Money Crimes with Nicole Lapin - UNSOLVED: Sophie Toscan du Plantier 1

Episode Date: September 17, 2026

In December 1996, French television producer Sophie Toscan du Plantier traveled alone to her remote holiday home on the windswept Mizen Head peninsula in County Cork, Ireland, a place she loved for its isolation and beauty. Two days before Christmas, her battered body was found on the lane outside her cottage, beaten so severely that the quiet farming community around Schull could scarcely comprehend it. She had come to Ireland for a few days of peace before the holidays, and instead became the victim of a crime that would haunt the country for decades. In Part 1 of Murder: True Crime Stories, host Carter Roy introduces Sophie, the elegant and private Parisian who found refuge on the rugged Irish coast, the glamorous but demanding life she led back in France, and the brutal winter night that turned her beloved sanctuary into one of Ireland's most infamous crime scenes.Follow Murder: True Crime Stories for Part 2 of this episode: https://pod.link/1745145932If you’re new here, don’t forget to follow Scams, Money, & Murder to never miss a case! To hear episodes ad-free, subscribe to Crime House+. Join at crimehouseplus.com or if you’re listening on Apple Podcasts, tap “Try Free” at the top of this show’s page. Scams, Money, & Murder is a Crime House Original Podcast, powered by PAVE Studios.🎧 Need More to Binge? Listen to other Crime House Originals Clues, Crimes Of Reddit, Crime House 24/7, Serial Killers & Murderous Minds, Murder True Crime Stories, and more wherever you get your podcasts!Follow me on SocialInstagram: @CrimehouseTikTok: @CrimehouseFacebook: @crimehousestudiosX: @crimehousemediaYouTube: @crimehousestudios

Hi everyone, it's Vanessa Richardson. Before today's episode, I want to tell you about another crime house show, Murder True Crime Stories. Join Carter Roy every Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday, as he explores history's most notorious murders like you've never heard before. Follow Murder True Crime Stories, available wherever you listen to podcasts. This is Crime House. There's a certain kind of person who's drawn to the edge of the world. The places where the road just stops. Some people go there to get away from something.

Others go to find out who they are when nobody's watching. West Cork, Ireland was and is exactly that kind of place. It's made up of little villages and farms and fishing harbors on the southwestern tip of the country. And before December 1996, people left their doors unlocked. because there'd never been any reason not to. It was also the place Sophie Toscon de Plontier had chosen for herself. She was a French filmmaker who'd found her refuge in West Cork, a cottage at the end of a long, narrow lane facing straight out at the Atlantic.

But two days before Christmas, a neighbor found her lying on the ground outside the gates of her own home, and almost 30 years later, the country is still asking, who put her there? People's lives are like a story. There's a beginning, a middle, and an end. But you don't always know which part you're on. Sometimes the final chapter arrives far too soon, and we don't always get to know the real ending.

I'm Carter Roy, and this is Murder, True Crime Stories, the Crime House original powered by Pave Studios. New episodes come out every Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday, with Friday's episodes covering the cases that deserve a deeper look. Thank you for being part of the crimehouse community. Please rate, review, and follow the show. And for early, add free access to every episode. Subscribe to Crimehouse Plus.

You'll get part one and part two at the same time, plus exclusive bonus content. To join, go to Crimehouse, plus.com or tap try free on the Murder True Crime Story show page on Apple Podcasts. This is the first of two episodes on Sophie Toscon de Plantier, a 39-year-old French filmmaker who was killed outside her holiday cottage in West Cork, Ireland in 1996. I'm going to do my best with the pronunciations, but I am no expert, so if I get anything wrong, please go ahead, let me know. I do read the comments and I appreciate getting to know how to say it

right and trying to learn both French and Irish accents. Today I'll introduce you to Sophie, a woman who had money, access, and a front row seat to French cinema. But what she wanted most of all was solitude. She found it in West Cork, and in December of 1996, she returned to her holiday home for what should have been a normal vacation. It was anything but. Next time, I'll explain what happens.

