Murder at the Cottage | Sky

This operation was carried out a year before the STDP murder when a boat with undercover detectives went out from Castletownbere just down the road from Dunmanus.

"Mr Cushnahan(Fine Gael MEP) said such deliveries, "which can cross several countries need close surveillance, the tightest security and total cooperation between and within countries."

What kind of local cooperation was needed to keep this quiet? Or is a better question; How the f*ck did anybody think something like this could be kept quiet? The real point is that the Guards were prepared to carry out these kind of hare-brained schemes with the 'cooperation' of other countries (like France????) and there is no doubt that they were up against people who wouldn't think twice about killing anyone they believed to be a threat to them.

The botched investigation and the obvious framing of Bailey only points one way.

You're completely correct. There was a pretence of him being a suspect but had he been arrested for questioning like Bailey the whole thing would have fallen apart. He was obviously part, big or small, of the conspiracy to cover things up.

There's a big difference between being at the scene before and after a murder.

Can you give some examples and how they might relate to this case?

I mean someone there with gardai about also... I find the notion of someone getting unnoticed to the body 'as a crime scene' after discovery fantastical even allowing for the ineptness of the gardai.

Just regarding murderers trying to contaminate crime scenes:

This happens a lot, as the general public has become more and more aware of forensics. Murderers worry that they got blood on themselves or left DNA at the scene during the crime, so they try to generate a plausible explanation for it.

Two cases for example off the top of my head...

1. Murder of Rachel O'Reilly in Dublin. Her husband Joe killed her. Beat her to death with a dumbell. When he was pretending to discover her body, he rushed over to her and embraced her. He did this so that if the gardai found her blood on him or his DNA on her corpse, he would have a reasonable explanation for that. "Oh it must have happened when I held her dead body". (The forensics team in the end, did actually find blood drops on his shoe that could not have come from embracing her corpse)
2. Murder of Billie-Jo Jenkins in UK. Police believe her stepfather Sion Jenkins killed her. Beat her to death with a tent peg. Police believe he pretended to discover the body, then went to sit in his car as he waited for police to arrive. They think he did this because he was worried he had gotten blood on him during the murder and had possibly transferred it to his car. So if they found blood in his car or on him, this would allow him to say "Oh it must have gotten there when I found her body and I must have transferred it to the car." (Sion was found guilty in court, served time in jail, but had his sentence reversed due to unsafe conviction).

Yes but both of those examples relate to someone 'pretending' to discover a body and having contact with the body and informing police of that as an explanation. Those scenarios I totally get.

But here the person who is declared as having found the body said they didn't touch the body afaik?

And the person who identified the body wouldn't have touched the body, one assumes?

So who has a legitimate reason to have touched the body and offer that as an explanation to police for contamination?

So... as I said, it's not adding up to me.

Somebody (can't remember who) made a point her car was searched prior to going to the dump. Even so it is quite bizarre behaviour. You just found a young woman battered to death, your neighbour, up a lonely boreen, you don't know by whom and he doesn't know if you can ID him, and you go off on your own to dump rubbish.

Never thought of this, crazy when you say it!