As you know I focused mainly on the Sophie Toscan du Plantier murder and it feels like 2025 was the last year of significant updates, with the Jim Sheridan film. It seems like the police review will just run forever and I am confident they will not find enough evidence to convict the killer, even if he is still alive. Also, my historical crime research is at a tidy point to pause after I published British Gangs a year ago.

Otherwise I am still active on sites I fully own. These are true email newsletter platforms with no social media element at pauldettmann.uk and americanavibes.uk and I am now switching focus to my music and film writing. My first volume of the Fleetwood Mac story should be out by Christmas, with volume two to follow in 2027.

Thank you all so much!

This time we also talked about our writing processes, how much we enjoy research, and some of the pitfalls and struggles that all writers face in separating facts from rumour.

Emma and I also chatted about Mary Carr a few weeks ago and you can hear that extended discussion below or click here. You can buy Emma’s novel Mercy right now and you can pre-order her nonfiction book on Mary Carr here. Emma’s earlier Mary Carr novel is here.

The Lucy Worsley episode on Mercy Newton / Kitty Newton will actually be on Lucy’s podcast rather than on the TV series which you will be able to listen to here in February. Paid subscribers to Lucy’s show can listen now.

Emma and I also chatted about Mary Carr in March 2025 and you can hear that extended discussion below or click here. You can buy Emma’s novel Mercy right now and you can pre-order her nonfiction book on Mary Carr here. Emma’s earlier Mary Carr novel is here.

We always try to put the focus on the victims on Crime Guy, but in this case, with no credible suspects at all, Suzy has always been the centre of her own story. I think of her as ‘officially missing’ but of course she was declared dead in a legal capacity on 27 July 1993. Having someone go missing puts the family in legal limbo and makes the situation even more maddening.

You can read more about Suzy and her legacy at the Suzy Lamplugh Trust website.

I remember this case re-appearing in the news regularly since 1985. I cannot quite remember it happening, unlike the Suzy Lamplugh abduction the following summer, but it remains a major story. An entire family had been shot dead in a remote farmhouse in the middle of the night, in a building that was apparently locked tight from outside intervention. Suspicion gradually formed around the 24 year-old adopted son of Nevill and June Bamber. Could he have used inside knowledge to enter through a closed window, meticulously staged the whole scene and then re-arrived later on in the company of Essex Police, feigning complete ignorance?

The label of ‘noble cause corruption’ is something new to me this Christmas, but the idea behind it is familiar. The idea that there are some cases which just do not have enough evidence to secure a conviction, even though what happened is commonly accepted among the police and members of the public. In other words, ‘everyone knows who did it’ but cannot quite prove it. This happens a lot in all aspects of our lives, and it is desperately annoying when it happens to you. That speeding fine, that parking ticket… the mitigating circumstances, the reasons why you don’t deserve that particular penalty, but you lost the receipt or some other piece of paper that you need to show the authorities. You know you’ve been treated unfairly, but can you prove it?

It is difficult to imagine how appalling it would be if you were accused of murder, knowing you were innocent, but totally without an alibi or any way of demonstrating your innocence. I have written before on Crime Guy about how most of us cannot demonstrate our whereabouts for about 90% of our normal daily activities. When you think about it, alibis do not often exist.

The more I listened to Blood Relatives this Christmas, the more Jeremy Bamber reminded me of Ian Bailey. Bailey, now deceased, was an undisputed narcissist, an alcoholic and a convicted wife-beater. He was a thoroughly unlikeable man. Knowing he was innocent of the murder of Sophie Toscan du Plantier, he took pleasure in taunting the police, neighbours, friends, and even strangers with his innocence. He trusted the system to protect him, an innocent man in his own eyes, and took his eccentric actions to extremes, thoroughly alienating most of Ireland. But in the end, and quite surprisingly, Ian Bailey was right. The system did protect him. He was never charged with murder, never faced a court on that matter.

I find the most striking aspect of the White House Farm murders to be that the police did conclude it was a murder-suicide. Everything pointed to the explanation that Sheila Caffell, who was suffering from poor mental health, shot her family and herself. It was a tragic and unsatisfactory explanation, but the police were so sure of this that they began burning the damaged house contents. Mattresses, carpets, anything covered in blood, was burned in a fire at the farm soon after the tragedy. It was an open and shut case. A locked room mystery. The house was locked up from the inside, so whoever perpetrated the crime had also died in the farmhouse.

