Original subtitles

- At 18, I was charged with murder.

Notorious, the teenage dominatrix.

I was accused of killing a respected English cricket umpire

by throwing him bound hand and foot into a raging river.

I was very naive, very young, very stupid.

- It was just an incredibly sad, sad story

of a girl who got involved with the wrong people.

- [Renee] I was charged with my then boyfriend,

Neville Walker.

The shocking secrets of bondage and discipline were exposed

for the first time in three sensational trials

that gripped a whole nation.

- She looked for all the world like a demure debutante.

She did not look like a murderer,

or a dominatrix for that matter.

- I was there, so I know what happened.

My clients knew me as Mistress Dominique.

This is my story.

(dramatic music)

(suspenseful music)

- Well, not only was it a, you know, sensational,

jolly trial, it had so much media interest because of that.

- It was just absolutely full on with pictures.

Good story, got everything.

- [Anna] It was a media scrap all right.

- Get out.

- [Reporter] Details of a conversation

were given to the court by secret witness A,

but all personal details of the witness

have been suppressed.

- Neville said that they couldn't let Mr. Plumley-Walker go,

otherwise, he'd go straight to the police

about the hiding he'd just been given.

He said that they had to get rid of him.

- Did she tell you anything

about Mr. Plumley-Walker's condition at that time?

- She said that he walked out to the car

and she showed me how bent over he was,

hands tied in the front,

and that when they got to the falls,

they took him out of the car and they weighted him down.

- Did she say anything else

about Mr. Plumley-Walker at that time?

- She said that she knew that he knew

that he was going to die.

- Disbelief.

I knew that it was not true.

I was angry.

I was angry that she was up there lying.

- There was a lot of talk about the secret witnesses

and, you know, who they were,

you know, back in the newsroom,

and, actually, in restaurants and bars, you know,

whenever you went out

there was a lot of speculation about who they were.

And, you know, sometimes you would hear some

quite well-known names in New Zealand circles mentioned.

- [Narrator] Neville Walker had allegedly given details

about Peter Plumley-Walker's death

to a man in the holding cells

at the Auckland District Court.

The man was a police informer.

- He told me Ms. Chignell had been beating Plumley-Walker

and just generally abusing him,

and that he'd actually beaten him himself as well.

And then Plumley-Walker cried out,

"I'm fucked, I've had enough."

- I'm fucked, I've had enough.

- Yeah, then Walker said him and Ms. Chignell

went and had a coffee and something to eat,

but when they came back, they found him all slumped over,

looking a lot worse for wear.

So they unchained him and Walker tried to find a pulse,

but he couldn't, so he gave him cardiac massage.

- What else did the defendant, Walker, tell you?

- Well, they decided to take the body to Huka Falls.

And when they got to the falls, they dumped him over.

- Did he tell you anything about

Mr. Plumley-Walker's condition at that time?

- He said his arms were still twitching.

- If Renee and her accomplice had known that he was alive,

then plainly murder at Taupo was,

not to put too fine a point on it, a slam dunk. (chuckles)

- It was always going to be a case

where any lawyer involved was gonna make his mark.

Either way, good or bad,

they were gonna be in the media every single day.

- Well, we had our moments.

- Christopher Harder was just extraordinary.

- I had a lot of admiration for Chris.

He was a superb, determined, perhaps obsessively so,

private investigator.

He was also, though, a renegade.

- Just as the bite.

- [Carroll] At one stage he got a scorpion and produced it,

and said, "What's going on at the moment in this trial

is as bad as a scorpion as the fatal killer of my client."

- He did things that were likely to annoy the judiciary,

and the risk was

we just had no way of knowing how he would impress a jury.

- On the 1st of May, you were in court

and you spoke to Neville Walker, is that right?

- [Secret Witness B] Yes.

- [Chris] And you were bailed at

about 10 past two in the afternoon, weren't you?

- Early afternoon.

- Did you then contact Constable Ruth requesting a meeting?

- Yeah, to give him a book on a car and I said

I had something else I wanted to talk to him about.

- Well, I put it to you that at this meeting

you received money from Constable Ruth

for previous information given to him.

