Everybody is talking about ‘West Cork’, the podcast delving into the murder of Sophie Toscan du Plantier. Marjorie Brennan spoke to the couple behind it, and the backlash they had feared as they return to the area this summer for the literary festival.

There has been an explosion of interest in podcasts in recent years, with the audio format joining boxset binging as the competitive leisure pursuit du jour. After the breakthrough success of the US podcast Serial, the true crime genre has become an increasingly crowded one.

One podcast in particular has been singled out for acclaim since it debuted on the Audible platform in February. Named by Time magazine as one of its top podcasts and lauded by documentary maker Louis Theroux, West Cork is a 13-part podcast series delving into the murder of French filmmaker Sophie Toscan du Plantier at her holiday home near the Cork seaside village of Schull almost 22 years ago. Her murder remains unsolved but it has been at the centre of several court actions involving Ian Bailey, a suspect in the case who continues to deny any involvement.

The podcast creators are the London-based couple Sam Bungey and Jennifer Forde, who met as students at Trinity College, Dublin. Forde is a documentary producer who has worked for the BBC and Sam is a journalist who has worked for many outlets, including NPR in the US.

They spent three years working on the podcast and still seem slightly surprised at its huge success. Forde says they are “over the moon” at how well it has been received. “We were totally taking a punt on what it would be like, who would be interested in doing it,” says Bungey.

The couple had just married when they came across a piece in an English newspaper on Bailey’s High Court action against the State for wrongful arrest.

“We had been talking about doing something together… Jennifer’s background is in television documentaries and I had done some work in radio. We were both really interested in podcasts and thought about trying to do a story like Jennifer would do, across several episodes of TV, but doing that in audio. Then, Serial came along and we thought we could definitely do it. Around the same time we came across Ian Bailey’s story in a newspaper… That [case] was just about to get started so we went over and sat in on it. I think it sort of happened in stages. We were pretty fascinated with it in the beginning, then we kept passing these hurdles in terms of getting access to the various people who the story affected… starting with Sophie’s family and then going from there.”

While Serial, a US cold-case investigation into the conviction of Adnan Syed for the murder of his ex-girlfriend, attracted a huge listenership, it also attracted criticism for its lack of interest in the victim of the crime, 18-year-old Hae Min Lee, and its failure to include any contribution from her family. This was a situation Bungey and Forde were at pains to avoid and to this end, they sought the participation of Sophie Toscan du Plantier’s family from the start.

Sophie Toscan du Plantier was murdered in Schull, West Cork, almost 22 years ago. The case is still unsolved.

“Getting her family involved was the first step towards making sure Sophie herself was a presence throughout the series,” says Forde. “We both watch crime dramas on TV and we listen to other true crime podcasts… it seems that often the female victim is just a springboard for the rest of the action. It was important for us not to fall into that trap. To try and find that balance was really difficult particularly when so much of it was about a man who has been long accused and fighting for his innocence.

“But we felt Sophie’s family needed to give us permission to tell this story because we knew that much as we would try to be sensitive around putting in details about Sophie’s life and the murder, you can’t avoid talking about the grisly details. Without the family’s involvement, we would have felt a little bit uncomfortable doing that.”

When the couple came to Dublin for Bailey’s action against the State, they spoke to family members based here and realised the huge potential of the story.

“My cousin said it was one of those stories that never really goes away, every few years there’s something else that surfaces and shifts your perspective on it again,” says Forde. “Those conversations made us realise that this could potentially be a really big and rich story that was specifically about one place, one country and one jurisdiction but also allowed you answer universal questions about guilt and innocence, and how people are perceived based on the news.”

Bailey is a central and compelling character in the podcast, and while initially apprehensive about talking to Bungey and Forde, he went on to become enthusiastic about the project, giving freely of his time.

“It is a professional relationship but a very complicated one where you have someone who sees himself as a veteran journalist who thinks the story should be covered in a certain way, but he knows you can’t just tell the story he wants you to tell,” says Bungey.

“We were always very conscious of the idea that we had a duty of care to everyone involved in the story, which is a very tricky thing to balance. But it helped that we were in constant contact with all of the people involved. We would talk to Ian, the next day we would talk to Alain Spilliaert [lawyer for Sophie’s family] or the detective involved in the case. We wanted to get everyone’s story, then to interrogate it as much as possible before putting it out there.”

Forde says they did a lot of soul-searching in terms of what to include in the podcast, and she was especially conscious that the violent circumstances of Sophie’s death were not portrayed in a disrespectful manner.

“We did not want to give too much detail about Sophie and the way she died. People obviously want those details but you have to be respectful. We had to really figure out why it was important to include particular information because otherwise there was a real risk it would be gratuitous. We really had to interrogate ourselves as we went along — work out why was this important to the story and if we couldn’t justify it, we left it out.”

According to Forde, one of the most important characters in the podcast was West Cork itself. “It was really important to us that West Cork as a place should be like a central character. We really tried to bring it to life through all the voices of the people that live there. The history of the place is so interesting to us, the landscape, the atmosphere,” says Forde.

The couple ended up with hundreds of hours of audio and the process of editing was, unsurprisingly, a challenging one.

“Every time we did interviews, it was for about two to three hours. Sometimes we sat down with someone more than once. We might use two minutes from hours of tape,” says Forde.

Bungey adds: “It was really difficult choosing… some people we sat with for a long time and they had really interesting things to say and we ended up not using the tape because it just didn’t fit with the way we were telling the story.”

Meanwhile, the story continues to unfold. At the time of writing, it was reported that Bailey plans to go to the European Court of Human Rights after losing an appeal challenging a French decision to charge him over the death of Sophie Toscan du Plantier.

While there is a distinct possibility that the couple will do a follow-up to the podcast, Forde says nothing has been decided yet.

“Inevitably, once it’s out there, you hear other things and start talking to people in different ways. The story is ongoing. We thought we’d be done with it. We got to the end and we thought there would be this great moment… but you feel yourself being drawn back in. We’ll see. Definitely maybe,” she says.

Meanwhile, the couple are busy with their ten-month-old son, whose arrival coincided with the fraught final months of the podcast production. “It was terrible timing,” says Bungey. “We thought we’d be finished well before he arrived. He heard the words ‘West Cork’ more than anything else in the first few months of his life.”

The couple are looking forward to discussing their podcast at the West Cork Literary Festival in Bantry in July.

“You get paranoid about these things... part of us thought that we might not be allowed back into West Cork after doing it but it doesn’t seem that way,” says Bungey.

- Sam Bungey and Jennifer Forde will be at the Maritime Hotel, Bantry, on Friday, July 20, at 8.30pm as part of West Cork Literary Festival. For more, see westcorkmusic.ie/literaryfestival/