THE CASE FOR THE PROSECUTION (SOPHIE: A MURDER IN WEST CORK)

Confused and frustrated by the Sophie Toscan du Plantier case?

That's understandable after the appearance of a second documentary series on the extraordinary murder of the French filmmaker outside her farmhouse near the west Cork village of Schull.

Hot on the heels of Oscar nominated film director Jim Sheridan's five-part Sky Crime series 'Murder at the Cottage: The Search for Justice for Sophie,' comes John Dower's three episode factual miniseries for Netflix, 'Sophie: A Murder in West Cork'.

Understandably, it tramples on a lot of the ground covered in Sheridan and journalist Donal MacIntyre's more florid examination of the 1996 murder in the remote coastal community.

However there are two big differences.

Dower's Netflix series has the full co-operation of the family of Sophie Toscan du Plantier.

It also features a lot more local people who are not that enamoured with the chief suspect, Ian Bailey.

'Sophie: A Murder in West Cork' begins pretty similarly to 'Murder in the Cottage,' with local publican Billy O'Sullivan recalling the murder victim fondly and recounting her final visit to his bar for a cup of tea.

The true crime miniseries draws on archive news footage from RTE, UTV, Sky News and French television to convey the initial horror of the documentary filmmaker's brutal murder in a remote rural area, the shock in a community used to "blow ins" settling in the village and the overwhelming scale of the challenge faced by police not used to such crime.

Dower's documentary also picks over the bizarre nature of the murder investigation - the lack of DNA evidence or blood samples at the crime scene, the disappearance of a gate with blood prints, the rumour mill about Sophie claiming to have seen a ghost of a white lady among the ruins of Three Castle Head which local folkore believed was a harbinger of death.

It also relies heavily on interviews with Garda Detective Superintendent Dermot Dwyer to show how investigators moved from an initial trawl of interviews with 50 suspects to focus on one man.

Like Sheridan's series, Dower features interviews with that suspect - the eccentric English journalist Ian Bailey who has been the focus of the investigation for 25 years but who the Irish Director of Public Prosecutions has been loathe to take to court.

However unlike 'Murder at the Cottage,' the focus on interviewing Bailey as he vigorously protests his innocence is not as intense.

'Sophie: A Murder in West Cork' dives deeper than Sheridan's programme into the background of Bailey, a former stringer for Fleet Street newspapers, based in Gloucestershire.

We learn that he arrived in Schull after the breakdown of a marriage which left him with little money and embraced the Co Cork village's reputation as a haven for bohemian characters from all over the world.

In interviews with a range of "blow ins" who have settled in Schull from sculptor Peter Bielecki to jewellery designer Len Kipitch to writer Elizabeth Wassell, former publican Denis Quinlan and lesbian feminist artist Toma McCullim, a picture emerges of Bailey that is much more unsympathetic than in 'Murder at the Cottage'.

Quinlan speaks about his unease about Bailey any time he appeared in his pub.

Bielecki emotionally recalls the savagery of an assault Bailey carried out on his Welsh partner, the artist Jules Thomas and the impact on one of her kids - an attack the journalist doesn't deny.

As the miniseries unfolds, Detective Superintendent Dwyer and journalists like The Sunday Independent's Michael Sheridan add weight to the view that Bailey is a disturbed and manipulative individual with an unhealthy penchant for being in the limelight who has been lucky to evade a murder trial in Ireland because of a lack of forensic evidence.

That penchant is highlighted in a tale told by the actress Anne Cahalane, who played Sophie in a reconstruction for the RTE show 'Crimecall,' who alleged in the Irish High Court in 1996 that he surfaced during the shoot at Three Castle Head and claimed to have known the murder victim, despite having stated in several media interviews he had not.

The documentary claims Bailey, who was one of the first journalists on the murder scene and who ended up supplying copy to many newspapers and briefing other French and Irish journalists, seemed particularly interested in her marriage and love life.

Bielecki refers to allegations that Bailey on several occasions appeared to drunkenly confess to the murder, with Amanda Reid also claiming he told her teenage son while giving him a lift that he did it.

Another Schull resident, a gardener Bill Fuller alleges that while visiting Bailey in his home, he was spooked when the journalist began to project on him how he had seen Sophie the day before the murder in a supermarket and was turned on but in trying to proposition her at her home events got out of hand.

