My outdated colleague was disquieting however not a killer, writes DAVID JONES

The Ian Bailey I knew within the Eighties was an old-school Fleet Street newshound straight from central casting.

Ruthlessly bold, with an air of conceitedness, he boasted of his spy contacts inside the federal government intelligence company GCHQ and, together with his 6ft 4in body and attractiveness, he thought himself God’s reward to ladies.

Listening to a few of his maudlin final phrases this week – in a valedictory voicemail message performed again to me by considered one of his few pals – it grew to become clear how low he had sunk when he collapsed and died, final Sunday, exterior his shabby digs, in Bantry, County Cork.

According to his former companion, artist Jules Thomas, who later instructed me his poignant story in a four-hour unique interview, Bailey, 66, had been ‘hounded to his grave’.

For he had spent nearly half his lifetime below the shadow of suspicion, accused – and in France convicted – of committing probably the most surprising and perplexing murders in Irish legal historical past.

After struggling a collection of coronary heart assaults, Thomas stated, Bailey succumbed to ‘the stress from the persecution’ and the fixed concern that he could be extradited – and even kidnapped by his supposed sufferer’s household – and made to serve a 25-year sentence handed down by a Paris court docket in 2019.

Relatives of Sophie Toscan du Plantier – an alluring French movie producer and socialite, brutally dispatched within the prime of her life, aged 39 – view Bailey’s demise moderately otherwise.

Though Irish police couldn’t convey him to trial for lack of proof, they’re totally satisfied it was he who descended on her distant vacation residence, on the south-western tip of County Cork, in 1996, and – maybe as a result of she rejected his amorous advances – frenziedly battered her with a poker-like instrument earlier than crushing her cranium with a concrete block.

Angered by the bungled Irish homicide investigation and pissed off that the Dublin police refused handy him over to France, even after the Paris court docket discovered him responsible, her household regard demise as his ultimate escape.

To add to their frustration, the Manchester-born journalist died earlier than the completion of a cold-case overview which, they hoped, would finish their 28-year struggle to ascertain his culpability past doubt in each nations.

‘We were expecting Bailey to die because we knew his health was exceptionally fragile in the last weeks, but we hoped he would live long enough to see justice,’ Sophie’s uncle, physicist Jean-Pierre Gazeau, instructed me.

What, then, is the reality behind this tortuous affair? As Bailey might need put it, when penning a racy information report: scapegoat or psycho – how ought to he be remembered?

There was actually one thing disquieting in regards to the freelance reporter I sometimes labored with. A Gloucestershire information company sacked him for staging a drug-fueled social gathering within the workplace and bunking off a court docket case he was speculated to cowl to attend Cheltenham races.

But may he have turn out to be a cold-blooded assassin? Not in keeping with Jules Thomas, who lived with him for greater than 30 years, and – to her lasting astonishment – was twice arrested for alleged complicity within the homicide however by no means charged.

Sensationally, she insists police ‘stitched him up’ to guard the actual killer – a rogue detective inside their very own ranks. More of this astonishing allegation later.

However, if as Thomas maintains, Bailey grew to become ‘the perfect patsy’ for the Irish police – an English outsider in an space nonetheless pervaded by Republican hostility – then he hardly helped his personal trigger.

Back in his Fleet Street days, he relished being on the centre of intrigue (the Geoffrey Prime spy scandal at GCHQ was a Bailey speciality) and when he grew to become the chief suspect in Sophie’s homicide he appeared to benefit from the consideration.

This sense of significance was a lot in proof after I met him once more, 5 years in the past, on the smallholding he then shared with Thomas. He was desperately eager for our interview to be filmed by a real crime TV crew encamped within the backyard.

When I requested whether or not he was afraid, with the French court docket’s inevitable responsible verdict imminent, he claimed to be going through his ‘false’ conviction stoically, saying, with a wave of his nicotine-stained hand, that he was ‘in a John Wayne state of mind’.

Gazing at this ageing eccentric, who had swapped the sharp fits of his youth for a scarf and a battered straw hat, I noticed how the ex-reporter had turn out to be the arch villain of his personal grisly story.

Declaring information reporting to be ‘trivial’, Bailey left Fleet Street behind within the early Nineties, decamping to West Cork to attach together with his Irish roots and reinvent himself as a poet.

Struggling to make ends meet, he discovered work in a herring processing manufacturing facility. It was there that he met Thomas. Also divorced, with three teenage daughters, she was accumulating scraps of fish for her cats. Within a 12 months he moved into her yellow-painted cottage, near the coastal city of Schull.

