S32 E5: Life on The Lam | Sea of Lies

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This is a CBC podcast.

It was Halloween, 1996.

While everyone was putting on their costumes, pretending to be Tickle Me Elmo or Baby Spice or whatever the fine folks of 1996 dressed up as, there was a man in the back of a police cruiser in Essex, apprehended for pretending to be someone he was not.

David Davis was arrested under suspicion of murdering Ronald Platt.

They had proof he'd been stealing Platt's identity and that he'd been in Devon that July, the same month that Ron's body was pulled up from the seabed.

But if Davis really was the one who put him there, the police needed evidence.

So with Davis taken off in the cruiser, All attention turned to his home, the quaintly named Little London Farmhouse on Little London Lane.

Out in the world, Davis had been acting in the theatrical role of Ronald Platt for months.

So now the police were anxious to peer into the backstage area and see who else was participating in this production.

I was sent up to Chelmsford, not to assist with the arrest, but to assist with the searching of Little London Farmhouse post his arrest.

Joining the investigative team that day was a young officer called Brian Slade.

The neighbors had told police that the man they knew as Ronald Platt had been living in the house with his young wife.

So they mobilized in the driveway and prepared to take her in for questioning, and then bring in scores of officers to search every square inch of Little London Farmhouse.

Peter Redmond, the man whose original door knock had started all of this, was the one who knocked on this door too.

The woman who opened the door was shocked to see the officers.

The feeling was mutual.

I was surprised how young she was.

To Redmond, she looked like she was twenty at the oldest.

Redmond asked her name.

She said, I'm Noel.

Redmond said, I'm arresting you under suspicion of murdering Ronald Platt.

And she said,

What about my children?

Children.

Children?

She got a young baby with her

and a toddler.

About three, I think, the little one was.

And she was much more, oh gosh, you know,

what am I going to do with the babies?

The baby was still breastfeeding, but the three-year-old, the police explained, would need to either stay with a friend or the police would arrange for social services to take her.

They were going to take Noel all the way to Devon for an interview.

As the officers began moving through the house, they noted how sparse it was.

It hardly looked like the warm home of a young family.

Outside, there were flowers and a well-manicured lawn and a bountiful vegetable garden.

But on the inside, there was hardly any signs of a life being lived within its walls.

Upstairs in the toddler's bedroom, there was scant a single toy.

It looked like they had been squatting in a foreclosure home.

Was this woman and children held against their will?

Were they prisoners in their own home?

The wife disappeared from sight for a moment.

And Noel packed a bag for the children, nappies, etc.

When she was arrested, a neighbor said that they'd look after the children.

When the officer chaperoning Noel stepped closer, suspicious at what was taking so long.

The young wife sheepishly held the bag, and the officer gestured for her to hand it over.

And the police officer searched that bag before it was handed over to the neighbor and found cash and a number of gold bars in that bag.

Because what child doesn't need their gold bars for an overnight?

As the neighbor arrived to pick up the toddler, downstairs Brian Slade was unprepared for what he was about to find.

I just remember it being really hot.

We were in the house and in order to make sure the video came out we had lights on me so that I had the heat from the lights.

As he pressed record on his trusty camcorder to keep a visual record of any evidence they collected, officer after officer came forwards, their hands full.

And there I was in my shirt and tie counting thousands of pounds, and then Swiss francs, and then gold bars started arriving, and it was like, What's going on here?

An eerie silence creeped into the house as the officers began their work.

Even before the first puzzle pieces were snapped together, they could sense that this was all leading somewhere very dark.

I'm Sam Mullins, and this is Sea of Lives from CBC's Uncover,

Episode 5, Life on the Lamb.

Suddenly, everything was in motion.

You need to understand that

having arrested somebody, You only have a limited amount of time that you can hold that person in police detention.

You only have 36 hours to hold someone before you have to either A, charge them or B, let them go.

You need to move quickly.

One team of police were heading from Devon to Essex to help catalog everything they found in the house.

Another team was transporting Davis and Noel back to Devon.

And back in the police station, detectives Bill McDonald and Ian Clenahan were preparing for their high-stakes interviews with Davis and Noel.

It's difficult at this point to explain to somebody listening the speed at which things start to happen.

