Not if he a visited the place previously..... A former lover would know the place alright...
The entire country is covered in minute detail by Ordnance Survey maps. The half inch to a mile (1:126,720) scale map at the time would have had far more detail than Google maps shows today. It would also have had the advantage that a paper map doesn't have location tracking built in.
Anyone with even very basic mapreading skills could plan and follow a route on a map to her house.
One cannot assume without evidence that the murderer had to have known the area and been local.
Agree this is a remote townland not down town New York. Its easy to spot a cross roads or right/left turn.
Really like I was travelling all around Europe in the eighties, we used maps to get around, believe me once you can read a map you can find anywhere on the planet within reason without much bother, one would think we were driving around in circles like eegits asking locals where we were before the advent of google maps and sat navs the way some people are talkin
Not having a go at you, but some people seem to think that before the Internet was invented no one knew anything.
Vikings, Magellan, Copurnicus, the Apollo voyages to the moon and back, my dad driving around Ireland in 1961.
People could navigate then. They didn't need Google maps.
One thing here is a fair point and something that struck me when watching the documentary where they show the Christmas swim.
Firstly Bailey references something about talking to his lawyer which comes across a bit strange but knowing his apparent penchant for dark/mistimed humour, I just assume it was probably another bad joke.
What struck me most about the clip however was that to me he seemed to act completely normally, he recites a poem, says thank you/happy Christmas and just seems boringly normal (for him). Bearing in mind this is a couple of days after a violent frenzied attack. I'd say something if the man was Peter Suthcliffe and had a string of murders behind him but he definitely didn't act the way I'd have expected someone to act two days after having committed their first murder.
JT mentions multiple times that she doesn't think he'd have been able to keep something like this from her. From my take on watching that he'd want to have been incredibly good at hiding it.
The murderer had to have known the area and been local. It was 96 without google maps.
The amount of drink Bailey & JT were consuming at the time of the murder, I'm surprised they could remember their own names waking up in the morning....
Was JT not taking sleeping pills as well?
I can't remember what time I went to bed at last night? And I was sober watching bands from the nineties on Youtube. I left the property to check the out houses were locked before turning in. Thankfully, nobody was murdered in the vicinity last night, otherwise I might have some explaining to do...
Sorry Gard, I can't remember what time I left the house last night, I don't recall seeing any cars passing, but there might have been.. Don't recall how long I was outside for?
Imagine being questioned after being on a bender... Although Bailey gave conflicting statements about his movements on the night before the murder, I can only imagine how foggy his brain would be whilst in the process of sobering up.
I would also question Maria Farrell's eye witness account of the man near the bridge...
It would appear that she didn't want to be identified in the beginning (hence the fake name 'Fiona'). She rang from phone booths originally to mask her identity. This leads to two possible things:
1) She did see somebody by the bridge that night, and wanted to share this information with the Gards. Maybe she was with somebody she shouldn't have been with, hence the false name etc....
2) She's a total fruit cake that wanted to manipulate the enquiry with made up stories?
It really makes no difference now going forward.. Her reputation is shot to pieces, and she has been discredited numerous times.
I hope the case is opened up again.
There is a big difference between MF and Jules. Jules mostly stuck to her story all the years. MF is a self confessed liar. Did Jules retract the part that Bailey got out of bed? Didn't she retract some statements she made when arrested?
Thanks, I had forgotten that case and it is good to recall that some Gardai do a great job and that DNA is a tremendous forensic tool. I would love to have seen David Lawler's face when he realised that he had supplied the evidence that would send him away for life! (I think and hope he is still in prison. I wonder if he is guilty of other unsolved murders, like his cousin Larry Murphy who was in the same class with him in school?)
But the Gardai had put David Lawler on the spot by asking for a sample, as they did with many others in that investigation, and he took the risk, probably because poor Marilyn Rynn's body wasn't found for two weeks. IB was persistently volunteering his samples during questioning in Bandon Garda station when everyone assumed that forensic evidence would be recovered from the murder scene.
Let's see if those sunglasses help get a conviction for that horrible gang attack in Blanchardstown. The defence will try everything to exclude that evidence.
