from Europe, they find they like it and end up staying.

It's a feel that the area has.

The locals called them crusties.

I would say, like, "the garlic eaters."

Well, I first came to West Cork in 1986,

and it was just wonderful.

There I was in this rural idyll,

a sort of magnet for different nations, different people,

different art disciplines.

So you're a "blow-in." Explain what that means.

A blow-in's anybody that doesn't actually come from the place they're sitting in.

It's a description for somebody that wasn't born and raised there, I suppose.

I came here with my three children.

A lesbian, so, you know, a bit of a thing at that time.

But, actually, it's a place that really welcomed us.

I think people are desperate to find a safe, quiet place to live.

There were lots of sets of blow-ins.

The blow-ins that were the artist community.

There were blow-ins that were yachties,

hippie dope smokers.

I suppose I was the...

lesbian feminist blow-ins.

Very artist-orientated.

So maybe that says something about sort of the type of people.

People that think differently.

These were people drawn to the more rugged, wild West Cork lands.

The lost children of Europe.

We have a very determined team on this, an experienced team.

The divisional officer would have been Chief Superintendent Noel Smith.

This was a foul murder. This lady had obviously invested in this country,

and it's terrible that she should be killed in this fashion.

It would've fallen to Dermot Dwyer

to lead the investigation in practical terms.

Oh God.

Wait a minute, now.

Take away the cup.

Now...

That was the first murder in West Cork for nearly 100 years.

Where every murder investigation starts, you start with a clear mind.

You have no preconceived ideas

because if you do, it's wrong.

It's the evidence and the intelligence.

That's what directs you in a certain way.

Some people use this expression of you

as "the Cork Columbo."

Listen, don't mind that. That's rubbish. If... if... if...

Columbo was a well-paid man. I wasn't. End of story.

An outdoor crime scene is a very difficult area

to get evidence left by the perpetrator.

There was one foot mark.

It was only an approximate shoe size, but that's all.

We found blood on the field. We found it in two or three places.

There were bloodstains on the metal gate.

I had the gate removed as blood evidence.

The house was the next area we should be looking at.

There could have been an assault at the house.

There was nothing disturbed.

No broken cutlery, no broken anything.

No sign of an assault or aggression.

I was very surprised.

Everything was neat and tidy,

where it should be.

The initial information was

she was in the premises on her own.

But there was two wine glasses.

Somebody may have come in.

The fingerprint expert would've taken whatever fingerprints was available.

But also, I was fascinated by her door keys

in the back of the lock.

The possibility was

she could have answered a knock on the door

and was inveigled out of the premises,

and the door closed behind her.

Then we moved upstairs.

The bedroom was most unusual

in that it had a raised bed as it used to be in all country houses.

She had requested a local carpenter do it for her,

and the lady didn't have curtains.

Because she was so enthralled by the Fastnet lighthouse.

She could read in bed sitting up with the lighthouse light flashing.

Could someone have been watching her?

Oh, absolutely.

No doubt.

The fingerprint expert,

his results were negative.

There was no indication of other people in the premises.

We then focused on the possibility of DNA evidence.

Our forensic laboratory at the time was only starting to get a DNA system,

and you need a lot of physical evidence,

near to a... a teaspoonful of blood,

where in today's technology, two head hairs is now enough.

They found nothing there.

It all transpired 'twas hers,

poor, uh, Sophie's blood.

With blunt force trauma,

the blood most likely will be the victim's blood.

This morning, the body was removed from the scene...

If there are no witnesses to a murder

and you've no DNA...

We'll be pulling out all the stops

to get the person or persons who killed Sophie.

...everything then is circumstantial evidence.

Thanks again, and happy Christmas.

We had no experience of this.

We had no experience of serious crime at any level.

The local guard, they were just local guys, you know?

They'd never witnessed anything like it.

What it did to them, you know,

I've heard of them crying themselves to sleep for three nights.

From everyone on Morning Ireland,

a happy and peaceful Christmas.

My ex-husband and I were on holiday in Ireland

over Christmas and New Year's 1996.

