Intermission
JEFF: Before we begin, what are you doing right now?
JEFF: Have you raided us on Spotify or Apple?
JEFF: If not, why don’t you do that right now?
DEE: And don’t forget to follow us on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
DEE: And of course, tell your friends.
DEE: There’s a brutal, shocking murder in a quiet town on the far edge of Ireland.
JEFF: The main suspect is a polarizing journalist that nobody seems to like.
DEE: So how did this case never get solved?
JEFF: We’re going back to West Cork on this episode of So Much Crime.
DEE: So Little Time.
JEFF: Welcome to So Much Crime, So Little Time.
JEFF: I’m Jeff.
DEE: And I’m Dee.
DEE: And in this episode, we’re continuing our coverage of the Audible podcast, West Cork.
JEFF: Last time, we did a preview episode and told you all about episode one.
DEE: Normally, we’d cover the rest of the series here, but this one is a bit long.
JEFF: Yep, there are 14 episodes between 30 and 45 minutes each.
DEE: So we’re giving you a special intermission episode.
DEE: This show you’re listening to now will cover episodes two through seven of West Cork.
JEFF: We’ll come back and cover episodes eight through 14 next time.
DEE: I told Jeff we weren’t spending enough time on Irish podcasts.
JEFF: So we decided to listen to this one that goes on for 14 episodes.
JEFF: If you want to go listen to West Cork yourself, you can find the link in our show notes.
DEE: Okay, let’s get back to the story.
JEFF: Before we get to episodes two through seven, let’s do a quick recap of what we covered last time.
DEE: West Cork is an Audible podcast that came out in 2021.
DEE: It’s 14 episodes in total, most range from 30 to 45 minutes long.
DEE: And West Cork was the number one nonfiction bestseller on Audible’s top 10 list for seven weeks straight.
JEFF: All right, so what’s the story?
JEFF: This is a cold case murder, which we seem to do a lot of.
JEFF: West Cork is about the murder of Sophie Toscan du Plantier.
JEFF: She was a French television producer.
JEFF: She was murdered outside her holiday home near…
JEFF: All right, Dee, I need your help here.
JEFF: So we’re in County Cork in Ireland.
JEFF: Skull is a town?
JEFF: Is it a city?
JEFF: Or is it the name of a town?
JEFF: Or is it like an area in a town?
DEE: We only have like five cities in Ireland, Jeff.
DEE: We don’t do what you guys do here, which is call everything a city.
DEE: So Skull is probably the town and Toramore is like maybe the village.
JEFF: Anyway, that’s where this takes place.
JEFF: And this crime happened on the night of December 23rd, 1996.
DEE: Episode one is mostly about the location, the setting and the community at large in Skull.
DEE: The episode is called The Blow-Ins.
DEE: And it’s really about people who came to this cold, rugged western edge of Ireland to reinvent themselves or disappear.
DEE: We met a bunch of people from the town, including a lot of blow-ins.
DEE: Ian Bailey was one of these blow-ins.
DEE: And he, in this story, is our main suspect.
DEE: And then we ended with the crime.
DEE: On December 23rd, 1996, Sophie Toscan du Plantier was brutally beaten to death outside of her cottage.
JEFF: So in this one, we’re gonna get much more info about Sophie and Ian and the town.
JEFF: So I think we can get to it.
DEE: Let’s do it.
DEE: All right, Jeff.
DEE: We often start on the hosts.
DEE: Last time we spoke about the hosts, we both said like, yeah, yeah, vibes are good.
DEE: They seem like they’re doing a good job.
DEE: I don’t think there was anything majorly negative that we said about them.
DEE: Is that correct?
JEFF: That’s correct, yes.
JEFF: Did your opinion change on them?
DEE: I’m unsure.
DEE: So, it feels a little bit like they are helping to inflate the ego of someone who already has an inflated ego or had.
JEFF: I wonder if you could say that any slower.
DEE: Okay.
DEE: Well, so I was trying to be careful of my words here.
DEE: I don’t want to go into too much of the story yet.
DEE: We haven’t given the context back, but what I will say is the start of episode two, what ends up happening is they realized, the hosts go to West Cork and they realized how remote, how rural it is and really like, they’re not going to be able to find their way around, find all these important places, that some of the events leading up to Sophie’s murder and Sophie’s actual murder occurred.
DEE: So what they do is they bring in a local.
DEE: And this local is Ian Bailey.
DEE: Now they do this knowing that he is the main suspect in the murder case.
DEE: So he’s showing them where to go.
DEE: And I’m kind of confused with this.
DEE: It kind of, how did you feel about the fact that he was the one showing them where to go?
JEFF: I think it’s weird.
JEFF: I think it’s weird.
JEFF: I think it stood out.
JEFF: And I think, I would like us, we’re gonna go through episode by episode and kind of describe what happens in each one.
JEFF: But I think it’s a good thing to call out at first that like, this is really where episode two begins.
JEFF: Like it’s the main suspect taking the podcast host to the scene of the crime.
JEFF: That’s weird.
DEE: So I was wondering like, so part of me was like, okay, hold on.
DEE: Like there has to be a focus here.
DEE: Is this like a ploy to get more information?
DEE: Is it like kind of similar to the ruse they had for Jim Lewis and unsealed the Tylenol murders?
DEE: Like, is that what they’re doing?
DEE: Or are they buttering them up to get more information to bag for future?
DEE: Like if they just act as if they are naive and they don’t know things and he starts speaking and like maybe lets a couple of things out.
JEFF: Maybe, I think that’s possible.
JEFF: Yeah, I think, it’s hard to know.
JEFF: I do think there’s a degree to which he is someone who does like to have his ego inflated.
JEFF: Like that comes through.
JEFF: I mean, they say that.
JEFF: I will say in their, in the host defense, I feel like they seem to come across to me at least with, there’s not a lot of bias or I don’t know, I feel like there’s a strong neutrality to the way they present themselves.
JEFF: Like they don’t share strong opinions throughout all of these episodes, I don’t think.
JEFF: But what they don’t say explicitly, I feel like there is something implicit in the way they sort of focus so much on Ian.
DEE: Yeah, I don’t know.
DEE: I just find it weird.
DEE: I was, I just think, I don’t like it.
DEE: I didn’t like it.
DEE: And then you’re right with the neutrality.
DEE: Like I kind of have to remind myself, like if Ian Bailey is guilty, it feels like they’re inflating his ego, as I said, and kind of bringing us along for the ride to be like, this is what we’re doing, like la la la.
DEE: But the other part of me is like, do I need to calm down and take a leaf out of them?
DEE: In episode one, we discussed it with a snippet from a radio show where a caller rang in and said, he, like everyone is acting as if he is guilty.
DEE: Like he has not been found guilty.
DEE: And like, if we are to believe in the justice system in Ireland, we have to say, it’s up to them to prove his guilt.
DEE: It’s not up to him to prove his innocence.
DEE: And part of me is like, well, I need to calm down and be like, he was never found guilty.
JEFF: I mean, that’s what I always say to you, right?
JEFF: Is you just need to calm down.
DEE: I mean, I feel like it’s what people say to me most moments of my life.
JEFF: Well, and it has been over 20 years at the point where they’re talking to him since the crime occurred.
JEFF: And in all that time, I mean, he was not formally charged with this crime.
JEFF: So I mean, in their defense, I think that’s a fair point.
DEE: Like maybe they’re being clever here.
DEE: They know that he’s like the person that’s most likely to give them information.
