Preview
DEE: Hello, everyone.
DEE: Before we begin with today’s episode, we wanted to ask you, have you given us a rating on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you’re listening right now?
DEE: If not, please do.
JEFF: If you already did give us a rating, please tell your friends about our podcast.
JEFF: We really appreciate it, and thank you for listening.
JEFF: West Cork in Ireland isn’t just remote.
JEFF: It’s called the farthest place you can go and not get your feet wet.
DEE: People go there to get away from everything, to reinvent themselves and maybe also to commit murder.
JEFF: In this episode, we’re going back to Ireland for the Audible Original podcast, West Cork.
JEFF: Welcome to So Much Crime, So Little Time.
JEFF: I’m Jeff.
DEE: And I’m Dee.
DEE: In this episode, we’ll introduce you to the Audible podcast, West Cork.
JEFF: After that, we’re going to tackle a true crime question of the week.
DEE: If you haven’t listened to West Cork, that’s perfect.
DEE: This is a preview episode.
DEE: We’ll introduce you to West Cork and only talk about events from the first episode.
DEE: There will be no spoilers for what’s to come.
JEFF: If you want to go listen to West Cork, you can find the link in our show notes.
DEE: Special note, West Cork is longer than other podcasts we’ve covered.
DEE: So instead of just doing a full recap next time, we’re going to release a special intermission episode.
JEFF: So if you’re listening along to West Cork, we will discuss the first episode here.
DEE: Then in our intermission episode, we’ll recap what happens through episode eight.
JEFF: And then we’ll come back in a third West Cork episode, and that’ll be called our full recap.
JEFF: So in that one, we’ll discuss pretty much everything, but especially focus on what happens in episode nine through the end.
DEE: Got all that?
DEE: No?
DEE: That’s okay, neither do I.
DEE: Check out our show notes, it’s all written down there.
JEFF: But before any of that, we need to discuss if this crime is even worth your time.
JEFF: All right, so this crime happened on December 23rd, 1996.
JEFF: Before we get into the story of the podcast, let’s jump in the time machine and talk a little bit about 1996.
DEE: What’s our time machine music?
JEFF: We should definitely have time machine music.
DEE: Yeah.
DEE: Are you reading in the years?
DEE: The Irish people will get that.
DEE: The Americans, I’ll leave a link in the show notes to read them in the years.
JEFF: All right, Dee, I would like to do a flat reading of the top song on the US pop charts.
DEE: A flat reading, as in you’re not gonna like, you’re not gonna give any melody to it.
DEE: You’re just gonna read the words.
JEFF: Nope.
JEFF: That’s right.
JEFF: And I’d like to see if you can tell me what song this is.
JEFF: Okay.
JEFF: Are you ready?
DEE: American or Irish?
JEFF: Yes, American.
JEFF: American song.
JEFF: Don’t leave me in all this pain.
JEFF: Don’t leave me out in the rain.
JEFF: Come back and bring back my smile.
JEFF: Come and take these tears away.
JEFF: I need your arms to hold me now.
JEFF: The nights are so unkind.
JEFF: Bring back those nights when I held you beside me.
JEFF: I’m gonna say blank, blank, blank.
JEFF: Say you love me again.
JEFF: Undo this hurt you caused when you walked out the door.
DEE: Unbreak my heart.
JEFF: That’s it.
DEE: Bye.
DEE: Unbreak my heart.
DEE: Oh.
JEFF: Tony Braxton.
DEE: Oh, okay.
JEFF: Tony Braxton.
DEE: Great one.
JEFF: That was the top song in 1996.
JEFF: Let’s actually skip the other song.
DEE: Top song in December 1996?
DEE: Love Us.
JEFF: Yep.
JEFF: All right, I wanna give you the tagline from the top movie.
JEFF: And you’re gonna love this.
JEFF: You’re gonna love this.
JEFF: All right, the tagline is, so many dogs, so little time.
DEE: Oh my God, so many dogs, so little time.
DEE: I’m presuming, oh, 101 Dalmatians.
JEFF: 101 Dalmatians, yeah, I was.
DEE: So many dogs, so little time, are you joking?
DEE: That is hilarious.
JEFF: Yeah, that was the number one movie, and that was one of the taglines, it’s on the poster.
JEFF: Oh my God.
JEFF: Yeah.
DEE: That’s fantastic.
DEE: It is.
DEE: Awesome, those Dalmatians.
DEE: And that was a crime, too.
JEFF: Cruella de Vil, yeah.
DEE: Not very kind, apparently.
DEE: Little bit cruel.
JEFF: In fact, very cruel, Cruella.
DEE: Cruella de Vil, Cruella.
DEE: Sorry, I don’t know.
JEFF: Did you want to go through any Irish things or not?
DEE: Why am I singing new today?
DEE: No, but the Spice Girls were definitely rocking us in 1996.
DEE: They came about with Wannabe, I think, in the summer of 1996, and I’m pretty sure their song, To Become One, was a hit in December of 1996.
JEFF: Are they Irish?
DEE: No, English.
JEFF: Even, not even one of them?
DEE: Not even one.
JEFF: They’re all English.
DEE: They’re all just English.
DEE: But to be fair, they’re great crack.
DEE: They’ll join, you know this group we’re cultivating who we’re gonna go out and have a pint with?
DEE: Well, some a tea, a cup of tea with.
DEE: There’s a few people that we’ll go down the tea route with as opposed to the pint.
DEE: The Spice Girls can come into that group.
JEFF: We’re gonna invite the Spice Girls?
DEE: Yeah.
JEFF: Okay, for a pint.
DEE: For a pint.
JEFF: Great.
JEFF: All right, was that our time machine?
DEE: That’s right.
DEE: I’m just a time machine.
DEE: Cool.
JEFF: All right, should we move on to the main feature?
JEFF: All right, let’s talk about this podcast and the crime that this is about.
JEFF: So, West Cork is an Audible podcast.
JEFF: It originally came out in 2018 on Audible, and then it was released on all platforms in 2021.
JEFF: There are 14 total episodes.
JEFF: They range from about 30 to 45 minutes in length.
