Front Burner - Weekend Listen: The twisted true story of a man who couldn’t stop lying

Episode Date: February 1, 2025

A body is pulled from the ocean, and a race against time to capture one of the world's most wanted criminals begins.Uncover: Sea of LIes is the story of a con man who couldn't stop lying. A tale of murder, stolen identities, fine art, a diaper bag stuffed with gold bars, and a crime solved by a Rolex watch. From rural Canada to coastal England, he lied and deceived at every turn.Award-winning podcaster Sam Mullins (Chameleon: Dr. Dante & Wild Boys) takes you inside the world of a devious scammer whose trail of destruction crosses continents and decades. So who is he? And how did this ruthless villain finally get unmasked? More episodes of Sea of Lies from Uncover are available at: https://link.mgln.ai/kP7LAY

What does a mummified Egyptian child, the Parthenon marbles of Greece and an Irish giant all have in common? They are all stuff the British stole. Maybe. Join me, Mark Fennell, as I travel around the globe uncovering the shocking stories of how some, let's call them ill-gotten, artifacts made it to faraway institutions. Spoiler, it was probably the British. Don't miss a brand new season of Stuff the British Style. Watch it free on CBC Gem. This is a CBC Podcast. Hey everybody, Jamie here. We have a special bonus episode for you today from the brand new season of Uncover. It is called Sea of Lies. A body is pulled from the ocean and a race against time

to capture one of the world's most wanted criminals begins. This is a story of a con man who couldn't stop lying. A story of murder, stolen identities, fine art, a diaper bag stuffed with gold bars and a crime solved by a Rolex watch. From rural Canada to coastal England, he lied and deceived at every turn. Award-winning podcaster Sam Mullins takes you inside the mind of a devious scammer whose trail of destruction crosses continents and decades. So who is he? And how did this ruthless villain finally get unmasked? Now here is the first episode of Sea of Lies. Have a listen.

This story begins with a miracle. I don't know what else to call it. And when I say miracle, I don't mean it in the religious sense. At least I don't think I do. I mean it in the religious sense. At least, I don't think I do. I mean it in the sense of luck. Luck is a spectrum. There are lucky breaks, flukes, good fortune, but then there's a tier of luck that is so

far beyond the parameters of chance that it feels divine. And while the story that I'm about to tell you features the whole spectrum of luck, coincidences, right places, wrong times, million to one shots connecting, there's no story at all. No truth, no justice without the thing that happens first. The thing so far beyond the brackets of likelihood. It was a miracle. Because a father and son who weren't even looking accidentally found something. Someone who was never supposed to be found. We begin July 28th, 1996, in the holiday town of Brixton in Devon, England, where a college kid happy to be home for the summer was looking forward to two straight months of sleeping in. So, I was back home from university in London, hoping to spend some time at the beach or

relaxing at home, but my father had different ideas. Craig Coppock was the son of a fisherman, a line of work that Craig knew to be fundamentally incompatible with the sleepy goals of a university kid. So whatever dreams he had for that summer were quickly dashed by a pronouncement from his dad. His deckhand was on holiday, so he told me that I'd be assisting him on board the boat. Craig had been helping his father on the trawler since he was 11, so he knew all too well what assisting dad on the boat would look like.

We used to leave at around 4.30, 5 o'clock in the morning. We'd stop, pick up some newspapers, head down to the boat, and then we'd be out fishing all day until dark. Day started off beautifully. Very sunny day, very little wind. Those perfect days on the water, you can see your reflection in the sea. The kind of days that make you glad you're working on a boat, as opposed to the horrible ones where weather is absolutely terrible and you're questioning your life decisions. Craig and his dad headed out on their 10- meter rig, the Malkyrie, to trawl for cod a few miles offshore.

And after the first few hours, it was shaping up to be an underwhelming day of fishing. It's fair to say on the first two toes, we weren't catching enough fish to cover expenses. But John Coppock was as experienced a fisherman as you could find in all of England. His body seemed like it was designed by God to wrestle slippery things on unstable decks. He was solid in stature and sharp of mind from countless years of reading between trawls. And he had a hunch on where they'd find their big catch for the day,

a notorious area known to the local fishermen as the Ruffs. Other fishing boats tended to avoid it due to the nature of the seabed, which is rocky and treacherous for nets. Craig's dad was unafraid of the Ruffs because he'd modified his nets specifically to traverse the big rocks that the other fishermen were wary of. After a couple of hours in the roughs, they started to bring up the net to see if their third toe would be different. And as the seagulls began circling, they could tell right away that this was the catch they were after. But then, their fortunes turned. We brought the net up from the bottom, which involves bringing the codend on board.