happened after Sophie was found dead outside her home and the main suspect that emerged. He was arrested twice, released twice, and never charged with anything in Ireland. More than 20 years later, a French court tried him anyway. In a courtroom he never set foot in. All that and more coming up. Before she was Sophie Toscan de Plantey, she was Sophie Bognol, a little girl growing up in the heart. of Paris. She was born there in July of 1957. Her father, Georges, was a dentist. Her mother,

Marguerite, was a deputy mayor. Two working parents meant Sophie had a comfortable middle-class childhood. Her family even at a country house in the south of France. And because Sophie was the only girl, she had two brothers, Bertrand and Stefan. She had a lot of people looking out for her. At the same time, her parents made sure Sophie could stand on her own two feet. Some sources say that when she was a teenager, they sent her to Ireland to live with a local family and work on her English during the summer. Others just say the family visited Ireland several times. Either way, Sophie came home absolutely in love with the country. She kept coming back to it in her diaries for the rest of her life.

In one entry, she wrote, quote, feel at ease here with the people, their language, and their thoughts. In other entries, she wrote about how strong and proud the Irish people are. For Sophie, being an Ireland seemed to awaken something in her. Years later, her mother would say that from an early age, she could tell that Sophie was drawn towards something quieter and more real. Marguerite added that Sophie refused to be swallowed up by the superficial side of Parisian society. But for the moment, Paris was all Sophie had, and it's where she started her own family. In her late teens, she met a young man named Pierre Jean Baudet. In June of 1980, when she was 22, they got married, and a year later, they had a son

who they named Pierre Louis. But the marriage was short-lived. Pierre Jean was more of a businessman, while Sophie was chasing an artistic kind of life, she was interested in acting. So in 1983, when their son was about two, they divorced. Sophie got primary custody. And the next stretch of her life was just the two of them. She and Pierre-Louis moved into an apartment in Laal, a few streets from her parents and the church where she was baptized. And the place was so small that they slept in the same room.

Neither of them seemed to care. Sophie took Pierre-Louis everywhere, restaurants, galleries, the cinema. Years later, he was a grown man. Pierre-Louis described that period in the simplest possible terms. He said he was everything to her and she was everything to him. Then in 1990, another person entered the picture. By then, Sophie was working as a press attache promoting French films abroad for an organization called Unifrance and for the Cannes Film Festival.

It wasn't the acting career she'd once imagined for herself, but it put her inside the industry. That may, her job sent her to Khan. That's where things changed between 32-year-old Sophie and 49-year-old Daniel Toscon de Plontier. Daniel was one of the most powerful men in French film. He'd run the Gaumont Film Company from the mid-197, into the mid-80s, greenlighting movies from directors like Federico Fellini and Igmar Bergman.

Since 1988, he'd been president of Unifrance, which technically made him Sophie's boss. He also knew everybody, politicians, artists, even the French president. Sophie was impressed and she wasn't easy to impress. Here was someone who could keep up with her. They started seeing each other. and Daniel began doing the thing that would change the shape of her career. He told her to stop trying to act and start producing. He made the introductions.

He put her in the room. Soon, Sophie started working on documentaries and realized she was really good at it. Before she knew it, producing turned into directing and writing, and she started developing her own projects. The one her friends remembered best was the same. series she never got to make. Four films each built around a single bodily fluid. Breast milk, blood, semen, and bile. It was strange, and it was hers. Within a year, she and Daniel were a couple that people wrote about. She accompanied him to red carpets where they were photographed

nonstop, and he made sure her family could enjoy the spotlight too. He regularly got them front row seats to all the premieres he was invited to. The next step seemed obvious. In June of 1991, they got married. But the version of Daniel that Sophie married was not the version the cameras got. Away from all of it, he was anxious and quiet and thoughtful. That was the man she wanted more of. Instead, she got less. The premieres didn't stop after the wedding. Almost every night, there was something. They were either hosting or being hosted. The phone never stopped ringing. Gilles Jacob ran the con festival for decades and was one of Daniel's closest friends. He watched this play out up close, and years later he described the problem in one line.

