Sea of lies

Ian Clenahan was 29 and just one week into his new post as a detective in southwest England when he was thrust into the case that would define his professional life.

Like his colleagues in the Devon & Cornwall Police, he was hardly prepared for uncovering Canada's most wanted man in a sleepy English town.

Still, Clenahan had a feeling it would be the "pinnacle” of his career.

And, he says now, decades later, "it was, by the way."

Clenahan’s boss, Det. Sgt. Bill MacDonald, says detectives and investigators around the world would dream of an investigation like this one.

“And it fell to us. We nearly got it so wrong on a number of occasions.”

By that, he means that Albert Walker very nearly got away with it all. 

How a middle-aged Canadian financier found his place on Interpol's most-wanted list is a tale these small-town officers painstakingly pieced together. As all good con artists do, Walker wove a web of lies so broad that unpicking it felt nigh impossible at times.

Following a series of devastating financial crimes, Walker fled Canada in 1990 and spent five years evading capture in the United Kingdom, slipping unnoticed from one place to the next. The investigation ran into a series of dead ends, but every time, something extraordinary seemed to guide the detectives forward.

“I think I used all my luck up in one inquiry,” Clenahan said. “When you think about it logically, how we've got from there to there is unbelievable.”

The rise and fall of Walker is examined in the podcast Sea of Lies, hosted by Sam Mullins. The series, from CBC Podcasts' Uncover, launches on Jan. 27 and travels from rural Canada to quaint English villages, taking listeners inside the world of one of Canada’s most notorious fraudsters and telling the nail-biting story of his unravelling.

And it all began with a shocking discovery in the middle of the English Channel. 

I. Knock knock

It was an idyllic summer's day in 1996 — bright sunshine and a sea so calm it mirrored the sky. 

Craig Copik was working alongside his father, John Copik, off the English seaside town of Brixham when they ventured out to the Roughs, a notoriously perilous stretch of water avoided by most fishermen. 

But John's decades of experience gave him an intimate knowledge of these waters. He was certain the reward would be worth the risk. 

When Craig dropped their final catch onto the slippery deck, he could smell the human body before he could see it.

“I think something instinctively inside of us knows when you're in that situation.”

The corpse of a middle-aged man lay perfectly preserved within their net.

The likelihood of finding a body out at sea was not lost on him.

“It's an absolute million-to-one shot. There's a million square miles of ocean out there."

Yet this was just the first in a string of unbelievable events in the ultimate undoing of Walker.

As coast guard officer Paul Aggatt stepped onto the Copiks’ deck, he immediately knew something wasn’t right. The man's pockets were inside out and he had an open wound on the back of his head.

“We didn't do anything more because now we're looking at a crime scene,” said Aggatt. 

When police arrived, the Copiks came under fire. John rebuffed accusations they’d robbed the body.

“If we were going to take his wallet, we'd probably have his Rolex watch as well." 

The accusing officer picked up the limp arm of the body and the kinetic watch started to tick. The time on the watch face was 11:35, July 22 — six days before. The well-preserved condition of the body suddenly made sense, but little else did.

An autopsy revealed the cause of the man’s death as drowning. But there were no obvious signs of an altercation aside from a head wound, and officers remained baffled for weeks over who this person was and how he ended up in the middle of the channel.

“It's unusual if we don't identify them. We were fairly close to just saying: ‘Well, we can't,’” said MacDonald.

Except they didn’t because something prevented this case from hitting a dead end.

The answers, they discovered, lay ticking on the dead man's wrist. 

Following a coroner’s casual suggestion that Rolex keeps records of ownership, and thanks to the service history of the dead man’s watch, officers were provided with a name: Ronald Platt.

Platt, they would soon learn, was an introverted character who moved through life unnoticed by most.  

A termination notice to a local council tax department from an old address in Essex, northeast of London, provided a clue as to what might have happened.

“I'm no longer liable for property tax. I'm moving to France,” Platt had written to the department.

It was a fact confirmed by the only person detectives could find at that point who knew him — a previous guarantor called David Davis whom they interviewed in Essex.