JEFF: So it’s a lot of content.
JEFF: When it first came out, West Cork was the number one non-fiction bestseller on Audible’s top 10 list for seven weeks straight.
DEE: Love that.
DEE: Love it.
DEE: So what is the story in West Cork?
DEE: So first of all, I don’t know why we do it, lads, but it’s a cold case murder.
DEE: We know going into this that we’re unsure.
DEE: It hasn’t yet been solved.
DEE: It happens in West Cork, which is a county in the west of Ireland.
DEE: And it’s about the murder of Sophie Toscan du Plantier.
DEE: She was a French television producer who was visiting her holiday home near Skull in County Cork, Ireland.
DEE: And she was beaten to death outside that holiday home on the night of the 23rd of December, 1996.
DEE: Okay, so Jeff, I want to know your initial thoughts where I want to start is my old reliable.
DEE: What’s your feeling about the hosts?
JEFF: So the hosts are Sam Bungie and Jennifer Ford.
JEFF: They are a married couple.
JEFF: I think they’re British.
JEFF: Are they both British?
JEFF: English?
DEE: Yeah, they signed it anyway.
JEFF: Yeah, so not Irish.
JEFF: So from an accent standpoint, we’re all over the place on this one.
JEFF: They’re, I think they’re interesting.
JEFF: I’m curious to hear more past the first episode and kind of like how present they are, but there’s so many voices in this first episode that I think sometimes I’m not always like, they’re just one of the, or two of the many voices.
JEFF: There’s a couple of fun facts about them that I feel like we should talk about.
JEFF: So aside from being a married couple, they seemingly came obsessed with this case and creating this podcast over what, some length of time.
JEFF: And…
DEE: Well, they were at the case, the hearing that we’re going to talk about in 2014.
JEFF: Right, right.
JEFF: And they actually had a baby during the making of this, which…
DEE: I love this little tidbit that their friends were like, you need to name the baby podcast because that’s all you talk about.
JEFF: Yeah, and I read this article about the Irish Examiner, and one of the things they said was, it was talking about finishing the podcast and having the baby.
JEFF: They said it was terrible timing.
JEFF: This is Sam talking.
JEFF: I said, we thought we’d be finished well before he arrived.
JEFF: He heard the words West Cork more than anything else in the first few months of his life.
DEE: I mean, I feel like there are worse things you could hear in the first months of your life than West Cork.
JEFF: Sure, yeah.
DEE: I do, I find them quite affable.
DEE: I’m kind of, I often have said, it takes me a while to warm to hosts and I never know what to think of them.
DEE: I’m like, I’m not offended.
DEE: These are not offending me.
DEE: The two, the couple seem to work well together.
JEFF: It’s a low bar, they’re not offensive.
DEE: I’m not offended by them.
DEE: I’m quite, I’m more endeared.
DEE: I’m more on the positive side of things than I am.
DEE: I’m not neutral.
DEE: In a lot of cases, I’m like, I’m neutral.
DEE: I have no feelings towards these people, but I have some feelings I like that we got that little tidbit about like their baby and like how invested they were.
DEE: Like they basically moved to West Cork for a good portion of time to really soak in the community and really like research this case.
DEE: And I feel like that kind of makes me warm to them a bit.
DEE: I think it’s gonna be interesting to see how the husband and wife dynamic, if it at all comes up and we can kind of see any back and forth with them.
DEE: I don’t really feel like we get much of it in episode one, but I’m interested to see.
DEE: Often I feel like, was it in the podcast on the shaman?
DEE: What was that one called?
JEFF: Filthy Rituals.
DEE: Filthy Rituals where they were, we felt like the presenters kind of came out more throughout the podcast.
DEE: I’m interested to see how their dynamic works.
DEE: Like the dynamic and Filthy Rituals seemed kind of very jovial and kind of, I found a little bit dismissive of like the people involved, whereas I don’t get the feeling we’re going to have that vibe from the hosts in this one.
DEE: Yeah, I think I actually, I think I quite like them.
JEFF: Wow, all right, you just took us on a journey.
DEE: I know.
JEFF: From not offensive to quite liking them.
JEFF: Yeah, that’s the whole spectrum.
DEE: Yeah, sometimes I have to talk it out to know how I’m feeling, you know.
JEFF: Sure, sure.
JEFF: Let’s get into the story itself, specifically, well, I guess we should talk about the story that occurs in this episode, but also maybe select the broad strokes of the, of what we know about the whole series.
DEE: Before we jump into the story itself, what I would, I was hoping to ask you a little bit about the start, like how it started, because I felt like it was kind of interesting.
DEE: Do you remember like the phone dials up and they’re like, oh, I don’t know, maybe he’s not home.
DEE: Maybe he’s not going to answer.
DEE: And it’s basically a start with this guy, Billy.
DEE: It’s like Billy, oh, how are you?
DEE: Like, and they start this conversation and then that just teeters out.
DEE: And then it fully launches into like the broad strokes of the podcast and goes into quite gruesome description of the murder that has occurred.
DEE: I feel a little bit like Billy’s at the start of this.
DEE: I don’t know.
DEE: It was just an interesting start because I was like, oh, Billy’s going to be really integral to the whole thing.
DEE: And turns out he’s not really, but anyway.
JEFF: Yeah, so it’s a little bit of a collage approach, which I think we’ve seen in several shows where they sort of give you a little bit of a lot of things.
JEFF: And it’s sort of disconnected is like a negative.
JEFF: I don’t feel like it’s disconnected in a bad way, but yeah, so Billy is, we learn eventually, he is a bartender, Billy O’Sullivan at the bar where Sophie, the last person to see her alive, actually.
JEFF: And he has this line, if I’d known she was going to be murdered, I would have remembered everything.
JEFF: I love that.
JEFF: Which is, it’s an amazing line.
DEE: Yeah, what a line.
JEFF: But yeah, but then we jump around and we hear from a bunch of different people and you know, he comes back, he pops back in a little bit, but it moves around to a bunch of different people from West Cork.
JEFF: Yeah.
JEFF: Yeah, I think it did a good job of sort of starting to set the tone and like I think the, in a way like the seriousness, like the gravity of how this crime affected this town.