Daniel wanted to show Sophie off. Sophie, quote, didn't want to be the wife of. Sophie's aunt put it another way. She said Sophie had a kind of Alice in her. Wonderland quality about her in that world, that she was dropped into a place she didn't quite understand and couldn't quite leave. Part of what she was up against was Daniel's history. Sophie was his third wife and the women for her were pretty intimidating. The first was Marie Christine Barreau, an Oscar-nominated French actress. The next was Francesca Cominici, an acclaimed Italian director. In between, Daniel dated Isabelle Uper, one of the most celebrated actors in the history of French cinema. Gilles thought she handled it better than most people would have.

He said she needed to make Daniel understand that his history didn't excuse him from paying attention to her, and she had a way of making the points without raising her voice. Every so often, Sophie would simply vanish. and Daniel would spend the rest of the day hunting around Paris looking for her. But she may not have wanted to be found because the truth is, Sophie liked being alone. She was happiest when nobody was looking at her, and the longer she spent in Daniel's orbit,

the more that need sharpened into something urgent. So she went looking for somewhere to disappear to. And she already had a place in mind. Around 1993, about two years into their marriage, Sophie flew to Ireland and drove out to West Cork on the Misen Peninsula. It's one of the last pieces of land before the open Atlantic. Bear hills, stone walls, cliffs dropping into gray water. Sophie loved it immediately. And she wasn't the only foreigner who felt that way.

By then, enough well-off outsiders. were buying second homes along that coast that people had started calling it the Irish Riviera. It made for an unusual kind of community. Farming and fishing families who'd worked at peninsula for generations lived alongside artists and writers and Europeans with money, most of them had turned up in the last 20 years chasing the same thing Sophie was. Locals had a word for the newcomers, below-ins. Everybody got along, more or less, but everybody also knew which category they were in.

That wasn't why Sophie was there. She went for the anonymity, and she protected it. Locally, she used her maiden name. In West Cork, she wasn't the wife of a famous French producer. She was just Sophie Bognor, and she quickly realized that she wanted to find a house and stayed for a while. She looked at two properties with her cousin.

The first was lovely, an estate up in the hills, grain and settled and calm. The second was a stone farmhouse in a town called Dunmanus West near the village of Toomore, a few miles west of Skull. It sat at the top of a Boreen, which is the Irish word for a narrow country lane, and it had no neighbors in sight. Just the field, the gate.

and the ocean. Sophie's own word for the place was violence. Her cousin hated it. There was no heating, the light was bad, the wind came off the water all night and rattled the shutters against the walls. Sophie bought it in 1993. For the next three years, she came out four or five times a year, sometimes with Pierre-Louis, sometimes with a friend. Daniel made the trip exactly once, and that was just fine with Sophie. The cottage was where she read and wrote and thought. From her bedroom window, she could see the light out on Fastnet Rock, turning over and over all night.

She never put up curtains because she didn't want anything between her and that. There's a name for that light, and it's the kind of thing Sophie would have loved. Fastnet is the last piece of Ireland before the open ocean. A granite tower on a bare rock about four miles off the coast. For hundreds of thousands of Irish people who left during and after the famine, sailing west to America, it was the last bit of home they ever saw. So they started calling it Ireland's teardrop. Its actual Irish name, Karig Aynir, means the lonely rock.

Sophie lay in bed and watched it every night. and she filled notebooks while she was out there, mostly about the landscape and how hard it was. In one entry, she described coming across a dead lamb on a path torn apart by a fox, fur caught in the bushes, the body reduced to almost nothing. The scene interested her more than it upset her. Sophie had a dark streak she never apologized for, drawn to death and bodies and the parts of being alive that people won't leave out of films sometimes. that bodily fluid series was the truest thing about her as an artist.

