Introducing...West Cork

Summary

Podcast Summary: Sweet Bobby – "Introducing...West Cork"

Podcast: Sweet Bobby (by Tortoise Media)
Episode: Introducing...West Cork (Episode 1 of "West Cork")
Date: July 20, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode introduces listeners to West Cork, a critically acclaimed investigative podcast exploring the notorious 1996 murder of Frenchwoman Sophie Toscan du Plantier in rural Ireland. Hosts Jennifer Forde and Sam Bungey retrace the case’s emotional and social impact on the West Cork community, balancing gripping storytelling with nuanced reflections on truth, memory, and justice. The episode sets the scene—both the landscape and the people—while posing central questions about guilt, innocence, and the lasting scars of unsolved tragedy.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Crime that Shook West Cork

• (02:26 – 03:18):

  • Sophie Toscan du Plantier, a French woman, was murdered just before Christmas 1996. Her body was discovered in her nightclothes and boots, suggesting she was fleeing an attacker. There were no witnesses, no forensics, and no clear motive.
  • “To the police, it looked like she’d been running from someone. And this was as far as she got.” [C, 02:44]

• (03:34 – 03:42):

  • The case is referred to locally as “the murder” because of its singularity in living memory. Twenty years later, it remains open and unresolved.
    • “For the woman’s soul, for the family, you know, it’s like the casket can’t be closed.” [B, 03:42]

2. West Cork’s Character and Its "Blow-ins"

• (04:14 – 07:08):
  • The hosts delve into the 1970s countercultural influx to West Cork: urbanites, hippies, and alternative lifestylers (“blow-ins”) seeking new beginnings far from city life.
  • Len Lipch, an ex-accountant, describes his journey to rural self-sufficiency:
    • “I had nothing really. I had that. My house, my ruin. No electric. I had my donkey and cart.” [A & C, 05:29-05:35]
  • The region’s openness to newcomers and potential for reinvention is highlighted:
    • “You could be who you wanted to be rather than who you really were.” [A, 06:18]

3. The Social Ripples of the Murder

• (07:08 – 09:09):
  • Suspicions quickly settle on one outsider (“blow-in”). He’s arrested twice but never charged. With no hard evidence, the community is left deeply unsettled.
    • “The town turned against him, branded him a murderer. Years went by and where you might expect him to leave, he dug in.” [C, 06:34]
  • The case becomes a kind of obsession for the hosts:
    • “We’d go so mad thinking about who might have done it, we started to take seriously the guy who thinks that the murderer was a horse...” [B, 08:39]

4. The Suspect and the Public’s Perception

• (09:30 – 11:29):
  • The narrative weaves together public opinion and the legal process, highlighting how suspicion and prejudice take root (“badness in him when you look at him” [A, 11:54])—even as some question whether the “outsider” is a scapegoat.
  • Discussion of the suspect’s celebrity/notoriety:
    • “[His] name and face on the front page with no need to recap the story or his involvement in it. Everyone already knows.” [B, 10:20]

5. Gossip, Distrust, and the Guards

• (12:34 – 13:22):
  • Community trust in the police (“guards”) is low, amid rumors of scapegoating and official bias.
    • “People would be unwilling to come to an area where they felt there was a killer on the loose...if the person that was blamed was to be not a local and perhaps leave the area quickly, taking the blame with them like the scapegoat being driven out of the village, well, all the better, you know.” [A, 12:51]

6. The Mystery Deepens – Local Lore and Fear

• (13:27 – 15:41):
  • The episode captures the uneasy interplay of local lore, rural isolation, and underlying xenophobia about outsiders and control of community affairs:
    • “You don’t go down there and do anything unless they allow you to do it. ... You ever see the film Deliverance? Well, that’s all I’m going to say to you.” [A, 13:47]
  • The murder’s impact ripples through the wider community, causing fear and prompting changes in behavior (locking doors, fear of strangers).