DEE: Like we hear from an episode two, from a few people from the area who didn’t even want their names said on the podcast for fear of like any repercussions from what they might say, like in the local area.
DEE: So Ian Bailey obviously didn’t have that fear.
JEFF: Right, but of course, when they spend all this time with him, they’re gonna get his version of the story, right?
JEFF: They’re gonna get his perspective on it.
JEFF: And I think it’s hard not to become, like he does come across as someone in his own way, sort of very charming and charismatic.
JEFF: And I think that it probably has an effect on you, right?
JEFF: Like you, I don’t know whether it makes you empathize with him, but it certainly makes you sort of fascinated with him in a way that may not be good.
JEFF: I don’t know, it’s hard to say.
DEE: It is hard to say.
DEE: I feel like regardless of what the point of it is, it just feels, if I was Sophie’s family, I don’t know how I’d feel about this podcast in general, but if I was Sophie’s family and I could see how much airtime Ian Bailey is getting in it, it just doesn’t sit well with me.
JEFF: Yeah, I think that’s a good point.
JEFF: I definitely agree with that.
JEFF: Well, and I think if you go back to the first podcast we talked about, Inside the Crime, the Unalinsky story, there, again, we spent most of the show with the main suspect, but there we knew the main suspect definitely didn’t do it, right?
JEFF: Like we talked about in that one, how if you were Unalinsky’s family member, like how would you feel about the kind of the way that it’s being presented?
JEFF: But that was very different.
JEFF: I think Ian Bailey still had, at that point, that they were talking to him a shadow of suspicion, even though he hadn’t been charged, he hadn’t been convicted, but he still kind of lived, I mean, he lived for decades under this possibility that he did it.
DEE: He chose to live, he remained there in this small town, like he didn’t leave, and I’m sure we’ll get to that at some point, but like he did have the choice to leave and reinvent himself maybe somewhere else, but he didn’t do that.
DEE: He stayed for the drama, for his ego, for his name, to stay in the center of it all.
JEFF: We talked so much in the last episode about the idea of these blow-ins being people who come to this town from where they’re different part of Ireland or different part of Europe, to reinvent themselves, to become someone new, which is what he did, right?
JEFF: That’s what so many people we heard from in the first episode did.
JEFF: But in his case, he comes there, he reinvents himself, he gets this notoriety, this negative attention, and if anything, he leans into it.
DEE: Yeah.
DEE: Oh, he’s there for us.
JEFF: He draws more attention to himself.
DEE: And as we were saying, if he was innocent, and 20 years after the crime, he’s feeling like, oh my God, people still think it’s me and blah, blah, blah.
DEE: Why would you be like, yeah, of course, I’ll show the podcast hosts of this, the hosts of this podcast around the area.
DEE: Of course, I’ll go back and continuously court this story and the attention that comes from it.
DEE: Why would you do it if you were burned badly?
DEE: Like if you were like, I, this is, you know, had such a negative impact on my life.
JEFF: Well, but this is the same thing.
JEFF: This is the same thing we talked about with the Tylenol murders too, right?
JEFF: Where you’ve got a main suspect who seems to want to talk about the crime for, I mean, at least for a long time, for several decades, right?
JEFF: Where he seemed to like the attention.
JEFF: He liked talking to the FBI.
JEFF: He liked talking to the Chicago Tribune.
JEFF: And, but we still think, like we don’t have another suspect.
JEFF: Well, we did have another suspect, but we, he’s one of the main suspects.
JEFF: But he seemed to like keep coming back to the light in that way, which was, which is, I think is very similar to what Ian Bailey is doing.
DEE: Yeah.
DEE: Interesting.
DEE: Kind of hard to wrap my head around that.
DEE: I can’t imagine of all the things in life to lean into.
JEFF: Well, yeah.
JEFF: All right.
JEFF: Should we get more into kind of going episode by episode?
DEE: Yeah, let’s do it.
DEE: So episode two is called Back of Beyond as we mentioned.
DEE: It does start off with Ian showing them around, showing the hosts around.
DEE: Episode one was like setting heavy as we mentioned.
DEE: And I did quite like the start of episode two where it like really discusses how wild this place is.
DEE: It’s kind of, I wonder like for you, if you understand how wild the concept that this murder happened here, like it’s so uncommon in small communities in Ireland, first of all, but even in Ireland in general, I think, and I feel like it often gets lost from my experience, my very limited experience in America.
DEE: Definitely in California, maybe it’s a size thing, but like if someone dies in Ireland in a car accident or a suspicious death, it’ll be reported and everyone will be talking about it.
DEE: But not only that, but people, yeah, people chat about it all the time.
DEE: Like it is like top news and it feels somehow personal.
DEE: Whereas I feel like here, things can happen down the road or down the street and nobody speaks about it.
DEE: Like when you go into work on the Monday morning, there isn’t like a chitchat about it.
DEE: I find that odd.
JEFF: Why do you think that is?
JEFF: Like how much of that is you think just a factor of like the size of the population or the diversity of the population or the segmentation of the culture?
DEE: Whoa, that was a lot of options.
JEFF: That was a lot of things.
DEE: I feel like there’s too much.
DEE: We’ve like one real news channel at home.
DEE: Like we don’t, I’m sorry.
DEE: I know we don’t tell anyone from Ireland who’s listening.
DEE: But like there’s one main news channel.
DEE: And like no matter what news channel you’re listening to, like you’re gonna hear more or less the same stories.
DEE: Maybe slightly different take on it, but like more or less the same stories.
DEE: Whereas here there’s like so many different news channels.
DEE: You can listen to the local one.
DEE: You can listen to the one like a few cities up.
DEE: You can listen to the one that’s like more like focused on the country as a whole.
DEE: There’s just so much option.
DEE: Maybe it’s just a scale thing, but I just find it bizarre.
DEE: Like I’ve heard about horrific incidents really close to us.
DEE: And you and I live really close to each other.
DEE: And like a number of people that we chat to and work live really close to each other.
DEE: And yet nobody maybe has heard about it or nobody discusses it.
DEE: I just find it bizarre.
JEFF: Yeah, and I think we live in a large metropolitan area, right?
JEFF: Where there are multiple large cities with a fair amount of crime in different places.
JEFF: So even if you are listening to the local news, things may not be covered or they may feel distant.
JEFF: And then I think that’s right.
JEFF: I think that perspective of like, well, OK, so we live in one part of California.
JEFF: But California is by population, like, bigger than most countries, right?
DEE: Yeah.
JEFF: And geographically, it’s huge.
JEFF: And it’s very segmented in terms of its geography.
JEFF: And it’s like, and then that’s one of 50 states, right?
JEFF: So if something happens in Oregon, like, that feels really far away.
JEFF: Yeah.
JEFF: So it’s, yeah, I think, I mean, I’ve lived in smaller communities.
JEFF: I think, I mean, I’ve lived in a bunch of different parts of the country where it felt a lot more kind of close knit.
JEFF: I don’t know if it’s the same as Ireland, but there were elements here.
JEFF: I think from my experience in the US., and I think, like, when you’re talking about the beginning of this episode, where they talk about just, like, they need Ian Bailey to take them to the scene of the crime because it’s so hard to get there, right?
JEFF: Which we got into in the first episode, we get into more here, of just like, it’s a really isolated part of an isolated area.
DEE: It’s the name of the show.
DEE: They call it the Back of Beyond because it’s in the middle of an hour.