And the more time she spent out there, the clearer things became for her. Back in Paris, the marriage to Daniel wasn't getting any easier, and the cottage gave her the distance to think about it honestly. Her cousin, Frederique Gazo, later said that Sophie was quietly weighing whether to end it. But there was one other thing about the cottage. In the years leading up to December, 1996, Sophie became convinced that someone had been coming into the house while she was back in France. It wasn't a break-in exactly. Nothing was taken, but somebody had been using her bathroom.

For a woman whose whole reason for being there was to find peace, it must have been the worst possible feeling. It meant that her one private place at the edge of the world wasn't entirely hers. Someone had been watching her. They knew when she came and when she went. Sophie wasn't the type to freak out, though. She simply changed the locks. But she'd soon realize that wasn't enough to keep the danger out. Over the years, I've met people whose lives were changed.

forever in a single moment. In my new podcast, before and after, I explore what happens after that decisive moment, personal, powerful conversations with Colin Kaepernick, Jeremy Renner, Gabby Giffords, and others. Join me wherever you get your podcasts. Search before and after with Lester Holt to listen completely free or subscribe to Dateline Premium to unlock new episodes early.

In 1993, 36-year-old Sophie Toscan de Plontier bought a stone cottage at the end of a lane in West Cork, Ireland, and spent the next three years going back as often as she could. In December of 1996, she went back. But this visit was different. For one, she was traveling alone. Usually she came with family or a friend. This time, she'd invited people, but no one could make it with Christmas coming up so soon, so for the first time, she made the trip by herself. She was also vague about when she was coming home. The plan was to fly back to France for Christmas on the 23rd or the 24th,

but she never pinned it down. When people asked how long she was staying, she kept it open. On top of all that, it seemed like a last-minute decision. Sophie normally told her caretaker a couple of weeks ahead of time that she was coming to visit. This time, the caretaker, a local woman named Josephine Helen, who lived about a mile from the cottage and looked after it when Sophie was in France, only found out a week before. On Friday, December 20th, Sophie flew out of Paris, connected through Dublin, and landed at Cork Airport in the early afternoon. She picked up a rental car and drove

west toward the coast. That day, Josephine led herself in, lit the fires, and put up some Christmas decoration so the house wouldn't feel cold when Sophie arrived. Sophie got there around 4.30 in the afternoon. The gate at the bottom of the lane was shut the way it was supposed to be to keep the neighbor's livestock in. She opened it, drove up, and let herself into a warm house. Josephine rang 15 minutes later to check that she'd made it. Sophie said she had. Around half past 11 that night, the phone rang again. It was Agnes Thomas. calling from France to catch up. Agnes was Sophie's closest friend, and the two of them had worked together at Unifrance for years. The next day, Saturday the 21st, Sophie kept to herself.

Josephine's husband, Finbar, walked over toward the cottage with his son and saw her car parked in its usual spot. But Sophie never came out to say hi, and they didn't knock. Then, at some point that afternoon. She drove the 20 minutes into Skull to pick up a few things. It was the last shopping weekend before Christmas, so the village was busy. She went into a shop on the main street, bought what she needed and left. On Sunday, the 22nd, Sophie went for a walk. She drove out to a spot on the my zen called Three Castle Head, which is the local name for the ruins of Dunlough Castle. Three stone towers on a headland above 300-foot cliffs built in the early 1200s with a lake behind them. She walked the grounds for about an hour.

The water there is deep and usually dead still. But when the wind picks up, like it did that day, it lifts froth off the surface and drags it into pale moving columns. locals have a name for the shape that makes they call her the white lady and the legend attached to her is not a friendly one if you see the white lady you don't see another day sophie saw something out there she didn't say what but her aunt later said it must have been horrifying because it terrified Sophie. She was scared enough that she drove to the nearest house she knew, which belonged to friends of hers named Yvonne Unger. She had a glass of wine with Yvonne and her husband and told them about what she'd seen.

