Original subtitles

But paradise was lost

when the sanctuary Sophie created became the location of her brutal death.

Now her family must remember not only her spirit and her dreams here in Cork,

but her murder too.

...Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women.

If the murderer keeps living like everybody else,

I will have done nothing for my daughter.

Each year up to now, Sophie's family

have travelled to West Cork to remember her, but this year,

Georges and Marguerite Bouniol have begun a new campaign.

Launching The Association for Truth About the Murder of Sophie Toscan du Plantier,

the new association says despite the complexities

of different legal systems in Europe, everyone should recognise

that victims' families have universal rights.

(ENGLISHMAN)"Juvenalis, the Roman satirist,

"is reported to have first asked and answered the question,

"'quis custodiet ipsos custodes?'"

"'Who was there to guard the guardians but themselves?'"

"Indeed, for the first 64 years of their existence in the Irish police force,

"An Garda Síochana held a monopoly on both self-discipline

"and the investigation of complaints."

"The answer to the question of who now guards the guardians,

"in relation to police forces in Ireland and other democratic states,

"is the statutory police complaints authority, be it a board,

"commission, ombudsman or hybrid variant as is the case in Ireland."

This was my Masters thesis,

for which I received a 72% markage on,

which is almost unheard of.

So in 2012,

two years after he got that law degree from Cork University

and 16 years after being accused of the murder of Sophie,

Bailey lodged a complaint against the conduct of the murder investigation

and began building his own civil case against the Irish state.

The story or narrative that the Irish police tell

differs significantly from the way Ian Bailey and Jules Thomas tell it.

'Well, I was in a kind of quandary for a certain stage,

'just looking for somebody I could write to, you know?'

I was feeling the human rights were really violated,

so I thought of writing to Mary Robinson.

She was President. So I said,

"My name is Jules Thomas, partner to Ian Bailey."

"You may be aware of our case."

"Ian and myself have both been arrested twice

"and taken for 12 hours' questioning by detectives at Bandon Garda station."

"No charge has been made."

The fucking damage that these. (BEEP)did to our lives

and these fuckers in Guard-blue fucking uniforms went around...

And this is provable if you check with the DPP's 2001 critique,

he talks about it. They went around telling everybody.

And if anybody actually was saying, "Hang on a second,

"I've known Ian Bailey for a long while now. He might be a bit of a bollocks,

"he might be this, he's a bad poet, but I don't believe he murdered this woman,"

the Guards became actively hostile to that point of view.

So we took on the state of Ireland in a civil action.

I won't say I'm sick and tired of banging on and complaining,

but I've done everything I could within my bailiwick

over the period of 22 years to try to do whatever I could

to clear my name or to highlight the shenanigans that have gone on.

Actually, apparently I've been accused of not protesting my innocence enough.

Well, that's a lot of bollocks.

The libel case, it was admitted in court

that the Guards had actually fed information to the newspapers

trying to perpetuate the idea that Ian was the murderer.

The admittance in open court that the newspapers

had been fed this information by the Guards,

that was enough for us to say, "Right, these are the people we can now attack."

Anyway...

Ian Bailey and his partner Jules Thomas

arriving at court this morning with Mr Bailey's solicitor

for the start of his action against the state.

He claims he was wrongly arrested

in relation to the murder of French film-maker Sophie Toscan du Plantier.

His lawyers told the court he will allege

that Gardai told everyone in the community he was guilty

and that as a result, his life has been a misery for the last 18 years.

He said this was not just a case for damages,

it was for the jury to look at the Garda investigation

and decide if this was how it should've been conducted

by the people we entrust to uphold the law. The state denies all the claims.

They denied everything, actually.

Just flat denial was their modus operandi.

Warnings issued by the Gardai as to the alleged danger presented by Bailey to the community.

In a report submitted to this office on 26th February 1997

for the purpose of a consultation, the Gardai stated the following.

"One, it is of the utmost importance that Bailey be charged immediately

with this murder as there is every possibility he will kill again."

Well, they said this to the DPP.

I mean, they didn't make any bones about it.

They said, "We need an immediate arrest

"because this man will kill again." It wasn't just to witnesses they said this, but to the DPP.

After a certain point,

they just were harassing us.

