Once described as a 'walking scarecrow' Ian Bailey leaves many circling for answers
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There are so many stories about Ian Bailey that some of them are bound to be true — maybe even the one about him having a brief job scaring away the birds, shotgun in hand, on a farm in Co Waterford.
Bailey's long-time solicitor, Frank Buttimer, believes that one. But as ever with the English-born writer and poet, who has died following a heart attack, we are never absolutely sure.
What is certain is that the former journalist found himself at the epicentre of the most high-profile unsolved murder in modern Irish history, and that he has taken his consistent claims of innocence with him to the afterlife.
"That fateful day," as Frank Buttimer describes it, was the discovery of the body of Sophie Toscan Du Plantier outside her home at Toormore near Schull on December 23, 1996.
A crime shocking in its brutality, it robbed a family of a wife and mother and stunned the nation. It also set in train an investigation that has still failed to bring a suspect before the Irish courts and introduced a cast of characters which highlighted West Cork's sometimes otherworldly aspects — with Bailey at its core.
It had all started so differently.
Bailey was born in Manchester, one of two children to their craft butcher father, Ken, and mother, Brenda. Bailey told a court in 2014 that the family lived in Stockport, before later moving to Hucclecote, near Gloucester.
On deciding to become a journalist he underwent a traineeship and later moved to Cheltenham, from where he began freelance work which included contributions to the famed Insight team at the Sunday Times. His first marriage was to fellow journalist Sarah Limbrick, but it ended after a few years and it later emerged there had been an allegation of assault by Bailey.
As the 1990s began, his thoughts began to wander away from journalism and towards the possibility of a new life in Ireland, which he had first visited in 1986.
Bailey gravitated towards Schull following a spell in Kilmacthomas in Co Waterford — that job of scaring away the crows — and he secured a position at a fish factory. He then met Welsh-born artist Jules Thomas, who was raising her three daughters at her home at the Prairie, Lissacaha.
Bailey first moved into an adjacent property and as the relationship flourished, later into the family home. He had begun sending stories into newspapers prior to Ms Du Plantier's murder, and it was as a journalist that he attended the scene following the discovery of Sophie's body.
Books, documentaries and podcasts, as well as acres of newsprint have followed regarding the details and unanswered questions about both the murder and the subsequent investigation, an ill-starred enterprise that seemed to misfire from the very start. Bailey was quickly identified as a suspect and with his first arrest in February 1997, his life was changed forever. Jules Thomas was also taken into custody at that point, and both were released without charge.
On his return Bailey addressed the media, denying any involvement. Gardaí evidently thought otherwise, arresting him for a second time in January 1998, when he was again released without charge. The rumours and the conjecture never went away.
In 2003, Bailey brought a libel action against a string of newspapers, in what seemed an opportunity to repair his reputation. He won two but lost six of the eight actions, yet the damage was worse than that.
With the extraordinary testimony of Marie Farrell, the woman who had made anonymous calls to gardaí around the time of the murder alleging she had seen a man of similar bearing at Kealfadda Bridge, his conviction in the court of public opinion seemed complete. Except it wasn't, not least because of the even more extraordinary volte-face by Ms Farrell just two years later. In repudiating her earlier statements, she threw the focus back on the garda investigation.
But as ever, there were more twists in the tale.
According to Frank Buttimer, Bailey should never have been described as "the self-confessed prime suspect" in the case.
"When he acknowledged he was the prime suspect he developed this superb tag — 'the self-confessed prime suspect'. A confession [that he was simply being treated as a suspect] was conflated with becoming almost a confession for doing the crime for which he was never charged," Mr Buttimer said.
Life back at the Prairie sometimes spiralled out of control. Bailey was arrested in August 2001 for assaulting Jules Thomas and later admitted it was the third time he had done so.
Much later, when Bailey was on trial in Paris in absentia for the Du Plantier murder, a statement given by one of Mr Thomas's daughters alleged that as far back as 1995 he had made an advance on her.
Through it all, the Bailey-Thomas axis survived, but a number of people have attested to the strain the relationship was under over the years.
"His dark side was alcohol," Mr Buttimer said on the topic of the physical assaults on Ms Thomas. "He never would have conducted himself like that but for alcohol and he recognised himself and he said it himself, that alcohol was a malign influence on him and the only time he conducted himself in that fashion was under influence of alcohol."
A High Court appeal in 2007 over his libel action against the newspapers, settled after a few days, was the forerunner to a legal action against the then minister for justice and the then garda commissioner regarding his treatment in the course of the Du Plantier investigation.
But if it seemed like Bailey’s luck was changing, in 2010 he was before the High Court on a European arrest warrant after French authorities launched a bid to extradite him. It would begin almost a decade of efforts to have him brought before the courts in France, all rebuffed by the courts in Ireland.
Bailey himself turned to the law, graduating with an honours degree from University College Cork and later completing a Masters, anchored around a thesis on police accountability in Ireland.
This reporter recalls a rather dry legal seminar a decade ago in which Bailey discussed his findings at the West Cork Hotel. At that stage, his hair still black and the suit and tie still on display, he maintained a striking, hulking presence.
But that too would start to slip. By 2019, he had been convicted in Paris for the 1996 murder — a trial completed without his presence or involvement and utterly rejected by him and his legal team.
It is intriguing to imagine him in the French court. For all the steadfastness of his denials of any involvement in the murder, his relationship with the truth has always come under scrutiny.
The scarecrow story mentioned at the top of this piece should be factual — after all, he said it in a witness box in 2014, ahead of losing his legal action against the State and the gardaí, for which he was ultimately hit with a huge bill.
