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Welcome to Acast Classics 2026, four exceptional limited series handpicked for their journalism, craft and storytelling.
If you love this podcast, we know you're going to be hooked on West Cork.
So we made episode one available for you right here.
Enjoy.
And is intended for a mature audience.
Hello?
Hello, is that Billy O'Sullivan?
That's right.
Hi, Billy.
My name is Jennifer and I am a radio reporter and I'm here with my husband and we're doing a piece on the Sophie Toscan de Plantier murder.
Two days before Christmas 1996, a French woman was murdered in a remote part of West Cork on the southwest coast of Ireland.
She'd been badly beaten and was found in her nightclothes and laced-up boots, tangled in briars and barbed wire by the path below her holiday home.
To the police, it looked like she'd been running from someone, and this was as far as she got.
There were no witnesses, no forensics, no clear motive.
Down an isolated lane, there was just the body of a woman that people knew little about.
On the night that she died, Sophie stopped by O'Sullivan's pub in the small village of Crookhaven.
Billy O'Sullivan was behind the bar and he was the last known person to see her alive.
If I knew she was going to be murdered, I would have remembered everything, mate.
In West Cork, it's simply known as the murder because there hasn't been another murder that anyone can remember.
20 years on, the case is still open.
I think for the woman's soul, for the family.
You know?
It's like the casket can't be closed.
To understand why and what that's meant for West Cork, we have to go back to the 1970s, where this all began.
MUSIC
This is West Cork, an Audible original series.
I'm Sam Bungie.
I'm Jennifer Ford, and this is episode one, Blow-Ins.
When Len Liptick was in his 20s, he wore a shirt and tie and punched in as an accounting clerk in central London.
It was the 70s and Len figured if the job and smog didn't finish him off, nuclear annihilation would.
He hated work and he hated London.
He wanted out and he'd heard about a place called West Cork.
One day, got on it.
Got the tickets, bought a car for, I think it was £7.50, and a Morris 1000.
Had a trailer on the back.
I had £25 in my pocket and left for Ireland.
When he got to Ireland, Len drove west as far as he could, out onto a mountainous peninsula on the far southwest coast.
He stopped in a hillside village, found a piece of land with an old ruined cottage on it,
Learned to weave belts from wool that he sold at the market, and drank the local illegally brewed alcohol, poutine.
I mean, I had nothing, really.
I had my house, my ruin, no electric.
I had my donkey and cart.
Len the accountant had vanished.
In his place was Len with the donkey and cart.
Yeah, it was like a dream come true.
It was incredible, really.
It was a hideaway at the edge of Europe, a community that grew by word of mouth.
People floating on the breeze into West Cork.
The locals had a name for them.
They called them blow-ins.
Like a lot of places out on the fringes, West Cork attracted people for all sorts of reasons.
You could reset or reinvent yourself.
Maybe you were looking for something.
Or maybe you were running from something.
As another Bloughan put it.
There were people coming in to West Cork, which is sort of wild and woolly, the wild west of Ireland, you know.
And nobody knew their past.
You could make that up, couldn't you?
You could be who you wanted to be rather than who you really were.
Which eventually led to trouble.
When one blow-in was murdered and another was suspected of doing it.
The suspect was arrested a couple of times, but there was no hard evidence of any kind, and the case never went anywhere.
The town turned against him, branded him a murderer.
Years went by.
And where you might expect him to leave, he dug in.
He stayed in his cottage just a few miles from town, and everyone else was supposed to go on with their lives, with this horrid event unresolved and the embodiment of all their unsettled nerves still resolutely among them.
I see him in the market, you know, selling his pizzas there.
And really, he's always trying to be normal and trying to get people to like him.
But we all know, don't we?
Barry, it's 20 years this Christmas.
I saw the date last night and did a quick double take.
20 years this Christmas since Sophie Toscan de Plantier was found dead near Skull.
And this investigation...
Continues apace.
Hard to believe that.
20 years ago tomorrow, that news broke that her body had been found, we remember, on the programme today.