Neither of them had grown up with the story of the white lady, so it didn't land the way it would have with a local. They just chalked it up to a strange afternoon. Years later, Yvonne said that if they'd known the legend, they wouldn't have let Sophie go home alone. But that was all hindsight. After chatting with Yvonne and her husband, Sophie left and headed east. Around 4 p.m., she stopped by O'Sullivan's bar in the harbor village of Crookhaven,

where the owner, Billy O'Sullivan, made her a cup of tea. She sat at the counter and talked for a while. Then she went home. At some point that day, Sophie also made a phone call to her gardener in Ambox in southwestern France, where Daniel had a manor house. She wanted him to order a linden tree and planted outside the bedroom window. It was going to be Daniel's Christmas present. That night, she got into bed in one of the warmer room.

with the book of W.B. Yates, around 11 p.m., she put it down and called Daniel. It was a short conversation. She was flying home in a day or two, and they'd have all of Christmas to talk. They were planning to spend it, just the two of them, then ring in the new year with friends. After chatting for a bit, Sophie hung up, but she didn't stay put. Around 8 a.m. the next day, Monday, December 23rd, a woman named Shirley Foster woke up. She and her partner, Alfie Lyons, lived behind Sophie's place. And the three houses on that hillside shared one long lane down to the road. The third house belonged to another family who only used it in the summer, which meant that in December, Shirley and Alfie were the only people living on that lane at all.

Around 10 a.m., Shirley got in her car and started driving down towards Skull. The route took her right past Sophie's gate. Partway down, she noticed something pale caught on the wire fence. Her first thought was that a piece of white material had blown loose off a line somewhere. Then she got closer. There was a woman lying on the ground beside the gate. Shirley turned the car around when home and got Alfie, he phoned the guardee, Ireland's National Police Force. When the first officers arrived on the scene, they found the woman lying on her back in a white t-shirt and long johns with lace-up hiking boots pulled onto her bare feet.

One leg of the long johns was snagged on the barbed wire. Her nightgown was stuck under a pile of brambles near bramble. by pinned down by a blood-spattered concrete block. Beside her head was a large, flat piece of slates also covered in blood. There was also blood on the metal gate. Her hands had defensive wounds. Her fingers were broken. Her face was so badly beaten that it was almost impossible to recognize her.

All told, she had something like 50 separate injuries. A local doctor from Skull pronounced her dead at 11.05 in the morning at 1120, the parish priest of Goline administered the last rites with two guard officers standing there. Nobody had a name for her yet. Then at 1240 in the afternoon, Finbar Helen, the caretaker's husband, made the identification. It was Sophie. officers went up to the cottage there was no forced entry and nothing obviously out of place but josephine helen walked them through the rooms and because she knew that house better than anyone she caught two things the iron poker from the fireplace was gone and in the kitchen

two wine glasses had been washed and set out with two chairs pulled up close to the radiator To Josephine, it looked like Sophie had company. While officers were walking through the cottage, the story was already getting out. Reporters had reached the lane within hours of the body being found, and they'd started filing. One of the first was a local freelancer named Ian Bailey. Ian was a tall, big-framed Englishman who'd moved to West Cork a few years earlier and picked up work for the Irish papers. and for a freelancer in a corner of the country where almost nothing ever happened, a murder like this was career-defining.

Ian went at it hard. Meanwhile, in Paris, Sophie's family found out that a French woman had been murdered in Ireland from the news. At first, there was no location, just a country. But Sophie's mother watched the report and had an immediate sense that it was her daughter. Nobody in the room wanted to agree with her. Then the broadcast said the murder had happened in West Cork and the family did the math they didn't want to do. How many French women were out on that particular stretch of coast four days before Christmas. Sophie's brother Bertrand started calling the cottage caretaker.

The line was busy. He kept dialing. When Josephine Helen finally picked up, she screamed. Screamed, Bertrand couldn't make out a word of it and didn't need to. He asked for the question anyway. She told him, yes, Sophie was dead. Back in West Cork, the officers working the scene were out of their depth, and they knew it. They didn't have anyone with experience working a homicide like this one because West Cork didn't have homicides like this one. So they called Dublin.