One morning, he brought in the breakfast tray with The Irish Times.

This beautiful French woman on the front page

murdered in West Cork.

Isn't this awful?

I thought, "I'd like to know more about this woman."

What can you tell us, Superintendent,

about Sophie Toscan du Plantier?

She's been visiting here for a few years,

bought this property.

She's a person who kept very much to herself.

What was a married woman,

a mother,

doing all alone in Ireland at Christmas?

...the woman picked a home

that even by the standards of West Cork is extremely isolated.

...why she should decide to spend Christmas alone in West Cork

when she had a child and a husband in France.

She was a documentary producer.

Divorced.

She had her son, Pierre-Louis,

and lived alone with him

before Daniel came into her life.

Daniel Toscan du Plantier was a very big film producer,

very well-known.

Daniel was brilliant and intelligent...

and Sophie really liked that about him when they met.

They were on the same intellectual and creative level,

and they just clicked right away.

He courted her very cleverly.

He invited us to a premiere.

Uh, we had the best seats.

He tried to win Sophie through her passions.

But when Sophie married Daniel,

I cried. I didn't understand.

I've never cried at a wedding like I did at Sophie's.

As if I felt something. Really.

As if I had a premonition.

I'm a woman who sometimes has premonitions.

In Paris, she lived in a particular kind of world with Daniel.

And it wasn't Sophie's world.

Every evening, they had people.

They were with people. They have to go out.

And Sophie didn't like that.

I always said there was an Alice in Wonderland quality to Sophie.

She liked to be alone,

especially given her husband's life.

My mum didn't like glamour.

She always wanted to be private, authentic.

She needed an escape,

and Ireland was the perfect escape.

She wasn't Sophie Toscan du Plantier over there.

She was just Sophie.

When she was a child, she lived with an Irish family for a time.

So she wanted a house in Ireland.

So she travelled down with her cousin.

She says she'd hesitated between two houses.

One was in peaceful Irish landscape of green rolling hills, sort of thing,

and the other was... She called it "violence."

And they found that house.

My daughter Alexandra didn't have a good feeling when they arrived.

Very remote.

No light, no heating,

and there was a terrible wind

because the whole night, the shutters were banging like that.

Alexandra said, "You're not going to buy there."

"Don't buy there."

If you really want to know Sophie,

just go to her house in Ireland.

The sun, the wind,

the rain,

all things that reflect her character.

Tortured, calm, stormy, noise, wind.

You really have Sophie's spirit there.

Its wild beauty and remoteness

was what attracted Sophie du Plantier to the Mizen Peninsula.

She was very cheerful, sunny, bright,

and at the same time, she had a very romantic side.

Not in the sentimental sense, but a black romanticism.

The dark side.

Attracted by the morbid,

death,

monsters.

She had planned before she died to make a series about bodily fluids.

That was her big project,

to make a series of films about

breast milk,

blood,

sperm,

bile.

This sort of thing interested her a lot.

She had a very gothic side.

This gave her a sort of contrast.

It gave her depth.

A real depth.

She was a talented writer,

and she wrote a great deal and with great affection about West Cork.

The most haunting passage I remember was she described a dead lamb

she'd seen on a path,

savaged by a fox.

Tufts of its fur were in the bushes around,

and she talked about how it was pulp,

the scalp of a body.

It gives me shivers now

because that's exactly what happened to her.

I mean, I don't want to get too fanciful about the whole thing.

I've tried to keep my eyes riveted on the facts,

but it was quite chilling to read that.

Our investigation's progressing very steadily.

We are continuing our inquiries in France and locally in the Cork area.

In any murder case, and this is a tried and tested system,

you set up an incident room.

A team of 50 detectives has now been assembled to lead this investigation...

Everything is studied and logged into this incident room.

What's the current state of the investigation?

We are doing house-to-house visits, and we have extended questionnaires.

One of the things we always do

is generally referred to as house-to-house inquiries.

There's a special form you'll make out for it,

and our guards, who would know the people very well,

they went to every house within ten miles and said "Where were you on that night

between twelve o'clock and four o'clock in the morning? Where were you?"

