Sophie: A Murder in West Cork - Netflix.

If they had, at various times, suggested to people that they did it, gave a false alibi, had a partner who said they left in the middle of the night when the murder took place and came home with an unexplained cut on their face, had noticeable scratches on their hands and arms, called into people after the gardai had been there to find out what they were asking, denied having a bonfire in the days after the murder when there was evidence and witnesses who said they did, asked a cameraman in more recent times what might happen if he pleaded guilty to a crime of passion.. I suppose they would also be a very good suspect.

I'm not saying he should be convicted on this evidence, I have an opinion that he is a good suspect whose interest and impact on the retelling of the murder has been profound.

Bailey put her in hospital two or three times and was prosecuted at least once for it, he had an explosive, rage filled tendency for violence and his own partner says she can’t trust him when he drinks whiskey. One woman made a statement that Ian invited her to sleep in the studio and she woke up with him in bed beside her, Jules apparently showed the upset woman a massive bruise on her leg and said he did worse to her. He allegedly pinned another woman to a wall in a pub and made a pass at his partner’s daughter. His ex-wife said he flew into rages where he threw stuff around the house. I thought they showed a screenshot of one of his diaries where he wrote he would like to kill someone if he could, will have to look back over it. It seems to me he was a danger to more than just his partner.

He’s obviously prone to serious outbursts of rage and violence.

the other suspects who have alibis... do u trust gardai to a do it right seen they fkd so much up or b bother at all once ib was in frame. this cud unlock a lot of things if reviewed

She seems to have a thing for blaming senior gardai for unsolved murders. The second article is barely literate, I’d be embarrassed to link to it.

MF gave a statement in her own name in December 1996/Jan 1997 to say she saw Sophie in her shop and a man in a long black coat appeared to be watching her from across the street. She also said she drove to Cork on the Sunday morning and saw the same man hitching a lift around 7.30am.

Sometime in mid January she rang anonymously to say she had been out driving on the night of the murder and saw a man in a long black coat close to the bridge at Kealfadda. She never rang back and gardai had to appeal on the Crimewatch TV programme for this person to call back.

None of these statements mentioned Ian Bailey. MF was only living there a year and said she had never seen this man before.

The next part is in now in dispute. As far as I can gather MF originally said she saw a picture of IB in a newspaper and took it out on to the street and showed two Gardai, saying this was the man she saw and they named him as IB. She now says she was told by the gardai that the man she saw was IB.

Curiously, her sighting of the man in the coat hitchhiking on the Sunday morning ties in with IB having spent the night at a house on that road, apparently only 100m away from MF's sighting. One person in the house said he had to get up for work that morning and heard the front door opening around 7am. IB had left the house in the early hours and came back but no one really knew for sure if he also left again at 7am and came back. IB left out the entire episode in his account of his movements over the weekend given to the Gardai.

Even more curiously, it appears, from Michael Sheridan's book, that IB himself was the source of the rumour that he had been spotted at the bridge 'washing his boots'. MF never mentioned this in any of her statements, yet IB told journalists after his arrest that he was told he had been spotted washing his boots at the bridge. This isn't included in any statements of his interviews with gardai that I can find. Michael Sheridan thinks IB filled in that detail himself because that's what he was doing, but at the time didn't know that MF had only said she saw a man walking.

If IB spotted MF as he hitchhiked on the Sunday morning, and also realised it was her that spotted him at the bridge, that would explain him leaving out the night spent at the party in his original statements. He only corrected this after going to the house and hearing that they had told the gardai he spent the night there. He then went to the station and amended his statement.

Yes, he did know far too much about the crime. In the days after it he wrote that she had been hit on the back of the head and was chased down the hill but explained this by saying everyone in the pub was saying the same. The problem is, no one saw the back of her head until the body was examined during the post-mortem, the chase down the hill was not known about until a forensic examination found a bloodstained stone halfway down the bank. The pathologist report was shared with senior detectives but not junior gardai or locals. In the west cork podcast Bailey also admits the gardai were telling him nothing and he struggled to come up with ‘angles’.

In one of the court cases he tried to shift responsibility for these details to a young inexperienced French journalist who was not in the local area. Nick Foster tracked her down and she said this was total nonsense.