Woman shares story of day she shared eerie moment with Ian Bailey holding chisel

A woman has looked back on an eerie moment she spent with murder suspect Ian Bailey.

Mr Bailey, the suspect for Sophie Toscan du Plantier’s muder, died on Sunday after a suspected heart attack. He collapsed on a street in west Cork. Mr Bailey has always denied any involvement in Ms Toscan du Plantier’s death.

Siobhan Burke met Ian Bailey at the West Cork Symposium, a small group of creatives with a passion for working with natural materials.

Speaking of the encounter, she recalled: “Ian Bailey attended  our West Cork Symposium one year. We always sold the tools off at the end in cheerful conversations with our new stone carvers.”

She recalled how Mr Bailey pointed a chisel at her.

“But he stood behind me quietly, called my name sharply, & had a chisel pointing directly into my chest when I spun round. He had no money to pay for the tools, though he stuck to his promise to drop the cash off somewhere at a later date. But the huge smile on his face at my fright isn't something I've forgotten,” she said on X, formerly known as Twitter.

Ian Bailey died at age 66 in Bantry, Co Cork, on Sunday. The former journalist was arrested twice and questioned by gardaí about the murder of Ms Toscan du Plantier but he constantly denied any involvement in the killing of the french woman, whose body was found badly beaten outside her holiday home in Cork in 1996. 

Mr Bailey, with an address at The Prairie in Schull, was convicted of her murder in absentia by a Paris court in May 2019, which imposed a 25-year sentence. The High Court rejected an attempt by French authorities to extradite Ian Bailey for the murder in October 2020, they ruled that he would not be surrendered to France after a European Arrest Warrant was issued in 2019.