NetflixSophie Toscan du Plantier loved her solitary holidays in Ireland.
Inspired by her travels to the country as a child, the French TV producer bought a two-story cottage outside Schull, a picturesque bayside town in West Cork, with a view of a lighthouse from her bedroom window. Sophie became a familiar friendly face to the locals, though most couldn't claim to know her well.
On Dec. 22, 1996, having only been in town for a couple of days to do some research, the 39-year-old mother of two called her gardener in southwestern France to order a linden tree to be planted outside the bedroom window at her family's country home in Ambax as a gift for her husband, prolific film producer Daniel Toscan du Plantier. She spoke to Daniel on the phone shortly after 11 p.m. But she never made it home for Christmas.
At around 10 a.m. on Dec. 23, Sophie's battered body, still clad in pajamas, was found sprawled in the brambles at the edge of the path leading up to her house, her head smashed by a concrete block that was lying nearby.
"It's almost as if she's hovering over us," Bill Hogan, an American cheesemaker who got to know Sophie when she'd stop by his farm for a wheel of fromage to take back to Paris, told The Guardian in 2010, remembering the impact of her life—and shocking death—on the close-knit community. She'd visit the curing house and "we'd have a glass of wine there and talk. She was highly intelligent—her mind would go from one place to another peak entirely and it would take me two weeks to understand what the connection was."
Hogan mused, "This part of West Cork is really a haven for writers and artists and that has been violated by Sophie's murder."
He was one of many who described Sophie as a captivating person, someone whom you might only meet once but would never forget.
"Oh, she was everything," Pierre-Louis Baudey, who was 15 when his mother was killed, recently told Britain's Independent ahead of the June 30 premiere of Netflix's three-part Sophie: A Murder in West Cork—not the first documentary on the case but the first project her family has participated in and endorsed. "I am an only child and my parents divorced when I was one, so I lived with her. We were very close. She wasn't just the wife of a French producer. She was arty and intellectual. She was very social but more than half of her was solitary: writing, thinking, meditating."
According to the Independent, members of Sophie's family were also interviewed for Irish filmmaker Jim Sheridan's five-part Sky Crime series about the case, Murder at the Cottage: The Search for Justice for Sophie. But, after previewing the show, which premiered June 20, they asked that their commentary be removed, not approving of what they perceived to be a sympathetic portrayal of Ian Bailey, the only suspect ever named in Sophie's death.
A native of Manchester who reportedly moved to West Cork in 1991, Bailey was arrested in February 1997 and again in January 1998 in connection with the case but never charged with Sophie's murder in Ireland. However, a three-judge panel at the Paris Criminal Court convicted him of murder in absentia in May 2019, sentencing him to 25 years in prison. But though he was arrested in Dublin in December 2019 in the wake of the guilty verdict, he was released on bail and remains free, albeit loath to leave the country for fear of being taken into custody.
In October, the Irish High Court rejected what was France's third extradition request.
Bailey's longtime lawyer, Frank Buttimer, told CNN in 2019 that the verdict was a "grotesque miscarriage of justice," adding, This was not a trial in the sense that anyone understands it." Following the October decision, he told the Press Association, "Mr. Bailey intends to return to West Cork and he intends to attempt to get on with the rest of his life as best he can, subject to any other decision that is made by the state in relation to any appeal."
This week Bailey threatened to sue Netflix over A Murder in West Cork's use of an interview he gave in 2018 that, he claimed in a letter to the streamer, was presented to him as a "'teaser' for a Lightbox idea for a Netflix production." He alleged in the letter that he was "contractually bound" to Sheridan's project and "at no time did I agree to [the Lightbox interview] being used in a finished documentary."
E! News has reached out to Netflix for comment. Ireland's The Journal reported Tuesday that the company had confirmed that Bailey's interview would remain in the show despite two requests from him to have it removed.
John Dower, director of A Murder in West Cork, told the Independent, "Exclusive contracts are rare in documentaries but for a prime suspect to sign one when he claims he wants his story out there is odd. Sheridan's film takes the stance that Ian Bailey is a victim of police corruption and they're entitled to do that; we took the view of the family."
