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Hey there, bingers. Welcome back to another week, another serving of Binged.
And yeah, I know our podcast is called Binge, but we like to ration things and give you the option of either pacing yourself or gorging, you know. We're all about conscious indulgence over here. If you're coming straight out of the water from last week's episode, don't towel off just yet because we're jumping back into the sea yet again with one more seawater-drenched crime case from the European coastline.
this time off the coast of England in the waters between the UK and France. So it was July 28th, 1996, a beautiful summer day off the coast of Brixham with a nearly cloudless sky above the English Channel.
John Kopik was a commercial fisherman by trade, and he was out on the water in his fishing boat that afternoon together with his son. They began reeling in their trawling net, and they could feel by the weight of it that they were bringing in a lucrative bounty. As the net drew closer, they began to see how productive this trawl had been. The net was full of bass, and even what was apparently a much larger catch. Maybe a dolphin, they thought?
They pulled the net into the boat, eager to inspect their catch. But the large animal they expected would be a creature of the sea turned out to be a creature of the land. It was a human being, a dead man.
For a moment, they considered throwing the body back into the water because they knew that if they brought the body back to the mainland and reported it, they'd also have to discard the entire catch along with it and lose a day's worth of wages. But they ultimately decided to do the right thing. They returned to shore and summoned the police.
By this point, it was early evening. The first to arrive at the port was Detective Constable Ian Clenahan, who was working a late shift and was the only on-duty officer working the Criminal Investigation Department, or CID, at the time. Clenahan followed the fisherman and his son down to their boat to look at the body. The dead man was fully clothed, but he had no wallet and no ID on him, so the identity of this man was a mystery.
The only potentially identifying characteristics were a tattoo on his hand, it was a tattoo of a maple leaf, and a Rolex watch. Detective Clannahan's first thoughts were that this was either an accident or a suicide. Bodies found in the sea were not uncommon to the Devon and Cornwall police, where a large swath of English coastline falls under their jurisdiction.
The most likely circumstances here, the detective felt, were either a boating accident or maybe a fall from a cliff. So the man was brought into the medical examiner who noted multiple injuries on the dead man, bruises on his body and a gash in his head, which again could have all been caused by a fall. The dead man's lungs were full of seawater, which established that the man was still alive, probably unconscious when he entered the water and died from drowning.
The police wanted to notify the dead man's family if he had any, but they still had no clue to his identity. They had no dental records, fingerprints on file, nothing. And no reports had been filed for missing persons fitting the man's description. Detective Phil Sincock of the Devon and Cornwall Police was assigned to lead the investigation, and he put his focus on the dead man's expensive Rolex.
The Rolex was a 30-year-old silver Rolex Oyster watch, and this watch, like many watches, was designed to stop working if the wearer had been motionless for more than 48 hours. So this allowed investigators to pinpoint the likely day this individual died, because the watch had stopped at 11.35 p.m. on July 22nd.
which meant the man had died sometime on July 20th, two days earlier. Now they wondered if somehow the watch could be used to identify him. One of the mortuary workers had remembered recently reading that the Rolex company kept meticulous records of all their cells and watch owners. Each Rolex watch has a unique serial number that's engraved into the watch face just underneath where the bracelet joins the face.
That serial number can be used to locate the date, location, and receipt of sale. Investigators contacted Rolex and Rolex found the purchase receipt. The buyer was a man named Ronald Joseph Platt. So it appeared as though they had finally identified the dead man. Now they needed to find out whom they needed to inform of the man's death.
Investigators pulled up Platt's information and found that his last known address was a rented house in Essex. They contacted the owner of the house, Platt's landlord, and the landlord gave them the name of someone to contact, a friend of Platt's named David Davis. Platt had provided Davis's name as the personal reference before he signed the lease. This was also along with a mobile telephone number. So the investigator called up David Davis on that number and got him on the phone.
David Davis was a personable man who sounded to the English investigator's ears American. The investigator told him that they'd possibly recovered the body of a friend of his and asked if they could come visit him in Essex, but he asked if he could come down to visit them instead.