- That probably happened at the same time.

That's not why I called him.

I mentioned to him about the book

that I promised to give him,

and then I said I had something else

that I wanted to tell him.

By that I was referring to what had been said to me

by Neville Walker.

- How much money did you receive?

- Well, I'm not sure.

- Take your time, think about it.

Was it a hundred, 200, 500?

- It wasn't that much.

- Well, how much?

Was it in the hundreds or the tens?

- It was 300, sorry.

- [Chris] You have a number of previous convictions,

is that right?

- Yes.

- Do you accept that you have about 36 burglary convictions,

29 for theft, 46 for false pretenses,

nine for altering a document?

- Yeah, I got quite a long past record,

but over the last year that has changed, thankfully.

- Cellmate confessions,

one simply cannot say they never happen

and that they're never genuine,

but reliability is a major issue

because prisoners have too much to gain

by cooperating with authorities.

Almost invariably,

the toughest witness of the police officers,

all those professional witnesses called for the Crown

know that they're not there to help the defense.

- [Stuart] You were present when Mr. Dewar

first came into the interview room to speak to Ms. Chignell,

weren't you?

- Yes, I was.

- And you didn't take any notes of this conversation,

did you?

- No, it was his interview.

I took down her written statement at the end.

- And what did you do with it?

- Gave it to DSS Dewar.

He made the comment that it differed

from what she'd said in the interview room.

- [Stuart] Did you agree with that?

- Yes, as I was taking the statement from her,

I mentioned that it differed

from what she'd earlier said to Dewar,

but she insisted that what she put down in the statement

was, in fact, what she now was saying happened.

I was only there to record her statement.

- Did Mr. Dewar show you his job sheet notes?

- Yes, he asked me to read them

and make sure they were correct as I record them.

I was convinced it was a true and correct record

of the interview, and I certified it as such.

- And did you then show Ms. Chignell the job sheet notes

that you had just certified as correct

so that she could see the differences?

- No, that was done later

by Detective Senior Sergeant Dewar.

- Well, it might've been fairer to show her right then

exactly what you and Mr. Dewar had maintained

that she had said.

- I could've done that,

but I knew Ms. Chignell was an achieved liar.

I wasn't gonna push her or lose her confidence

when we'd at least got her talking.

- She had been encouraged to talk.

Payn took the statement,

which didn't have the oral material

that Dewar later recorded.

- Even Detective Payn was quite shocked

when he came back in with a statement

and banged it on the desk.

You know, Renee, you're to sign this now.

And I was shocked.

I was absolutely shocked and just angry as well,

that, you know, he's a detective

and he's wanting me to sign something I have not said.

- He had alleged a number of admissions

that weren't recorded on a job sheet.

- And he was a bully.

- Our in was to try and drive a wedge

between the testimony of the two police officers.

- Were you critical of Mr. Payn

after reading the statement he took from Ms. Chignell

after your interview?

- I was obviously disappointed.

It was missing one important point.

- What important point?

- Well, admission

with regards to the murder of Mr. Plumley-Walker.

- You said that she told you three times,

I knew what was happening to him.

- A number of times, yes.

- She said something like,

I taught you bloody bastard.

I decided to leave the bastard hanging there.

Is that what you're saying?

- No, that's what she told me.

- Well, I suggest to you that she said none of these things

and that they're total fabrication.

What do you say to that?

- Well, if your defense is attacking the police,

I think that's pretty pathetic.

See, I don't work on commission.

I don't rely for the future of my success

on convictions and acquittals,

and I don't have to tell lies,

and I don't run that risk of perjuring myself.

Now, your client clearly told me her involvement

in the presence of Payn, and he substantiates that.

- And yet when she sees your record for the first time

and she comes to the place where you say

that she said it was murder, she immediately says to you,

"No, I didn't say that."

- Yes, that's right.

- I suggest to you that in the midst of all the activity,

you simply got it wrong,

and you misunderstood what she was trying to say to you.

- No.

There is absolutely no doubt in my mind

that your client said it was murder then.

Now it really was a bombshell.