The first time we saw the suspect was in 2014.
One Sunday morning in our London flat, we read a short piece about the case in a British newspaper.
The suspect was suing the Irish police, the guards, for wrongful arrest.
Claiming 20 years of harassment and mental torture, which he says has ruined his life.
That without having the evidence to actually charge him with anything, they'd managed to convince an entire country that he was guilty of murder.
He was tall and powerful looking, striding into the courthouse wearing a black great coat and a scarlet red scarf that had been caught by the wind.
He had big bushy eyebrows and was staring down the camera lens.
It was a face you could read things into.
And it was a face that would launch us down a three-year rabbit hole.
We'd spend a winter in West Cork and then a summer, trying to make sense of an investigation where everything is still on the table, where witness stories are still changing 20 years on.
And we go so mad thinking about who might have done it, we started to take seriously the guy who thinks that the murderer was a horse.
We'd spend time with the victim's family.
Why was a woman with a husband and child in France alone in West Cork just days before Christmas?
And we'd sit for hours with the suspect and his accusers.
What was it about this man that has people so convinced he did it?
How is an innocent person supposed to act anyway?
How a guy looks or carries or the size or the height or the weight of him or the presence he might have or whatever kind of a demeanour he might give off is completely irrelevant.
Exactly, that's exactly what I... Do you think that we, as a country, should be saying, like, to be honest with you, there are those that think he did it and those that think he didn't, right?
And he knows that, and he regards himself as the chief suspect.
But, like, maybe Ireland should be saying, we need to leave this guy alone.
He's doing everything in his power to try to prove that he's innocent.
That is not supposed to be the way the law works.
It's supposed to be you're innocent and the state is supposed to prove that you're guilty.
We decided to go to Dublin to sit in on the trial and see for ourselves.
And we found that we weren't the only ones intrigued by this man.
Wedged into the benches at the back of the courtroom sat us, two curious journalists, next to some curious old ladies.
They'd arrived early to get a good seat, equipped with flasks of tea and a selection of small, neatly cut sandwiches.
One lady told us that she and her friends had formed a kind of club to follow the trial.
They made sure that at least one of them could go every day and each evening report back what had happened.
They couldn't rely on the papers to make the observations they were interested in.
The newspapers would tell you about the back and forth between the lawyers and the judge and the witnesses.
But they weren't going to recount the look and dress and demeanour of the suspect in the level of detail these ladies were after.
It's him they'd come to scrutinise.
We saw just how notorious this guy is.
National newspapers can put his name and face on the front page with no need to recap the story or his involvement in it.
Everyone already knows.
Yeah, sure, you'd be familiar with him.
Unless you live under a rock somewhere, you know.
He's had to be developing dementia or something.
In between court sessions, we took to the markets and pubs around Dublin to ask about him.
And we're copied out from it, girls talking.
We've read the book, we're copied out.
We're actually hooked on it 24-7.
You know, gun to your head, what do you reckon, did he do it?
Did he do it?
I would have said yes.
What gives you that impression or what makes you feel that?
There's just a badness in him when you look at him.
There's a badness in him, you know?
I actually met him when he was up here the last time.
How come you met him?
He was just walking down here?
He was on a break from the court.
I said, I know you from the TV.
And he got talking to me.
I looked at him and I said, God, he's such a nice gentleman.
However, as we say, that's the outdoor face.
We all have indoor faces.
And nobody knows, really and truly, nobody knows if there's a murderer among us.
It's a real Agatha Christie thing.
Nobody knows.
They really don't.
Couldn't trust anything coming from the guards.
Let that be my opinion now.
The guards were caught up in a run of scandals at the time and had some people willing to believe the worst about them.
That the force might have concocted a case against an outsider in a crime everyone wanted solved.
People would be unwilling to come to an area
Where they felt there was a killer on the loose, where they felt that a tourist like her was going to be murdered in her home.
I mean, that's the very worst.
