She was the glamorous wife of a powerful French film-maker whose brutal murder in the Irish Republic horrified and captivated her native country. Now the body of Sophie Toscan du Plantier, found on a grass verge by her holiday home in west Cork in 1996, has been exhumed in a final attempt by French investigators to find her murderer.

A documentary-maker and wife of the acclaimed producer, Daniel Toscan du Plantier, she had fallen victim to an apparently motiveless killing that has never been solved. The move follows a campaign, led by her family, to relaunch the inquiry into a case that has gripped French public opinion amid severe criticism of the Irish police investigation.

Judge Patrick Gachon ordered the exhumation from the village cemetery in Mauvezin, southwest France, in the hope of discovering DNA evidence overlooked by detectives in Cork.

The judge is also being urged by the victim’s relatives to question witnesses as part of a review of Mrs Toscan du Plantier’s death two days before Christmas almost 12 years ago. Mâitre Eric Dupond-Moretti, the family lawyer, said: “We have got to start this inquiry from scratch. It’s just not moving forward on the Irish side.”

His comments follow the release last month of an Irish pathologist’s report on the killing, which said that Mrs Toscan du Plantier had been beaten to death outside her cottage in Toormore, near Schull, with a slate stone or a cavity block, both of which were lying near her body.

She was wearing cotton pyjamas, and her head bore witness to the violence of an attack that left it fractured, lacerated and swollen. She had tried to escape but had been bludgeoned to the ground after catching her pyjama bottoms on barbed wire. Her neck bore the mark of a Dr Marten boot, indicating that she had been stamped upon.

The pathologist said that he found hairs – perhaps those of her killer – under her fingernails. The drops of blood on her nightclothes may have also come from her murderer, the pathologist suggested. Irish forensic scientists carried out DNA analysis on the hairs and blood, but the tests were inconclusive. Police believe that Mrs Toscan du Plantier, who was to due spend three days in Ireland to prepare two documentaries before returning to France on New Year’s Eve, knew and opened her front door to the killer. Two empty glasses were in the house. The William Butler Yeats poem, Death, was beside her bed: “Nor dread nor hope attend/ A dying animal/ A man awaits his end/ Dreading and hoping all.”

Ian Bailey, a British journalist who lived nearby and reported on the crime, was questioned twice by Irish police but released without charge. Mr Bailey denied any involvement in the killing.

With French newspapers branding Irish investigators as incompetent, and judicial sources in Paris complaining of a lack of cooperation from Dublin, the victim’s relatives set up an association to push for further inquiries last year. Prominent members of the French Establishment, including a former Culture Minister and the head of the Cannes Film Festival, have backed the campaign, prompting Judge Gachon to relaunch the case.

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