Bailey's response that some of these remarks were attempts at black humour are dismissed by Detective Superintendent Dwyer.

Bailey has, of course, been convicted of the murder in France after being tried in absentia in Paris where the courts can hear a case for the killing of one of their citizens on foreign soil.

That 25 year conviction would not have occurred had it not been for the determined pursuit by Sophie Toscan du Plantier's son from her first marriage, Pierre-Louis Baudey-Vignaud and other relatives for a case against Bailey to be heard.

Indeed, the most striking moments in Dower's miniseries come in the interviews with Sophie Toscan du Plantier's relatives which provide insights into her Gothic sensibility, the fragility of her second marriage to the renowned film producer and friend of French President Jacques Chirac, Daniel Toscan du Plantier and her deep affection for Ireland.

We learn from a close friend Agnes Thomas about the deep intellectual connection between Sophie and Daniel, prompting her aunt Marie Madeleine Opalka to remark that her niece's second husband courted her to perfection, spotting her interests and offering her the best of seats at film premieres.

Yet we also learn Sophie was uncomfortable in the spotlight that her husband inevitably moved in through his work with celebrated film directors like Akira Kurosawa, Federico Fellini and Andrei Tarvosky.

A cousin Frederic Gazeau reveals that she had at least one affair outside her marriage.

The greatest achievement of 'Sophie: A Murder in West Cork' is undoubtedly the way it captures the depth of her family's grief, their frustration at how the murder investigation failed to secure a prosecution in Ireland and their determination to secure a conviction.

Pierre-Louis Baudey-Vignaud is very clear that there is only one suspect in their opinion - Ian Bailey.

But he also talks eloquently about the toll his mother's murder exacted on himself and the family.

"It was a transformation from childhood to adulthood," he muses at one point.

"When she died, a little part of all of us crumbled."

The series' interviews with her ailing parents Georges and Marguerite Bouiniol are particularly heartbreaking.

While Dower tries to counterbalance the family and Detective Superintendent Dwyer's firm view of what happened to Sophie with interviews with Bailey protesting his innocence and that he has been framed, the overall tone is very much weighted against him.

Greater emphasis is put on the possible destruction of evidence in a fire in the back garden of Bailey's studio than in 'Murder at the Cottage'.

An interview with Arianna Boarina, an Italian friend of Jules Thomas' daughter who stayed at their cottage a day after the murder, appears to corroborate allegations that he had scratches on his arm which would not be consistent with felling a tree and slaughtering a Christmas turkey, as he claimed

She also alleges a black overcoat was rather unusually being soaked in a bucket beside a shower in the family's bathroom.

Measured against Sheridan's miniseries, Dower's is not as visually impressive but what it lacks in style, it recovers to a degree with its much more comprehensive set of interviews.

The inclusion of Boarina's interview particularly rams home just how limited Sheridan's documentary is in terms of its interviews and how it was hampered by the family's withdrawal of their cooperation.

Yet like 'Murder at the Cottage,' there is some frustration too that some details of the case appear to have been glossed over in Dower's miniseries that need further examination.

The Bandon Tapes, in which Gardai discussed the case including alleged attempts to get an individual to befriend Bailey and secure a confession, don't really feature.

Local shopkeeper Marie Farrell's spectacular about turn after initially claiming she spotted Bailey in an area near where Sophie died on the night of her murder is covered but while it is alleged the suspect intimidated her, there is no proper deep dive into her subsequent allegation that Gardai told her what to say.

While we understand the family's quest for justice, Dower, unlike Sheridan, doesn't really question the merits of a trial in France where the accused and his lawyers are not present to answer the claims against him and where more weight is given to circumstantial evidence than in the Irish courts.

The absence of Jules Thomas, who features so heavily in 'Murder at the Cottage,' is also striking.

It's hard having watched both series to come to anything other than the conclusion that both filmmakers have omitted certain testimonies because they don't really suit their competing narratives.

Regardless of which order you watch either documentary, the cumulative effect of watching both is one of consternation.

While both miniseries shine a light on the bizarre aspects of a murder that has inspired a true crime podcast and radio documentaries, you cannot be definitive about Bailey's guilt or innocence.

The real tragedy of Sophie Toscan du Plantier's murder is that it robbed her family and the communities she lived in of a mum, a daughter, a niece, a cousin, a colleague, a neighbour and a talented filmmaker.