Murder: True Crime Stories - UNSOLVED: Sophie Toscan du Plantier 2

Episode Date: September 17, 2026

In Part 2 of Murder: True Crime Stories, host Carter Roy follows the tangled, decades-long investigation into the murder of Sophie Toscan du Plantier. Suspicion quickly fell on Ian Bailey, an English journalist living nearby who inserted himself into the coverage of the very crime he would come to be accused of. Bailey was arrested twice but never charged in Ireland, where prosecutors said the evidence fell short, and he maintained his innocence until his death. Yet the case refused to rest, moving across borders when a French court convicted Bailey in absentia and Ireland refused to hand him over. What followed was a saga of conflicting witness accounts, questions about the original investigation, and two nations at odds over how to deliver justice. Nearly thirty years later, no one has been convicted in an Irish court, and the murder of Sophie Toscan du Plantier remains painfully unresolved.Head over to our YouTube channel to WATCH our video episodes: https://www.youtube.com/@crimehousestudios If you’re new here, don’t forget to follow Murder: True Crime Stories to never miss a case! Want all 2 parts of every case all at once? Join Crime House+ and get both parts of each case dropped at once ad-free. Join at crimehouseplus.com or if you’re listening on Apple Podcasts, tap “Try Free” at the top of this show’s page. Murder: True Crime Stories is a Crime House Original Podcast, powered by PAVE Studios.🎧 Need More to Binge? Listen to other Crime House Originals Clues, Crimes Of Reddit, Serial Killers & Murderous Minds, Crime House 24/7, and more wherever you get your podcasts!Follow me on SocialInstagram: @CrimehouseTikTok: @CrimehouseFacebook: @crimehousestudiosX: @crimehousemediaYouTube: @crimehousestudios

Hi, it's Carter. Are you the type to fall down an internet rabbit hole and not come up for hours? Well, you'll love crimes of Reddit. A new Crime House original with Sabrina Deanna Roga and Alexis Link Letter. Every week, one host brings real true crime stories from Reddit while the other reacts completely blind. No prep, no spoilers. Then they swap.

It's the feeling of sending your group chat a thread at 2 a.m. that starts with, you have to see this. except Sabrina and Alexis are in the chat with you. Follow Crimes of Reddit on Apple Podcasts and Spotify or subscribe at Crimes of Reddit Pod on YouTube. This is Crime House. West Cork, Ireland has a word for people who move there, blow-ins. It doesn't matter how long you stay, a year, a decade, the rest of your life.

If you weren't born there, you're a person from somewhere else, and part of you always will be. Sophie Toscon de Plantey was a blow-in, a French woman who fell for a wild stretch of Irish coast and bought a piece of it. The locals liked her, but she was always a visitor, someone who came and went.

Ian Bailey was a blow-in too, an Englishman who'd washed up in the same small corner of the country a few years before Sophie did. Tall, loud, a bit strange, and never really one of them. Someone people watched out of the corner of their eye. They were two outsiders in a tight community. And when Sophie was killed two days before Christmas in 1996,

suspicion fell hard and fast on the other outsider. But decades later, one question still hangs over West Cork. Did they catch a killer, or did they ruin an innocent man's? life. People's lives are like a story. There's a beginning, a middle, and an end. 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, a crimehouse original powered by Page 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 Crime House community. Please rate, review, and follow the show. And for early, ad-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 CrimehousePlus.com or tap try-free on the Murder True Crime Story Show page on Apple Podcasts.

This is the second of two episodes on Sophie Tosquins de Plantier, a 39-year-old French filmmaker who was murdered outside her holiday cottage in West Cork in 1996. And once again, I am going to do my best with the pronunciations, but I'm no expert. So if I get anything wrong, please feel free to let me know I love to learn how to do a little better. And last time I introduced you to Sophie and her fast-paced life in France. When it became too much for her, she escaped to her remote, cottage in Ireland, but her peaceful sanctuary turned into a nightmare in December 1996 when she was murdered two days before Christmas. Irish authorities investigated for weeks without a solid lead

until a local reporter finally emerged as suspect number one. Today I'll lay out the case against Ian Bailey. Irish authorities were sure he was their man, but they could never get past circumstantial evidence and even two arrests didn't stick. Then the French government stepped in and held its own trial. The two countries reached opposite conclusions, leaving everyone to wonder who got it right. And nearly 30 years on, a new DNA result raised the question all over again. All that and more coming up. On December 23rd, 1996, a neighbor found 39-year-old Sophie Toscombe de Plontier beaten to death on the road outside her holiday cottage near Skull in West Cork. She'd been struck with a rock and a concrete block.