It was only when Tolleshunt D'Arcy’s very own Agatha Christie started rummaging around that a new narrative emerged, one that the police had either never seriously considered or had emphatically ruled out. Ann Eaton decided that her cousin (not a blood relative) Jeremy Bamber, had killed his family. Evidence in the form of a gun silencer was suddenly ‘found’ and even though that item was mishandled at every turn, it was relied on in court as a crucial part of the prosecution case.

Most people seem to agree that Sheila Caffell could not have shot herself if the silencer had been on the end of the long rifle, making it so long that she could not use the weapon. And her blood type had been found inside the silencer, perhaps indicating that the silencer was indeed on the rifle when she was shot. But another member of the close family also had that blood type. In the absence of DNA testing, the blood could have belonged to two people, not just Sheila, even though the jury were emphatically told there was only a match for Sheila.

The reliance on the silencer was invalid because of the way it had been brought to the attention of police, carried around, taken to another property, thrown in a car, thrown in a desk drawer, perhaps taken back to the farmhouse… the silencer had been on quite a journey. And it turned out that it was not the only one. The police inspected ‘several’ silencers, at least two and perhaps three including this one. Silencers which belonged to two men, David and his father Robert Boutflour. It turns out that Robert had the same blood type as Sheila, and David’s blood type had also been found on the ‘main’ silencer found by David. This is all very intricate, and it seems the police and CCRC have glossed over or brushed aside these details.

I will leave you to discover all the to and fro about the key piece of new information described in the podcast: the possibility of a 999 emergency call from within the farmhouse during the period of time when Jeremy Bamber was standing outside with about half of Essex Police. It is another eye-watering case of incompetence from the much-maligned CCRC. However if that phone call did indeed happen, it leaves open the possibility that earlier police intervention might have saved lives.

I cannot add anything to this case that has not been covered in this excellent and sober podcast, other than to draw your attention to it. If you are as obsessed about the Sophie Toscan du Plantier case as I am then perhaps you will always look for parallels in other cases.

There is a sophisticated and committed campaign group supporting the innocence of Jeremy Bamber. I have also been reading The Doc Maker here on Substack over the last year or so, someone who believes in Bamber’s innocence. If you prefer to read rather than listen then most of the podcast’s revelations are detailed in Heidi Blake’s extensive 2024 article linked below.

Resources

New Yorker ‘In The Dark’, Season 6 by Heidi Blake

New Yorker Feature Article, Heidi Blake, July 2024

The Doc Maker (Substack)

Jeremy Bamber Innocence Campaign

Crime Guy “Unsolved” Podcast

My podcast returns on New Year’s Day with another look at the disappearance in 1986 of estate agent Suzy Lamplugh. I am joined once again by Geraldine Comiskey.

Bamber vs The Doc Maker

Noël Cause Corruption

As you tuck into your Christmas pudding please spare a thought - and some cash for Jeremy Bamber’s legal fight…

Listen now

4 months ago · 5 likes · 4 comments · The Doc Maker

In this episode we talk a little about the ongoing police cold case investigation. I always had very low expectations (and still do) which is why I might inadvertently give the impression that the case is now closed. This is not to make a comment against the police after 29 years, but just to accept that the chance of any breakthrough now, with no eye witnesses, most other witnesses deceased, including the prime suspect, and very limited extant forensic evidence. I always saw the M-Vac experiment to recover DNA to be a last throw of the dice, unlikely to recover anything other than Sophie’s DNA. Geraldine has since mentioned that the M-Vac recovery process has completed but that cross-checking with various DNA samples is ongoing. One might guess that their first task was to compare it all against Ian Bailey’s samples which he voluntarily offered to police shortly after the murder in the winter of 1996/7 to rule himself out.

You may be new to this case, and I always try to provide enough context if you are. The best place you can start is where I started. Below is my very first post on this case, written on Medium in June 2021. How little did I know…? I have revised my thoughts on so many things since then, which is why I wanted to reshare it. It’s as close as I can get to my first thoughts.