And I knew by her demeanor, which had changed at that point,

that she'd had a moment of weakness that had dropped

and that remark just came out.

Now, I am absolutely certain that is what she said.

- What was surprising was that Renee actually never spoke.

She never gave any, you know,

she didn't take the stand at all.

And I think a lot of us were quite surprised by that.

- I don't mean to demean her her intelligence or anything,

but she was confused as a young woman,

confused by the process.

She would've been a lamb to the slaughter

of cross-examination had we ever called her,

and so she was never going to be called.

- [Reporter] When 19-year-old Renee Chignell

arrived for the final day of her High Court trial,

she followed her lawyer's instructions and said nothing.

- [Reporter] Are you feeling confident?

- When the jury came back in it was absolute silence.

I remember looking at this one particular older woman,

and she didn't look at me, you know.

We'd had days and days of looking at each other and smiling,

and she didn't look at me.

- All rise.

(suspenseful music)

In relation to the accused, Neville George Walker,

how do you find him guilty, or not guilty?

- [Juror] Guilty.

(gasping)

- [Public Gallery Member] Bullshit.

- And in relation to the accused, Renee Melanie Chignell,

guilty or not guilty?

- Guilty.

- [Ngaire] She didn't do it.

- She didn't kind of react the way I thought she would.

And later she told me that she just didn't believe it.

She thought it just couldn't be true.

- I can hear my mother calling out to me,

telling me that she loves me and other people talking to me.

That was a really, really painful memory

just to feel just the hurt from,

you know, friends and family, yeah.

It will stay with me for a long time.

- When the first verdict and the first trial came out

that they were guilty,

everyone was absolutely astonished.

You know, they just couldn't believe

that it was a guilty verdict.

- I was very sorry, really.

I thought it was wrong.

I thought manslaughter at most,

but murder seemed way off the mark.

- Whatever went down I don't think personally,

and I think a lot of people agreed with me at the time,

there was the intent there to kill him.

- [Reporter] There were gasps of surprise

as the two were given the mandatory sentence,

life imprisonment.

- No comment to make at all.

- [Reporter] The two convicted murderers

were rushed away under tight security to Mount Eden Prison.

- And we got taken away so quickly

back down to the holding cells and I just lost it.

(chains rattling)

I put a dog collar around his neck

and clipped it to a chain from the ceiling.

I asked him if it was tight enough and he said,

"No, Mistress, I want tight bondage."

So I put everything up a couple of notches

and the collar slipped up his neck.

He didn't have anything in his mouth,

so he was able to talk.

He wasn't blindfolded.

He was absolutely fine.

He was on his tiptoes by this point.

If he stood flat-footed,

the chain around his neck would've tightened.

I asked him if he was okay and he said.

- Yes, Mistress.

- He was getting right into it, enjoying it.

He was all for tight bondage.

- What happened then?

- I left the room.

I would say, slave, I'm going out of the room.

You are to behave, you know, I will be back soon.

And I would sometimes go out, sometimes not.

I would open the door, shut the door, still be there,

and then come up and give him a smack.

And it's just that heightened sense of arousal

that they're going through.

I was quite taken back by what Peter had told me.

I had a coffee and a cigarette

and told Neville all about it,

that Peter was a sick-minded person.

Neville agreed.

(suspenseful music)

I was gone about 20 minutes, I suppose, longer than usual.

I would've thought that if he was having any problems

he would've yelled out, or made some noise.

I would've heard the chains shaking

because they were down and would've made a noise

if he was trying to get my attention.

I came back in, it was absolutely,

I can't even put words into how I felt when I saw him.

Neville!

I remember screaming out to Neville to come in.

I was getting him down onto the floor.

(loud thump and Renee crying)

- [Neville] What the fuck is going on?

Fuckin' help him, mate.

(Renee crying)

- [Reporter] Dominatrix Renee Chignell and her lover,

Neville Walker, are still behind bars

for the murder of Peter Plumley-Walker.

Elsewhere today, lawyers were filing a formal appeal

against the verdict.

Questions were being raised about lawyers' conduct

and controversy was raging over the use of police informers

in the trial.