Like, they didn't have any more questions to ask

and we didn't have anything more to add.

We didn't think he'd done it. The Guards are saying, "We know he did it."

"We KNOW he did it!" I mean, how appalling is that?!

Like, lots of people would believe the Guards.

Their friends fell away, because every time they were meeting with friends and stuff like that,

the Guards would call round the next day and want, like, a full interview and not leave people alone.

It was quite cruel.

The Guards went round to them and pestered them constantly,

so much that they stopped coming near us.

I mean... quite heartbreaking losing some friends.

So Marie, you were driving here from Goleen to Schull.

That's right. And YOU were driving?

-Yes. -And there was a passenger, somebody where I am, yeah?

Yes. OK.

And yous were driving along here and you'd seen no cars

and then in your headlights coming up towards the bridge,

here at this turn, you saw somebody. Yeah. There was a man just here.

Just pull in here. -Just here? -Yeah.

OK. So you know this is the turn -to Sophie's? -No, I didn't know that.

The only place he could be coming from was Sophie's

-or some house up this way. -OK. But he could've been just a drunk.

-He could've been, yeah. -You know? But you think it was

the man that was outside your shop? Definitely. I can still see him.

I can still see him across the road from the shop

even though now it's, what, nearly 24 years later.

Nearly like Middle-Eastern colouring.

It's amazing to me that the police didn't draw an identikit of this guy.

Yeah, no, they never asked to do that. It was like...

...they had their man, but they had to build the case around him.

The person that she said she saw was described as being about 5-foot 8, 5-foot 9 in height

and over subsequent statements to the Gardai,

that person's height went from 5'8, 5'9

to 5'10, 6 foot, to someone being very tall.

And what's significant about that is Ian Bailey is, I think, 6'3. He's a very tall man.

And anyone who would see Ian Bailey could not confuse him for standing at 5'8.

Tanned, sallow-skinned...

Tanned, sallow skin,

a long thing face. This description by Marie Farrell

in her very first statement of the man outside her shop

is what alerted the DPP to the contradictions in her statements.

But the police understanding that Ian Bailey was the man

in the long, black coat meant this man was never investigated.

The libel trial of Marie Farrell had dramatically stated at one point that she thought in her own head,

when being confronted by the chief suspect,

that Ian Bailey "would kill me in two minutes"

and so this was a woman completely living in fear.

Fast-forward to the end of 2005

and a sensational turn of events,

Marie Farrell announcing that she was retracting her evidence

about seeing a man at Kealfadda Bridge and that that man was Ian Bailey.

And furthermore, Ian Bailey had never intimidated her.

Complete reversal that extended into saying

that the real intimidators in the case were the Gardai.

She rang. I'm on the phone, "Hello, who's this?"

"Don't you know me?" I just didn't pick up the name right away

and I said, "No, who's this?" And she said, "I'm the woman who gave evidence

"against Ian Bailey." I'm saying, "Which one?" And she says,

"The woman." And I says, "I can't talk to you!"

That was my immediate reaction. "You're a state witness, you can't be ringing me."

"You're one of them." And she said "No, no, no, no."

"I want to tell you the truth." And I said, "OK."

OK, let's get this out of the way. The inference is

that you changed your opinion because you'd go to a case against the state,

Bailey would be paid a load of money and you'd get half it.

I don't know where that came from. There was nothing for me to gain

by changing my statements or my story.

The only thing was, I thought it was time to tell the truth and stand up to the Guards.

Got a phone call from the Garda Inspector

and he told me that Sophie's parents were going to take a case,

a civil action, against Ian Bailey and there would be another court case

and I'd have to go to court again. And I told him that I would never,

ever again go to court for the Guards and tell lies.

I did benefit from, you know, doing whatever the Guards wanted me to do.

Did you think Bailey did it? THEY told me he did it.

And at the time, I did believe them, but then I started thinking

if he did do it, why do they need to manufacture all of this stuff around him?

Marie Farrell said she had two lives,

one with the Gardai and what she would do for them

and her other, normal life. She knew she shouldn't have done so,

but felt she had to go along with it because the Guards had done her a lot of favours.

They'd promised not to tell her husband she was out with another man.

