Nicola Tallent

Beautiful, you know, beautiful resort and all the rest of it.

Initially, as the news started filtering back, the police over there had brought John McAreevy into custody and questioned him.

Roughly, it would later emerge.

And then as the kind of the time went on and the Irish ambassador, who I think was the nearest was based in South Africa at the time, came to the island and the pressure kind of went on from here as well.

And there was a group of men rounded up who worked in the hotel.

And there was a narrative that there was a theft ring and that they were stealing coins and stuff from rooms of very wealthy people.

It was a very poor place.

Yes.

In order to make it look like a drowning or an accident?

Oh, right, okay.

Are they still there?

And it wasn't that there was just people were milling about doing the normal thing.

And there were petals around our feet everywhere we went, not realising we were journalists there to cover a horrific murder.

But the thing was, and what the unfortunate thing, of course, was, had they done the job properly and exactly, they got the suspects and they made the crime fit where they were.

But if they'd done it the other way around, like a hotel is a brilliant crime scene as such because it's contained, your clock coming in and out, you had the key cards on the doors.

The room was cleaned every night, so you had kind of clean prints could have been got, etc.

And the movements of all those suspects were...

But after the trial, it was really the judge who called a halt to it all, wasn't it?

Yeah, I mean, I think the judge realized that this is just not right.

Because the locals believed and rightly so that there was a fit up here.