- Well, the submission to the Court of Appeal

was that the trial judge, the summing up was erroneous.

You could not tell from the verdict

whether there were some jurors

who were satisfied beyond reasonable doubt

of murder at Auckland,

or whether they were satisfied beyond reasonable doubt

of murder at Taupo.

And the law required that they had to be sure.

- [Reporter] The appeal judge is saying the jury

wasn't clearly told their decision on where he died

must be unanimous before they could return a guilty verdict.

They also declared Walker's conviction

a miscarriage of justice

because the police didn't disclose damaging information

on a controversial crown witness,

secret witness B.

He referred the Court of Appeal to an affidavit

from an old friend of secret witness B's,

who said, "B told him that he lied

about the twitching at the falls.

He lied about the beating, and that he'd done it for greed."

- That's what caused the Court of Appeal

to order a new trial.

- The Plumley-Walker murder trial

begins all over again tomorrow.

It'll be the second trial

for Renee Chignell and Neville Walker.

- [Reporter] On the eve of this new trial,

Neville Walker is a free man after his successful appeal,

but Renee Chignell is still in prison.

- The superintendent of the jail said to me,

"Renee, you have a visitor here."

I thought, well, great, I've got a visitor.

She said, "Well, the visitor

is actually in one of the other wings."

And for the life of me, I couldn't think who on earth

she was talking about, you know, friend or who?

Mom, oh, my God, oh, my God.

I can't believe they let you in here.

They never do that.

- [Ngaire] I'm not a visitor, sweetie.

- What?

- Parking tickets finally caught up with me.

They slapped me with a ridiculous finding cost,

10,000 bucks.

- Can you have got the money?

You should have asked.

- I could've got it,

but my other choice was a few weeks in here with you.

- Oh, mom.

- So tell me what's going on.

I heard Neville's out on bail.

- Have to wait for the second trial.

- [Ngaire] So why are you still in here?

- 'Cause I didn't apply.

I don't want bail.

- Oh, baby, why not?

- Before he got out,

he used to smuggle notes to move from the men's prison.

He worked in the kitchens.

It's where they make our food.

- [Ngaire] What did he say to you?

- He wants me to take all the blame.

He reckons the courts will go easy on me.

Give me a shorter sentence

'cause I'm a young white girl with no record.

Says he loves me and he'll come and see me in prison.

- No, he's just using you.

You can't listen to that.

- If I'm out on bail, he can try and get to me,

control me even more.

- Not if you came home with me.

- The news and TV reporters, they'd never leave us alone.

- [Ngaire] I don't care.

- I'll just get used to it.

Being out, what if I was found guilty again?

They'd just lock me back up.

It's too hard, mom.

I can't face it.

I didn't want to put any more stress on my family

and friends, you know.

I explained to everyone that I'm fine.

I'm safe here.

No one's going to pester them.

- Dramatic new developments

in the Plumley-Walker murder trial.

There's no verdict.

After 15 hours, the jury couldn't reach a conclusion

and so the judge dismissed the 12 men and women.

- [Reporter] Defense lawyers were warned by the judge

not to discuss the case with the media

because there could be a new trial.

- I've got no comment to make.

And then we had, of course, the third trial

in front of Justice Noel Anderson.

(suspenseful music)

The question was, particularly the third trial,

how did we convey these evidential issues to the jury?

The defense contention was death at Auckland

and at worst manslaughter.

And the prosecution contention was

death by drowning at Taupo.

And so there laid the seeds of a real battle

in terms of the forensic pathology.

- [Reporter] A postmortem on Peter Plumley-Walker was done

soon after his body was pulled from the Waikato River.

That medical evidence

was called as part of the Crown's case,

which hinges on proving Plumley-Walker was alive

when he was thrown over the Huka Falls.

- Dr. Taylor, did you examine the deceased's heart?

- [Dr. Taylor] Yes.

- What did you see?

- I saw the small atheroma bump

in an otherwise normal artery for the age of the patient.

- Did you reveal that detail in your pathology report?

- Yes, I said I considered the atheroma to be normal.

- But now you're saying normal for age?

- Yes.