One more thing they needed to happen was for their star witness to get to Devon as soon as possible.

They called Elaine.

We can only hold him for so many hours, and we need as much information as we can.

So I agreed.

I said, okay.

Elaine arrived at the Exeter police station that afternoon, 30 miles from where they found Ron's body in the first place.

They had interviewed Elaine before, but this time, with the pressure of a charge looming, they needed her to tell them everything about Davis and Noel and Ron and herself.

Everything on the record.

A 30-page statement.

It was the longest statement that this particular detective had ever done.

30 pages.

Every detail was essential.

A well-dressed stranger showing up to her work, coffee table books, trips to London, Switzerland, France, bank accounts, rubber stamps, flat buying, flat selling, Harrogate, Calgary, back to Harrogate.

The full story of Ron and Elaine and Davis.

But when the interview turned to Noel, there was a bombshell waiting for Elaine, from which she would never fully recover.

In the conversation about when they arrested Noel and David Davis,

the detective started talking about David Davis, and they were talking about his children.

Elaine, of course, knew about Davis' children, who still lived in the States.

And I said, oh, yeah.

I said, there's Jill, who lives in New York.

There's Noel, who's with dad.

And there's a younger one called Heather.

So I said, he's got three daughters.

All three of them in their teens and twenties.

And as she was describing this, the female officer interviewing her furrows furrows her brow.

And she said, No, I'm talking about her children, Noel's children.

Noel,

the teenager?

And I'm not kidding you, my, you know, when you say that expression, my chin just dropped to the floor.

I just was like, huh?

What?

How could she have children?

How, in this case, is the heaviest question of all.

She didn't have a boyfriend in Harricut when I knew her.

so why, how, how, it didn't make sense.

It didn't make sense.

Elaine had never so much as seen Noel interact with a male other than her father.

And now the police told Elaine that Davis and Noel were living and presenting as a couple with kids?

I said, no, no, no.

She is definitely his daughter.

I said she looked up to him like a daughter looks up to her father.

And she said, well, I think we believe that they're husband and wife.

And there was more.

The police told Elaine that since Noel had been living in Essex, raising these children, officially, on paper, she was going not by Noel Davis, but by a different name.

Elaine Boys.

She was using my identity.

So that was another shock.

I thought, what?

I couldn't believe it.

I still can't believe it now.

Yeah, unbelievable.

Noel and her father had arrived from Essex, and the detectives were ready to finally get some answers.

They're held in the custody suite at Torquay Police Station.

It's myself and Ian Clenahan that are conducting the interviews.

He's a tall, confident man.

He was dressed really smartly.

He was like a businessman.

Very plausible.

Immediately seeking to establish rapport.

We'd spoken on the phone a few times and he was just really charming.

Oh, Ian Clanahan, how lovely to meet you.

Davis had picked a lawyer from the local directory to sit in with him during their inquiry.

Traditionally, when someone in custody meets with their lawyer to discuss strategy, they do so in the designated solicitor's room.

But to Davis, that was out of the question.

He insisted on doing it in the cell.

Immediately, he was trying to establish a position of strength.

He just had this kind of aura, I suppose, at that stage.

Came in and kind of ruled the roost.

And can you get me this?

Can you get me that?

And it's never been done before.

And I don't know why we entertained it that time, to be honest, but that wasn't my decision.

Table, chairs, everything.

Food was brought to them.

Yeah, seriously.

You have a sense that at every point, he feels superior.

With him smugly seated in the interview room, he remained chatty and jovial up until the exact second that they pressed the record button on the tape.

And then he changed.

He did what we would call a no-comment interview.

Regardless, Clenahan still put the questions to him.

Explain why he was down in Devon at the time.

Was he aware that Ron Platt was down there as well?

Was he aware that Ron Platt was staying in a different accommodation?

No comment, no comment, no comment.

When it was Noelle's turn to sit in the hot seat, she opted to be a different kind of uncooperative.

She exercised her right to speak and actually she ended up as time went on tying herself in knots because more and more times she was, well, I can't remember.

Her story was that, yes, she was married to David Davis, and yes, she was originally from the States, but everything beyond that was slippery.

You start asking her about addresses that she lived at, she couldn't remember them.

You started asking her about places that she went to, family, and she couldn't remember those either.