7. West Cork’s Evolution and Those Drawn to It

• (16:11 – 21:00):
  • The landscape and its allure to outsiders is painted vividly, alongside a recognition that dream and reality often diverge—especially come the long, isolated winters.
    • “It was like stepping into the past...in a kind of an odd way, you know.” [A, 17:01]
    • “You sort of move to the edges where the ripples are less strong. So West Cork was about as far as you could go, wasn’t it?” [A, 19:45]

8. Shock and Shame – Local Reaction

• (21:00 – 23:38):
  • The murder upends the self-image of West Cork as peaceful and welcoming; locals express shock, fear, and a sense that something essential has been lost:
    • “It took someplace special and made it everywhere else. That’s what it done and it still hasn’t gone away.” [A, 23:40]

9. Myth, Memory, and Ghosts

• (25:05 – 27:33):
  • The discussion turns to local legends (like the White Lady of Three Castle Head), blending the archaeological, the mystical, and the tragic. Myths become ways to process the lack of resolution:
    • “On her last day alive, Sophie Toscan du Plantier went walking out at Three Castle Head. But something spooked her...” [B, 27:33]
    • “Maybe it’s what happens when there’s no resolution to a crime like this. People try to make sense of it and decide on an ending for themselves.” [C, 28:27]

10. The Need for Resolution

• (29:02 – 29:50):
  • Residents voice a desperate longing for closure for Sophie and her family:
    • “It needs to be...I think, for the woman’s soul, for the family. You know, it’s like the casket can’t be closed.” [B, 29:11]
    • “Even if there is no guilty or innocent verdict, I’d like to know, hear the whole story, you know, and I would like to hear it with some kind of continuity instead of, okay, this fella said that, and that one said this, and that’s rubbish and he’s a liar. I’d like to hear the story with all that kind of, yeah, taken out of it with warts and all gone.” [A & B, 29:21-29:50]

11. Reconstructing the Final Hours

• (29:54 – 31:46):
  • The hosts methodically reconstruct Sophie’s last days: her arrival from Paris, mundane errands, a final visit to the pub, and her last known moments, observed by Billy O’Sullivan:
    • “It was a beautiful still night, frosty, full moonish and calm. You could hear ... and then we don’t know what happened after that. But she was found the next morning battered to death.” [A, 30:54]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “You could be who you wanted to be rather than who you really were.”
  – Len Lipch [A, 06:18]
  (On the appeal of starting over in West Cork)

• “For the woman’s soul, for the family, you know, it’s like the casket can’t be closed.”
  – Local resident [B, 03:42; B, 29:11]

• “The town turned against him, branded him a murderer. Years went by and where you might expect him to leave, he dug in.”
  – Host narration [C, 06:34]

• “We all have indoor faces and nobody knows, really and truly, nobody knows if there’s a murderer among us. It’s a real Agatha Christie thing.”
  – Dublin local [B, 12:17]

• “It took some place special and made it everywhere else. That’s what it done and it still hasn’t gone away.”
  – Tom Quinn [A, 23:40]

• “Maybe it’s what happens when there’s no resolution to a crime like this. People try to make sense of it and decide on an ending for themselves.”
  – Host narration [C, 28:27]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 02:26: Start of the murder narrative; introducing Sophie’s case.
• 04:14 – 07:08: “Blow-ins” and the 1970s counterculture influx.
• 09:30 – 11:29: Community suspicion, the suspect’s notoriety, and public opinion.
• 12:34: Distrust of the police and scapegoating anxieties.
• 13:41 – 15:41: The social impact and mythology around the community response.
• 17:01: Personal stories highlighting the region’s countercultural appeal.
• 21:00 – 23:40: The emotional and social fallout among locals.
• 25:05 – 28:27: The interplay of local legend, myth, and the haunting lack of closure.
• 29:02 – 31:46: Calls for closure and a step-by-step tracing of Sophie’s last actions.

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Episode Tone & Style

The episode is richly atmospheric, blending investigative journalism with oral history and local color. The hosts convey empathy and humility, often referencing their own limitations as outsiders while gradually peeling back layers of rumor, myth, and memory. There is a persistent sense of melancholy and unease—a portrait of a community forever altered by an act of violence that remains, in every sense, unresolved.

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For more on investigative podcasts from the makers of Sweet Bobby, visit Tortoise Investigates.

