A Dream of Death: How Sophie Toscan du Plantier’s dream became a nightmare and a west Cork village became the centre of Ireland’s most notorious unsolved murder

‘It was French film-maker Sophie Toscan du Plantier’s dream to have a holiday home in beautiful Schull in west Cork. But on 23 December 1996, she was brutally murdered outside that holiday home, the poetry book she had been reading chillingly left open on a page occupied by the Yeats poem ‘A Dream of Death’. For 23 years the story of her murder has not left the headlines, the victim overshadowed by Ian Bailey, the main suspect in the case, who has consistently maintained his innocence and claimed attempts were made to frame him for the crime, but who was the focus of a historic trial in absentia in Paris in 2019. Here, in the definitive account of what became Ireland’s most notorious unsolved crime, Ralph Riegel delves into the facts and theories of the unsolved murder that caused such shock waves in Sophie’s native France and in the quiet Cork countryside she had chosen as her retreat.