Didn't stop MF. Her guilt wasn't exactly tested. Although I get your point.
she is hardly gong to contradict herself now, that would look suspicious and show she was lying when she said she beliveed him innocent
I was quoting the podcast link to clip above
Or the local doctor who pronounced her dead at the scene,
or the local priest who administered the last rites at the scene,
or the local gardai who prayed with the priest at the scene.
or a local fox who may have happened by in the night,
all before the pathologist arrived at the scene.
West Cork says the French or Irish forensic or investigators would not tell them either way whether the boot lace DNA was compared with lab staff ETC DNA
Yes i thought there was blood on her shoe too. Was there blood on the sole of her shoe as well. What I wrote " They got a sample from her shoe from a "single sample swab" which had DNA of unknown male according to West Cork podcast. Podcasts says it could have been saliva and could have come from someone speaking in the post mortem." is from West Cork podcast. Here is the clip https://voca.ro/1QBiyx2LvTWG
I'm not an Ian Bailey cheer leader if that's what you are implying...??
It's quite ironic that you label him a 'degenerate self loathing drunkard' and then imply that he hijacked a murder investigation ??
Are you suggesting the Gards didn't form the same opinion too?? That they couldn't detect that he was an ego driven, self opinionated, drunken, media hoor.....??? Really??
The Gards are 100% responsible for the failure to investigate the murder properly and professionally. They failed at every turn, at every level. They targeted their man (Bailey) without one jot of evidence against him, they closed off any other line of investigation, and when ultimately realised they had nothing on him, procured false witnesses to change their statements to implicate Bailey at the scene / alleged confession(s).
The Gards hijacked their own murder enquiry. Their conduct was borderline criminal.
Bailey may be a drunkard. He may be egotistical. He is a Wife beater.... That dosen't make him a scapegoat for a corrupt murder investigation. There are plenty more home grown drunken wife beaters around the country besides Bailey, that dosen't make them, or him murderers.
Several newspaper / online sources report it as blood, others as DNA.
Not to mention beating up his partner. Who also got threatened and intimidated by the gardai (sounds like Reid-style guilt presumptive techniques) and her daughter also arrested.
Fishonabike said it was blood yesterday with a bit of authority. Not sure.
If your trying to show sympathy for IB can it. At best he's a degenerate self loating drunkard who's antics completely hijacked a murder investigation.
Bailey no more killed Sophie than any of us on this forum did.
I think he played the media to meet his own ends... He knew he had nothing to do with the murder, and assumed the Gards would eliminate him soon enough... He probably adored being the centre of attention (again, knowing that he was innocent).
As the botched investigation blackened his name, I'm sure he was adding up law suites, libel cases, compensation, a book deal....etc
His antics certainly rattled the Gards. How could this pompous Brit embarrass us like this in front of the world.. I wouldn't be surprised by how they reacted. There was not one shred of evidence connecting Bailey to the crime scene, they needed somebody to put him in the vicinity.
Enter Maria Fallell.
She was coached by the Gards and made change her statements several times. And the young fella being plied with drugs, cigarettes and money to give evidence. At this point, the investigation was locked on to Bailey, he was carrying the can for this, no matter if he committed the crime or not.. In reality, the Gards stopped looking for anybody else, their whole game plan was to put Bailey behind bars.
Without a doubt, the investigation was rotten to the core. Missing statements, pages torn out of log books, lost evidence, manipulating witnesses, money & gifts passing hands...... (That's before we talk about 'favours owed')
How could so much time and resources be used chasing shadows? Also allowing the real murderer to make good his escape?
Sophie had a complex love life... She had many admirers, and had taken on several lovers during her marriage. One scorned lover had already tried to throttle her previously... She kept herself to herself by all accounts, spoke French with little English. She was known to bring gentlemen friends to her cottage - Was it a glorified love nest??
Her Husband didn't even bother to come over with the family after her murder... And was married again within 18 months (obviously truly gutted about the tragic loss of his Wife).
Who was speeding away from the crime scene that morning?? What triggered such a violent rage that resulted in Sophie's head being caved in?? Too repeatedly keep smashing a rock / block of a woman's head in a frenzied prolonged attack is personal.
There are so many more people of interest here than Ian Bailey.
In my opinion, the murderer came from outside the community. The way she was murdered points towards an emotional motive. Maybe a scorned lover? Maybe her Husband was embarrassed about her infidelities and needed her out of the way, or maybe a divorce would be to expensive..? He didn't take long to get over her....
