IAN BAILEY, at one time chief suspect in the killing of French filmmaker Sophie Toscan du Plantier in west Cork, has launched his own podcast on Spotify. Called Ian Baily In His Own Words, the Manchester-born former journalist and long time resident of west Cork outlines the series saying: “In several episodes I will tell the story of exactly who I am, where I came from, what I have done and not done and where things might be going.”
He says it is a bid to reveal the “trials, tribulations and torture… for a crime I didn’t commit”.
The badly beaten body of Madame Sophie du Plantier, a French filmmaker, was found outside her holiday home near Schull, west Cork two days before Christmas in 1996.
Ian Bailey came under suspicion early in the investigation into the killing. He has always said he is completely innocent, denying any knowledge of the crime, and has never stood trial in Ireland. The Director of Public Prosecutions (in Ireland) has always ruled that insufficient evidence exists to mount a prosecution. No forensic or witness evidence has ever placed Bailey at the scene of the crime.
He was found guilty of murder in a Paris court in his absence, but the trial was based on circumstantial evidence and hearsay, none of which would be admissible in a court in Ireland or Britain. Mr Bailey goes into the details of the trial in his podcast. His ‘admissions’ to the murder — used against him in France — were a result, he says in the podcast, of his dark, sarcastic sense of humour.
In 2012 Supreme Court Judge Adrian Hardiman said, on overturning a High Court decision to allow Bailey to be extradited to France: “The fruits of the investigation have been considered not once but several times by the DPP [Director of Public Prosecutions] who has concluded and reiterated that there is no evidence to warrant a prosecution against him.”
Mr Bailey’s three-part podcast series details his life before and after the murder of mum-of-one Sophie Toscan du Plantier on December 23, 1996.
In the second episode he claims that he was threatened by gardaí, who told him he would be shot if he didn’t confess to the murder. The implication, according to Mr Bailey, was that paramilitaries would be involved.
He says: “I’m not a saint but I’m certainly not a demon or a killer.”
