Sophie: Two Doors, Three Gates

A detailed look at the West Cork crime scene reveals some clues previously missed

One more look at some of the crime scene evidence in the Sophie Toscan du Plantier case. After this I'll do some more general crime posts mixed in with a Suzy Lamplugh revival. As the holidays draw to a close I'm aiming for one post a week.

Was the gate open or closed? There is only one gate that people talk about in relation to this case. It had blood on it in several places. It was very large, perhaps 14 ft long. And it was found open by Shirley Foster at 10am on Monday 23rd December 1996. Sophie was known to be fastidious about closing the gate to protect against livestock, and for security. As the last person home on Sunday night, arriving in her Ford Fiesta, it seems certain she would have closed it. Who opened that gate, if anyone, becomes an obsession. Did you know there are at least 3 relevant gates? This one plus two more.

Another gate sits outside one of the doors to the cottage. I am reluctant to use terms like front door and back door because these labels can easily be misunderstood. I think of the ‘back’ of a property as being the way into the back garden, furthest from the street. But front and back become meaningless in a location as remote as this. This gate sits outside the white wooden door which had the blood stain near the handle, on the outside. As though someone with a bloody hand had opened or closed it. In front of this door was an old style, heavy metal dustbin. Very familiar in the 1990s and earlier. They had to survive hot ash from fires. No plastic wheelie bins here. The police crime scene map suggests this gate, also quite large, was shut at the time of the murder.

A third gate sits between the cottage and the storehouse. This is an outbuilding close to Sophie’s cottage that she had thought was included in the purchase. In fact it belonged to Alfie Lyons. This gate is not shown on the police map, which frustratingly stops short of the storehouse, and it is not known if it was open.

Let’s take a look.

This is where we need to start imagining scenarios, and is the part that is so difficult to do on your own. Just when you think you have covered every angle, someone suggests another flaw or additional possibility. Please comment below if you see any gaps or issues here.

Either a confrontation began at the blood-stained white wooden door or it didn’t. The confrontation either began exactly where Sophie was found, or somewhere else. We do know where the confrontation ended. We know that Sophie’s blue dressing gown was removed. We think this must have happened during a scuffle but cannot be sure. Maybe she shrugged it off herself in trying to escape or it was pulled off against her will. We know it was found underneath the largest object: this object is usually referred to as a concrete block, weighing around 23kg and about 18 inches long.

Where do these threads take us? There seem to be three main options:-

1. Sophie runs down the hillside or down the laneway for some reason, presumably because she is escaping danger or towards some kind of event down by the largest gate. In this scenario she runs either past marker no. 2 on the map above or marker no. 5. I think it unlikely she goes past marker no. 2 even in this scenario unless under duress.

2. Sophie calmly walks down to the largest gate following the laneway, taking her past marker no. 5. She is not being followed or chased, but perhaps someone at the gate was calling for attention or causing a commotion. In this scenario she is being drawn towards the gate, not running away from the cottage. Maybe it was an animal in distress.

3. Sophie answers the door to someone she knows. They walk calmly together down to the gate via marker no. 5. An argument begins on the walk and gets out of hand.

Another relevant question: if Sophie answered a knock on the door, which door was it? I’m not sure anyone has properly analysed all the implications of which door it might have been. If this seems pedantic it is because the details really do matter.

There are reasons this is such an important question. However the killer arrived, whether by car or on foot, the most obvious point of arrival is by marker no. 7 on the map above. This viewpoint is also shown in the photo below. A total stranger arriving from this point would not be able to see the western door, labelled ‘back door’ above. It is quite difficult to see it from any angle actually. A stranger would not know there was a second door, they would come to the ‘front door’ (highlighted below) which is close by the parking area and easy to see from a long distance away.

Note: I am grateful to a source with local knowledge for explaining that there is an off-road pedestrian route from the north, coming south over the very steep and rocky hillside. There is no vehicle access from this direction, but a person with local knowledge could have found the route if determined.

So a stranger would come to the door highlighted above, the front door of the cottage. But the smear of blood was on the other door, the invisible door, the door no stranger would know of. How could a stranger, having killed Sophie, potentially in the dark, return up to the cottage to an invisible door, thereby leaving a blood smear near the handle? How did the blood get on that door? They were in a rush, remember. They had just committed the most appalling crime and would want to flee. We can think of reasons they might want to check over the cottage, but time was of the essence. This case has remained unsolved partly due to the lack of eye witnesses. Whatever they did up there, it had to be brief. They would have returned to the front door, not the back door.

There’s another possibility. The killer was no stranger at all and knew all about the two doors, or walked to the site from the north and saw the back door first. But this gate was closed so to access the back door meant climbing over it or opening it, risking noise. As it happens, the invisible ‘back’ door is much closer to the Lyons house and is the first door you reach from that direction. Only two people could have come from that house: Alfie or Shirley.