If somebody local was the assailant, their entire demeaner would change in the following days. Apart from being blood splattered and ripped apart by bryres, they would be noticed by their friends and family as being disheveled / missing from their normal routines. And one would assume that a missing neighbor, friend or work colleague would raise a red flag within the community after such an horrific crime - (Nobody was reported as missing or acting strange at the time).
Justice has not been done for Sophie - Neither has Baily been treated fairly. He is still serving he's sentence.
One would think that the first thing that would be done would be to compare the DNA profile to that of pathology lab staff and scene of crime gardaí for elimination.
Hopefully this DNA sample, even if first identified ten years ago, is what will help finally solve this case.
Okay, so let's assume that these photos existed (there's no evidence that they did exist but let's assume they did for now) - how would you see that as having worked, how did IB take these photos?
There's photos of him, taken with a long lens, looking through the front window of the cottage in the Netflix doc while one of the contributors says he was seen crossing over the cordon to examine the scene as far as I remember.
They got a sample from her shoe from a "single sample swab" which had DNA of unknown male according to West Cork podcast. Podcasts says it could have been saliva and could have come from someone speaking in the post mortem. EDIT: that was 2011 a French forensic scientist went to Cork so youare corect 1997 was much harder
IB told several people in news desks or reporters that he had photos of her alive, he told at least one person that he had taken the photos himself. It's one thing saying you have photos, hoping to pick some up afterwards, its another to say you took them yourself so no copyright or licensing issues would come up. He told the photographer sent to collect some crime scene photos that they had been taken around 11am.
The photographer said they were taken through bushes and practically nothing could be seen except that there were gardai around. In their official account they drove up to the scene and spoke to gardai, so its not clear why they resorted to taking photographs through bushes at that time.
David Lawler volunteered a sample to gardai, believing it wouldn't have been preserved at the scene: Fatal chance brought together an unlikely killer and his victim (irishtimes.com).
As the garda forensics guy on the documentary said, you needed practically a teaspoon of blood, a decent sample of semen or a large number of skin cells to get a profile in 1997, if the attacker was wearing gloves and had no direct contact with the victim then any forensically aware person would consider it unlikely there was DNA or fingerprint evidence of them to be found over a larger area of open, rough terrain.
Taking blood samples for drink driving is quite a bit different to taking a swab in a murder investigation.
In any case, once they had a warrant to seize personal items they were likely to get a sample. Just this week or last week a guy was linked to a serious assault because his DNA was found on a pair of sunglasses.
It's true that the failure to preserve the scene meant that IB could explain away e.g. a fingerprint. This is particularly egregious because a central plank of his defence is that he did not know Sophie personally and never visited her house before the murder. But he was also offering to give a blood sample - a match with blood at the scene could not be explained away.
Perhaps you are right and the chaos of the investigation was such that a journalist like IB had been told just weeks after the murder that there had been a total failure by the forensics team. What a terrible scenario! A murderer brazenly offers sample of his blood because, as a journalist, he had discovered that the blood he had spattered all over the crime scene did not yield any evidence. I'm prepared to believe anything at this stage about this investigation (and it would make a dramatic scene for CSI:Dublin) but I prefer the simpler explanation - that IB was confident his blood and hair samples would prove his innocence.
Who in Ireland was convicted of rape/murder after volunteering a DNA sample? I don't recall any case in this country where the culprit provided DNA samples voluntarily but it is possible someone did so in the past before DNA testing became part of the forensic arsenal.
You say there are few advantages in refusing to provide samples. The legal profession will await a detailed exposition of your reasoning before they abandon their strongly-held opposition to this notion. The law makes it very difficult to take samples. The tragi-comic history of our drink-driving legislation continues to this day:
https://www.irishtimes.com/news/crime-and-law/courts/high-court/drink-driving-conviction-overturned-as-wrong-doctor-allowed-blood-sample-1.4513999
I wasn't disagreeing with you. I was disagreeing with the person who said there was plenty evidence but the late arrival of Harbison was the reason no evidence of value was found. There's no way to determine evidence was lost due to Harbison's late arrival. They still found blood on the door and the gate and DNA on her shoe lace. . It is true to say they got nothing of evidential value but it is not true to say there would have been forensic of evidential value had Harbison been there immediately which is what the other person said. No one knows that.
That night was near freezing and cold frosty weather helped preserve DNA in Marlynn Rynn's case.though I don't know if it was much colder in Marlynn's case.
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