Cold Case Review of Sophie Tuscan du Plantier murder to proceed

Well there is a thread, so people are discussing the topic, much like any other topic on boards.
If you have a problem with the thread moderation I think you should take it up with the mods.

Thank you! That is very clear and helpful. Most useful photographs.

However - it does still appear that the "missing gate" is the one at which the murder took place. It was standing open when the body was found, of course. And now I'm getting muddled; - was "Sophie's gate" - the one beside the pumphouse and leading into her land - was this one open or closed at the time the body was found?

"So it is entirely reasonable to subject the Garda case to scrutiny and consider other narratives"

Not on Boards.i.e it isn`t. There are too many poorly informed contributors making half assed allegations based on nothing more than a bit of hearsay or worse still Chinese Whispers.

Take yourself for example. You and I have been on these threads for a number of years now. I remember at one point that you held the firm belief that Farrell and Bailey knew each other before the murder. The clear implication in that was that Farrell and the Gardaí went to great lengths to set up Bailey. Far beyond anything Farrell has alleged since she revised. Farrell claimed from the outset that she didn`t know him. Then West Cork Podcast came along and got to the nub of it with Bailey when he described meeting Farrell for the first time after the murder. He said she was "this woman who I did not know at all."

Similarly with Leo Bolger and his witnessing Sophie being introduced to Bailey. You claimed it was another conspiracy with the Gardaí using the fact that they had Bolger over a barrel because they`d nailed him on a drugs bust. I remember that you even made suggestions about the judge in that case. You also made a whole issue about the convenience of recovered memory. Along comes West Cork Podcast and confirms that no, actually Bolger had been saying for years before the drug bust that he saw Bailey being introduced to Sophie. He had even been lined up several years previously to testify as much in the libel case. It was confirmed to WCP by counsel.

And having said the above I would add that I consider you to be one of the best informed contributors on here. But your constant deferring to dodgy practice in almost every instance is wholly wrong and has been shown to be wrong on the Bandon tapes where the only conspiracy evident is two cops remarking that a colleague needed to change his statement regarding an ill judged remark that he had made about Jules Thomas. And that is something that he was perfectly entitled to do. If only every major investigation was subject to the level of scrutiny that this one got.

There's far more dodgy behaviour than that relating to the Guards on the case. Just more semantic games from you oh it's only "conspiracy event" if you can show it was 2 or more Guards acting in secret, even if we have evidence of multiple actions on the case by different Guards.
That sort of semantic nonsense gets you and the thread nowhere.
That's just what, as a matter of luck, was recorded on the Bandon tapes, and even that alone is even to establish that the Garda conduct in this case was not on the level.

We also have "missing", "lost" or deliberately destroyed:
A French wine bottle found four months after the murder in a field next to the scene.
A black overcoat belonging to Ian Bailey.
The original memo of interview of Jules Thomas following her arrest in 1997.
An original witness statement from Marie Farrell provided on 5 March 2004.
An original witness statement from Jules Thomas dated 19 February 1997.
Job books are meant to form a complete record of all activity undertaken in a major or critical incident along with the rationale for the decisions made. The report stated that as the hard-backed book had a glued spine “it would not be possible for pages to simply fall out of the book by accident and for them to be removed, this would have to have been a deliberate act”.

Have you yourself not said the Garda investigation was up to scratch, especially in the early stages?
Why did the Guards not follow Harbinson's instruction?
So right there, we have reasonable doubt even without any of the other dodgy behaviour from the Guards.

No one has given a credible, convincing detail for the interactions between Marie Farrell and multiple Guards in the investigation. How it was she identified Bailey at 3am and why.
Why did a Guard meet with her alone at a Dublin hotel?
It's one thing to 'know' someone, but it is surprising that Marie Farrell is claiming she as a shopkeeper on Schull main street never so much as set eyes on a distinctive character as Bailey once.