- How closed was the artery?

- To a moderate degree.

- You're aware the heart slide has been examined

by Sir Brian Barratt-Boyes.

- Yes.

- And that he will give evidence for the defense to say

that it was the main heart artery

and that it was 50% closed.

What do you say to that?

- In my view, the deceased had no disease of the heart

that could have contributed to his death.

- You're not disagreeing with Sir Brian Barratt-Boyes,

are you?

- I'm telling you my opinion.

No doubt he would tell the court his opinion.

- When you start getting professional people in,

like Sir Barratt-Boyes,

you know, it makes a huge difference.

- Question then was, well, what was the mechanism

by which Plumley-Walker had, in fact, died?

And was it strangulation,

or was it pressure on the vagus nerve

caused by the ligature when he was strung up?

- Dr. Taylor, if a person were to die by hanging

in unusual circumstances,

what evidence would you require as a pathologist?

- A rope.

- Did the police tell you

that the deceased was more upset on the day he died

than he'd ever been before?

- No.

- [Chris] Did the police tell you

that he had been rejected by his wife

after the divorce that morning?

- No.

- [Chris] Did the police tell you

that he had a nine year matrimonial separation?

- No.

- Did the police tell you

that he did not want to be divorced on that day?

- [Dr. Taylor] No.

- Can you describe to us how the police first suggested

he may have died?

- In bondage.

He was tied with his feet and arms stretched out

and a noose around the neck.

He was suspended from the ceiling.

- Did they tell you how they suspected he was standing?

- Possibly on tiptoe.

- [Chris] Balls of his feet?

- Yes.

- Ever tried to stand on the balls of your feet

for 20 minutes?

- No.

- If a person became tired,

or lost concentration for a moment in a situation like that,

could the bonds on the neck have caused vasovagal,

or compression of the neck causing acute heart failure?

- Mr. Harder.

- Yes.

(thump)

(door opens) (somber music)

- I insisted to Neville that we phone the ambulance.

This man needed help, you know, he definitely needed help.

Neville was also trying to help with the chest compressions.

To this day,

I don't know what stopped making that phone call.

If I could turn everything back,

by God, we would've been on the phone straight away,

you know.

I don't understand why I listened, you know,

and it's my fault as well for just not doing

what I knew was the right thing to do.

Picking up the phone and ringing the ambulance.

We were in shock.

We didn't know what to do.

(phone ringing)

And then the phone rang and it was mom

saying she was bringing around fish and chips for tea.

I sort of agreed.

(phone ringing) (somber music)

Mom was late.

I kept going back into the room

seeing if Peter was coming around,

but there was no sign of it.

She finally turned up about nine o'clock.

- [Ngaire] Is everything okay?

- Yes, mom.

(suspenseful music)

- [Neville] It's getting late, eh?

- According to witness A,

Plumley-Walker was alive and well

after the incident in Auckland.

So our strategy was to demonstrate to the jury

at trial number three

that she had received a huge benefit

for cooperating with the police,

that she had made this up all along.

- You say that the accused, Chignell,

told you that Plumley-Walker walked naked to the car?

- No, no, I never said naked.

I said he walked to the car.

- The jury has been told that the deceased was bound up,

wrapped in a blanket and placed in the car.

Do you understand that?

- Yes, but I distinctly remember Renee showing me

how he walked, bent over.

- This was all in mid-February 1989

when you were under some stress in prison,

given your situation, weren't you?

- Yes.

- [Stuart] You desperately wanted to get out, didn't you?

- Not desperately, no, I wasn't desperate.

- You knew that your boyfriend was facing

a very long term of imprisonment?

- Yes.

- So I suggest to you

that the state of mind that you were in,

you simply got it wrong from the outset,

and once you'd given your information to the police,

you quickly realized there was some advantage

in you maintaining your story.

What do you say to that?

- No, I never received any advantage.

- Am I right that you gave evidence

at Ms. Chignell's depositions in June 1989?

- Yes.

- The following day you were released on bail?

- Yes.

- You had twice before been refused bail, is that correct?

- Yes.

- Did you know that when you gave your evidence

that the police would not oppose your application this time?