And there were fundamental things like, well, you must remember where you lived.

And then it was a question of, well, can you remember what school you went to?

And she named an area that she'd gone to school,

but she couldn't remember the name of the high school.

They just needed a single verifiable time that she, Noel Davis, was being Noelle Davis somewhere.

Something from her that concretely we could go and say, right, okay, that proves you are who who you are purporting to be.

But there was nothing by design.

I had a sense that she'd been schooled and rehearsed on what she should say when she got into that situation.

The cover story, although she was comfortable with it, as it turned out, was fairly limited.

So she kept repeating it.

What were you doing in mid-July, Noel?

She gives a story that they were both down in Devon and they've come down for a holiday.

She's unaware that Ronald Platt is in the area.

She hasn't got a clue about it.

Don't know what you're on about.

Yeah, we've got a boat.

He's been out on his boat, but Ron Platt, I haven't a clue what you're talking about.

He's not down here.

So that was her interview.

We were kind of up against a brick wall, and clearly we weren't going to be going any further.

The police made the call to release Noel.

She was on the hook to return at a later date if they saw fit, but by virtue of her needing to care for her children and their gut feeling that she wasn't wasn't directly involved in Ron Platt's death, they let her walk for now.

She wasn't the one they were after.

Our main interest was with him.

Back in the David Davis interview, Clenahan continued peppering him with questions.

Did he meet Ron Platt during his time down in Devon?

Did he go on out on a boat with Ron Platt?

Why has he got Ron Platt's identification and his fucking living under the name of Ron Platt?

Yeah, it was just no comment for everything.

And then there's breaks in the interview process where,

you know, refreshment breaks, comfort breaks or whatever.

Where they hit stop on the recorder.

He would talk while the tapes were off.

He would talk not about the job, but he would talk about everything.

The weather, you know, whatever you wanted to talk about, he would talk.

And I remember in one comfort break, in front of a solicitor, David Davis kind of

joyed me by suggesting that I should try harder or in some way I was going to have to up my game.

And

I can remember at the time

that really sticking.

The arrogance of somebody to say that in that situation.

But then when the tape is running during the formal interview, you're back to that, you know, no comment.

I'm sure psychologists and people would have a field date.

He was very, very confident that we had nothing to prove that he was involved.

There was only one thing that seemed to shake the confidence of the confidence man.

He was quiet when he was being fingerprinted, and I think he, because of course, the game's nearly up then, isn't it?

And his fingerprints are sent off.

I imagine Davis running an algorithm in this moment.

He knew that the unique ridges from the tips of his fingers held the power to unravel his whole plan.

And he knew he'd been fingerprinted exactly one other time,

which was not ideal.

3,500 kilometers away, his prints were likely sitting on a dusty shelf in an Ontario office labeled Albert Walker.

But what are the chances that the small-town nobody cops from two separate countries an ocean apart were out here sharing fingerprints?

No,

they had nothing.

He was sure of it.

For the Devon police, their time was up.

They had all they were going to get in the interviews.

The team at the house had sent along their initial findings, and it was pencils down.

It was now up to the Crown Prosecution Service to determine whether or not they had enough to formally charge Davis for murder.

It certainly wasn't a given.

They really agonized over the decision.

Well, to be fair, we didn't have a lot of evidence then.

Nothing they yielded yielded from their interviews was helpful to laying a charge.

The documents the team found in the house in the first 24 hours seemed promising, but they would require a lot of following up before they could be considered solid.

The strongest thing that they did have was a provable lie.

Davis originally told police that he last saw Platt in June, but they knew that Davis's cell phone was in Devon in July, making calls to local businesses, and that both he and Ron were there at the same time.

So we knew what he told me on the phone was lies.

And the other thing that they knew was that there was a boat.

In the search of Little London Lane, they'd found a photo of Davis proudly posing with his boat, the Lady Jane.

And we knew that David Davis could be tied to a yacht of that name.

And when we researched Coast Guard records and maritime records, there was a boat in the name of the Lady Jane at sea off the coast of South Devon around the time of

what we believe to be the murder and the recovery of the body.

Very strong, but very circumstantial.

The general circumstances put forward a fairly strong but not conclusive case that actually David Davis could be responsible for this man's murder.