They also took care of a prosecution for no insurance against her husband

and offered help with an application for a council house.

She said she was told that they needed her help

to build up a profile of Ian Bailey as a dangerous and threatening person

so the DPP would charge him.

Marie Farrell was used in the libel trials

as being the bolster for the state.

Her evidence was to be absolutely believed and believable.

And then the next trial, she's then presented as being a person you could NEVER believe

and that she's wholly unbelievable.

And then it followed, "Why should we believe you now, Marie Farrell,

"if you have shown yourself capable of telling a welter of untruths in sworn evidence?"

Council for Mr Bailey, Tom Creed, said the case

was not about the credibility of Marie Farrell, but about the credibility of the Gardai.

She had been squashed like a fly when she turned on the state, but despite this

had come to court voluntarily because in the end, she wanted to do right by Ian Bailey.

It was hard to understand the tactics of the defence

questioning a self-confessed perjurer in the stand for nine days

to prove that she was a liar.

Oh, I was destroyed. I remember driving home one night from the train station...

...and I thought, "Will I keep driving through Roosky and drive into the Shannon?"

"'Cos I can't take any more of it."

We are now in a position where it's impossible to know what to believe.

They had no scientific or forensic evidence

to link Ian Bailey to the scene.

So after that, it becomes a circumstantial case.

And the only circumstantial evidence really was

the Kealfadda Bridge testimony, which has been the focus of so much controversy over the years

that no-one knows at this point what, if anything, was seen at Kealfadda Bridge.

(SINGS)# Welcome to my world! ♪

All the time I've hoped when I've been before the Irish judiciary,

ALL the time, EVERY time I've hoped and given them the benefit of the doubt

and just believed in something called justice.

And do you know what I've got? Nothing but... injustice.

I didn't know it was gonna be 64 days. They said it would be over in a month, six weeks.

I think they ran it for so long just to try to wear me out

and wear down my team of lawyers and people.

And they almost did! They almost... they almost wore me out.

I had to separate myself from myself,

this might sound very strange, to deal with it.

I just made sure my hair was good, I was wearing nice clothes

and my teeth cleaned and didn't have any hairs coming out of me ears.

Ian Bailey said while it was tough, he wanted to clear his name

and prove once and for all he had nothing to do with the murder of Miss du Plantier.

At 64 days, the action Ian Bailey took in the Irish High Court

was the longest-running civil case in Irish legal history.

Ian Bailey himself spent 10 days in the stand

and four days were taken up by the testimony of Martin Graham,

who came into contact with Ian the day after his first arrest.

Mr Graham maintained that the Gardai tried to get him

to get close to Ian Bailey to see could he overhear

some type of incriminating conversation.

And Mr Graham claimed, as a reward for doing that,

or to enable him to do that, he would be supplied

with cash, clothing and most interesting of all, drugs.

Martin Graham told the court he was given cash, cannabis

and clothes to befriend Ian Bailey and get information linking him

to the murder of Sophie Toscan du Plantier.

But he didn't like the idea of, as he said, of being a rat, being an informer.

And eventually Mr Bailey learned about this Garda approach.

He came round and he said, "Actually the Guards have given me some money

"to get you drunk, so you admit it."

We said, "God, that's funny, isn't it?" He was actually a double agent,

he told us exactly what was going on with the Guards.

The court heard Mr Graham rang the newspaper,

who sent a reporter and photographer to meet him. He was to meet Gardai, get cannabis and tape the meeting.

He answered the ad from the Sunday World. "If you have the story, tell us."

And he said to Dublin, "Yeah, I've got this story."

"I want a thousand, I wanna ticket out of the country"

and they said, "OK, we got Ken and Billy down in Cork."

"Send 'em off together down there."

'They asked me to try and familiarise myself with Ian Bailey

'and get to know the man and hopefully Ian would confess,

'would confess the whole crime to me. Well, since that time

'I've had £500, £600 in pay-offs.'

'They've bought clothes for me as well as providing about 15 to 18 ounces of hash.'

But the next day Ken told me that Dublin decided they were not going to pay Martin his thousand

and he wasn't getting a ticket. And I said "Guys, this is bad."

"He is now in West Cork and the shit will hit the fan for him."