The codend is the very end of the net where all the fish accumulate. Then there's a rope to open it up and that will drop all the fish on the deck. But as soon as we got the codend up in the air to bring it over the rail of the fishing boat, you could immediately smell something was dead. I'd had the occasional dead seal in the fishing net, but this didn't smell like that. I'd never seen or smelled a dead body, but I think something instinctively inside of us knows when you're in that situation. nose when you're in that situation.

I opened up the codend, dropped the catch onto the deck, and immediately you could see the figure of a man lying on the deck in between the fish that we'd caught. Father and son stared at the body in disbelief. The body was barely touched. Usually when anything dies in the ocean, it ends up on the seabed and then crabs and lobsters and little sharks and fish will be eating it. The man on their deck was fully dressed, wearing a button up shirt, trousers with a belt and laced up shoes. His skin had a grayish hue and appeared almost like latex.

And honestly, it just looked like a really bad prop from a horror movie. So much so that it was unbelievable. The coppics approached slowly for a closer look when they noticed two key details. The body had a tattoo on its hand. It was really difficult to tell what the tattoo was. And we noticed quite soon that the guy was wearing a Rolex watch. To young Craig, there was a body on the deck, and with it a mystery. But to his father, a much more experienced seafarer, all he could see upon the deck was the dilemma now before him. The right thing to do would be for him to go into the cabin and radio the coast guard about this. But the right thing in this case, as it often is, would not be the financially savvy thing to do.

AC My father knew that immediately the catch would have to be condemned, so all the fish that had been caught with the body would have to be condemned. So all the fish that had been caught with the body would have to just be kicked over the side dead. By condemning the catch, we were condemning ourselves to going home without a paycheck for that day. And beyond today, Craig's dad knew there could be a second, even bigger financial hit coming down the road from this. There was an urban legend among the fishermen community that they believed to be true. In the UK, if you find a dead body and no relations can be found, then after 13 weeks, you become liable for the burial or disposal of that body, the person who found them has

to deal with the funeral arrangements cost. So before they did anything, father and son would need to have a sober talk about their options. In the privacy of the open sea, it was obvious. No one needed to know about this. This could easily be kept between them and the gulls. The more they thought about it, the lost money, the lost day, the hassle of

inviting cops on board and giving legal statements, it didn't seem worth it to get involved. Even though it felt wrong. This didn't need to be their problem. But then myself and my dad had a discussion. My dad felt strongly that if one of us had gone missing at sea, then my mother would definitely prefer to know we were dead than always be wondering what happened, etc. So we came to that conclusion that the right thing to do would be to report this so that the dead persons, loved ones could get some sort of closure. Coppock made contact with the Coast Guard over the VHF radio and Central Command paged one of their most experienced men.

My name is Paul Agate. I'm an ex-fisherman and I joined the Coast Guard in 1983. Agate was told that the Coppix had a body on their deck, so he headed out on a small Coast Guard seerider to meet them. And as he crested toward them, he felt confident that he knew the identity of the man upon their deck. He'd been expecting this call. Now we were actually looking for a body. We'd had an incident a couple of weeks before where a young lad had gone missing. It was all over the news. A couple local 20-year-olds found a pedal boat on the beach when they were stumbling

home from the pub and took it out into the bay. What they didn't know was that the pedal boat they found was broken, and what the surviving boy didn't know was that his friend never learned to swim. Two weeks of searching had yielded no trace of the kid, except for a single item. And we recovered a white trainer, which was identified by people ashore as it had been worn by the missing lad. So, Agate boarded the Coppock ship with a body bag, fully expecting to quickly zip inside

a single white-shoed lad. But of course, that wasn't to be when I got there and saw what I saw. As Coppock was steering the ship toward the harbor, on the shore, the police were setting up a perimeter on the customs pier. The authorities were hoping to tape off a relatively private part of the quay, where they could deal with the body out of view of the holiday makers and kids with ice cream cones. So there was quite a crowd on the quay side as we came alongside.