It was out of the detectives' hands and into the hands of the Crown Prosecution Service, and the deadline to either charge or release him was imminent.

We were literally running out of time.

They were huddled in a room up on the top floor of the police station for literally hours poring over documentation, representations from us and from other experts in relation to what we had and what we could actually prove.

Nearby, Elaine was anxiously awaiting word of what they'd decide.

If they didn't have enough evidence, they would have released him on the Monday.

And I actually got across to them very clearly because I was really worried about it.

I said, if you let him go,

you'll lose him.

He'll escape.

I said, he's got loads of money.

I said, he'll just disappear.

And you're looking at the clock and thinking, we need a decision.

And it was a question, you know,

they're still considering it.

Finally, late that night, McDonald gets the call from upstairs.

And he says, authorise a charge, charge him.

And we charged him with murder.

With Davis behind bars for now, the real work was about to begin.

When you look back on it in hindsight, we hadn't even started on the evidence gathering at that point.

Yes, he was in custody, and yes, they were confident they had the right man, but they also knew for certain that they didn't have anywhere near enough to convict him.

Not yet.

They had no idea what was coming.

David Davis was formally charged in early November, but in late November, who could have guessed that a revelation was coming so gargantuan, so what the hell is going on?

That all charges would be dropped against David Davis.

One night at the police station, McDonald was at his desk working on the case when through the door burst the most calm and measured detective in the office, looking not at all calm and measured.

He came rushing into the inquiry room and ushered me outside.

And he said, sir, you need to come with me right now.

And it was unusual to see him quite so agitated.

And he dragged me down the corridor into an office.

next to the fax machine and I'm kind of perplexed looking at him.

He said, we're just about to get a fax.

For our Gen Z listeners, a fax machine was a tool used to send important documents or photocopies of your butt cheeks in the year 1996.

The fax machine sort of fires up and

lights are flashing and stuff and the pages are starting to come off the fax machine.

And the first page that comes off is a mugshot of David Davis.

And then the next thing that's coming off is an international arrest warrant in the name of Albert Walker.

It turns out that our man David Davis was actually wanted in Canada for theft, fraud and the embezzlement of money.

We're not talking small change, we're talking big money.

And then off the fax machine next is

this picture of Noel.

And the next thing that emerges is that actually it's Sheena Walker.

And the allegation is that she's been abducted from Canada and taken overseas by her father, who is in fact Albert Walker.

So we're looking at father and daughter.

The pages kept coming.

They faxed us a poster of Interpol's top 20 and he was like fourth on the list.

Not only is he the most wanted man in Canada, he's one of the most wanted men in the world.

And we're like, oh my god,

in Sleepy Devon, there he is surfaced, and, you know, we've got him.

And then we both stand there and we're looking at each other, and it's like, oh, my God, that's that moment, you know?

When Noelle Davis was called back into the police station, detectives Clenahan and MacDonald told her that they knew she was Sheena Walker, that she was Canadian, and that her father was Albert Walker.

The jig was up.

But the lingering question in the air, her relationship to Albert and how on earth they came to pose as husband and wife with two children, that was something nearly everyone we spoke to felt hard to address with us directly.

Even some police only agreed to speak with us on the condition that we didn't ask them about this aspect of the case.

What I can tell you, though, is that when the detectives asked her, this stolen child who had spent a quarter of her life on the lamb, who the father of her two small children was, she said nothing and began to cry.

To understand how Sheena had got to this point, sitting in this police station being asked such sensitive questions, we need to go back in time to when Sheena became Noel.

Kathleen Folbig was known as Australia's worst female serial killer.

She was convicted of killing her four infant children until a scientist uncovered the truth.

Scientists want to know the truth and want to get to the bottom of things, particularly in a case like this where science can solve it.

The Lab Detective is a story of a shocking miscarriage of justice and an investigation into why Kathleen's story might not be the last.

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Six years earlier, on December 5th, 1990, Albert and Sheena Walker touched down at Heathrow and checked into the Ritz, London.

It was a risky choice to bring his 15-year-old daughter into this dark unknown with him, but there was no turning back now.

Albert had successfully squirreled away millions of stolen dollars in the months leading up to this.

And even more valuable than that, he had a head start, and every intention of using it to throw those who'd be looking for him off his scent.

