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West Cork · yarn fm

Blow-ins

March 29, 2021·28 min·1 clip
Two days before Christmas 1996, a French woman was found beaten to death in her nightclothes outside her Irish holiday home — and twenty years later, no one has been charged.
The murder has one local name. Sophie Toscan de Plantier, a French woman with a holiday home in remote West Cork, was killed two days before Christmas 1996. The details are bleak. She was found below the path from the house in nightclothes and laced boots, caught in briars and barbed wire. No witnesses. No clear motive. No forensics at the scene for the police to work with. Crookhaven is the first stop. Billy O'Sullivan was behind the bar that night, and he was the last known person to see Sophie alive. His memory comes with regret: if he had known what was coming, he would have remembered everything. After that, the place keeps talking. In a noisy pub, a man says power decides who may come down there and what may be done. The episode leaves that hanging. He could mean the guards, the locals, both, or the way talk hardens into fact. Suspicion wants an outsider. The narration turns over whether someone was framed, whether a criminal outsmarted the guards, or whether chance had more say than anyone wants to admit. The case does not stay with one suspect. It pulls in people caught by the investigation, people pushed out of town, and a son in Paris still seeking justice for his mother. Then it returns to tea. Sophie sits in her usual spot, makes a loose promise about Christmas Eve, and heads into a still, frosty, full-moonish night.

As heard by us

A cold case that starts in one pub in Crookhaven and widens outward.

The episode treats Sophie Toscan de Plantier's murder as a wound that never quite closes in West Cork. It starts with her last known stop at Billy O'Sullivan's pub in Crookhaven, then moves to the body found the next morning, the lack of witnesses, and the way the case keeps…

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Why you'd press play

A murder case that keeps widening from a pub in Crookhaven.

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