And then we just received instructions to wait for a certain police officer to come down to the boat. My name is Ian Klenahan. I was the original officer who was allocated the investigation initially when the body was brought to shore. Klenahan was a young cop from Liverpool, a scouser. And on the day he got his first call on what would turn out to be the biggest case he'd ever work, he was still in his twenties and had just been posted in Devon earlier that

week. It was one of my first jobs that I picked up. It came through that a body had been trawled up and could I go down to commence investigations into trying to find out who he was and the circumstances behind it? Klinehan, like the Coast Guard, was expecting this to be the body of the missing 20-year-old. But on the ride in, Paul Agate of the Coast Guard became certain of two things. One, this was not the body of the 20-year-old. And the second thing.

I saw the pockets were turned inside out. That didn't look right. It just didn't look right. And looking at him further, I noticed he had a very nasty wound in the back of his head. So now I've got a body that looks like it's been searched. It hadn't been the crew on board the boat because it was still in the net when I got on board. So this was obviously done before he went in the water. So we stopped everything. We didn't do anything more because now

we're looking at a crime scene. Once the boat was docked, Ian Clenahan and a couple of other Devon police officers climbed aboard to collect the body. When Agate, the Coast Guard, raised his hand. And I said, no, we don't need to move this guy. It's not the guy we're looking for. I said, something really weird here.

I think you better get a team down here and get on with it. As they waited for the team, Klenahan and the other two looked at the body for themselves. When one of the officers suddenly turned his attention to Craig Coppick and his dad. The pockets had obviously been turned out. So we asked myself and my father if we'd take in the guy's wallet. This was exactly what Craig and his dad didn't want, and partly why they had a moment of pause before they radioed the body in in the first place.

Police have that ability to make you feel guilty. Suddenly being questioned about grave robbing or stealing things from dead bodies. It wasn't much fun at all. Young Craig was sweating at the accusation, but luckily his dad was a bright man who could think on his feet. We said if we were going to take his wallet, we'd probably have his Rolex watch as well. Crisis averted. The accusing officer circled back to the body. He picked up the guy's arm, took the watch off his wrist and said, it's not a real Rolex because it's not working.

At which point it started to tick again because it was a kinetic watch. The time on its face read 11.35, the 22nd. Today was the 28th. And it's at this point when Craig opened his mouth in a slip of youthful confidence to offer what he thought was something helpful to say. The watch I was wearing on that day was engraved with my name and birthday on the back, which was given to me as a gift. I said, it might be worth checking the back of the watch for an engraving. The officer shot Craig a look. And he said, your problem is you've been watching too much effing Inspector Morse. It was more than dismissed.

He made me feel terrible, like watching too much fucking Inspector Morse. I was like, all right, I'm not going to say anything else. While Craig was embarrassing himself off to the side, Inspector Clenahan continued looking at the body. There was nothing that kind of smacked me in the face as being, this is suspicious. He had the watch on, so that would kind of rule out a robbery. There was a cut on his head. But when you consider what he's just been through, he's been dragged along the bottom

of a seabed, and he was fairly clean other than that. There was no signs of him being involved in an altercation. His shirt was tucked into his trousers. He was all neat. So you think, okay, well, I don't know what the cause of death is. So that will be ascertained in due course. After the police surgeon had taken his notes, the body was loaded into the coroner's van. And for the first time in many hours, it was just Craig and his dad on the boat again. But the moment was brief as they noticed a figure approaching. The local pastor or vicar came down to the boat, offered us some counseling. We suggested that if he gave us 20 pounds, we would go and self-counsel in the bullers'

arms, which was just across the road from the boat. But he wasn't keen on that course of action. So I just went for a pint with my dad, just to rehash what had happened. I think he was just checking I was OK. And then, yeah, we went home and told everything to Mother. Every night at 8 p.m., the bells of All Saints Church chime the tune to abide with me. The hymn was written right here in Brixham in the early 19th century by a vicar whose flock was comprised almost entirely of fishermen. The chimes are thought to call home all the souls of the men lost at sea.