By May 1997, he said that Gardai smelled a rat.

He said he knew he had been rumbled. He said he knew he'd caught policemen being corrupt

and their pensions and livelihoods were at stake.

He said he was driven around for about 45 minutes.

He said they kept digging him in the back and asking him where were the tape recordings.

Mr Graham broke down as he said his life was threatened.

Gardai denied all wrongdoing with regard to Martin Graham

and the defence team tried to discredit his allegations.

However, his strange version of events

did seem to be supported by an actual phone call with a policeman.

The Bandon Tape Scandal broke in December, 2013.

In police stations all across the country,

the Gardai had been recording telephone conversations.

This was both secret and illegal

and it was happening from the early 1980s.

The Bandon tapes were just one of many police scandals

that were exposed at the time.

This resulted in the resignation of the Garda Commissioner.

A lot of the calls in Bandon were about Sophie's murder,

including conversations with Marie Farrell and Martin Graham.

Will he be wanting a monetary reward for making a statement?

After hearing the Bandon tapes,

the part involving Martin Graham became irrelevant

when, in a sensational development at the last hour,

the defence raised the statute of limitations.

The judge ruled he hadn't lodged his legal action

within the six-year time limit required by law.

The Director of Public Prosecutions report criticising Garda conduct

and dismissing the police case against Bailey

was not admitted into evidence.

He had sued for wrongful arrest and made several other related claims.

The bulk of his claims were struck out.

And so the questions for the jury were reduced to the central plank of this case.

Did Gardai conspire to implicate Mr Bailey by taking statements

from the witness Marie Farrell knowing them to be false

and did Gardai later conspire to take statements

from the same witness alleging intimidation?

I would've said that we had generated a huge amount of evidence

to achieve our objectives. All of that was directed by the judge to the jury

not to be considered and after, I think, about 60 days of hearing

being told "Look, folks, all you've got to decide now

"is which version would you prefer of this very discrete element,

"namely the police and what they're telling you about Marie Farrell

"or Marie Farrell telling you what she's telling you about the police?"

I'd say they must have come out having been given this direction

and thinking, "What was all the other stuff about?"

Just after 4pm today, they replied no to both questions.

I can't say anything at the moment, sorry.

Having lost his case, he now faces a possible legal bill of millions of euro.

Ian Bailey took his action on the basis of wrongful arrest

and the High Court, in a very convoluted way,

found that there wasn't the suggestion of a conspiracy.

They found no evidence of a conspiracy. There was no evidence of wrongful arrest

on the basis of Garda actions based on the information they had at the time.

But certainly in terms of the mistakes that were made

and the consequences of those mistakes,

there's no point saying the Sophie Toscan du Plantier investigation

has not been damaging for the Gardai. It WAS quite damaging.

A whole generation has grown up and this has been hanging over West Cork.

"Have no doubt, it's that bollix Bailey."

And people say to me, you know,

"Ian, so-and-so came up to me and said 'Do you think he did it?'"

So it's left a really big question mark.

Actually, this process,

this decanting which is going on

is very cathartic.

I've lost my cases against the state.

We were never gonna win those and I've learned recently

that I'm going to be lumbered with an approximate cost bill

of the Irish state of some seven million Euros.

And strangely enough, that's the least of my worries,

because apparently on the 24th of May,

I'm going to be tried in France for murder. And I'm not intending

to offer myself up, because I have no faith at all in the French legal system

and I know that the material which is going to be used to prosecute me

is based on a falsity.

♪I've No Alibi

Are you filming all of this? I wouldn't mind a private moment to just have a...

Oh God. Anyway, you don't need to play it all out, but...

...Damien Dempsey, I've got into him.

I'll just turn it off for now. He's very good, Damien.

I just liked it, you know? "I've got no alibi and I talk shite."

I was listening to it last night and I thought

"Jesus, that is so spot-on in terms of alibi," you know?

You can tell the state of mind of a writer by the state of his desk.

Nobody knows how you're gonna be able to handle a thing.

You hope you're gonna be able to handle it, you hope you're gonna be tough enough,

you can tell yourself you're in a John Wayne state of mind

or whatever, but you just don't know how you'll handle it. And I just hope and pray that I can.