JEFF: Right, like there’s a line in there about how it’s referred to as the murder because there hasn’t been another one, right?
JEFF: And this was 1996.
JEFF: So for the next like 20 something years, like this is still known as the murder.
DEE: Yeah, yeah, like I feel like I know that’s something we’re gonna get into like how, as you said, like it’s all focused on the community here.
DEE: Like we’re not really focusing on, we don’t really hear much about Sophie.
DEE: We don’t hear much about, we just hear a lot of different people, a lot of different voices and really just focusing in on the community and the impact that this has had on the community itself.
DEE: So that’s maybe as I was, I could have crossed you totally a few minutes ago when you were about to launch in to give us a bit of context just about the story overall, broad strokes.
DEE: You’re good at adding the context into our conversations.
JEFF: Well, so yeah, so I think, so like I said, two things.
JEFF: I think what happens in this episode, this episode is called Blow-Ins, the first episode, and it’s referring to people who come to West Cork, come to this part of, on the western edge of Ireland, from different parts of Ireland, from different parts of whether it’s England or Europe, to sort of like reinvent themselves, get away.
JEFF: And so we hear sort of a collage of voices of different people going back to people who came in the 60s or 70s and have sort of turned into different people now that they’ve been there.
JEFF: But in the context of that, we also get bits and pieces about what the whole show is gonna be about, which is about this murder from 1996 of Sophie, who was this French TV producer who was married to this famous film director, also French.
JEFF: She had this house that she came to as sort of like a refuge in West Cork.
DEE: Just for slight context to people who don’t know, it was in 1973, Ireland joined what was then and what is now the EU, which meant that people in Europe were able to freely go in to each other’s countries.
DEE: So it was like, you know, visa situations out the window kind of thing, like very easy for people to move between countries, which ended up with like an influx of people either buying holiday homes or moving for certain amounts of the year, if not fully, to different places in Ireland and across Europe.
JEFF: Yeah, so we get a lot of like, how that affected this area, right?
JEFF: Because there were the people who originally lived here for generations and maybe were in a lot of places, not that excited to have all these people coming in to their small, very small kind of isolated community and for better or for worse.
DEE: Kamir, you mentioned the fact that like, well, this episode is obviously called Blow-Ins and you mentioned like how they define, like, had you heard that term before?
JEFF: No, never.
DEE: Really?
DEE: That’s so interesting.
JEFF: Is that a term in Ireland?
DEE: Like, yeah, like a Blow-In.
DEE: I think it’s more down the country than it would be in like Dublin city.
DEE: I don’t think we ever call someone a Blow-In if they come into Dublin because it’s more like densely populated.
DEE: But if you move to like a more rural part, you’re definitely a Blow-In, especially if you come from Dublin.
JEFF: Is it a derogatory term?
DEE: I think like with any term, you can use it in a, like in an endearing way or in a derogatory way depending on like who’s saying it and how people are saying it.
DEE: I’m sure there’s plenty.
DEE: I’m sure when it was first coined, the term would have been used in a derogatory manner.
DEE: But like, I don’t know.
DEE: Irish people are always slagging each other.
DEE: Even if it’s in a derogatory term, most people don’t take it to heart.
JEFF: Well, okay.
JEFF: So I think, yeah, we’ve kind of covered.
JEFF: So that’s basically, I mean, this episode is a lot of sort of table setting of the history of this area, the different types of people who are there.
JEFF: We get to meet a wide variety of them, I think, and hear a little bit of their stories.
DEE: Yeah, I really love that about this episode.
DEE: Like, I’m not sure how much it colors the area for me, but I just really enjoyed hearing about all these different people.
DEE: Like, all of the different people who have come in, as they said, to reinvent themselves, which is just a really interesting, like, term or idea of going somewhere and just, as someone said, like, you can tell your story and sure nobody knows if it’s true or not.
DEE: It kind of makes me feel a lot like how a lot of Americans, not all Americans, I know not all Americans get the opportunity to go to college, but if anyone in America, when you all like leave high school and you go to college, like often you’re like moving out of state, like you’re moving to somewhere where you don’t know anyone else and you do get to kind of have that re, like you get to reinvent yourself in that, that kind of pivotal time where you kind of sort of know what kind of person you want to be, but you want to detach yourself maybe from the person you were in high school or middle school or whatever.
DEE: Not something that we would have done because sure I went to college with loads of people I knew and even if I didn’t know the people, I knew sort of of them from the schools, because it’s such a small area in comparison.
JEFF: Yeah, I think, I mean, you alluded to this, but I feel like that’s a little bit of a thing of a certain level of privilege in America, right?
JEFF: Well, the majority don’t go to college and many who do, like I had friends in high school who went to college, but they went to like a local college, like a state university or something or a community college and that was with a lot of people that they knew.
JEFF: I mean, I was fortunate enough to go to a college where I didn’t know a single person and-
JEFF: Fortunate.
JEFF: Well, okay.
JEFF: In a way that I think I was able-
DEE: Yeah, to reinvent yourself.
JEFF: Yeah, yeah.
JEFF: And I think I did that.
JEFF: But I think to your point, yeah, I mean, when you’re 17, 18, 19 years old, that can be a good time to wanna sort of like start fresh.
JEFF: And I think I get the appeal of, I mean, these people who moved to this part of Ireland were doing it at different stages in their life, but sometimes they were like, they just needed a do-over, like they needed a reset.
JEFF: And this is what that provided for them.
JEFF: Like there was a Tom Quinn who, he described it as like stepping into the past.
JEFF: Yeah.
JEFF: And yeah, he talked about like basically growing his own food and kind of like having like the self-sufficient lifestyle and just like becoming a person who he wasn’t in his old life, which I thought was great.
DEE: I liked the guy Len, the accountant who moves to London and turns in like turns his or changes his car for a donkey and cart.
DEE: And then he hears about West Cork and just decides that that’s where he wants to be.
DEE: Also, he was mentioning Pudgene and I was wondering, have you ever heard of Pudgene?
JEFF: I don’t know what that is.
DEE: Do you not?
