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It would become known as the “Rolex Murder” – for the single clue that identified the victim, leading officers through an international web of lies and deceit.

On July 28, 1996, a man’s body was found in the net of the Brixham trawler Malkerry six miles off Teignmouth.

Detectives found nothing on the body to indicate who the drowned man was. Their only clue was a 25-year-old Rolex Oyster watch which was still attached to his right wrist.

Six weeks later, after researching Rolex’s meticulous service records, officers established that the victim was 51-year-old former soldier Ronald Platt.

The serial number and service documents showed the timepiece had twice been taken by Mr Platt to a firm of Harrogate jewellers in the 1980s.

Following Mr Platt’s trail to Essex, a landlord pointed officers in the direction of Mr Platt’s “best friend”.

That would eventually turn out to be fugitive Canadian businessman Albert Walker, who had given his name as David Davies and made out he was an American.

He initially told police that he had given Mr Platt money to set up an electrical business in France and had not seen him since June.

But when police drove out to Davies’s home in the quiet village of Woodham Walter, near Maldon, to get a written statement, the officer was in for a surprise.

As fate would have it, the detective went to the wrong property where he was told: “Our neighbour is called Platt, not Davies”.

Alarm bells rang and police put him under the microscope for three weeks before arresting him on a Halloween armed raid.

But it was another month before police found out that Davies was really Walker and the woman he was passing off as his wife was in fact his daughter Sheena.

Walker, then 52, was jailed for life at Exeter Crown Court in 1998 after being found guilty of murdering his friend and business partner whose identity he had used in a complex plot to protect his double life.

A jury of eight women and four men convicted Walker, who at the time of his arrest had been Interpol’s fourth most wanted man and Canada’s number one fugitive.

Just weeks before the Canadian authorities began investigating the alleged theft of nearly $4 million Canadian from his financial services business, Walker had fled across the Atlantic to London with his 15-year-old daughter in December 1990.

He chose the identity of one of his Canadian clients – David Davies – to use as his own.

Later he befriended mild-mannered TV repairman Ronald Platt and his 39-year-old girlfriend Elaine Boyes in Harrogate where the couple unknowingly played a part in extending Walker’s web of deceit and lies.

Walker used them as a front for a bogus company operation, with accounts in Switzerland, to launder cash to further his stay in Britain.

When they had served their purpose, Walker paid for them to start a new life in Canada – a country Mr Platt loved after living there in his youth – and assumed his second false identity. But when a disillusioned and jobless Mr Platt returned to Britain in 1995 he became a threat to Walker’s security and freedom.

In July the following year Walker took Mr Platt out on his 24ft yacht Lady Jane, which he kept moored at Dittisham in the River Dart, knocked him unconscious with a blow to the back of his head and threw him into the sea, with a 10lb anchor tucked into his trouser belt.

Passing the life sentence, Mr Justice Butterfield told silver-haired Walker: “It was in my judgement a callous, premeditated killing designed to eliminate a man you had used for your own selfish ends.”

The judge said Walker found Mr Platt “firstly inconvenient, then increasingly a possible threat to your continued freedom. He became not merely expendable but a danger to you and he had to die.

“The killing was carefully planned and cunningly executed with chilling efficiency”.

The case sparked headlines on both sides of the Atlantic and led to at least two books being written about the murder, plus countless Canadian television documentaries.

The officer in charge of the murder case was Detective Superintendent Phil Sincock.

“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 which was why they had me over to Canada talking about them,” he said as another film about the story was released.

“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.

“Inside the cabin were some cushions on which we found some head hairs. DNA tests proved that they were from the deceased man. And forensic tests found zinc traces from the anchor on Mr Platt’s belt and traces of leather on the anchor.”

During the investigation police found over 15 gold bars, each worth over £25,000, plus quantities of cash belonging to Walker at a string of different locations.

Mr Sincock said: “In case anything went wrong he was converting a lot of his cash into gold bars and secreting them so that if he had to do a runner he would have had something to survive on in case his identity had blown out.

“For six years he had managed to evade capture and he was no fool. He was very clever and was probably the most accomplished conman and persuasive person I have ever met, but at the same time it must be remembered that it was also a calculated and premeditated murder.”

Walker was transferred back to Canada to see out his sentence in 2005.

Two years later, he was convicted of 20 fraud and theft charges and sentenced to a four-year term to run concurrent to his life sentence for murder.

He applied for parole early in 2015 but later abandoned the bid.