I can't imagine that it can in any way be good.

You know?

I think Ian is a bit hyper.

He's dealing with the French case's imminence

the best way he can

and is just being really as creative as he can to block it out.

I mean, in the past, we did it with a lot of gardening.

He actually dug the ponds and, you know,

did loads of the hard labour around the place, building stone walls and everything.

And I was just busy planting. So we kept ourselves so busy and got so exhausted

we didn't have time to think about other things.

Do you think he's using alcohol to block out reality?

Oh, without a doubt he uses that as well,

which isn't really going to help. He's gonna crash any minute.

I hope he doesn't, but I think he might.

He's his own person, you know?

We both do our own thing. We're not trying to control each other.

No way I could control him and vice-versa.

♪ Happy birthday, Miss Thomas

♪ Oh, happy birthday to you ♪

Thank you.

Please don't.

The reason we're here this evening

is to celebrate Miss Catherine Julia Thomas's inception

from David and Beryl. See, I'm trying to re-romance me missus,

but it's an uphill struggle!

He was doing very well when he was in AA.

It IS upsetting. He was much better off when he was getting support.

Are you winning? I don't know if I'm winning,

but I'm in a John Wayne state of mind! And you're looking lovely, lady.

See, I was a journalist and I schmoozed

with the... the lowest of the low

and the highest of the high. Diana.

Princess Diana always had an eye for me.

And, er... on the topic of... oh, because I'm getting...

When we turned up and I saw him lashing into pints already,

I thought "Oh God, it's five in the afternoon."

Well, I could just tell from his stammer...

♪ Have I told you lately I love you?... ♪

It's like he's performing all the time.

You know, he's loving an audience and he's not quite being himself.

He's over the top. You know, it's sort of annoying at times for me.

♪ Ease my troubles # That's what you do... ♪

I mean, I'm the opposite end of the scale, so I'm not the best judge.

I hate attention. # ..all my sadness

♪ Ease my troubles # That's what you do ♪

To Jules!

It was his night, I know that.

The centre of(FRENCH)'attention'.

He doesn't get it. I'm sure he doesn't get it.

He doesn't see what he's like.

It's not fair on me, is it, really? Putting up with it.

I have told him he can choose between me or alcohol.

Doesn't seem to make any difference. And I can't kick him out.

There's nowhere he could go if I did kick him out.

He'd literally be homeless.

Such ghastly times. You don't walk out on someone

in the middle of ghastly times anyway.

I think that would be completely against my nature to do that.

Yeah, it's a funny position I'm in.

Halfway between the doghouse and the jailhouse.

I... I still... still have a residu... I have love for her.

You know? It's very confused as well because nobody,

NOBODY'S ever been through what we've been through. Nobody!

If I could do anything, if I could change anything, I would.

Could I have done anything to change it?

The only thing I could have done that might have changed it,

if I'd have been either in hospital, incapacitated,

or away from West Cork on a certain day in December 1996.

Fuckers.

I mean, they haven't ruined my life, but they've ruined Jules's life.

Sorry.

Oh!

When I look at or listen to the police talking about DNA

and "Oh, back then, DNA wasn't as good as it is now",

I kinda go, "Well, the most primitive DNA...

...are our fingerprints." When I was a child in the womb,

I reached out to touch my mother's stomach,

just like every human since the beginning of time.

And by reaching out to touch her, I created,

on the tops of my fingers, ridges.

And now, I have a fingerprint.

So, the police, when they suspected Ian Bailey,

they did take his fingerprints when they arrested him

and we never got the report of that and I was always looking to find out

in the police statements that I got from Frank Buttimer.

I couldn't find them in the libel trial

or in the civil trial

and then I went to the French file.

And I found this report

from the forensics,

John O'Neill. What he basically says

is that Ian Bailey's fingerprints were nowhere to be seen.

But he does say there were other marks there.

So the question is, are there marks there

that, if we found another suspect,

could we put them at the scene of the crime?

This seems of fundamental importance to me.

At the scene of the crime, even if I'm not here,

that will remain.

We subsequently learned that at the outset, there were 50 suspects.

Seems that the police managed to reduce the number of suspects

right down to one in not more than two weeks.