Note: All ads, promotional materials, and non-content sections are omitted from this summary.

Transcript

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[B]

ACAST classics welcome to Acast Classics 2026. Four exceptional limited series handpicked for their journalism, craft and storytelling. If you love this podcast, we know you're going to be hooked on West Cork, so we made episode one available for you right here. Enjoy. The following series contains some graphic images and is intended for a mature audience. You might not be home yet.

[A]

Hello?

[B]

Hello, is that Billy o'? Sullivan?

[A]

That's right.

[B]

Hi, Billy. My name is Jennifer and I am a radio reporter and I'm here with my husband and we're doing a piece on the Sophie Toscan Duplantier murder. We're here for a few days and we just want to.

[C]

Two days before Christmas 1996, a French woman was murdered in a remote part of West Cork on the southwest coast of Ireland. She'd been badly beaten and was found in her night clothes and laced up boots tangled in briars and barbed wire by the path below her holiday home. To the police, it looked like she'd been running from someone. And this was as Far as she got, there were no witnesses, no forensics, no clear motive. Down an isolated lane, there was just the body of a woman that people knew little about.

[B]

On the night that she died, Sophie stopped by o' Sullivan's pub in the small village of Crookhaven. Billy o' Sullivan was behind the bar and he was the last known person to see her alive.

[A]

If I knew she was going to be murdered, I would have remembered everything.

[C]

In West Cork, it's simply known as the murder, because there hasn't been another murder that anyone can remember. Twenty years on, the case is still

[B]

open, I think, for the woman's soul family. You know, it's like the casket can't be closed.

[C]

To understand why and what that's meant for West Cork, we have to go back to the 1970s, where this all began. This is west cork, an audible original series. I'm sam bunge.

[B]

I'm jennifer ford and this is episode one blow ins. When Len Lipch was in his 20s, he. He wore a shirt and tie and punched in as an accounting clerk in central London. It was the 70s and Len figured if the job and smog didn't finish him off, nuclear annihilation would. He hated work and he hated London. He wanted out. And he'd heard about a place called West Cork one day, got on it,

[C]

got the tickets, bought a car for,

[A]

I think it was 7 pound 50 Morris thousands. Had a trailer on the back.

[C]

I had 25 pounds in my pocket

[A]

and left for Ireland.

[B]

When he got to Ireland, Len drove west as far as he could, out onto a mountainous peninsula on the far southwest coast. He stopped in a hillside village, found a piece of land with an old ruined cottage on it, learned to weave belts from wool that he sold at the market and drank the local illegally brewed alcohol.

[A]

P. I mean, I. I had nothing really. I had that.

[C]

My house, my ruin.

[A]

No electric.

[C]

I had my donkey and cart.

[B]

Len the accountant had vanished. In his place was Len with the donkey and cart.

[C]

Yeah, it was. It was like a dream come true. It was incredible, really. It was a hideaway at the edge of Europe. A community that grew by word of mouth. People floating on the breeze into West Cork. The locals had a name for them. They called them blow ins. Like a lot of places out on the fringes, West Cork attracted people for all sorts of reasons. You could reset or reinvent yourself. Maybe you were looking for something or maybe you were running from something. As another Blowin put it.

[A]

There were people coming in to Westcourt, which is sort of wild, and woolly the wild west of Ireland, you know, and nobody knew they passed. You could make that up, couldn't you? You could be who you wanted to be rather than who you really were.

[C]

Which eventually led to trouble when one Blowin was murdered and another was suspected of doing it. The suspect was arrested a couple of times, but there was no hard evidence of any kind and the case never went anywhere. The town turned against him, branded him a murderer. Years went by and where you might expect him to leave, he dug in. He stayed in his cottage just a few miles from town. And everyone else was supposed to go on with their lives with this horrid event unresolved and the embodiment of all their unsettled nerves still resolutely among them.

[A]

I see him in the market, you know, selling his pizza there. And really it's. He's always trying to be normal and trying to get people to like him. But we all know, don't we? You know, Barry, it's 20 years this Christmas. I. I saw the date last night and did a quick double take. 20 years this Christmas since Sophie Toscan de Plantier was found dead near Skull. And this investigation continues apace.

