Original subtitles

Hello again, and first, the reconstruction of the brutal murder

of Madame Sophie Toscan du Plantier in West Cork.

We were filming over at Three Castle Head for that Crimeline reconstruction.

We were filming down near the sea,

and a man came bounding across the fields towards the crew.

He was wearing wellies and had a big, swinging, long coat on him.

He wanted to know what was going on. He wanted to be part of it.

And he said, "I'm a local journalist,

and I really have the inside track on all of this."

It was in the middle of filming, so people said, "Thank you very much."

"We're busy here now, but thank you."

But then, always in the back of my head,

I thought he said, "Actually, I met her on this walk recently."

Almost like he was showing off.

And it was

Ian Bailey.

Ian is certainly somebody who is not shy

about coming centre stage in this story.

Can I ask you something?

Are you going to interview Bailey?

I think so, yes. Yeah.

He loves being interviewed.

He loves it.

This has only just really come out.

See that...

Each one of those is potentially capable of producing an apple,

but a lot of it...

Look, it's being germinated by little flies 'cause...

You notice there aren't any bees about?

Ah, bee.

Apis apis.

We call this the Prairie Cottage, this is known as.

I live here with my partner, Jules.

The cows are in the field.

They're the cows I use the milk from to make my bread and butter puddings.

We have three gardens here.

This is the first garden.

Those are runner beans.

Different varieties of lettuce.

There were some leeks, but we just pulled them all.

I came to Ireland to have a new way of life,

and I thought, "Actually, I wanna get out of the fucking rat race,"

and I made contact with various newspapers,

you know, as a journalist, but at the same time, writing poetry.

And then I met Jules.

I had a house that I had to move out.

She said, "I've got a spare place out here,

and I use it as a studio 'cause I'm an artist and I paint."

"You could rent that."

We became friendly, and subsequently we became lovers.

She's Welsh, and, I mean, she was here a long time before me.

You know, it's her land.

This is the studio house down the lane.

Jules would have the big canvasses,

and I had a kitchen, and I had a little office in the back

where my Underwood typewriter sat.

The victim's house is about three miles along the road.

It's probably a mile as the crow flies.

I'd done some work for her neighbour, Mr. Alf Lyons,

but I was never introduced to her.

I was aware of her, but I didn't know her name.

It was alleged, unexplainedly,

that a lady had seen me down at Kealfadda Bridge

that night in the early hours of the morning.

Around 3 a.m. on the morning of the 23rd December,

I saw a man walking along the bridge.

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

When I pointed the man out to the Gardaí,

they told me that his name was Ian Bailey.

And it wasn't me. It was completely untrue

because at that time, I was actually asleep in the Prairie Cottage.

He denied that he was at Kealfadda Bridge,

which is 2.6 kilometres from Sophie's house

and actually is in the opposite direction to his own house.

Kealfadda Bridge is southeast of Sophie's house.

Ian's house is northeast of Sophie's house,

so it doesn't seem logical for him to be down at Kealfadda Bridge

if he was at Sophie's house.

There was a short period, up to the start of January, uh,

when we focused on our pain and not the investigation.

I remember the last conversation that we didn't have.

She left me a message.

I didn't call her back.

I eventually called her three days later,

and she had already left for Ireland,

and she died two days later.

I wondered why she tried to call me.

Did she want me to come too?

It's a mystery

because she usually liked to go there alone

and this time, she asked practically everyone to go with her.

She asked me to go with her,

but I couldn't because my mother was visiting Paris,

so I didn't go.

And me, I had such a bad flu.

I was on a drip.

We still don't know exactly why she insisted so much.

We don't know if she was scared or something.

It's terrifying.

As if it was predestined that no one could go with her.

My mother read palms,

and when she saw Sophie's,

she went pale.

She had a very short line here.

Before Sophie died,

a clairvoyant friend came to my house.

There was a photo of Sophie on the wall,

and she said, "Oh la la."

"This young woman will have a violent death when she is 40."

I replied, "That's not possible."

"Sophie is too vibrant to die."

It's as if everything shifted so it could happen.

I feel terrible because if I had been there,

she wouldn't be dead.

I feel responsible.

I should have gone.

We were trying to

determine what could have happened on the night,

a freezing night.

