Memoir Mystery: The Blockbuster True Story That Maybe Wasn't True At All

At Morrison's, we've got everything you need to cook up a fuss for your mum this Mother's Day. Pick up a whole British chicken fresh from Market Street for half price. Was £5? Now just £2.50. Now that's a hot deal. Marissa's to shop at Morrison's. Majority of stores online, chicken £1.45 to £1.65 kilos, and 15th March. Every case file, interview and archive tells a piece of the truth. I'm Kylie Lo and on my podcast, Dark Down East, original reporting is at the heart of every case I cover. I don't just retail crime stories, I investigate them. I'm speaking with families, searching court records, and piecing together the facts that have been overlooked and forgotten with time. The result? True crime storytelling that digs as deeply into a case as you do. You can listen to Dark Down East wherever you get your podcasts. Camside media. Hello? What is this? What do you want me to say? It's just I. Camille, yeah. Camille and Weekly. Oh. It's early 2025, and a middle-aged woman named Rainer Wynn is appearing on a British talk show to talk about the salt path, a film based on her memoir set just over a decade earlier. My husband, Moth and I were living in a little home in Wales, the place we built and restored over 20 years. Imagine a rickety old farmhouse at the end of a quaint village with vegetables growing in garden and sheep bleeding against a backdrop of looming grey green hills. This is where they spent years building a life, raised their children, and hoped to grow old together. But in the background to that, we've had a financial dispute with a lifetime friend that ended up... You can't say it, but I can. You've got a condo over that, yeah. This is Jason Isaacs of White Lotus and Harry Potter fame, who's playing Rainer's husband, Moth, in the film. Rainer herself is played by the great Jillian Anderson. They gave us just a few days to move out, pack 20 years of life, and in that week, Moth had what we thought was going to be just a routine hospital appointment, but it turned out to be anything but, and he's diagnosed with a new degenerative condition, got us no treatment and no cure. Cortico-Basel degeneration, or CBD, is a devastating, progressive disease similar to Parkinson's. It's extremely rare, very serious, and very fast acting. CBD quickly leaves people unable to live a normal life. Faced with a double whammy of Moth's bleak prognosis and finding themselves homeless, the winds could have imploded into spare. Instead, they decided to do something unexpected, extraordinary, actually, especially given a diagnosis for Moth that would result in serious and imminent physical collapse. Avoid the stairs. They said they didn't know. Yeah, they did say that was going to be a bicycle, could give us really, it was don't get too tired, we care for long stairs, so we walked 630 miles. Rainer is not joking here. She says they did walk 630 miles. In that walk along the so-called Southwest Coast Path, England's Longish National Trail, is the subject of the salt path. The book was a smash hit bestseller and made Rainer win very famous, even before Hollywood came knocking. It's really hard to overestimate how huge she was, like what kind of a literary superstar she was in this country. She was everywhere. She has sold more than 2 million copies of her first book. This is Chloe Hajimuthaeu, an investigative journalist who works for the UK's observer newspaper. There wasn't a chat show so fresh she wasn't on. A literary festival she hadn't appeared at, a podcast she hadn't done. She was everywhere. And she was telling this story again and again, as the story of what happened to her and her husband. This was their truth. Their journey and what happened on that long walk clearly struck a chord with the British public. The book was more than just a bestseller. It was a phenomenon. Coming out of lockdown, this book is released. And I think that kind of plays a part in its popularity because we're all locked down in our homes. Everybody knows somebody who's sick, people are dying. It's like a terrible time. You know, they lose their home. They find out he's dying. And instead of sort of being knocked sideways by this, they put rock sucks on. And they decide to walk 630 miles all along the southwest coast of the UK of our island. I've been to Cornwall. I've actually done very small parts of this walk. It's not the Rockies of the Alps, but it's still a daunting trek, along an often damp, frequently windblown coast. They meet people along the way. Lots of people score them because they're homeless. They've got this really restricted diet. They're constantly hungry. And then this kind of secular miracle happens where the combination of the walk, the immersion in nature and I think also importantly their love mean that his symptoms start dissipating and where he was finding it difficult to sort of get his coat on and put his rock sack on by himself and he needed help. By the end, he's like lifting their tent above his head and suddenly physically he's rejuvenated. The walk, as told by Rainer, didn't just cure their ailing souls. It practically cured Moths condition or greatly slowed it to the extent that he seemed cured. It's about knowing what's really important in life, what's real as your relationship, what's real as your connection to nature and your sort of grit and determination. Rainer's first book, The Smash Hit Salt Path, is quickly followed by two more in the same vein, long walks, great determination and moth defying the odds of his prognosis. Incredible stories of a couple on hard times turning their lives around against the odds through nothing more than love, hope