Ian Bailey became the only show in town.

(BAILEY)'The most interesting statement that I had never seen before

'and wasn't included in the DPP's file

'was a statement by a driver living in Goleen at the time,

'who says on Monday 23rd December 1996,

'he leaves his home in Goleen, he's driving up to Cork.'

'So this is around 7.30 on that Monday morning, OK?'

'A car comes right up behind him and overtakes him on the hairpin bend

'and he has to swerve to pull out.'

So on the Tuesday, the Guards go into Goleen

and go house to house, knocking on the doors,

"Can anybody help? "Have you seen anything?"

And he says "Yeah, at 7.30 yesterday morning I was overtaken at very high speed

"by a blue Ford Fiesta. I think it had red number plates."

Now the funny thing is, I hadn't seen that statement

until I found it in the boxes of discovery.

It wasn't included in the DPP's file.

In other words, it wasn't sent to the fucking DPP.

After the murder, the Guards are appealing for anybody with information.

Inquiries are still continuing and we're doing house to house visits.

We're getting a great response from the public and I thank them.

But there's always something out there that we don't know of

and it could be of immense help to us.

They're appealing for drivers and cars, certain cars

that were seen, to come forward.

There's no fucking appeal for a blue Ford fucking Fiesta, is there?

Driving away from the scene at 7.30 in the morning.

As soon as I saw that statement,

I wasn't able to categorically rule out

the unknown identity of the driver

as having been the culprit who murdered her.

So this is 7.30. Now if you go through the statements that...

Hello? Don't come in! Oh, go on, come in, come in. Sorry.

No, come in if you want, but let me know.

Erm...

Yeah, erm... so they do an appeal for the...

And there was no appeal for anybody who'd seen a blue Ford Fiesta.

What's that all about, eh?

In 2008, the French state applied to the Irish state

for what they call mutual assistance

to give the French the Irish police file.

The Minister for Justice directs that it is appropriate

and orders the files to go out. Now, that became then the material,

of course which was rejected by the DPP,

but which was relied upon by the French in their eventual application for extradition

through the French court system.

They exhumed Sophie's body in France.

They conducted a battery of new forensic tests.

Crucially, they were given access to the Garda murder file.

And that was probably the greatest acknowledgment that there was never going to be action in Ireland,

because had there been the remotest prospect of something happening, that wouldn't have happened.

They were given permission to send French detectives to Ireland

to re-interview investigating officers in the Gardai,

but also some of the witnesses in the original murder investigation.

I am so sorry for the family as well.

They really, really believe Ian did it.

What can I say?

Sophie Toscan du Plantier's son Pierre-Louis and her brother Bertrand

spent this weekend at the West Cork holiday home where she stayed and where she died.

What are we? Sunday, 19th May.

And, erm... God, where would you start?

Well, I'm here at the market. I'm trying to carry on doing everything that I normally would do.

What's happening today is that Pierre-Louis, the son of the victim,

is going to make an impassioned plea for the good people of West Cork

who are required as witnesses in Paris to travel over

so that they can get rid of this devil that lives amongst them.

And it's very, very, very... surreal, unreal.

It is frightening.

In a way, my speech here

was also an appeal to all the witnesses

which are requested to come in France

to come and testify against the suspect.

Last week, I had this feeling of sickness

right in the pit of my stomach. Really, really fucking visceral.

And that sort of comes and goes.

The file that the French were acting under

was the file that was rejected here numerous times in Ireland

and was corrupted, many of the statements withdrawn or discredited.

And all of that shit was handed over to the French.

They think they've got all the evidence they need.

We've seen it, because we put an appeal in.

Our French barrister says there's no way you could fight it.

"It would be a waste of my time", he said. "And your money."

It's because hearsay in French law stands as evidence.

So if somebody says "Oh, he said he did it", that's enough for them.

It's very difficult to say, but I just can't see any set of circumstances

where Ireland will extradite an individual to France

on foot of a conviction in France for a crime that happened in Ireland

and for a matter which the Director of Public Prosecutions found

that the same individual shouldn't even be charged, let alone tried.

But the one thing I've learned about this case is,

you don't make predictions because it's one of those cases

where you really don't know what's coming down the tracks.

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