The conclusion we came to was,

she had come out of the house, dressed for bed.

Something happened outside.

The door closed.

She was brought or run down the roadway

to where the body was found.

The guy that did this murder...

was a fella that lost it completely in the head.

He goes berserk, frenzied.

She was, uh, battered.

And then left the body where it was.

He wasn't thinking right.

During the assault,

she had rolled in or was pushed into the vegetation.

The body had been found in a location

that was full of briars.

Thorny, extremely strong,

thick-stemmed briars.

If you rubbed your hand to them, some of them were that big.

Detectives believe the killer would have been cut and bruised.

Gardaí say they want to hear from anyone who may have noticed

a person with suspicious wounds or cuts or...

It is quite likely that whoever attacked her

would have marks or perhaps bloodstains on their person or on their clothing.

Gardaí obviously had a lot more investigation to do,

but it would have fallen very much then to the Gardaí in West Cork.

They'd never, ever had to deal with a murder before,

and they were suddenly behaving

like they thought cops should behave or something.

They would ring up,

and it was all sort of sotto voce,

and they'd go, "Are you alone?"

"Have you got anybody there?"

And then they'd peer up over the window ledge

to see if the coast was clear,

just like the Blues Brothers, looking to left or right.

There was all a bit of an air of desperation about them.

One day, I went into the paper shop,

and I noticed there was a local guard who I knew

and a detective from Bantry. They were scrutinising me.

"And what's that about, then?"

Then I walked down Schull high street

and just popped my head back around up the main street,

and what should I observe but the same two police officers.

I was thinking, "Why are they looking at me?"

Hmm... Nothing more than that really.

You got the impression that they'd decided on Ian,

and they were desperate

to make it stick.

I can remember saying to them that I was brought up to believe

that you're innocent until you're proven guilty,

and that was clearly not the case with Ian.

And they said, "Wouldn't you think

if you really were convinced or thought someone had done it,

it was okay to do that?"

And I said, "No, it isn't."

Ian Bailey, at that time,

emerges as a journalist in the immediate wake of the murder,

but he had had a career in journalism in England before that.

When I knew him in the early '80s,

he was about 20-ish.

He was doing a lot for The Times.

And he set up an agency in Cheltenham

and did that extremely well.

I think there's a little bit of a romance about journalism.

I was writing articles while I was at school,

and growing up, I read a book.

It was All the President's Men by Bernstein and Woodward.

I thought, "That's what I want to do, I want to be an investigative journalist."

You're not the most popular person,

but you have an edge,

and you have a huge privilege.

You will have an awful lot more information

than you can ever publish.

You know, he was a natural at getting information out of people.

I thought he was an excellent journalist.

During January, I was still being a reporter.

I was covering the... the case,

and I was coming up with lines of inquiry and stories.

Ian Bailey was reporting on the crime,

and he contacted a number of newspapers,

including The Irish Daily Star

and The Sunday Tribune.

I would ring up The Sunday Tribune,

a reputable Sunday paper, during the week

and talk with the news editor about ideas for the Sunday coming

and just telling her what I was picking up

to give her an idea of the... maybe the sort of story or line I could take.

That instinct in him would be there.

Looking at him as a journalist and this thing has happened up the road,

fair play.

Absolutely fair play, and I'd do the same.

He finds himself in the middle of an extraordinary case.

So of course he was very excited

and determined to write articles and make some money.

It's obvious.

On 26th December, three days after the murder,

Ian made his way around the back of Sophie's house,

which was still cordoned off,

to Alfie Lyons' house to deliver milk and briquettes,

even though it transpired that Alfie hadn't requested him to do that.

So he was there at the scene then.

Bailey got an article published on 28th December in the Star

with the title of "the tangled love life."

And it gave the impression to people that he knew a hell of a lot.

He said that Sophie had been killed by blunt force trauma.

He also mentioned

that there were two wine glasses on the draining board and sink.

And he also added

that she had not been sexually assaulted,

which one would judge as he had good contacts in the investigation.

You don't necessarily win friends by being an investigative journalist.

In fact, if you're good at what you do, you tend to make enemies.

He certainly put it about that she had lovers

and that she had male visitors at her home.

There's been the most extraordinary range of stories.