[C]

Hard to believe that 20 years ago tomorrow that news broke that her body had been found.

[B]

We remember her on the program today.

[C]

The first time we saw the Suspect was in 2014. One Sunday morning in our London flat, we read a short piece about the case in a British newspaper. The suspect was suing the Irish police, the guards, for wrongful arrest, claiming 20 years of harassment and mental torture, which he says has ruined his life. That without having the evidence to actually charge him with anything, they'd managed to convince an entire country that he was guilty of murder. He was tall and powerful looking, striding into the courthouse wearing a black great coat and a scarlet red scarf that had been caught by the wind. He had big bushy eyebrows and was staring down the camera lens. It was a face you could read things into

[B]

and it was a face that would launch us down a three year rabbit hole. We'd spend a winter in West Cork and then a summer trying to make sense of an investigation where everything is still on the table, where witness stories are still changing. 20 years on. We'd go through it so often with anyone who'd listen that one friend suggested podcast as a name for the baby we had while making this. And we'd go so mad thinking about who might have done it. We started to take seriously the guy who thinks that the murderer was a horse.

[C]

We'd spend time with the victim's family? Why was a woman with a husband and child in France alone in West Cork just days before Christmas? And we'd sit for hours with the suspect and his accusers. What was it about this man that has people so convinced he did it? How is an innocent person supposed to act anyway?

[A]

How a guy looks or carries or the size or the height or the weight of him or the presence he might have or whatever kind of a demeanor he might give off is completely irrelevant. Exactly. That's.

[B]

That's exactly what I.

[A]

Do you think. Do you think that we. Do you think that we as a country should be saying, like, to be honest with you, there are those that think he did it and those that think he didn't, right? And he knows that and he regards himself as the chief suspect. But like, maybe Ireland should be saying, we need to leave this guy alone.

[B]

He's doing everything in his power to try to prove that he's innocent. That is not supposed to be the way the law works. It's supposed to be you're innocent and the state is supposed to prove that you're guilty. We decided to go to Dublin to sit down on the trial and see for ourselves. And we found that we weren't the only ones intrigued by this man. Wedged into the benches at the back of the courtroom sat us two curious journalists next to some curious old ladies. They'd arrived early to get a good seat, equipped with flasks of tea and a selection of small, neatly cut sandwiches. One lady told us that she and her friends had formed a kind of club to follow the trial. They made sure that at least one of them could go every day and each evening report back what had happened. They couldn't rely on the papers to make the observations they were interested in. The newspapers would tell you about the back and forth between the lawyers and the judge and the witnesses, but they weren't going to recount the look and dress and demeanour of the suspect and the level of detail these ladies were after. It's him they'd come to scrutinize. We saw just how notorious this guy is. National newspapers can put his name and face on the front page with no need to recap the story or his involvement in it. Everyone already knows.

[A]

Yeah, sure, it's. It's. Well, you'd be familiar with it from. Unless you live under a rock somewhere. You know, you have to be at the. Developing dementia or something.

[C]

In between court sessions, we took to the markets and pubs around Dublin to ask about him.

[B]

And we're copied out from it. Girls talk and we've read the book, we're copied out. We're actually hooked on it 24, seven,

[C]

you know, gun to your head. What do you reckon to be doing?

[A]

Did he do it? I would have said yes.

[B]

What gives you that impression? Or what makes you feel that

[A]

there's just a badness in him when you look at him, there's a badness in him.

[B]

You know, I actually met him when he was up here the last time. How. How come you met him? He was just walking down here. He was on a break from the cold. I said, I know you from the tv. And he got talking and I. I looked at him and I said, God, he's such a nice gentleman. However, as we say, that's the outdoor face. We all have indoor faces and nobody knows, really and truly, nobody knows if there's a murderer among us. It's a real Agatha Christie thing. Nobody knows. They really don't.

[A]

Couldn't trust anything coming from the guards, that. That'd be my opinion.

[C]

Now, the guards were caught up in a run of scandals at the time and had some people willing to believe the worst about them, that the force might have concocted a case against an outsider in a crime everyone wanted solved.