We don’t know if the killer ever knocked on the door to alert Sophie. But we do know that someone, and we presume the killer, left blood on the back door. That person who left the blood either knew the cottage well because they knew Sophie, or had lived there before her, or visited Alfie regularly, or they knew it well because they had researched the setting. But before we diverge too much, we have to accept this was not a planned killing because the weapons were obtained at the crime scene, impromptu. If it was a spur of the moment event then nobody staked out the cottage in the days before the murder. They must have already known the layout of the building or the landscape.

We now need to dig even deeper than this. The blood on the door is a real puzzle. Let’s take a closer look.

Remember this is the back door, the invisible door. The picture shows that it is a mortice type that requires a key to lock. It is not a door that would lock automatically when closed. We know it is Sophie’s blood. At what point was the blood smeared onto the door? And who applied it?

Common consensus is that the killer caused the smear. If it was Sophie, then immediately we realise that the attack started here. Sophie was either trying to escape down the lane or back into the house and accidentally caused the smear. I can’t persuade myself that the attack began here or that Sophie caused the smear.

Most people seem to favour the killer causing this mark. If it was the killer then this happened during or after the attack. I can’t stand up any theory other than that it was after the attack, which means the killer returned up here after killing Sophie while at risk of discovery.

So an important question: why and how did the killer cause this blood smear? Was he trying to close the door or gain entry? It looks from the shape and location of the smear as though it was caused by touching the handle as if to open the door. Why would he want to go inside? There is no reason. This is a man under immense pressure, covered in blood and needing to escape. The only thing he can achieve by entering the property is to incriminate himself. Nothing inside was disturbed. The most likely explanation is that he was closing the door. But could it have been locked? Isn’t it more likely, from everything above, that this door was not used by either Sophie or the killer? The front door, not this door, is the most likely access to the cottage. The reason for this smear is a mystery. There's just one other consideration. We know Alfie Lyons came to the cottage after the murder, he said to warn Sophie about the killer in the hills. This is the door Alfie would have knocked on. Receiving no answer, did he test the handle?

Why did the killer choose the weapons he did? The killing was not premeditated which meant the killer had to improvise. There is little disagreement that death was caused by heavy objects found at the scene. Some people debate which stones and rocks were used or not. But the largest, heaviest block was found on top of Sophie’s blue dressing gown. This to me is strongly persuasive of an impromptu unplanned killing, not a professional attack. You could debate in the comments whether you think a professional might have dressed up such a scene to confuse investigators.

Going further still, I have seen various theories about the large concrete block. We know it came from the structure known as the “pump house” which was a very small building and not large enough to walk into. It had no doors or windows. It was more like a tiny bunker. To free the block from the pump house required a number of fiddly tasks, all of which required a certain amount of force. It was not cemented in place, but rather loosely left on the top row of blocks. Several people think this points to the killer having prior knowledge of the area. At first glance, the pump house looks strong. Only an insider would know that the wooden cover was rotten and there were blocks at the top that were loose, goes the theory. And even then, Sophie would have to be unconscious at this point otherwise she would have escaped while all this civil engineering is going on. But this theory also depends on a certain amount of darkness. In the dark, it would have been very difficult to free the block. But there was a full moon, no clouds. Far from darkness. Or did the attack happen after dawn?

What time of day do you imagine all this happens at? For a long time I thought it was the middle of the night. That narrative was put about to tie up with the now-discredited sighting of a man down near Kealfadda Bridge and the known whereabouts of Ian Bailey. This is a red herring that should trouble us no further here.

More recently I have come to realise the time of the attack was likely during or after dawn. It could very easily have been around 9am. It could not have been long before then as the sun rose at 8:40¹. There are reports that all the lights in the cottage were off when the police arrived. How did Sophie get out of the house without turning lights on? If she was running away from or towards an intruder surely she would not have paused to turn off lights. If she had a torch, what happened to it? If it was night, was there enough light from the full moon to see her way down to the gate? Everything is so much simpler if the sun was up. The post mortem leaves open either of these possibilities.

It is clear from the autopsy report that Sophie ate food two to three hours prior to death, and some people consider the stomach contents to resemble breakfast cereals rather than dinner. This would explain the loaf of bread being left out on the counter in an otherwise very tidy and clean kitchen. Nobody leaves bread out overnight because it spoils very quickly in the open air. The loaf points to a morning murder. More than that, it points to a murder during or just after breakfast. What time did Alfie Lyons leave his bedroom?

As per Sophie: The Final Verdict, we find this:-

Shirley Foster rose at 8:20 a.m. on Monday, 23 December. She had not been out of the house all Sunday and now had things to do. She made breakfast, whereupon Alfie also rose and got dressed. He had briefly been up an hour earlier to put on the heating and make tea, before coming back to bed. He had also been ‘up a few times during the night to go to the toilet.’

You can read more about Alfie Lyons here, but to save you some time, I have not persuaded myself that he is a suspect. It is hard to account for what happened to his blood-stained clothes. Everyone on the documentaries agrees that the killing would have caused at least some blood, and probably a lot of blood, to attach to the killer. There were many hours spent trying to track Ian Bailey’s clothes for this reason.

Over to you. Does this deeper analysis of the location help? I now have a much better understanding of the possibilities, and of how steep and rocky the location is.

1. Sun rise times (link)