Two guards came up, asking us questions and various things.

I remember them coming to the house. Some Bantry boys came in.

Unless something happens specifically, most people would find it quite difficult

to tell you minute by minute, "What were you doing?"

If they wanna talk to me, they can talk to me.

Unless you've got the... you know, a photographic memory.

If you're telling the truth,

you've no problem.

If you're covering up, you tell lies.

When the Gardaí arrived to interview me,

they brought a photograph with them of Sophie,

and they said what did I think of this woman.

I said, "Yeah, very nice."

"No, but could she be a lesbian?"

It did kind of shock me.

I thought, "Is there any possibility

that this monster was some lesbian?"

There was one guy living locally who had a predilection for spying on women

and stealing gas canisters.

Apparently, he used to go around knocking off tanks of gas.

He was a small bit...

What's the word? He was a bit odd, the poor fella.

It threw up all types of people like that.

People acting not normal.

They've interviewed about a thousand people. They say...

It was just so much information.

The Gardaí had identified a total of 54 suspects initially.

Quickly, that narrowed down to about ten, but one by one, they went through those.

...detectives led by Chief Superintendent Dermot Dwyer.

The investigation is being taken very seriously.

I was writing stories for the local papers

and one of the national papers.

There was one story I picked up.

A lady who lives at Three Castle Head called Yvonne Ungerer

told me she had had a visit from the victim on the Sunday before

and that... that Madame du Plantier said

that she'd had this really very strange experience.

There's a ruined castle

on Three Castle Head.

There she saw something terrible,

and it scared her.

And she felt

terrible fear.

She arrived at the Ungerers' house really scared,

saying, "Oh my God, I saw a woman."

Like a white shape.

Three Castle Head is meant to be haunted

by a melancholy female ghost.

The White Lady.

I learned this story about this lady,

this mythological, legendary character

who lives at this place on the lake.

And when you see her,

it means you are going to die in the hours that follow.

She didn't go to an Irish person's house.

An Irish person would never have let her leave.

If they'd known the legend,

they wouldn't have let her go home.

But they didn't know.

I remember when we arrived in Ireland.

We found ourselves in Cork, in a hotel,

on 25th December.

All the Irish families were together celebrating Christmas.

I think it was the morning of the 26th

that they called me and said, "You can come and see the body."

A big room, the morgue.

You cross the room. You see a coffin at the end.

You have to breathe.

You have to catch your breath and tell yourself, "Here we go."

And the first time I saw Sophie, I didn't recognise her.

Uh... I didn't. It wasn't her.

What I noticed was her hands.

And that her hands were so...

Thank God

my sister didn't see her hands.

We were able to see Sophie's body.

Marguerite...

saw her.

She... she kissed her,

but she said, "This isn't my daughter."

I'm sorry.

Set. Ready...

- Are you... - You're OK. You're fine.

...today's murder is still ongoing and because the question...

I'm sorry, everyone. I lost my eyeline.

I can remember journalists from all walks of life.

The media were very visible.

I went to Schull five or six days after the murder.

When journalists go somewhere new,

they go and see the local journalists.

A colleague called Eddie Cassidy told me,

"Ask for Ian Bailey."

Because I was a local correspondent,

the French press came in, came to me,

and various other news organisations.

He was clearly the best-informed journalist on the scene.

He told me a little of what he knew.

He was extremely nice.

Very helpful.

In another life, I was an investigative journalist in Britain.

I did a lot of sensitive stuff.

I worked for The Sunday Times' Insight Team on stories to do with GCHQ.

Suddenly, he found himself in the middle of a phenomenal story

in a place where nothing ever happens.

From my point of view, uh...

I was being very busy as an active freelance journalist.

Writing articles, trying to make a living for myself.

I was picking up things in Schull,

getting on with my job as an investigative journalist.

He said, "Ask your French colleagues

to investigate Sophie Toscan du Plantier's life."

I genuinely felt that there was somebody in France

who had a vested interest in this.

