A key witness in the murder of French film producer Sophie Toscan du Plantier in west Cork has died.Toscan du Plantier’s near neighbour Shirley Foster, who discovered the 39-year-old mother’s badly beaten body near her holiday home in Toormore in 1996, died on Wednesday.Foster, a retired art teacher, lived with her partner, retired chef Alfie Lyons, in their two-storey old farmhouse less than 100m from Toscan du Plantier’s holiday home at Dreenane in Toormore.On the morning of December 23rd, 1996, Foster left their home at about 10am to drive into Schull. She was driving down the laneway they shared with Toscan du Plantier when something caught her eye.Shirley Foster, a former neighbour of Sophie Toscan du Plantier and a key witness in the case of her 1996 murder, has died. Photograph: Rip.ie She noticed some white tissue hanging on barbed wire, and when she looked more closely she saw what she thought was a blow-up doll, only to discover it was Toscan du Plantier’s badly beaten body.She returned home and told Lyons, who inspected the body before he rang gardaí, who arrived at the scene to begin one of the longest-running murder investigations in the history of the State.Foster made several statements to gardaí and she testified on behalf of a number of newspapers in a libel action in 2003 brought by the chief suspect Ian Bailey at Cork Circuit Court.[ Gardaí seek international help to identify DNA found on Sophie Toscan du Plantier bootOpens in new window ]After the death of her partner in 2021, Foster moved to live in Schull. She told The Irish Times that year that she found all the media publicity about the murder distasteful.She said she would not be watching either of the two major documentaries released that year about the murder, as she pointed out that she had seen similar media publicity before in the case.“We had people bringing their grannies and small children to look at the cross marking where Sophie was found and then some were cheeky enough to drive up to the house and peer in the windows,” she said.“It was very voyeuristic and every time there was some story in the newspapers they used to start coming, so I expect it will be the same now with people coming up the driveway on foot of these documentaries.”English-born Foster, who was in her early 90s and more recently was living at Greenmount Road in Ballydehob, is survived by her sisters Jane and Pam and her daughter Gilly. She is one of more than 20 witnesses including Bailey, who died in January in 2024, who gave statements to the original Garda murder investigation team but have since died.A full Garda cold case review of the killing was ordered in June 2022.Foster met detectives from the Garda serious crime review team within months of its launch, and confirmed the accuracy of her statements to the original investigation team.