Likewise with Leo Bolger... the murder was the talk of the town. Yet there is no record of Leo Bolger mentioning this supposed meeting until years later, no one else can remember him mentioning this when Bailey was arrested, or even sooner as he was talked about the town as a suspect. So nope, I don't find him credible at all.
The discrepancy in the sentence handed out to Bolger for drugs offences and some of the other drug related cases handled by the same judge is remarkable.

Why did the Guards interviewing O'Colmain bring up his son's drug arrest?

We had Mark McCarthy on this thread being quoted as having seen Bailey and Sophie together at Cape Clear, as if it was fact. Yet when he was pressed on it that it didn't tally with Sophie's diary, he came out with gibberish about confusing the woman with someone from the TV reconstruction.

Was that conspiracy? Was that a mistaken witness? Was there a personal vendetta?
OR are we just not allowed by you to question the credibility of such claims, because it makes us a conspiracy theorist?
And doesn't that just establish what a nonsense line of argument it is intended to shut down discussion and why posters openly deride such claims and ignore them?

Witnesses can be sincerely mistaken, they can allow themselves to be 'guided' by the police questions where they are uncertain, or yes they can lie for their own ends or corrupt ends.
Multiple posters provided reasons why it is important to get independent witness statements, as soon as possible after an event. And that's witnesses who saw the ACTUAL incident. Here we are so far removed from the actual incident there is even more reason to doubt testimony.
You have failed to engage with this but objectively, it forms reasonable doubt about testimony given years later and especially where year later recollections become 'clarified'.

So wherever on the spectrum all of this dodgy behaviour falls between incompetence, malfeasance or outright corruption... it is entirely reasonable to question the Garda focus on Bailey and the Garda conduct in this investigation.
There's more than enough red flags about this investigation that they do not get the benefit of the doubt.

And any further attempts to gatekeep the discussion will be treated with the contempt it deserves.

According to @tibruit this is perfectly acceptable behaviour from police investigating a murder.

D/Sgt Hogan: Okay, yeah. I need to talk to you about, em, your colleague’s statement of evidence. I need him to...but I’ll talk to you first...

D/Gda Fitzgerald: The most honest man.

D/Sgt Hogan: He has comments in it like “I knew she was making every effort to tell me the truth.” Do you follow?

D/Gda Fitzgerald: Yeah

D/Sgt Hogan: I don't need them for starters

D/Gda Fitzgerald: That statement needs to get **** chopped up anyway

Nothing to see here. No sirree.

These are not the actions of police interested in justice or finding Sophie's real killer. These are people out to get a 'result' at all costs.

And oh look at what pieces of evidence could not be traced by GSOC, GSOC who was stonewalled by retired Guards.

The original memo of interview of Jules Thomas following her arrest in 1997.

An original witness statement from Jules Thomas dated 19 February 1997.

The Guards are obviously hiding something. The only question is what.

It may solve it or sadly it may just establish that their conduct in the active stage of the investigation focusing on Bailey meant the real killer(s) either were missed entirely or not properly scrutinized, leads \ evidence not followed up, "lost" etc etc

I think her husband is behind her murder... I don't know how but he is the only one to 'gain' from it. Not coming straight to Ireland after her murder was so strange.

I seem to remember him saying in an interview in January 1997 that Sophie was pregnant at the time of her death (which she clearly wasn't as per the post mortem). Odd.

He is the last person to have spoken to her so he definitely knew she was alone in the house.

"gatekeep much?"

Someone needs to try. Otherwise this thread descends into conspiracy chaos. It has been open season on Bailey right from the time he first confessed. I suspect because of that there`s a bunch of ye here who seem to think that it`s open season on everyone else too. It isn`t. Everyone else didn`t confess.

"In reality most on here are searching for justice for Sophie"

No you`re not. You are living in a dystopian episode of Murder She Wrote where the the obvious suspect is never the killer.

There is no need to gatekeep a thread, what are you actually on about, what are you even worried about? There are moderators who manage the threads if you have a problem, just go and take it up with them. They are very good at keeping people in line.

Most are earnestly searching for justice since it's been almost 30 years, and the cold case review is coming up on what 3 or 4 now too, and it's just crickets. If there was nothing to answer why would there be a cold case review at all?