A spokesperson for Sheridan and Dare Films told the newspaper, "Both productions share a large number of similar contributors, including key witnesses, investigators and local residents. Mr. Sheridan's project cooperated with Netflix and released various contributors from contract when asked. Murder at the Cottage is an independent, balanced documentary and does not make a conclusion either way on the guilt or innocence of Ian Bailey. The series explores the case in great detail and tries to understand why a convicted murderer in France is a free man in Ireland."
Bailey, a freelance journalist who lived not far from the victim and was covering the crime for several newspapers, including Ireland's since-shuttered Sunday Tribune, was first questioned a few days after Sophie's death. Some weeks later, according to CNN, his editor at the Tribune told police that Ian had told her he'd killed Sophie to revive his career. Per police records, Bailey admitted to saying that, but insisted it was a joke.
Lacking forensics tying him to the crime, investigators from Ireland's national police force, the Garda Síochána, were left to parse through any cryptic comments he made to them or anyone else about Sophie's death. Maintaining his innocence but not shirking attention, Bailey went on to study law at the University of Cork and could be seen selling organic vegetables at the Schull farmers market on weekends with his longtime partner, Welsh artist Jules Thomas.
At the same time, he continued to publicly fight to clear his name, suing eight newspapers for libel. Ultimately only two publications out of the eight, The Sun and the Irish Mirror, were ordered to pay damages of about $4,800 each in 2004, while the other six were found to be justified in their reporting. In handing down his decision, Cork Circuit Court Judge Patrick Moran called Bailey an "attention-seeker who courted notoriety."
French police kept investigating Bailey as well, though they didn't have the authority to force him to submit to their questioning. Buttimer, his lawyer, told The Guardian in 2010, "Mr. Bailey has always protested and maintained his innocence. With due respect and sympathy for the family of the late Mme. Toscan du Plantier, he has always maintained that any effort by the police to implicate him in relation to the unlawful killing of Mme. Toscan du Plantier was misguided and corrupt."
Bailey also filed a lawsuit against the Garda, Ireland's Attorney General and the Minister for Justice for wrongful arrest, alleging at trial that he'd been the target of what amounted to a corrupt crusade that had ruined his life.
He lost the case in 2015, a jury determining that authorities did not conspire against him to procure false statements from a witness (one of the only claims that hadn't been dismissed already due to a six-year statute of limitations). A subsequent watchdog investigation found no evidence of police corruption in the murder investigation, either, according to a report shared in 2018.
Despite a few temporary breakups over the course of three decades, Jules Thomas was with Bailey up until April, when she told the Irish Mail on Sunday, "After 25 years I am sick and tired of banging on with this; it's been just awful—all that stuff in print, the press attention, the photographers, everything." Moreover, her family had refused to visit when Bailey was around, and she was looking forward to seeing them at her beloved West Cork home more often.
That being said, Thomas added, "I am convinced of his innocence, always have been and that it was a stitch-up by the guards from the beginning." She would have broken up with him sooner, but "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 told the Mail on Sunday this month that she and Bailey talked to Jim Sheridan extensively for Murder at the Cottage—and that the director had told her Bailey never mentioned how she too was arrested twice. "It was horrific, their interrogation, and unbelievable how Ian would not have said anything about my arrests," Thomas said. "But that's so typical of him, he has to be the central character with no thought at all of what I was suffering."
While testifying in Dublin's High Court in 2014 in the course of his lawsuit against police, Bailey admitted to having been "seriously violent" toward Thomas on three occasions, most recently in 2001, after which he pleaded guilty to a charge of assault. "I don't know what I can say about that other than to say it's to my eternal shame," he said.
Meanwhile, the reason Sophie's family—including her parents, now both in their 90s—agreed to be involved in Netflix's A Murder in West Cork was that, finally, they felt someone was going to celebrate her life as well as plumb the case of her death. That she'd get to be the central character in her story for a change.
