Cold Case Review of Sophie Tuscan du Plantier murder to proceed. **Threadbans in OP**

This sketch for sure is much more incriminating than the other sketch I had seen which was comically bad. I haven't actually seen this, is it from the same individual, how long after the first sketch was this taken, and was it after other suspects had been excluded or before?

I asked earlier, but was on a bit of a long thread so you may have missed it, but I would be interested in whether you would agree that there was a period of time in the immediate hours, and probably days, weeks even when there were a significant number of more viable candidates than Bailey?

I mean this from the perspective of the investigating Gardai contemporaneously, rather than looking back from the present day.

Only according to Bailey and Thomas.

They claimed the fire was no later than early December.

But neighbour Delia Jackson said she was home from London at Christmas time and saw the fire then.

I may be mistaken, but I believe she didn't say she saw the fire, just that she heard/smelled the fire, is that correct? I'm not trying to be disagreeable, I just want to make sure we are not providing misinformation.

This distinctions are not important when us armchair investigators are coming to our own conclusions/opinions, but are absolutely critical when building a case to bring before a DPP and jury. Since the thread is about a cold case review, we should try to be thorough, and not add to the confusion.

If I am mistaken here though I apologise up front.

There's no need to be looking for further clarification

She went as far as confirming she has a specific suspect/s

She made clear her wish not to identify

I'm old enough to remember when this case was featured on Crimeline.

And if I remember correctly they did show a photograph of the alleged "boot print" and it was almost invisible; a shoe-shaped impression on a tangle of long blackberry stems and trampled grass. Extremely difficult to take a plaster cast of (in the classical Sherlock Holmes manner, lol) and they also mentioned that other people had walked around the area before it was segregated as a crime scene - I'm guessing Ms Foster and the first Garda to arrive, at least.

If my recall is right (and I'm sure there will be no delay in correcting me me if it's not) this "impression" was so vague that it would be extremely difficult to estimate the shoe size and almost impossible to determine the brand. Bigger than a woman's, and boot-ish was about the most that I could see.

Doesn't look invisible to me, there is a definite imprint of a thread, there are companies out there who do investigate prints based off photographic evidence, I would be interested in what they come up with, but the print above would definitely rule out a load of candidates imo. In addition there is size evidence. It is not near as good as a plaster cast, but a cast is just a 3D print of the imprint, a photo is 2D

Read the post,

I asked if two people may have been involved, nothing about identity. But thanks for butting in there.

Just to clarify I think people are getting hung up on the semantics around the term viable. In the process of a cold-case, there is a revisiting of the evidence, sequence of events etc. that is carried out to re-build up the case, and see if it comes to the same conclusion. By conclusion I don't mean necessarily a different suspect, it could be the same suspect, but the events happened in a different way than is currently thought.

In the above you are taking the term "viable", and trying to associate it with "provable", I would take it more to mean "feasible" and extend that contemporaneously to the individuals who are investigating the case. Within the minutes and hours after many murders (including this one), there is usual minimal obviously provable evidence available (things like DNA have to be tested, weapons need to be identified etc.), however there is usually a pretty big list of viable suspects. As time moves forward the list of suspects will wax and wane a little, before reducing down to a select few, or one prime suspect. On the flip side, the list of evidence will be gathered and grow.

In this case I believe that contemporaneously, to the people doing the investigating, if they were following a standard protocol, Bailey would have been way down the list of viable suspects at the time. He would have been less of a suspect than the immediate family, than previous partners, after the people who were in the immediate vicinity at the time, after the people who were well acquainted with Sophie, after the people who lived closer than 4 km to the site, after people who had any form of relationship with her at all, all the way down to people who had no known relationship, or possibly would have met her once or twice. There was probably somewhere between 50-100 more viable candidates on that list, at that time. This was whittled down very quickly within hours they were probably able to eliminate half the people, and over the next few days plenty more. Bailey shot up the list over the coming days and weeks. Anything that comes later on (beyond perhaps the firs 8 days or so), is essentially meaningless when it comes to the justification of the Gardai to make him essentially the only suspect, how did they eliminate other suspects. What was the reasoning for these decisions? It was in the missing jobs book, the pages may have removed, but the information was not eliminated from the various Garda's minds. Many of those gardai are still around today, and it appears that there is no one willing to talk about it. This withholding of information is preventing justice for Sophie.

FWIW I can think of a couple of possibilities for why this is the case, one of which would explain even more why they focused on Bailey.

It should be noted, it wasn't the investigators findings of the evidence that moved Bailey up the list in those early days, it was mainly his actions and odd behaviours. If he had called in sick and said he was out of the journalism game when contacted, it probably would have been days before they got around to looking in to him. Then they probably would have called to the house, and Jules would have said they were both in bed all night, and there would have been no one else in the premises to dispute this, and they would have likely moved on further down the list.

No I wouldn't agree anyhow

Who would they be

Kerry Baby John’s parents kept their secret for near 40 years.

That is an interesting point

Posted above, but on the morning of the murder I would put the viable (i.e. feasible; not provable) candidates as such: To the people doing the investigating, if they were following a standard protocol, Bailey would have been way down the list of viable suspects at the time. He would have been less of a suspect than the immediate family, than previous partners, after the people who were in the immediate vicinity at the time, after the people who were well acquainted with Sophie, after the people who lived closer than 4 km to the site, after people who had any form of relationship with her at all, all the way down to people who had no known relationship, or possibly would have met her once or twice. There was probably somewhere between 50-100 more viable candidates on that list, at that time.

I get that you disagree, that's ok with me.

Yes the number of 50+ is alluded to here, but without the log that should be there of how the suspects were processed \ arrived at Bailey it is hard to know how properly the 50+ were investigated.

https://www.irishmirror.ie/news/irish-news/gardai-probing-sophie-murder-once-31977979

It is pretty much impossible for us here to know, however there are people still out there who do know in the vast majority of individual suspects. First port of call is the Gardai doing the investigations. This means the collective group of people. Those jobs books would have been looked over and added to numerous times by many people as the case is being built. Did they have an incident room, many discussions would have occurred over the following days and weeks about the candidates and rounding on Bailey. There is no doubt that many of the Gardai believed imo that Bailey did it but what brought them to that conclusion, it would be good for them to release that information? This information should all be available from the memories and minds of these Gardai. That is what the cold-case review should be looking at imo. Perhaps they correctly identified Bailey, but through illegitimate methods, or alternatively maybe they excluded someone else for the wrong reason, we just don't know, but they do.

The other resource is the people who were investigated themselves, Leo Bolger comes to mind, he and his wife talk about how he was investigated and excluded. I'm not sure who else, if anyone talked about that publicly, but almost certainly did privately with others.