Old thread seems to be permanently locked. It will be interesting if anything can come of this at last.
Threadbanned Posters:
Was there an offical police report on this?
The blood from the back door handle was tested again in 2002 in the UK after that DPP report and I believe the phrase the scientist used was "“very strong support” that the blood came from Sophie. The sample was not given to the French to test in 2011.
On the bloodstain on the back door.
From the DDP Report
At page 23 of Dr. Geraldine O’Donnell’s statement, she refers to light bloodstaining of human origin being found on the outside surface of Sophie’s back door. (E.G.9) She was provided with an insufficient sample to identify the blood grouping.
https://syndicatedanarchy.wordpress.com/
Thanks. Found it
The point of the article is that it is not easy to remember detail. Details could be up to 30% inaccurate. Even short term memory is transformed by what we expect.
As we reconstruct long term memories they become more and more like a game of Chinese whispers with ourselves as the detail becomes more and more transformed with each iteration by our perception and expectations.
It’s easier to remember the truth.
It's on the podcast addict app 33 minutes & 54 seconds long
Add in alcohol and tiredness and even less reliable.
Memory, even very short term memory, is far less reliable than people think.
https://www.livescience.com/human-behavior/short-term-memory-illusions-can-warp-human-recollections-just-seconds-after-events-study-suggests
This has significant ramifications for the accuracy witness statements. A memory may be broadly correct but the details cannot be relied on without corroboration.
I wouldn't pay much notice to contradictions at this stage. It's a quarter of a century since the murder. Easy to make errors after all that time.
I can't find it only trailers on spotify and podtail. Someone on twitter said it was 30 mins and had "Further contradictions re key parts of his narrative, clear implication that JT lied in her statements". If anyone finds it can they post the link.
Surprise surprise
Bailey in the indo today saying his podcast is released he said it was originally to be someone asking him pointed questions and him answering but he has decided to do monologue instead
"Could it possibly be that a practicing medical doctor does not know that arterial blood (being oxygenated) is a lighter colour than venous blood?"
Unlikely, and he would know that the darker drier blood around the site was older than the lighter coloured blood that "impressed" him. Garda Prendiville called it "wet" and Byrne called it "fresh". If Harbison was aware that there was wet fresh blood on the body 24 hours before he got to examine it, it's unlikely he would have considered the previous evening as his favoured time of death.
I didn’t realise a doctor was on the scene that morning but it seems he was no help to the State Pathologist.
He sounds impressed that some blood on the body was a lighter colour. That is practically inevitable if the body was badly beaten and the head smashed. Could it possibly be that a practicing medical doctor does not know that arterial blood (being oxygenated) is a lighter colour than venous blood?
I’m sorry, that would be an outrageous slur on a practicing doctor so the journalist must have garbled things but imagine the look on Harbison’s face if the good doctor repeated that quote to him as if he had a brilliant insight 😤
One reason the various docu-dramas about this case don’t work as TV viewing is that they take the investigation seriously. The murder was horrendous but the investigation and the pursuit of Ian Bailey can only be treated as a farce.
We hear no more of all that bould talk about the DNA yielding results once techniques improve. The parents of Baby John, probably the most notorious murder before this case, have been identified after almost 40 years but I don’t think the bozos in this case got any worthwhile samples from a crime scene strewn with blood and hair.
The two Gardaí first on the scene, Prendiville and Byrne reported lighter coloured fresher blood around the face and neck. Doctor O'Connor arrived about 11am, he reported "Her nose and nostrils were covered in bloodstaining which to me appeared lighter in colour than the rest of the blood staining.” Nothing about "observing" rigor mortis. Dr O'Connor did not take the temperature of the body. Harbison arrived 24 hours later and he could only go on what he found.
He started the autopsy at 2pm in Cork hospital, so death could have been anytime from 38 to 28 hours beforehand. If he was able to establish the time of the murder to within a couple of hours between midnight and 10am I'm sure Marie Farrell would have "seen" Bailey on the road at that particular time.
As for Harbison driving down on Monday, one of the shortest days of the year, he would not have arrived till well after dark. Indeed the forensics team from Dublin did not arrive in Schull until 10pm, and they got lost trying to find the place. Calling Harbison incompetent or lazy or both or even drunk on his arrival is scurrilous, imo.
Harbison should have been able to give a time frame of 3 hours at least. If he was unable to do that, he would have either ben incompetent or lazy, or both. the Gardai on the scene had made elementary observations about rigor mortis in the period after the body was discovered.
Even in the 1970ies forensics would have had the capability of narrowing the time of death to at least plus or minus 3 hours. I know this first hand from somebody who studied medicine in the 70ies in a mainland European university.
The temperature at night time and during the day until forensics was at the scene was known and could have been factored in with ease. A time frame from 2am to 7am would have been to wide as a serious answer. That's a whole 5 hours.
Harbison should have been able to give a time frame of 3 hours at least. If he was unable to do that, he would have either ben incompetent or lazy, or both.
It was in front of the house, most notably at the door. It is the door at the back side of her house, I believe it's facing West, towards Alfie and Shirley. That's also the thing that sunned me always about this case:
If she either walked or ran down to the gates and met her death there, how come the blood is at the door of her house?
Was she injured in an attack right at the door and ran to the gate possibly screaming, or did she walk slowly with somebody to the gates to be killed then and there.
And then the killer came back to her house, looked around for something and made the stain of blood at the door himself?
Also, if she ran screaming how come Alfie and Shirley didn't hear a thing.
Either way, lot's of options, lot's of loose ends and unanswered questions.
Someone in the locality but not necessarily from the locality!
Didn't she have the locks changed once this was discovered (quite some time before the murder) and it subsequently stopped?
More a case of ruling some out
Not particularly.....
Wasn't somebody using Sophie's cottage to have a bath in.. probably sleep over too....?
What if this individual wasn't expecting Sophie to be at home?
but without evidence to link someone to the crime scene it could have been anyone.
Except it was likely someone in the locality that knew she was there at that particular date
even in the mid 90s you could have driven from Malin Head and been on the road home in that time. It doesn't help much in narrowing down the potential suspects.
Could have been shortly after 11 pm that night or 9 am next morning.
Perhaps slightly off topic, but a French court delivered another dodgy in absentia guilty verdict in a high-profile case. Similar to the Bailey trial in Paris, resplendent with dodgy uncorroborated evidence rejected previously, but they delivered a guilty verdict nontheless. Political pressure to bring the trial was highly likely, another thing one suspects was a feature of the Bailey trial.
Canada unlikely to extradite the man to France on the reading of this article.
What new information?
Even the Gardai are working on the basis that Bailey has an alibi until around 2 pm.
In any case, my point remains that the abysmal failure to collect any worthwhile forensic evidence from the scene of a brutal murder is compounded by the Garda failure to observe rigor mortis in the corpse that day.
After a quarter-century of investigation and trials, we know no more about this horrible murder than was apparent on the morning her body was discovered. Let that be the investigators’ epitaph.
With the benefit of new information that Harbison didn't have at the time, we know Sophie was killed sometime between midnight Sun and 10am Mon. Ian Bailey had no alibi other than Jules from when he left the pub around midnight until around 2 pm Mon. So no matter what Harbison estimated the time of death to be between midnight and 10am Bailey's alibi was going to be busted.
Dr Marie Cassidy was appointed deputy to John Harbison a year after Sophie's murder in 1998.
John Harbison retired 6 years later and Cassidy succeeded him as state pathologist in 2004.
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