There's been a lot of speculation about this.

We don't deal in speculation. We deal in facts.

Basically, she was having crazy parties

and, you know, sex, drugs, and rock and roll, I suppose.

I stopped reading it because it's just nonsense.

I got angry enough, uh, reading the first one, you know,

which was obviously conjecture on his part.

No basis in truth at all,

so just him looking for headlines.

Crap, yeah.

Crap. I mean, basically, we'd have known.

That wouldn't have gone unheard of, you know?

After Sophie's death, the newspapers started saying

she had lovers,

that she went to Ireland with these lovers.

Um...

I don't know about "lovers" plural. I know of one lover.

Sophie told me one morning over breakfast,

"Listen, I'm going to leave Daniel. I'm leaving."

"I'm moving in with someone else."

I was a bit shocked.

Sophie had begun a liaison with Bruno Carbonnet

six years before, around '91, who had visited West Cork with her

at least on two occasions.

Daniel knew about it.

Sophie called him and said, "That's it."

She had cleared out her stuff and was leaving.

It was a separation. They were still married, but they were separated.

When she asked Daniel if he was okay, he said,

"No, it's winter here."

But this man was quite dark.

Sophie couldn't put up with it

because she was an extremely joyful and sunny woman.

Bruno soon showed himself to be possessive,

and Sophie wanted to keep her distance.

Sophie had ended the relationship around Christmas '93,

but it ended acrimoniously.

His behaviour was very worrying after their breakup.

He sent Sophie a screw by post.

There were reports suggesting that he had assaulted her in Paris.

Their relationship lasted over a year,

and then she went back to Daniel.

At the time, everyone thought that there was only one person

who could have wanted to harm Sophie.

Her ex-lover,

Bruno Carbonnet.

A number of Gardaí travelled to France in January '97

and did get French police to question Sophie's, uh, lover, Bruno Carbonnet.

And he was able to satisfy Gardaí that he wasn't in West Cork.

It subsequently transpired that he was in Paris.

He was able to produce a receipt

he'd signed for... for the installation of a phone, I think, on the 22nd/23rd.

He had a fool... you know, absolutely solid alibi.

Another theory was that of the "hitman."

A man who, I don't know, would have been sent by Daniel.

Bailey was telling people of his theories

gathered by his own investigation.

That there was a French connection

because Daniel Toscan du Plantier would lose half of his estate

from any divorce,

had hired somebody to assassinate his wife.

He said it to me again and again.

"Toscan du Plantier sent a killer from France to get rid of his wife,"

and he persisted with this idea.

The victim had a large amount of insurance money on her life,

and the beneficiary of the insurance money was the husband,

Daniel Toscan du Plantier.

Sophie was his third trophy wife,

and he wouldn't come over

to identify the body.

I think this attitude made people suspect Daniel.

Wouldn't you drop everything to lay your hands on your wife's coffin?

Daniel refused to go to Ireland to answer the investigators' questions.

Quite surprising when his wife just died.

I can understand why people are surprised.

But I went to the house in the south of France

to help organise the funeral, and Daniel was devastated.

So devastated.

I think that's what stopped him from going to Ireland.

I also think that he felt very guilty. Daniel said to me,

uh, "Agnès."

"I wasn't with her when she died. I wasn't there when she died,

and I just can't accept it."

Whoever did it had to know the area very well.

You could even ask some locals to go to the house, and they wouldn't find it.

So a stranger would not find it.

What assassin would come to a very isolated region

and then rely on weapons of opportunity,

like a slate rock or a concrete block,

to carry out an assassination?

It was absurd.

So Daniel again initially was a suspect

but was eliminated from their list of suspects pretty early on.

We eliminated every possible suspect from Paris.

The... We left nothing undone like that. Do you know what I mean?

It was Bailey who threw the police's focus onto Bruno Carbonnet

and Daniel.

At one point, he contacted the Gardaí

to say that he had information

related to a French connection to the killing.

All these stories about the French connection

all led back to one person,

and that was Ian Bailey.

Could that have sent the investigation in the wrong direction?

Of course. Of course. And wasn't that why he wrote it?

In, I guess, the end of January to early February,

things started to become... become very strange.

I was putting stories through to The Sunday Tribune.

