The Con Introduces: Sea of Lies

Hey everyone, Sarah Chlevin here.

“I'm back in the feed today to tell you about a new podcast that I think you might like.”

It's called the Sea of Lies from CBC's Uncover.

It begins when two fishermen, a father-in-son, find something they were never supposed to find.

The body of a man, a man that the police couldn't identify. Little did they know this unlikely discovery set in motion a series of events they could have never predicted and uncover a massive true story of deception. It's a story of murder, stolen identities, fine art, a diaper bag full of gold bars, and a trail of destruction from rural Canada to coastal England.

So who is the man at the center of it all and how did he finally get on masked? Here's a clip from the first episode of Sea of Lies. And if you like what you hear, the full series is waiting for you right now. Just search for uncover, wherever you get your CBC podcast. We start on a fishing boat with a body brought up from the depths of the English Channel.

I saw the pockets were turned inside, that didn't look right, it just didn't look right.

And looking at it further, I noticed the other 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 Klenahan in a couple of other dev and police officers climbed aboard to collect the body. On an agate, the coast guard raised his hand. I must admit, no, we don't need to move this guy. I said something really weird here.

“I think you'd 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 I asked myself for my father if we'd taken the guy's wallet. Young Craig was sweating at the accusation.

But luckily as 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 areverted. He picked up the guy's arm. Took the watch off his wrist and said it's not real Rolex because it's not working.

At which point it started to take 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. So I was like, "Oh, I'm not going to say anything else."

Well Craig was embarrassing himself after the side. Inspector Klanahan continued looking at the body. There was nothing that kind of smacked me in the faces 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 sea bed. And he was fairly clean other than there. There was no signs of him being involved in an altercation. You know, his shirt was tucked into his trousers. It was all neat.

So you think, "Okay, well, I don't know. 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 in self-count saw in the bulldozerms, 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 okay.”

And then, yeah, we went home and told everything to mother. Every night at 8 p.m., the bells of all saints church chied the tune to abide with me.

The chimes are thought to call home all the souls of the men lost at sea,

“which is to say that Brickson 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.

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.”

That was some of sea of lies from CBC's uncover. All episodes from the series are available now, search for uncover wherever you get your CBC podcasts.

A BBC World Service and CBC podcast production.