On the morning of 23 December 1996, Sophie Toscan du Plantier was found murdered in a lane near Schull, West Cork. She was 39 years old and a regular visitor to
Ireland from Paris, where she lived with her husband, a celebrated film-maker, and 13-year-old son, Pierre Louis Baudey-Vignaud. Her death transfixed the media in both
Ireland and Paris, partly because it was just so jarring. The murder rate in
Ireland was so low that there was only one state pathologist, and it took him 28 hours to reach the scene.
It was close to Christmas. Sarah Lambert, the producer of Netflix’s new documentary, Sophie: A Murder in West Cork, struggles to underline how big a deal this was. “More so in Ireland than a lot of other countries, Christmas is such a family time. I know a lot of married couples that will separate and go back to their parents. People were flabbergasted that she, a mother, would be there by herself so late in December.” The location was so remote, the community so tight-knit, that such violence seemed incongruous. It was expected there would be a swift resolution. In a place where you couldn’t buy a new cardigan without everyone knowing about it, how would anyone get away with murder?
In fact, the case has never been solved. Some of this was due to procedure, as described by one Garda forensic, Eugene Gilligan. These were the worst possible crime-scene circumstances: outdoors, in the middle of the road, when it takes 12 hours to get there and there is a community culture of staying quiet. So the mystery has clung on for 25 years. But entombed under the speculations, a deeper question has gone undisturbed: who was Sophie Toscan du Plantier before she was a victim? Who was she when she was a human being?
“People were fascinated,” remembers Lambert, who grew up in Ireland and was a child when the murder happened. “Partly because Sophie was really beautiful. But beautiful women in stories always have to be very simple.” Toscan du Plantier was a complicated person – gothic in her sensibilities, dark and witty in her interests, as described by her cousin Frédéric Gazeau, an associate producer on the documentary. She was a film-maker herself and was talking to friends before she was killed about starting a project on bodily fluids: breast milk, semen, blood. Gazeau, when he became involved in the film, had “only three requests. My wish was to give to Sophie a real place in the story, to have a balanced treatment between the main suspect and the victim. The second request was not to show the body of Sophie. I didn’t want to be involved in a voyeuristic project. The third was to treat the story with dignity and humanity – to talk about emotions rather than evidence.”
‘Just don’t show her body!’ Netflix makes a true crime show with a difference
