Sophie: The Deceased Witnesses
As time marches on, memories of the West Cork murder are dying away
Time is a funny thing. It has a habit of marching on, for some reason. Time flies too. It marches sometimes and flies at others. Time. A conundrum.
We know what time does to memory. It’s not what you’re thinking. It’s not like a lettuce, memory. Some parts fade immediately and some hardly at all. Some moments will remain burned into your brain forever, whether you want them there or not.
What time does to a cold case can be very strange indeed. For those who were in West Cork at the time, 23 December 1996 was a low ebb. Very many people will remember many things about the week that followed. Some people are bound to know a few things they have not shared.
What time does to a cold case, very often, is loosen tongues. Some secrets die with their keeper but sometimes people feel a need to share, to unburden. How would I feel if this case was solved by someone who knew all along? Foolish? Angry? I hope not. I would feel contentment. The notion that all cases are solvable is almost a maxim of true crime. How they are solved varies, but sometimes we just sit and wait, and the answer pops up out of the blue. One day, another witness will come close to death and will speak. Some hoped that the suspect would squawk before he croaked. He didn’t. What does that tell us about the man who couldn’t stop talking?
I wanted to choose an image for this post that was not the victim or the suspect or any of the witnesses. I hovered for a moment over Marie Farrell but she is still with us and anyway, did she really see anything relevant? Eventually I chose the Fastnet lighthouse, a potent symbol to Sophie Toscan du Plantier.
It’s good to have hope! It was very sad that Sophie’s father died not knowing. I’ve just been looking at the Madeline McCann Netflix series and am struck by the similarities between the Irish and Portuguese police methods. They both seemed to just want a confession - understandably , as they operate under such pressure to solve high profile cases that involve another country. They also seized upon a suspect who was an outsider who inserted himself into the investigation. This derails the whole investigative process - police forces everywhere should learn from these mistakes.
Time does very strange things to memory too - just try telling a family story from years ago - everyone will have different versions. Perhaps if that initial focus on the one suspect hadn’t happened, we would know by now who the killer was. As it stands, memories can’t be considered as any sort of evidence. Our only hope is the science but if these latest DNA tests come back as Bailey’s I’ll be very very suspicious!
You make an important point especially re people's anger in the event it turns out they were wrong all along. Ego plays a massive role in people's adherence to their narrative. If a deathbed confession, or, better still, forensic evidence, cleared Ian Bailey post-humously, some people would find a bitter pill to swallow. There is also a hierarchy of suspects, like a popularity contest in reverse, with Bailey at the top, followed by other people who were hated or had no social capital (lovers, unemployed or in low-income careers, outsiders, childless, estranged from family etc). Every community has these people and in West Cork they had quite a few (Heinz Wollny etc).