When Davis arrived at Devon and Cornwall police headquarters, he sat down with the investigator who asked him if he knew a Ronald Platt. David said he indeed did know Ronald Platt. In fact, Ronald Platt was a close friend of his, but he hadn't seen him in about six weeks since Platt had left for France to set up a new business.
He was told that Platt was found dead and he expressed some sadness at the loss of his friend. He was seemingly helpful and polite, volunteering information about Platt, some of which was useful to the investigation.
He'd done national service in the British Army, he told police. He'd always wanted to leave England and establish himself in Canada, and he had tried to do so with his girlfriend, but things didn't work out, and he eventually returned back to England. The girlfriend's name, he told the investigator, was Elaine Boyce. He said Platt had two older brothers. After this conversation, police wanted to make sure the dead man was in fact Ronald Platt, so they located his military records, which contained a dental chart.
and comparing the chart with the dead man's teeth, the man who had been caught while fishing was indeed Ronald Platt. The military records also provided the names of Platt's next of kin, including his two brothers. Police contacted one of them, who was stunned to learn of the death of his younger brother.
Platt's brother also confirmed, based on the maple leaf tattoo, that the dead man was indeed Platt. The brother explained that Ronald, who was a divorced 50-year-old TV repairman, had been out of contact with the family for some time, which is why he had not been reported missing. In fact, they didn't even know where he was. After the conversation, based on all the information they'd gathered, they believed that Platt had probably died accidentally while en route to France.
Maybe he'd fallen off a boat or a ferry. So, open and shut. They were getting ready to put the coroner's file into the report and close the case, but they needed a written statement from David Davis, since Davis was the last known person to have seen his friend Platt alive. But they realized they'd misplaced his mobile number, and they had no other way of getting in touch with him, except for his address, which was a house called Little London Farmhouse over in Essex.
So they decided to send Detective Sergeant Peter Redman up to Essex where David lived to knock on his door and talk to him in person. After making the four-hour trip, Redman arrived in Davis's neighborhood and found that the houses on the street didn't have numbers or names to indicate which was which. Not knowing which was the Little London Farmhouse, Redman decided to knock on each of the four doors and see who answered.
After knocking on the first door, an elderly couple greeted the detective who asked if they were at the little London farmhouse.
The elderly couple pointed to the house next door and told him that was the Little London Farmhouse, and they asked if they could be of any assistance. Redmond explained he was just looking for a man named David Davis. They were about to close this case. The couple told Redmond that they'd never heard that name before. The residents who lived at the Little London Farmhouse address, the couple told him, were Ronald Platt, his wife Noelle, and their two young children.
They'd been living there for a couple of years, but they weren't home at the moment. Now, it's safe to say, probably like you, Detective Redman was confused. They told him that Platt was an American and worked in finance, which was curious because they knew Platt, in fact, worked as a TV repairman and was English. They learned this from his brothers. But David Davis was Canadian, easily mistakable for American, and worked as a financial advisor.
Redman asked for more details, and they told him that Platt seemed pretty well-to-do. In fact, he had a yacht he kept docked down south in Devon, which was near where the body was found. Redman returned to police headquarters and relayed this information to Detective Clannahan. The two investigators agreed that it sounded like David Davis had stolen his good friend Ronald Platt's identity.
In fact, he'd been using Platt's identity for the last two years, mostly while Platt was still alive. This was a head scratcher. It didn't make sense, and the investigators knew they need to probe this deeper to make heads or tails of it. Upon digging further, they found that Noel, Davis's wife, had also been using a false name, the name of Elaine Boyce, which they recognized as the name of the dead man's ex-girlfriend.
The more they learned, the more the pieces weren't fitting together. They realized that the next person they needed to talk to was the real Elaine Boyce.