Which is to say that Brixham and the Devon Coast is a place where finding the body of an unidentified man in the ocean is not necessarily a rare occurrence. It's a holiday town, so swimmers get into trouble, leisure boats capsize, fishermen get caught in storms, and Stone Throw Away is Berry Head, a sea cliff well known locally as a place where people go to take their own lives. With the body now safely in the hands of the coroner and Devon police, they don't know who they have and they don't know what they have. But lying in their mortuary was the key to unraveling a nearly perfect crime that spanned years and continents. An unimaginable web of lies was about to come undone. I'm Sam Mullins, and this is Sea of Lies, from CBC's Uncover.

Episode one, luck or something like it. ["Sea of Lies"] Since Detective Ian Clenahan was both young and new in town, he'd been partnered up with a veteran of Devon Police. I'm Bill MacDonald, Detective Sergeant in the Devon Cornwall Police, so I was a team leader effectively. Bill is measured with his words in a way that only someone with 30 years of interrogation experience could be.

We interviewed him in his purpose-built bird-watching space, where he patiently sits, confident the birds will come to him. We felt that in the next couple of days, there would be something that would get reported, which was an explanation. Sooner or later, somebody would get reported missing. Because obviously that would be a case as well if your husband, brother, son, whatever, never came home. J.D. WOGAN After two days passed without anything, McDonald

and Klenahan decided that it was time to take action. So if you were the two guys tasked with trying to learn the name of an idealist man plucked from the bottom of the ocean, where do you even begin? S.C. MCDONALD Well, old-fashioned detective work. So you start by going through all the missing persons listed in the Davenham Cornwall Police. Where do you even begin? Well, old-fashioned detective work. So you start by going through all the missing persons listed in the Davenham Cornwall Police, and you try and rule those out.

And then you go further afield, and you look at missing persons in the southwest. Then you go further afield and look at missing persons in the south. We were doing stuff within the media. This is the description of the guy. This is what he was wearing. We'd released a photograph of the tattoo.

Has anyone got any information that may help us identify the man? Obviously, within our police computer systems and databases, you can also search on tattoos. But no, we didn't get anything. So it was never going to be easy. We contacted ferries. We were talking to different shipping companies. To see whether there's any reports of any fishermen

been lost at sea. We got passenger manifests for different boats and stuff. Everything was coming to a dead end, really. I seem to recall there was a passenger reported missing from a cross-channel ferry. But over the coming days, sort of, actually, when you looked at the description, you looked at, you know, the person involved,

none of it matched. It's like looking for a needle in a haystack, isn't it? You're trying to find one name. You would think distinctive tattoo, circumstances, media coverage, press, something would come out somewhere, but it just didn't. It was just...

It was just unexplained. Lacking readily available information from out in the world, the Devon Police naturally were very interested to learn if the results of the post-mortem had a story to tell. An autopsy is looking at something which will give you more information and you're looking for clues. The pathologists listed the body as male, 5'9", brown hair, receding, possibly in his 40s. Estimated time in the water, one week. Both noted the tattoo on his hand, but either because it was old or it warped in the seawater, neither pathologists

could make out what the tattoo was of. There was bruising on the right hip and on the outside of the knee on the same side of the body, but it wasn't obvious when the bruising occurred. One thing that was obvious though. The cause of death was recorded as drowning because of sea water detected in the lungs. So clearly when the body entered the water, that person was breathing and they drowned. And that you would expect if somebody had fallen into the sea or if somebody was taking their own life or there was an accident at sea, drowning would be the natural cause.

And as for the gash on the back of the head, while the first pathologist thought it consistent with being trawled along the seabed and the ruffs, the other advised that it was inconclusive what had caused the gash and that they should keep an open mind. But really, there wasn't anything new to go on after the autopsy. And after devoting police resources for a few weeks, it felt like it was time to scale down the effort. If no one cared enough about whoever this poor soul was to come forward with new information, there was little more the cops could do. This was looking like it would be recorded forever as an unidentified person.

It's unusual if we don't identify them. There's not many that go unidentified. We were fairly close to just saying, well, we can't. So let's just like make arrangements for the body to be cremated and or buried or whatever they were going to do with it as an unknown person. And that would have been the end of it. But it wasn't. Because I'm telling you, luck or something like it was leading them somewhere.

