The Ian Bailey is dead thread

[Alphakrul1]

Not as uncommon as you’d think. The investigators will probably be aware of it.

10 Convicted Murderers Who Gave TV Interviews Before Being Arrested

• 10 Stephen McDaniel.
• 9 Matthew Haverly.
• 8 Brian Hawkins.
• 7 Dennis Rader.
• 6 Ian Huntley.
• 5 Gerard Bayden Clay.
• 4 Chris Watts.
• 3 Margaret and Neil Archer.

[Raylan]

How many of them were selling cheese?

[Cheasty]

Reddit has great gossip about how the perpetrator was apparently a detective based in the general area in a station which nobody wants to name but is obviously Bantry.

This detective had the entirety of the local community living in fear and it’s “well known” that he was having an affair with Sophie.

“Take it from somebody in the local community.”

It’s well known that his (red) car was seen speeding away from the Du Plantier house in the middle of the night on the night in question.

It’s well known that he’s now dead and died quite some years ago.

It’s well known that he died of cancer. It’s also well known that he committed suicide.

His name is so well known that nobody will name him.

Tremenjus stuff altogether.

[artfoley]

@Raylan

How many of them were selling cheese?

How many of them were carkies?

[mikehunt]

I’m hearing the Gardai have found a note with ‘I did it’ written on it.

[Fagan_ODowd]

@Alphakrul1

Not as uncommon as you’d think. The investigators will probably be aware of it.

10 Convicted Murderers Who Gave TV Interviews Before Being Arrested

• 10 Stephen McDaniel.
• 9 Matthew Haverly.
• 8 Brian Hawkins.
• 7 Dennis Rader.
• 6 Ian Huntley.
• 5 Gerard Bayden Clay.
• 4 Chris Watts.
• 3 Margaret and Neil Archer.

That’s 8 but I’ll throw in Joe O’Reilly to make it 9.

[Cheasty]

Another thing I love about this case is that apparently “everybody in the local community knows who did it and knows that Bailey is innocent.”

But conversely, “everybody in the local community knows Bailey did it”.

[BruidheanChaorthainn]

I have his name. Heard he drove a similar coloured car which was identified by Martin o Sullivan at 7 am not far from the area.

[Cheasty]

@BruidheanChaorthainn

I have his name. Heard he drove a similar coloured car which was identified by Martin o Sullivan at 7 am not far from the area.

Name him so. He’s apparently dead and you can’t defame the dead.

[BruidheanChaorthainn]

I don’t believe it was Bantry guarda station either. It was cork city.

[Cheasty]

Reddit also tells me it is “established” that Bailey rang Sophie Toscan Du Plantier just before she left Paris for Cork.

[Cheasty]

@BruidheanChaorthainn

I don’t believe it was Bantry guarda station either. It was cork city.

It’s well known that it was Bantry Garda Station.

It’s also well known that it was Cork City Garda Station, there being only Garda station in Cork city.

It’s well known too that it was Ulan Bator Garda Station.

[BruidheanChaorthainn]

@Cheasty

Reddit also tells me it is “established” that Bailey rang Sophie Toscan Du Plantier just before she left Paris for Cork.

Guards agreed both Sophie and Ian kept detailed day to day diaries. Sophie kept all of her numbers of people who contacted her.

There was no mention of Ian in any of her stuff and no mention of Sophie in any of Baileys dairies either.

[Cheasty]

It’s been confirmed on Reddit mate.

[BruidheanChaorthainn]

@Cheasty

@BruidheanChaorthainn

I don’t believe it was Bantry guarda station either. It was cork city.

It’s well known that it was Bantry Garda Station.

It’s also well known that it was Cork City Garda Station, there being only Garda station in Cork city.

It’s well known too that it was Ulan Bator Garda Station.

The Bantry guarda station is where all the tapes were made of the guards trying to set Ian up. I’d imagine that’s where the confusion comes from.

[Cheasty]

@BruidheanChaorthainn

The Bantry guarda station is where all the tapes were made of the guards trying to set Ian up. I’d imagine that’s where the confusion comes from.

I think you mean Bandon

[BruidheanChaorthainn]

Sorry I’m playing football manager here

[Malarkey]

@Fagan_ODowd

Justine McCarthy

Bailey could never resist having his name in a newspaper

The last time Ian Bailey rang me he said he had a cracking story about a national personality who, he alleged, had indulged in a sexual orgy. Ring so-and-so, he instructed. Do the leg work. He had this superior way of issuing editorial diktats as though he were Citizen Kane himself.

What differentiated this call was that the story he was offering did not feature himself. I asked if the orgy participants were consenting adults. He said “yes” and I replied that there was no public interest reason for reporting it. He never rang me again.

That last conversation has been replaying in my mind since the death five days ago of the man suspected of murdering Sophie Toscan du Plantier in December 1996. How extraordinary that one of the most ubiquitous dramatis personae in Ireland for nearly three decades should fall dying in a street with passersby trying to save his life.

