Ian Bailey’s former partner has said she was not surprised when she heard of his death.
Mr Bailey died yesterday after collapsing in Bantry, Co Cork where he lived.
Speaking from the home the couple shared for almost three decades, Jules Thomas said: “He was a creature of excess and I suppose that’s the result.
“No, I wasn’t surprised. He had had a heart attack and then a double heart attack and they couldn’t operate because they knew his heart was too bad so it was on the cards really to happen quite soon.”
The 74-year-old Welsh-born artist told RTÉ News that when they separated as a couple in 2021, she was emotionally burnt out.
“I just didn’t have any feelings for him at the end, that’s why I got him out. He was impossible to live with,” Ms Thomas said.
Mr Bailey was convicted of assaulting Ms Thomas in 2001 and received a three-month suspended sentence.
She remains adamant that he did not murder French woman Sophie Toscan Du Plantier.
Ms Toscan Du Plantier’s body was found at the entrance to her home at Toormore near Schull in west Cork on 23 December 1996.
Ms Thomas said: “I know he didn’t do it, he is such a messy person there would be blood everywhere, and also, he could never keep a secret. He was just one of those people who talked and talked.
“He would never, ever have done something like that for a story or any other reason.”
Asked if she felt sadness after Mr Bailey’s death, Ms Thomas said she had once felt sorry for him but no longer.
She said: “Well, I felt sorry for him a while back, but you give up feeling anything for somebody who is just so hopeless with themselves.
“You know, he wasn’t helping himself at all, from what I could see, anyway.”
She said she has not had contact with him for a very long time and is unaware of any instructions concerning his burial.
She said before the news of his death came yesterday, she had begun drawing together notes to prepare a draft outline for a book about the last 25 years of her life.
She said she is doing it “to get it out of my system, like self-analysis”.
Asked what it was about him that she once loved, Ms Thomas said she was not sure now looking back.
“I am not sure now looking back on it but when people click together and make each other laugh, and get on, I suppose that’s what it was really,” she said.