The thing that saved this person from being forever unknown came in the form of a suggestion, really, from one of the staff members of the coroner. A casual suggestion that might sound familiar to you. Because one of the two men in the autopsy, Robin Little, had a chance conversation with a friend just afterwards. And he said, look, Rolex keep records and you might be able to identify this person by contacting Rolex. Oh, sure. It doesn't sound like such a bad idea when the coroner officer says it, but when the

son of a fisherman says something. Each Rolex watch has a, and we're talking obviously this fake and there's real Rolexes, but a real Rolex will have a serial number which is recorded by Rolex that's unique to that watch. No one who handled the watch saw the serial number at first because it's only visible when you take the pin out of the band to expose the side of the casing. So Robin Little sent the watch to Rolex and just over a week later, Rolex were able to tell us that yes, the watch had been serviced, it had a service history, and it had been serviced at a jeweler's called Fattorini's in Harrogate.

Curiously, Harrogate is about the opposite end of England from where the body was found. Devon is down in the southwest and Harrogate is way up in the central north. And sure enough, they had a record, a card in a filing system, which had the serial number of the Rolex watch and then underneath had a name. R.J. Platt. And the Platt was P-L-A-T. R.J. Platt. Of course, it doesn't mean to say that just because the watch has got a service history for a man called Platt, that the person wearing the watch is the person called Platt. But it certainly took us further forward than where we were at that particular time.

It was only seven letters, but R.J. Platt rolled off the tongue a lot better than the bloke from the sea. He had a name now. It was a start. Klinehan spent the week typing the name into every tool at his disposal, checking registries, council tax receipts, and state records. And he found an address linked to a Ron J. Platt in Essex. Geographically, Essex isn't near Devon either.

It's way on the Belgium Netherlands facing side of England. So they needed a man on the ground in Essex to head to this flat, and they found one. My name is Peter Redman. I was a detective sergeant for for Essex Police and I was stationed locally here at Chelmsford. My God, Redmond's voice is straight up ASMR. My first involvement was a phone call one evening. An inquiry had been sent from Devon and Cornwall to look into an address in Chelmsford, Beardsley Drive.

So Redmond headed out and when he arrived at the place, he was able to confirm that Platt had once lived in one of the flats there, but had moved out a while back. Redmond contacted the local tax department about the address and they told him that Platt had written on his termination notice, I'm no longer liable for property tax. I'm moving to France." Platt was moving to France? This detail would light up the imaginations of Clenahan McDonald when they heard it, because a move to France could conceivably place Ron Platt on a boat in the English Channel where his body was found.

But the most useful bit of information that Redmond was able to find in Chelmsford came when he spoke to Platt's old landlord. They did give me the name of his chap-du-guaranteur for him. When he applied to rent the place, Ron Platt needed to provide a reference. So he gave one. Mr. Davis. David Davis. In an investigation in which they had failed to find a single person involved in Ron's life who actually knew Ron, learning the name and mobile number of a character reference felt like gold. And since this Davis person lived nearby in Essex, Peter Redman was the one who called

him up. I spoke to him on the phone and strong North American accent. I didn't want to tell him that potentially he or friends are dead. I tried to say, could I meet him? I would go and meet him. And Davis obviously wanted to know what this was all regarding. So Redmond had to come out with it on the phone. When I told him that Ron was dead, I mean, he didn't, he wasn't hugely emotional,

but it was how I would have expected someone to be told that someone's dead, really. I've done a few death notifications in the past. Redmond said that if it was okay with him, he would like to ask Davis some questions about Ron in person. Davis said, sure. I'll come to the police station. It's a main appointment.

He came in, I got him, brought him through to my office, sat him down. We had quite a long chat. Very personable character, very distinguished looking, very smart, casually dressed, but you could tell by the shoes, the jeans, the jacket, very expensively dressed. And he explained that Ron had gone off to France. After their chat, Redmond told him that his colleagues who were the ones investigating Ron's death in Devon would be contacting him as well,

and they would be able to give him more information about the circumstances of their finding his friend. The first time Ian Clenahan called David Davis, there was no answer. But then, as so often happens in British police procedurals, there was a high-stakes scene involving tea. I was making a cup of tea, and I can always remember it, and the kettle was there next to a desk. My phone rings, and you've got one of those phones where you can star, star, zero to pick up a phone that's ringing, and it was was him and he started to talk to me. David Davis began telling Klenahan the story of how he and Ron Platt became friends.