[A]

People would be unwilling to come to an area where they felt there was a killer on the loose, where they felt that, you know, a tourist like her was going to be murdered in her home. I mean, that's the very worst. People love to come to West Cork for the isolation, to come to their. Their holiday home. But to think that there might be a killer outside your window would certainly depress the price of property in the area. And if the person that was blamed was to be not a local and perhaps leave the area quickly, taking the blame with them like the scapegoat being driven out of the village, well, all the better, you know.

[C]

So is that what happened? Did an outsider get picked on and framed?

[B]

Did a canny criminal outsmart the guards?

[C]

Or did someone just get lucky? This next clip is hard to understand. We were talking to one man in a noisy pub when the guy sitting next to him started chiming in.

[A]

If you go down there, it'll speak

[C]

for itself, he says. If you go down there, it'll speak for itself.

[A]

They rule the company down there. You don't come in there and do anything unless they allow you to do it. I ever see the film Deliverance, well, that's all I'm going to say to you. You don't Go down there and mess with their town.

[C]

They rule the country down there. Do you understand me? You don't go down there and do anything unless they allow you to do it. Did you ever see the film Deliverance? Well, that's all I'm going to say to you. You don't go down there and mess with their town. Was he talking about the guards? The locals?

[A]

Both?

[C]

Maybe this was just big city talk, but we were curious to see what he meant. And over three years we learned that the impact of this crime extends far beyond this suspect. His fight to clear his name. The titillating question of did he or didn't he do extends to people who got caught up in the investigation and were driven out of town and into hiding. To Paris, where a man who was 15 when Sophie Toscandeplantier was killed is now fighting for justice for his mother. And it reaches all across West Cork, along the Boreins, over Mount Gabriel, and through the outpost towns of Skull, Golean and Cruikhaven.

[B]

Back when a trial site for the first transatlantic telegraphs was set up in Crookhaven, one of the signal station operators wrote that arriving here felt like reaching the end of everywhere. The pub at the end of everywhere is O'. Sullivan's. And Billy O' Sullivan has lived in Crookhaven all his 80 years. And on this day, he's invited us out on his boat hauling lobster pots. Growing up, Billy was one of seven. His brothers and sisters were all leaving Crookhaven in search of work. Up to Dublin, the uk, to America. Billy wanted to stay. It's just that there wasn't much to keep him here. He tried his hand as a lighthouse keeper, a fisherman.

[A]

God was a tough. Mother of God Almighty. Notice hard work. And the problem. I was seasick all the time.

[B]

Eventually he took over the pub from his father. But it was one of three pubs in a village of just over 100 people.

[A]

And some of them hadn't money and others wouldn't pay. For God's sake, You couldn't make a go there at all, you know. But then gradually it improved.

[C]

Tourists started to venture down this way the first summer home was built. And people in West Cork started to notice new faces around in the off season, people coming to explore, people like Tom Quinn.

[A]

It was fishermen, farmers, small farmers, and very few of the likes of me, very few.

[C]

Like Len with his donkey. Tom was one of the early pioneers of this new movement to West Cork. Tom's a house painter. During this interview, just like every other time we met him, Tom was covered in paint. There was paint on his woolly hat. There was paint all over his think outside the box T shirt. It's a wonder he can see through the flecks of paint on his glasses. Tom found the place kind of by accident. The first place he stumbled into was Skull, a fishing town that would become the hub of this new community.

[A]

I was just driving on this road and all of a sudden you kind of like this kind of cineramascope kind of sesame de mille kind of scene opens up. And I felt like I was stepping into the past in a kind of an odd way, you know, it was like stepping into the past.

[C]

Land was cheap. People bought old farmhouses and started growing their own vegetables, rearing animals.

[A]

I got into this whole big self sufficiency thing, you know, I was growing all my own food. I had goats and bees and ducks and hens and I was catching fish and digging turf and trying to kind of beat the system, you know. I love this place.

[C]

People like Tom and Len kept turning up. Ireland joined the European Union in 1973, meaning people could come from all over Europe and draw government benefits. One local put it this way, it's the farthest place you can go and not get your feet wet. If the coast was another 50 miles west, they'd all keep going.