When they did, they informed her about the discovery of Platt's body at sea, her ex-boyfriend, and she was devastated. She had been with Platt for 13 years, she explained, and they'd broken up just two years earlier because they had failed to make a new life together in Canada. They asked Elaine what kind of man Platt was, and she described him as warm and charismatic, kind and loyal, but also shy, quiet, and passive. He must have finally committed suicide, Elaine said.
They asked her why she thought that. She said she'd figured he'd finally had enough and didn't want to live anymore, having lost everything he had. "What about David Davis?" the investigators asked. "Did you know him?" Boyce said that both she and Ron had been longtime friends with Davis. "Why?" she asked. One of the detectives explained that he'd recently talked to Davis. "How recently?" Elaine asked. "Probably five or six weeks ago," answered the detective.
This made Elaine freeze as she tried to digest this information. That's very strange, she said. I spoke with him only two or three weeks ago and he made no mention at all about Ron having died. In fact, he'd mentioned to Elaine that he hadn't been in touch with Platt. So she immediately knew something was very, very wrong here because her good friend, David Davis, had lied to her.
And so did the investigators. They knew something was wrong. After this conversation, they began digging into David Davis's financial records to see what he was up to around the time of Platt's death.
And they discovered that in the two weeks leading up to Platt's death, Davis, who had been calling himself Ronald Platt for the last two years, was spending time in the company of the real Ronald Platt down in South Devon. This was where Davis kept his yacht, the Lady Jane. And it was also close to where Platt's body was fished out of the sea.
Finally, at least some of the pieces were flirting with fitting together. Davis and Platt were together at the time of Platt's death, and Davis had a yacht which gave him the means to dispose of his good friend Platt's body in the sea. And his failure to mention Platt's death to Elaine Boyes only increased suspicion, on top of the fact that he had assumed his dead friend's identity two years before he died.
So now this inquest had become a murder investigation and David Davis was the prime suspect. Meanwhile, David Davis reached back out to Elaine Boyce. He wanted to know if she was able to meet him. Elaine was terrified of meeting Davis at this point because she suspected he may have had something to do with Ron's death and she was afraid he might try to harm her considering that his now living girlfriend had assumed her identity.
But she also didn't want to tip him off that she had suspicions, and she wanted to see if he might reveal any useful information. So she agreed to meet, reluctantly. Okay, you guys, let me guess. Your medicine cabinet is crammed with stuff that doesn't work. You still aren't sleeping. You still hurt, and you're still stressed out.
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They met up and had lunch, and Davis told Elaine how wrecked he was to learn that Ron had died. But to Elaine's ears, this rang false. Davis sounded totally inauthentic, and this confirmed to her in her heart that he had murdered Ron. She reached back out to the investigators who were already convinced Davis killed Platt.
However, they still needed more to prove their case, but they also didn't want Davis to flee, and they were reasonably sure he was responsible for Platt's death, so they placed him under arrest for suspicion of murder. Also, they raided his house while his wife, Noelle, was there, and some of the items they found corroborated that Noelle had been living under a stolen identity, so she too was placed under arrest.
Among her possessions was a bag with 4,000 pounds in cash inside and two gold bars. The house was full of documents and envelopes containing 50-pound notes, gold bars, just more money. Again, all of this only made Davis look more suspicious, but they still didn't know the significance of it. It told them that they were on the right track, but it still wasn't enough evidence for a conviction. It was all circumstantial.
There was still nothing to disprove that Platt had accidentally drowned or committed suicide. And the time to charge Davis was running out. They had to either charge him or let him go. So they decided to charge him in order to buy a little extra time and keep him in custody so he wouldn't flee.
But the Crown prosecution gave the investigators one week to either collect the evidence they needed against Davis or to drop the charges. So they were now racing against the clock to prove that this was a murder and not merely an accident, and that David Davis was the man responsible for that murder. And they decided to go back to square one, beginning with John Kopik, the fisherman who first reeled in Platt's body.
What they learned from Kopik this time around is that he'd had suspicions from the get-go. And when they asked why, he explained that the gash in his head looked more intentional than accidental. But also, the way the man's pockets were turned inside out suggested that someone had gone through them before dumping him. And then there was also the matter of the anchor. What anchor? The detectives asked.