I was talking to Helen Callanan, who was the news editor.

She said to me on one occasion, "Do you know what they're saying up here?"

I said, "No, tell me."

"They're saying the word is you murdered her."

It was just so ridiculous...

But she was telling me this, you see?

I was hearing this for the first time from her.

I now know that I'm... it's out there.

Somebody is putting round the false word that I have... I'm the murderer.

Barth O'Leary came to the house.

It was a nice day, the weather was good, and I was outside working,

and I had rolled-up sleeves.

Bailey was seen by two members of our force,

and his arms and his hands were all scratched.

Serious scratching, now.

I chopped a Christmas tree down to save a bit of money

because Christmas trees are expensive.

I climbed up to the top of a pine tree, a Sitka spruce, in fact.

I sawed the top off,

and then I had to pull it down through the tree,

and got a little bit of light scratching on my hand... hands and arms.

You'd hardly notice them.

Now, you'd think, wouldn't you,

if I had have had anything to do with it,

which I didn't,

you'd think, wouldn't you, that I would have...

And the scratches had come from briars, which they didn't,

you'd have thought I'd have... I wouldn't have been working bare-armed.

Normally, the photographer would have taken basic photographic shots.

Back then, normal cameras wouldn't be quickly available for a guard,

and a drawing... a drawing would be acceptable.

A drawing was done

by Barth O'Leary

who you could quite clearly see

didn't have an ounce of artistic integrity within him.

Surely it would've been easy to send the photographer out

to photograph his hands.

It just seems a no-brainer at this stage. Why not take a photograph of him?

You can't be going round with a camera photographing people and that.

If you did, you'd be in more trouble. He wasn't arrested or anything.

I'm gonna let the chickens out, so stand back.

Come on out.

Buck-buck!

He also had a nick on his forehead,

which he said he got from killing three turkeys.

We used to rear turkeys,

so on the Sunday, 22nd December,

my job was...

And the turkeys were in the shed.

...was to go in, uh, and... and to kill them,

and in the process...

Well, I... The way I did them, I strung them up by their feet,

and then, you know, um...

It sounds cruel, but it has to be done. Somebody had to do it.

Uh, I broke the neck,

and in... in the process of doing this with three turkeys,

I...one of them, as I was holding the feet,

one of the legs sort of came free

and just scratched, actually, my hairline,

just a tiny, little... It wasn't... Again, it wasn't a blood scratch.

And subsequently that got blown out of all proportion.

They said, "Ooh, you got that

in... in the process of murdering Madame du Plantier."

The Christmas swim is always, you know,

a wonderful social occasion for the community.

So I just went down to the swim where I saw Ian,

a very striking person, a very tall, strong man.

I shook hands with him, and I noticed markings on his hand,

kinda parallel lines,

maybe four or five or six across the back of his hand.

There was a uniformity to them, is what I would say.

The time frame... caused me to wonder. That's all.

I just thought it was a curious thing, is what I would say.

I told my family,

and I just sort of wondered aloud, shall we say? That's all.

Towards the end of January 1997,

I had a visit from a man

who introduced himself as Detective Superintendent Dermot Dwyer.

He came to the house. Jules was out.

I invited him in.

Ian Bailey's about 6 ft. 3.

He was a very imposing man,

full of confidence,

and he was a very good speaker.

We sat down.

I made him coffee.

He made very good coffee too as a matter of fact.

I think we still had mince pies left from Christmas,

so I offered him Christmas pies.

Oh, I would, look...

Yeah, he was. He told the fricking country the day we left.

Eating two mince pies...

He seemed quite reasonable to me at the time,

and I was... I... I was very happy to assist if I could.

I was fascinated, everything I heard about him.

He was sizing me up,

and I was sizing him up.

Kind of a friendly conversation, but it was probing on both sides.

Bailey's a complex character, you know.

He's a complex character.

And I said, "Ian, we'd better talk about this murder."

Ian married in the '80s

in Gloucester.

She was called Sarah, and they bought this great big house in Gloucestershire.

Perhaps he'd landed on his feet, hadn't he?

I'd say they both had an edge to them.

And I think something is going wrong when they moved into the house,

and they eventually split up.

And then, you know, everything crumbled around him.

He was completely different after the marriage had gone.

