In January 2024, Ian Bailey died of a heart attack in Bantry, County Cork, a few days short of his 67th birthday. For roughly the last 27 years of his life, Bailey had lived under a cloud of suspicion: he was notorious as the self-styled “prime suspect” in the shocking murder of a French film producer, the Sophie of Senan Molony’s title, who had been spending a few days around Christmas 1996 in her holiday home on the remote Mizen peninsula. She had been savagely beaten with a rock and a concrete block, her skull being crushed.

Senan Molony’s book about the murder, the investigation and the suspect, Sophie: the Final Verdict (2024), came out the year after Bailey’s death. It’s described as nonfiction. While most of what I write about in this newsletter is fiction, I have occasionally discussed nonfiction works, such as Emilie Pine’s Notes to Self and Brian Klaas’s Fluke. Indeed, the latter had until last week been my most read post. I’ve approached Molony’s book rather differently from those other works of nonfiction. Broadly speaking, I treated them in much the same way as I tend to treat fiction: I read them mainly for enjoyment and wrote about them because I had enjoyed them. I bought and read Molony’s book intending to take issue with at least some important parts of his argument. I wasn’t expecting to find the experience pleasant and, for the most part, I didn’t.

His main thesis, which is indisputable, is that “Ireland did not do right by Sophie Toscan du Plantier” (p. 335). Nobody has been tried for or convicted of her murder in this country, and the Supreme Court refused to permit Bailey’s surrender to the French authorities under a European Arrest Warrant. The case is highly unusual in that in Ireland it is considered unsolved and the investigation as still continuing, while in France it has been closed. Bailey was tried in absentia in 2019, convicted and sentenced to 25 years. (Of course, the sentence was never carried out.)

One of the first things I learned from the book is that we may have got the murdered woman’s name slightly wrong. “Toscan du Plantier” is her married surname, from her second marriage, which was to the film producer and leading figure in the French film industry, Daniel Toscan du Plantier. It seems, however, that she was generally known by her original name, her name before marriage. Sophie Bouniol was the name on the credit card she used to rent a car on her arrival in Ireland (p. 12). It’s also the name by which her husband referred to her in the statement he gave to the police judiciaire after her murder, to be sent on to the Garda: “I am the husband of Sophie Bouniol” (p. 69). “Bouniol” is how her immediate neighbours knew her during her life and it’s also how Bailey (who lied about having met her before) referred to her before the murder. Molony says that she went by “Bouniol” in Ireland but this seems unnecessarily restricted. It’s likely that she was known as “Bouniol” everywhere. (It doesn’t seem at all implausible that, as a film producer, she might have wished to maintain a consistent professional identity through her two marriages and one divorce.)

Obviously, the name “Sophie Toscan du Plantier” isn’t inaccurate: it really is a name that belongs to her. It’s hers, even if she tended not to use it. But it’s now the name by which she’s almost exclusively known, certainly in Ireland, so it seems ironic that Senan Molony, who complains that Ireland has never fulfilled its obligations to her, should contribute to the perpetuation of this (admittedly slight) misidentification. This is all a longwinded way of saying that I’m not sure what I should call her in this post. On the one hand, it seems perverse to refuse to use the name which appears in all the news coverage of the murder and the subsequent investigation, and in court documents and official papers. On the other, that may not be the name by which she would have wished to be known.

Molony is in no doubt that Bailey was the murderer. Bailey was, he tells us, “a violent, vain and sex-obsessed misogynist” (p. 327). Experts engaged by the Cour d’Assises in Paris (which tried and convicted Bailey in his absence), concluded that he

had a narcissistic personality and was “psycho-rigid, violent and impulsive, egocentric, and intolerant to frustration, with an immense need for recognition”, as well as prone to “committing acts of violence under the disinhibiting effect of alcohol”. (p. 325)

Molony makes it clear that Ian Bailey was an alcoholic with a history of domestic violence. He physically attacked Jules Thomas, the woman he lived with, several times, including one incident in which he broke her jaw. He was a liar, a fraud, a show-off and a fantasist with, if Molony’s judgment is reliable, a grossly exaggerated sense of his own abilities and achievements as a poet, a journalist and a bodhrán player. Molony heaps up the evidence of Bailey’s bad character to the point where the reader can’t be in much doubt that this was an evil and dangerous man. What he doesn’t manage to do, in spite of all the evidence he amasses, is point to a clear link between this vividly drawn monster and the vicious crime. A report on the evidence in the case, prepared by a lawyer in the office of the Director of Public Prosecutions, and running to 44 pages, says in its fourth paragraph:

No forensic evidence linking Ian Bailey to the scene was found despite the fact that the murder of Sophie Toscan Du Plantier was the direct result of an apparently frenzied and furious attack upon her in a briar-strewn location. If in fact the attack was carried out in a frenzied manner one might have expected that the assailant would have left traces of blood, skin, clothing fibres or hair at the scene. No such material was discovered.