You can read Geraldine’s book about this cold case here.

I recently recorded a special interview with a friend of Crime Guy, the professional Irish journalist Geraldine Comiskey. She has written a book on the case, turned conventional wisdom on its head, and come up with her own theory about how that night unfolded.

This was also the year that Jim Sheridan returned to the case with his cinematic release, Re-Creation. Geraldine has seen that film but we are still waiting for a UK release. All of this and more is in our interview which will go out on 23rd December. You can follow and subscribe now on Spotify, YouTube and Apple to make sure you get it the moment we send it out.

Looking ahead to New Year’s Day, and I will be marking 2026 with a renewed focus on Fulham estate agent Suzy Lamplugh. July will be the 40th anniversary of her disappearance. Work is once again taking me closer to London this winter and we may at last carry out our walk of the key locations in the Suzy Lamplugh disappearance. She is still technically missing, but there are no credible theories that suggest she might still be alive.

Although Geraldine and I are not quite as close to this case, we have both read the books by Andrew Stephen and David Videcette, and I have seen all the documentaries over the years. The only thing I feel sure of is that John Cannan (who died in November 2024) was always a convenient patsy and had no involvement in Suzy’s disappearance. You can hear this part of our interview in the same places on 1st January 2026.

It could have (perhaps should have) received major news coverage in Ireland and would then have been picked up around the world. I think some of the ‘why’ of that is relevant. David Malone himself, a professional journalist, only heard about the case from a very short article about the murder in a Canadian newspaper. What’s that all about? David himself admits perplexity:

“I first learned of John Horgan’s terrible murder when reading a tiny newspaper report: one short paragraph buried in the inside pages of, not an Irish paper, but a Canadian daily. I could never have imagined that this humble report would be all that the world knew of these broad-reaching, dark, strange events – events much stranger than anyone could possibly have guessed from the bare smattering of words they had been granted in the newspapers of the day.”

We could guess perhaps that the satanic element, the Catholic religious element, the intra-neighbourhood element, and the fact that this was a child killing of another child… that all of these elements had combined to result in a burying of the story, whether conscious or otherwise. I found out long ago that Ireland, then as now, is a very different place to England.

While we were recording our interview, a number of times I felt like this was not quite a real case. Almost every detail is uniquely disturbing. The level of preparation that Lorcan Bale undertook was unusual: he made large holes in the top of his wardrobe and in the ceiling above the wardrobe. These holes left a lot of dust and mess inside the wardrobe that was never seen or cleaned up.

The holes gave access from Lorcan’s bedroom straight into the attic above. Lorcan had run a lamp off a power extension cable into the loft and conducted at least one ouija board session up there with a friend, also called Lorcan. There was something up there that has been described as a satanic shrine with an altar and certain vile sacrifices or offerings.

How does such a young boy turn out this way? It’s a natural question but unfortunately the answer is usually some version of it depends. We know that Lorcan Bale had a number of occult and even satanic books available to him. They’re not especially disturbing books. Many people have read Aleister Crowley, Dostoevsky. But Lorcan Bale read and possessed a fair number. He had spent years of his short life in hospital for various different complaints. Had he found the books in the hospital library? It seems unlikely.

Geraldine Comiskey described one of the local Dublin markets as a sort of 1970s dark web. Perhaps he obtained the books there? But what triggered his curiosity in that direction? I have never really subscribed to the conspiracy theory about satanic worship cults. The idea has the smell of the witch trial, also a false conspiracy, about it. But could Lorcan, only a young boy, really have been groomed by adult satanists? And how could all of this happened without his overbearing parents getting wind?

The killing itself is horrific. It’s not something you can practice, hitting a human over the head with a wooden club. You get one chance. I would imagine most people err on the side of caution. Even when I am splitting wood I find it takes a while to judge the force. Lorcan killed John Horgan with a single blow. Imagine the anger and energy required to do that, and to get it right first time.

Listen to our extended interview

You can read more about the book and buy it here. If you missed our extended interview, these episodes are now available here on Substack and on Spotify.

Part two will follow in a week or so, which gives you plenty of time to read or listen to this book between these chats. If you enjoy listening to me talking to Geraldine Comiskey then there is a full hour-long discussion elsewhere here on Crime Guy.