DEE: Okay, so Pudgene is something, it’s basically an Irish moonshine.
DEE: It’s, I brought some facts for you about Pudgene.
DEE: It’s from the sixth century.
DEE: It’s apparently one of the world’s strongest drinks.
DEE: If made like the way it used to be made, it can be between 40 to 90% ABV.
JEFF: 90% is a lot of percent.
DEE: It’s a lot of percent.
DEE: And also something I think I knew at some stage of my life, but I re-learned today, is the Irish word for a hangover is Pudge.
DEE: So it’s the start of the Pudgene, which I love that.
DEE: It’s basically, it’s made from, originally it would have been made from potatoes, or it could be made from potatoes.
DEE: It’s illegal.
DEE: It can’t be sold.
DEE: I did find a certain brand or selling it, I think somewhere in Boston or whatever, but the levels have to be, like I think it’s like 42%.
DEE: Like, so it has to obviously be measured to that.
DEE: But yeah, anyway, there you go.
JEFF: But it’s effectively like a potato-based moonshine.
DEE: Yeah.
JEFF: Have you had it?
DEE: No, I actually never have.
DEE: One of my friends, one of my very close friends, her friend that she grew up with, apparently, the dad used to make puccine and they used to always steal it.
JEFF: Your friend’s friend’s dad used to make, okay.
JEFF: So that’s like your what, cousin or uncle?
DEE: True story, basically, more or less.
DEE: But I do, I love this.
DEE: I love this whole like seeing into like all these different people who have moved here.
DEE: I find that really fascinating.
DEE: We also like, as we’re hearing about these people, we’re getting these weird snippets of like about him and people’s opinion of him.
DEE: And, you know, there’s a radio snippet of saying like, you know, it’s wrong the way people are dealing with him and he’s being harassed.
DEE: And then it discusses the trial of him against the guards in 2014 and how that’s when the hosts go.
DEE: But we don’t really get a sense of who him is yet.
JEFF: That’s right.
JEFF: We do.
JEFF: Well, we get his name eventually.
DEE: Eventually we get it, but it’s all like we’re hooked on it.
DEE: Like all these, we get snippets from different people who are going to this trial.
DEE: So basically this suspect, this him that they’re talking about, who has apparently been like the main suspect in this murder is suing the Gardee for harassment in 2014.
DEE: So that’s what, how many years after?
DEE: Do the maths.
JEFF: 18 years.
DEE: 18 years after.
DEE: And then you get all these Irish people being like, we’re hooked on it.
DEE: We’ve coffeeed out on it.
DEE: Oh, I can see there’s a bit of badness in them.
DEE: There’s all these different like accents going on, like all these, like there’s a Dublin version of the Hamstead’s Justice League with their homemade sandwiches that go to court every day.
DEE: There’s someone being like, oh, he looked nice, but you know, that could be the outdoor face.
DEE: This is a real like Agatha Christie thing.
DEE: And they’re getting real into it.
DEE: And it’s another person is like, if you haven’t heard about this, if you don’t know who he is, like you must have been living under a rock.
DEE: Like there’s all this like, I don’t know.
DEE: I love the Irish of it all.
JEFF: No, I love that as well.
JEFF: I love having another like murder club that brings their flasks of tea and their sandwiches to court.
DEE: Does this happen for every murder?
DEE: I feel like so many things that we follow.
DEE: My favorite part is like the L-biddies with their sandwiches and tea trying to crack the case.
JEFF: Well, so yeah, so the person that they’re talking about is Ian Bailey, who is also a Blow-In, right?
JEFF: Like he’s one of the Blow-Ins.
JEFF: He’s English.
JEFF: He, like so many others, he came to West Cork to kind of reinvent himself.
JEFF: And so he is the main suspect in the 1996 murder.
JEFF: And in 2014, yeah, this is the trial where he is suing the guards for basically false arrest, which is kind of an odd place to start.
JEFF: So, I mean, again, we know this is a cold case.
JEFF: So we know he’s our main suspect, but we know he was obviously never convicted.
JEFF: I wanted to ask you, so yeah, as you alluded to, like this, they make a big deal about how this was like national news and everybody was talking about it in 2014, like was this on your radar?
DEE: I mean, like I’ve known about like this for the lot, definitely for the last number of years, but in 2014, I’m not sure if it was, it might have been out of the country at the time, but it wasn’t something that was pivotal.
DEE: Whereas like when I spoke to my mom about this particular murder, she was like, oh yeah, like it was everywhere.
DEE: So, yeah.
JEFF: Okay, well, let’s see, so we’ve talked about Ian Bailey a little bit, so presumably we’re going to get a bunch more about him.
DEE: And he does come in to this episode, like a small, but him and his wife, Jules, are interviewed.
DEE: And her, one of the interesting things she says is like, you know, about all these Blow-Ins that are coming in, and both Jules and Ian Bailey are Blow-Ins.
DEE: And Jules says like, oh, you have to keep yourself busy, or else you’ll drive yourself mad, or go and have an affair, which happens more often than you’d imagine.
DEE: And then Ian Bailey like jumps over her and starts to speak about, I don’t know, poetry or something.
JEFF: Well, yeah, where are we going with that?
DEE: That was it.
JEFF: Okay.
DEE: That’s a big group.
DEE: Where are you going with that?
DEE: What’s your point?
DEE: Hurry up and get there.
JEFF: I had a question related to that.
JEFF: Something that she alluded to about keeping yourself busy.
JEFF: So we get a little bit just about the geography, the weather, the, so, first of all, have you been there?
JEFF: Is this a place you visited?
DEE: I haven’t been to Skull, but I’ve been very close to Skull.
JEFF: So it’s described as very cold, rugged, on the edge of the, what, the Atlantic?
JEFF: Is this in the Atlantic?
DEE: Yeah.
DEE: I think what they kind of talk about is how people come in the summer and if you go to the west of Ireland, if you go to West Cork or Kerry or Galway or Donegal, which are all on the west coast, in the summer and you get a nice day, it is genuinely the most beautiful place in the world.
DEE: Like the beaches are beautiful, the sea is beautiful.
