Murder at the Cottage | Sky

Bloody Hell. Disgusting vile character. And that was going on under the guards noses but the intel had to come from London.

Read it again, I said the gardai would be justified in thinking portions of the garda file, or the whole thing itself, might be leaked once IB got hold of it. The leaking of the DPP report demonstrates this.

It's the function of GSOC to investigate this and recommend disciplinary action or dismissal, there was none recommended. It seems like they reasoned that the timing was wrong since most of the irregularities happened after the DPP shelved the case and also items that were lost would have helped rather than hindered their case. The claim that there might have been an attempt to pervert the course of justice was tested before a jury and it was rejected.

I have read it again and I stand over my comments. The whole posting was a, rather clumsy, attempt to minimise this appalling episode and justify a despicable act which could only have been perpetrated by a Garda or Gardai.

Whilst the wholesale misplacement of exhibits was in keeping with the widely held belief of Garda conspiracy, it could, at a real stretch, be "justified" insofar as gross negligence or extraordinary incompetence can be categorised as justification. But the removal of these pages cannot be similarly glossed over. This was a wilful, deliberate act, which could amount to attempting to pervert the course of justice.

It is not within the gift of Gardai, whatever the motivation, to interfere in any way with evidence. Destruction of evidence related to an ongoing murder case is, it hardly needs pointing out, verboten.

Sensitive information can be redacted if deemed necessary, prior to being released.

But to suggest that cutting whole pages from the job book is anything other than sinister, is absurd. There is no "possible explanation" that justifies or mitigates this.

The GSOC report was a whitewash and is widely regarded as such. See below.

https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/lost-five-files-139-statements-and-one-gate-37185350.html

Crikey there is a lot of info in there re her husband, what was going on up on the 'hill', the guard in the car with a key witness, his subsequent suicide etc.

Coincidentally I was speaking to someone today who spends their summers down that way and he mentioned the guard who committed suicide being a well known angle on the case down there. What angle I don't know.. different to what was in that Twitter thread anyway.

No, I'm not misquoting you. They would definitely not be justified in either thinking the file would be leaked or in acting in the way they did. They are Gardai, civil servants, with clear responsibilities and well documented policies and procedures. It is not and should not be their role to evaluate the impacts of information being made public. There is no ambiguity on this point.

The general thrust of your post was a transparent attempt at minimisation of what is, essentially, the most damning act of the Gardai and physical evidence of conspiracy.

However, it is a reassuring to see you finally accept that the removal of the written job records cannot be justified under any circumstances. Nor can it be mitigated by suggestions of Heath - Robinson type possibilities.

Your last question is presumptive. The evidence removed was not necessarily fake and may not have been presented to the DPP as it did not support the case against IB. It may have been genuine but undermined the case and been removed for that reason.

"specific pages missing are from an area of the book when Ian Bailey seems to have first been identified as a potential suspect in the murder by gardaí – and as such, they are potentially very significant". -GSOC report.

Newspaper articles say he is in his seventies now. That would put him mid forties to mid fifties at the time of the murder and knew Sophie close enough for her to tell him she was leaving her husband to stay in Ireland and also knew Ian and Jules.

No, I'm not misquoting you. They would definitely not be justified in either thinking the file would be leaked or in acting in the way they did. 

You are misquoting me and are now conflating two very different things in that single sentence. They would be justified in thinking the file would be leaked, the DPP report was leaked and from what I remember from the West Cork podcast, Ian gave the garda file to the presenters on a USB stick. I think he gave it to Nick Foster as well.

Tweets are all on this thread.

Whoever it is, one would have to wonder what would cause someone to grapple with their conscience for so long, to keep the disclosure to themselves from 2001 until now and what change of circumstances might have promoted him to first discuss it last year with the person now living in Europe and then recently contact a solicitor and gardaí.

Maybe he feels freer to speak out now because the relationship between the 'confessor' and the person they helped has changed in recent times. Just a random hypothesis...

The Irish Daily Star has an interview with Jules.

She was the person who allegedly "confessed" to the "elderly man" who made the new statement.

She says it is not true she confessed to washing clothes.

Looking at the crime scene photo of the table there is the open book held down with the jar of honey, a spent match a box of matches and a candle.

Compared to the other candle on the windowsill the one on the table has burnt for some time but not all the way down.

Why was she reading by the light of one candle?

How long had it burnt? If she was on the phone for an hour to Daniel (upstairs probably) was there enough time for that candle to burn between returning to the house and the phone call starting?

Or did she go back downstairs after the phonecall? If that is when she lit the candle? And whilst she was reading facing the window her killer appeared outside, so she blew out the candle.

The candle wasn't burnt right down so somebody blew it out.

If the candle was lit at midnight it should be easy to calculate when it was extinguished. Might help a theoretical timeline.