@JemimaTab
I think anyone who could mete out the brutality that Ian did to his partner - on multiple occasions- is capable of murder. That isn’t to say that he murdered Sophie. But he was extraordinarily violent to his partner Jules, and was convicted of violent crimes against her. In episode 3 of the Netflix series, this is brought up and he says something like “it takes two to tango”. In other words, he was attempting to blame Jules for his attack against her, in which she sustained serious injuries including large chunks of her hair torn out, damage to her eye socket, her lip torn from her jaw, etc. Anyone going onto the Relationships board on MN to report something like this would be advised in no uncertain terms to LTB or else he would kill her. In the libel case, one of Jules’ daughters said that Ian propositioned her when she was 18. Apparently the reason that Jules finally split from him was that her daughters (and grandchildren) would not visit when he was there. This man does not have any redeeming features.
In his multiple interviews with the press, he gives every impression of relishing the limelight, and I think part of him thinks he has somehow outsmarted the authorities. Which, judging by the Netflix series, does not seem to have been too difficult as the police really fucked up the investigation. But it seems to be a psychopathic mindset.
No, it doesn’t mean he murdered Sophie. But the evidence was never gathered and so I doubt she will ever receive justice.
His violence was utterly appalling, and his attitude to it almost equally so — actually, I thought it was very revealing of a certain DV perpetrator mindset , especially the way he kept comparing it to an Elizabeth Taylor/Richard Burton folie à deux — but against that (in terms of it meaning he was a more likely murderer of STduP), there seem to be absolutely no indications he was ever violent to anyone other than Jules.
The press speculated about violence being the cause of the end of his first marriage, but the police interviewed his ex-wife and she said he was never violent towards her, despite already drinking heavily. The DPP report also contains interviews with two women who say he made a pass at them while drunk at house parties in west Cork, and say that when they rejected him, he didn’t turn nasty.
Which obviously isn’t conclusive in any way either, but doesn’t constitute a demonstrable pattern of ‘violence towards women’. Only one woman, alas for her..
Like a pp, though, for someone so often branded a ‘womaniser’, I notice there’s a remarkable lack of gossip, press stories or police investigation of any pre-Jules west Cork relationships, or any affairs he had outside his relationship with her. Talk is rife in places like this, so hard to see how it could have happened and been kept quiet.
I suspect that the failure to extradite IB to France had a lot to do with her decision to finally leave him — I’m not sure I buy the ‘daughters and their children won’t visit’ thing. Her daughters, entirely understandably, always hated IB — violent, alcoholic cocklodger who made a pass at one of them aged eighteen and still living under the same roof, and made their mother notorious — and have had periods of total estrangement from her for years and years. Plus at least some of the grandchildren aren’t so very young — at least one is six or seven — so grandchildren aren’t a new thing.