I quickly bought Molony’s most recent book about the murder of Sophie Toscan du Plantier for several reasons. It came out last September, just six months after Ian Bailey died. Would it contain any juicy information that people were reluctant to print with Bailey still alive?

Molony appears in some of the Sophie documentaries and enjoys a high profile in Ireland, but also I heard he had completely lost sight of any objectivity and had produced one of the most anti-Ian Bailey books yet.

I did find the book biased and in places it does wilfully misconstrue certain facts. But the annoying part about all true crime books written by professionals or semi-professionals is that none of them are uniformly dreadful.

Even Michael Sheridan’s very old and detailed account is full of vital information. Nobody is infallible. Every book, on any topic, will contain errors. However sometimes it is the way people respond to errors that tells us the most.

During the promotional activities for his book, Molony managed to enlist none other than Irish Prime Minister (Taoiseach) Micheál Martin to appear at certain events. Martin used those events to add his own opinions on the way the murder case was carried out.

This episode took a dramatic turn this summer when a solicitor who used to work for the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) in Ireland at the time of Sophie’s murder began legal action. That solicitor, Robert Sheehan, was appalled at the casual way Molony’s book implied he had not fulfilled his objective responsibilities when he evaluated the (thin and one-sided) evidence collected by the Irish police.

In my view, and after writing about this case for around four years, the DPP report, running to around 44 pages, is the most neutral and reliable document ever produced as part of this case.

The irony is that Robert Sheehan is emphasizing that it was a team effort ultimately signed off and released by the office of the DPP. It was not his pet side-of-desk project. But it is a very strong piece of work and if it turns out he was the sole author then he can stand proud that he discharged his public duty without fear or favour.

This is not Molony’s view. This episode of the wider chapter has been covered in Ireland’s version of Private Eye, called The Phoenix. Their “lazy, sloppy approach” to journalism (in Molony’s words) has completely misrepresented Molony’s view that the DPP report was the product of one man’s demented protection of the eccentric Englishman, Ian Bailey.

Yet here we have it, from Molony’s own book:-

It seems to me extraordinary that a single lawyer in the DPP's office could effectively be a jury of one, deciding that each piece of evidence is not beyond all doubt, over and over again. What is instead reasonable is for the hundreds of individual hurdles to be lined up against Bailey in a case based on circumstantial evidence. Let him try to surmount them all if he could - let him even knock down a few - until a panel of twelve from the Irish public is fully satisfied where justice lies… The DPP, as an office, stood behind its single assessor and kept doing so but the collective failure is sheer scandal.

All of this energy being expended on a deceased individual, safely beyond the reach of any and all known legal systems, Ian Bailey.

The mistake so many people make, and it is a very attractive and logical way to think, is that if you have a very large amount of circumstantial evidence, then that evidence somehow multiplies in value. If you can assemble an enormous list of weak evidence, then somehow that weak evidence turns into a strong foundation. Were you to apply this logic to a building project, or anything in the physical world, you would see the fallacy.

For some reason, in true crime, people think that flimsy circumstantial evidence can be added to and built upon to make a strong case. I would go further and say that most of the ‘evidence’ against Bailey is actually gossip and hearsay, and this is more or less what Robert Sheehan found as well.

Sheehan’s recent legal proceedings against both Molony and Martin have hit the sand, at least for now, although the reason seems to be something more like confusion. The judge believed she had to rely on an email sent from the DPP but in fact the email itself states that judges are to act independently, and that any referral to the DPP to arbitrate should be made later on. If the DPP gets involved too quickly in any matter, then one important recourse for appeal is immediately closed.

Unlike other journalists I won’t pretend to be an expert in Irish law. I’m not even an expert in English law. But from a pragmatic standpoint it seems to me that the Irish system, just like the British one, will close ranks and prevent this sort of action from succeeding.

There is literally no way to get a British Prime Minister to account for actions taken while in that role, and no prospect of it happening in Ireland. Sure, a Prime Minister ‘might’ have to suffer a speeding ticket or a driving ban, there being only one set of rules of course, but hauling him to court for any substantive action taken or failures made in the course of his normal duties would be unprecedented.