[A]

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[C]

Pete Balecki came here for a holiday sometime in the mid-90s and just never went home.

[A]

With the things that were going on in the UK and in Europe, there's levels of violence going up and so what you do is you sort of, you move to the edges where the ripples are less strong. So West Cork was about as far as you could go, wasn't it?

[B]

But having the dream is one thing, actually living it is something else. It's very quiet in the winter. People who don't know that yet are

[A]

going to have to keep themselves very busy somehow, or they'll go mad, or they'll split up and go and have

[B]

affairs, which is quite common, actually. That's Jules Thomas, she was one of the early settlers. She lives with her partner, Ian Bailey. He abandoned life as a reporter in the UK in search of something a bit more rustic.

[C]

Is there something about people who come in the summer? Do you ever look at them and go, oh, I don't fancy.

[B]

Oh, they do fall in love with

[A]

it in the summer.

[B]

Grey and wet.

[A]

There's actually a phenomena that people come and they may become like their holidays, maybe with the children, and they enjoy it so much here and then they maybe go back to wherever they're going, back to maybe London. And each time they say, oh, do you know, I think I'd really like to live there, I think I could live there. And they come over, but they haven't experienced a winter, perhaps, and the winter is a long, cold, dark period. Very little happens.

[B]

West Cork underwent a sort of rural regeneration. The hippies pushed house prices up and soon they were joined by another well heeled group, actors and writers and lawyers who bought second homes down here. It became a sort of playground where the pressures of modern life didn't seem to apply. For a time it was perfect, but then there was a Murder here. And everything changed again.

[A]

The whole place was. It was like a tinderbox.

[C]

Jim Duggan was one of those lawyers who bought a second home in Skull. Two years after the murder, he'd find himself representing the suspect. But back then, he didn't even know him. Back then, all he knew was as much as anyone else, that someone had been murdered and the killer was still at large.

[A]

You were frightened, you know, this was something awful that had happened and people just couldn't deal with it or cope with it. People locked, double locked their doors. My wife would not go out. My children would not be left out.

[C]

It was more than just the immediate fear felt by those that lived around Skull. This kind of thing just didn't square with how the people of West Cork saw themselves.

[B]

It's a generous community of people. It's a kind place to live. And this was a huge shock. All the more so because nobody really knew she existed. Almost like she was almost like a sort of phantom that came in and came out of her own accord and she had slipped through the net of the hospitality and the kindness. I remember thinking how terribly sad it was and I remember being embarrassed as well.

[C]

Nadine O'Reagan grew up in West Cork. Her dad ran the local paper.

[B]

I know that sounds like a strange term to use, but you know when somebody who comes in from abroad to live in this beautiful kind of surroundings and then this happens and you're just thinking like, this isn't what we're like, this isn't West Cork isn't like this.

[A]

The person who you know was entitled to come here almost owns a house here. He loves it here. Who loves the way of life here, is living way happily and is entitled to do so. And we're glad that there is dead. You know, somebody's killed her and it not only killed her, but killed something else.

[C]

Tom Quinn, the house painter again.

[A]

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[B]

People talk about this murder as having left a stain on West Cork, as though the landscape itself somehow remembers. A local poet told us West Cork is full of numinous or spiritual places that feel, as she put it, cargoed with mystery. So I think this is the gate she talked about. One place the poet talked about was Three Castle Head. These are the ruins of the last stronghold of one of the old Westcourt clans, the Imageenes. Back when the Normans were invading Ireland in the 1100s, the Imahannis were pushed out onto West Cork's Mizzen peninsula. They built castles on the sites of old Celtic forts, strategically located to defend themselves from any attack. 3 Castle Head is so strategically located that we had trouble finding it.

[C]

Okay, let's keep going.

[B]

Yeah, but I just think we're really lost. The wrong way to get there, you drive out along the peninsula until the road runs out and then walk out even further. And just when you're thinking about turning back, you round the top of a hill and there, by a large lake, are the ruins of three small castles linked by a stone wall.

[C]

That's the coldest thing I've ever seen.

[B]

Let's see. Oh, the rocks look so sharp. There's something about it that's completely overwhelming.

