Shocking story of murderous international conman retold in new podcast

ALMOST 30 years since one of Devon's most infamous crimes, a new podcast has revisited the Rolex Murder.

- by STAFF REPORTERS

On July 28, 1996, a man’s body was found in the net of a Brixham trawler six miles off Teignmouth. Detectives could not identify the drowned man and their only clue was a 25-year-old Rolex Oyster watch which was still attached to his right wrist.

Untangling the mystery of the dead man, the watch and his killer would take detectives many months.

The investigation was filled with intrigue, plot twists and a web of lies. It eventually led to the arrest and conviction of sociopath Canadian conman Albert Walker, one of his country’s most wanted men and someone who, to the present day “can’t stop lying”

The subsequent criminal trial was one of the biggest in Exeter in the 1990s and attracted media interest from around the world.

A new seven-part podcast has been produced which reexamines the Rolex Murder. It contains extensive interviews with those at the centre of the investigation, including detectives from Devon and Cornwall Police, a fishermen on board the trawler and those who knew the killer and victim.

The story, retold in the Sea of Lies podcast, unfolds from the moment the body is brought aboard the trawler. It was that of a man with his trouser pockets turned inside out, but no form of identification apart from a tattoo on his right hand, a Rolex watch on his wrist and a “substantial gash” to the back of his scalp.

Without the watch police would never have discovered who the dead man was. It took six weeks of researching Rolex’s meticulous service records for officers to establish the body in the sea was 51-year-old former soldier Ronald Platt, described in the later court case as “shy and introverted”