Police later made a lot of Bailey’s violence in direction of Thomas. When she tried to cease him driving whereas drunk, he hit her so onerous that she had a ‘grapefruit-sized’ swelling over her eye, a court docket heard. He additionally attacked her ferociously after a row in mattress.

Though she describes him as ‘narcissistic’, Thomas, the general public school-educated daughter of an eminent psychiatrist, performs down these incidents, saying Bailey could possibly be ‘gentlemanly’ and turned nasty solely on uncommon events after bingeing on spirits.

They loved 5 largely glad years collectively – residing off the land and visiting raucous pubs the place Bailey would bang a bodhran (a standard goatskin drum) and interview the musicians for newspapers – earlier than the homicide accusation ‘destroyed’ their lives.

Yet, as police found when looking out the cottage, there was a sordid aspect to Bailey. His diaries contained lurid accounts of his perverse sexual encounters, and except his Twitter account was hacked his lewdness continued till he died.

Thomas makes mild of this. ‘He may have fantasised about stuff like that, but he knew it wouldn’t work with me, so he didn’t strive it on. I’d have kicked him up the bottom,’ she stated airily.

What, then introduced Sophie, who was married to the French movie director Daniel Toscan Du Plantier, into Bailey’s orbit? Ironically, they have been drawn to this far-flung outpost for a lot the identical purpose.

Described by her household as ‘untamed’ and ‘full of vital energy’, her affinity for rural Ireland started on scholar visits, and in 1993 she purchased a cottage, 4 miles from the one Bailey and Thomas shared.

She stayed there 4 or 5 instances a 12 months, writing, strolling alongside the rugged cliffs and relishing her escape from the arty Parisian salons.

When detectives probed her non-public life in addition they found that Sophie, who had an open marriage, loved trysts on the white-painted cottage with at the least considered one of her lovers, French artist Bruno Carbonnet.

On December 20, 1996, after attending a glittering social gathering along with her husband, Sophie flew from Paris to Cork for the final time, intending to remain till Christmas Eve. Three days later, nonetheless, at 10.38am on December 23, a neighbour discovered her physique on the foot of the winding lane resulting in her home. Though it was evident, from her damaged fingers, that she fought her attacker, she had been viciously battered greater than 50 instances and was barely recognisable.

The dealing with of the case was farcical from the outset. Since Ireland’s solely obtainable pathologist was in any other case engaged in Dublin (some say at a Christmas social gathering) Sophie’s stays have been lined with tarpaulin and left for greater than 24 hours.

By the time she was examined it was troublesome to ascertain when she had died, although a half-digested meal of fruit and nuts instructed she had most likely eaten breakfast earlier than going exterior, for causes by no means defined. Two rinsed wine glasses on the draining board instructed she’d had current firm.

Among the primary individuals to reach on the scene have been Bailey and Thomas. When the Cork Examiner heard {that a} girl’s physique had been discovered, they despatched him to look into the story. His girlfriend Thomas , a eager photographer, got here alongside to take footage.

A witness later claimed Bailey knew of Sophie’s demise earlier than the newspaper known as, however whether or not that’s true is among the many innumerable unresolved questions.

Over the following days, nonetheless, when he started sending uncannily well-informed reviews to newspapers in France and Ireland, giving particulars apparently identified solely to the police, he fell below suspicion.

Police curiosity intensified when a minimize was observed on his brow and scratches on his arms; wounds which weren’t there earlier than the homicide.

Meanwhile a procession of witnesses started to level the finger at him. A Schull shopkeeper named Marie Farrell claimed to have seen a person she believed to be Bailey staggering down a lane close to the homicide scene within the early hours of December 23, then washing his boots in a stream.

Farrell later retracted this damning assertion, claiming it had been made below duress from the police. Bailey’s lawyer, Frank Buttimer, tells me she messaged him to specific her regret this week for contributing to his downfall.

Then after his first arrest, on February 10, 1997, a number of of Bailey’s acquaintances got here ahead to say he had admitted the homicide to them. It additionally emerged in police questioning that he had left his mattress for a substantial time within the early hours of December 23.

And in France, a buddy of Sophie alleged she had been involved with Bailey by cellphone a month earlier than the homicide, although he swore he didn’t know her and claimed to have seen her solely as soon as, from a distance, whereas gardening at a neighbour’s home.

Was Bailey bedevilled by an odd collection of coincidences which, when pieced collectively, appeared to incriminate him? Or was he the killer?

In Schull, many of us believed the latter – and nonetheless do. However, after listening to Jules Thomas’s defence of Bailey – which can kind the idea of a ebook she plans to publish – I’m much less positive.