People love to come to West Cork for the isolation, to come to their holiday home, but to think that there might be a killer outside their window would certainly depress the price of property in the area.
And if the person that was blamed was to be not a local and perhaps leave the area quickly, taking the blame with them like the scapegoat being driven out of the village, well, all the better, you know.
So is that what happened?
Did an outsider get picked on and framed?
Did a canny criminal outsmart the guards?
Or did someone just get lucky?
This next clip is hard to understand.
We were talking to one man in a noisy pub when the guys sitting next to him started chiming in.
He says if you go down there, it'll speak for itself.
They rule the country down there.
You don't go in there and do anything unless they allow you to do it.
Well, that's all I'm going to say to you.
You don't go down there and mess with their town.
They rule the country down there.
Do you understand me?
You don't go down there and do anything unless they allow you to do it.
Did you ever see the film Deliverance?
Well, that's all I'm going to say to you.
You don't go down there and mess with their town.
Was he talking about the guards, the locals, both?
Maybe this was just big city talk, but we were curious to see what he meant.
And over three years, we learned that the impact of this crime extends far beyond this suspect, his fight to clear his name, the titillating question of did he or didn't he do it.
It extends to people who got caught up in the investigation and were driven out of town and into hiding.
To Paris, where a man who was 15 when Sophie Toscan de Plantier was killed is now fighting for justice for his mother.
And it reaches all across West Cork, along the Boreans over Mount Gabriel and through the outpost towns of Skull, Goline and Crookhaven.
Back when a trial site for the first transatlantic telegraphs was set up in Crookhaven, one of the signal station operators wrote that arriving here felt like reaching the end of everywhere.
The pub at the end of everywhere is O'Sullivan's, and Billy O'Sullivan has lived in Crookhaven all his 80 years.
And on this day, he's invited us out on his boat, hauling lobster pots.
Growing up, Billy was one of seven.
His brothers and sisters were all leaving Crookhaven in search of work, up to Dublin, to the UK, to America.
Billy wanted to stay, it's just that there wasn't much to keep him here.
He tried his hand as a lighthouse keeper, a fisherman.
God was a tough mother of God almighty.
Eventually he took over the pub from his father, but it was one of three pubs in a village of just over a hundred people.
But then gradually it improved.
Tourists started to venture down this way.
The first summer home was built.
And people in West Cork started to notice new faces around in the off-season.
People coming to explore.
People like Tom Quinn.
It was fishermen, farmers, small farmers, and very few of the likes of me.
Very few.
Like Len with his donkey, Tom was one of the early pioneers of this new movement to West Cork.
Tom's a house painter.
During this interview, just like every other time we met him, Tom was covered in paint.
There was paint on his woolly hat.
There was paint all over his Think Outside the Box t-shirt.
It's a wonder he can see through the flecks of paint on his glasses.
Tom found the place kind of by accident.
The first place he stumbled into was Skull, a fishing town that would become the hub of this new community.
I was just driving on this road and all of a sudden you kind of like this kind of Cinerama scope kind of says it'll be the mill kind of...
Scene opens up.
And I felt like I was stepping into the past in a kind of an odd way.
Do you know?
It was like stepping into the past.
Land was cheap.
People bought old farmhouses and started growing their own vegetables, rearing animals.
I got into this whole big self-sufficiency thing, you know.
I was growing all my own food.
I had goats and bees and ducks and hens and I was catching fish and digging turf and trying to kind of beat the system, you know.
I love this place.
People like Tom and Len kept turning up.
Ireland joined the European Union in 1973, meaning people could come from all over Europe and draw government benefits.
One local put it this way, it's the farthest place you can go and not get your feet wet.
If the coast was another 50 miles west, they'd all keep going.
Pete Bilecki came here for a holiday sometime in the mid-90s and just never went home.
With the things that were going on in the UK and in Europe, there's levels of violence going up.
So what you do is you move to the edges where the ripples are less strong.
So Westcourt was about as far as you could go, wasn't it?
But having the dream is one thing.
Actually living it is something else.