The call went to the Garda Technical Bureau, where a detective, named Eugene Gilligan took it. He and his team got in the car and headed for Quark. It was two days before Christmas. Every town between Dublin and the coast was jammed. The drive took them close to five hours. They reached Skull around 10 p.m. and found the local station empty because every officer was up at the scene.

Somebody pointed them west. Gilligan parked at the edge of the property and walked up. Local officers led him to Sophie. She was exactly where Shirley Foster had found her 12 hours earlier, still on the ground, still tangled in the wire. Gilligan wanted her moved. The longer she lay there, the more exposed she was to the weather, the animals, and anyone who wandered up the lane. He called the state pathologist Dr. John Harbison in Dublin and made his case. But Harbison couldn't get down from Dublin until the next day, and the local officer in charge,

wanted the body left exactly where it was until he did. Normally, the local force defer to the bureau on something like this. Not that night. So Sophie stayed out there. Officers bought a tarp at a hardware store and skull and covered her with it. Years later, Gilgan said it was highly inappropriate. Not only that, but whoever had done this to her was long gone. and the people who were supposed to catch them were already a step behind.

Sometimes the mysteries of the past tell us some very weird and wonderful stories. And indeed, make us ask more questions, like why were soldiers stationed at Hager's Wall sent underwear? If you enjoy the bizarre, niche parts of history look no further than You're Dead to Me from the BBC. Hosted by Greg Jenner, each episode pairs expert historians with brilliant, comedians to learn and laugh about the past. The new season covers everything from the history of underwear to medieval saints. To hear more, Serge, for You're Dead to Me, wherever you get your podcasts. On the morning of December 23rd, 1996, Shirley Foster found 39-year-old Sophie Toscon de Plantey

beaten to death outside the gate of her own home. By that evening, a forensic team had driven down from Dublin and was working the scene, but the state pathologist couldn't get down until the next day, so Sophie's body had stayed out in the open all night. Dr. John Harbison arrived on December 24th, more than a full day after she was found. That delay cost them one of the most important pieces of information. Sophie had been lying in near-freezing air for over 24 hours, which slowed decomposition down so much that Harbison couldn't establish a time of death. Luckily, he could determine almost everything else.

She had died of multiple blunt force injuries to the head, which had fractured her skull and caused bleeding and swelling in the brain. There was no evidence of sexual assault. And when they lifted her up, Harbison noticed a shallow depression in the earth where her head had been, with blood in it. He wrote that this told him she was already. lying in that position when the blows landed. Harbison also found things that should have ended this case in a month.

He scraped under the fingernails of both hands and bagged what came out and wound around the fingers of Sophie's right hand were nearly a dozen hairs, dried blood, gluing them in place so firmly that he had to work them loose. Sophie had fought back and had gotten a piece of who who ever attacked her. There was one more thing in Harbison's report, and it's the kind of detail that sounds like nothing until you think about it for a second. The blood on the legs of Sophie's long johns looked wrong.

The blood from a head wound runs, it streaks and smears and drags downward. These drops were mostly round, with only a little tailing at the edges, which is what blood looks like when it falls straight down from above. And the fabric told the same story. Where the long johns had bunched and folded, the drops landed only on the exposed surface. The cloth tucked underneath stayed clean. So the blood fell after the leg was already bunched from something bleeding directly above it.

That meant somebody had been standing over her bleeding. which meant that some of the blood on Sophie Toscond de Plante's clothing may not have been hers. The scene was full of evidence like that. Hairs, blood, the fingernail scrapings, all of it carefully collected and logged. In the right hands, it was the kind of physical evidence that solves a case. But at that point, there was something even more important that needed to happen. had to tell 15-year-old Pierre-Louis that his mother had been killed. Decades later, Pierre-Louis, spoke about that moment briefly.