DEE: It’s like rugged landscape.
DEE: It’s just stunning.
DEE: But there’s a massive difference between a summer day in Skull or in West Cork or wherever and a winter day.
DEE: And particularly when it’s so isolated.
DEE: And I think that that’s what a lot of the community were saying, like people fall in love with it and then they move and then they realize the darkness of the dark.
JEFF: Can I say, we were talking earlier about going to college.
JEFF: So I went to college in Central Maine, which I visited that school twice, two or three times before starting as a student there.
JEFF: And all those times were in the summer.
JEFF: Maine has a summer that lasts, I don’t know, six weeks.
JEFF: It’s, there’s a short window of time where everything is green, everything is warm, everything is beautiful.
JEFF: But when you’re there from, you know, September to May, most of that time it’s cold and gray and snowing.
JEFF: And I knew that because I lived in the North, but still like the sort of length and severity of the winters there, having only seen that campus in the summertime was, it was a lot.
JEFF: It was, I feel like that resonated with me of like, yeah, you come in the summer, you think, I’m gonna move here, I wanna live here always, but you don’t think about how drastically it changes.
DEE: Yeah, absolutely.
DEE: I did, go on.
JEFF: I was gonna transition to the next thing.
DEE: I was just gonna say like, there was a lot, like as we’ve said, like this whole episode is like very much about the community and like they talk again towards the end of the episode about like the shock of the community, the impact of this on the community.
DEE: This still hasn’t gone away.
DEE: It’s kind of left a stain on this area in West Cork.
DEE: And they speak to Jim Duggan, who’s a lawyer, who I think ends up representing Ian Bailey.
DEE: He is a second, like a holiday home and school.
DEE: And he speaks about people who are frightened and people started to double lock their doors, which reminded me a lot of Inside the Crime, that kind of like rural, but really safe area, like no door locking, like everyone just comes and goes.
DEE: And then a murder happens and then everyone is on edge.
DEE: And he was saying people were afraid to go out, the children weren’t let out.
DEE: It was just, yeah, it’s sad to think of like the kind of, the innocence, I don’t think innocence of an area really makes sense here, but it feels like some sort of innocence was taken from the area.
DEE: Some sort of safety was like, the safety net was like pulled from us.
JEFF: Which is, I think, I feel like exacerbated by the crime not really being solved, right?
JEFF: Like there’s no closure, there’s no resolution.
JEFF: It’s just like, and they speak to this in the episode of like feeling like someone murdered someone and that murderer is potentially still here.
JEFF: It’s one of us, we don’t know who it is, but this is a small community.
DEE: And I was wondering as well, like, as you say that, like when it’s called a Blow-Ins, and this is kind of alluded to at some point in the episode, but like whether the guardie might have been, like, or what your thoughts are, just having listened to the first episode, are thinking, well, a Blow-In was murdered.
DEE: There’s this unease and like the community is unsettled.
DEE: Maybe if we pin this on another Blow-In, it goes away.
DEE: If we pin it on a local, like if it turns out a local has done it, there’s still an unease.
DEE: Whereas if you get rid of the Blow-In, do you know what I mean?
JEFF: Why is it different if the suspect is a Blow-In or a local?
DEE: Just to clarify, I don’t think it’s different, but I’m wondering in the psyche at the time, was it, if it’s someone else, it’s someone else’s problem, it’s not something that has permeated through our community.
DEE: It’s not something prevalent that has grown in our community.
DEE: It’s something that has arrived here.
DEE: It’s like an object that is not native to here.
DEE: Like it’s outside of us.
DEE: Do you know what I mean?
DEE: I wonder, is that what the thought was from some people who believed that it wasn’t him, it wasn’t Ian Bailey that did this?
JEFF: Yeah, and I feel like that’s a common thing that we’ve seen elsewhere.
JEFF: Of just wanting to pin it on someone who is an other, right, and an outsider.
JEFF: And there’s a certain amount of psychological safety in that, and maybe, I think also like xenophobia or maybe inherent bigotry of a type.
JEFF: But yeah, I think that’s right.
DEE: There was also just so much interest in the case.
DEE: Like, I mean, I think we heard from Leo and Sally Bulger, and I get a feeling we’re gonna hear from them a good bit because they lived less than a mile away from where Sophie was, Sophie’s body was found.
DEE: Maybe less than a mile away from her house, like in the same laneway.
DEE: They talk about a bovereen, which I’m sure you’re not familiar with.
DEE: A bovereen is like, a boher in Irish means road, and if you put I for the N, the E in sound at the end of an Irish word, it means small.
DEE: So it’s like a small road.
DEE: So the bovereen, like it’s a really small road or a really small laneway where two houses, in this case, the boereen is like where the two houses go off it.
DEE: So I feel like we’re gonna hear from them quite a lot because it was in fact, Sally who came upon the body and she ran back to get Leo to call the police.
DEE: So they speak to them at one stage and they say, you know, the casket can’t be closed because really the casket can’t be closed.
DEE: Like the family are getting low closure on this because it’s never been solved.
DEE: And then I think it’s Leo that says, we need someone to tell the facts without the opinions.
DEE: Like just the facts, like without everything else, without the red herrings, without whatever, just the facts.
DEE: And I was wondering, I found out a very interesting line.
DEE: I was wondering like, is that the plot point for the entire podcast?
DEE: Like, let’s get in into this muddled story that has been told for so many years.
DEE: There’s so many different facets to it.
DEE: And let’s try and focus in on the facts.
JEFF: Yeah, I mean, I feel like that’s, I feel like that’s what we’re gonna get through the rest of this series, right?
JEFF: Like they’re gonna try to present to us as many of the facts as they can.
JEFF: I mean, again, it’s a cold case.
JEFF: So there’s no legal resolution to it.
JEFF: But if they can, if they can present as much evidence as they can over these next, what, 13 episodes, I guess we’ll find out, right?
DEE: Yeah, I mean, yeah, I hope so.
DEE: I hope we don’t get it muddied with lots of opinions because when we see 14 episodes on a podcast, I’m just like, oh my God, this just feels like a lot.
DEE: Maybe that’s my like brain at the moment.