I mean, you know, he was a mate. 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 both wound up living near each other in Essex some years later. As David Davis launched into the story, Klenahan, standing at the tea station, was unprepared to take notes. David Davis, Author, The Rolex Show So I grabbed a piece of paper that was nearby and I couldn't even find a pen. So I grabbed a piece of paper and a pencil and I started writing what he told me.

The mundane detail of writing utensil was more significant than Klenahan realized in the moment. He had no way of knowing that in two years' time this very note would become evidence. I can always remember exhibit IDC 7 was that piece of paper. Proof that the man he was talking to was intentionally misleading him. He said to me that Ron had left England to travel to France to start up a TV repair business in France. When Ron Platt first broke the surprising news about his move to France, David Davis said that he offered to help his friend out financially to make it happen.

And while an exchange of money just before someone dies of mysterious circumstances can be a red flag, it didn't sound like it in this case. He was a successful American businessman who had a lot of money and his mate Ron didn't have much at all. I mean, we weren't talking about a lot of money. I've got two and a half thousand pounds in my head, which is a nice sum of money, I suppose. But it's not a world-shattering, life-changing sum of money, but it's enough to get him over to France, maybe find some accommodation so that he can

then find some work to support himself. But ultimately, as to the question of what the hell happened to him, like everyone else, Davis had no idea what his friend would have been doing in Devon. Boarding a boat that would take him to France? That would make some sense. As they ended their chat on the phone, Klenahan asked if Davis could point them toward any other people who knew Ron. Davis said he'd never met Ron's family, but he knew that he had brothers.

And then notably, Davis told Klenahan that Ron had once served in the military, so maybe they could find his family that way. And sure enough, he had an army record and we were able to go to his army record and compare the dental charts. They matched. And by searching his service record, it confirmed the fact that they had a record of this tattoo. This confirmed that they didn't just have a Ronald Platt, but this Ronald Platt. So we're starting to get some real progress. Finally, with a little wind in their sails,

through the Army records, they were able to find a family member of Rons in Wales. So they grabbed their coats and were out the door to meet Brian, Ronald Platt's big brother. A brother lived in Haon Wai. He welcomed me into his studio. He was a cartoonist. They began by showing Brian a photo from the coroner's office, a zoomed in shot of the

hand tattoo. And Brian confirmed the tattoo. And that was actually because we all wondered what the tattoo was. It wasn't clear what it was. The best guess that anyone had at this point was that the tattoo was maybe of a star or a constellation. And he confirmed that actually the stars were in the shape actually of a Canadian maple leaf. And he talked about his brother having dual nationality and holding a Canadian passport and the fact that he loved Canada. And then the three men sat down for the tough part.

I explained obviously the circumstances. We had a difficult conversation. He was clearly obviously distressed and perplexed and concerned and had absolutely no idea why his brother would be in Brixham or on the south coast of Devon. In their conversation with Brian, MacDonald and Clenahan learned that Ronald Platt was the middle child with two brothers, that he'd spent his formative years growing up in Canada before coming home to the UK at 17 to join the Royal Air Force. Brian described his little brother as being quiet,

private, that Ron suffered from depression and dark moods, which pricked up the ears of both detectives. Are we talking about somebody who's taken their own life? Potentially this man, Platt, had some form of mental health worries. But even here, sitting with a member of his nuclear family, clear answers remained elusive. It turned out that the three Platt brothers weren't close at all. There had never been a falling out or any animosity. It was just that where their brotherly bond was supposed to be, instead, there was just a vacuum. Brian didn't know much of anything about his little brother's life and certainly knew

nothing about the end of it. Klinehan and MacDonald thanked Brian and started their drive back to Devon. And you would think at that point it would be obvious as to write what had happened, but actually it wasn't. And we were equally perplexed and left scratching our heads thinking, well, what's this man's connection with Devon? And we couldn't find one. And that in itself was just very odd.

