The murder of Sophie Toscan du Plantier in December 1996 is one of the most infamous unsolved crimes in Irish history, and one of the strangest legal sagas in modern Europe. Sophie Toscan du Plantier was a 39-year-old French film producer who had bought an isolated holiday cottage in West Cork, near the village of Schull, as a private retreat. Two days before Christmas, she was found beaten to death near the gate of that cottage, in her nightclothes, on a lonely Irish hillside. The investigation that followed became infamous, both for what went wrong in its earliest hours and for the man it fixed upon: an English journalist named Ian Bailey, who was arrested twice, never charged in Ireland, and always maintained his innocence. And there the case entered genuinely extraordinary territory, because a single murder came to be answered by two countries in two opposite ways. In this episode of Crime at Bedtime, we tell the full story of the murder of Sophie Toscan du Plantier: the killing on the West Cork hillside, the flawed investigation, the chief suspect who was never convicted in Ireland but was tried and found guilty in France in a court he never attended, the three separate Irish refusals to extradite him, and a mystery that his death has now sealed, perhaps forever. Settle in, get comfortable, and let us tell you the story of two days before Christmas.
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