Journalists have been criticised, online and in west Cork, for posthumously “hanging” Bailey, whose metaphorical fingerprints still smudge the Frenchwoman’s violent end at her holiday home on the beautiful Mizen peninsula. Knowing his journalistic ethics, I imagine he would be leading the posse if he could. He could never resist an opportunity to see his name in a newspaper; preferably in the headline rather than the byline. To me, his natural calling was not as a journalist but as a PR man spinning facts to suit his narrative.

My first encounter with Ian Kenneth Bailey arose from a call he made to the news desk of a paper where I previously worked. He had a story. The editor passed it to me. The story was that a petrol attendant had told gardaí a silent male passenger had been in Toscan du Plantier’s car when she stopped for refuelling the day she arrived from Paris. Bailey argued this indicated she had travelled with a man from France, giving credence to his theory that the killer was somebody from abroad, probably “a hired assassin”.

After that, he kept calling. Sometimes he would call several times a week, checking if I was working on whatever tip-off he had given me. One time, he called from his “woodshed” late at night, incoherent with drink. I knew he was calling other journalists too. Some of them were colleagues sitting just feet away from me in the newsroom.

One time he called to say he was coming to Dublin and we should meet. The rendezvous he chose was an outdoor table on a busy street where people walking past did a double-take on recognising Ireland’s most famous murder suspect. He was such a notice box.

Manipulative and domineering

When the organisers of the West Cork Literary Festival asked me to interview Jennifer Forde and Sam Bungey, the makers of the West Cork podcast series about Sophie Toscan du Plantier’s murder, he pestered me for weeks beforehand demanding a free ticket and the right to speak from the stage. The night before the interview, he came to my hotel and left a package at reception. It was a book of his poems.

He was manipulative and domineering, but if either trait was an offence our jails would be bulging at the seams. Sometimes he echoed Donald Trump’s attitude to women’s appearances, like the time he laughably deemed Toscan du Plantier “plain” in published photographs of her. His presence unnerved me but that might have been because he was a suspected murderer. A reputation like that comes with a ready-made aura.

The question everybody wants answered is if Ian Bailey killed Sophie Toscan du Plantier with a rock and left her to die in her nightdress near her garden gate the night before Christmas Eve? Who can say now?

What I can say is that there is incriminating evidence, contrary to sweeping dismissals in some news organs, such as Village magazine’s pronouncement that there was “not a shred of evidence”, and the verdict of Hot Press that “gardaí had little or nothing in the way of evidence”. This is objectively untrue.

Bailey had no alibi. He changed the story he told gardaí that he had been in bed with Jules Thomas, his then partner, after gardaí discovered that he had left their bedroom during the night. He had scratches on his face and hands the morning after the murder, which he said he got from killing turkeys and cutting a Christmas tree. He denied ever having met Toscan du Plantier but witnesses said on oath that he did. A house guest saw clothing soaking in the bathroom and neighbours saw him burning items on a bonfire on St Stephen’s Day. Bailey was among the first to reach the murder scene, contributing to its contamination. Not least, he had a history of violence against women. A lamentable fact, some say, but it did not make him a killer. Sadly, it might have brought him close the night Thomas was hospitalised and almost lost an eye after one of his beatings.

Circumstantial evidence

The Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) decided against a prosecution because the case against Bailey relied on circumstantial evidence and was not considered watertight.

In the 27 years since Toscan du Plantier’s brutal killing, Joe O’Reilly and Graham Dwyer have both been found guilty of murdering women based solely on circumstantial evidence. Last year, the Court of Appeal dismissed Dwyer’s appeal against evidential phone records, ruling that there was other “compelling” evidence against him.

A fair justice system would reserve as much as possible of the adjudication on a case like this to trial judges and juries, not the prosecutors. With the current system, neither justice nor the public interest is necessarily served, as Toscan du Plantier’s family has learned.

Some say Bailey was not the brightest. Though he may not have been as brilliant as he presumed, he certainly did not lack intelligence. He knew that, in Ireland, the litmus test for not pursuing a murder prosecution is the prospect of failure and condemnation for wasting “taxpayers’ money”.

Now the only suspect is gone with whatever secrets he had. And he had some, as he hinted in one of those poems he left at the hotel reception desk. “Many are the chapters yet untold before the story ends,” he waxed presciently.

He murdered her.

[BruidheanChaorthainn]

Am I correct in saying you believe Madeline Mccanns parents were responsible for her death / disappearance? Sorry If I’m wrong I often get mixed up.

[Cheasty]

@BruidheanChaorthainn

Am I correct in saying you believe Madeline Mccanns parents were responsible for her death / disappearance? Sorry If I’m wrong I often get mixed up.

In the same way I think it’s important for people to state who they believe is responsible for various geopolitical catastrophes in order to ascertain a person’s bona fides on individual geopolitical catastrophes I think it’s important to find out who people believe committed various high profile murders in order to find out how they think in general.

My answers:
JFK - Oswald did it alone
RFK - Sirhan Sirhan did it
Trevor Deely: I don’t know, it’s possible he wasn’t murdered and was washed out to sea but I think he was murdered alright
Madeleine McCann: I don’t know but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t the McCanns
Sophie Toscan Du Plantier: Ian Bailey did it