DEE: I’m like, I can only like focus in on like, we’re used to kind of doing six, I think maybe eight episodes, definitely, for our previews and our recaps here, but 14 seems like a lot for this murder.
DEE: And I’m just hoping that they stay on track with keeping opinions out and keeping the facts in.
JEFF: Well, we should probably wrap up this preview by talking about the last few minutes of the first episode, which we get some facts, right?
JEFF: Like we get basically a little bit about the crime itself.
JEFF: So most of this first episode is about the history of West Cork, about the Blow-Ins, and we get, like you said, we get these little bits about Ian Bailey and all these different people and their stories.
JEFF: But then towards the end of the episode, we finally get to the crime itself and the murder of Sophie and kind of her last day and what was known about her last day in this December, 1996.
JEFF: So there’s a bit about Three Castle Head, which I had to go look, I didn’t understand what they were talking about.
JEFF: Do you want to describe Three Castle Head?
DEE: So Three Castle Head seems to be like the ruins of a castle where a lot of people go walking out on, but seemingly the family, the last family that lived there, all were murdered, like had a bloody end.
JEFF: They all died violently.
JEFF: We learned that they all died violently in some way.
DEE: And it says to commemorate them, I’m not sure who is commemorating them in this way, but to commemorate them, a drop of blood like falls every day on the walls.
DEE: Is that accurate?
JEFF: Yeah, from a drop of blood drips from the walls of the main tower every day.
JEFF: That’s the rumor.
JEFF: That’s one of the rumors.
JEFF: There’s a couple of rumors.
DEE: And the other rumor is that this white lady appears Yeah, so sort of a ghost story about this white lady.
DEE: And if you see the white lady near Three Castle Head, you basically shouldn’t be left alone because it’s like a curse.
JEFF: Yeah, it foretells your death.
DEE: So seemingly the day that Sophie was murdered, she went to Three Castle Head and she was spooked by something and she was leaving.
DEE: And this couple, I don’t think they were from the area.
DEE: I think they might have been Blow-Ins as well.
DEE: Like saw her and kind of were like, are you okay?
DEE: And she was like, yeah, yeah, yeah.
DEE: Like, I’m just like, I have to get home, I have to get home.
DEE: And it says that like a guard, a guard out like after was like, oh, sure if only you were locals, you would have known to not let her leave on her own if she’d seen the white lady.
DEE: Like a guard was like, we don’t do that here.
DEE: Like, we don’t mess with the spirits, which I found really interesting.
DEE: It wasn’t just like, anyway.
DEE: What do you think in here now?
DEE: Do you believe in this kind of spooky stuff?
JEFF: I mean, not really, no.
DEE: Not really, but would you be on your own after you saw the white lady?
DEE: Yeah, me too.
DEE: I’m like, logically, I don’t believe in this, but absolutely am I not being on my own after I see this white lady.
JEFF: So, and to contextualize this a little bit.
JEFF: So Sophie, so this is what we know of her last day, right?
JEFF: That she went and went for a walk at Three Castle Heads.
JEFF: She went to O’Sullivan’s Pub.
JEFF: We talked about that earlier, where Billy was the last person maybe to talk with her.
JEFF: She had tea and a scone.
JEFF: She left alone.
JEFF: She was, what?
JEFF: What?
DEE: He says, you say it right.
DEE: He says scone.
DEE: Did you notice that?
JEFF: No, I said scone.
DEE: No, I know you said scone.
DEE: I don’t know if it’s a British thing.
DEE: He said scone.
JEFF: Whatever, it sounds delicious.
JEFF: I would have one.
DEE: Yeah, oh yeah, because you actually don’t know what a scone is.
JEFF: It’s a little pastry.
DEE: Yeah.
JEFF: Is it not?
DEE: I think.
DEE: We’ll have a talk.
DEE: It’s, but not your biscuit, not like biscuits here where you have them with gravy.
JEFF: No, no, like it’s more like a.
JEFF: Like a cake.
JEFF: It’s closer to a biscotti, like a, not hard like that.
JEFF: Okay, this is a weird tangent, but.
JEFF: It’s like a, it’s dense though, right?
JEFF: Like it’s not light, like an angel food cake.
DEE: No, you’d like cut it in half and like put butter and cream and jam on it.
JEFF: Yeah.
DEE: But also I’ve just seen a little snippet from the independent.co.uk who said posh people definitely say scone.
DEE: So it must be a posh posh British thing.
DEE: They say scone.
JEFF: Are you a posh British person?
DEE: No.
JEFF: I try to say that with a little more derision.
DEE: Sorry, that is totally an aside.
DEE: She has a T in scone.
JEFF: My point was that she came to West Cork alone, right?
JEFF: Like she wasn’t traveling with her family.
JEFF: She had a young son and husband who were still in France.
JEFF: And she was there alone.
JEFF: She’d come a few days before.
JEFF: And then on this last day, she went for this walk.
JEFF: She went to the pub.
JEFF: She left alone.
JEFF: So as far as we know, she was spending all of her time, all of her time alone.
JEFF: And then the next morning, they find her, her neighbors find her body, like you mentioned before, which is pretty much how this episode ends.
JEFF: Which I think also just from a construction standpoint is interesting that we don’t start there, right?
JEFF: Like we actually hear more about the main suspect before we hear about even the crime, let alone the victim, which is unusual.
JEFF: I think that’s unusual.
DEE: I think it is unusual.
DEE: Like as we said, like it feels like the first episode is very much focused on the community and the area where this happened.
DEE: It’s called West Cork even as a podcast.
DEE: And I think we’re hearing a lot of from the community members.
DEE: I also feel like it was alluded to in the episode, like people didn’t even know she was there at the time.
DEE: Like people barely knew her.
DEE: So maybe the point in not discussing her is more to focus on the fact that she wasn’t known to the community.
DEE: Like focusing on the community, the impact it has, and then this happens.
DEE: And she’s now obviously known a good bit to the community because of her murder.
DEE: Yeah, I thought the ending was really strong.
DEE: It ends with like beautiful, still night.
DEE: And it just, yeah, when you know what has happened, like it’s a lot.
