Dominatrix relives fatal night
Docu-drama outlines cricket umpire’s final hours and watery grave.
The teenage dominatrix convicted then acquitted of murdering a cricket umpire nearly 30 years ago has spoken of her regret at not calling 111 after finding him unconscious and not breathing in a bondage session.
Renee Chignell was 18 when Peter Plumley-Walker died at a $200 bondage session with her in January 1989.
Chignell and her boyfriend, Neville Walker, then 34 — who dumped Plumley-Walker’s body off the Huka Falls — faced three murder trials over the death. They were convicted at the first trial, the jury at a second trial ordered on appeal couldn’t reach a verdict, and the pair were acquitted at a third trial.
The Crown claimed PlumleyWalker was still breathing when thrown off the Huka Falls. But the jury in the latter trial agreed the 51-yearold had died accidentally during the bondage session.
Chignell, now 47, has opened up on the case that shocked the country in the docu-drama, Mistress, Mercy: The Renee Chignell Story, broadcast on TVNZ 1 tonight.
Chignell spoke of her horror at seeing Plumley-Walker — who was chained up — in distress when she checked on him. “I can’t even put words into how I felt when I saw him.
“I remember screaming out to Neville. He came in. I was getting him down on to the floor.”
But she said it was Walker who decided not to call for medical help.
“I insisted to Neville that we phone the ambulance . . . this man needed help, he definitely needed help,” Chignell said. “Neville was trying to help with the chest compressions. If I could turn everything back, by God we would have been on the phone straight away.
“I don’t understand why I listened. 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.”
Plumley-Walker had booked the bondage session at Chignell’s Remuera townhouse, where she lived with Walker, on the day his divorce was settled.
Chignell said Plumley-Walker told her he had been “naughty” and “needed to be disciplined”.
Plumley-Walker was told to say “mercy, mistress mercy” as a safe phrase to end the session.
“I would say: ‘Slave, I’m going out of the room, you’re to behave, you know I will be back soon’,” Chignell said. “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.”
She said there was nothing to suggest Plumley-Walker was struggling with the session or his health.
But after taking a break she found him unconscious and not breathing.
“I would thought that have if he was having any problems he would have yelled out or made some noise,” she said. “I would have heard the chains shaking.”
Chignell and Walker put PlumleyWalker’s body in his car boot and drove it to Huka Falls, near Taupo. “The next thing I knew that we were in the car driving down,” Chignell said. “I remember a lot of crying. Just being so overwhelmed with the whole situation.”
At Huka Falls they hurled the cricket umpire into the surging water. Plumley-Walker’s body was found several days later, and the police launched a major operation that enthralled the country.
In the docu-drama, Chignell recalled hearing the guilty verdict at the first trial in 1989: “I can hear my mother calling out to me, telling me that she loves me.”
At the third trial In mid-1991, when Chignell and Walker were acquitted, she remembered “just being so thankful, so thankful”. Meanwhile, Walker’s former defence lawyer, Christopher Harder, yesterday continued shooting his own planned “big screen movie” on the case — which has a working title of Twitching by the Falls. The first shoot took place in December 2017. Harder refused to be interviewed for TVNZ’s Mistress, Mercy production.
Mistress, Mercy: The Renee Chignell Story
tonight, 8.30pm is on TVNZ 1