Using a driver's license he swiped accidentally on purpose from a former client named David Davis, Walker goes to Geneva as Davis, visits a safety deposit box, buys two London Geneva first-class tickets, return with his Amex that he knows they'll be able to trace as a decoy.

Then he flies to Paris and takes a boat back.

After tying a thorough naval knot with his movements, he needed a place where they could lay low.

He found a place in London that served as a temporary cocoon.

While Sheena's mother back in Canada was reporting her missing, and the Canadian police were sending Interpol Switzerland photos of father and daughter, Albert and Sheena were getting ready to make their debut as different people, 200 miles north of London, in Yorkshire.

I mean, when he was here, 200 on a Sunday morning, it has not changed one bit since Albert was here.

Not at all.

Reverend David Hoskins was the flock leader of the Baptist Church in Harrogate in 1991, when David and Noelle Davis, a lovely American father-daughter duo, first appeared.

Show you exactly where they sat.

Every Sunday morning, the two of them

on their own there.

Reverend Hoskins was one of the first people to meet this new version of Albert Walker.

And he was telling me he was

from America, that

he'd come here because he'd made his pile

and loved the town and thought he would sell here with his daughter Noelle.

Harrogate was a perfect town for them to start a new life.

Far from the glare of London, but still a place where you can throw some money around without people raising an eyebrow.

Well, he presented himself as a great

international banker.

He would tell you that.

He wouldn't tell you much else.

He was keen on telling people

that he'd done extremely well.

He got a nice place, became a regular at the higher-end spots, and one day he went into an art auctioneer where he met a woman named Elaine Boys, who had a boyfriend named Ronald Platt, who had a medium-term plan to move to Canada.

And immediately, of course, Albert Walker devised a medium-term plan himself.

Their current identities had limits.

He had the Davis driver's license, but Noel had no ID to speak speak of.

So if he could find a way to earn the trust of Elaine Boys and Ronald Platt and find a way to entangle himself with them, by the time they made their big move to Canada, he and Sheena would be able to smoothly and permanently step into the shoes and identities of Elaine and Ron.

And all through this, just as it was in Canada, Home base for Albert and his daughter was the church.

He could talk theology.

I mean, he knew what he's talking about.

He was generally liked.

He seemed quite, you know, full of savoir-faire and bon homie, all of that, you know, he looked the part, he talked the part,

and he was good.

I mean, honestly, he just was.

And he was charming.

He could be very charming.

Molly Mountford was a well-traveled and discerning woman who belonged to the church.

She remembers David Davis not only showing up, but showing up in a big way.

David Davis became very involved in the Harrogate community.

I know that he got to know a lot of people here, and certainly a lot of members of the church were friendly with him.

And Noelle, his daughter, did babysitting for them and things like that.

He'd show up at all the extracurricular church meetings and gatherings.

and seemed to be interested in becoming a leader in the community.

And one day, this community took a big blow.

One of the biggest employers in town was a huge chemical company.

And around this time, they closed their plant in Harrogate.

So suddenly, several of the congregants found themselves out of work.

And I called a meeting at the man's at our house one evening and just said, if anybody who's been made redundant, you know, would just like to turn up, just have a chat for general support and see where that takes us.

Then please do.

Among the depressed figures gathered around the Reverend's dining room table that night was Molly, whose husband's job was in jeopardy with the big layoff.

And there's a crowd around our dining room table and David Davis came

and just said things like, I've got a lot of expertise in finance and all the rest of it.

And if I can help any of you, I'd be delighted, you know, about investing your money, what's best to do with your money.

I'm your man.

But as Molly watched Davis that night, essentially taking over the meeting, she saw clearly a quality in him that she'd been wary of from the time she set eyes on him.

Straight from the beginning, really, he made the hairs on the back of my neck stand out because I just felt there was something creepy about him.

Molly Mountford, a real one.

I thought he was over the top with charm, and I think people who have a lot of charm use it, often use it to their own ends.

As Davis was giving a spiel that felt like he'd given many times before to this room of vulnerable people, Molly couldn't bite her tongue anymore.

In the middle of it, in the middle of this, I questioned something he said.

He wasn't used to being challenged.

Davis's whole demeanor changed, and he glared at her.