It's very quiet in the winter.
People who don't know that yet are going to have to keep themselves very busy somehow.
Or they'll go mad.
Or they'll split up.
You go and have affairs, which is quite common, actually.
That's Jules Thomas.
She was one of the early settlers.
She lives with her partner, Ian Bailey.
He abandoned life as a reporter in the UK in search of something a bit more rustic.
Is there something about people who come in the summer, do you ever look at them and go, oh, I don't fancy that?
Oh, they do fall in love with it in the summer.
They don't realise it can be so long and grey and wet.
There's actually a phenomenon that people come, and they maybe come on their holidays, maybe with their children, and they enjoy it so much here, and then they maybe go back to wherever, they're going back to maybe London.
And each time they say, oh, do you know, I think I'd really like to live there, I think I could live there, and they come over, but they haven't experienced a winter, perhaps.
And the winter is a long, cold, dark period.
Very little happens.
West Cork underwent a sort of rural regeneration.
The hippies pushed house prices up, and soon they were joined by another well-heeled group.
Actors and writers and lawyers who bought second homes down here.
It became a sort of playground where the pressures of modern life didn't seem to apply.
For a time, it was perfect.
But then there was a murder here and everything changed again.
The whole place was, it was like a tinderbox.
Jim Duggan was one of those lawyers who bought a second home in Skull.
Two years after the murder, he'd find himself representing the suspect.
But back then, he didn't even know him.
Back then, all he knew was, as much as anyone else, that someone had been murdered and the killer was still at large.
You were frightened.
This was something awful that had happened.
And people just couldn't deal with it or cope with it.
People locked, double-locked their doors.
My wife would not go out.
My children would not be left out.
It was more than just the immediate fear felt by those that lived around Skull.
This kind of thing just didn't square with how the people of West Cork saw themselves.
It's a generous community of people.
It's a kind place to live.
And this was a huge shock, all the more so because nobody really knew she existed.
Almost like she was almost like a sort of phantom that came in and came out of her own accord.
And she had slipped through the net of the hospitality and the kindness.
I remember thinking how terribly sad it was and I remember being embarrassed as well.
Nadine O'Regan grew up in West Cork.
Her dad ran the local paper.
I know that sounds like a strange term to use, but you know when somebody who comes in from abroad to live in this beautiful kind of surroundings and then this happens and you're just thinking, like, this isn't what we're like.
This isn't, West Cork isn't like this.
The person who, you know, is entitled to come here, owns a house here, loves it here, who loves the way of life here, is living away happily, and is entitled to do something, we're glad they're there, is dead.
You know?
Somebody's killed her, and not only killed her, but killed...
Something else.
I said it to you the last time, Sam.
It also killed something here.
It took some place special and made it everywhere else.
That's what it done.
And it still hasn't gone away.
People talk about this murder as having left a stain on West Cork, as though the landscape itself somehow remembers.
A local poet told us West Cork is full of numinous or spiritual places that feel, as she put it, cargoed with mystery.
So I think this is the gate she talked about.
One place the poet talked about was Threecastle Head.
These are the ruins of the last stronghold of one of the old West Cork clans, the Imahines.
Back when the Normans were invading Ireland in the 1100s, the Imahines were pushed out onto West Cork's mizzen peninsula.
They built castles on the sites of old Celtic forts, strategically located to defend themselves from any attack.
Three Castle Head is so strategically located that we had trouble finding it.
Okay, let's keep going.
Yeah, but I just think we're really lost.
The wrong way.
To get there, you drive out along the peninsula until the road runs out, and then walk out even further.
And just when you're thinking about turning back, you round the top of a hill, and there, by a large lake, are the ruins of three small castles linked by a stone wall.
That's the coldest thing I've ever seen.
Let's see.
Oh, the rocks look so sharp.
There's something about it that's completely overwhelming.
Something so eerie.
You ready?
Yeah, I need some space.
Oh, yeah.
Beyond the castles and down to all sides, there's a sweeping view to the Atlantic, hundreds of feet below.
