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Chapter 1: What events led to the demise of Peter Plumley Walker?
I got the flat in Rotomahana Terrace just before Christmas 1988 so we could do B&D sessions. Renee told me what to buy from the hardware store and where to hang the chains on the wall. I also made some whips according to her instructions. We advertised in the newspaper just after Christmas, but until Plumlee Walker died we only had about ten sessions involving six of seven clients.
One guy got dressed up like a woman and Renee would tell him to do things like clean the shower, which she held him on a chain and made him bark like a dog. Then she'd tell him how stupid he looked. Another guy liked to be tied to a chair with his feet facing backwards. He would pay Renee 200 bucks to whack him with a jandal while she was dressed like a jazzercise instructor.
When Plumlee Walker rang up, he had a long conversation with Renee on the telephone about what he'd get for his money. Whatever Renee did to him, he wanted to do twice back to her. She didn't agree to that, so he came along to Rotomahana for an introductory session.
Thank you, Jeremy. That was, of course, a quote from Neville Walker, co-accused in the murder of Peter Plumley Walker, along with Renee Chignall. And it's interesting because you don't hear Neville Walker talk much in this whole thing. You don't hear a lot from him when you investigate it because his counsel never put him on the stand and they never put Renee Chignall on the stand.
So it's quite interesting to hear him talking so mundanely. about the setting up of this B&D room.
Well, thanks very much. I'm really pleased that you, that's a great, great compliment to my impersonation of Neville Walker there because I thought it was bang on the money. Yeah. And even, did you notice my pronunciation of it, Rotomahana Terrace as well? Not Rotomahana. No. Because in 1989, nobody would have been saying Rotomahana. They would have been calling it Rotomahana.
And whilst we're looking into the mundanity, I guess you'd say, or the sort of nuts and bolts of the operation they're running at Rotomahana Terrace 28A, here is a reading from the advertisement they put in the New Zealand Herald. Basic B&D, bondage and discipline, $130. Basic humiliation, $130. Reduced from $160. That's quite good. So it was on special, wasn't it?
Basic humiliation. Yeah, basic humiliation down $30. Why did they not put basic B&D on special? I don't know.
If only they could have put Neville Walker on the stand, they could have asked him. Did they reduce anything else? Basic bondage was $130 reduced from $180. Oh, that's quite good. $50 off. Basic discipline, Renee, was also $130, and that was reduced from $180. I mean, they've only been business. These are fake reductions. It was always... It was always $130. They're putting these reductions in.
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Chapter 2: How did the court proceedings unfold in Peter Plumley Walker's case?
Yeah. Yeah, B and D. Okay.
Although, to be fair- Neville Walker was saying that she was hitting someone with a jandle. Well, there we go.
That's the summer. I mean, the thing is, if you're really, really cold, maybe it's no good. Imagine if you've got your raisin smugglers out and you're getting whacked with a jandle. It hurts when they're erect. It doesn't hurt so much when they're not.
Well, I'm concerned that we need to move forward. This is going to blow out into a fifth episode. That's fine. So, as you know, in late April 1989, Neville Walker and Renee Chignall admitted they were involved in the throwing of Peter Plumley Walker's body over the hook falls. They were arrested and charged with murder. And that led to the first trial.
And that first trial started at 11.05am on Thursday, November 1989, and it ran for four weeks. Some well-known lawyers were involved. I think they were well-known at the time, but they've become very famous since. Christopher Harder. He jumped on board as Neville Walker's defense lawyer.
And Stuart Grieve was Renee Chignall's and her father, Con Chignall, having sold an Auckland property to cover the cost of Grieve. Well, he was a QC, Stuart Grieve. Yeah, yeah. So Con coughed up her dad. He sold a business, actually, a property, and paid for a very, very good lawyer, which I ā
think Rene should be very grateful for well Stuart Grieve because I've said there was a connection there I've been around to his house and he would have been in his early to mid 40s so probably on the way up and probably pretty established in those days in the world of law in your 40s one of the first things I said to you was he's wearing a rug that's a wig and not like a court rug or a court wig he doesn't wear a rug that's what I'm saying that's what I'm just trying to explain
I was wrong. And I texted you, didn't I, Gerry? Yeah, you were wrong. I said I was wrong about the rug. He's got a great hairline.
It was just so thick. Oh, it's thick. It's very, very thick hair.
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Chapter 3: What were the arguments presented in the first trial?
How are they going to prove that? He had bruising around his buttocks, but quite severe bruising in different places. But equally, that could have happened. Like BND. Yeah. It could have happened days ago. And the defense said that it might have even happened that morning at another BND place because he did get that $200 out after he left the divorce. Yeah.
And the other thing is with bruising, bruising can sometimes last for weeks. I mean, you might have taken a knock four or five days before and the bruise sometimes takes a day or two to come out.
