A Dream of Death Page 11
Other witnesses offered evidence that challenged the timeline offered by Mr Bailey, who was adamant he first learned of the killing at lunchtime when contacted by The Examiner. Shirley Foster said she met Mr Bailey driving up her laneway at speed. The meeting was not, she said, on the main Skibbereen–Schull road as Mr Bailey had claimed. Mike MacSweeney, a photographer for Provision Photographic Agency, said he was told by Mr Bailey that photographs of the murder scene were available. These had, he said, been taken around 11 a.m. However, this was two hours earlier than Mr Bailey had indicated that he had first learned of the killing.
Eddie Cassidy was adamant he had not told Mr Bailey during their telephone call that the Toormore incident was a murder nor that it involved a French national. He told the hearing that at the time he made the call on that December morning, he had still been trying to determine if it was a hit-and-run or whether it might have involved someone from a local New Age traveller community.
James Camier, who operated a vegetable shop in Goleen, said he recalled Ms Thomas calling in to him around 11 a.m. on 23 December 1996 and informing him that a murder had taken place and that it involved a French national. Ms Thomas would say that this meeting took place on 24 December, a full 24 hours later, but Mr Camier was insistent it was the earlier date.
It was put to Mr Bailey that he had confirmed his involvement to Helen Callanan, news editor with the Sunday Tribune, in a telephone conversation in early 1997. Mr Bailey insisted he merely confirmed to her what was being said locally about him. ‘People were asking her who Eoin Bailey was. At one point she said that it was being said that I was the killer. I said, “Yes, that is right.” I said it in jest. It was said in a light-hearted way. I had heard it from other journalists that I was supposed to have done it – I really was not taking it seriously,’ he said.
Mr Bailey said it was a similar story with the comments he had made to Sophie’s friend Yvonne Ungerer. He was adamant that he merely repeated to Mrs Ungerer the hurtful things being said about him – namely that he had killed Sophie with a concrete block. ‘I was not in any way serious – I do not think she took it seriously,’ he insisted.
Just when it appeared the libel action couldn’t get any more sensational, the defence team introduced someone who would quickly become the focal point of the hearing. Schull shopkeeper Marie Farrell took to the witness stand on 17 December, the eighth day of the hearing. From then on, her evidence would dominate the newspaper coverage and the hearing itself.
Mrs Farrell said she was living in fear of Mr Bailey and was afraid to allow her children out of her sight because of him. She claimed that Mr Bailey had effectively been ‘torturing her’ and that she was only reluctantly appearing at the libel hearing on foot of a subpoena issued by the newspapers’ defence team.
The shopkeeper told how, in the early hours of 23 December 1996, she was driving to her home outside Schull. She said that as she passed Kealfadda Bridge she saw a ‘tall man, in a dark coat, kind of distinctive-looking’. The man was walking with an unusual gait, his arms swinging by his side.
She said that, in January 1997, she spotted the same man in Schull, not far from her shop. It was at this point she notified gardaí. The man was identified to her as Ian Bailey. This statement was crucial because it contradicted Mr Bailey’s assertion that he never left the Liscaha property after returning home with Ms Thomas on 22 December. Kealfadda Bridge was approximately four kilometres from the du Plantier holiday home.
Mrs Farrell then claimed she was informed that Mr Bailey wanted to meet her. When he came to her shop, she said, he checked it to see if it was ‘clean’ and that there were no ‘bugs’ or electronic recording devices. The journalist had brought a tape recorder with him and said he wanted Mrs Farrell to say that the gardaí were placing her under duress to make a false statement about him. The shopkeeper told the hushed courtroom that she had refused to make any such recorded statement. She claimed Mr Bailey’s attitude towards her then changed. Later, she claimed he told her he knew things about her – and produced addresses in London and Longford she had associations with. It would subsequently emerge that Mrs Farrell had had apparent difficulties with the Department of Social Services while living in the UK.