There was no forced entry and no obvious motive. And despite a whole host of forensic evidence, none of it led anywhere. But one name kept coming up again and again, a local freelance journalist named Ian Bailey. Ian was one of the first journalists to reach Sophie's cottage. He said his colleague at the Cork Examiner called him at 1.40 in the afternoon to tell him a woman had been killed. About 20 minutes later, the local radio shared the story. But the early reports didn't say who the victim was, and they didn't say where it happened. Ian knew where to go anyway.

Around 220 in the afternoon, he turned up at Sophie's property, looked around the police tape, and left again. without asking the officers a single question. And it's a strange way for a reporter to behave when he's gotten a jump on the biggest story of his life. And that was just the tip of the iceberg. Ian was among the first report that the victim was French. He said his editor, Helen Callanan, told him so. But she disagreed. According to Helen, all she told Ian was that a foreign national had been killed.

She never said the victim was French. And that wasn't the only thing in Ian's reporting that got ahead of the facts. His early article said Sophie had died of blunt force trauma, that there was no sign of sexual assault, and that two wine glasses had been found in her house. None of that was public at the time. Ian's answer was that he had good sources inside the investigation, and maybe he did.

But some people in West Cork started to wonder whether the source he kept quoting was himself. A few of them said something even more unsettling. Ian had been talking about a murder before anyone else even knew there'd been one. One person said he'd canceled plans on the morning of the 23rd, hours before his colleague supposedly called him at 140 to tell him about the murder in the first place. And then there was Ian himself. In the days after the killing, neighbors and Gardi officials, which is the Irish police force, noticed he had cuts and scratches on his forehead, his hands, and his forearms.

Ian said he'd gotten them killing turkeys for Christmas and cutting down a Christmas tree. That was the kind of explanation that was impossible to disprove and, hard to believe at the same time. Sophie had been attacked in a patch of briars and barbed wire. Scratches were exactly what you'd expect on whoever had been out there. And then there was Marie Farrell, the Skull Shopkeeper. And last time I explained how she came forward under a fake name and eventually told the guardee she'd seen a man out at Kilfaida Bridge

at around three in the morning on December 23rd. The bridge was about a mile and a half from Sophie's house and miles from where Ian lived. When Marie later saw Ian in a shop, she told a guard officer that he was the man she'd seen. Her statement put Ian out in the dark near the scene on the night Sophie died. It was the closest thing the guardee had to an eyewitness, and it didn't help that Ian already stood out in West Cork. A French investigator who worked the case years later put it plainly. Ian wore shorts all year, even in the dead of winter. He was known to drink until he blacked out.

One neighbor said he'd scared her by howling at the full moon like a wolf. For a long time, people wrote him off as a harmless local eccentric. Then a woman was beaten to death a few miles from his house, and overnight the eccentric started to look like something else. but the thing that turned West Cork against Ian Bailey was gossip. In the weeks after the murder, story after story reached the guardee about things Ian had supposedly said. A couple who were friends of his told police he'd made a comment about having gone, quote, too far. An editor said Ian told him he'd done it to reignite his flagging career.