And I mean, the problem for the prosecution there is that the body's being smashed around, thrown off the hook falls. It's being bashed around in the water and it's heavily decomposed after six days.
Six days it was in the waterfall, was it?
Yeah.
Okay, that's going to be hard to do some kind of report and work out what happened before and what happened afterwards.
Exactly. Especially when there's bondage and discipline involved. Especially around... Beyond reasonable doubt. So the main other crown evidence, as far as I see it, was the testimony of witness A and witness B. Okay, so at this point, can we just stop for a second?
Because without someone seeing someone or hearing something at some stage, all you have is the testimony of the reports that Renee Chignor and Neville Walker have given to the police and their account of it. Mm-hmm. and the pathologist's report. That is all you have. You have a sighting of the car. We all know they went down there. They're not saying that they didn't.
Yeah, and no one's questioning that they torched the car. No. So all of that they agree to. So they have no way at this stage of proving... that there's no other people involved in it. So it's either Renee and Neville's word and with the pathologist report, but there's a big gap. They've got a problem. The prosecution have a huge problem here.
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Chapter 4: What evidence was introduced in the second trial?
Not good. No, you'd be like, oh, well, we should have called the police at that time. Remember when I was saying before they should have called the police once Peter Plumley Walker had died? And this, of course... Unless, of course, they did it.
Neville Walker had, I guess what the police are trying to say that, well, the idea is that Neville Walker beat him so badly for the disgusting things that he'd said around what he'd done to children that they couldn't really go to the police because Peter Plumley Walker laid charges against them and that's why they have to move over the Hocker Falls.
There's a lot of presumption there, isn't there? Yeah, there is. Okay. But as the pair were locked away with little or no hope of, Everyone in the country was speculating about Witness B at this point. The whole country was thinking it was all black. Murray Mechstead, you've heard that one? I have. Yeah? Yeah. I don't know why, but everyone said it was Murray Mechstead.
Various politicians, they were saying, were Special Witness B. Because some thought it was Hudson or Hall.
What, from the cooking duo? Yeah. Why would it be them? I don't know. But didn't people know that this person was in jail? Secret Witness B was in jail. Oh, they thought it was... I remember now. People thought it was Secret Witness B and their name was suppressed because they were a famous person.
Yes. Yes, not because of the... Yeah.
Not because they were a police informant and they were a jail informant.
Yeah. Okay, that's right. Between trials... Defence lawyer Christopher Harder went loose. Went crazy. And he turned into some kind of private investigator searching for Witness B, door knocking, night-time meetings in brown Hondas. In his research, he found all kinds of evidence that Witness B was an extremely dodgy alcoholic.
So he focused on trying to discredit Sigrid Witness B because he knew.
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Chapter 5: How did witness testimonies impact the trials?
Yes. It looks like he's had a shitter. Okay. So the Court of Appeal has therefore got to grant another trial.
Yeah. Justice Hill. Yeah, I'm going to say it. He had a shitter. I agree with you now. I didn't want to say it, but you've bullied me into it. And he had a shitter. And the verdict was overturned by the Court of Appeal due to inadequate direction from the judge. And the second trial was set.
Oh, good. All right. Should we take a break and then come back with the second trial? Let's do that. The second trial is really boring, but the third one's great.
I'm a little bit concerned we're going to have to go into a fifth part of this.
We're going to be okay.
We're going to be okay.
We just need to quickly go to the second trial because it was boring. Okay.
Okay. Second trial. let's put our foot down on the second trial. We'll rush through that.
1991, the second trial.
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Chapter 6: What were the outcomes of the jury's deliberations?
So three years to 13, I mean, there's something going on there. And the fact that, yeah, she can go to university while she's at prison.
And this was all about timing for the defence, as I said, because they couldn't do it in the second trial. They couldn't say that. There was also a dodgy matter of a letter that was discovered by one police officer to another suggesting a red herring. And judges don't like when police officers are talking about red hearings.
Okay, and this is an interesting situation because, as you said before, Stuart Grieve had said, Jury, especially in 1989, trusts the police. They think that the police are good people. They get into it for the right reasons. As we know, looking back at history, that's not always the case. Although you would say that most people probably do. But there still are people inside of the police force.
Of course there are. There are always dodgy people inside of any organisation who will pervert the course of justice to obtain the means that they need to obtain.
Yeah. I mean, I think, and we've talked about this before, I think they sometimes think they've got the right person and they just can't prove it. They go, this people did it. And in this case, in 1989, you find a bonded and disciplined person and a guy that's been in trouble with the law before in a dead body. Then you go, it's probably them. So what was the letter that they found?
What did it say? I'll read the letter out to you. And this is from a police witness that had to read the letter out. We don't have his name. It was suppressed. Ron, he's referring to Inspector Cooper who was working on the case. Please find enclosed a statement I took off a Green Lane woman in relation to the above homicide.