DEE: I will say to take it away from the gruesomeness that we do end on, and I thought it was so funny when the host was like to Billy who runs the pub was like, this place has obviously changed a lot in the last 30 years.
DEE: And Billy is like, no, it’s the exact same.
DEE: Like, of course it is.
DEE: The beauty of a country pub is that it’s old and in the country.
DEE: I just thought that was so funny.
DEE: He’s like, exact same, same stools, same TV, same lap.
DEE: It’s so funny.
JEFF: All right, so we’ll come back next time and we’ll jump through the next episodes two through eight in our next episode and then get through the rest of it and the one after that.
DEE: We can’t leave without asking the very important question, Jeff, are you eager to keep listening?
JEFF: Oh yeah, oh, I think for sure.
JEFF: I think, I mean, I like the sort of mood setting of this.
JEFF: It’s an intriguing way to begin.
JEFF: I think this is a very different beginning than anything else we’ve listened to.
JEFF: So I feel like we say that a lot, but I think maybe we’ve been finding some unusually constructed stories.
JEFF: What about you?
DEE: Yeah, yeah.
DEE: Like I’m intrigued to listen to what I think parts of this were good.
DEE: I think we’ve come across stronger first episodes.
DEE: Don’t love that the victim isn’t being like kind of highlighted, but I think maybe there was a point to that.
DEE: And I feel like, I feel like I have a bit of a trust.
DEE: I’ve trust in the hosts that they’re going to bring Sophie and I think they’re going to bring her to the fore in future episodes.
JEFF: Yeah, on that note, well, I think when you know that there’s going to be 14 total episodes, I guess I kind of, and we talked about this a long time ago, like I don’t look ahead at the episode titles of What’s to Come, but I presume that we’re going to get much more on her, on her story, on the crime, and that this was really just more like prologue in a way.
JEFF: Like this whole episode, I feel like it was mostly a form of prologue to What’s to Come.
JEFF: So there’s plenty more time for them to get into it.
DEE: Yeah, I don’t know.
DEE: Yeah, it definitely wasn’t my favorite.
DEE: I’m definitely interested in continuing, and I do have hope, as I said, there was parts of that I really liked, but that’s very like into the details.
DEE: Very scene setting, very much like a novel where they’re using flowery language to tell you about the smell and the taste and the blah.
DEE: And given that you are an English, whatever you have, how many degrees you have in English and stuff, I presume you’re like, oh, I love this, I love this, I love the scene setting.
DEE: And me, I’m like, here, where’s the action?
DEE: I just, maybe that was lacking a little bit for me here.
JEFF: Okay, well, I hope for your sake, we get more action.
DEE: Yeah, yes.
JEFF: All right.
JEFF: All right, Dee, it’s time for our question of the week.
JEFF: All right, so this episode prompted this question for me that I wanted to ask you.
JEFF: Would you be, or have you ever been, a true crime tourist?
JEFF: So to be clear, I’m talking about visiting a place specifically to see the site of a crime.
JEFF: Do you think that’s something that’s okay to do, or is there a time where you feel like it is okay or isn’t okay?
DEE: Oh my God, I can’t believe you’ve asked me this.
DEE: Okay, would you believe one of the things we hadn’t discussed in the main part of this episode was, Jeff, when you guys visit Ireland, I feel like now you have two spots to visit, West Cork and to Braddon.
DEE: And I’m like, oh, maybe actually, maybe now that you’ve asked me the question, it makes me think I need to pause and not say that to you, which I’ve already said to you.
DEE: That’s not great.
DEE: Yeah.
DEE: Okay, there’s a lot to this.
DEE: First of all, have I been a true crime tourist?
DEE: I have for like the like of, like I’ve seen where famous people have died.
JEFF: Do you have an example of that?
DEE: John Lennon.
JEFF: Oh, the Dakota in New York.
JEFF: You went there specifically to see the spot where John Lennon was murdered.
DEE: It was mentioned on a tour.
DEE: It was like part of the tour.
DEE: But now I feel Icky about it now that you’ve said like, and then also I accidentally, well, like, I mean, we went to the Viper rooms in LA.
DEE: Is it in LA?
DEE: Hollywood?
DEE: That wasn’t a murder, I suppose.
DEE: That was just a death of River Phoenix?
JEFF: Is that where River Phoenix died?
DEE: Joaquin Phoenix is still alive.
JEFF: Joaquin Phoenix is still alive.
JEFF: River Phoenix was his brother, who died in the 90s.
DEE: The Viper.
DEE: Yep.
DEE: The Viper room.
DEE: So, that all kind of does intrigue me.
DEE: I’m sorry, I’m a terrible person.
JEFF: I mean, I only a little bit think you’re a terrible person.
JEFF: I feel like there is a distinction to be made with celebrities, I think, I mean, John Lennon is a particularly significant one.
JEFF: I feel like that.
JEFF: I mean, I’ve been to New York a bunch of times, and I’ve never kind of gone out of my way to go there to Dakota.
JEFF: But I think if I was in that neighborhood, and like I would probably go there just to say I’d been there maybe.
JEFF: Yeah, I guess, I mean, that was maybe implicit in the question, was a little bit of judgment.
DEE: It was 100% judgment, yeah.
JEFF: Okay, a little bit of judgment.
JEFF: I don’t think it’s okay.
JEFF: I think particularly for something like this, where we’re talking about not a celebrity, right?
JEFF: We’re talking about just a regular person who is a victim of a crime.
JEFF: I don’t feel like that’s ethical to do.
DEE: So I wouldn’t be the type of person, like I remember Chernobyl was opened up a couple of years ago, and people started going and getting like selfies and stuff.
JEFF: Yeah.
DEE: Okay.
DEE: That would not be my vibe.
DEE: Like, I’m not going to go.
DEE: I have been to concentration camps around Europe.
DEE: I’ve been to some harrowing places that I’ve visited.
DEE: I’m not the type to like take a selfie outside of it and be like, oh, my God, went here.
DEE: Like, not my vibe at all.
DEE: But I do find it intriguing and I do find it interesting.