Ian was left with nothing.

Absolutely nothing.

He was someone who'd slightly lost his way.

A huge contrast to this amazing, energetic man in his twenties

who I met in 1975.

And then he disappeared.

I think he saw Ireland as a sort of nirvana.

I can remember the first time I ever laid eyes on him.

He came through that door there. A looming presence. Big man.

A striking-looking man, looking a little bit like a buccaneer

'cause he had black hair drawn into a ponytail.

He presented his card. He was very self-assured.

Uh, and the card read "Eoin Bailey."

He was in Ireland, so he changed his name to Eoin.

I had a sense of him being a chameleon.

He was another one of these people

that'd come over from England to have a relaxing life

and start something new, you know? Although he was a bit strange with it.

The big, long jacket on, he had a book under one arm and a staff under the other.

He certainly made an impression.

Whether he made a good or a bad impression is the question.

Once I got to know him, I was quite happy

if he did not come in here.

Overly confident.

A bit theatrical.

Aggressive.

An absence of kind of ordinary modesty.

And then suddenly he'd start to recite a poem, you know?

He'd call the pub to order, stand up in the middle of a thronged bar.

Demanded attention. Big, booming voice.

And reamed out a load of drivel.

Do you want a poem?

"In the halls of Skibbereen..."

That's all I can remember!

He'd give a background to what this...

each poem he would recite.

No, "in the markets of Skibbereen." It was a poem about the market.

Nobody could even fathom out the background,

let alone the poem.

I'm sitting on the rock on Dunmanus Bay

Calling for the dolphins to come and play

A big pod, please Swimming in perfect harmony

Because I have many questions To ask of the dolphins...

He wrote, um...

Oh, it sounds very harsh to say "doggerel,"

but it certainly... They were not well-developed poems.

Questions about this, questions about that

Questions about what has happened And what has not happened yet

Questions about this And questions about that

I want my questions answered By the dolphins of the west

It's a simple poem, observational poem. The bay sometimes fills up with dolphins.

Writing is hard.

It's not the work that mattered to Ian.

I think it was the image of himself as Irish poet.

You know, appropriating Irish culture and Irish language

to serve some grandiose image of himself.

He just annoyed the hell out of people, just naturally. I just...

Who was he,

the strange character of Ian Bailey?

Clearly, he was hungry for admiration,

even notoriety.

We were talking in the kitchen, and he said, did I play poker?

And I said, "No, I don't."

And he said, "You should."

I thought, "Strange thing to say."

"I don't play poker, but I know it's a game of bluff."

Did I ask him, did he play poker?

Not at all.

I didn't ask him that in the... because I don't play poker. Do you get me?

And he said to me,

"I'm gonna place you at Kealfadda Bridge

in the early hours of the morning of the 23rd."

I said, "That's ridiculous. That's nonsense."

He said, "We'll see."

That was not true. Why would I say that?

"I'll place you..." That was the words.

"I'll place you at Kealfadda Bridge,

uh, at three o'clock in the morning."

As if.

Why would I tell him that? I didn't tell him that at all.

'Twas a good story by him.

I said, "Who do you think did it?" And he said,

"It was a professional hitman."

"A stranger from Paris

on behalf of Daniel Toscan du Plantier."

He said to me, "Who do you think did it?"

I said... I don't know if I should even be saying this now,

I said, "Look, Ian, do you know what I think?"

I said, "The man that did it is local."

"He's a headcase,"

and so on.

And I said, "I've a good idea who that is,

and I think you've a good idea," and I left it like that.

I realised that this guy was a...

I believe to be actually a psychopathic criminal

wearing the blue uniform of An Garda Síochána.

Look, there was about ten different cops interviewed him.

He doesn't know the name of one more.

He knew me, and every problem he has now...

...I'm the cause of all of it.

I think a lot of people were scared of him.

He'd be ranting and raving,

banging his hand. "So-and-so treated me like this,

my ex-wife treated me like that."

He was a powerful, aggressive figure.

I don't like him.

Many of the neighbours didn't like him. But it doesn't make him a murderer.

I was typing,

and I noticed two gentlemen coming round the back of the studio.

Came to the back door.

They were pretty austere.

One of them said, uh,

"You can take those off,"

pointing at my wellingtons.