"I've been making documentaries for over 20 years and those are the hardest interviews I've ever had to do," director John Dower said of interviewing Sophie's mom and dad, noting, "The father, Georges, kept breaking down in heaving sobs of tears."
Because even after 25 years, the grief remains fresh.
"We were her parents," Georges Bouniol told the Irish Times of his daughter in 1999, back home in Paris after attending a memorial Mass in the West Cork village of Golleen for the third anniversary of her death. "We made her. We could not follow her, we could not protect her..." Added his wife, Marguerite Bouniol, as they watched old home movies, "I want to talk about her, because I don't want us to forget her."
Daniel, Sophie's second husband, told the paper that his wife had "an obsessive sense of mystery. She liked to have lots of secret gardens—even after we married, I'm not sure I knew everything about her."
That sounded fitting of a woman who took vacations alone to a remote area in Ireland—though sometimes she brought Pierre-Louis, her son from her first marriage—and eschewed the media attention that came with marrying Daniel, whose previous two wives were actresses and his past paramours included Isabelle Huppert and Isabella Rossellini.
His first date with Sophie was at a Le Monde-hosted dinner at a chateau during the 1989 Cannes Film Festival, where she was doing PR for Unifrance, the national movie promotion board. The place card only referred to her as Daniel's escort and other guests mistook her for Huppert—which enraged Sophie, Daniel remembered, so it took a bit of persistent wooing back in Paris to finally win her over.
By 1999, Daniel was remarried and not on good terms with Sophie's family. Her aunt Marie Madeleine Opalka told the Irish Times that they didn't approve of his criticism of the police handling the investigation, especially when he hadn't even gone to Ireland in the wake of his wife's murder ("We, the family of Sophie who truly loved her, are grateful to the Irish police")—or that he and his fourth wife had named their new baby girl Tosca, the name Sophie had wanted to give to the daughter she still hoped to have.
Daniel, who died in 2003 of a heart attack at the age of 61, said Sophie was "impulsive" and would disappear if she was upset at him. Opalka said her niece did often come to her house when she felt like avoiding her husband—but if she was that mad, it would have been for a good reason.
"When she arrived somewhere the air vibrated in a special way—there are few people who have such an aura," Opalka described Sophie. She called her "the most beautiful baby I have ever seen—absolutely ravishing. From the moment she was born I admired her. I was fascinated by her."
Marguerite, Sophie's mother, said, "Every year, we feel torn apart when we arrive and see Sophie's house from a distance, overlooking the valley, waiting for us. Every year, our hope of seeing justice done decreases." The family had a stone Celtic cross inscribed simply with "Sophie" put up at the spot where she died.
Whatever they think of Ian Bailey, Sophie's family primarily wanted to see whoever was responsible for her death caught and punished.
"I've had to be twice as strong as anyone," Marguerite told The Guardian in 2010. "But it's natural, isn't it, that I should want my daughter's murderer to be behind bars?" Some days, it was hard to maintain her Catholic faith, she admitted, explaining, "It depends on the day. There are moments I don't believe at all. There is something totally unjust and abnormal about parents surviving their children."
Sophie's beloved cottage now belongs to Pierre-Louis, who told the Irish Times in 1999 when he was only 18 that he had no plans to ever sell it.
"It's my house now, and I want it to be open to all my mother's friends and family, as it was when she was living," he said. "I go there and people are kind to me. Each time, I return to find her belongings, her smell. I sleep in her bed, and I feel she is with me—I am happy."
Now married and with children of his own, he told the Independent that sitting down with Dower's documentary crew was cathartic for him. "I needed them," he said of the interviews. "With friends and family, it's taboo—you don't go around speaking about the murder of your mother. When I finished [watching the series] I felt love for Ireland. I want to go back. I feel at home with my mother when I'm in that house in Schull. I know it's strange."
Sophie: A Murder in West Cork is streaming on Netflix.
(E! and Sky Crime are both owned by Comcast Corp.)