In January 2025, a woman who writes under the byline Heather Jane got a Google Alert: CBC had a new podcast, Sea of Lies, about her father. He is Albert Walker, the man the British press called the "Rolex Killer." Walker embezzled millions from Canadian clients, fled to the UK with her teenage sister, assumed the identity of a man named Ronald Platt, and murdered Platt at sea in 1996. Police caught him after Platt's body was identified by the serial number on his Rolex.
She listened to the series in one sitting. The next morning, she vomited and was sick for three days. A peer told her, "It wasn't food poisoning, babes. It was a trauma response." In an essay for Toronto Life giving up her anonymity, she writes that 30 years after she last saw her father, she still vomits "at the mere thought that he remembers me."
Her case has already filled three books, seven dramatized TV versions, a 2000 play, and "a seemingly endless slew of podcasts." Yet the press cared least when her family needed it most, she writes: while Sheena was missing for years, her mother "had to beg news outlets to put her on the air."
Heather Jane allows that the genre can work, citing Serial, which she "devoured" and calls "a way to pursue justice where the police and courts have failed." But much of it "is just a cheap bid for clicks that retraumatizes people who are already reeling," she writes, and the fallout from Sea of Lies "was simply the price of someone else's entertainment."
She says she has "never seen a deep dive that tried to locate the millions of dollars my dad stole from his investors," or one asking why police let the case stall. "But, if someone made a podcast like that, I would gladly devour the story of the Rolex Killer."
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