"You're not gonna need them where you're going today, boy,"

something like that.

Next thing, I was cautioned. "You have the right to remain silent."

"We're arresting you for the murder of Sophie Toscan du Plantier,"

and I was handcuffed.

It's a very serious matter, to arrest somebody for murder.

I was driven off to Bandon, and immediately we're on the road,

the atmosphere in the car became very threatening and menacing.

I had Culligan next to me. He was jabbing me in the ribs, saying,

"You're the murderer. Everybody knows you are."

One of them said,

"Even if we don't pin this on you, you're finished in Ireland."

"You'll be found dead with a bullet in the back of your head."

All these allegations were put to the two guards concerned.

They said they didn't do it. Bailey said they did.

On the murder of Sophie Toscan du Plantier,

the police arrested a suspect this morning.

A man of about 40 has been arrested by the Irish police.

According to unconfirmed local reports,

the man being held claims to be a journalist.

In February, we learned that a suspect had been arrested.

Until then,

we knew almost nothing about the Garda investigation.

They called to say, "We have a suspect."

"We're going to question him."

They were sure enough in their conclusions to say,

"Yes, it's him. We are sure it's him."

He was arrested under Section 4 of the Criminal Justice Act,

which allows Gardaí to hold suspects for 12 hours.

A decision will have to be made about eleven o'clock

whether to charge or release him. The man is believed to be in his forties...

My details were taken down. Height, weight, fingerprints.

I was made to strip in front of three or four people,

down to my underpants,

and I answered questions that I was asked in successive waves

by successive teams of detectives who came in.

"No, I wasn't there." "No, I didn't do this, didn't do that."

We had very good grounds

for arresting Bailey as a suspect.

It was an accumulation of various factors,

including the scratches on his hands.

Also, there were a number of his movements

around the time of the crime

which didn't add up.

Gardaí in County Cork are treating as suspicious

the death of a woman whose partly clothed body

was found this morning near Schull.

The whole issue of timing was crucial in this. Who knew what when?

She was discovered this morning around 10 a.m. At the moment...

It was in the two o'clock news. So everyone knew at two o'clock.

Bailey said he got a phone call at twenty to two...

...from a guy called Eddie Cassidy,

editor of The Cork Examiner.

Eddie Cassidy was very honourable.

Cassidy's version is he said there'd been a killing,

but he didn't say she was French, just that it was a foreign national.

West Cork was a cosmopolitan society

of a lot of foreign people.

But Ian Bailey and Jules Thomas

then drove straight to the crime scene

without any information whatsoever on the identity of the victim.

Ian Bailey would say that Eddie Cassidy did say that she was French

and he knew there was a Frenchwoman living near Alfie Lyons,

for whom he previously had done gardening work.

But the question the Gardaí were focusing on,

did he know about her prior to when Eddie Cassidy rang him?

Subsequently, a woman who was living in Skibbereen, Caroline Leftwick,

said that Ian Bailey rang

sometime between half eleven and twelve o'clock

to say he couldn't come because there had been a murder.

She asked would she know the victim. He said, "No, it's a French lady."

Then Ian Bailey was due to deliver a turkey to a man called Paul Ó Colmáin.

He thought it was around half eleven. Bailey rang to say, "I can't deliver."

"There's been a murder." He said Ian Bailey sounded quite excited.

At half ten or eleven in the morning,

Jules went into the local village.

A husband and wife said, "Where's Ian?"

She said, "He's gone off investigating a murder."

At that stage, no one knew anything about a murder.

There was no digital system in operation at that time.

You've got to rely on whatever a person says,

and naturally there's gonna be disputes about that.

He's denied all this,

and that's completely at odds with his version

that he didn't know about it

until twenty to two when Eddie Cassidy rang him.

At twenty past two, he appeared at the crime scene.

Martin Malone, one of the Gardaí there, thought he was acting somewhat strange.

He didn't stay long. He found it strange that he didn't ask any questions.

This was most unusual for a journalist,

to arrive at this historic, catastrophic event,

and then immediately disappear.

It's just very hard to reconcile his version of events

with the witnesses who've given statements to the Gardaí.

One guy, Detective Sergeant Callahan, I think,

said, "You fucking bastard! You fucking bastard!"