Thirty years on from the murder, that remains the biggest puzzle about this case: how is it possible that a “frenzied attack” could be carried out without leaving any trace of the attacker at the scene or, so far as the investigation has been able to discover, any of the dead woman’s blood on the clothes or person of the “prime suspect”? This is the gap in the evidence that Molony’s book attempts to repair. In this, he is following the approach of the Garda detectives who conducted the investigation. They sent a large file to the Director of Public Prosecutions, expecting that official to respond with instructions to arrest Ian Bailey and charge him with murder. The 44-page report that I referred to above is a review of that file.

The report was written by Robert Sheehan, a solicitor in the DPP’s office. Having discussed the evidence in detail, Sheehan concluded that prosecution of Bailey for the murder was “not warranted by the evidence”. The Director accepted this conclusion and did not authorize a prosecution. Sheehan’s report is an unusual document. It was prepared for internal use in the prosecutor’s office. Such material wouldn’t ordinarily be publicly disclosed. It became public in this case as the result of a peculiar set of circumstances.

In 2011, a French investigating magistrate made the first of three attempts to have Ian Bailey surrendered to France so that (after an investigation there) he could be tried for the murder. The Irish High Court ordered that the warrant should be executed. On appeal, however, the Supreme Court unanimously held that the European Arrest Warrant Act 2003 did not authorize the surrender in the circumstances of this case. It emerged that Eamonn Barnes, who had been Director of Public Prosecutions at the time of the murder and the original investigation, sent an email to his successor, James Hamilton, expressing his concerns at the conduct of senior gardaí involved in the case. Hamilton consulted the Attorney General who said that Barnes’s email and Sheehan’s report should be disclosed to Bailey’s lawyers. The report was referred to in court. Subsequently, a journalist uploaded it to Scribd.com where it is still available. There is no authoritative or official copy open to public view, except to the extent that the document has been mentioned in court judgments.

Molony refers to Sheehan’s report only in passing. He says:

It seems to me extraordinary that a single lawyer in the DPP’s office could effectively be a jury of one, deciding that each piece of evidence was not beyond all doubt, over and over again. What is instead reasonable is for hundreds of individual hurdles to be lined up against Bailey in a case based on circumstantial evidence. Let him try to surmount them all if he could — let him even knock down a few — until a panel of twelve from the Irish public is fully satisfied where justice lies. (p. 340)

If this view were to prevail, it would reduce the Director of Public Prosecutions to a piece of pointless window-dressing. The office was set up in the 1970s to ensure that decisions as to the prosecution of offences were taken by an independent authority. It is intended to protect the prosecutorial function, to insulate it from external pressure, whether from politicians (including the Attorney General), the Garda Síochána, journalists or public opinion. Eamonn Barnes, who made the preliminary decision not to prosecute Ian Bailey, was the first holder of the office and had been involved in drafting the legislation which established it. He had strong views on how the Director should operate. For example, he was firmly opposed to explaining his decisions.

His view was that giving reasons for a decision not to prosecute … could be viewed as tantamount to saying that he believed someone was guilty, but did not have the evidence to prove it … Despite public and political pressure, Barnes steadfastly refused to explain his reasoning, stating that if reasons were given in one case they ought to be given in all, “[o]therwise wrong conclusions will inevitably be drawn in relation to those cases where the reasons are refused, resulting in either unjust implications regarding the guilt of the suspect or former accused, or suspicions of malpractice, or both” … (Dictionary of Irish Biography)

It’s hard to argue against that reasoning, even if it doesn’t easily accord with current ideas about transparency and accountability.

Barnes felt that the gardaí investigating Bailey had tried to exert improper pressure on him and that it was essential to resist it. His email to Hamilton refers to a “thoroughly flawed and prejudiced Garda investigation culminating in a grossly improper attempt to achieve or even force a prosecutorial decision which accorded with that prejudice”. Hamilton agreed that the investigation had “many shortcomings”, though he didn’t echo Barnes’s allegation of “prejudice”.

