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West Cork - audible podcast

17 replies

MulhuddartDrive · 16/02/2018 19:58

Anyone listened to it? I've binged it over the last 3 days and need to go back to the start and listen again. I knew very little about the investigation of the murder except that Bailey always seemed creepy as fuck, but from how the podcast lays it out, the incompetence of the guards and the seeming one track investigation blew any chance of a conviction for any suspect.

I can't begin to imagine the awfulness of the last 20 years for Sophie's family. RIP Sophie.

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eloisesparkle · 18/02/2018 09:14

My heart goes out to Sophie's family.
When bad things happen to visitors to Ireland I feel ashamed for my country.

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busyknee · 19/02/2018 09:12

I've been totally hooked for the last week. Just awful that the investigation was so bungled. The strangest thing is the star witness changing her story and refusing to say who was in the car. So deeply, deeply odd. Must be appalling for Sophie's family.

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MulhuddartDrive · 19/02/2018 13:14

Yes, the change in her testimony is very odd. And giving the name of a dead man when she did finally disclose it. It's amazing that for such a small community where you would expect everyone knows what everyone else had for lunch that there wasn't more information.

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busyknee · 19/02/2018 13:34

Made me wonder if she'd made the whole thing up.

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MulhuddartDrive · 19/02/2018 13:42

But why the whole thing of making the annonymous phone calls then? Maybe she wanted to bit of excitement of getting "caught" using her home phone for the last call? So very strange.

The guards just fucked the whole thing up completely. It's hard to tell if it's just incompetence or a cover up.

The horse theory was an interesting aside though!

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busyknee · 19/02/2018 13:59

Yeah, I wondered where they were going with that one!

Possibly she wanted the attention. Or she was with a guard?? It's just strange. To be able to stonewall in a murder investigation like that.

Even if he's married and doesn't want anyone to know, it's 20 years ago now. Surely he must realise how important it is.

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MealyPotatoes · 19/02/2018 21:44

Yes, a brilliant series and terribly sad for Sophie’s family to have had this dragging on.

The guards made a complete balls of the investigation.

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Eighttimeseight · 21/02/2018 19:22

I haven't seen this podcast but I've always believed that Ian Bailey didn't do it. He's no angel but I do think the Guards thought they had their man and didn't sufficiently follow up other leads.

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Fleurygirl · 21/02/2018 21:38

I've just finished listening to it today, it was a marvelous podcast, I felt Ian Bailey probably was the murderer up to about Chapter 8, or whenever Marie Farrell decided to change tack and completely redact her statement, and start singing for the other side. She may have been pressurised by the Gardai, but she definitely had another agenda too, whether it was to protect her boyfriend or whatever. I sincerely doubt some of her claims though, about the detective coming to the house she was cleaning and stripping off, demanding sex? Unlikely in the extreme.
I do think the Gardai made a balls of gathering the evidence, the delay in getting the pathologist to the crime scene, no prints, no forensics etc.

But I also feel it demonstrates that the Irish legal system works well in insisting on the innocence of the accused until proven guilty, I like the fact that the DPP wouldn't allow him to be charged without sufficient evidence.
I would prefer a guilty person to walk away, than an innocent person go to jail.
None of this brings any solace to Sophie's poor family, who only want justice for their daughter. Her son sounds like a beautiful person too.
The horse thing was just plain weird!

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SilentlyScreamingAgain · 22/02/2018 00:23

I love the podcast, it's a fantastic and sets out a very fragmented story well.

There is so much of Marie Farells' story that makes little sense to me. I know Schull well, I remember the ice cream parlour, if not her dress shop. Schull is much more chi chi now but back then, the only clothes available were hippy wear and sturdy polyester and the idea that a Parisian woman would be browsing in a Marie's clothes shop is a little odd.

That any shopkeeper on the Saturday before Christmas had time to glance out the window and notice a foreign looking man, in a long black coat and beret seems fanciful. (She only needed to add a string of onions around his neck and he could have been fresh out of an episode of 'Ello, 'Ello).

I also have problems with the Kilfadda Bridge sighting. I live on a similar boreen and sometimes walk my dogs at night because of the lack of light pollution from houses or streetlights, you can see cars coming from miles away. If you didn't want to be seen, as presumable you wouldn't if you'd just murdered someone, there is loads of time to hide before the driver gets close enough to see you.

It is easy to mock the Guards but it's sort of like mocking your office first aider for not being able to preform open heart surgery. They weren't used to dealing with serious crime or any crime really. Schull is too small to have a social welfare (or dole) office, so people used to sign on at the Garda Station and that was their main job of the week. They also used to drive around checking on vunerable people, for example there was an elderly woman, living alone in a house without electricity outside the village and they'd pop in to have a cup of tea and see if any turf needed bringing in from the shed. It was about as far from Law & Order as it was possible to be.

Furthermore, the extent to which the locals won't talk about anything except the weather is hard to overstate. The culture of looking the other way is impossible to explain to anyone from a city or even a large town. That must have made investigating a murder almost impossible.

Bailey is an awful man but I don't think that he's a murderer. There probably should be a crime of pushing yourself forward in a murder Investigation and wasting the time of those trying to do their job and he's most certainly guilty of that. To anyone else, his social exclusion since Sophie's murder would have been punishment enough but he's enjoyed his notoriety and perceives himself to be a local celebrity, if not hero.

I think it's ironic that two blow-ins created so much sound and fury to draw attention to themselves that they enabled a local to quietly get away with murder.

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Fleurygirl · 22/02/2018 06:07

Wow, Silentlyscreaming, that is an amazing post! I loved all your additional info, you are not one of the contributors are you? Niamh, the daughter of the guy who ran the local newspaper! Im only kidding, I am familiar with small town rural Ireland of years ago, though not Schull.
I totally agree with you about M Farrell's sighting of the guy outside the window...I actually thought that too, with the addition of the beret, it was too much nearly.
And I would be inclined to agree that the Gardai weren't purposefully inept, they probably did the best they could in strange and difficult circumstances, particularly in the immediate aftermath.
I'm going to ponder on the additional scene setting you've given us, certainly food for thought, thanks a mill!

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wedwose1 · 27/03/2018 00:35

Silently screaming "It is easy to mock the Guards but it's sort of like mocking your office first aider for not being able to preform open heart surgery."

Brilliant.

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gabsdot · 27/03/2018 11:12

Do you have a link for this podcast. It sounds great.

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MegCleary · 02/04/2018 18:27

Just finished it and mind swirling. It was great. I kept thinking that Marie was with a guard and that’s why she wouldn’t name him.

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visitorthedog · 02/01/2019 23:45

Old thread I know, but I’ve just finished listening to this, anyone else?

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Apileofballyhoo · 17/01/2019 15:46

My DH has just finished! I haven't because I read up on it all a few years ago and came to much the same conclusion. It's so very sad that a terrible murder was carried out and the murderer was never caught.

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visitorthedog · 17/01/2019 15:58

@gabsdot - very late reply but it’s free on audible!

@apileofballyhoo - I’ve only just listened to a few podcasts like / similar to this (Serial, S-Town etc) and it’s interesting how they sway your opinion one way and then the other based on how the (and which) facts are presented. I know that sounds obvious but it’s quite interesting in how it gives another view on human nature, I think. Although it is sometimes uncomfortable listening in that it’s so much about the potential perpetrator and so little about the victim.

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