And came at me like that.

Made a fist. Sorry if I...

You know, as though he was gonna hit me.

I've no doubt in the world that they didn't.

None whatsoever.

They were aggressive. They used a lot of expletives.

They seemed to me to be very unsophisticated.

They'd never met somebody like me.

An English person with a bit of an education

and a bit of experience in life.

Bailey said, "They'd never met anyone quite like myself,

used to dealing with a less-educated person."

That's vintage. God help us.

And, uh...

And then he stood up. He said, "You..."

He started muttering, calling me all sorts of names,

and I was a murdering bastard,

and this mantra, "You did it, you did it, you did it" started.

If you're interviewing a fella, there's only a certain subject.

You are going to repeat yourself. But I don't think that would be like,

"You did it, you did it," and kept that going.

While Ian Bailey was being interviewed

in Bandon Garda Station,

members of the Technical Bureau went

to examine the house and the studio,

looking for incriminating forensic evidence.

I got a phone call from the investigation unit

to go down and look at a premises where he lived.

We had to get the keys for the premises from the owner.

I was given a list of garments

that he was believed to be wearing and was seen wearing.

If you go to a suspect's house,

the evidence gained, we could do something with it.

But unfortunately, there was nothing we could find or saw that was evidential.

So then we went to the studio.

At some point in my interrogation, Dermot Dwyer came in.

I was told that somebody had seen me down at Kealfadda Bridge

in the early hours of the morning. I said, "That's nonsense."

Then I remember that thing that Dwyer told me prior to the arrest.

He was gonna place me at Kealfadda Bridge.

I did tell him that he was...

seen at Kealfadda Bridge.

I said to him, "Look, these are the facts."

I told him a certain amount of evidence was against him,

and I said, "Ian, you're in trouble."

We were told to look for a dark blue or black overcoat,

a hat, and big boots.

At the back of the studio,

we found...

a fire scene.

- Can you introduce yourself? - Um... My name is Louise Kennedy. I'm, uh...

I live in Liscaha.

Louise Kennedy was out walking on the 26th,

four days after the murder.

I went for a walk on 26th December, St. Stephen's Day,

and I saw a fire burning behind the studio.

There wasn't anybody there

but she saw the remains of a bonfire and a mattress burning.

I just thought it was unusual.

I thought he was burning...

...maybe getting rid of evidence.

I mean, I can't say that. I'm not 100% sure. I...

But that's what I thought.

That's why, I suppose, I told the guards, maybe.

Ian claimed that there had been some fire

earlier in December,

but there was no fire on, um, St. Stephen's Day.

The bonfire site would have been two, three metres across, diameter.

It was a major fire.

I had a big old spoon,

and I literally went through all the ash

to see what was remaining

within that fire scene.

We removed big items,

including, uh, mattress springs.

Then I found small items from clothing.

Buttons.

Coat buttons.

Jeans. Boots. There was... There was... There was even boots.

All the clothes that we thought he would be wearing that night,

they were burned.

My view at the time,

why do you burn the beds, the bedding,

your own clothing just outside your back door?

And it was a fresh fire.

But unfortunately, DNA, blood evidence,

the whole thing was gone.

No hard evidence.

Very disappointing, but certainly it was a deliberate act.

There's no doubt about that.

The murder of Sophie Toscan du Plantier.

Two people are detained for questioning.

Hours after the first arrest,

a woman was taken in for questioning.

A woman was also arrested at midday.

The man was arrested this morning.

The woman was detained this afternoon.

My partner, Jules, was also arrested.

The story was she had something to do with it.

His head at this stage was gone.

That's the way I see it.

And she'd be far more put together than he would.

She'd know what to do.

Did he bring home something?

What did he do with his clothes?

They were under the impression that he exercised

a coercive control over her,

he manipulated her.

So she, eh, would be questioned

separately from Ian Bailey.

Jules said they'd been in the Galley Inn in Schull on the night of the 22nd

and left there at the latest about 12:30 a.m.

On the way home, they stopped at Hunts Hill.

There's a nice view from there. Ian got out of the car

and commented that lights seemed to be on across the valley in Alfie Lyons' house.

He could also see the gable light

on Sophie's house.