Kopik explained that, along with the body, they'd found a 10-pound plow anchor caught in their net, which could have been used to weigh down the body. The investigators were stubbed. "'Why didn't you mention this before?' "'Because you never asked,' Kopik said." He then admitted that they tried to sell the anchor at the market, but no one wanted to buy it, which was a lucky stroke for the investigators who took the anchor and entered it into evidence."
Because the anchor was not attached to Platt's body in any way when they were both found in the trawling net, detectives were trying to figure out how it could have been used to weigh down the body. One of the officers took the anchor and placed it through his belt like a sword.
I think this is how he said they sent Platt's belt to the lab and experts detected the presence of zinc alloy, which was consistent with the anchor's coating. This proved the theory correct. The anchor, they reasoned, had probably been shaken loose from Platt's body when it got snagged in Copic's trawling net. So this established that Platt's death was not an accident, but it still didn't rule out the possibility of suicide.
Even though they were sure it was a murder, they still needed to prove it beyond any reasonable doubt. David Davis was a bit of a hoarder. So as well as he may have thought he'd covered his tracks, there was a wealth of potential evidence found during the raid of his home. And sifting through the hundreds of items recovered from David's house, police discovered purchase receipts made in Platt's name. One was from a boating supply shop in Devon from a purchase made on July 8th.
And one of the items he bought? A 10-pound plow anchor. Just like the one found with Platt's body. This was now reason enough to impound and search Davis' yacht. And when they had the yacht in their possession, police searched the cabin and found a bag containing all of the items Davis had purchased from the shop that day. That was all except one. The 10-pound plow anchor. It was missing.
They dusted the bag for fingerprints and they found Ronald Platt's fingerprints on the bag. And on a seat cushion inside the cabin, they found blood as well as three head hairs. When processed for DNA, all matched Ronald Platt. They believed that the murder weapon was likely the plow anchor. And the store where David bought it told investigators that an anchor such as that one was not suitable for use on a yacht like Davis's. So there was no other reason to buy it.
Their case against David Davis was growing stronger, and yet there were still enough blind spots that the full picture had yet to take shape. So they recontacted Elaine Boyce. They wanted to hear from Elaine the whole story of how she and Platt knew Davis and how their relationship had developed.
Elaine told the detectives that she had first met David Davis in Harrogate back in 1991 at an auction house where Elaine worked as a secretary. Davis had walked into the auction house one afternoon, curious about a painting that was on display in the outside window.
They got to chatting and after an hour or so, they'd established a rapport and Davis offered Elaine a job. Elaine told him she wasn't sure how much longer she'd even be in England. She explained that she and her boyfriend, Ronald Platt, had been saving up and planning to relocate to Canada to start a new life together there. Davis was encouraging and he told her he could take care of her travel arrangements and pay her more than what she was making at the auction house.
With benefits, he told her, which if you've been a regular listener to Binge since the beginning, you'll probably recognize this as a red flag. But Elaine took Davis up on his offer and he made good on it. He paid her what he said he'd pay her. And before long, she and her boyfriend, Ronald and David Davis had become the best of friends.
Davis started a fine art company and brought both of them on as partners. He wanted Elaine to become director of the company, he told her. Elaine's confidence was shaky at this time in her life. The notion of assuming a role of such power and authority made her nervous. But her friend, Davis, reassured her that she was totally cut out for this role. And he also convinced her to become the signatory for all the company accounts.
He said he didn't want his name attached to any of the company documents on account of his ex-wife back in the States. She was pursuing alimony from him and looking to take him for all he had. I made my money and I don't want her to have any of it, he explained, which this made sense to Elaine. And one of the perks of Elaine's new job with Davis's fine art company was travel across Europe. Boyz accompanied Davis on several trips to explore properties for potential acquisition.