Yet he told that same court in Dublin that he'd first read All The President's Men aged 14, and it was this which initially drove him towards a career in journalism. However, when Bailey was 14, that seminal book was still four years away from being published.
This very week, RTÉ journalist Philip Boucher Hayes described how he had met Bailey some weeks before that court appearance and told him about his own journalistic epiphany, one that involved All The President’s Men — only to then hear it repeated by Bailey in court.
So what was this? A scatty memory? A buffoonish tendency to embellish his own story? Or something else?
Bailey always denied any involvement in the Du Plantier murder, yet just weeks after the killing, schoolboy Malachi Reid told gardaí Bailey had said he "went up there with a rock and bashed her fucking brains out”.
Others have also told of would-be confessions. If they could be attributed to, say, black humour, it was further proof of Bailey's inability to stem his worst instincts, to keep out of his own way, and that of others. Plenty of people approached this week for comment have declined to do so, and not always out of a respect for the dead.
Frank Buttimer, his long-time advocate, admits that Bailey's proclivity in recent years to sound off about the case had made his own job more challenging, but he also challenged the notion that Bailey was inherently arrogant, claiming his client’s pronouncements were typically down to "the acquisition of a greater degree of confidence in his own communication capacity” while being “quintessentially English in his delivery”.
Buttimer also argued that the sheer strangeness of Bailey’s life may also have amplified certain aspects of his character.
"Ian Bailey had a public persona and he had a private persona. His public persona was deeply affected by the perception of him by others at the outset. He perceived himself, in the eyes of others, as a man who killed Madame Du Plantier, which he did not, and then therefore in the eyes of people who looked at him like that, he had got away with murder," Mr Buttimer said.
"And to deal with that he had to become almost aloof, cold, dispassionate, observant, careful, fearful of his physical wellbeing and all those things — it was like the creation of a shield. Imagine being the guy who is innocent but who was seen as having got away with murder? Privately, he was more relaxed, much more at ease, much better in his humour and demeanour. But he always knew he had to go out and face the public because some form of life had to go on publicly."
The Paris judgement and related 25 years sentence was never going to be served as long as Ireland refused to extradite him, but the threat of his removal had already impacted his life, not least when he could not attend his mother's burial in England for fear that authorities there would transfer him across the Channel.
The ruling of the Paris court also seemed to speed up the ageing process. In recent years Bailey could still be seen shuffling around the markets in Bantry and Glengarriff, looking increasingly disheveled if not downright unwell. There is a telling scene in the 2021 Jim Sheridan documentary on the Du Plantier case where Bailey is holding court in a pub, the camera lingering on him as he slips into a rolling, intoxicated wreck before our eyes.
Amid all the hubbub, Ms Thomas ended their relationship.
Even then it took months for Bailey to move out of her home and since then he has occupied various short-term accommodation, before his final berth in the centre of Bantry town. When the relationship break-up became known, Ms Thomas gave an extensive interview with a Sunday newspaper in which she re-affirmed her belief in Bailey’s innocence, but stressed how she was “sick and tired” of the circus around him.
"‘If I had left him in the middle of all that it would have looked like he did it, so I just gritted my teeth,” she said in 2021.
According to Ray Hennessy, the Bantry-based solicitor who represented Bailey in the district court, it was the sundering of this relationship that had the biggest impact of all — the one constant in Bailey's life gone, leaving him unmoored.
In recent years Bailey did most of his talking on social media, initially on Twitter, and more prominently on TikTok, which became his platform of choice.
He seemed to delight in online battles with a persistent critic who he labelled a “troll” and he rarely missed a chance to hawk his wares online. Theoretically, his own podcast, In His Own Words, should have been popular, yet by the time it appeared in 2022 it raised barely a murmur.
Maybe, with the verdict in France and the intense focus of the Sheridan and Netflix documentaries, people were less inclined to dive into Bailey’s own ramblings. There was also a sense that by then, he was an increasingly unreliable narrator of his own life story.
Bailey was the subject of an assault in Bantry and was also back before the courts himself, convicted in 2021 of drug-driving and other offences, all relating to being initially stopped at a Garda checkpoint near Schull on August 25, 2019.
Those matters were all under appeal at the time of his death — more unfinished business.
In addition, the health scares became more pointed. Last year saw two heart-related episodes and the coverage since his death indicates that he knew his time may shortly be up.
In some ways Bailey was perfect for social media, given how he polarised opinion.
Ray Hennessy said people would sometimes shout “murderer” at Bailey at the markets, yet others would pay him for shout-outs on TikTok or have their photo taken with him.
According to Frank Buttimer, it was often simply a case of Bailey communicating with anyone who would speak to him. Plus it’s said he had an abiding affection for Ireland, which was one of the reasons he never took early opportunities to start his life again elsewhere.
Bailey had cut an increasingly isolated figure and died in penury. The speed of his interring at a crematorium in Cork on Tuesday took everyone by surprise, but it was also a lonely exit, his sister Kay, ever supportive, not in attendance.
Ultimately, the journalist became the story. Following his death, Jules Thomas said Bailey couldn’t have committed the murder because he was incapable of keeping a secret, but if he was an open book, everyone is still left with more questions than answers.
And even in death, Bailey is still casting a shadow — on the Mizen Peninsula, in France, and beyond.
Back in that courtroom in 2014, Bailey's barrister, Martin Giblin, queried him about his time out in the fields. “You were kind of a walking scarecrow,” Giblin said.
"Yes," came the reply.