DEE: And that’s I suppose we spoke about that, like on our first episode, like, why are you interested in true crime?
DEE: Why are you interested?
DEE: That does interest me.
DEE: Like, if there’s a plaque at the side of a road, I’m going to go over and read it or a plaque on a bench in a park, I will read it.
DEE: If there’s flowers laid at the side of the road, I will wonder and I will try and research to hear what happened.
DEE: Like, that’s just how I operate.
DEE: I think the way you phrased your question, maybe, is why I feel a little bit itchy about it because you said like a true crime tourist.
DEE: Like, am I going to be like, okay, I’m going to plan my trip all around, like this part of the world to visit all these places.
DEE: People got brutally murdered.
DEE: No, like, I’m not going to do that.
DEE: But like, if I’ve read about something and I’ve heard a lot about it, part of me would maybe be interested in seeing where it happened.
DEE: But I also think what is what kind of changes the idea of this is to kind of depend on the family.
DEE: Like, I think some families want their person to be remembered and to be commemorated and to be, like, you know, disgust.
DEE: Maybe not like…
DEE: I feel like it depends on how the family would feel about it.
DEE: And that’s also a hard thing.
JEFF: I think that’s fair.
DEE: Because, say in the Unalinsky murder, like, we knew the family wanted nothing.
DEE: They were, they just opt in and left the area, which is very different to how some other families may have, may react in certain situations, similar to that.
JEFF: I think that makes sense.
JEFF: I agree with that.
JEFF: And I think, like, and I would draw a distinction between something that is the site of whether it’s a murder or, like, I mean, you talk about a concentration camp or, like, something that has historical significance, right?
JEFF: Like, like, for me, like, I will always remember going as a kid to Ford’s Theatre where Abraham Lincoln was shot and, like, seeing the, you know, the booth where he got shot and then across the street where they took him afterward where he died and they’re, like, they have, like, encased in glass or plexiglass, like, the pillow that his head was on and it’s, like, the blood stains from 150 years ago and, like, it’s really gruesome in a way, but it’s also, like, it’s Abraham Lincoln.
JEFF: Like, it’s a piece of important American history that I think is significant.
JEFF: I think that’s different.
JEFF: Like, I think that’s in a different class in the same way I would put, like, going to, like, the site of, like, the World Trade Center in New York or, like, something where, yeah, a lot of people died here in a horrific event, but it’s also, like, a significant moment in history.
JEFF: Like, same thing, I would classify that in the same way as, like, concentration camps.
DEE: But we’ve also discussed in this episode how, like, for this particular murder, it was a significant point in skulls history.
DEE: So if you’re using that logic, and, like, you know, the thing is, if a murder occurs, if it’s you that knows the murder victim, or if it’s you that is, like, related in some way to the, you know, in terms of proximity or whatever, like, that is history to you.
DEE: So, I don’t know, I think it’s a really fine line.
DEE: I think, like, you know, driving past where a body or a murder was found is very different to stopping and taking a selfie, or stopping and, like, taking a photo or harassing people around the area about it and making it, like, a fanfare, and, oh my god, got to see this today.
DEE: Like, that’s very different than saying, like, wow, that’s where that happened.
DEE: Like, that story really, like, caught me.
DEE: I think they’re two different things.
JEFF: Yeah, a lot of it is around sort of the tone and sort of appreciation of the seriousness of where you are.
DEE: Exactly.
JEFF: I think we agree.
DEE: Did you answer your first ever true question of the week?
DEE: I don’t know, for anyone who’s listening out there, have you noticed how Jeff just doesn’t answer these questions?
DEE: He puts them out there and then he sits, like he just has a seat on the fence.
DEE: It’s like Jeff’s seat is on the fence.
JEFF: I ask the questions.
JEFF: I don’t answer them.
DEE: Yeah, there’s only two people.
DEE: We both need to ask them.
DEE: I’m gonna bring the question next week and I’m gonna ask it of you and you are gonna have to be the one to answer it first.
DEE: I’m not gonna say a thing.
DEE: That’s gonna be hard for me to not say anything, but anyway.
JEFF: All right, should we talk about our next show?
DEE: Yeah, let’s do it.
DEE: Thank In our next episode, we’ll do an intermission check-in on West Cork.
JEFF: So again, this is a long series, so all we’re gonna do next time, we’re not gonna cover through the end, we’re just gonna discuss through the first eight episodes.
DEE: After that, we’ll post a full recap where we discuss all 14 episodes.
JEFF: So if you’re listening to West Cork on your own, after you get through episode eight, check back in to listen to our intermission episode.
DEE: Don’t forget to follow us on Instagram, Spotify, Spotify, rate us, send us to your family and friends.
DEE: So Much Crime, So Little Time.
DEE: So Much Crime, So Little Time is a production of MimeGov Media.
DEE: The executive producer is Paxton Calariso.
DEE: Our associate producer is Blythe Tai.
DEE: The music was composed by Vyacheslav Starostin.
DEE: If you haven’t done it yet, please subscribe to this show in your podcast app.
DEE: Don’t forget to give us a five-star rating and a review.
DEE: Even better, tell your friends.
DEE: To join the discussion, look for us on social media.
DEE: Check out the show notes for all the links.
DEE: Thanks for listening.
DEE: Did you know that Mother Teresa received her Honorary US.
DEE: Citizenship in November 16th, 1960, 1996?
JEFF: I did know that I actually have a tattoo that commemorates that moment.
JEFF: We should keep that in.
DEE: Oh my God, Bill Clinton became president also.
JEFF: In 1996.
DEE: Seems like that.
JEFF: You know, I covered an Al Gore speech for my high school newspaper in 1996.
JEFF: And it was one of the most boring things I ever did.
DEE: You know, I was nine in 1996.
JEFF: I know.
JEFF: I was in high school.
DEE: Go on.
JEFF: I am older than you.
JEFF: We’ve established this.
DEE: I know, but I’d like to remind you, I don’t know why, it brings me a lot of joy.
JEFF: All right, Paxton, I feel like a couple of these things we just said actually would be pretty good to keep in, but let me introduce this segment.
DEE: This segment.