[C]

Yeah. I need some space.

[B]

Oh, yeah.

[C]

Beyond the castles and down to all sides, there's a sweeping view to the Atlantic hundreds of feet below. And on the day we were there, the wind was moving so quickly across the top of the lake that it looked like something terrifying might burst out of it. You can see why all sorts of myths and legends have been attributed, to this place. Some say the bottom of the lake's never been found, but that there's treasure down there which will bring bad luck to whoever finds it. Which, to be fair, is what you would say if you had treasure buried anywhere. They say the last family to live there all died violently. And to commemorate their deaths every day A drop of blood drips from the walls of the main tower. But the most common myth at 3 Castle Head is of the White Lady, a ghost who haunts the lake, foretelling the death of anyone who sees her.

[B]

On her last day alive, Sophie Toscan du Plantier went walking out at Three Castle Head. But something spooked her. The people who own the land live in a farmhouse out there and knew Sophie from her visits. They recalled that on that day she came running to the house, having been frightened by something up at the the lake. They tried to get her to stay the night, but she insisted on going home. A local guard would later remark to Sophie's aunt that it was a shame the landowners weren't from around there. Had they been local, he said, they would have known not to let someone who'd seen the White lady off on their own. A whole bunch of myths have sprung up around Sophie's murder, from idle gossip to crazy stories like this. Stories about white ladies and a foretelling of Sophie's death. And maybe it's what happens when there's no resolution to a crime like this. People try to make sense of it and decide on an ending for themselves.

[C]

But this isn't folklore. A woman was brutally murdered. Whoever did it got away with it early on. A local warned us to remember we weren't investigators. Not the first such warning he'd offered a couple of foolhardy reporters. Over the past three years, we've met many people who've been consumed by this case. Haunted detectives, crusading victims, amateur sleuths. We all need to manage our expectations. But surely it's possible to sift out the fiction, to go to the source of the rumours, look them in the eye and discard all the nonsense and then see what's left.

[B]

I think the local feel is it needs to be finalized.

[C]

Leo and Sally Bulger lived less than a mile from Sophie's house.

[A]

Oh, that's for sure.

[B]

It needs to be, you know, I think, for the woman's soul, for the family. You know, it's like the casket can't be closed.

[A]

People have to be allowed to put it together for themselves in the end, you know, even if there is no guilty or innocent verdict, I'd like to know, hear the whole story, you know, and I would like to hear it with some kind of continuity instead of, okay, this fella said that, and that one said this, and that's rubbish and he's a liar. I'd like to hear the story with all that kind of, yeah, taken out

[B]

of it with warts and all gone.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Sophie Toscan de Plantier boarded a plane from Paris on Friday, December 20, arriving at her home in West Cork that evening. She was spotted alone several times that weekend, browsing clothes in a clothes shop, picking up groceries. On her last day alive, she visited three Castle Head. By the time she left her friends up there, it was dark. About 6pm she drove the few miles down to Crookhaven to O' Sullivan's Pub. Billy O' Sullivan was behind the bar and he was the last known person to see her alive. So can you.

[C]

Can you describe. I mean this place has obviously changed a bit.

[A]

Not as exactly.

[C]

It's identical.

[A]

And she said sitting up there in usual spot and she'd usually have tea and scone or something, he says.

[C]

They chatted for a while, just pleasantries. Sophie made a vague promise to call back in for a Christmas Eve party. She finished her cup of tea and scone and then she left.

[A]

It was a beautiful still night, frosty, full moonish and calm. You could hear because there were stories all over the place about people hurt, us screaming and. And maybe they did, you know, and then we don't know what happened after that. But she was found the next morning battered to death. On the.

[B]

West Cork is an audible Original production written and produced by Jennifer Ford and Sam Bunge. Produced and sound designed by Kristen Muller, Alex Trehano, Robin Wise and Paul Schneider. Our theme music was composed by Shani Avaram. Our recording engineer is Sean Moher. West Cork is edited by Mike Olive. Our fact checker is Christine Baird and Jesse Baker and Eric Newsome are the executive producers. This is audible.

[A]

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