JEFF: Yeah, like, you keep going down this road until you think you’ve gone, like, you’ve missed it or, like, it can’t possibly be any further, but it is.
DEE: It is.
DEE: Did you love that the locals give vague directions to nosy tourists when they come about?
JEFF: That, so the thing that this reminds me most of is living in Maine, where I think there is, I think, and having not been to Ireland, a similar kind of, like, distrust of outsiders in a way and a rural nature to the community and a lot of, like, unmarked country roads.
JEFF: And, you know, like, I feel like the stereotype of getting directions in Maine is, like, you drive down past, you know, where that one farmer’s barn used to be, but that burned down 10 years ago, you take a left, and you go past where that big tree used to be, but that fell down a storm two years ago, and, you know, like, you’re never going to find it, right?
JEFF: Like, and it’s almost like, it’s almost like a joke of how obscure the directions are.
DEE: I feel like, maybe I’m wrong, but I feel like if this was in the US, they wouldn’t need the locals to give them directions, because this would be like part of some sort of tour or something.
JEFF: Like a double-decker bus tour or something.
DEE: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
DEE: Try to get those around those bo-reins.
JEFF: All right, so we talk a little bit about what happens, like, just the kind of nuts and bolts of this episode.
DEE: So the nuts and bolts really are like the crime scene and like the sloppiness in a way of the guardee to protect the scene, but I say sloppiness with, like, I’m not firm in that because really it’s kind of hard to know what they would do.
DEE: So first of all, as we said, like, this is referred to as the murder because there aren’t any other murders there.
DEE: So the guardee that are involved in this, like, this is, they might have been trained on this a long time ago, but like, it’s very new to them.
DEE: And I know there was one guard who had just recently done, like, a crime scene course or something.
DEE: So he was trying to put everything in place.
DEE: But like, mainly we’re looking at inexperience here.
DEE: The weather at that time of year is going to be pretty brutal.
DEE: It’s so rural.
JEFF: And right, we’re outside too, just to be clear.
JEFF: So the victim is found outside.
JEFF: It’s December 23rd, right?
JEFF: So it’s Christmas.
DEE: It’s winter, which is cold and wet and dark.
JEFF: And so there’s a delay too, if I can jump in for a second.
JEFF: So the more experienced professional investigators are coming, I think, from Dublin, which is how far is Dublin?
JEFF: It’s far from here.
DEE: Yeah.
DEE: So what’s interesting is like now it’s not so far away because there’s like motorways and stuff like that.
DEE: But like, that’s only in the last whatever, 10, 15 years that there was like good roads between here and Cork and you’re talking Cork City then.
DEE: So then it’s the roads from Cork City out to West Cork, which is like another bit of time.
JEFF: So like in 1996, yeah, like how far, like how long would that have taken?
DEE: Oh, I don’t know.
DEE: I think they go through it.
DEE: I think they talk about it taking like a full day, like seven hours or something.
JEFF: Okay.
JEFF: Yeah.
JEFF: I think so I have a note here that it took one of the main detectives didn’t get there until 10:30 p.m.
JEFF: local time, I didn’t write down what time they left.
DEE: It said it was 12 and a half hours after Sophie’s body was found.
DEE: So that’s Eugene Finnegan came from Phoenix Park, yeah.
JEFF: That’s the whole day.
DEE: And like even at that stage, there was like a little note about how there’s obviously no mobiles back then, no mobile phones or cell phones, as you guys call them.
DEE: And they were like rewiring the phone box, the local phone box in Tremor.
DEE: So like to actually figure out where they were going was tricky.
DEE: But by the time Eugene Finnegan arrives there, it’s too cold to determine a time of death.
DEE: And it was so dark that they couldn’t do anything until sunrise.
DEE: So they had to move the body to the morgue and preserve the body as much as they could.
DEE: But from the description, apparently, there’s no point in attempting to preserve the scene.
JEFF: Well, yeah.
DEE: Because it had been compromised so much already.
JEFF: And there’s a few things about this.
JEFF: There’s a detective who says the first thing you do is do nothing.
JEFF: And the first guards on the scene definitely didn’t do nothing, right?
JEFF: Like they sort of poked around.
JEFF: And then I want to talk to you.
JEFF: Because there’s a few different investigators that we hear from.
JEFF: One is this forensics expert, forensic, oh, forensics expert, Donovan.
JEFF: Yeah.
JEFF: Who is so good at his job that there have been multiple assassination attempts by the Irish mob.
DEE: Yeah, so I actually, yeah, the Irish mob.
DEE: I actually Googled him.
DEE: And two of the biggest things in his career that come up, you know, do you know the story of Lord Mountbatten?
DEE: He was like, I should know this.
DEE: Maybe the Queen’s brother.
DEE: I should fill that in with some actual facts.
DEE: He was like high up in the Royals and he used to, yeah, because I think he was, yeah, I think he’s the Queen’s brother, but I’ll double check that.
DEE: And he used to go to the west of Ireland to fish, et cetera.
DEE: In 1979, he basically went out fishing, lobster potting and tuna fishing.
DEE: He went out on the boat and his boat exploded.
DEE: And basically, it was the IRA who they deemed to have done it.
DEE: And O’Donovan was one of the ones who helped convict the guy who had actually put the bomb or detonated the bomb on the boat.
DEE: So that’s pretty impressive.
DEE: O’Donovan had shown showed flax of paint from the boat and traces of nitroglycerin on his clothes.
DEE: Yeah, that helped to give him life imprisonment, which is interesting.
DEE: And then the other is the general who apparently tried to kill him.
DEE: So also interesting.
DEE: But it’s just funny, like the description of him now is like this kind of like older man like kind of pottering around the place and then they’re like, but then you talk to him about forensics and he’s like, he’s honest.
JEFF: Right.
DEE: I love that.
JEFF: So yeah, so he, it takes him a while to get there.
JEFF: And then what else there’s only I mean, there’s not a lot of other key details, I think, in this episode that we should cover there.
JEFF: There’s a bit about some of the neighbors just kind of nosing around trying to to like pretending to be checking on their vacation houses.
JEFF: But really, they just want to get a glimpse of the scene, which I feel like is like.
DEE: But they were also surprised that they could like get so close to us.
JEFF: Yeah, there was only perimeter set up to prevent the locals from just kind of walking right up.
DEE: The other thing I think to note in this is that Shirley and Alfie are mentioned in Episode one.
DEE: They their house is like as close as you can get to Sophie’s holiday home.
DEE: And it’s actually Shirley who comes across Sophie’s body first.
DEE: And she runs back up to get Alfie.
DEE: The guardee goes straight to them.
DEE: They didn’t want to talk to reporters, apparently, which is just another note.
DEE: But yeah, it’s it was kind of a frustrating like so many things coming together.
DEE: I felt like in this episode, it was kind of frustrating from an investigative point of view and with the time and the weather like they had to go out and like buy a plastic sheet to try and cover or preserve the body.
DEE: Like this is how like unprepared they were because they it wasn’t something that they dealt with.
DEE: Like a priest came about to give last rites but didn’t use ointment or didn’t anoint.
DEE: A local farmer helped to ID the body.
DEE: A sign went up to keep it all out but still like the boot prints piled up as they said.
JEFF: Yeah, I mean when you look back on this and why this case was never definitively solved, like a lot of it I think comes back to these first, the first people on the scene and the lack of like preserving the scene of the crime, right?