And we couldn't find one. And that in itself was just very odd. The mystery of what happened to Ron Platt had consumed water cooler chatter at the police station for weeks. You can imagine you work in a busy office with lots of people. Everybody had a suggestion. And I remember being frustrated with, you know, I was saying to a lot of people, without any evidence, you need evidence to draw a conclusion. And in the coming weeks, nothing new would turn up.

It was obvious to MacDonald and Clenahan that it was time to let this one go. Wind it down and get this thing off their desk. It wasn't all for nothing. They ID'd the mystery man and notified the family so that they could have a proper funeral. That was something at least. It felt like it was over. We'd done all we could have done.

I don't think we thought we would ever find out what happened exactly to him unless we got more information to say, well look, I've heard that he was setting out on this boat on this day to travel to France, that maybe we could have done some more digging. But I think it was accepting that we were never going to find out the true circumstances of what had happened at that point. Okay, he'd come off a boat, that was obvious. He drowned, that was reality. How are we ever going to find out what happened? How are we ever going to find out what happened? Everybody had a theory. I look back on it now and smile because we had some

fairly imaginative suggestions but actually none of them were anywhere near the true reality and the story that unfolded which was the most incredible story with the most sensational ending I guess you would say. Tanya Mosley didn't even know she had a sister until she went missing. Her sister Anita left home in 1987 and never returned. Now Tanya, along with the help of her sister's son Antonio, is determined to find out what happened. I'm Kathleen Goltar and this week on Crime Story, one woman's search for her long lost sister.

Find Crime Story wherever you get your podcasts. The day that everything changed begins with Klanahan at his desk in the police station. As far as he was concerned, all the final paperwork on Ron Platt was filed and finished. The only minor outstanding thing that remained was for him to make contact with David Davis on behalf of Ron's brother, Brian, to retrieve some of Ron's possessions. So Klenahan had to call Davis. So one late shift, I was sat in the office and thought, you know what, I'll give him a ring.

But consequently, there was a hiccup. I couldn't find the piece of paper with his phone number on anywhere in the office. So I thought, oh, right, okay. So I thought, right, I'm going to phone up an officer in Essex to see whether he will go around because I'd lost his phone number basically. So he got Peter Redman of Essex police back on the phone. And I said, look, I'm doing a favor. Would you pop around to this address, which I'd got from him in my previous conversation.

He said, would I mind getting hold of him? Peter Redman again, the most low key cop of all time. And I said, yeah, no problem. Could do that. Redman's post in Chelmsford is a really busy office. He usually has a million things to do and wouldn't under normal circumstances drive the half hour drive to go and do another detachment a favor right away. But this day, he had a reason to want to make the drive. I'd got a higher car had been delivered to me, a brand new car.

That day for a trip I was due to take the following day. So I thought perfect. Opportunity to take the new car out for a spin. So Redmond heads out for the small village called Woodham Walter. And that's where it all started to unravel. As Peter Redmond drives his brand new car that day in 1996, he has no idea that he himself has become a vehicle of fate. He and Clenahan and McDonald will spend the rest of their lives thinking about how big a role luck played that day. What would have happened if Clenahan didn't lose Davis' phone number? They'd wonder

in the coming decades. What if Redmond didn't feel compelled to take the new car for a spin and someone else went to Woodham Walter that day. They never know. Woodham Walter is a beautiful chocolate box village that could be in Devon or North Yorkshire. The countryside is beautiful. He was told that Davis' home was a place on Little London Lane that was called simply Little London Farmhouse. When Redmond took my producer Alex on this exact drive, everything looked the same as

it did back then, but for one key detail. Driving down here, you've got the two houses here. The houses all have signposts with their names on them, but they didn't then. I've driven down here thinking, well, that's not it. That doesn't appear to be it. That doesn't appear to be it. I pulled up at the end of the drive here, literally just here, and went and knocked on the doorstep with his hand perched to knock.

This dear listener, is the biggest what if from that day. What if Redmond didn't accidentally knock on the wrong door? And Frank and Audrey answered. Frank and Audrey, the neighbors, were both in their late 70s. Charmingly, whenever they met a new person, like the police officer on their doorstep, they'd offer right away. We're not married to each other. We're both widows and lived together just as friends. Peter double-checked the address for David Davis and asked them if this was

the little London farmhouse. They said no this is the little London house. Farmhouse is next door. Who do you want? I said oh I'm after um David Davis. David Davis? Frank furrowed his brow. He'd never heard of a David Davis. And he said, oh no, Ron Platt lives next door. I beg your pardon? The man in that house right there? In the address that David Davis said was his house? To you?