At this stage, detectives had found no explanation for Platt’s death other than the story Davis told. A story that in two years would be used as evidence of a proven lie.

Davis was an American businessman. 

“He was a really good friend of his. They first met up in Harrogate, the northern town where the Rolex was last serviced. And then they'd both wound up living near each other in Essex some years later,” said Clenahan.

Davis said Platt had indeed left for France and he’d helped him financially. Other than that, no lead for what happened to Platt was forthcoming.

Through Davis, police tracked down Platt’s brother, but they rarely spoke and the only suggestion Brian Platt could offer was that Ron suffered with his mental health. There was no suspicion of foul play.

“We'd done all we could have done. I don't think we thought we would ever find out what happened,” said MacDonald.

Their final task was to retrieve some of Ron’s possessions for Brian from his good friend, Davis. But police had lost Davis’s phone number, so local Essex Police officer Peter Redman headed to Davis’s address to complete the job.

By chance, he knocked on the wrong door.

The neighbours who answered had never heard the name David Davis and one said: “Oh no, Ron Platt lives next door.”

Redman remembered the neighbour’s words verbatim: “There was Ron and he's got a much younger wife. They'd lived there for about a year.”

And one last thing: “They had a boat, that they were sailors and that they often went down to the West Country.”

What Redman had unwittingly unearthed was a case he’d never forget. A case that had just been blown wide open. 

II. The box

It was a quiet winter night in 2024 in the town of Orangeville, Ont., northwest of Toronto, when Andy Staley welcomed podcast host Sam Mullins into his home to show him something.

Surrounded by piles of paper, he sat down, opened a bottle of red and sighed, steeling himself to relive it all.

“How much do you want me to tell you?” he asked.

Mullins was there for something valuable: a box. 

The papers in the box held every detail of what Walker did to Staley’s family decades before.

“You say you hate your boss, you say you hate whoever, and I say ‘No,’” Staley said. “I know what it feels like to truly hate somebody, right?”

An affidavit written by Staley’s father, Bob Staley, marked the first chapter of Walker’s crimes.

He and his wife, Betty, first met a 23-year-old Walker at Knox United Church in Ayr, Ont., west of Hamilton, in 1968. Walker had joined the choir after recently marrying a local woman, Barb McDonald.

Over time, the couples became best friends. Andy Staley would even babysit Walker’s two youngest children, Jill and Sheena. When Bob and Betty moved away in 1978, it was Walker who kept in touch.

In Barb Walker’s self-published memoir, Dancing Devil: My Twenty Years with Albert Walker, she recounts asking her husband why he went out of his way to stay close to them.  

“Because one day they will have money,” he replied.

Years later, Walker would ruin their lives.

The story of what transpired was reconstructed through the contents of the box and Barb Walker’s book — the most detailed account we could find of the young Albert Walker.

A high school dropout from Hamilton, he worked a series of menial jobs, yet consistently spoke of himself with unwavering confidence.

Barb had a knack for numbers and started doing taxes for a handful of wealthy locals. Walker spotted an opportunity.

Walker Financial Services was incorporated in Ontario in 1978 and marketed as a one-stop financial shop. “Investments, bookkeeping, all of it and more,” read a brochure.  

When the Staleys inherited 80 hectares of undeveloped land in the Vandorf area, north of Toronto, Walker was nearly 10 years and six branches into a seemingly successful business.

“Why not trust him with the sale of the land?” Andy Staley recalls his mother saying.

What she didn’t know was that Walker Financial was a con.

It was a simple premise. Walker would invest clients' cash in Walker Guaranteed Investment Certificates, with promises of 15 per cent returns annually. If investors kept receiving their 15 per cent, Walker's reputation remained intact and investors kept investing.

Their money fuelled his high-flying lifestyle of sports cars, luxury vacations and Michelin star meals, as revealed in Barb’s memoir and Alain Cairns's book, Nothing Sacred: The Many Lives And Betrayals of Albert Walker.