- No.

- So you're saying your release

the day after you gave evidence

came as a complete surprise to you?

- Yes.

- Your boyfriend was sentenced to 13 years imprisonment

for conspiring to import in the importation of heroin.

You were convicted and sentenced on the same charges.

What did you get?

- Three years on both counts.

- It was about 11:30 by then.

Neville and I sat down and talked about what we would do.

We thought we had to get rid of the body

as far away as possible.

(suspenseful music)

I guess the next thing I knew

that we were in the car driving down.

I remember a lot of crying,

a lot of just being so overwhelmed with the whole situation,

just being so surreal that this was,

was just far too much going on to really take on board

the enormity of the situation.

- After you told Ms. Chignell there were differences

between her statement and Mr. Dewar's job sheet,

did she make any amendments to her statement?

- She added one thing.

She said, "I tell all my customers when they arrive

that if I tie the knots too tight or hit too hard,

all they have to do is say, "Mercy, Mistress, mercy."

- So you're saying that she told the deceased

that if things were too tight, all he had to say was

"Mercy, Mistress, mercy,"

and something would be done about it?

- That's what she said, so I feel he recorded it.

- In your evidence you suggested that Plumley-Walker

was happy and out celebrating his divorce.

- That's correct.

- [Chris] Did you put that up as a red herring?

- No.

- Where did you get the information he was out celebrating?

- At a briefing when I first joined the inquiry.

- Who gave you that information?

- Detective Senior Sergeant Dewar.

- Have you ever suggested to Inspector Cooper,

the officer in charge of the case

that other information you had obtained

might be used as a red herring to suggest drowning at Taupo?

- Definitely not.

- May I approach the witness, Sir?

This is a letter to Inspector Cooper.

Do you recognize the signature?

- It's my signature.

- Do you see the line with red herring in it?

- I do.

- [Chris] Read it.

- Objection, Your Honor.

The question is not fair to the witness.

The whole document should be read.

- Yes, agreed, the whole document.

- Read the whole letter.

- Ron, I enclose a statement I took off a woman

in relation to the above homicide.

In view of recent publicity,

she has decided to come forward

with this gem of information.

Does not sound as though it has any relevance.

At brightest, we may be able to use it

as a red herring at any subsequent retrial as a possibility

it may have been Plumley-Walker screaming for help

from the river, some eight hours after he was tossed over.

Regards, Les.

- My understanding of a red herring, detective,

is that perhaps you'd like to indicate if it's yours also,

something lays a false trail and misleads.

- I would call it more of a diversion, Sir, yes.

- I'm just trying to understand

why you would want to suggest

that a court should be diverted or misled in a retrial

by a red herring?

Can you assist us with this?

- It was a bit of a snide comment.

One I obviously regret now.

- Now, facetious aside.

- Most definitely, Sir.

- You know, police were pillars of society, you know.

What they said went.

No one ever questioned what the police did

because, you know, their word was law.

You never questioned their behavior or their morals.

And that was a mistake

as we have discovered over the years,

and you only need to ask

Louise Nicholas about that really to, you know.

- After Ms. Chignell's comment,

well, in that case, it's murder.

I continued to question her and she said,

"She lifted the deceased up

until his feet were almost hanging off the ground."

She said that she knew what was happening,

and she left the bloody bastard hanging there.

Now at this point, I cautioned her

and then I asked her to continue if she wished.

- Did she tell you anything else?

- She said she went and had a cup of coffee

in another part of the house.

And when she came back into the B&D room,

Plumley-Walker had turned blue.

And she thought, you stupid bastard.

She thought he looked funny hanging there,

and Neville wanted to go and get a camera and photograph.

- Well, we had to try and show that he was a liar

and to use the old vernacular that he had verbaled her.

When I'm approaching a cross-examination,

I go through in my mind a process

which I call closing the gates.

It's not an original phrase.

So you anticipate what the witness is going to say

and ask all the questions that might enable

a particular witness to avoid a direct answer.

And you do that without giving away

what the crucial question is.

And once you've decided to close the gates,

you then ask the crucial question.