and determination. It was inspirational to millions of readers and the most inspirational thing about it was that this was the couple's true story. One of the special things for me being part of it, I know it's true for Gillian as well, is that most stories are stories where you used to them. They're well told, they're well structured, you know, scripted from the beginning, you're thinking, well, I know roughly where it's going to be, I know it's going to pay off and know what, but everything that happens in it is something that happened on their journey, which is such an unusual experience as an audience member. Only, maybe things didn't go down exactly as Jason Isaacs and Julian Anderson and millions of others were led to believe. The whole thing starts with a tip off and they essentially said, look, I've met the author and her husband and something's not right. I'm Josh Dean and this is Camillean, a show about people who have something to hide. This week, the story of the salt path, an extraordinary tale that's hiding more extraordinary tale. Some cases fade from headlines, some never made it there to begin with. I'm Ashley Flowers and on my podcast The Deck, I tell you the stories of cold cases featured on playing cards distributed in prisons designed to spark new leads and bring long overdue justice because these stories deserve to be heard and the loved ones of these victims still deserve answers. Are you ready to be dealt in? Listen to The Deck now wherever you get your podcasts. This is Camillean, the weekly. Part of being a journalist is that you pretty commonly get tips from friends in the industry, from sources you've met along the way, but often from strangers, members of the general public. But the vast majority of these tips don't go anywhere. Like I get so many of these and essentially, they're mostly people who have gripes against somebody they know. It very rarely leads to something, but you follow them just in case, you check in with them, you try and find out what somebody's trying to tell you. And what Chloe's source who remains anonymous was telling her on this occasion was that he or she knew this couple that Moth was not nearly as sick as described in the book and that Moth and Rainer Winn were not even their real names. This person said to me, the first thing I'm going to give you is their real names. I know what I to use pseudonyms all the time, but normally you get on Wikipedia and you can find out their real names, right? These names were nowhere. Their real names are Tim and Sally Walker. Get it? I mean, why would you change your name from Walker if you're writing a book about walking? I mean, this was literally my first thought, even before Chloe highlighted it. So the journalist and me is going, hang on a minute, something's up here. Why are their names not public? Chloe's interested now. So she calls up some neurologists, people who could give her information on corticobasal degeneration. Moth's very rare and apparently dangerous neurological condition. Nobody knows of a case of somebody with this neurological condition that's got to over eight years. That's not severely disabled in a wheelchair needing 24 hour care. Meanwhile, Moth has apparently had this condition for 18 years. And he looks fine. He's not in a wheelchair. He's able to walk. He can do his shoelaces up and his buttons up. So there's nothing obviously wrong with him. Chloe's editor wisely suggests caution. Health records are private. It's going to be very difficult to prove that someone doesn't have a condition he claims to have. And he doesn't want to launch a whole investigation of a beloved book based off a single tip. He suggests that Chloe simply call Moth and ask him, what? Hang on a minute. I want to get stuck into an investigation, only go to him when I've got all the juice. And he was like, no, I think he should just ask him. There was some logic to this. If Chloe's source was wrong or simply had an axe to grind, this could be very embarrassing for her. Not to mention cruel, if Moth really was that sick, I approach Rona and Moth straight away and say, look, I'm really interested in this miraculous recovery. Your movie's about to come out. I'd love to interview you about how Moth has recovered and they said, no. I sort of said, all right, well, could you show me some medical records? I know they're private. I wouldn't publish them. But what I'd love to see is how this miraculous recovery has been documented. And then I can tell my readers about it. And they just stop responding to me at that point. That doesn't prove anything that they don't want to engage with me, but it certainly doesn't prove he does have it. Chloe's source had another piece of useful information. The address of the house, the walkers had lost when they became homeless. It was in North Wales, near Putheli. The home was now being rented out by another woman. So I don't stay there. And I start chatting to her and she says, yes, it's really funny when I moved in here. There were loads of letters coming for Tivine Sally Walker, loads of debt. They had a lot of debt. They were bay lifts letters, lay payment letters, all kinds of things. In small villages like this, nothing stays secret. Everyone talks and knows each other's business. The rumor is she stole loads of money from her employer. She worked for an estate agent, Proketeer Savaeer. And she stole a lot of money and got away with it. And a estate agent is what we call a real estate agent here in the US. Someone who represents buyers and sellers of property. So I go to all the estate agents in town and eventually somebody says, oh, you want to talk to Janice? She used to work in the estate agent