She said she met him some weeks later and he shouted at her, ‘I know you saw me … but I did not kill Sophie.’ She alleged that on another occasion Mr Bailey had been across the street and made cutthroat gestures to her. Under cross-examination by Mr Duggan, she emphatically denied she had been placed under any kind of duress by gardaí to make a statement implicating Mr Bailey. She also denied she had personally invited the journalist to her shop. ‘I do not think any woman in her right frame of mind would invite Ian Bailey to her shop – especially when she is on her own,’ she replied.
Direct evidence ended, and the plaintiff and defence teams then took two days to make their closing arguments. Strangely for a libel action, not one of the journalists involved in the articles in question was called to offer evidence, a fact loudly complained about by Mr Duggan, who alleged that his client had just been subjected to ‘trial by ambush’. However, in a libel action the role of a plaintiff is to establish what alleged damage was caused to their reputation, and witnesses relate specifically to this task. Effectively, it was up to the defending media outlet whether to call the journalists involved to offer evidence.
Judge Moran said that, given the length of the hearing and the large amount of material that he wanted to consider, he would reserve his judgement until early in the new year. The move did not come as a surprise. Few expected a ruling within a matter of days after such an intensive two-week case, particularly with Christmas less than a fortnight away. Mr Bailey looked calm but weary after the Circuit Court experience.
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On 19 January 2004, Cork’s Camden Quay ground to a standstill as reporters, photographers, lawyers and members of the public battled to pack into the small courtroom. Dozens of people milled around outside the courthouse waiting for news of the ruling. Six different TV crews stalked the pavement, waiting for the verdict and footage of the key individuals in the case.
An inkling of which way the ruling might go came when Mr Bailey arrived with just his legal team. It was the first time throughout the entire hearing he had attended court without his partner by his side.
Just over 40 minutes after beginning his ruling address, Judge Moran dashed Mr Bailey’s hopes of a landmark judgment against the media. Far from the triumphant victory he had hoped for, the outcome of the libel case was a disaster for him. The judge said that the journalist had attempted to mislead the hearing about whether he was a violent man – and that none of the newspapers had defamed him by referring to him as the prime suspect in the du Plantier case.
The only comfort for Mr Bailey was that Judge Moran ruled against the Irish Mirror and the Irish Sun on a secondary issue to the hearing. This involved allegations by both papers that Mr Bailey had been violent towards his ex-wife, Sarah Limbrick. The judge said no evidence whatsoever had been offered for this, and he ruled that Mr Bailey had been defamed as a result.
But the judge, in a hard-hitting conclusion, said he would have ‘no hesitation in describing Mr Bailey as a violent man’. He said it was apparent that Mr Bailey ‘is a man who likes a certain amount of notoriety, likes to be in the limelight and likes a bit of self-publicity’.
Sitting in the courtroom, Mr Bailey showed no emotion, despite the obvious implications of the ruling. He stared stoically ahead as the judge’s comments drew gasps from some in the public gallery. After Judge Moran concluded his address, Mr Bailey briefly conferred with his legal team before leaving the court. So large was the crowd of reporters, photographers, TV crews and onlookers outside the courtroom that gardaí had to clear a path for him to reach the vehicle waiting for him.
He was left facing having to pay three-fifths of the newspapers’ costs in their successful defence of the action. Mr Bailey’s legal team secured just half their costs against
the two newspapers who were found to have defamed the journalist on the secondary issue. The total cost of the libel action was put at between €600,000 and €700,000, with Mr Bailey facing having to pay €200,000 of the newspapers’ costs. The newspapers immediately moved to freeze any defamation award payable to Mr Bailey on the secondary action until he indicated how he intended to pay his share of the costs ruling.
The hearing was clearly exhausting for Mr Bailey and Ms Thomas. But they weren’t the only ones. The entire Cork media were exhausted from a two-week case that, given the unrelenting daily 14-hour workload, seemed more like a six-week hearing.
I briefly spoke to a couple of the journalists whose work had been cited. It is every journalist’s worst nightmare to have a defamation action taken against them and there was sympathy among their Cork colleagues for those involved. From my brief conversations with them, I realised most had been keen to offer evidence and felt frustrated at not being afforded an opportunity to do so, even though they understood the legal strategy involved.
