The Blow-In: Ian Bailey’s fight to clear his name Paperback – 9 May 2024
A thirty-year cold case… A beautiful victim seeking refuge from her high-society life. A handsome drop-out with a history of domestic violence.
When the wife of a wealthy French film-maker was murdered in her Irish holiday home on a remote Irish peninsula, a local freelance journalist thought he had the ‘scoop’ that would revive his career.
Instead, he was arrested for the murder of the mother-of-one.
The only strong evidence was retracted after the chief witness claimed police had coerced her to frame her neighbour (an allegation the officers have consistently denied). Ian Bailey was never charged with murder in Ireland, because three consecutive Directors of Prosecutions felt the case against him was, at best, local gossip. He voluntarily gave DNA samples which came back negative. He had no motive or opportunity to carry out this brutal attack on the far side of a mountain within a half-hour time-frame.
Yet he spent the next thirty years trying to clear his name, a decade fighting extradition attempts – and the last five years of his life living under the shadow of a sentence handed down in Paris after he was convicted in absentia.
He died in a public street at the age of sixty-six, destitute, alone – and still protesting his innocence.
Who Watches the Watchers? 