here. So there's always somebody called Janice in the story that's got all the gossip, right? Janice confirms the rumors that Rainer win, pardon Sally Walker stole money from her employer back when she and Moth had lived in town. And she knows exactly who Chloe needs to speak to next. The man who ran the estate agents that Sally Walker worked for, Martin Hemings was his name, has died. But his widow, Raaz, is still alive. You know, she's this 70 year old living in rural Wales in the middle of nowhere. And I'm calling her at this point from London. And I said, look, this must be a bit weird for you. I'm a journalist working for the Observer News paper on doing an investigation. I think you might be able to help me with. You probably have no idea what this is about. And she said, oh, no, I have a pretty good idea. Raaz had been waiting for years for someone to call. She said, I think I know who this is about. They've changed their names, haven't they? Back in 2008, Sally Walker had been working as a bookkeeper for Martin Hemings for about seven years. It was a family business. It was a really small affair. They would have like Christmas lunches together. And Martin's wife Raaz worked at a stately home nearby, where Tim, aka Moth, also worked as a gardener. The two couples were close. The Hemings couldn't understand why the real estate business wasn't making any money. One day, Martin asked Sally to pay a moderately small amount into the bank. It was less than $1,000 in US money. The next day, he notices that it's not in the account. So he calls the bank manager, who says it was never paid in. And what's more, someone other than Martin has been signing off on checks, which prompts the two to look in some detail into the accounts. And they look and over the last few months, they could see that 9,000 pounds was missing. So they call Sally and say, look, we're investigating this. You just got to stay at home, don't come to work. And she appears within days with the money. And says, I'm so sorry. I borrowed it. I always intended to pay it back. She's crying. Please don't involve the police. Martin is upset, as you would imagine, but he agrees to settle the matter and move on. They've known Sally for years and they have their money back. But still, he and his wife are worried. So Ra's and Martin Hemings decide to take a closer look at the company's finances. They spend months going over the books from the whole time Sally had worked for them. And what they find is bad. $60,000 pounds missing. This time, they report the missing money. The police arrest her and they search the house and they question her on allegations of theft and fraud. And she just says no comment. And at the end of the day, it's a small Welsh town. They say to her, go home and come back tomorrow. But she doesn't come back the next day. She vanishes. The police later find Sally's car just over an hour's drive from their home. And land did no on the North Wales coast. Apparently a distressed Tim Walker had a hunch she might have gone to sky off the Northwest tip of Scotland. It's where the couple were married. It sounds like it was quite distressing. And the police in the Isle of Sky spent some time looking for her. They couldn't find her. She'd actually gone to London to meet a relative of Tim's and asked him for money in order to pay back the stolen funds. Sally persuaded this person to lend her a hundred thousand pounds and put their house up as collateral. She then goes back to the Hemings and says she will pay all the money back as long as they will call off the police investigation and sign a non disclosure agreement. The Hemings accept this. They just want a quiet life. They don't need a court case. This is a chance to get their money back. And the police decide eventually not to prosecute. Problem solved for Sally Walker. Sort of. Although now she's out of a job and she owes someone a hundred grand. And unfortunately for the walkers this relative goes bust. Which means his debt is transferred to someone else. And this entity wants the money back. Money that the walkers not surprisingly don't have. They're taking the court and giving a year to repay the loan. Which they don't do. And so in summer of 2013 the house is repossessed. 2013 was the year that the walkers under the pseudonyms Rainer and Mothwin began their coastal walk. It just turns out the back story wasn't quite what they told the world. Although they had lost their home. Rogues, vagabonds and vagrants. Rainer win rights in the salt path. However you classify the homeless in the summer of 2013 we became two of their number. But there's more to this part of the story as well. When I went and stayed in their house in Wales they were getting all these late payments and debt collection letters. And one of the letters was coming from officials in France. I was like what the hell? So I took it to a colleague at work whose French and he said no that's property tax. You would only get that if you own a property in France. So I go to France and follow this and sure enough Sally and Tim Walker own a property in France. You know I think most homeless people on the streets of America or the UK would not have a property in France. Chloe's first investigation on the salt path scandal came out at the beginning of July 2025. My editor-in-chief sort of took a risk and he put the story on the front page. But it just went insane and he called me later that day and said I think he'd broken the internet. This may seem like an odd choice for a front page story on one of the UK's biggest newspapers. But the reason this was news speaks to just how big the phenomenon of reiner and moth winds adventures had become. How deeply