So when Walker,  with no previous real estate experience, achieved an eye-watering $10-million sale of their inheritance, Betty Staley and her brother, Bill Richardson, felt he was the sure-fire man to invest with.

“He's just the magic money man. He turns water into wine,” said Andy Staley.

The cash injection from the investment by the Staleys in 1989 came just in time to buy Walker breathing room. His plan had hit a roadblock two years before — the 1987 economic crash — and he’d been treading water ever since.

Walker worked out he had until early 1991 before it would all come crashing down. That’s when remaining promissory notes matured. That’s when he needed to get out.

Barb’s book describes how while Walker Financial was crumbling, his marriage was in a similar state of disarray. A bitter divorce and custody battle ensued, splitting the four children between their parents. Walker was arrested and fingerprinted for crossing the threshold of the now-restricted family home.

As Walker’s own board members and Barb pushed increasingly for financial transparency from him, Bob and Betty Staley were growing evermore fearful, fuelled by his refusal to meet.  

Eventually he gave them a date: Dec. 5, 1990. But he never showed.

According to Bill Schiller’s book, A Hand in the Water: The Many Lies of Albert Walker, at the time of the intended meeting, Walker was airborne, on his way to a new life. 

Walker fled Canada amid allegations he had embezzled roughly $3.2 million from about 70 clients. He also took something else of significant value. Alongside him on a flight to London, England, sat his 15-year-old daughter, Sheena.

It wasn’t until Jan. 15, 1991, a day Andy Staley calls “the day of reckoning,” that he understood the true impact on his family.

Bob Staley suffered a life-threatening mental breakdown. 

“It ruined him,” his son said.

Betty Staley began collating evidence in the desperate hope that one day Walker would be found and held to justice.

The anger stayed with Andy Staley.  

“I wanted vengeance. I wanted blood and lots of it.”

III. The woman who knew both Ronald Platts

In the U.K., Walker’s next victim was unknowingly about to be targeted.    

It’s clear that Elaine Boyes still finds talking about Walker uncomfortable, more than 30 years on. Stumbling over her words, she takes a deep breath and begins.

When he walked into her life under a different name, she was a 31-year-old receptionist at a fine art auctioneers in Harrogate, in northern England.

At the time, she was in a long-term relationship with Ronald Platt, an older man.

Boyes was outgoing, chatty, career-driven, whereas Platt was a man of few words, and few friends for that matter.

Their differences seemed to complement each other perfectly.

“They just really seemed to be meant for each other at that time somehow,” said Boyes’s friend, Chris Idle.

They built a life together in Boyes’s hometown of Harrogate, but had grand plans to one day move to Canada, a place Platt idealized, having lived there during his childhood.

Everything changed when Walker, who presented himself as a well-dressed American called David Davis, walked into the fine art auctioneers where Boyes worked, inquiring about a painting. His charisma was palpable and she found herself enthralled in conversation.

He said he was moving to Harrogate and intended to set up a business.

“He said: ‘I like you. I really could do with somebody like you working for me,’” Boyes said.

The proposition came out of the blue, and as the conversation continued, it was clear his area of interest wasn’t so much about the business as it was about Boyes.

“It was just like he wanted me, he wanted to do a business that I would be happy doing. You know, if I'd have said: ‘Let's do a sweet shop,’ I bet you he would have done that.”  

Even their plans to move to Canada didn’t deter him.

Boyes remembers him saying: “It would be great because you could save up. I could pay you more than you're earning a year and you can then save up to go to Canada.”

Many weeks later, her skepticism about this stranger's offer was quashed when Platt met Davis and was reassured by his confidence, professionalism and charm.

It was this confidence that kept Boyes in Davis’s grip for so long.

Shortly thereafter, Boyes was living the life, on double her previous salary. 

Inspired by her own love of photography, her job was unusual. All she had to do was photograph fountains in Geneva for a coffee-table book and scout potential properties in France for Davis’s real estate portfolio.

Soon enough, she and Platt became close to Davis and his quiet teenage daughter, Noelle.