I am thinking of attempts to get Tony Blair and Jack Straw to account for the Iraq War, 2003 edition, that hit the skids very quickly. Perhaps it is better that we are so reluctant to prosecute our leaders, because the spectacle of American Presidential impeachment is surely worse, and virtually always political (petty and trivial) in nature anyway.

Senan Molony has no such legal protections, but he does have a long career in the Irish media to cushion him. I watch the next episode with popcorn in hand, but the serious point here is that Robert Sheehan has succeeded in putting this case back on everyone’s radar at a time when we learn the official police re-investigation is dragging on, possibly sidetracked by ancient DNA samples which have already been tested and are most likely contaminated, for reasons explored at length by others through the decades.

When I took a pause from writing about this case, I had realised that I had to stop putting myself in the role of “solver” of the crime. I don’t have all the facts, and many of the “facts” seem to dissolve on close inspection.

Without inside knowledge of the case, we outsiders know that there are things which are kept private to any investigation. And those people, police officers or support staff, court officials, will not usually talk fully even after they retire. They still have a pension to keep taking. Nothing wrong with that, but it is a powerful lever against careless talk.

In the UK we even have the Official Secrets Act, the mere name of which casts a chill down any spine, even the most hardened military personnel.

So I am recycling my (infamous) piece that ran through a list of lesser-mentioned suspects. I wrote this piece in 2022. I felt then, and still feel now, as though many likely suspects were never properly considered.

Someone told me recently that Wolney did not in fact kill himself, but died of a brain tumour. What on earth are we to believe, in the end?

What do you think? All of these men are now dead. Are there any living suspects? Please be careful and mindful that it is not respectful to throw around the names of the living. One thing this site has always been is professional and courteous, and I have always tended to stay away from naming anyone not already in the public domain.

With that in mind, it is surely fair game to mention anyone who appears in any of the books, documentaries or podcasts. They have opened themselves up and played a role, one way or another, so I am sure they would be okay with being talked about again!

Who did it?

The police chose Ian Bailey as their suspect on 23 December 1996, the day Sophie Toscan du Plantier was killed. Yet it has taken over three years for them to (not) choose a new suspect, or indeed to posthumously confirm Ian Bailey as the killer.

We hear the police have consulted the FBI, but I have not seen anything from the FBI on the matter. Now we see the police are talking to an entrepreneur, Jared Bradley, CEO of M-Vac systems. Their team travelled from Utah to Ireland to use their new equipment to take DNA samples from the forensic evidence, which has been slowly degrading for close on 30 years in the police archive.

M-Vac equipment has apparently been helpful in other cases. But most people close to this case believe the only blood on Sophie’s clothes belonged to Sophie. Nobody really believes the killer’s blood got onto the evidence. So will this amazing equipment just confirm what I suspect? That the blood belongs to the victim?

Jean Pierre Gazeau, Sophie’s uncle, who had some involvement in the Netflix version of events, has claimed there are 6 Irish police officers working on the new investigation.

In their article dated 25th July 2025, the Irish Sun stated in relation to the concrete block found at the murder scene: “It is widely believed that the killer had to leave his own blood on these.” This is certainly not widely believed, and certainly not by me. In fact, there are many people who believe the concrete block was not the murder weapon at all, and that it was already lying there on the ground when the attack began.

This case is intensely frustrating. Without the local hysteria these days, perhaps it is a good thing that police are taking their time. Why could they not ignore the ridiculous pressure at the time of the killing and take such a dispassionate approach in 1996? If they had, Ian Bailey would never have been associated with this crime. We might have found the killer while he was still alive. Because whoever your favoured suspect is, he is dead.

I did not think this at the time but I think it now: is this re-investigation just a way to stall off public pressure? The police and government can claim they are looking into it, because undoubtedly they are, but with no deadline and no end in sight, they can just leave the case open for year after year.

Is M-Vac another stunt? I do not think so. I agree that investigators should (literally) leave no stone unturned. But where is the enormous gate they lost? If the stones were not the weapon and therefore do not contain any trace of the killer, the gate may well have done. The killer may have used the gate to steady himself. Taking samples off the gate would have been interesting, but the gate was ‘lost’ many years ago.

