Murder at the Cottage | Sky

DivilsAdvocate

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117895395#Comment_117895395

In the libel trial before she broke down i think yes, but the guards were never going to charge her with perjury considering she was saying they coerced her into testifying in the first place.

If she was charged with perjury then you'd have to charge all the guards who put pressure on her to falsify statements and incidents.

prefab_stout

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117895415#Comment_117895415

Plenty of people would have been driving around dark country roads while drunk. It was very much common practice in this country until not too long ago.

mossie

I think the biggest problem with him driving there is how he would avoid getting blood in the car. I would assume the guards would have taken his car in for tests?

sekiro

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117895429#Comment_117895429

To be fair, considering the nature of the crime, that car would have been in a mess had he driven it back home afterwards. There no tactful way to put that. He would have almost certainly needed to have ditched the car somewhere it couldn't be found. I wonder if the Gardai ever did examine his car or home etc in any great detail.

odyssey06

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117895428#Comment_117895428

Well the generally toothless GSOC would have charged the detective in charge of the evidence in relation the deliberate destruction of 35 pages (including pages relating to MF) had he still been in the force. But dead men tell no tales.

DivilsAdvocate

One of the only bits of interesting information from the interview on Monday, that has largely gone unnoticed, was when Bailey said that Sophies son was kicked out of Daniel Tuscan Du Plantiers house not long after the murder.

DivilsAdvocate

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117895511#Comment_117895511

Do you know off hand when the pages were discovered missing?

EdHoven

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117895039#Comment_117895039

The whole "IB is guilty" rests on MF's alleged sighting of him on foot a Kealfadda Bridge.

So it is in the interests of AGS and their sock puppets on here to say he walked.

Undoubtedly in the real world a pie-eyed IB would have no qualms about driving.

odyssey06

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117895543#Comment_117895543

GSOC said it was unable to clarify when the interference may have taken place other than believing it was likely to have occurred since a review of the file in 2002, but possibly as far back as the 1990s. The commission said it had considered whether the interference with the Jobs Book warranted sending a file to the DPP, but they had chosen not to on the basis that one of the main gardaí who had responsibility for the documents had since died.

https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/arid-30859712.html

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117894445#Comment_117894445

comment in Tomi

what is that. https://streamable.com/a22821

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117895666#Comment_117895666

Tomi Ungerers statement, or it could be in Yvonne's. It was referenced that she had a sense of foreboding after being at three castles head, but this has been taken massively out of context in terms of everything they said.

drumm23

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117895298#Comment_117895298

And there was no forensics (that we know of) in the car; which is massively unlikely considering the state of the murder scene.

DivilsAdvocate

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117895597#Comment_117895597

Very interesting, great find

MoonUnit75

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117894222#Comment_117894222

Helen Callanan told a different version of events to IB. IB said Helen just happened to mention that she had heard rumours about him being a suspect and he jokingly replied 'yes, it was me, of course I did it' or something like that. Helen's version is that she had found out from others that her main correspondent on the case was actually the main suspect and had been getting information on the investigation due to him being the one investigated. She rang to eff him out of it because he was making a fool of the paper and to finish his relationship with the company. So it wasn't a lighthearted conversation over the water cooler.

The DPP report was written in 2001 without the DPP even speaking to any of the witnesses. Most of the same witnesses gave evidence in 2003 during the libel trial and Judge Moran specifically mentioned the same witnesses as being credible and truthful. That is after seeing them cross-examined by Ian's legal team. That is what matters, not a paper exercise and imagined scenarios thought up by someone in the DPP's office.

The one thread that runs through all the alleged confessions that marks them out as different from the interrogations by the gardai is that IB was either drunk or under extreme stress, according to these witnesses.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117895666#Comment_117895666

Much as I love Jim, what he says is not what the statement on the screen says is it?

Bit of artistic licence most likely.

MoonUnit75

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117894595#Comment_117894595

MF was questioned about this in court and agreed with the state's barrister that a named detective had gone to Longford to try and track down the man based on the little amount of information she did give them. She agreed this was inexplicable if he had earlier suggested to her that she just make up a name, which is what she had claimed.

You have to remember, MF wasn't publicly known until sometime shortly before the libel case in 2003. The gardai put out an appeal for anyone who was in that area who saw something suspicious to come forward, that obviously includes anyone MF was in the car with. The gardai could not publicly appeal for 'the person who was with MF' as she was not publicly known as being the witness and this would expose her. If they prosecuted her for not saying who she was with, that would invalidate her own testimony, the only one they did have.

MoonUnit75

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117895176#Comment_117895176

Marie Farrell had only lived in Schull for a year at the time of the murder. She lived a distance outside the town as far as I know. When she moved there first she ran a stall in Cork city, it was only later that she opened her shop. So she was on the main street in her shop for less than a year, maybe less than a few months at the time of the murder.

