Ronald Platt, left, and Albert Walker, right (Image: SWNS)
The prized luxury watch was the sole initial clue that unravelled the mysterious death of ex-soldier Ronald Platt. His
body was discovered entangled in a trawler net near Teignmouth, Devon, on July 28, 1996.
The 25 year old Rolex Oyster, still clasped to his wrist with its stainless steel strap, had been submerged for over a week. However, when detectives were at their wits’ end, a simple shake of the watch in the mortuary breathed life into its self-winding mechanism.
This breakthrough allowed police to piece together a ‘timeline’ and pinpoint Mr Platt’s identity using the watch’s serial number. The clues from the Rolex eventually steered the authorities towards Canadian businessman Albert White as Mr Platt’s murderer.
White received a life sentence at Exeter Crown Court in 1998 and remains incarcerated in Canada. Yet, the whereabouts of the Rolex remained an enigma, with no reports of its location until now.
A Freedom of Information request directed at Devon and Cornwall Police has disclosed that the watch was actually retrieved by Mr Platt’s relatives in 2002.
In their FOI response, the police stated: “The major crime investigation team have provided the following information. The watch was returned to a family member in July 2002 and signed for by that individual.”
Ronald Platt wearing the Rolex that helped solve his murder (Image: SWNS)
The current location of the item remains a mystery, even after over two decades.
Walker had initially fooled the police by giving them a false name, David Davies, and claiming to be American.
However, his double life was exposed when officers visited his Essex home for a written statement and accidentally knocked on the neighbour’s door. The neighbour revealed: “Our neighbour is called Walker”, which raised suspicions among the detectives.
Walker, then aged 52, was later convicted of murdering Platt, his friend and business partner, whose identity he had also stolen as part of an elaborate scheme to maintain his double life. During sentencing, the judge described the murder as “a callous, premeditated killing designed to eliminate a man you had used for your own selfish ends.”
He added that the crime had been “planned and cunningly executed with chilling efficiency”.
In 1990, Walker had fled to Yorkshire from his native Canada with his 15-year-old daughter after defrauding over 70 clients of more than three million Canadian dollars. To evade arrest, he assumed the false identity of David Davis, concocting a backstory of being an English businessman living with his wife, who was in fact his daughter.
Elaine Boyes, whose partner Ronald Platt was murdered. (Image: SWNS)
He then entered into a business partnership with Mr Platt and borrowed personal documents such as his passport and driving licence under the guise of ‘business purposes. ‘ When Platt expressed a desire to return to Canada, Walker lent him money in 1992 and subsequently stole Platt’s identity using these documents.
Three years on, Mr Platt ran out of cash and returned to England. Walker, who had assumed Platt’s identity, felt his fraudulent life was under threat.
In 1996, he lured Platt onto his 24ft yacht, the Lady Jane, for a fishing trip, where he delivered a fatal blow to Platt’s head and dumped his body at sea, weighed down by a 10lb anchor.
Platt’s decomposed body was discovered weeks later, but the Rolex on his wrist remained in pristine condition. The watch not only led back to Platt as the original purchaser through Rolex’s meticulous records but also pinpointed the time of the murder.
At the time of his capture, Walker was Interpol’s fourth most wanted man and Canada’s top fugitive.
The anchor, purchased with Walker’s Barclaycard, became another crucial piece of evidence.
Canadian con-man Albert Walker, who was known to Elaine Wright and Ronald Platt as David Davis. (Image: SWNS)
Det Supt Phil Sincock, who led the murder investigation, previously said: “There was one bit of luck in terms of the Essex policeman going to the wrong door, but other than that it was down to painstaking police work and some new ground-breaking scientific inquiries.
“We seized a whole van load of documentation from Walker’s house and among it all was a two-inch square sales receipt which showed that he had purchased, on a Barclaycard, an anchor.
“We proved that his yacht was at sea at the material time. For the first time in any case, we took the yacht’s GPS navigation system back to its manufacturers and they were able to plot co-ordinates which gave us the time and date it had been switched off and proved it had been very near to where Mr Platt’s body had been found.
“Tests on the Rolex watch established it would have taken 44 hours to wind down. The watch stopped on June 22, which meant that he had died on June 20.
“From the GPS we could put Walker’s boat in the area on June 20.”
Now aged 78, Walker was transferred to a prison in Canada in 2005 and has not yet been granted parole.