And he virtually told me that really I should be seeing a psychologist or psychiatrist or something and that he knew something about that.

And I was so incensed, I stood up and said fine and walked out.

Molly left the others with a warning.

Don't get too near.

Don't get too close to this.

And she left.

No one took Davis up on his offer that night.

Apart from the one woman at church giving Albert side-eye, generally speaking, everything was going swimmingly for Albert Walker in Harrogate.

Elaine and Ron were wrapped around his finger and had helped him turn his millions in Swiss banks into physical assets in the name of his corporation.

They were saving up money for their move to Canada, and he had seen not a single flag to indicate that the authorities had the faintest idea where he and Sheena were.

He was like a hero from one of his thriller novels that he so loved reading.

He had outsmarted everyone.

But then, just before Christmas 1992, something happened that would change everything.

Sheena got pregnant.

Suddenly, everything was in fast forward.

He bought Elaine and Ron the tickets to Canada and all but shoved them out the door before she started to show.

Merry Christmas.

goodbye.

No time to sell your flat.

No time to sell your business.

I'll do it.

You just need to leave right now.

He needed to sell everything as fast as he could, and they needed to leave town before people started asking questions.

He had a pregnant teenager, and he needed to find a new place to start over.

Like a snake, he needed to shed his skin.

And they were gone.

Good afternoon here at the hair.

My name's Paula Windsor-Williams and I think it was around 1994 I started doing a gentleman's hair called Ron Platt as I knew him.

With the real Elaine and Ron happily away enjoying the good times in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, Albert and Sheena Walker made their debut as husband and wife.

Albert was Ronald Platt and in person Sheena was no longer Noelle Davis, but Noelle Platt.

Although on paper, she was Elaine Boyes.

God, this is confusing.

Anyway, they were the Platts now.

So when Ron came in initially, I think from memory, he was quite white.

So he wanted me to put obviously a dark colour on his hair, his whole, you know, disguise really of what he wanted.

The age gap between the fictional married couple of Elaine and Ron was conspicuous.

So they were going to need to bridge the gap with the best tool at their disposal.

Tacky dye jobs.

I mean, probably he should have been a couple shades lighter for him to have been able to get away with it, but it looked very artificial.

Whereas with Noelle, you know, she just had some highlights, which was obviously just a few pieces of colour just to brighten her up and make her hair a colour look lighter.

They changed their whole deals.

Sheena went blonde.

Albert did away with the fancy clothes.

They traded in for an older car.

And they mostly kept to themselves.

He wanted to probably go under the radar very much, you know, with everything with him.

They just blended, I think, and that's what they wanted.

In the year in Devon, a lot happened in their lives.

Sheena gave birth to her first child.

Albert got a sailboat.

And in early 1994, Albert enrolled in a course for, get this, psychology and counseling.

And every month he'd be back in Paula's chair, not mentioning any of it.

I always got the impression that I shouldn't be asking things.

Well, I suppose I knew that Noelle was his wife.

I didn't sort of say, you know, why is she so much younger than you?

It wouldn't have been a question I'd have asked.

It's just quite scary to think that you can spend time with somebody and actually know nothing about them and what they're capable of.

At the end of the Devon year, Albert had a new plan.

He finished his course in counseling and decided to invest in a company called Solutions in Therapy, which was based in Essex.

What he liked about Solutions in Therapy was that much like Walker Financial, it would be easy to run and easy to scale.

So the fake platts moved to Essex.

Woodham Walter to be specific.

Little London farmhouse on Little London Lane to make a meal of it.

It was there that Sheena gave birth to her second child.

Albert started his work in solutions in therapy and began pitching people on expanding the operation further.

Maybe he could run a new office in Chelmsford, he thought, have his own shop.

So he did.

And here is where he'd done it.

He found a perfect pastoral setting just a short drive from the office with a wife and two children.

A twisted mirror image of his Canadian life six years earlier.

This time, the wife was his daughter.

This time, the one-stop financial shop was a one-stop therapy shop.

This time, he had millions of dollars.

Who knows how long it would have lasted?

Who knows if anyone ever would have found them?

Who knows how long this sordid tale would have played out?

If it wasn't for the day that Albert Walker received a letter from Ronald Platt saying that he was done with Canada and was moving back to England for good.

