This week’s Scannal revisits the high-profile murder of French documentary filmmaker, Sophie Toscan du Plantier, on the Mizen peninsula in West Cork in 1996. There hadn’t been a murder on the Mizen peninsula in West Cork for a hundred years according to locals, but December 23rd 1996 changed all that. The brutal slaying of the well respected French documentary filmmaker Sophie Toscan du Plantier on Christmas Eve that year cast a pall over the seasonal festivities, not only in the immediate area of Goleen and Schull, but right across the country. To this day nobody has ever been charged or convicted for this horrific crime. Sophie’s family learned of her killing from reports in the french media that night but it was to be over 30 hours before her body was examined and removed from the scene of the crime. In the early days media speculation about the murder was rife, but the Gardaí did not seem to have any obvious suspect. A local newspaper-stringer, Iain Bailey, who’d reported on the crime, was to become the focus of the enquiry – arrested twice he gave many media interviews acknowledging that he was a suspect but denying he had anything to do with the murder and he was never charged. Despite huge interest in the case in France, as months lead to years it seemed no closer to being solved. Bailey took a libel case against eight newspapers which attracted such huge interest that the presiding circuit court judge had to remind those in court that it was not a murder trial but rather a civil libel case. However the case did lead to a massive amount of testimony coming into the public domain about Bailey and the crime for the first time. Bailey brought actions aginst eight newspapers for libel – he won two of these cases and was awarded €8,000 in damages. In 2008 – after seeking justice for over 11 years – the Irish Authorities have finally agreed to send the files to their counterparts in France. Sophie’s body has been exhumed and French