She's part of the French show business, so I think it's fascinating people.

But you can think something.

Can you prove it?

Sophie du Plantier was married to a top French film producer.

The couple were among the social elite in Paris.

Daniel was a very big producer.

He had produced for lots of big directors.

Antonioni,

Kurosawa,

Tarkovsky.

More than that, he was the embodiment of French cinema.

He'd studied classics, Latin and Greek, so he was very cultured.

He'd been the director of the biggest French studio.

He was a public figure.

You would see him on TV.

...opera every 100 years, so this will be the last...

I've rarely met anyone so brilliant, so eloquent.

Daniel Toscan du Plantier was very well-known.

He knew Jacques Chirac well,

who was the president of France at the time.

So he was very high-profile in France.

But I had the impression that there were two Daniels.

That when the curtain fell,

he was much more switched off,

much more anxious, and quite silent.

I knew that Daniel had financial problems, that he wasn't in an easy situation.

When she died...

...Daniel said, "Don't speak to anybody."

"I don't want to receive any journalists."

"I want to block everything."

"I don't want..." duh-duh-duh.

And people thought, "Why did Daniel do that?"

He didn't go to Ireland to identify the body. It was the family.

We don't really know why he didn't come,

but it was extremely surprising.

When you find out that your wife has been murdered,

you go and deal with it.

The people of Southwest Cork remain baffled.

The Gardaí still await a break.

On 27th December,

this woman called Marie Farrell

was visited by Gardaí, given a questionnaire,

and one of the questions was, "Did you see Sophie Toscan du Plantier?"

And she said she'd been in her shop on Saturday 21st around three o'clock.

When Sophie left the shop, she'd seen this man across the road

outside McCarthy Butchers on Main Street.

Thought he looked a bit weird. Very long coat.

He was standing across the road from my shop,

and when she left the shop, he followed her down the street.

He went from corner to corner, watching every place she went.

Another word for it would be "stalking."

She didn't know who this guy was.

All these statements meant the Gardaí could trace

the last-known movements of Sophie Toscan du Plantier.

The last-known pictures of Sophie Toscan du Plantier

as she arrived in Cork Airport on December 20th.

We have a feeling there may be somebody out there

who has further information to give us,

and for whatever reason is not coming forward at that stage.

Hello again, and welcome back to the Crimeline studio.

This following reconstruction traces what happened

from the time Sophie Toscan du Plantier arrived in Cork

until the morning...

I was down in Schull, and it was all over the papers,

and quite a few people started to say, "You look so like Sophie."

A friend in film contacted me,

and he said, "These people are looking for somebody to do a reconstruction."

Sophie arrived at Cork Airport...

Would I be interested?

I have no acting experience whatsoever.

I mean, it was watched by so many people.

Thank you.

People still associate me with that.

There weren't any makeup artists.

What I had to do was put on a wig.

I thought, "Oh my God, this is so amateur and terrible," to be honest with you.

She made some purchases in Brosnan's Spar supermarket.

But I felt I was doing something positive.

The next day, Sunday 22nd December,

Sophie drove to Three Castle Head...

...and walked for around an hour in this area.

She then dropped in to Billy O'Sullivan's pub in Crookhaven.

She had tea there and spoke to some people in the bar.

I suppose the most difficult part was probably driving up to the house.

Everything was still quite fresh.

At six o'clock, lights were seen on in her house.

And then to go into the house and know that three or four weeks ago

that this woman had come to her, um, her death in such a horrendous way.

What happened over the intervening hours remains a mystery.

I felt a kindredness towards her.

That's the way I would see it.

I understood why she was down here,

exactly what she loved about it.

A woman died here,

and we somehow all felt responsible for that.

But it didn't make sense

to our experience of what West Cork was.

Nobody really knew how we all fitted into that,

how we thought about ourselves.

Twelve o'clock on Christmas Day, there's always a... a swim for charity.

We always go down to the pier, and hundreds of people go down there,

and it's a social sort of event.

The Christmas swim gets everyone together after Mass.