the country's readers have become invested in their story. Every newspaper, every outlet was copying it. So I have to admit I was writing on a bit of a high. I was like wow you know this is cool. I've never had a story that's gone so viral. Some people were appalled by the revelations that they'd been duped but others responded differently. There were some people who were writing who thought that I was being cruel, who saw reiner win and moth as kind of vulnerable people and saw what I was doing as an attack. And people who just also just thought like it was a great book who cares if it's true or not. You know people are dying in Gaza why are you bothering with this novel, this or this memoir? It is a story that had changed people's lives, given them hope. On some level why did all this other stuff really even matter? And then suddenly in the middle of all of this I get this message and it says dear Chloe my name is John I have corticat basal degeneration and he says I read the salt path and I got a lot of hope from that book and your article has now extinguished that hope. I think I can live with it but I'm not sure my wife can. And it was like such a blow if there's one thing that will bring you back down to her that's a message like that I can tell you. If a story gives people hope does it matter if the author used a bit of artistic license? Rainer did not speak to Chloe at any point. She communicated only through lawyers and via a statement on her blog. Rainer and moth are, she said, names that many people know them by and when is her maiden name. She maintained that moth was truly sick and had not lied about his illness but also noted that a lot is still unknown about the condition and that symptoms present in an atypical way. Though she was sorry for any mistakes she'd made in her job. She claimed the Hemmings were as keen as she was to come to an agreement and that it was done on a non-admission basis. She described their home in France as quote an uninhabitable ruin in a bramble patch which they had not visited since 2007. They were homeless after the house was taken by debtor she says and so the central premise of the book was true. She also wrote, as our walk along the salt path taught us, when life has ground you into the dirt, you need to stand up, turn your face to the wind and continue underfraid. And what becomes clear is that they did set out and do some walking in the summer of 2013 soon after their house was repossessed. But where's the line between a story that takes some liberties and a work of fiction? That's after the break. Some cases fade from headlines. Some never made it there to begin with. I'm Ashley Flowers and on my podcast The Deck, I tell you the stories of cold cases featured on playing cards distributed in prisons designed to spark new leads and bring long overdue justice. Because these stories deserve to be heard and the loved ones of these victims still deserve answers. Are you ready to be dealt in? Listen to The Deck now wherever you get your podcasts. This is Camillean Weekly. In the summer of 2025, everyone was talking about the revelations revealed by Chloe Hajimahthaeu and the observer. Online forums like Reddit and Mumsnet have at this point exploded after my first article. Everybody had an opinion and it had left people with more questions and answers. If the origin story of the walk wasn't entirely true, what actually did happen out there? Everybody is playing it detective trying to work out what happened in the salt path. It's really kicking off and now I'm being contacted by people who say, I think I'm one of the people that she describes in The Deck. The Parsons are a married couple with a story that's eerily similar to the winds. They'd lost their home after the husband was injured and could no longer walk. And they traveled from Australia to walk the southwest coast path in honor of another friend who was dying. And they were blogging at the time and posted a photo and said, we've met this lovely couple Sally and Tim on our walk. It's a shame we were going in opposite directions. It would have been lovely to walk with them. This is mentioned in the salt path and the Parsons were disappointed with how the book had described the encounter. It didn't ring true. And there was one detail they found particularly confusing. They had done their walk in 2015, two years later than the walk in the salt path. Then in 2018, after the book was published, they spotted Tim and Sally in a magazine. So they email Sally, she's got a website with her email and they say, hey Sally, we couldn't believe it. You've written a book. How cool is that? But why are you using weird names? And why did you say that you walked two years before you did? And why did you say in the book that you were going in the opposite direction than the direction we saw you going in? Sally responds, she says they actually walked throughout again a couple of years later. So at this point when I'm piecing it together, I'm like, okay, it seems like they did not do the walk as they described. At very least, they did the walk across several years it looks like. Chloe is the first to acknowledge that none of this is a crime and that people exaggerate tales in alleged memoirs quite often. But a pattern was emerging. There's a man named Bill Cole. He read the book, was moved, and it gave him an idea. Bill had experienced some success in life. He just bought his dream home, a citer farm in Southwest England. But his wife was seriously ill and they needed to be near a hospital. The country was just too far from the car she needed. Bill had never met the winds, but he reached out and offered them a place to live, cheap rent, and exchanged