There are so many questions about what happened in the final year of Ronald Platt's life.

Did he know that Walker had stolen his identity?

What did Platt make of Sheena having children?

But the only people who know what happened were Ron and Albert and Sheena.

To me, there are a million questions.

But to the Devon police, by necessity, there was only ever one.

How did Ronald Platt end up at the bottom of the ocean?

When they arrested Albert Walker, they had all of their resources on trying to answer this question.

The body came ashore on the 28th of July, and then he was arrested on October 31st, Halloween, 1996, and it went to trial

mid-98.

We worked on it solidly to the trial date in 98.

So So

just under two years solidly, we worked on that inquiry for.

That was our only job.

We were on it full-time.

Even with their undivided attention, they knew enough about Albert Walker to know that this wasn't going to be easy.

This was a man who'd hidden in plain sight, undetected for six years, because he'd been crafty and knew how to cover his tracks.

So if he really was the one who killed Ron, undoubtedly, he would have done a clean job of it.

If the police were going to find justice for Ronald Platt, they were going to need to do their very best detective work.

They were going to need timelines, paper trails, and the latest technology all pointing in the same direction.

They were going to need witnesses just to have a chance.

And even with all that, they knew they'd need something else, the guiding force that had been with them all along and had brought them to this point.

Luck.

Their next miraculous stroke of good fortune begins with the name Lady Jane written on a whiteboard.

We had to find that boat because that is the mechanism about how the whole murder was committed, wasn't it?

And without a boat, You know, he could say, well, okay, I haven't even got a boat.

You know, where's my boat?

It beggars belief how we came across the boat.

Early on in the inquiry, the Essex police in charge of searching the farmhouse had a briefing where they were laying out possible leads based on their discoveries at the house and things that needed following up on.

And a lad was just walking past, a couple was just walking past the room and walked in and what's this, you know?

And written on the board was the boat, the Lady Jane.

We knew the boat's name, but we didn't have a clue where it was.

And he'd been in some dry dock earlier on the week before and had just seen this boat and remembered the the name and he said I know where that boat is.

So then everyone looks at him as if to say, what?

And he says, yeah, I know where that boat is.

I saw it in an Essex boatyard last week.

So everyone packs up and runs down to this boatyard and there it was, you know, it was, yeah, we found the boat.

Incredible, we actually found the boat.

And the lucky breaks didn't stop there.

When the police charged David Davis with murder, it was all over the media, which jogged the memory of a local fisherman named John Coppic, the man who first discovered Ron Platt in his fishing net that summer.

As he read that police continued to investigate the death of Ronald Platt and put out calls for tips, Koppick remembered something from that day that seemed inconsequential at the time.

Ron Platt's body wasn't the only out-of-the-ordinary thing in his net that day, and the more he thought about it, he wondered: could the two things be related?

Kopik called the police and asked, what about the anchor?

To which the detective replied, Come on, John, what anchor's this?

And he said, well, there was the anchor in the net.

And he said, what anchor you talking about?

Kopik explained that the day they caught Ron Platt's body, back at shore, they discovered that caught in a different part of the netting was an anchor.

But interestingly, the anchor wasn't in the net in with the fish, down at what we called the cod end.

It was caught more near the net's mouth, in the same trawl that produced the body.

So the police asked, Where's this anchor now, John?

and Koppic said Well, we gave it to so-and-so, who gave it to his mother to sell in the car boot sale.

That first day, right after the police took the body off Kopik's boat, Kopik steered his vessel to its usual parking spot in the fishing boat pens.

As Koppik was finishing up, one of his buddies walked by, spotting the anchor in the net, and was like, Is that anchor up for grabs?

Kopic gave the anchor to his friend, who ended up not needing it.

So a month later, he gave it to his wife to sell at a car boot sale.

She tried to sell it for 15 pounds, but there were no takers.

So Koppic's friend's wife just takes the anchor to her mother's house.

So then you go and speak to mother, and she's, oh no, we didn't sell it.

It never sold, so it's still in my garage, you know?

So the police go to her house, she leads them to her backyard where they find the biggest piece of evidence in the biggest case any of them will ever work.

They send it to forensics.

We had a local scenes of crime sergeant and he'd been involved in the investigation all the way through.

And he takes the anchor and I can remember coming back in a day or two later.