All he would say was that, quote, it was an earthquake. There is my life before and my life after. Meanwhile, Daniel told the family not to say anything to the press. No one really questioned that. They didn't want to talk to reporters either. They were trying to process the news. But then Daniel made a decision people are still turning over. He chose not to travel to Ireland to identify his wife's body that fell to her relatives.

He never gave an explanation that satisfied anyone. And even though the family had gone radio silence, the story didn't. Sophie's husband was one of the most recognizable men in French culture and a personal friend of the president. Her murder led the French news, and the coverage didn't read as a distant tragedy. It read as an accusation. A French woman had been beaten to death on Irish soil, and no one had even told her family. Sophie's own mother had learned her daughter was dead from a television report. For a small division of the Gardee who'd never handled a murder like this,

two governments were suddenly watching, and they were doing. doing their best to reconstruct Sophie's last four days from scratch. They took witness statements, they chased anonymous tips, they pieced together the flight, the drive, the walk, the pub, the phone calls. Through it all, one question hung over the case. Why? Her passport was in the house, so were her car keys in her wallet. She hadn't been sexually assaulted.

She barely knew anyone in the area. hadn't spent enough time in West Cork to make an enemy, let alone one who'd do something so brutal to her. Nothing about it made sense, but the authorities hoped a man named Dermot Dwyre could fill the gaps. Dwyer was the detective superintendent who led the investigation. People around the force called him the Cork Colombo after the TV detective who always got his man in the end. Dwyer said he came in without a theory. He just looked at the evidence and followed it. But at first, all they could do was cast a wide net.

Officers knocked on every door for 10 miles asking the same question. Where were you on the night Sophie die? They spoke to around a thousand people. Every answer went on a form, and every form went on file. Out of all those interviews came a list of 54 names, and from that, the shorter list of about ten real possibilities. And yet, one by one, the names on that list were checked out and set aside. So if the door knocking couldn't find the killer, the forensics would have to.

Instead, they kept coming back empty. There were no fingerprints on the bloody gate, the slate or the concrete block. The two wine glasses in Sophie's kitchen were even strained. When they were dusted, there were no prints on them at all. Not a visitor's, not even Sophie's. Somebody had washed them clean. That left DNA, but this was 1996 and DNA testing was still new. The labs needed way more material than they do today,

and what little this case gave them came back as Sophie's own blood. Even the hairs wound around her fingers led nowhere. But not all of it could be blamed on the technology. The scene wasn't sealed off until December 28th, five days after Sophie was found. Until then, reporters and photographers had been walking all over the property. With the forensics going nowhere, the case came down to people in what someone might have seen. And in late December, the authorities finally. got a hit. That day, officers canvassing near Skull spoke to a local shopkeeper named Marie

Farrell. On her form, Marie said Sophie had been in her shop on Saturday the 21st, around three in the afternoon. When Sophie left, Marie noticed a man in a long, dark overcoat across the street watching her. He followed Sophie down the street, corner to corner, keeping her in sight. Marie said she didn't know him, only that something about him was wrong. And without a name, there wasn't much to do with it. Then, in the new year, the Gardee got a phone call. On January 11, 1997, a woman calling herself Fiona said she'd seen a man out by Kilfada Bridge at around 3 in the morning on December 23rd.

The bridge is about a mile and a half from Sophie's house. then she hung up. She called from a public phone box in Cork City, so there was nothing to trace. When she didn't call back, the West Cork Chief Superintendent went on a TV program called Crime Line and asked her on air to get in touch. She called the next day from a different phone box, still using the alias. Detectives couldn't figure out why a witness would try this hard to stay anonymous. Then she rang a third time on January.

24th and used her home phone. The guardee was able to trace the number to an address in Skull. The woman who opened the door was Marie Farrow. The reason for all the secrecy was simple and human. Marie was married and she'd been having an affair. On the night of the murder, she'd been out with the man she was seeing, so coming forward meant explaining where she'd been at 3 in the morning. But once Marie said it out loud, she gave them the rest.