Then, in early February 1997, a 14-year-old boy named Malachi Reed got a ride home from Ian. The next day, Malachi told his mother what Ian had said to him in the car, quote, I went up there with a rock and bashed her brains in. Malachi's mother reported it. Her account and her sons never changed. The boy was so shaken by. the encounter that for a long time afterward, he slept with an axe beside his bed. Ian would later say all of these remarks were misunderstandings, that he had a dark sense of humor,

that he'd made grim jokes, and that a lot of the time he was just repeating what other people were already saying about him. Still, by early 1997, the picture in West Cork was set. and there was one more thing feeding it. It was widely known locally that Ian had a history of violence toward his partner, Jules Thomas. Jules was a Welsh artist who'd come to West Cork in the 1980s, and she'd been with Ian for about six years. And on more than one occasion, he had assaulted her,

once badly enough that she was hospitalized. For the guardee. it all added up. They were ready to make a move on Ian. On February 10th, 1997, about seven weeks after the murder, Garda officers arrested Ian Bailey at his home. He was 40 years old. Not long after that, they arrested Jules Thomas too. They thought she knew more than she'd said. They put the two of them in separate rooms and went to work. Irish law shaped everything that happened not. The guardee could hold Ian for 12 hours. That was it.

Twelve hours to break him or let him walk. They asked him about the scratches. Again, he blamed the turkeys and the Christmas tree. They asked about the confessions. He said they were all misunderstandings, just dark jokes and other people's words repeated back. Had he killed Sophie? No, he said he didn't even know her.

her. Now that last part may not have been true. Some neighbors said Ian and Sophie had at least been introduced, and years later, it came out that Sophie had mentioned Ian's name to friends back in France, saying he'd wanted to meet with her about a possible project. But the Gardee didn't have that in 1997, so they turned to Jules. At first, Jules back to Ian up. And she said the two of them had been out at a bar the night of December 22nd, came home around half-past midnight, and went to bed. She said they'd been there all night. But as the detectives kept pushing, her story started to move.

She admitted she couldn't be sure Ian had stayed in bed. He'd been restless, tossing and turning, and at some point he'd gotten up. The next thing she clearly remembered was him bringing her coffee. around nine the next morning. And when he handed her the cup, she noticed something, a fresh scratch on his forehead. One she was certain hadn't been there the night before. The detectives took Jules' new account back to Ian,

and his story shifted to match it. Now, he admitted that he'd gotten up in the middle of the night, but only to write. He said he worked in the case. kitchen while, then had gone out to the studio, a separate building on their property, a couple hundred feet from the house. While they questioned him, other officers searched the property. At first, they turned up nothing. Then out behind the studio, they found the remains of a fire. To investigators, it looked like someone had burned clothes and the mattress. If there had been

anything on those clothes, it was gone now, but the bonfire went straight onto the pile of things that looked bad for Ian Bailey. Confronted with it, he didn't deny lighting a fire. He said he'd done it earlier in the month. And that was the shape of the whole case right there. Everything looked bad. None of it was proof. The 12 hours ran out. Ian had admitted nothing. and the guardee had no forensic evidence tying him to the scene, so they let him go. He walked out of the station a free man. But as far as West Cork was concerned, they now had to live beside a killer. Nominated as one of the best British true crime podcasts,

Murdomile is hailed as a masterpiece of compelling storytelling. Research used in the original police files. Over 300 episodes, Murder Mile has covered. hundreds of crimes you won't hear anywhere else. As well as solving cold cases, unearthing new evidence, and even discovering a serial killer, no one even knew existed. For a truly original podcast, subscribe to Murder Mile. In February 1997, the guardee arrested Ian Bailey for the murder of Sophie Toscon de Plontier, then let him go without any charges. They had no confession and no forensic evidence.

What they did have was a townful of people who were certain he'd gotten away with murder. And over the next few years, Ian didn't do much to make himself look innocent. In the summer of 1997, a journalist named Brege McGlachan drove down from Dublin to write a piece about Ian for the Sunday Independent. She told him it would be sympathetic,

and he agreed to talk. She stayed about a week. Ian drove her around the area and she paid for gas. They talked about everything and he kept circling back to the murder, turning over his own theories about who might have done it and why. Then, near the end of the week, driving her back towards skull, Ian pulled over on an empty road. There were no other cars.

Nobody in sight. He got out. went to the trunk and took out a ball of twine. Muglachlan later wrote that in that moment, she was certain he was going to kill her, that he'd strangle her with it out there where no one would see. Instead, he got back in the car and drove on. Nothing happened.

