Alison O'Connor: Sophie’s family not served by her being reduced to a commodity

In the quarter-century or so since the French woman was murdered, this case has never come near to even a vestige of coldness

Pierre-Louis Baudey-Vignaud as a child with his mother, Sophie Toscan du Plantier.

If it weren’t such a serious issue, you’d nearly laugh at the notion that the gardaí are contemplating a “cold case” review of the murder of Sophie Toscan du Plantier.

In the quarter-century or so since the poor woman was murdered, this case has never come near to even a vestige of coldness. 

On the contrary, it regularly incites a frenzy among many disparate groups; the media primarily, latterly including documentary makers, the public, even day-trippers who continue to make the ghoulish trek up a West Cork country road to see just where the Frenchwoman was so brutally slain.

What better publicity for the latest bandwagon jumpers than for there to be loose talk about a Garda review of the case? 

That is based apparently on the ever-changing evidence of a woman whose credibility rating is such that you would hardly put her name on a reference for employment for a summer job. 

Hers is an ever-changing story. Even before that particular cold-case news broke, there had been no shortage of headlines generated by those two new programmes, all lapped up by those who can never hear enough horrifying detail about Sophie’s death.

See how I used her first name there? No surnames needed. We’ve all been living with the memory of this woman for so long, it is as if we knew her — except we never did. 

That honour was left to her family and friends who are not being served in any way by this ongoing reduction of their mother, daughter, grandmother, friend, to a commodity who has previously served to help sell newspapers and books and who now boosts the bottom line for Netflix and Sky. 

It fits so neatly into that genre of “true” crime, presented as some sort of glossy fiction.

It is ever thus. Pick up the next crime book you come across and — shock, horror — you will no doubt find it’s all about the shocking murder of a woman — every bloody injury inflicted by the crazed killer almost lovingly detailed. 

I did it just now and had all my prejudices about the fetishisation of violent crimes against women confirmed. It was a thriller by an internationally best-selling, female, author. 

The blurb says it is about a woman who was brutally murdered at an isolated house. 

When she was found, a toddler — female, of course — was at her side. I don’t bother anymore with this grisly trope which so frequently involved female dismemberment, not to mention sexual violence. 

The plotlines can be incredibly well thought out, but the constant repetition of the mutilation of women’s bodies and their ultimate murder gets both repetitive and repulsive.

Sophie Toscan du Plantier was viciously beaten to death outside her holiday home in a quiet, peaceful part of West Cork.

As a young journalist, I reported on the Du Plantier case at the very start; that freezing cold Christmas of 1996 where the gruesome murder at a remote location truly could not have been more shocking. 

Given that I grew up just a short distance away, and was at home for Christmas, I also felt that horror at a visitor in our midst being so brutally killed. 

Even all these years later, it remains one of those things you almost cannot accept actually happened; it was the violence of the act against any person, but especially one who loved West Cork and who visited regularly.

News didn’t travel quite as fast in those days, but reports of this horrendous crime went all around the world.

Of course the victim wasn’t just a person, but a woman — a very attractive one, a mother of a young child, one with a certain level of celebrity in her native France and with just enough of a whisper of turbulence in her high-profile marriage. 

Well, you could hardly have made it all up, frankly. Take it from someone who was reporting on it daily in those early weeks — the appetite for detail was insatiable. I was 26 then and she was 39, and to my young mind at the time seemed old. 

Now I’m 51, no one has ever been convicted of leaving her dead in a ditch, but the insatiability for detail has not waned. If it ever does show any danger of subsiding, it is stoked by a new du Plantier project with its attendant publicity.

Truly the arrival this summer of these two new documentaries has pushed the entire scenario over the edge. Each time there is a new “Sophie” project, it brings new tourist ghouls to the town most associated with the crime — Schull — asking for directions to the remote holiday house. 

Even in the current circumstances, that is not the sort of tourism boost that any place needs.

I’m not going to bother even naming the documentaries because it is not like they need the publicity, apparently the viewing figures have made for a very good return on the respective investments. I don’t intend to watch them either.

I’ve had my fill of picking over the carcass of this crime. 

Chatting to a friend this week, she said she would watch them, but not until after her summer in West Cork is over. She didn’t say it outright, but it was clear that hearing the details of an unsolved murder of a woman close to where she holidays herself did not make for the type of vacation viewing she was interested in.

An exception to these more recent projects can be made for the superb 2018 podcast series West Cork, which so brilliantly drew the different strands of the case together, as well as painting such a comprehensive picture of this place where so many people from elsewhere have decided to make their home. 

That would have been a perfect end-point in terms of features on the Frenchwoman.

Publicity is the oxygen of the man who has been the main suspect in this case from the beginning — let’s not even use his name here. 

He has long almost overshadowed the victim with his narcissism and attention-seeking. The two latest projects have simply served to fuel that.

It is entirely understandable how Ms du Plantier’s family feel they cannot rest until her murderer has been brought to justice. But there has been more than enough evidence presented by now to show that splashing Sophie all over a screen will not solve this case.

It fits so neatly into that genre of ‘true’ crime, presented as some sort of glossy fiction.