She started with some easy observations: ‘I knew Ian better than anyone and he was an emotional person. If he had done this, he would have been in bits the next morning, but when he brought me coffee he was completely normal.

‘And Ian was such a messy person. My youngest daughter said, “Mum, he was so messy that (if he had committed a murder) there would have been blood everywhere!”’

What was extra, Thomas stated, Bailey ‘had verbal diarrhoea’ and regaled her about each element of his life, because the weeks and months handed he would have felt compelled to admit to her.

Convincingly, it have to be stated, she additionally tried to dismantle the proof in opposition to Bailey.

Yes, had acquired up within the evening, however he was writing to a deadline – a newspaper story in regards to the space’s first web café – and wanted to fax it the next morning. Her daughter had seen him writing on the kitchen desk when she acquired as much as go to the john.

Yes, his arms have been barely scratched, however that was as a result of he’d climbed up a tall Christmas tree and used a bent noticed to chop it down. As for the minimize on his brow – a hairline nick, not the type of wound that might certainly have been inflicted by a girl preventing for her life – that was prompted when he killed a turkey.

The police had drawn up a listing of fifty potential suspects, she stated, discounting all however Ian with inordinate haste. Among them was a German man who lived domestically and killed himself quickly after the homicide, apparently as a result of he was affected by a responsible secret.

Then there was Sophie’s lover, Carbonnet, who was stated to have been so distraught when she jilted him that he burnt a few of his work. He had a cast-iron alibi, as did her husband (although given the character of their marriage there have been unfounded early solutions that he might need despatched somebody to kill her).

However, Thomas claimed, one concept that has by no means been disproved is that Sophie’s assassin was a police officer. Incredible as it might sound, she says she had heard rumours to this impact for years and Bailey satisfied her it was true.

It stems from considered one of many strands of proof which, Thomas claims, police conveniently brushed below the carpet.

This got here to mild solely in 2019, when Bailey’s lawyer was given sight of a weighty file on the case despatched to French prosecutors by the Irish.

It contained the assertion of a driver who was dangerously overtaken on a bend by a dashing blue Ford automotive at about 7.30am on the morning of the homicide. Suspecting it may have been Sophie’s killer, he reported the incident, but it surely seems police didn’t observe it up.

The dashing Ford was first revealed in 2020 by an Irish investigative journalist who discovered {that a} native detective drove an analogous mannequin.

The journalist additionally found that the married officer, ‘a notoriously violent person and sexual predator infamous for having affairs’, was believed to have had ‘a sexual encounter’ with Sophie after assembly her whereas investigating drug dealing close to her vacation residence.

During our interview, nonetheless, Thomas went additional, claiming the detective confessed to considered one of his nurses earlier than dying of most cancers a number of years in the past. Though he swore the nurse to secrecy his alleged deathbed admission ultimately got here to Bailey’s consideration.

If true, she says, it might clarify all the things that had occurred to them subsequently.

Their ‘wrongful’ arrests, in 1997 and once more in 2000, the intentionally flawed investigation, the mislaid proof (police even ‘lost’ the blood-spattered five-barred gate beside which Sophie was discovered), and the truth that Bailey continued to be focused even after forensic checks proved his innocence.

Despite the fierce wrestle, there was no match between specimens of blood and hair Thomas and Bailey offered and people discovered on Sophie’s physique.

Thomas doubts that this surprising ‘cover-up’, as she calls it, will ever be investigated. ‘If it were proved it would bring the whole Gardai [Irish police] system down,’ she stated. ‘People would have no truck with them, or belief.’

Though Thomas is certain of Bailey’s innocence, she wearied of his obsession with the case and his heavy ingesting. Two years in the past she requested him to go away the home.

When he refused, her daughters wrote him a letter saying he was placing her by means of psychological ‘torture’ and so, reluctantly, he moved to the close by city of Bantry, discovering a room above an off-licence.

Knowing he had a dangerously diseased coronary heart, he refused to vary his junk-food food regimen and spent his welfare advantages in native pubs. In his distress, he ‘ate, drank and smoked himself to death’, Thomas instructed me.

When she heard of his passing, final Sunday, she ‘tried to cry but nothing came’, for she not had any emotions for him. Nevertheless, she intends to maintain preventing to clear his title as a result of there may be ‘no one else left to defend him’.

Given that no person attended his cremation in Cork, on Tuesday, it might seem not.

So, was my outdated colleague shamefully vilified? Or was he a cold-hearted killer, maybe pushed right into a frenzied rage when Sophie rejected his advances?

Frustratingly, I nonetheless don’t know – and I think we are going to by no means have a conclusive reply. But I’m erring on the aspect of innocence.