But she put the whole strange episode in her article, and it was clear she'd been, frightened. That was the effect Ian had on people now. Even the reporter who came to write the sympathetic profile drove away shaken. A year after the murder in December in 1997, Sophie's family came to West Cork for a memorial. Garda officials told them the same thing they'd been saying for months, an arrest was close. In January, 1998, they arrested Ian a second time. And This was their last shot, and they knew it. Under Irish law, they could detain him twice, 12 hours each. There would be no third arrest. They were sure that a man who'd supposedly

confessed to half of West Cork would finally crack in the room. He didn't. Still no confession, still nothing but circumstantial evidence. For Sophie's family, it was a fresh wound on top of the old They couldn't understand how the Irish authorities kept arresting this man and kept letting him walk. And for a few years after that, the case went quiet. And then in 2003, Ian himself brought it roaring back. He sued eight newspapers, Irish and British, that had linked him to Sophie's murder. Ian said they'd defamed him, and he blamed the guardee for feeding the press a story with nothing behind it. He clearly expected to win and walk away with a payout, but that's not what

happened. To defend themselves, the newspapers needed to guard a case file, the one that had been sealed all this time. The court ordered it, released. And suddenly, for the first time, the whole case against Ian Bailey was laid out in open court in public all in one place. For years, people in West Cork had only heard rumors about Ian. A version of this, a second-hand account of that, the trial changed that. With the guard of file finally out in the open, the full case against him became public for the first time, and hearing all of it at once was far more damning than any single rumor had ever been.

One after another, the people who'd given statements to the guardee took the stand and repeated them consistently. That included Marie Farrell, who told the court again that the man she'd seen at Cafada Bridge was Ian Bailey. And Marie added something new. She testified that after she'd given her statement, Ian came after her again and again, trying to make her take it back.

Sometimes he did it without a word, dragging a finger across his throat or pointing a finger gun at his own head. Other times he was blunt, telling her he'd ruin her life if she didn't recant. According to Marie, it went on for months. It also included a couple named Richie and Rosie Shelley. They'd been at a New Year's Eve gathering with Ian at the turn of 1998, and they testified that at the end of the night, Ian had put his arms around Richie and said,

I did it, I did it. When Richie asked what he meant, Ian said he'd gone too far. Rosie backed her husband's account, and the judge said he accepted their evidence. Ian's answer was the same one he'd given from the start. He said people were mistaking his grim sense of humor for confessions, or hearing him repeat back the very rumors the town had already pinned on him. Now, the judge had both versions in front of him, and he had to decide which was true. When Patrick Morin made his ruling in early 2004, the results was more tangled than West Cork

wanted it to be. Ian had sued eight newspapers. The judge rejected six of those claims and upheld two. Morin found that those six papers were justified in calling him. him the chief suspect. Based on Marie Farrell and the other witnesses, Morin said he believed the man Marie saw at the bridge probably was Ian. However, Morin found no evidence that Ian had been violent toward his ex-wife, a different woman from Jules Thomas, as two papers had claimed. He awarded Ian $8,000 euros in damages for that. So it was a split, but the headline

that came out of that courtroom was the one that stuck to Ian for the rest of his life. A judge had heard the case and found the papers were entitled to call him the prime suspect in Sophie's murder. But one distinction mattered more than the verdict, and it's easy to lose in the drama. A libel trial is not a murder trial. It runs on the balance of probabilities, which is a much lower bar than the beyond reasonable doubt standard, a criminal case has to clear. And Ireland's director of public prosecutions, the office that decides who gets charged, had already looked at this case and said no. There simply wasn't enough to prosecute.

It would come out later just how deep the DPP's doubts ran. A solicitor in the DPP's office had reviewed the Guard investigation and written a long, scathing analysis of it. His conclusion was that the case wasn't just then, it was flawed. The Gardee had failed to properly secure the crime scene. Evidence had gone missing, and there were real questions about how they'd handled their witnesses. Ian would push that idea much further. In a later action against the state, he alleged an outright conspiracy to frame him. He claimed a former British soldier named Martin Graham had been given money, clothes, and cannabis by the guardee to befriend him and coax out an admission. He claimed senior officers had leaned on the local state solicitor to press the DPP for a prosecution.