JEFF: Which is what episode two really I think conveys and then we get, I guess we get a little bit more into that in episode three.
JEFF: Yeah.
JEFF: Do we want to get into episode three?
DEE: So, yeah, like finally in episodes three is called Sophie, how do you pronounce her second name?
JEFF: I would say Bunyol, but, but I also took three terrible semesters of college French and not the source.
DEE: So that’s Sophie’s maiden name.
DEE: My thoughts here is like, finally Sophie has arrived.
DEE: Like, it took so long to get to her.
DEE: But I’m also not sure how I feel about this episode.
JEFF: So this episode, yeah.
DEE: What did this episode bring?
DEE: Do you feel?
DEE: And like, was it sensitive to Sophie as like a victim?
DEE: It’s really like, I suppose my overarching question is, do you feel like this episode brought Sophie to life?
DEE: Like brought Sophie to the listeners to really describe her as a person?
JEFF: Yeah, I mean, this is so this episode is all about Sophie and it’s really the only episode all about Sophie, right?
JEFF: Like where we get to hear her backstory.
JEFF: We get a lot about her, the house that she was staying, which I guess was done to her specifications where everything was white, like the walls, the stairs, like the floor, everything was white.
JEFF: She had this bed that was placed a meter off the floor so she could watch the lighthouse out the window.
JEFF: No curtains on the window.
JEFF: I guess she liked to sit in bed and read and stare out the window.
JEFF: But yeah, it’s a little bit odd, I think.
JEFF: So she was a TV director, 39 years old.
JEFF: She had a son named Pierre, who was pretty young when this happened.
DEE: He was 15, I think.
JEFF: Yeah.
JEFF: We hear a little bit about her husband, who was a big movie director in France.
JEFF: There’s a fun little anecdote about when he was first pursuing Sophie, the French director, but he was still married to his then current wife, but he was in the process of getting divorced.
JEFF: And Sophie said, basically prove yourself to my mother.
JEFF: So he sent copies of his divorce paper to Sophie’s mother, and she wasn’t seemingly that impressed.
JEFF: But she was like, all right, I guess I’ll be okay with this.
DEE: There’s some descriptions I think we get of her from other people, a glamorous French film director’s wife.
DEE: That’s a choice.
DEE: Imagine being described just solely as the film director’s wife.
DEE: Ian Bailey said she came out with different men.
DEE: Ian wrote an article for the Daily Mail, I think it was, about Sophie’s tangled love life.
JEFF: Yeah, there was a lot about affairs, so her affairs, her husband’s affairs.
DEE: A potential open relationship.
DEE: Numerous locals said they wouldn’t have said that, like they would have known.
JEFF: Right.
JEFF: Which then plays into something from this, so we also then, it sort of goes back and forth between hearing the background on Sophie and more about the scene of the crime.
JEFF: So we go inside the house where she was murdered and there was, I guess in the kitchen area, there were two chairs placed close together, two wine glasses on the table, and a book of Irish poetry open on the table, and so there was speculation of like, was there another person there with her drinking wine?
JEFF: But, sounds like no, sounds like this is just this from her family.
JEFF: This is how she liked to sit and drink wine and read poetry.
JEFF: But yeah, I feel like we don’t get a great sense of who she was.
JEFF: She’s described as being sort of like, there was something unobtainable about her or like, sort of mysterious about her.
JEFF: Just sort of leaves me a little unresolved.
DEE: Yeah, this is what I think like frustrated me.
DEE: Like when I saw name of the episode is about Sophie, like finally we’re really going to get an idea for her and like, who she was as a person outside of this.
DEE: And I just don’t think we do.
DEE: Like I think we get this really high level like, oh, she was glamorous.
DEE: She’s married to this like film director and likely liked sleeping around.
DEE: And like that felt like really like even if all of that is true, there has to be more and there is more, but we don’t get that.
DEE: And yet after this episode, we get Ian Bailey part one, Ian Bailey part two, Ian Bailey part three, Ian Bailey part four.
DEE: And it’s just, I don’t know what the like tail end, the episodes at the end from eight all the way to 14 will be about, it doesn’t feel like it’s going to twist back to Sophie, to be honest.
DEE: Maybe it will.
JEFF: No, I doubt it.
JEFF: Before we get on to the Ian Bailey show, which is what a lot of the rest of the ones we’re going to talk about are, we do get, so she kept journals and they have access to her journals.
JEFF: And the episode ends, episode three ends with a quote from her.
JEFF: She’s describing, I think it’s a fox stalking lambs, and she talks about just kind of nature things that she’s seeing around her in West Cork.
JEFF: And there’s this quote that I wrote down.
JEFF: This is a quote from Sophie’s journal.
JEFF: You die in the wind and the sea and the land here.
JEFF: The rottenness is spread out in daylight, perfectly natural.
JEFF: Which they share is obviously like a metaphor for her, but I think also gets back to episode one where we’re just hearing about the ruggedness and the kind of brutality of the geography, right?
JEFF: Which seems to sort of infect the air of West Cork.
DEE: And we do towards the end of…
DEE: That was an amazing quote, actually.
JEFF: That’s why I wrote it down.
DEE: It would be interesting to hear, I suppose, more from her.
DEE: Like, that’s the only voice we seem to have of hers is those journals.
JEFF: But we’re going to get a lot more Ian Bailey.
DEE: Yeah.
DEE: There was a couple of bits that were just kind of weird, I suppose, which is like Daniel, her husband, like held a large celebrity-filled funeral and her family hated it.
DEE: So they held a second one that was much smaller and much more like what Sophie would have wanted.
DEE: Which, I don’t know, that bugged me a lot.
DEE: Like, it’s like a show.
DEE: And, you know, that’s, no.
DEE: But we do get some facts at the end of this episode, which are Daniel spoke to Sophie on the phone in and around 11 p.m.
DEE: And Sophie planned to be home for Christmas Eve.
DEE: So one of the questions that was brought up in episode one was like, why would a mother, who has a teenager at home, and a husband choose to spend Christmas away from them?
DEE: But apparently Sophie was planning to be home for Christmas Eve.
JEFF: Yeah, I don’t think we can read too much into that.
JEFF: I feel like her son was young, I mean, he was 15, and it doesn’t sound like they had, like her and her husband had the closest of relationships, which again, it’s like, it’s not our place really, I think, to judge that.
JEFF: And so I think it’s, maybe she was intending to go home for Christmas, maybe she just needed to get away and be by herself for a few days.
JEFF: We don’t know.
DEE: No, no.
DEE: The other thing that I think is interesting just before we move on is that the police did apparently troll through like the passenger lists for the boats and the planes to see like if anyone of interest in France had possibly come over and they didn’t find anyone on there.
DEE: Now I don’t know what the lists are like in terms of, you know, but anyway, just interesting thing to note.
DEE: So then we go on to episode four, The Killer Among Us.
DEE: We start off with this Christmas swim in 1996, which I found really funny because obviously, like that’s like a thing in Ireland.
JEFF: Is this a thing all over Ireland to go for a Christmas day?
DEE: In certain areas in Ireland.
DEE: So like there’s a place in Dublin that people would go for a swim, wear Santa hats and jump into the water.
JEFF: So this is a thing in parts of the US too.
JEFF: Like I said, I feel like in Maine people do this.
JEFF: And have you done this?
DEE: No, no.
JEFF: I don’t, I don’t, like I, there’s a part of me that understands the psychology of someone who wants to jump into freezing water on Christmas day or something.