For Mr Bailey, the ruling could not have been more damaging. He faced potentially ruinous costs and, having taken the action to defend his good name, found himself again at the centre of an unrelenting media spotlight. Had he won the action, there is little doubt but that the future media approach towards him would have been radically different.
There was no doubt in my mind that a decisive factor in the entire two-week hearing was the evidence of shopkeeper Marie Farrell, who was now being referred to as ‘the star witness’ of the libel action.
7
MARIE FARRELL
I an Bailey may have maintained his calm demeanour amid the furore over his Circuit Court libel defeat, but few doubted that he was absolutely devastated by the outcome. What everyone had assumed would be a legal action with the media being put firmly on the defensive had instead resulted in Mr Bailey’s life being put under the microscope for public scrutiny.
Friends of the poet would later claim that he was effectively ambushed in the court, with his supporters particularly aggrieved that none of the journalists who had penned the relevant articles was ever put in the witness box. However, under Irish defamation law, Mr Bailey’s case was to set out the damage allegedly caused to his reputation – not to demand evidence from those who wrote the articles.
The newspapers’ defence strategy was to put the spotlight on Mr Bailey. And it had worked.
That January day, having painstakingly made his way through the scrum of reporters, photographers, TV crews and fascinated members of the public outside the Camden Quay court premises, he wearily headed back to west Cork. The car sped away and Mr Bailey vanished from sight for several weeks.
Every newspaper, radio programme and TV station wanted to hear from the journalist to get his reaction to the hearing and its remarkable outcome. He was, in media terms, the most sought-after man in Ireland. But he was nowhere to be found. Bruised by the intensive media focus on him throughout December and January, he took comfort with good friends in west Cork who were willing to shield him from the unyielding glare of the media.
On occasions, he avoided the Liscaha property altogether because it was a magnet for reporters and photographers seeking to contact him. Sometimes he would go shopping with Jules Thomas in either Skibbereen or Clonakilty, only to realise that their old Nissan car was being followed. His every movement in west Cork seemed to attract photographers, journalists and the simply curious.
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Later that year there were significant developments: Mr Bailey’s long-standing solicitor, Con Murphy, was appointed a circuit court judge to the bench in Cork, where he would serve alongside Judge Patrick Moran, at that point the longest-serving circuit court judge in Ireland, as well as Judge Seán Ó Donnabháin. The newly appointed Judge Murphy’s senior colleague was the very judge who had ruled against his client in the defamation action.
The journalist now needed a new solicitor – and the man he turned to was one of the highest-profile criminal defence solicitors in Cork, if not in Ireland. Frank Buttimer had built one of the most successful legal practices in Cork city and, since the late 1990s, had been renowned for his involvement in some of the most prominent criminal trials staged in the south, ranging from cases of armed robbery to murder.
The 2005 decision of the Central Criminal Court to resume hearing major criminal cases in Cork, Limerick and Galway, rather than every case having to be heard in Dublin, was a landmark ruling. One of the first murder trials heard in Cork after that decision involved a young man who was defended by Mr Buttimer. His client was acquitted.
A consummate criminal defence solicitor, Mr Buttimer was also a capable and articulate media performer. He was a regular on TV and radio programmes, offering his opinion about various legal issues in Ireland. Few doubted that Mr Buttimer’s involvement signalled that Mr Bailey’s legal battles were likely to intensify rather than recede.
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It had also been quickly established that Mr Bailey would be appealing the Circuit Court libel rulings to the High Court. The appeal was confirmed on 21 February 2004, just over a month after he lost six of the eight libel actions he had taken and had costs of €200,000 awarded against him.
The newspapers vowed to ‘contest the appeal as vigorously as [they] contested the original Circuit Court hearing’. But, they said, the circumstances of the High Court appeal were ‘further proof’ of the deeply flawed and unfair libel laws in Ireland. Under Irish libel laws, Mr Bailey did not have to lodge any money in court as a preliminary to his appeal, despite having an award of almost €200,000 against him from the Circuit Court. But the appeal would progress nonetheless.