Although Davis's company did not end up buying any of them, one thing each of these trips had in common was Davis asked Elaine to deposit large sums of money into various foreign bank accounts. Now, this did seem odd to Elaine, but she didn't really question it. Davis was so generous with both her and Ron that she took him at face value.
He's just a generous, big-hearted guy is how she saw him. For Christmas in 1992, Davis invited Elaine and Ron over for dinner. They were welcomed by him and his daughter, Noelle. That's right, his daughter. The woman that he had introduced to his neighbors years later as his wife, he was introducing in 1992 as his daughter. And certainly, she was young enough to be his daughter. So who was she really?
That Christmas, David had put together a grand Christmas feast for Elaine and Ron, who thought the mood of the mill was odd. For instance, whenever they'd begin talking to Noelle, the young woman would first look toward her father for approval, and only then would she reply. But unorthodox as this seemed, they tried to dismiss it because Davis had been such a loyal and generous friend.
After dinner, Davis gave Elaine and Ron Christmas gifts. He gave each of them a large book, and inside one of them was a Christmas card. And written in the Christmas card was a note that said, I will buy you both airline tickets to Canada. But there was a condition. They had to redeem this offer by the end of February 1993.
Now this was a total surprise to the couple and it's exactly what they needed. They took Davis up on the offer and they left for Canada the following January. Before leaving, Davis told them he wanted them to continue to be a part of his company. So he asked Ron to leave some personal documents behind as well as rubber stamps of his signatures so he could sign any necessary documents in his absence. Ron agreed and they left for Canada at the end of the month.
Now, obviously, unbeknownst to them, David Davis would now assume Ron Platt's identity. And unbeknownst to David Davis, Elaine and Ron were not having an easy time settling into their new lives in Canada. They repeatedly tried to land employment and failed. Money was dwindling. Platt was becoming more and more depressed and the couple's relationship was falling apart.
Eventually, the couple split up. A few months later, Elaine flew back to England to attend a wedding. But seeing her friends and family again, she decided to just remain there. At that wedding, she ran into none other than David Davis. And when she told him about her relationship with Ron ending and her intention to stay in England, he insisted, no, go back to Canada and try to work things out.
But this was one time that Davis's influence failed to move Elaine, who told him she was back in England to stay. And then she didn't hear from David Davis again until after Ron's body was found, by which time Ron had been living back in England for about a year. So this was a lot of useful information they obtained from Elaine Boyes. But the mystery that had yet to be resolved was why did David Davis wish to steal Platt's identity in the first place?
The police still had very little information about David Davis beyond what they learned from Elaine. So they contacted Interpol and provided David Davis's fingerprints, hoping to gain more insight into who he was. And when they got a call back from the Swiss police of all agencies, they
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The fingerprints didn't even belong to a man named David Davis.
They belonged to a fugitive named Albert Johnson Walker, the most wanted man in Canada.
and one of the 10 most wanted men in the entire world. He was number four of Interpol's most wanted list. So David Davis's real name was Albert Johnson Walker, and he was wanted for financial fraud. He'd owned a financial management firm in Canada, and he had embezzled over $3.2 million from his clients.
The real David Davis was just one of his many victims, and this explained the cash and the gold bars found in Davis' home and the many large deposits he had Elaine make when they were traveling through Europe on the pretense of buying property. He was laundering the embezzled money. In 1990, he felt the net was closing in on him, so he fled Canada, leaving his family behind, all except his 15-year-old daughter, Sheena.
He had told his family they were going on a trip to Europe, which they did, only they never came back. From that point forward, Sheena began going by the name Noelle, and Albert began seeking a new permanent identity for himself and his daughter so he could continue to escape detection. That's where Ron and Elaine came in. And when he flew them out to Canada, he and Noelle assumed their identities, believing they were gone for good.
Somehow, Walker didn't anticipate things would fall apart. So when Elaine returned, this created a problem for him. A problem that he solved by moving 300 miles away, reestablishing himself as a successful entrepreneur and presenting his daughter, Noelle, as his wife.