He's called Ron Platt? That was the spark. Redmond took a second to process what he just heard. Suddenly, this routine visit felt ominous. Ronald Platt is dead, but Davis is Platt? So Platt is alive? And living here? Next to this platonic couple?

Redmond needed to find out more. As Redmond stands on the exact stoop with my producer Alex today, at the same crooked cottage with the same wooden door retracing the steps he took nearly 30 years earlier, all of a sudden a man peers out from the side door of the house, suspicious as to why we're staring at his property armed with a microphone. Hello, my colleague's recording. as to why we're staring at his property armed with a microphone. Hello, my colleague's recording. I'm making a podcast about a man who used to live in this area.

Yes, the guy, the Rolex. That's the one. But the guy was actually, because they got the wrong house, the police, when they came here, they came to this place. This is the policeman. Oh, is it you, the policeman?

So you knocked on that door. This door, yeah. They didn't it you? You're the policeman. So you knocked on that door. This door, yeah. They didn't have the name up. No, I vote, we put that up. Yeah, and it would be confusing because that's Little London Farmhouse, Little London Coist. So what on earth did Audrey and Frank tell Redmond that day that was so memorable, so enduring that decades later a future owner of the house would be able to recall it. Back to Redmond.

And when he had quite a lengthy conversation with them, lovely cup of tea and biscuits, I got the impression that they knew the neighbors quite well or as well as the neighbors would allow them to know. And they were telling me all about how they'd been there. Sometime I think they thought they were American. There was Ron and he's got a much younger wife, very pretty, very pretty. And I said, she's very quiet, doesn't have a lot to do with anyone. It's him who is the dominant part. They'd lived there for about a year. Oh, and one more thing. They had a boat.

They were sailors and that they often went down to the west country. After chatting for a fair while, Redmond stood up and asked if they would be so kind as to keep this conversation just between the three of them and made his way back to his car, dizzy. Thinking what on earth have I turned up here? All sorts of things are going through your mind. Why do they know him as Ron Platt? Yet to me, he's Mr. Davis.

Why? Redmond drove the new car straight back to the station in Chelmsford because he knew two detectives in Devon who needed to hear about this. I was in the office in Paynton, the police station, and I got the call from Peter saying, oh, you're not going to believe this. And then he told me what he discovered. Klinehan waved over McDonald and told him that the neighbors in Woodham Walter know David Davis as Ron Platt.

And you know, and you're both looking at each other with some disbelief, I guess, as to what's this all about? They knew immediately that this was something they were going to need to bring to the boss. I do remember going into Phil Syncock and he was in the middle of a meeting and told me to go away. And I was only young. He said, no, go away. Come back later.

I'm busy. And I said, no, go away. Come back later. I'm busy. And I said, no boss, I think. And then he got really angry with me and told me to do one. But no, I was insistent. Syncock finally relented. And after he absorbed the information, he had a plan. He said, we need to learn everything we can about the man living in that house, and we need to do it discreetly.

There's too many unanswered questions. There's too many unknowns, because it would seem that David Davis was probably, from what we could identify, one of the last people to see him alive. And then that was it. Then that was like the jaw-dropping moment where it all changed then. And there will never be another job like this. Seriously, there will never be another job like this. Coming up on Sea of Lies, we meet the one person who knows both Ronald Platts. When I look back for him, that was a so-intimidating meeting. He saw gold when he walked in the office. And Ron said, oh, you want to be careful. You don't know anything about him. You want to be really careful.

I thought he was either on the run, involved in some sort of witness protection program or with the CIA. But I will definitely have said, what is it? She was just sort of in awe of him. She was too trusting of him, beyond doubt. 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 Oake. Senior manager is Tanya Springer. And the director of CBC podcasts is Arif Nourani. MUSIC All right. That was the first episode of the brand new season of Uncover, Sea of Lies.

Episode two is waiting for you right now. Just search for Uncover wherever you get your podcasts. And be sure to follow so you don't miss an episode.