Obviously, everyone was aware of what was prevailing in the area

but didn't quite grasp, actually, the enormity of what had happened.

I think everybody was coming to terms with it.

The murder was part of the conversation down there.

And, uh, you start thinking about,

"God," you know, "there is somebody that can do this horrible thing."

"Are they living around here?"

We were all afraid there was a murderer among us.

We were afraid of one another.

People all around were scared.

You know, 'cause we never locked doors or anything.

But people did lock doors.

There's no denying

foreign nationals have been affected by the killing.

I feel scared, yes.

It's taken some of the beauty away, hasn't it?

They dread to think

anyone in such a close-knit area could've been involved.

That changed that whole atmosphere. Definitely.

People were crawling through ideas of who were the weirdos.

Who could this possibly be, this monster?

I was thinking about how everybody had made it "the other."

There were plenty of "others."

Blow-ins might have said, "It must have been

a repressed local farmer

who needed sex."

And locals might have said,

"Oh, it must have been one of those hippie dope-smoking ones

who needed sex."

The place is full of rumour and counter rumour,

and all sorts of theories have been bandied about.

In my mind, I was trying to think of neighbours

and various things and various people's lives.

You know, trying to analyse everybody,

work out motives, and all sorts of stuff.

People are afraid, yeah, that there's somebody out there.

If it's somebody living in the area, they might do it again.

Don't let people into your home

unless you're satisfied as to their identification.

If you're suspicious, ring the Gardaí immediately.

I did actually have a thought about somebody,

and it kept going on in my mind, and I couldn't stop it at all. I...

"Len, stop thinking about it. Stop thinking about it." you know?

And in the end,

it was just playing on my mind. I went to the guards, and I told them.

I did feel really strange having thoughts about other people

you know, when you have no proof.

Your mind goes off into ridiculous places, you know,

and I wasn't the only person to behave like that.

Sophie was murdered

between 11 p.m. on Sunday night and 10 a.m. the following morning.

We would ask anybody who was driving a car on that night

to let us know if they saw anything unusual.

And then on 11th January, there was this major development in the case.

The Gardaí received a phone call from a call box

from a woman calling herself Fiona

saying she'd seen a man at Kealfadda Bridge

around 3 a.m.

on the morning of the 23rd, when Sophie was murdered.

Chief Superintendent Noel Smith made an appeal to Fiona to contact them.

Now, you particularly want to address yourself to somebody here.

The caller made a phone call to Bandon Garda Station.

That caller gave us certain information

which we think could be critical in... in solving this murder,

and I am making a direct appeal to that person tonight to ring me here.

Please, if you're watching, or if you know who did make that phone call,

do get in touch.

She rang again the day afterwards

from a call box in Leap in West Cork, again using the alias Fiona.

When the Fiona thing started,

we thought, "Why doesn't she come forward?"

"There must be a reason she doesn't come forward."

She was married,

and she shouldn't have been there with another man.

We were all telling her

that obviously this poor lady's life had gone,

you know, so she should give her statement

regardless of the consequences to herself.

And she rang again on the 24th,

third phone call as Fiona.

But on this occasion, she made it from her home phone in Schull.

Gardaí traced it.

Fiona was Marie Farrell.

What did you see on the night of 23rd December?

I was driving from Goleen to Schull,

and I saw a man walking along the bridge, just along here.

Um,

he appeared to be in a drunken state and waving his arms around.

She said he was wearing a long, black coat and looking up at the sky,

and he was totally dishevelled and seemed to be out of it.

All the things of somebody that has totally and utterly lost it.

But then she was in Brosnan's supermarket in Schull

later in January,

and she saw the man again.

"Oh my God, that's the man I saw on the road."

I would've said that to myself.

I went into the shop. I bent down to get the paper.

I looked up, and there he was.

I dropped the paper and left the shop

because I knew the guards were in the street.

She'd seen this man at Kealfadda Bridge

the night Sophie was murdered and said, "That's the man."

When I pointed the man out to the Gardaí,

they told me

that his name was Ian Bailey.