We all hope for a resolution soon, even if the conclusion is that there simply isn’t enough evidence surviving today to solve this case. That is what I am anticipating, and it will disappoint many. But thirty years is a long time. Whoever is the killer, he is dead, so we will never know what motivated him. I know it is time to let this go. I want to move on from it. But these little developments keep happening.

There is still a lot of interest in what happens next. I think a more realistic hope is that someone still alive somehow knew what happened, or found out what happened, and that person may yet talk.

There appears to have been some back and forth between the two of them but first let’s make sure you are on top of the latest. Robert Sheehan is a solicitor who worked in the office of the DPP at the time Sophie Toscan du Plantier was killed by persons unknown in December 1996.

One of his tasks was to make a report based on the police file as to whether charges should be brought against an English suspect, Ian Bailey. In a 44-page calm and neutral document, he tore apart the weak and circumstantial evidence. This report would not ordinarily have been published but a long and (still ongoing!) legal process caused it to be revealed in 2011 and at some point thereafter, Robert Sheehan was identified as the author.

However it is important to note that the report is officially part of the DPP role and was signed off by many other senior colleagues including the DPP at the time. It is most certainly not the result of a “jury of one” or other similar nonsense claims. It is one of the most balanced official documents ever written about this case.

The only people who have an issue with this report are those who have decided (ironically enough, sitting as juries of one) that Ian Bailey killed a French tourist whom he had never met, did not know, and who lived a long and treacherous walk away.

Bailey wandered for several miles over the hillside just before Christmas 1996, viciously attacked a stranger in such a way that hardened professionals still cannot talk about it without crying, and left her to die in the lane beside her cottage. He went miles out of his way to “wash” his clothes by Kealfadda Bridge, which would have been futile in the dark, and then calmly wandered home for breakfast with his partner, her daughters, and several house guests as though nothing had happened. Furthermore, he left the house and returned to it totally undetected by any of its occupants.

This is one possible version of what happened that night. I suggest it is ludicrous.

The judge threw out the application for two reasons: the first initial reason given was that the comments made by Senan Molony were of a general nature against the public office of the DPP. Nobody who has followed this case will agree with that, but then debate moved forwards.

The final reason given for not allowing the application is that the DPP office itself had written an email dated 3 July 2025 stating that “the facts contained in a draft information prepared by [Sheehan] did not disclose a criminal offence or offences which may be put to a jury for its consideration.”

That email was obviously about an early draft and not relating to the final application document, but anyway this should not have mattered because in the same email: “the DPP refers to the Supreme Court decision in Kelly v. Ryan [2015] 1 IR 360 which points out that the question of whether or not to issue a summons is at all times one in the discretion of the District Judge.”

It is hard not to conclude that the district judge in this case was looking for excuses not to let the case proceed. There are so many vested interests in this case that it is a risk even writing about it. But this is not the end of the story. Robert Sheehan fights on, and will seek clarification of these points of law from the DPP again.

There are over a hundred, and possibly over 200, pages of information that I have received. Different journalists have received slightly different documents so we have been comparing notes and filling each other’s gaps since Thursday.

This will not be a forensic analysis of those documents due to the pressure of time. Not yet anyway.

The case is being brought by Robert Sheehan, a man who worked in the office of the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP), in Dublin in the late 1990s. In 2001 the office of the DPP wrote a detailed report that was highly critical of the police investigation into Sophie’s murder.

That report became public in 2011 and since then the author has been widely named to be Robert Sheehan. However, as anyone who knows anything about public life will know, nobody is allowed to write reports and send them out willy nilly. The DPP himself agreed to publication and the report was reviewed by others and amended on the basis of feedback.

I have spent around four years working on this case, and in the last year or 18 months the work has become sporadic. Jim Sheridan’s new movie is running through festivals around the world this summer ahead of a general release this autumn. But otherwise little has happened, and a police re-investigation is taking an inordinate amount of time.

My main question in relation to this defamation lawsuit, which it must be stressed is a criminal (not a civil) prosecution is this: why now?

There are certain circumstances. The publication last autumn of Senan Molony’s book won widespread media coverage due to the profile of the author. Much of the evidence in the book had been discredited long before.