But then it got complicated.

“Can't believe I'm saying all this, to be honest,”  Boyes said, shifting awkwardly in her seat.

She was then tasked with depositing large sums of cash in accounts in Geneva, believing it to be legitimate. And there was more.

Davis ensured that Boyes and Platt were entwined in his affairs. Within a year, he’d made them both directors of a new company, Cavendish Corporations, helped finance an apartment purchase and set Platt up with his own TV repair business — something he never asked for. 

But by February 1993, they’d shut up shop. Davis had bought Platt and Boyes one-way tickets to Canada for Christmas to make Platt’s dream a reality. Davis assured them he would tie up the loose ends of the business and sell the apartment.

Yet after just six months, Boyes moved back to Harrogate, alone. Finding employment in Canada had been difficult in the economic recession and their relationship suffered. The dream was over and so, too, was their romance.

Davis tried vehemently to persuade Boyes to return, to no avail. And then he was gone. He told her he was moving to Scotland and then onto France with Noelle.

Suddenly Boyes was alone. “I'm thinking, is this really what's happened to me?”

Three years later, she was working in a coffee shop in Harrogate when she heard Platt had been found dead. Her first thought, she said, was suicide.

But then, when speaking to Bill MacDonald of the Devon & Cornwall Police, something worrying came to light.

MacDonald mentioned they’d spoken to Davis about Platt’s death six weeks before.

Boyes remembers MacDonald saying: “I'm getting really bad vibes from you."

At that point, she told MacDonald: "Well, I spoke to this man, David Davis, two to three weeks ago. And in that conversation, he explained that Ron had gone to France."

Sometimes, Boyes said, "you've got to trust your gut instinct and my gut instinct said [Davis] was involved. In what shape or form, I didn't know, but he was involved and he was covering it up.”

A few weeks later, Davis telephoned Boyes and said he was in the area and would call in to see her. She said she was terrified. The police advised her to meet in public and play ignorant of any investigation.

“He explained … how he felt sorry, sad for Ron, and how he'd shed tears for him on the way up on the train. I didn't feel it was genuine tears.”

Her disclosure to police that Davis had expressed anxiety about them prompted them to act.

Concerned about his erratic movements from Essex to Harrogate, police knew they wanted to arrest him.

“We think there might be foul play,” Peter Redman said. So a decision was made. “We might as well go right from the top, arrest for murder, and then you can step back from that.”

The following morning, on Oct. 31, Redman was observing Davis’s home when he got in a taxi and sped off.

A car chase ensued and armed officers, assuming that an American might have a gun, pulled over the unsuspecting taxi driver outside Woodham Walter, where Davis lived.

As Redman arrested Davis for the murder of Ronald Platt, in his pockets were two IDs — those of David Davis and Ronald Platt.

Little did they know the man standing in handcuffs was neither of these people. 

IV. Under the radar

After the arrest, Redman headed back to Davis’s house with a team of officers. They needed to search the premises and arrest Noelle to find out whether she was involved.

“I was surprised how young she was,” Redman said of the moment she opened the door.

“Obviously she'd got a young baby with her and a toddler.”

For Boyes, who was asked about Noelle during her formal police interview later that day, the information that Noelle was a mother was astounding.

“You know when you say that expression, my chin just dropped to the floor? I just, I just was like, ‘What?’ How could she have children?” 

To Boyes, Noelle was Davis’s teenage daughter. And there was more: on paper, Noelle had been going by the name Elaine Boyes. 

“I couldn't believe it. I still can't believe it now,” Boyes said.

Back at the house, Noelle packed a bag for her children to go to a neighbour upon her arrest. 

“The police officer searched that bag before it was handed over to the neighbour and found cash and a number of gold bars,” said Brian Slade, a junior officer tasked with recording anything they found. 

With just 36 hours to hold Davis, police urgently needed evidence to charge him. 

The house search uncovered a number of leads; a photo of Davis posing with his boat, The Lady Jane, thousands of pounds in cash and gold bars. A search of Davis’s phone records confirmed he’d visited Devon in July.