JEFF: It’s a good free hat.
DEE: It’s good for the hangover from Christmas Eve, I’m sure.
JEFF: Okay, yeah, that makes sense.
DEE: But it just, there’s some snippets here off topic of like the murder that I just find so funny.
DEE: So someone’s just recording this, like this kind of reporter is doing like this off the cuff kind of recording of this local reporter.
DEE: And she’s, she is like, I’m just going to read some snippets.
DEE: There’s John with his bottle of brandy.
DEE: Fair play to you, John.
DEE: So Irish.
DEE: And then just so weird.
DEE: Oh, a fine wet Cork man there.
DEE: And then this one, I was just like, what is happening?
DEE: Why did they choose to put this on the podcast?
DEE: But anyway, Dennis has given us a flash of the nether regions.
DEE: That’s enough now, Dennis.
DEE: This is a family program, boy.
DEE: I was just like, why are we hearing this?
DEE: Anyway, the reason we’re hearing about this Christmas swim on that day is that there’s a recording, and Ian Bailey is actually in the video somewhere.
DEE: So I think that that was used at some point.
JEFF: Yeah, no, those are great quotes.
JEFF: And so not just Ian Bailey, although Ian Bailey, I think, is the main reason, but it’s also the police.
JEFF: One of the things they’re looking for is, so we know that Sophie was killed by three different weapons.
JEFF: There was a concrete block, a slate, and then a third missing weapon.
JEFF: And there’s a presumption that the person who did this would have injuries on their hands.
JEFF: And so they’re looking at people’s hands, I mean, looking at Ian Bailey’s hands, trying to see evidence of this, because this was basically what the next, well, two days later.
JEFF: So those injuries might have still been visible.
DEE: And we do get to the fact that Ian, in fact, had, not in this episode, but we do get to it within this group of episodes that Ian, in fact, had these, like, injuries.
DEE: I think he calls them scrapes.
DEE: I think the police would beg to differ.
DEE: The guardee would beg to differ on that one.
DEE: He’s just saying they’re scrapes from, like, chopping down a Christmas tree or something, or kidney turkey.
DEE: Yeah.
JEFF: Well, we’re going to get to that in episode five.
JEFF: Let’s run through episode four.
JEFF: I know they all kind of run together around here, but…
DEE: I feel like we don’t get much in episode four, really.
DEE: We start off with 53 suspects, which I thought was interesting.
JEFF: 53 suspects.
JEFF: And there’s this bit with Detective Gilligan who seems just, I feel like, generally smart and dedicated.
JEFF: He talks about the red mist, which is his metaphor for how, like, when you’re committing a violent act like this, your brain just sort of turns off.
JEFF: All that, like, just sort of get overtaken with the violence.
JEFF: And his point is this is how someone gets, like, stabbed 50 times, right?
JEFF: Like, which we’ve seen in other cases we’ve talked about.
JEFF: Like, what kind of overtakes a person?
JEFF: That’s his, that’s this red mist metaphor.
JEFF: We also learn that probably the suspect had to know the area because it is so remote.
JEFF: Like, it’s so hard to get there.
JEFF: You kind of had to know where you were going, most likely.
JEFF: And then we get a fair amount about the town getting sort of paranoid and turning on each other.
JEFF: I think that, to me, this was interesting, because you get this, all of these sort of locals who are turning on the blow-ins.
JEFF: We find out that, actually, once the police started looking into it, that turns out there’s a lot of people with criminal records who have come here to get away from their criminal past.
JEFF: We get a little bit about how people’s memories are unreliable, which we’ve talked about before.
JEFF: Yeah, and that there’s really no clear motive, there’s no hard evidence, but there are a lot of sort of petty grievances between neighbors, and that starts to come up.
DEE: Yeah, and I can imagine that.
DEE: I can imagine my mind would run wild and like, well, your man down the road’s a bit, he’s looked a bit weird a couple of days when I walked past him, so maybe he could have done something.
DEE: I think it was Len went to the guards about a neighbor, a single guy who lived with his mum, and he says now he’s mortified that he did that.
DEE: There was no evidence, it was just a vibe he was going with.
DEE: And there was some interesting, there was a man stealing eggs or ripping off a tin of gas.
DEE: So there’s people like that who those crimes are caught.
DEE: It’s like, that’s why I was out at that time.
DEE: There’s a lot of odd people in the locality, very eccentric folks.
JEFF: This reminds me, I feel like, oh gosh, shoot, what was that movie?
JEFF: There was Shaun of the Dead, the one after Shaun of the Dead in the Cornetto trilogy, the one with Timothy Dalton.
JEFF: Oh my gosh, Hot Fuzz.
JEFF: This reminds me a little bit of Hot Fuzz.
JEFF: Did you ever see Hot Fuzz?
JEFF: No.
JEFF: It’s a fun movie, but it’s about a small town in England where murders start happening.
JEFF: And it’s sort of, this is a part of the theme of the story of like, it’s just a way of people sort of start turning on each other and using their old grudges against their neighbors to accuse them of horrific murders.
JEFF: But there’s one other key thing that comes up in this episode, which is the Fiona call, which isn’t, so someone calls the police, uses the name Fiona.
DEE: 20 days into the investigation.
JEFF: January 11th, yeah.
JEFF: And says that she was out driving and she saw a man on the side of the road with a long black coat, wiping his hands down the coat.
JEFF: This was between 3 and 4 a.m.
JEFF: on the night of the murder.
JEFF: And she promises to call back.
JEFF: She does not call back.
JEFF: So the police go on this TV show, which they said was watched by one in four people in Ireland.
DEE: Crime time.
JEFF: Yeah, and they’re just imploring Fiona to call back.
JEFF: She calls back a second time.
JEFF: She makes a mistake this time, and she calls from her home.
JEFF: They’re able to trace the call.
JEFF: And it’s actually Marie, who was trying to disguise who she was because she was out driving with someone who wasn’t her husband between 3 and 4 a.m.
JEFF: And she didn’t want that to come out.
DEE: I mean, Jules did say in episode one, if you don’t keep yourself busy, affairs happen in a place like this.
JEFF: Right.
JEFF: So she saw something, and she felt compelled to call the police.
JEFF: But she didn’t want to get all pulled into this, but of course she does.
JEFF: One other thing I want to ask you about from this episode, from episode 4, was we get a little bit more about Ian Bailey, because of course, and we hear about his, where he changes his name sometimes to Owen.
JEFF: I didn’t catch the last name, but does it sound more Irish?
DEE: I thought they just went with Owen Bailey.
JEFF: Oh, did they?
JEFF: Okay.
JEFF: So what’s that about?
JEFF: Is that a thing?
DEE: He said it even for his byline.
DEE: I mean, there’s a lot of famous people who change their names, because stage names sound better.
DEE: That happens so often.
DEE: So when we say as desperate as it sounded, if he thinks I read an article, if I write an article and it’s going to be picked up by a newspaper, it’s going to be more likely picked up if I use an Irish name.
DEE: Of course he’s going to use an Irish name.
DEE: It kind of makes sense.
DEE: I don’t use my full name.
JEFF: What is the non-Irish version of The Edge?
JEFF: The Edge.
JEFF: All right, we should go on to episodes.
JEFF: So we already started talking about episode five.
JEFF: Well, episode five is called A Good Suspect.
JEFF: My summary of this was the Ian Bailey episode, although that ended up being too soon to call an episode the Ian Bailey episode.