I have read all the documents available publicly and most of the privately available ones in four years. The one document that stood out to me as being neutral and authoritative was in fact the 2001 DPP report, which rightly threw out all the half-baked circumstantial evidence against Ian Bailey. It made a prosecution in Ireland impossible without further investigative work, which never materially happened.

There has never been a shred of evidence against Ian Bailey. Most of the evidence in fact puts him at home, several miles away, at the two times when it is believed Sophie might have died. Late at night, in the hours after she called her husband, Ian was at home. And he remained there until the morning after, including in the hours around seven or eight in the morning, when many believe Sophie was killed due to the contents of her stomach resembling breakfast foods.

The only scenario which can place Ian Bailey at the crime scene is a highly unlikely midnight ramble across dangerous ground in the dark, and back again. During all of this roaming and murdering he received no mud or blood on any of his clothes and, farcically, also found time to wander miles out of his way down to Kealfadda Bridge, where he was spotted by one of the most unreliable and compromised witnesses ever to grace a courtroom.

I will report more as I receive it. It feels to me as though Robert Sheehan is doing more than protecting his own reputation. 2001 was a very long time ago indeed, and many people have criticised that report in the decades since. It feels to me as though he is still seeking justice for Sophie as well as for himself.

The DPP report is freely available from several sources online including this one.

The movie Re-Creation is now ready for its audience. I received an email Monday night with links to the new social media accounts. If you are in Ireland or NYC you can find details below to book for the premiere screenings. I hope there will be one in London and will report back via Substack App as soon as I hear anything. Please do get the Substack App because I do post regularly on there some things that do not make it into a full newsletter.

That’s all the news for now. Pretty enormous in Crime Guy’s timeline because it was partly the encouragement of Jim Sheridan and his team that really provided impetus and momentum to this site when it was still on Medium. We have now fully transitioned here to Substack where paid memberships absorb some of the cost of researching and interviewing key people.

I point you back to my extended interview with Geraldine Comiskey, which I can confirm will not be the final time you hear from Geraldine. She is a professional journalist and a local expert in the case going back many years. Her book and subsequent research has led her to form some new theories.

Important Dates

You can watch the world premiere at Tribeca Film Festival on June 8th and those in Ireland your location is the Galway Film Festival July 8th. I hope to report on a UK screening soon.

You can stay in touch with the Re-Creation team via this link including all the social accounts.

America withdrew from both Woodbridge and Bentwaters in Suffolk in 1993. Although there is still a British MoD presence at both sites, the scale of operations today is a shadow of what went on here during the height of the Cold War.

Construction of the base began in 1942 but by then the urgency was already ebbing away. The fortunes of war fluctuated and neither the British RAF or the American USAF could fully commit to the base. It was immediately mothballed on completion before eventually becoming the last airfield ever to be activated during WW2 in November 1944. The final wartime mission took place on 9th May 1945. British people might recognise that this was the very day after V.E. Day, after Britain had already claimed victory over Nazi-occupied Europe.

Bentwaters played a miniscule role in WW2 but it was just getting started as a Cold War hub. The base closed again in July 1950. But on 16 March 1951, the RAF handed control of the base to the USAF. Things were about to get interesting, and the most famous chapter in the base’s history began.

A local man dressed as a US airman explained that his MK16 weapon could unleash all 30 bullets in a magazine in 3 seconds. He explained that one of the police cars was a fake used in one form of Batman or another. The other police car was genuine. Both were Chevrolet sedans. There was a truck and a jeep. The jeep was capable of dragging large planes around the runway and airfield.

The presentation by the airman really brought home that this was not just a museum for our entertainment. The prospect of all-out nuclear confrontation in the 1960s through to the late 1980s was very real. It was a constant backdrop to my pre-teen years and there were times when it was genuinely terrifying. Our family daytrips often took as past the “golf balls” early warning radar, part of the British four-minute warning system and there was nothing funny about them. I was thrilled to see a leaflet about them in a glass case at Bentwaters.

There were some fun and even funny moments though, including the staged alien autopsy that harks back to my own past as a science fiction author.

An afternoon at Bentwaters would thrill anyone born after WW2. It really is eye-opening and there is so much to see you will likely want to return. You can find out more about Bentwaters here, and even join the society, or follow them on Instagram.