Yet his trademark self-confidence prevailed at the station.

“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?’” said Clenahan.

And then they pressed “record.”

“He did what we would call a ‘no comment’ interview,” said MacDonald. 

Noelle was not quite so confident.

Confirming her American nationality and marriage to Davis, she said they had been on holiday in Devon in July, but had no knowledge of Platt being there.

“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,” said MacDonald.

It was clear she wasn’t involved in Platt’s death and her children needed her, so she was released on bail. All eyes were on Davis.

Boyes was anxious. 

She told the police: “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.”

As Davis was fingerprinted, he went silent.

“'Cause of course the game's nearly up then, isn't it?” said Clenahan.

Davis was charged with murder. Detectives could prove he’d lied about the last time he’d seen Platt and place his boat in Devon at the time of the killing.

It was a huge moment, but nothing compared to what was to come.

Weeks later, routine fingerprint checks came up with the goods. 

“They faxed us a poster of Interpol’s Top 20,” Clenahan said.

Bang in the centre of the page was a mugshot of David Davis with an international arrest warrant.

“And he was like fourth on the list,” Clenahan said.

But he was called Albert Walker.

“And we're like, oh my God, you know, in sleepy Devon, there he is, surfaced, and you know, we've got him,” Clenahan said.

MacDonald stood at the fax machine in the police station in disbelief. 

“And then off the fax machine next is this picture of Noelle.  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.” 

In covering this story, the nature of the relationship between Albert and Sheena Walker was something those involved in the podcast were reluctant to discuss.

What led the young woman to this point no one could ever fully know. But the identities she and her father assumed six years earlier were the first chapter of the story. 

By the time they arrived in Harrogate in 1991, Walker had fully prepared a new life with his daughter.

He’d stolen his old client David Davis’s driver's licence and left a false trail through London, Geneva and even Paris, before heading 320 kilometres north of London.

“He was good. I mean, honestly, he just was,” said Rev. David Hoskins, who led the Harrogate Baptist Church, where Albert and Sheena attended every Sunday. 

It was the first of multiple identities.

Walker presented himself as an American banker wanting to settle there with his daughter. 

“He was keen on telling people that he'd done extremely well,” said Hoskins. 

With Elaine Boyes and Ron Platt caught in the whirlwind of Cavendish Corporations, the company they had become directors of, their signatures provided Albert and Sheena with permanent new identities. Something which proved invaluable when, at Christmas 1992, Sheena fell pregnant. 

By shipping Elaine and Ron off to Canada, Walker and his pregnant teenage daughter could move on, no questions asked. Their transition from father and daughter to husband and wife could begin.

From there, their next identities were formed.

By the time Boyes returned from Canada in mid-1993, David Davis had become Ronald Platt. 

He and Sheena, now Noelle Platt, were living as a family more than 480 kilometres south, in Devon.

With the age gap likely to garner attention, they invested in disguises.

Sheena went from brunette to blond, and Albert dyed his white hair darker. 

“He wanted me to put, obviously, a dark colour on his hair,” said Paula Winsor-Williams, Walker’s hairdresser in 1994.

During their time in Devon, Sheena had a baby daughter, Walker bought a sailboat and developed an intriguing professional interest: psychology and counselling. 

By 1995 he was back in business — an investment in a therapy company had taken him to Essex, where he, Sheena, their toddler and a new baby set up home in Woodham Walter. Life was good for Walker.

Until it wasn’t. 

Platt had written — he was coming back to England from Canada. 

V. Finding her voice

Today, Sheena Walker is impossible to trace. And that’s quite remarkable considering her role in her father’s downfall.

Brian Slade, the officer from Devon & Cornwall Police who searched Walker’s house in Essex, was responsible for managing the relationship with Sheena after Walker’s arrest.

“She didn't want to engage with me at all. Not even one-word answers. But she was extremely distrustful of the police.”

Sheena was released on bail.

“I had a strong feeling that she wasn't, she wasn't involved in the murder,” said MacDonald.