DEE: Ian Bailey part one.
JEFF: Ian Bailey part one of many.
JEFF: All right, so this is where we get to those scratches.
JEFF: So Ian, it turns out Ian was a suspect pretty quickly, early on.
JEFF: The police brought him in.
JEFF: They realized he had scratches up to his elbows, and he gave this story that he had cut down a Christmas tree 20 feet in the air, and then dragged the top of the tree down through the tree, which, that’s a weird story.
JEFF: I don’t feel like I’ve ever heard of anyone doing that, where they climb 20 feet up a tree, cut it off to get the top of the Christmas tree.
DEE: Yeah, and like, yeah, so that’s a weird story.
DEE: And when he’s asked about it even now, he’s like, oh, well, they’re not blood scrapes.
DEE: They were more like, oh, they’re hard to describe.
DEE: Like, he’s so evasive.
DEE: It’s like you with question of the episode.
DEE: Like when we do the true crime question of the episode, it’s like so hard to get you off the fence on it.
DEE: Ian Bailey is literally just evading.
DEE: He’s just like, oh, well, it’s not really like that.
DEE: And then also, have you read my poem?
DEE: Like, he just doesn’t answer the question properly.
DEE: He’s so shady about it.
JEFF: Also, I see what you did there.
JEFF: You just compared me to the main suspect in this printer.
DEE: If we go to the sawing down the tree, what I really liked here is the police.
DEE: The guardie did such a good job, or by the sounds of it, they did.
DEE: They spoke to people who had cut down similar trees, and even a forester to see if this story made sense with the scratches on his hands, or the injuries, I suppose we’ll call it, to his hands.
DEE: And they were all like, they didn’t believe it.
DEE: And then they sent out another guard to go and actually like kind of recreate what he would have done to see if he got them and he didn’t.
DEE: So yeah, they don’t have a photo of the injuries though, which I mean, you’re going to send a guard out to chop down a tree, but you won’t be like, let’s take a photo of this.
DEE: That’s not good.
DEE: And then we move on to the turkeys.
DEE: He’s got like a bloody mark or an injury to his head.
DEE: And he’s like, oh, it’s from a bloody battle with a turkey that I killed for the Christmas table.
JEFF: Right.
JEFF: I wrote down at this point in the episode after the tree and after the turkey in all capital letters of my notes, how is it not Ian?
JEFF: Like how is it not him at this point?
DEE: Yeah, I don’t know.
DEE: I don’t know.
DEE: There’s so much in this that like is frustrating because like, first of all, like Ian’s like whole alibi is that they went to the pub and then him and Jules went home together and they were there for the whole evening or the whole night in bed together.
DEE: But then it actually comes out like that he wasn’t at home or he wasn’t in bed all evening because he got up to do some writing and they’re like, oh, we never thought to say that because like that’s so normal.
DEE: And then it’s just, it’s just annoying.
DEE: Like those inaccuracies are so annoying because they show that you’re trying to hide something.
DEE: And even the night before the murder, so not the night of the murder, he said he went home to the, he went to the pub and went home with Jules.
DEE: But in fact, he stayed out with a friend that night and stayed on his couch.
DEE: And when he was questioned, his reaction was weird.
DEE: He was like, well, I went down to the station to let the police know when I realized that I told them a lie about that.
DEE: But he didn’t do this.
DEE: In fact, he went back to his friend’s house to say, oh, have you spoken to them?
DEE: What did you tell them?
DEE: Because now I have to tell them like the truth based on what you told them.
JEFF: Yeah.
DEE: Like that’s shifty, shady behavior.
JEFF: Well and one more layer to that, that I wanted to bring up.
JEFF: So all of that, I think is is shifty and shady.
JEFF: But the other thing is he’s a reporter by trade and he is reporting on this crime.
JEFF: And he is getting a ton of info on this crime under the apparent like reasonable guise of he’s, he’s reporting, he’s a journalist.
JEFF: But that’s also how he’s finding out what’s happening with the investigation.
JEFF: And if he is the one who did it, if he is the main suspect, then he’s effectively reporting on the investigation into himself.
DEE: It’s so weird.
DEE: So he’s at this stage, we said that they had like 53 suspects to begin with.
DEE: They have a short list of six now.
DEE: Like he’s one of the main suspects.
DEE: They have a short list of six.
DEE: He’s writing articles saying the Gardier going around to suspects, collecting hair, taking shoes, et cetera.
DEE: And he knew all that because he was one of them.
DEE: But he doesn’t report that.
DEE: And he doesn’t tell any of the papers that he’s selling these articles to, that he is one of these people.
DEE: He acts as if he knows because he’s in the know.
DEE: And the police are like holding press conferences, but they’re not inviting him because he’s one of the suspects.
DEE: So he starts holding his own press conferences in his house when he wasn’t invited to them.
DEE: He spoke about his thoughts and he has this weird theory on what the Gardier did in France because the guards went over at one point to France and, oh, they just went over there and like sat around eating croissants at the left.
DEE: So random.
DEE: But people are giving him oxygen, like they’re giving again his ego and inflation.
DEE: People are going to this press conference.
JEFF: Yeah.
JEFF: Yeah.
DEE: You know, in his like front room.
DEE: All right.
JEFF: There’s a couple of other key things for episode five.
DEE: Is it Detective Dermot Dwyer?
JEFF: Yeah.
DEE: The West Cork Columbo.
JEFF: Yeah.
DEE: Yeah.
JEFF: What did you think of that?
DEE: I just, I just love that he’s called the West Cork Columbo.
DEE: He’s so funny, but he’s really good.
DEE: Like he was saying, yeah, Ian Bailey’s quite a talker, a good talker.
DEE: But then Ian Bailey’s, I liked this part of the episode where it was like between Ian and it kept going back and forth between them.
DEE: So Ian Bailey is saying about Detective Dwyer, he was taken in by him, but he didn’t really believe, Ian didn’t believe or didn’t realize that Detective Dwyer was actually a fucking psychopath.
DEE: And then Detective Dwyer was like, do you play poker?
DEE: Like I don’t know, there was so much of this like back and forth that I really liked.
DEE: And then though, they start meeting for coffee.
JEFF: Yeah, there’s some weird things.
JEFF: There’s some weird things that happen here.
JEFF: There’s also the ride home that Ian gives the school kid.
JEFF: And so this is in February of 1997.
JEFF: So about what, a month and a half after the murder.
JEFF: And the kid gives a statement to the guards that, yeah, that Ian told him, so told the kid as he’s driving him home that he, quote, went up there with a rock and bashed her fucking brains out.
DEE: What?
DEE: Like, what?
JEFF: So, okay.
DEE: He was so scared that he went straight to the police and he was like, oh, I kind of, I was joking.
DEE: Well, first of all, you’re not funny.
DEE: You’re just not.
DEE: But second of all, like, who makes that kind of joke?
DEE: The next point that goes in is like the editors of all these, where he was selling the articles about the murder.
DEE: Some of them start ringing him up and they’re really annoyed at him because they’re like, we didn’t know you were a suspect and we’ve been publishing these articles without that information.
DEE: And apparently he got really annoyed with them and Ian Bailey said, well, yeah, yeah, well, it was me.
DEE: I did it.
DEE: I did it to resurrect my career.
DEE: And again, he’s like, oh, he just said it in the heat of the moment.
DEE: I’m like, you’re a fecking eejit.
JEFF: Yeah.