And he's very excited.

He's clutching the anchor.

And he's got photographs that have come from the post-mortem.

and he has a photograph of the anchor laying on the bench next to the body

and the anchor shaft perfectly fits the bruising on the thigh.

The first post-mortem had noted there was a serious wound on the back of the head and along the right side of the body there was bruising at the hip and bruising at the thigh.

And now, like a jigsaw piece, the points of contact aligned exactly.

So then if you put in the anchor like that, well, how did they secure the anchor?

Well, they must have tucked it into his belt.

So then we sent the belt off.

They put the belt under the literal microscope and discovered on the right hip portion of it, there were tiny silvery deposits of zinc that matched the zinc of the anchor.

And it didn't just match.

It was a really, really strong evidential match.

It wasn't a question, well, it could be the anchor.

It was almost, yes, that's the anchor.

This was the murder weapon.

Now they needed evidence to put Ron Platt on the Lady Jane and to put him there in mid-late July.

To do that, police needed to rely on two relatively new technologies at the time, DNA and GPS.

On the Lady Jane, they found Ronald Platt's fingerprints on a plastic bag, which, if you can believe it, also contained the sales receipt for the anchor.

In the cabin, they found Ronald Platt's hair on a pillow and specks of Ronald Platt's blood both inside the cabin and on one of Lady Jane's sales.

They also found a GPS unit that was one, turned off, and two, appeared to be missing a component.

The second component of this GPS they found on the other side of the country.

We've found the documentation in this house for a storage container.

Walker had rented a storage unit in the same week that police first contacted him.

Inside, police found several more gold bars, three suitcases containing Ronald Platt's clothes, and we found the GPS that fitted to the boat.

I said, don't touch it, don't switch it on, don't do anything of it, just box it up, bring it back here.

With the camera rolling, someone from the GPS manufacturer turns on the devices.

And they discovered that the devices had been switched off on the evening of July 20th, the last day that Ron Platt was seen alive.

Not only could they say that that was the date and time that had been switched off, they could also say the location at which it had been switched off.

When the switch was flipped at 9 p.m.

on July 20th, the Lady Jane was on the water.

Five miles off the coast of Tinmouth, out to sea, virtually contemporaneous on spot where john copec recovers the body

it was an extremely solid circumstantial case there wasn't one bit that was better or

more damning than another it just everything just kind of fitted into place but one thing we all know from listening to prestige true crime podcasts is that strong circumstantial cases are not always a slam dunk Reasonable doubt is a huge hurdle.

And know who loves cases built entirely on circumstantial evidence?

Defense attorneys.

What the prosecutors really needed to shore up this case was testimony from the one person who was there with Walker in Devon.

They needed Sheena, and they needed her to testify.

Shortly after the Interpol revelation, Sheena flew home to Canada with her two children and her mother, Barb.

While the detectives and prosecutors were building their case in England, Sheena disappeared completely from the public eye and was sheltered from the media circus by her mother and community.

But during that year and a half, those working the case wondered: would she take the stand against her father?

Or even now, would she remain loyal to him?

No one knew how deeply Albert's hooks were sunk in.

One day, back in Canada, Sheena got a call from a UK prison.

It was her father.

He said,

listen to me closely.

I need you to change your story.

Coming up on Sea of Lies.

She was delicate, she was vulnerable, she was nervous, she was anxious.

She clearly knew that this new statement provided some quite damning evidence against her father, and she was reluctant to put her signature to that piece of paper.

He tried to get an assurance from me that Sheena would come back and give that evidence, and I wasn't able to give him that assurance because I didn't know myself.

Sea of Lies is produced by What's the Story Sounds for CBC.

It's hosted and written by me, Sam Mullins, and produced and reported by Alex Gatenby.

Mixing and Sound Design is by Ivan Eastley.

From What's the Story Sounds, our executive producers are David Waters and Daryl Brown.

At CBC Podcasts, the senior producers are Andrew Friesen and Damon Fairless.

Eunice Kim is our story editor.

Emily Cannell is our digital coordinating producer.

Executive producers are Cecil Fernandez and Chris Oak.

Senior manager is Tonya Springer.

And the director of CBC Podcasts is Arif Nurani.

For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca/slash podcasts.