She said that when she was driving home, she passed a man at Kiofada Bridge who looked drunk, stumbling and waving his arms, staring up at the sky. He was wearing a long black coat and she hadn't gotten a clear look at his face. Then a few weeks later in January, Marie was at the supermarket buying a newspaper when she saw a man across the shop and became convinced he was the same man from the bridge, so she put the paper down, went outside, and flagged the first guard officer she could find on the street.

She pointed him out and asked who he was. The officer told her his name was Ian Bailey. The guardee already knew that name. Ian Bailey had been all over this case from the very first morning reporting on it. Ian was a 39-year-old Englishman, born in Manchester, who had come to Ireland in 1991 and settled out near a Goline with his partner and artist named Jules Thomas. He'd spent two decades as a journalist in Britain, and now he freelance for the Irish papers. The rest of the time he'd gardened, wrote poetry, and sold pizzas with Jules at the local market. He had covered Sophie's murder from the beginning.

Well, that was his job. But now Marie Farrell had placed a man who looked just like him on a bridge, a mile from Sophie's house, in the dark, on the night she died. And the moment detectives started seeing Bailey as more than a reporter, the rest of what they knew about him began to look very different. people had noticed cuts and scratches on Bailey's forehead, hands, and forearms in the days after the murder. He explained the injuries away, saying he'd slaughtered some turkeys for Christmas and had cut down his own Christmas tree. The Gardy tried to reproduce that kind of injury cutting down trees and couldn't. And the people who'd been with Ian on the evening of the 22nd before Sophie died. didn't remember any scratches on him at all.

And that was just the beginning. Because the more detectives learned, the more Ian stood out. And the next thing they focused on was the geography of the crime. Sophie's cottage was invisible from the road. To find it, you had to know it was there at the top of an unmarked lane behind a gate. So investigators had been working from a... simple assumption. Whoever walked up that lane in the dark had almost certainly walked up it before. It turned out, Ian had. In the years before the murder, he'd done gardening work at Alfie Lyons Place,

right next door, a few dozen yards from Sophie's front door. Well, then there was the question of what Ian knew and when he knew it. He was one of the first reporters, maybe the very first, to report that the dead woman was French. He said a source had told him. But when investigators tracked that source down, the man said he hadn't even known Sophie was French at the time. And then there was the article itself. According to Ian, the colleague at the Cork Examiner had called him with the story at 140 on the afternoon of December 23rd. but other witnesses remembered him seeming to know about it earlier than that.

None of it was proof, but it was adding up. The guardee formerly named Ian Bailey a suspect in her murder. He denied it that week, and he denied it for the next 27 years until the day he died. No forensic evidence ever put him on that property, and in Ireland, he was made. Never charged with anything. But in West Cork, people had already started answering the question for themselves. And they thought Ian looked suspicious. Thanks so much for listening.

I'm Carter Roy, and this is Murder True Crime Stories. Come back next time for part two on the murder of Sophie Toscon de Plantier and all the people it affected. Murder True Crime Stories is a Crime House original powered by Pave Studios. Here at Crime House, we want to thank each and every one of you for your support. If you like what you heard today, reach out on social media at Crime House on TikTok and Instagram. Don't forget to rate, review, and follow Murder True Crime Stories wherever you get your podcasts. Your feedback truly makes a difference. And to enhance your Murder True Crime Stories listening experience, subscribe to Crime House Plus.

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tap try-free at the top of the Murder True Crime Stories page. We'll be back on Thursday. Murder True Crime Stories is hosted by me, Carter Roy, and is a critical. Crime House original powered by Pave Studios. This episode was brought to life by the Murder True Crime Stories team. Max Cutler, Ron Shapiro, Alex Benadon, Natalie Pertsovsky, Sarah Camp, Alyssa, Mara della Rosa, Claire Swartzlander, Alex Burns, and Russell Nash.

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