Life was now comfortable for him, living off his ill-gotten wealth under an assumed identity. But when Ron Platt returned to England in 1995, Walker had yet another problem, and he knew there couldn't be two Ronald Platts running around. So when Platt reached out to Walker for help getting back on his feet financially, Walker invited Platt on a fishing trip on the English Channel between England and France and murdered him, throwing his body overboard with the anchor, assuming he'd never be found, or at least never identified.
the investigators still wanted to develop more evidence against Walker. Now, reminder, Walker is David Davis, who goes on to be Ronald Platt, but his real name, Walker.
They wanted their case to be absolutely airtight. And as they continued sorting the items they took from the yacht, they came across a handheld electronic device they didn't recognize. It was a handset with the letters GPS on it. That's because it was a GPS. But in 1996, not a lot of people knew what a GPS was.
And once they figured it out, they contacted the manufacturer who helped them collect information from that specific GPS system so they could track where it had been and when. And what they learned was that the GPS had been on the water near where Platt's body was recovered on July 20th, the day he died.
This proved that the yacht had been on the water with Platt on board around the time Platt died and entered the water, but it still didn't prove that Albert Walker was on that yacht at the time. Investigators hoped that Walker's daughter, Sheena, who herself was facing charges for identity theft, would be able to assist them in coloring in the last few lines of the case. And when Sheena learned that her father was suspected of murdering Ron Platt, she
She opened up to investigators and also agreed to testify against him. I mean, as a father, Walker was abusive and manipulative. I mean, he had kidnapped her. She was terrified of him.
When they asked her who had fathered the two children the neighbors assumed were theirs, Sheena hung her head down and refused to answer the question. Which tells me that her father's relationship with her was an incestuous one, and that Walker was a monster in every imaginable way. Financial fraud, identity theft, murder, and incest.
Which brings me back to the Al Capone theory that I talked about in episode one of Binged, whose basic principle is that if someone isn't moral in one way, it means they're probably evil in some other ways too.
Sheena went on to reveal that across all the time that she and her father lived together, she was with him all the time. He never let her out of his sight except once when he went sailing on his yacht. And when he got home that night, she said he was, in her words, disheveled and agitated. And the date on which this occurred was July 20th, 1996, which now gave police everything they needed to charge Walker with premeditated murder.
In June 1998, nearly two years after Ronald Platt's body was caught in that fishing net, Walker pleaded not guilty. And while he was under remand, Walker proved he was a consummate con man by selling his Lady Jane yacht to another inmate for $4,000, despite that yacht being securely stored at police headquarters.
Ultimately, Walker was found guilty of Ronald Joseph Platt's murder and the judge handed down a life sentence. He was eventually allowed in 2005 to relocate to a prison in Canada to be closer to his family, the one he had deserted. But then he was charged with the financial crimes he'd committed in that country and had more time added to his life sentence. In the end, Albert Johnson Walker, aka David Davis, aka Ronald Platt,
almost got away with the murder of Ronald Platt. If only he hadn't made the one critical error of failing to remove Platt's Rolex watch, it's likely he would never have been identified, his death never recognized as a murder, and the trail never would have led investigators on the long, winding path to Albert Walker Johnson.
I keep saying things like this story is absolutely insane every time I cover a case like this to the point where I'm afraid I'm going to wear out that sentiment. But really, this story is absolutely insane. Cases like these are all bonkers in completely different ways. The case of Albert Johnson Walker reads like a novel, almost like a Patricia Highsmith thriller, like Strangers on a Train or The Talented Mr. Ripley.
In fact, there's nearly a dozen books, plays, documentaries, and movies about Walker, such as the 2002 TV movie, AKA Albert Walker, and the books, A Hand in the Water and Nothing Sacred, which was used as a reference for today's episode.
And that concludes this week's episode. Join us next week as we shift our focus from the deep sea to the shallow waters of the Santa Clara River in Southern California. Our new theme for next week will be manslaughter. Can you guess what story we'll be covering? Tune in to find out. Later, Gators!