‘Mr Bailey had nothing to lose by taking a gamble in the Circuit Court and now he has nothing to lose by taking another gamble in the High Court,’ explained solicitor Hugh Hannigan of Simon McAleese and Co., who acted for Independent News and Media. Such a case would now take some time to prepare and to reach the hearing stage, potentially up to two years.
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The other major development in the case happened in France. Having been briefed daily on the revelations in the Cork Circuit Court libel action, Sophie’s family found encouragement that something, finally, would surely have to happen in Ireland. Alain Spilliaert, solicitor for the Bouniol family, explained in January 2004 that the family felt some kind of judicial action was now warranted in Ireland on foot of the dramatic revelations and witness testimonies. For months after the libel ruling and the costs award, the French family had held out hope that something would happen in Ireland.
They signalled a civil action against Mr Bailey. Their aim was to use this to maintain pressure for some form of prosecution to be sanctioned. I understood it was not their intention to seek any financial compensation from the Manchester journalist, who, as had already been made clear, owned no property in Ireland, had no major assets and was currently not in any form of permanent employment.
As the weeks following the 2004 ruling slowly passed, it became abundantly clear that the libel action hadn’t changed anything in Ireland in prosecutorial terms. Having lodged a criminal complaint over Sophie’s death with the French authorities in 1997, the family slowly began to consider whether an action in France might now be preferable to one in Ireland. If the Irish authorities would not act, despite the revelations of the libel action, the French would surely take action to see justice done for the family.
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The Association for the Truth about the Murder of Sophie Toscan du Plantier (ASSOPH), or l’Association pour le vérité sur l’assassinat de Sophie Toscan du Plantier, drew together a powerful mix of Sophie’s family, her friends and former film industry colleagues as well as associates of her husband, Daniel du Plantier. ASSOPH also ensured that the influential French media would continue to highlight key developments with the case. Although formally established in 2007, ASSOPH’s existence can be dated back to a seismic development in the case in Ireland two years earlier.
/> In October 2005, this startling development also threatened to have implications for the gardaí, Mr Bailey’s pending High Court appeal and even the Irish government. On 13 October, TV3’s southern correspondent, Paul Byrne, broke the story that Marie Farrell, the so-called ‘star witness’ of the Circuit Court libel hearing, was now retracting all her statements. The Schull shopkeeper, in a truly astonishing TV interview, claimed not only that her evidence was false but that it had only been offered after she had been put under extreme duress by gardaí to incriminate Mr Bailey. The interview dominated the news headlines in Ireland for days.
She was now adamant that it was not Mr Bailey she had seen at Kealfadda Bridge in the early hours of 23 December 1996. She said her subsequent statements alleging that the journalist had subjected her to a campaign of intimidation in west Cork were totally without foundation and delivered purely because of the pressure she had been put under by unnamed gardaí.
Mrs Farrell used the TV interview to publicly apologise to Mr Bailey for her statements both to gardaí as part of their original investigation and on oath during the libel hearing. She apologised for any hurt he or his family may have suffered as a result. Mrs Farrell said that while she deeply regretted what had happened, she had been under extreme pressure at the time and felt she had no other alternative.
Well, I panicked. Initially, I panicked because I had actually been out that night and I was somewhere where my husband didn’t know I was. I just thought the guards know what they’re talking about, there’s no way they’d say it was Ian Bailey if it wasn’t. And I just thought, I’ll do what they’re saying and that’s the end of it for me.
Between 1997 and the libel trial ... I had signed numerous statements. A lot of them, I didn’t even know what was in them. I was just asked to sign statements. I found out afterwards, you know, that they had been saying Ian Bailey had been harassing me and all sorts of things like that and none of that was true. But the gardaí just kept putting more and more pressure on me. I was just getting in deeper and deeper and it was just, like, getting out of control.