I hope I’m not reading too much into Barnes’s use of the term “prejudice” but it suggests to me that he suspected the detectives of having been driven by anglophobia, which isn’t uncommon in parts of Ireland even now, and wasn’t in the late 1990s. Had they latched on early to the idea that the eccentric, heavy drinking and sometimes violent Englishman best fit the bill and then directed most of their efforts to finding evidence to support their preconceived notion? No doubt it would be best to avoid this kind of speculation, but it’s clear that the gardaí were unusually determined that Bailey should be charged, and went to extraordinary lengths to try to bring that about, even suggesting that he was an incipient serial killer who was likely to murder someone else imminently if not locked up as soon as possible.

At least some gardaí are said to have been trying to work up an atmosphere of suspicion and menace around Bailey in the locality. Sheehan’s report comments:

Once Ian Bailey was believed by the public particularly in the local area to be responsible for the murder the fear thereby engendered was bound to create a climate in which witnesses became suggestible.

Molony is wrong, of course, to say that the decision not to prosecute is entirely the work of “a single lawyer in the DPP’s office”. Two Directors agreed with Sheehan’s assessment. Hamilton specifically says that he considered the file himself, though he can’t personally read all the 2,000 files that were at that point coming into his office each year. He obtained the opinions of two Senior Counsel. Robert Sheehan says he was taken off the file in 2003. Presumably his successor did not revise his conclusions as to the sufficiency of the evidence.

Molony’s dismissive view of the DPP’s office is complemented, I think, by his unusual attitude towards the standard of proof in criminal cases. He suggests that scientific progress (in areas such as DNA) have had the effect of making “proof beyond a reasonable doubt” an unworkably rigid and inflexible standard. Before the development of fingerprint science, he says:

… juries of twelve had been relied upon to punish they guilty “beyond reasonable doubt”, which in practice meant beyond any real uncertainty in their human assessment of the facts. Guilt or innocence was not wholly outsourced to science, and nor should it ever be, chiefly because traces can be found that connect utterly irrelevant individuals to locations and objects. (pp. 250–1)

I understand that in England and Wales these days the approved form of charge to a jury is not that they must be satisfied beyond a reasonable doubt of the accused person’s guilt but rather that they must be “satisfied so that you are sure”. It strikes me that this might, depending on what one thinks is “reasonable”, be an even more exacting standard than the time-honoured one that Molony believes has become too rigid.

But for the most part Molony isn’t all that concerned with the legalities of the case. Of the decision on the European arrest warrant, he says merely that the arrest warrant

… applied across the EU but turned out not to be applicable in Ireland in this case, due to arcane domestic legal rules. (p. 329)

I suppose that it’s true that the rules are “arcane” but they’re not wholly a matter of domestic law, in that the European Arrest Warrant Act 2003 is the Irish implementation of the EU Council Framework Decision 2002/584 JHA that established the arrest warrant procedure. The Supreme Court’s ruling was based on two sections of the 2003 Act, one of those being section 44. That section is badly drafted and requires the performance a “hypothetical test”, something with which Irish judges tend not to be comfortable (even if, on this evidence, they’re quite good at it). As Adrian Hardiman said in his judgment:

… the exercise required by the Framework Document, and by s.44, is necessarily a hypothetical one. To those who consider this over elaborate and unduly removed from the facts of the present case, I can only say that I do not disagree, but that the exercise required to be carried out is that enjoined by the statute and the Framework Decision, and there is nothing the Court can do about that. (Minister for Justice v Bailey [2012] IESC 16)

Despite the fact that it applies only to a very unusual and narrow set of circumstances — the murder of a French national in Ireland allegedly by a person who is not an Irish citizen — it’s an important decision, over which the five Supreme Court judges took evident care. Molony’s summary doesn’t do it justice.

While the two former Directors of Public Prosecutions both say that the Garda investigation was flawed and unsatisfactory, it may be that the most damaging failure was that of the Department of Justice, who had refused to pay for holiday cover for the overstretched State Pathologist, John Harbison. That, combined with the remoteness of the location, meant that the dead woman’s body lay out in the open where it had been found in freezing December temperatures for more 24 hours, covered by a blue plastic sheet. No body heat remained when Professor Harbison examined it, so the time of death could never be determined. It’s conceivable, too, that significant evidence (such as DNA) was lost or destroyed during this period. The Garda investigation as Molony describes it was largely a hopeless attempt to plug that gap.

Edition: Sophie: The Final Verdict, Hachette Books Ireland paperback, 2025.