Deeec

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117895920#Comment_117895920

Or the Gardai knew there was no man to be looking for

MoonUnit75

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117895861#Comment_117895861

The first time the gardai would have had access to the car was either on or after February 10th 1997, about a month and a half after the murder.

MoonUnit75

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117895944#Comment_117895944

On the Bandon Tapes they can be heard discussing how sensitive it was that this other man was married and she didn't want to break up his family. They didn't know they were being recorded until well over a decade later.

MoonUnit75

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117895428#Comment_117895428

It was Judge Hedigan who said he was referring Marie Farrell's testimony for Ian Bailey directly to the DPP, the gardai had no involvement in the decision not to prosecute her for perjury.

Deeec

As regards the car - Jules and Ian only had one car which they shared. So the car they drove to the murder scene the next day was the car IB potentially used to drive to Sophies house if he didnt walk there. If he did commit the crime he would have been covered in blood and if he drove to Sophies house the car would have been covered in blood. Would he have had had time to clean the car? Jules would have had to notice the next day the mess in the car or that the car was given a good oul clean. Why would he risk driving the car to the murder scene the next day?

If it was IB I dont think he drove to Sophies house.

MoonUnit75

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117895143#Comment_117895143

Agreed on almost all of this. The only thing I would think differently about is whether she knew the killer. The fact that she had her walking boots on suggests she didn't know the person well enough to invite them in, she was intending on going out in the freezing night instead. So to my mind it was either an unexplained noise that she wanted to investigate or it was someone she knew to see but didn't know well enough to say that they should come in out of the cold.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117895960#Comment_117895960

The only way those guards would give a flying fig about not identifying Mr Midnight is if he's one of them.

I'm sorry, but a supposed "key witness" and let's not bother finding him cos he's married???

Feck sake. I don't think so.

MoonUnit75

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117896098#Comment_117896098

Do you not see the paradox though:

Nothing MF said in her statements can be trusted because the gardai forced her to give them what they wanted

But yet, MF should have been forced by the gardai to tell them what they wanted to know about the man she was with.

How do these two thoughts sit together?

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117896141#Comment_117896141

The woman's a complete train wreck. Most compulsive liars occasionally tell the truth, but sifting through her endless lies and contradictions is something I just don't have the spoons for I'm afraid!

Possibly she was out with someone. They should have been made to come forward. It doesn't mean she saw IB at the bridge tho, perhaps the man she was with conveniently told her to invent this part to place him at the scene?

The woman needs an entire re-investigation just about herself tbh.

mamboozle

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117895889#Comment_117895889

The one thread that runs through the evidence from most of these witnesses is that they are admissions of guilt from IB, which would allow them to be admitted in court as they are exceptions to the hearsay rule. Very convenient. In the libel trial it suited the state to believe Marie Farrell and in Bailey's action for damages against the state it suited the state not to find any credibility in what MF was saying about being put up to things by the Guards. This has all to do with protecting the state and its officers. By far the most convincing analysis of all this saga is the evisceration of the framing of Ian Bailey in the DPP's file.

Most people who have studied this case have now moved passed asking whether there was a cover-up to asking what was about this murder that so much time, energy, resources and money had to be put into covering up the truth. It's why they reached a hasty conviction in France and wanted to embarrass us with a demand of extraditing Bailey when we know he's completely innocent.

odyssey06

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117896141#Comment_117896141

They don't sit together or have to be true at the same time, either one of them is a torpedo that sinks the whole MF nonsense below the waterline. It's the pincer on which her nonsense is caught.

The Guards didn't give a damn about breaching Marie Farrell's anonymity, when she phoned anonymously as 'Fiona', regardless of what implications that had for her marriage did they?

Are we expected to believe Marie Farrell's cared more about this man's marriage than her own?

Marie Farrell should have been forced to disclose who was in the car with her.

Yes, if the Guards had been doing their job properly. Which they weren't. And destroyed the evidence to cover up their shenanigans with Marie Farrell, such as the very basic question of how it was Marie Farrell came to identify Ian Bailey.

Despite working on Schull Main Street for a year and Ian Bailey being such a distinctive figure.

Despite her initial descriptions not resembling Ian Bailey at all.

The Guards didn't get to the bottom of who was with MF, despite converting Marie Farrell's testimony into identifying Ian Bailey when she blatantly did not in her earlier statements. Because it wouldn't have suited their tunnel vision on Bailey. The other person may not have been so easily converted.

Of course, there's the possibilities Marie Farrell wasn't anywhere near the murder scene that night, there wasn't anyone in the car with her, the person in the car with her was a Guard... who knows? All we do know is Marie Farrell is a fantasist and a liar.

tibruit

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117896098#Comment_117896098

If the guards really knew who Farrell`s passenger was, then his name would have been mentioned on the Bandon tapes.

mossie

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117895889#Comment_117895889

Does the DPP ever speak to witnesses in any case?