Her testimony would be vital. Having returned to Canada with her mother, however, Sheena had no obligation to return to the U.K.  

For months, Slade checked on her, calling regularly, building trust. It was a slow process.

“Her father had indoctrinated her mind in order to push her further away from her mother. Which clearly worked,” said Slade.

But then, Sheena received a phone call from someone else.

Walker phoned from prison, asking her to change her statement. Effectively to lie, saying she knew that Ronald Platt was in Devon in July.

In disclosing this information to Slade, something had shifted within Sheena. By signing a new statement exposing her father’s request, she was siding with the prosecution.  

“It was clear that the power that he did have over her had gone,” said Slade.

With the trial of Walker for the first-degree murder of Platt approaching, the prosecution needed Sheena to testify. She hesitantly agreed, but making that a reality lay on the shoulders of Slade.

Media coverage on both sides of the Atlantic was enormous and Sheena asked not to be photographed. 

So pivotal was she to the case that the Devon & Cornwall Police took an unusual step, flying her back secretly from Canada on an RAF Nimrod, a maritime patrol aircraft.

Slade recalled “Sheena being in the back of the car in tears, because she was so stressed about what was happening. She wanted to come over and do the right thing.”

And she did.

On June 22, 1998, Sheena Walker stood in Exeter Crown Court and testified against the man who had controlled her life for far too long.

“Albert Walker's eyes were fixed on his daughter throughout her testimony, but the young woman who once masqueraded as her father's wife never even looked in his direction,” a news report from the trial read.

Clenahan watched on with pride.

“I think she'd seen the light, hadn't she? She'd been under his spell for so many years.” 

The prosecution laid out its case, a hypothesis built on two years of painstaking work by the Devon & Cornwall Police and a series of lucky breaks.

For weeks, Walker had kept Platt on the coast of Devon at various accommodations in the belief that the pair would be moving to France together.

On the night of July 20, 1996, he took Platt out to sea, hit him over the back of the head with an anchor, looped it through his belt and threw him overboard, where Platt, a non-swimmer, would eventually drown.

When it came to proving a motive, it fell to the other woman Walker had so badly underestimated.

As Boyes waited to testify, she caught Walker’s eye.

“And I actually think: ‘I'm going to beat you. I'm going to beat you, mate,’” Boyes said. “And I tried to stare him out.”

She was the nail in his coffin.

“She was able to speak for Ron, who couldn’t tell his own story,” said Clenahan.

After a tearful performance, Walker claimed he would never have hurt his best friend. But his charisma could no longer save him.

It took the jury just a few hours to find him guilty of murdering Platt.

MacDonald remembers it viscerally.

“There's just audible gasps all around the room. I mean, you can physically feel the intakes of breath.”

For Boyes, the nightmare was over.

“​​I remember looking at him and I thought he just looked like a lost little boy. So that was a good moment.”

Walker was sentenced to life imprisonment.

The verdict made headlines across the globe. Within the story lay the unquestionable irony that it was the strength of the two women Walker had manipulated, coerced and undervalued the most that ultimately made him pay for his crimes. 

It was justice for Platt and Walker’s Canadian victims.

In 2005, Walker was transferred to the Canadian prison system to serve the rest of his sentence, where in 2007 he was sentenced to four years for 19 fraud-related crimes and one year for violating the Bankruptcy Act.

When we began researching this series in 2023, we learned that he was granted day parole in August of that year. 

He denied a request for an interview. 

Months later, his day parole was revoked.

The report from the Parole Board of Canada states: “Of great concern to the board is that you continue to misrepresent your criminal behaviour.” 

The board said Walker lied to others about his crimes in Canada by lessening the seriousness of his fraud offences. He misrepresented what happened when Platt was murdered, saying that Platt attacked him first, and even asked others to call him David.  

Twenty-six years in prison wasn’t enough time for Walker to take accountability for his actions.

His manipulation of the truth continues. At 79, he remains behind bars.

Top image: Good Tape Studio | Editing: Janet Davison