Jules said Ian was suggesting they might call over to Alfie's,

that there might be a party going on.

And he said to Jules, "I get the feeling

there's something bad going to happen here tonight."

That was a peculiar thing.

She said, "Will you get in the car and we'll go home?"

And they went to bed.

I went to bed.

I stayed in bed all night until the next morning.

I never left the house that night. Jules will tell you.

Jules Thomas gave the same story,

but she was quite nervous during the interview.

Then she finally admitted

that Ian may have got out of the bed.

She had a good sense that Ian was tossing and turning.

...and then he got up from bed,

and I would estimate that he got up about an hour later.

She didn't see him again

until he came in that morning at about 9 a.m. to give her coffee.

He had a fresh wound on his forehead.

I have no recollection

of seeing the scratch on his forehead on the Sunday.

French television, radio, and newspaper reporters

were amongst the crowd

as the Garda decision was awaited.

The questioning of the woman, how's that going?

Well, it's...

going.

He and Jules kept changing their testimony

every time they were questioned.

It came out that, actually, he got up in the middle of the night

and disappeared for a few hours.

Sometime after going to bed, I got up.

Did a bit of writing in the kitchen.

I then went down to the studio.

- He changed his story. - He did!

He admitted that he got up and he went out.

That was the first time he admitted that.

Ian said the studio's directly beside the house.

It's not.

It's 250 yards away.

I said I was in, but you asked more questions,

and I remembered that I'd got up to do some writing

that Sunday-into-the-Monday night.

And I told them that.

It was a significant admission that he got up and went out.

Jules said in her statement,

"From what was said at Hunts Hill, that he was going over to Alfie's,

the mark on his face, and now he's put at Kealfadda Bridge,

my concluding remark is there's strong evidence

to link him to the murder of the French lady."

Bailey now had been stripped of an alibi.

Bandon Garda Station was the centre of national

and international media attention last night as time ran out

for the holding of the two people detained for questioning.

I think they felt that they would get an admission.

At 10 p.m., Noel Smith came out

and told us,

"Mr. Bailey has left, free."

The lead investigator

told dozens of French and Irish journalists

no admission, insufficient evidence...

All we had was circumstantial evidence.

He didn't admit anything.

After 12 hours, they were released.

He's been released.

Is it a possibility that he could be arrested again when he leaves the station?

I wouldn't like to comment on that

in view of the fact a file is being submitted to the DPP.

It necessitated further work

and going back to witnesses and all that, everything.

Does it mean that you start the investigation at the beginning?

No.

It was made absolutely certain to me by all my interrogating officers

that I was the murderer.

They had no doubt. They knew it was me. They just needed me to confess.

But I can account for all of my movements during the period.

- Are you someway disappointed? - Not a bit, dearly. Not a bit.

You thought I was gonna be carrying the head out, I suppose.

If they had evidence, I wouldn't be here talking to you.

- I wouldn't have been released. - Yeah. Well...

I know I'm innocent. I have nothing to do with this killing.

All right. Pubs are closing at 11. You better hurry.

Good night.

A photograph appeared the following day. Ian was named in it.

So there was a cameraman waiting at Bandon when I went in,

and he got me, and I was all over the fucking newspapers.

You know, is this really true?

You know? I mean... God.

Did he do it?

You know, could he have? Why?

The next day, we saw Ian Bailey's face in the newspapers.

That's when Ian Bailey erupted into our lives.

It's not for me to say whether or not it's Bailey,

but justice has no time limit.

The person who did this

will have to take responsibility.

The number one suspect in the murder of Sophie Toscan du Plantier

still proclaims his innocence.

Did you know Sophie Toscan du Plantier?

I didn't know her inasmuch that I'd never met her.

Journalism has followed him around his whole life,

but he's now the subject.

He's so wrapped up in being the story

that he can never really be a journalist again.

He's a complicated, complex character.

But that still doesn't make him a murderer.

You're saying you didn't kill Sophie du Plantier.

I am saying I didn't kill her, I had no knowledge of the killing,

and I'm an innocent man.

People will choose to believe what they want to believe,

and that's fine.

All I would hope is that those decisions and their thoughts that they have

are actually based on fact.

And truth.

So why did everyone still think he was the murderer?

Because he told people that he'd done it.