- When Ms. Chignell saw your job sheet notes

for the first time, she took issue with it, didn't she?

- Yes, she refused to sign in that case, its murder remark.

- And was Mr. Payn present when she made these remarks?

- Yes.

- So what prevented him from writing it in his book

at the time?

- Well, I didn't ask him to,

and I didn't personally take notes.

See, I find that that impedes free discussion.

- You have said that Ms. Chignell

was apparently cooperative and willing to talk to you.

- Yes.

- And Mr. Payn had made jottings of less important matters

with previous discussions with her.

You were aware of that?

- Yes.

- So I suggest to you there was no reason that Mr. Payn

could not have taken note of such an important statement.

- No.

- I further put to you

that for you to create your job sheet accurately

without notes an hour after the interview concluded

is a remarkable feat in memory.

What do you say to that?

- Yes.

- So do you accept there are certain parts of your memory

that might be in error?

- There'd be parts, yes, but it's only minor parts.

- The adrenaline runs when you're cross-examining,

and, yes, it is an enjoyable process.

- Detective Senior Sergeant Dewar,

you were determined to win this trial from the start,

weren't you?

- No, no.

We're talking about a homicide investigation,

not someone taking the milk money.

- Come hell or high water.

- Yeah, man, that's absurd.

You get paid for results, Mr. Harder, I don't.

Your future and reputation probably suggests that you should

when, see, it makes no difference to me.

- Counsel is suggesting that you or the police

have become emotionally committed

to securing a conviction in this trial,

which has led to over-zealousness, misrepresentation,

and wishful thinking.

- I had no interest in the outcome of this trial personally.

- How many homicide cases have you overseen

in the past two years?

- Four.

- And what were the verdicts?

- On the murder counts of all four it was not guilty.

- Thank you, Mr. Dewar.

- It was like all the baggage had gone.

All the planted evidence had been disposed of, had gone.

- The former wife of cricket umpire, Peter Plumley-Walker,

has revealed her husband's long history of sexual deviance.

- [Reporter] The witness didn't come forward

at the first trial,

but decided she had something to offer this time.

(suspenseful music)

- You were previously married to Peter Plumley-Walker.

- Yes, in 1958.

We separated in 1980.

- What was his reaction to the separation?

- He was very upset.

For the next nine years,

he tried everything to keep us together as a family.

His mail kept coming to our home

right up 'til the day he died.

- The last time you saw Peter alive was when?

- Straight after our divorce.

We came out of the court together.

He asked me if I wanted to go for a coffee,

but I'd said I couldn't.

I had a friend waiting for me.

- [Chris] What was Peter's reaction to this

from your observations?

- He was very distressed.

The most upset I've ever seen him in my life.

He had tears in his eyes,

and was holding himself very tightly.

- [Chris] Did you have concerns about how Peter

might react to the divorce when it finally happened?

- Yes, I was very concerned.

- Were you told at some stage by the police

that they thought Peter might have died in bondage?

- Yes.

- [Chris] What was your reaction?

- I felt awful because of the divorce

and because he was just so upset.

I feel that's what I thought that he might have just

given in in bondage.

I don't know.

- Thank you.

(somber music)

(flames roaring)

- [Neville] Come on.

(door closes)

(Renee sobbing)

- [Neville] Fuck off.

(suspenseful music)

- I could read when the jurors came back in,

it was a totally different courtroom.

The environment, it was charged in a different way.

(suspenseful music)

- In relation to the accused, Neville George Walker,

how do you find him, guilty or not guilty?

- [Juror] Not guilty.

- And in relation to the accused,

Renee Melanie Chignell, guilty or not guilty of murder?

- Not guilty.

(indistinct murmuring)

(Renee sobbing)

Oh.

Oh, when they read out the not guilty,

just being so thankful, so thankful.

- You are both free to go. (bangs gavel)

(soft music)

(indistinct chattering)

- It was wonderful.

It was just a great, just being washed over me,

it was just that life could start again, you know.

(melodramatic music)

(music continues)

(music continues)

(music continues)

(music continues)

(music continues)

(music continues)

(music fades)

(bright music)