DEE: Like he’s a fecking eejit.
DEE: But is this kind of like, remember with Pam?
DEE: It’s like, how did she get away with this for so long?
DEE: I’m like, Pam wasn’t smart.
DEE: Ian Bailey doesn’t seem to be smart.
DEE: But why is he, why is he evading police?
JEFF: Well, OK.
JEFF: I know there’s a little bit more in five, but I feel like we’re getting into some of the stuff that is in six, which is also the Ian Bailey episode, but really more the Ian Bailey backstory.
JEFF: Can we bring in some of that?
DEE: Yeah, go for it.
DEE: Is this the Englishman episode?
JEFF: Yeah, it’s called The Englishman.
JEFF: And this is where we get kind of like what happened to Ian beforehand.
JEFF: So he talks about his kind of upbringing and his starting his career as a journalist, where it seems like he was really more about booze and parties than being a serious journalist and more about kind of the social aspects of it.
JEFF: We hear from his sister who talked about how he started drinking with a lemonade and pale ale shandy.
DEE: The rugby guys, wasn’t it?
DEE: He got into rugby, but he was there for the drinking, really.
JEFF: He partnered.
JEFF: And also, it doesn’t sound like he’s great at business, right?
JEFF: So he had this mentor who he set up a competing office.
JEFF: He basically turned on his mentor and set up a competing office.
JEFF: And then he partnered with this guy, George.
JEFF: But pretty shady in the way he ran this business.
JEFF: He had a wife who had a bad breakup with her.
DEE: They were deemed like a power couple though at one stage.
JEFF: Yeah, so his wife came from money, it sounds like.
JEFF: And when they got married, her parents bought them a house.
JEFF: When they split up, it sounds like he got pretty angry because his name wasn’t on the deed to the house.
JEFF: All of this sort of led into him ending up in West Cork, right?
JEFF: The end of his business with George, the end of his marriage with his first wife, the drinking problem.
DEE: There’s also two things to note here.
DEE: His ex-wife, his first wife apparently notes his anger and his temper and how he used to punch the wall, he threw a typewriter or something on the floor.
DEE: The other thing that’s interesting is his business partner, I think he said he went out for a drink with them before and Ian wanted to sit in the window and let people see us drinking champagne.
DEE: It was all about how people saw him as opposed to like anything else.
DEE: Like that was top priority for him.
JEFF: Yeah, I feel like we get a lot in this episode just really stressing the point that he wanted to feel important.
JEFF: He wanted to be seen.
JEFF: He wanted to be just at the center of attention quite a bit.
JEFF: We hear about him writing.
JEFF: So once he gets to West Cork, he has kind of a series of kind of awful sounding jobs, including in a herring plant and a job where he’s scaring off crows with a shotgun.
JEFF: But then he’s also like writing what sounds like shit poetry and forcing people to listen to him read it in bars and like wherever they’ll listen to him.
JEFF: More drinking, lots more drinking.
JEFF: Yeah, what do you make of this episode?
DEE: So my summary of this episode is, Jesus, he comes across like an awful plonker and he just enjoys.
JEFF: Awful what?
JEFF: Wait, what was that word?
DEE: Plonker.
JEFF: Plonker?
JEFF: What is that?
DEE: Yeah, like an aegis.
DEE: He comes across like an awful plonker who just adores the attention.
DEE: Like, he’s like, oh, Jeremy Arnes and Sinead Cusack, the hosts are like, he bumps into them and they bought like a book of his poetry or something.
DEE: And the hosts are like, do you think they recognized you?
DEE: And he’s like, that’s a silly question at this juncture.
JEFF: I also want to say as someone who has a degree in poetry, no one ever wants to listen to your poetry.
JEFF: Really, unless they paid to attend, like voluntarily came to a poetry reading, no one wants to hear your poetry.
JEFF: There’s a quote that I wrote down towards the end of this episode six.
JEFF: People didn’t really know Ian, and what they did know, they didn’t like.
JEFF: His cloak and his stick and his poems.
DEE: His staff, yeah.
DEE: And one thing I will say is like Jules liked him.
DEE: Jules fell for him.
DEE: Like she said, come live in my studio.
DEE: And then eventually he moved into the house.
DEE: And I know we’re going to hear more of his poetry and more about their relationship in a bit, but what I will say is like we have heard like how he kind of lies quite a lot.
DEE: Like he tells what he wants to be told.
DEE: And like Jules has, she kind of sees him like, she has a lot of empathy kind of for like his backstory.
DEE: But it’s so interesting because you just wonder how much she was told.
DEE: Like what was she told?
DEE: Was she told the truth?
DEE: You know?
JEFF: Yeah, well on the Jules topic.
DEE: He’s reinvented himself.
JEFF: I’m sure there’s another version of describing Ian where he’s more sympathetic, right?
JEFF: Like I, this isn’t that.
JEFF: He doesn’t come across very sympathetically here.
JEFF: No.
JEFF: I didn’t feel a lot of empathy for him.
JEFF: Like he came across as, yeah, like an alcoholic, abusive, not a good friend, a good friend, not good at a lot of the jobs he takes on.
DEE: Not trustworthy, just does his own thing, cares about how he’s viewed, not about anything else.
DEE: Like we got a little bit more about the whole abusive side of things in episode seven.
DEE: So episode seven is about the arrest.
DEE: So they do in fact.
JEFF: Yeah, sorry, just to be clear, that gets mentioned in episode five.
JEFF: We didn’t bring that up on February 10th of 1997.
JEFF: They do arrest Ian for murder.
DEE: Sorry, go ahead.
DEE: So episode seven is about the arrest.
DEE: Ian Bailey, his whole thing is that it’s a stitch up to get a blow in hung out for this murder.
DEE: That’s his thought.
DEE: Both Jules and Ian are actually arrested that day and brought in for questioning.
DEE: So Jules was arrested, wasn’t she?
JEFF: Yes, Jules was also arrested.
DEE: And they sign statements that they give.
DEE: They give statements and they both sign it.
DEE: And they claim that their statements were filled with errors, but they said them, they read them, they signed it.
DEE: So like, yeah, I don’t know.
DEE: Ian Bailey is like, I suspect they never met someone quite like me.
DEE: Maybe they’re used to less educated people.
JEFF: Yeah, yeah.
JEFF: So I wanted to ask you about this because he says he talked to the guards.
JEFF: So they arrested him and he talks to the guards because he thinks he’s smarter than them and that he doesn’t regret it.
JEFF: And when the hosts of the podcast kind of push him on that and said like, would you do that differently now?
JEFF: Like maybe would you not be so open with the guards?
JEFF: And he says that he doesn’t do hindsight thinking.
JEFF: Like basically he doesn’t believe in thinking about maybe he should have done something differently, which…
DEE: Like self-reflection?
JEFF: Yeah, what kind of red flag is that?
JEFF: Someone who doesn’t believe in hindsight thinking?
DEE: Yeah, that’s it.
DEE: It’s just so weird.
DEE: And like everything, like, so this, it just gets weirder and weirder.
DEE: So this is Ian Bailey part, what, four are we on?
DEE: Part three, this episode, really.
DEE: It’s all about him.
DEE: One of the questions, like the big question that the police had is like, how did you get to the body so quickly?
DEE: Like his story just doesn’t add up.
DEE: Ian Bailey claims that he was on the road to the post office when he met Shirley, but Shirley said, nope, I met him here in the lane at my house.