Rendlesham is a pine forest managed today by the Forestry Commission. It wraps completely around an MoD base that used to be a USAF air base called RAF Woodbridge. Another USAF base called RAF Bentwaters is also close by. Appropriately enough it is today the site of a Cold War museum.

Woodbridge closed as an RAF base in 1993, as indeed many other sites were. It is still owned by the British Government, and today is formally owned by the Ministry of Defence and operated by the British Army. It was the end of the Cold War that brought about the demise of many US-operated bases in England. Today it is a training facility.

We were spending a long weekend in the area and Rendlesham Forest was obviously going to be our first port of call. I say obviously. You might not know that my first novel, From Beyond Belief, written at university under the pen name of Paul Charles, was an X Files spin-off or what we might now call fan fiction. The names were changed but the characters of Mulder and Scully are fairly easy to spot. It was the first time I had a strong enough story to write a whole novel and I was really proud of it. It is still available today on Amazon and other places. Many of their UFO-related escapades happened in the pine forests of NW America. Twin Peaks country. Just like Rendlesham below.

We chose to follow the UFO walking trail, marked with purple arrows. Photos of the trail route and information at various points is a short scroll to the bottom.

The first point of interest is the gate below, the East Gate. The US servicemen from the air base (just out of shot to the right of this photo) emerged at this point and looked left into the forest. They saw lights and other comings and goings which they deemed to be UFO activity. There is no doubt that they thought this was alien activity and not just some amateur shenanigans. It certainly was nothing to do with the air base. Were that the case, they would of course have known.

The US airmen saw an metallic craft floating twelve inches off the ground. This smaller scale model shows what they described. Those with good eyesight will see a bright green child’s tractor right on top of the UFO which shows this is quite a small model, perhaps ten feet or so across. Maybe three metres.

The purple trail in Rendlesham is strongly recommended. It takes around an hour if you don’t stop very often and is three miles long. You can download the Forestry England map here but it does not have any UFO information on it.

Forestry England Maps

The leaflet we used can be collected free of charge in the main car park at Rendlesham and there is also a really cool coffee truck there called Tintos.

The purple trail takes around one hour and is three miles long.

This is a lo-fi video due to various technical issues but in the end Lola Kirke gave me the confidence to put it out there.

Substack can shine a dim light on the written word, but you will notice that they have quietly transformed themselves from a straight email newsletter platform to something completely different. They have an app with features like every other social platform. It is excellent, and the quality of content is knock-out. But that’s how Twitter used to be before… well, before.

This whole community could go tits up at any moment. But I’m sticking with it… for now. There is no other product on the market that charges no up-front fee and lets you do YouTube, podcast audio and text, and even photography, all in the same amazing system. Its main problem will be that it is free to use, at least until you start taking money yourself. It means that any charlatan can just bob on here on a whim and cause mischief. The way writers can recommend each other here is not only kind but effective. Virtually all my new sign-ups come from other writers on Substack, and the stats show that many of you have signed up to some of my best writer friends here.

We’re just a couple of weeks now from my first extended interview with an expert on the Sophie Toscan du Plantier case. is so interesting, opinionated, knowledgeable and just great that I can’t wait to talk to her properly. I have put the call in at 9pm so that we can talk all night if the mood takes us. We will need a good editor.

Other people have suggested doing those awful camera up the nose video reel things. I have a face for radio, really I do. But that hasn’t stopped millions of others spouting off in front of a very poor camera. So watch out!

As well as Crime Guy I write Smart Talk, an AI ecosystem that is linked to my day job. This is a collab with the AI expert, the genius, the queen of the prompt, who actually knows almost as much about AI as I do.

Some of you know that when you subscribe here I also add you to my ranting artsy blog known simply as DETTMANN because I could not think of anything else. There has been quite a lot of action on there recently, and a whole new potential career direction. I find nothing more exciting than writing a profile about someone I think is beyond cool, and then for that person to really love the output. I thank for unwittingly pointing me in that direction.

In the very accurate words of Geraldine herself, my music stuff is better than Rolling Stone. I think she said that, but it was late. It could have been the Princess of Wales. It’s been that kind of week.