Ireland's own courts never accepted the full conspiracy claim, and a police watchdog later found no evidence the guardee had set out to frame him, but the watchdog did confirm the sloppier truth. underneath it. The crime scene had been badly handled. And pieces of physical evidence had gone missing from Garda custody. As the kind of case, a careful prosecution might have closed, and this one never did. Of all the problems the DPP solicitor had flagged, one would prove more damaging than any others, how the guardee had handled their witnesses. Hand in two, 2005, that problem detonated. That's when the most important witness in the whole case fell apart.

Marie Farrell recanted everything. The woman who sworn a statement put Ian at the bridge and now said the whole thing was false. She said the guardee had pressured her into naming Ian Bailey. She claimed they told her the statement was just for their own files, that she'd never have to stand up in court and repeat it. Clearly, that's not what happened. Marie's recantation split the case in two, and people have never come back together on it.

To Detective Superintendent Dermott Dwyer, who'd led the guard aside of the investigation, the timing was suspicious. Marie had maintained the same story for the better part of a decade, unwavering, and Dwyer had believed her completely. To him, the fact that she was changing it now suggested somebody was pressuring her. Sophie's family didn't buy the recantation either.

They worried that Ian had scared her into it the way she'd once testified he'd tried to. The only person who was happy was Ian. With Marie Farrell now on his side, Ian went on the attack. He had already lodged a claim against the Irish state back in 2007, and in 2014, it finally came to the High Court in Dublin. Ian sued the Guard of Commissioner and the state, claiming they had wrongly arrested him and conspired to frame him for Sophie's murder. It turned into one of the longest civil actions in Irish legal history. The case ran 64 days and heard from 93 witnesses. Ian and Marie Fitts.

Farrell both took the stand, and Ian's team laid out the whole conspiracy theory. They said the guardee had leaked his name to the press before his first arrest, that they'd paid that former British soldier to befriend him and draw out an admission, and that they'd pushed Marie to name him, despite the DPP's own warnings about how shaky she was. Late in the trial, the judge threw out most of Ian's claims, including the wrongful arrest claim, on the grounds that too much time had passed under the statute of limitations. So what was left for the jury was the core question. Had those Gardee conspired to force false statements Adam Marie Farrell? After roughly two hours, the jury of 11 came back. They found no conspiracy. It was a catastrophe. It was a

catastrophe for Ian. Not only had he lost, he was ordered to pay the entire cost of the case, estimated it's somewhere between two and five million euro. The man who'd gone to court to prove he was framed, walked out facing a bill that would follow him for the rest of his life. But that's also where the Irish system ran out of road. A liable judge had called Ian, the chief suspect, and the DPP had looked at the same file and refused to do that. used to charge him. His star accuser had sworn he was the man and then sworn she'd been forced to say it. And when Ian took the state to court to prove he'd been framed, a jury said he hadn't been. Ireland could neither convict Ian Bailey or clear him. After more than a decade, the case had

ground to a complete halt. But Sophie was French and France. was not finished. Phoenix has bizarre crime. The canals of Phoenix, Arizona are hunted by a serial killer. People are like, well, are we safe? These are sexual sails. Two grisly homicides. I know I didn't tell anyone.

But solving these murders is just the beginning. That can't be his first rodeo. This is season six of American Nightmares, The Canal Murders. Out now, wherever you get your podcasts. While all of that was grinding through the Irish courts, Sophie's family had already turned somewhere else. They'd spent the better part of a decade watching the Irish system arrest Ian, release Ian and decline to charge him, when they were done waiting on Ireland.

In 2007, they formed a group. They called it the Association for the Truth about the Murder of Sophie Toscan de Plantey. It was mostly the family, Sophie's son Pierre-Louis, among them. At the beginning, they knew almost nothing about how to push a criminal case forward. So they taught themselves. They met every month, learning how the system worked and where it might give. And they had one real advantage. Sophie was a French citizen.