DEE: He got a call from a journalist friend apparently, telling him about the murder before 2 p.m.
DEE: But to make it to the scene by 20 past two, or 2.20 as the Americans might say, it would have been a bit tight given his, like his made it only given like approximate directions.
DEE: Like, so, you know, we’ve discussed back and beyond, like how hard this place is to find, but he manages to get there for 2.20.
DEE: There’s like a bonfire apparently, around the time of the murder in their house, behind the studio, things that they found there were like shoes, buttons, clothes, nothing apparently of value in terms of evidence, but like, that’s weird.
JEFF: There’s a great image of the police sitting on the ground with spoons sifting through the ash of the bonfire, which I mean-
DEE: I mean, at least they were doing something.
JEFF: But the jobs that some of these guards have, like the one who has to climb a tree and cut down a Christmas tree to see if he gets the same kind of cuts on his hands.
JEFF: They’re doing the work.
JEFF: It seems like they’re doing the work.
JEFF: They’re just not connecting all the dots.
JEFF: There’s also, we get a little bit more about Ian’s history of domestic violence.
JEFF: He compares himself, or he compares him and Jules to Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, which kind of plays more into that sense of self-importance.
DEE: Yeah, so what I found so horrifying in this aspect is that Ian Bailey was like, well, we’ve been together for 25 years.
DEE: Like, you’re kind of like, he’s trying to normalize it, like that this is not, this is normal.
DEE: Well, if we’ve been together for 25 years, of course I’ve boxed the head off for a couple of times.
DEE: That’s totally normal, isn’t it?
DEE: Like, no, no, not one year, not one month, not one day, not a hundred years, like absolutely not okay, absolutely not normal.
DEE: Like he totally diminishes it.
JEFF: Well, and the discrepancies in his story add up, right?
JEFF: Like we talked about the cuts on his head and on his arms, which there were people to corroborate that he did have the Christmas tree.
JEFF: He did actually kill the turkey, sure, but like even talking about the bonfire, like it’s suspicious if that bonfire happened after the murder.
JEFF: He says, and Jules say, that it was much earlier, like earlier in the fall, like it was months before, but it sounds like the neighbors say, no, there was a fire there.
DEE: Well, one of the neighbors said she didn’t live like in West Cork.
DEE: She was only home for the holidays.
DEE: And I can’t remember what date was it, the 22nd that she got back.
DEE: Like she was only home very soon after, and she walked by and smelt the bonfire.
JEFF: Right, right.
JEFF: And then the night of the murder, we learned that, so Jules and Ian were home, but Ian at some point in the night gets up, leaves the bed, claims he went to go write an article at his studio, which is about a hundred meters away, but the details are kind of muddled of that.
DEE: Well, it’s so weird because Jules is like, well, I know he wrote the article because the next morning it was out on the table and he showed it to me.
JEFF: Yeah.
DEE: Interesting.
DEE: Could he have possibly written it the day before and was just showing you it to like solidify it in your mind that that’s what happened?
JEFF: But she also didn’t remember that initially.
JEFF: No, she had to.
JEFF: She remembers it later.
DEE: Yeah.
JEFF: Remembers it later.
DEE: Remembers it, yeah.
JEFF: And just to contextualize this, so where Ian was living with Jules was a 36 minute walk to Sophie’s house.
DEE: Yeah.
JEFF: So he could have walked there and back for sure within that time that he was supposedly writing the article.
DEE: Which kind of plays in to at the end of this episode, we go back to Marie.
DEE: So if you remember, Marie is, she called herself Fiona.
DEE: She rang in this tip about seeing a man with a coat, a long coat and some form of hat.
DEE: Stumbling around the road.
DEE: And there was actually three sightings.
DEE: The sighting we already spoke about.
DEE: And the second sighting was a man kind of following Sophie.
DEE: I think it was the day before she was murdered in the village.
DEE: Someone else corroborated that, that they had seen that.
DEE: And then the third sighting of the man with the long coat and the hat was down by the bridge near Sophie’s house, the night of the murder, which goes against his alibi.
JEFF: So, all right, Dee.
JEFF: We’re at the end of episode seven here, out of 14.
JEFF: There’s a fair ways to go.
JEFF: It seems like we’ve gotten very little about Sophie, about the victim.
JEFF: We’ve gotten a lot about Ian, the main suspect.
JEFF: How are you feeling about this?
DEE: I’m like, I’m enjoying the listen.
DEE: Like I am finding it an interesting story to listen to, but I am so frustrated.
DEE: I don’t want to hear anymore from Ian Bailey.
DEE: Like, I feel like he’s just been given way too much air time.
DEE: I feel like it’s inflating his ego.
DEE: It just feels so like unbalanced.
DEE: I get that there’s a lot to say because Ian Bailey has continued to insert himself in the story, in Sophie’s story, because that’s what it is.
DEE: It’s her story, or it should be her story, in my opinion.
DEE: I just hope that she becomes, I hope, hope, hope, and I feel like there’s no point in hoping this, that she becomes more central in later episodes.
JEFF: Yeah, I mean, this is, and this is maybe a good point, as we kind of wrap up this intermission episode to talk about this, to step back from this.
JEFF: And like, I feel the same, I think it’s, but I also feel like this, we’ve come across this problem before where you’ve got these folks who seem to sort of crave the attention, whether they did it or not, right?
JEFF: And they like to be interviewed.
JEFF: There’s certain people who just like to hear their voices.
JEFF: They like to talk about themselves.
JEFF: The victims can’t talk about themselves, right?
JEFF: Like they don’t get to be a part of the story in the same way, which is…
DEE: I think that leads to the unbalanced nature.
DEE: And obviously Sophie’s family aren’t as interested in speaking.
DEE: Like I know we heard from her son, her now grown son, a little bit, but yeah, it’s a bit unfortunate, I think.
JEFF: Yeah, and I think there’s a different version of this where I think we’d get much more about Sophie, like from her son, maybe.
JEFF: I mean, we mentioned, I don’t think we mentioned this, but he has a daughter now that he named Sophie after her grandmother.
JEFF: And yeah, there’s a…
JEFF: The emphasis really isn’t on them through these first seven episodes.
JEFF: It’s very briefly on her.
JEFF: And honestly, even then, a lot of it is contextualized against the brutal crime itself, which I think isn’t probably the way that her family…
JEFF: This is my conjecture, but wouldn’t want her to be remembered.
JEFF: Of course.
JEFF: They’d want more about her life to be remembered.
JEFF: And I don’t think we get more than maybe 20 minutes of that at most.
DEE: And even still, as we said, it’s very surface level, like glamorous, liked poetry, didn’t like curtains, as if there’s a little bit of inference there that she likes to show off when, I don’t know.
JEFF: Well, we should wrap this up.
JEFF: So we’ll come back.
JEFF: We’ll wrap up the rest of this in our next one.
JEFF: Thank Next time, we’re gonna recap the rest of West Cork.
DEE: What happens with the Ian Bailey investigation?
JEFF: And is there ever justice of any kind for Sophie and her family?
DEE: We have seven more episodes to cover.
JEFF: Join us next time on So Much Crime.
DEE: So little time.
JEFF: So Much Crime, So Little Time is a production of MindGlobe Media.
JEFF: The executive producer is Paxton Calariso.
JEFF: Our associate producer is Blythe Tai.
JEFF: Our theme music was composed by Vicheslav Starostin.
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JEFF: Check out the show notes for all the links.
JEFF: Thanks for listening.