And on the day we were there, the wind was moving so quickly across the top of the lake that it looked like something terrifying might burst out of it.
You can see why all sorts of myths and legends have been attributed to this place.
Some say the bottom of the lake's never been found, but that there's treasure down there, which will bring bad luck to whoever finds it.
Which, to be fair, is what you would say if you had treasure buried anywhere.
They say the last family to live there all died violently, and to commemorate their deaths, every day a drop of blood drips from the walls of the main tower.
But the most common myth at Three Castle Head is of the White Lady, a ghost who haunts the lake, foretelling the death of anyone who sees her.
On her last day alive, Sophie Toscan de Plantier went walking out at Threecastle Head, but something spooked her.
The people who own the land live in a farmhouse out there and knew Sophie from her visits.
They recalled that on that day, she came running to the house having been frightened by something up at the lake.
They tried to get her to stay the night, but she insisted on going home.
A local guard would later remark to Sophie's aunt that it was a shame the landowners weren't from around there.
Had they been local, he said, they would have known not to let someone who'd seen the white lady off on their own.
A whole bunch of myths have sprung up around Sophie's murder.
From idle gossip to crazy stories like this.
Stories about white ladies and a foretelling of Sophie's death.
And maybe it's what happens when there's no resolution to a crime like this.
People try to make sense of it and decide on an ending for themselves.
But this isn't folklore.
A woman was brutally murdered.
Whoever did it got away with it.
Early on, a local warned us to remember we weren't investigators.
Not the first such warning he'd offered a couple of foolhardy reporters.
Over the past three years, we've met many people who've been consumed by this case.
Haunted detectives, crusading victims, amateur sleuths.
We all need to manage our expectations.
But surely it's possible to sift out the fiction, to go to the source of the rumours, look them in the eye and discard all the nonsense, and then see what's left.
I think the local feel is, it needs to be finalised.
Leo and Sally Bolger lived less than a mile from Sophie's house.
Oh, that's for sure.
It needs to be, you know...
I think for the woman's soul, for the family.
For her family.
You know?
It's like the casket can't be closed.
People have to be allowed to put it together for themselves in the end.
You know?
Even if there is no guilty or innocent verdict...
I'd like to hear the whole story, you know, and I would like to hear it with some kind of continuity instead of this fella said that and that one said this and that's rubbish and he's a liar.
I'd like to hear the story with all that kind of taken out of it.
With warts and all gone.
Yeah.
Sophie Toscan de Plantier boarded a plane from Paris on Friday, December 20th, arriving at her home in West Cork that evening.
She was spotted alone several times that weekend, browsing clothes in a clothes shop, picking up groceries.
On her last day alive, she visited Threecastle Head.
By the time she left her friends up there, it was dark, about 6pm.
She drove the few miles down to Crookhaven, to O'Sullivan's pub.
Billy O'Sullivan was behind the bar, and he was the last known person to see her alive.
So can you describe, I mean, this place has obviously changed a bit.
No, it's exactly the same.
It's identical.
Same stool as there, sitting up there in the usual spot.
And she'd usually have tea and scone or something.
He says they chatted for a while, just pleasantries.
Sophie made a vague promise to call back in for a Christmas Eve party.
She finished her cup of tea and scone.
And then she left.
It was a beautiful, still night.
Frosty, full moonish.
And calm you could hear, because there were stories all over the place about people hurt or screaming, and maybe they did, you know?
And then we don't know what happened after that.
But she was found the next morning, battered to death on the road.
West Cork is an Audible Original Production.
Written and produced by Jennifer Ford and Sam Bungie.
Produced and sound designed by Kristen Muller, Alex Trejano, Robin Wise and Paul Schneider.
Our theme music was composed by Shani Avaram.
Our recording engineer is Sean Moher.
West Cork is edited by Mike Olive.
Our fact checker is Christine Baird.
And Jesse Baker and Eric Newsom are the executive producers.
This is Audible.
Audible.