In French law, let France investigate the killing of its citizens abroad. More than that, the French system worked in a completely different way from the Irish one. in Ireland, a prosecutor has to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. In France, a conviction can rest on the overall weight of the evidence the whole story assembled rather than on clearing that single high bar. In 2008, France got the case files from Ireland, and its own investigation began in earnest. French investigators came to Ireland, interviewed the witnesses again, and found that the people who'd said Ian confessed to them

hadn't changed their stories in all that time. The magistrate reviewed it and ruled there was a case to be made. In 2010, France issued a European arrest warrant for Ian and asked Ireland to hand him over. Ireland said no. Their reasoning was technical, but it came down to this. France wanted to put Ian on trial for murder that happened in Ireland. not France. But Irish law was clear. If the crime happened on Irish soil, Ireland handles it.

Now they weren't going to ship a man off to be tried by another country for something that happened at home. So the warrant failed. France tried again in 2016. In 2017, the High Court threw that second attempt out as an abuse of process. As long as Ian stayed in Ireland, France couldn't touch him. So France did the one thing they could still do, take him to trial, without him in the room. In May 2019, more than 22 years after Sophie died, three judges sat at the courthouse in Paris to hear the case against Ian Bailey, now 62. Ian wasn't there, neither was his lawyer. Both of them called the trial invalid. and refused to take part.

But a stream of witnesses from West Court flew to Paris to say one more time what they'd been saying for two decades. The court heard about the scratches he had after the murder, but not before. It heard how he'd changed his story about that night. It heard that he'd stopped on a hill to look toward Sophie's house

and lit a bonfire days later. And it heard the confessions from the people who said they'd received them. The prosecution also took apart a theory Ian himself had floated over the years that Sophie had been killed by a secret lover. The prosecutor pointed out that Sophie had called her husband over and over during that final stay and had begged several friends and relatives to come out with her. That wasn't how a woman slipping away for a secret romance behaved.

After four days, the three judges convicted Ian Bailey. in absentia of the voluntary homicide of Sophie Toscan de Plontier. They sentenced him to 25 years. For Sophie's family, it was the closest thing to justice they'd had in 22 years, but it still didn't settle anything. The two countries had reached opposite verdicts. France had convicted him, and Ireland had never even charged him. France tried once more to extradite him, arresting him in Dublin in December 2019. In October, 2020, the Irish courts refused for the third time in a decade.

Ian called the whole thing a farce. So he stayed in West Cork, a convicted murderer in one country and a free man in the other. Both were true at once. And that was the limbo Ian lived in. for the rest of his life. And the doubts about the Irish investigation did not go away. In 2002, the Gardee opened a formal cold case review of the whole thing. What it confirmed was that the earlier complaints about the original investigation had real weight.

The crime scene was never properly sealed off. Officers, reporters, and onlookers had walked all over that property in the first days, and there's no telling what was trampled or lost. The guardee never put Ian in a proper police lineup for Marie Farrell. They never formally tested whether the man she saw was Ian Bailey. They took her word, or depending on who you believe, they nudged her toward Ian in the first place. Oh, and then there was the gate?

Near where Sophie's body was found, there'd been a metal gate with bloodstains on it. Investigators took it. into evidence. And then at some point, it simply vanished. Nobody could explain how the guardee lost a blood-stained gate. Every one of those failures was something Ian pointed to as proof he'd been set up. He kept saying it right up until he died of a heart attack in West Cork in January, 2024. He was 66. But his death didn't close the case. If anything, it opened it up. back up. With Ian gone, the question stopped being about one man's guilt or innocence and went back

to the thing that had been missing from the start. Who killed Sophie Toscon de Plontier? And could the evidence, after all this time, finally say? Something almost got lost in three decades of arguing about Ian Bailey. There was DNA at the scene that never belonged to him. And it had been sitting in the case the whole time. Back in 2011, a French forensic team examined Sophie's clothing and found an unidentified male DNA sample around the lace holes on the tongue of her right boot. They called it alien DNA.