She states she never took a great deal of notice of the case at the time and indeed asked me if the police had ever found a body while I was taking the statement. In view of the more recent publicity regarding Witness B and the appeal. She has decided to come forth with this gem of information.
It does not sound as though it has any relevance when one considers that the time of her hearing a scream would have been around 11.30am on the Saturday. But due to my lack of local knowledge, I have no idea where she was at the time of hearing it. I submit for attachment to the file.
At brightest, we may be able to use it as a red herring at any subsequent retrial as a possibility that it may have been Plumlee Walker screaming for help from the river some eight hours after he was tossed over. Oh, no. So they know it's eight hours. They know that the information is not helpful. Yes. And they're looking for a red herring.
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Chapter 7: What happened to the individuals involved after the trials?
What does it say? Chignall, Walker, freed by jury. Renee Chignall and Neville Walker walked free from the High Court at Auckland last night after a jury cleared them of the murder of Peter Plumley Walker. The pair grinned broadly as Mr Justice Anderson told them they were free to go for the first time in two years. Sighs of relief echoed through courtroom six.
as the seven women and five men of the jury delivered their verdict shortly before 10 o'clock last night. An emotional Walker said outside the court that he was relieved his fight for freedom was over. He said he had no plans for the future, but just wanted to get on with his life. I'm pretty happy there was a 50-50 chance the verdict could have gone either way.
Jubilant relatives and friends who had patiently kept vigil for much of the three-week trial were busy making celebration plans, but Walker said he just wanted to go home. For the lawyers and police involved, it was the end of an exhausting battle which had all begun as a kinky bondage session two years ago when Mr Palmley Walker allegedly told Chignall, I've been naughty and I need to be caned.
Wow, what brilliant writing from the New Zealand Herald there on the 15th of June 1991. So... They walk free. Let's move on now.
Well, what's interesting is you've got to say they didn't even bother trying the torching of the car. It was two years for that, but they'd already served that two years. So in the last murder trial they went and talked about it, they just conceded that. It was silly talking about it because everyone knew everyone had bit at it, that they'd torched the car. So they had spent two years in prison.
So what happens to Renee? So Renee and Neville walk free. Renee, what does she go on to do?
Well, she had her problems with heroin after this, once she was free. Should we take a break and come back with what these guys are doing? Okay, let's take a break and come back on that bombshell, what happened to Renee and Neville and Peter Plumlee Walker. That's interesting.
I wonder what happened to Peter Plumley Walker.
I am hanging on tenterhooks. First I'll tell you basically what I know about Renee Chignall and Neville Walker, what happened to them. Renee Chignall, and then I'll tell you what Peter Plumley Walker got up to after all this. It's not a lot. Spoiler. He didn't really do much after this. Renee Chignall was acquitted, had problems with heroin going forward. She went back on the game.
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Chapter 8: How did this case influence New Zealand's legal landscape?
And in my life, I always imagined her ā as being an innocent sort of victim of the whole thing. But then when you start hearing the detail and, you know, you hear about the setting up of the business and you sort of hear about her life afterwards, you know, rough situation, but... I think there's a grey area all through this. Oh, yeah. That's why it's so interesting.
Yeah, that's why it's so interesting. But one thing you can't deny is that the prosecution didn't prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he was alive when he went into the Hooker Falls, Peter Plumley Walker. And when that's the case, whatever you say about any of it, they didn't prove that across three trials. You know, there's problems in the first trial.
And what you say before, that first trial with the judge messing up the end of it, that was good for them because that jury was very keen to convict them for murder. And if he'd got that summing up right, they could have been in life imprisonment there.
The second trial, you've got that one holdout, and that keeps things going long enough for witness A's testimony to go through her trial so they could then cross-examine her, and also for that letter on the red herring to come up, and also the whole sort of media furore around witness B and the dodginess around that. So...
It took three trials to get them off, but they could have been done in the first trial and they could have been done in the second trial and there never would have been that third trial in which they were acquitted.
Yeah, an interesting thing happened from 1989 to 1991, certainly in the area of law, because after that, police informants were discredited. Also, New Zealand learnt what bondage and discipline was. Now, I don't think before the Peter Plumney Walker trial, most people would have had any idea what that was. Now, after all of this,
A lot of people now in New Zealand know what bondage and discipline was. It was an awakening in a lot of ways for New Zealand.
And even though bondage and discipline isn't strictly prostitution, prostitution was made legal in this country. So if you do believe Neville Walker and Renee Chignall's story, then it might have been more likely for them to call the ambulance at the time because it would have been less dodgy. I mean, they were operating in a dodgy area, weren't they?
And so they were very concerned, if you believe their story, what might happen if you call the police in and someone's died in a bondage and discipline situation as opposed to just a manslaughter situation or a workplace accident, if you know what I'm saying.
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