Nobody knew whose it was. For years, the technology couldn't do much with a trace that small, but by 2025, that had changed. In July of 2025, the Garda Cold Case team brought in an American firm called MVAC Systems run by a man named Jared Bradley. The MVAC is a kind of wet vacuum that lifts DNA off rough surfaces that older methods couldn't touch. Bradley and a forensic scientist spent a week in Ireland working over the exhibits, including Sophie's clothing and the rock and concrete block used to kill. kill her. They sent the samples to Forensic Science Ireland in County Kildare. And this time, they got something. For the first time in the history of the case, they recovered DNA that, in the words of one source close to the investigation, could only have come from the killer. It did

not match Ian Bailey. In 2006, that result, pulled the retired DPP solicitor back into the story. His name is Robert Sheehan, and he was the one who years earlier had written that scathing report, calling the Garda case fatally flawed. Sheehan wrote to the French authorities and asked them to overturn Ian's conviction.

His argument was straightforward. The most advanced testing available had run for nearly a year. It hadn't put Ian at the scene. Instead, it turned up someone else's, DNA. To Sheehan, the conclusion was obvious. France had convicted an innocent man. Ian's old solicitor began looking into a posthumous appeal to clear his former client's name. Others see it very differently. When Ian died in 2004, Ireland's deputy prime minister at the time didn't hedge. He called

Ian a violent man and said the evidence against him had been, quote, broad. and deep. Sophie's uncle, who has spoken for the family for almost 20 years, says Sheehan's argument rests on a false premise. He argued that the absence of Ian's DNA at the scene doesn't mean he wasn't there, and it certainly doesn't prove him innocent. The family wrote to the French government urging it to leave the conviction alone. And there's a genuine legal question underneath all of it. Who's DNA is it? Because so far, it hasn't been matched to anyone. And some close to the investigation have gone further, saying the results were inconclusive. That means it could be the killers. It could also belong to someone entirely innocent. A French investigator who handled the clothing

in 2011, an officer at the original scene, or even the person who built the wall that concrete block came from long before Sophie owned the cottage. Nobody has answered that yet. And until they do, it can't clear Ian and it can't convict anyone else. Almost 30 years on, one country has convicted a man of Sophie's murder, the other never charged him. To the very end, that man insisted that he was innocent, that he was framed. you could lose yourself in all of it, the arrests, the recantation, the two trials, the missing gate of the mystery DNA that may never be identified. A lot of people have, but strip it all away.

And someone real is still standing at the center of it. Before she was a fight between two governments, Sophie Toscon de Planteyé was a woman who loved, wild landscapes and gothic stories, who wrote in notebooks, who was loved by her family and her friends. She went to the edge of the world looking for a little piece, and she never got to come home. Her family is still asking the same question they asked that very first Christmas, Who killed Sophie? And every year, there are fewer of them left to ask it.

Sophie's father, Georges, died just before Christmas, 2004, on days after the 28th anniversary of Sophie's murder. Her mother, Marguerite, marks every anniversary surrounded by what's left of the family, her two sons and her grandson, Pierre-Louis, who was 15 when his mother didn't come home. Well, maybe that question gets answered one day. Maybe it never does. Either way, Sophie deserves to be remembered as more than the...

argument her death became, not as a case, but as a person, as Sophie. Thanks so much for listening. I'm Carter Roy, and this is Murder, True Crime Stories. Come back next time for the story of a new murder and all the people that 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

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Murder True Crime Stories is hosted by me, Carter Roy, and is a 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 Pritzofsky, Sarah Camp, Alyssa Fox, Alex Burns, Mara della Rosa, Claire Swartzlander, and Russell Nash.

Thank you for listening. Hi, it's Carter. Are you the type to fall down an internet rabbit hole and not come up for hours? Well, you'll love Crimes of Reddit. A new Crime House original with Sabrina DeAnna Roga and Alexis Lerner. link letter. Every week, one host brings real true crime stories from Reddit while the other reacts

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