for looking after the farm, and maybe making some citer. So Rayna Winner must move there for four years when wrote his second and third book there. In Win's second book, Wild Silence, Bill is clearly the character called Tom. A man described as having, quote, the clean soft hands of an office worker and, quote, whose hands appeared never to have seen dirt. The real life Bill says the couple were excited about tending to the farm, even planned to work on rewilding the land. But it didn't play out that way. There were some weird things going on, like they just weren't making citer, and they weren't really looking after the farm properly in the orchard, says Bill. Eventually, they left the farm entirely to do another walk, a thousand mile trek from Scotland to Cornwall, leaving the orchard unattended. And Bill co-kind of gets the courage up to brooch them and says, look guys, you know, what do you think about making some citer? You know, on my cider farm. And at that point, Moth says to him, unfortunately, I've been to see the doctor and he says I shouldn't plan after Christmas. And this is October. It sounds like Moth is saying he has only a few weeks to live. And Bill is absolutely devastated by this. And says, oh my god, don't worry about the farm. Don't worry about the cider. Forget it all. Just you concentrate on your health. That summer, Win's third book, Landlines was published. It told the story of that long walk from Scotland to Cornwall. At the beginning of the book, Moth gets a brain scan that confirms his diagnosis. He surely doesn't have much time. But by the end, after the walk, he has another scan. He's in the clear. And neuro just says, wow, now your brain looks like that of a normal person. The miracle of Moth's convalescence is complete. Only something doesn't add up. When Bill pieces it together, the second brain scan, in which he's being told apparently that he is clear of the disease, that is happening around the same time that Moth is saying to him, I've been told not to plan after Christmas. And he's like, what? What the hell is going on here? And so he approaches Rainer and says, like, can you kind of, can we meet up and discuss it? And she doesn't really want to talk about it. She doesn't engage with him. There's another strange detail too. Celebrity chef Rick Stein came to the farm to shoot an episode of his TV series. Since he arrived here, Moth has thrown himself into the art of traditional cider making. And I'm overjoyed to see that he's still got my old friend, the apple press, on the go. Stein's crew filmed Moth making cider by hand, using traditional grinding stone apple presses. A screw thread in the attic is turned by hand to lower the press, piling 80 tons of pressure onto the straw cheese below. By the way, this isn't the cheese you're thinking, the kind made for milk. It's the name for the material that the apple juice trickles through. Anyway, this is not the type of physical labor you'd expect from someone who is supposedly dying. And also not something Moth had actually been doing much of anyway, according to Chloe and Bill Cole. I for one never thought we would find ourselves in a situation where we'll be working on the land again. That for me personally, that feeds my soul. And to somehow find our way in this valley here at Hay is somewhat quite miraculous. Watching this episode, Bill must have felt very confused. It just did not jive with reality. Seeing the way it's made, it's going to taste better. So special. It smells of old farms. Old orchids. And just when he's kind of at his most confused, they send him an email saying, we've decided to terminate our tenancy. We're moving on. Moth isn't well and this doesn't suit his physical needs anymore. And they go like that. Bill goes down to say goodbye, they've already gone, the keys are under the mat. No forwarding address. That's it. The observer published several articles over the summer of 2025. Taken together, they thoroughly questioned the relationship between Rainer Winds' truth, as told in her books, and the actual truth. And for the first time, the salt path was facing a real public scrutiny. And at this point, Chloe assumed it was over. The book had been out for years. She'd shown how the walkers really lost their home, exposed holes in the story of the walk, and raised serious doubts about Moth's health. Then, a new email arrived. The walker's extended family is large, and both sides of the family spent time together at Tim and Sally's house in Wales. And in the wake of Chloe's reporting, certain members were starting to come out of the woodwork. This relative puts them in touch with another relative. Sally Walker's niece, who had quite the story to tell. Tim's parents noticed that they didn't have any money in their bank account. They were a retired couple, and all their savings were gone. And they go to the bank and they start researching. And it becomes clear that Sally Walker has stolen money from their bank account. This was a serious allegation. After everything else, it now looked as though Sally had not just taken money from a previous employer. She'd also stolen from her husband's parents. But this was an allegation from just a single source, and Chloe didn't feel she had enough to run the story. It's just hearsay, and also you also don't know if you're getting involved in family disputes. And then at some point, I managed to trace the woman that Sally and Tim Walker stayed with in the winter, who had offered them this meatpacking shed in the book during the winter of their walk. In the salt path, Rainer describes the place as a quote, meatpacking shed. And apparently it once was. But by the time the walkers were living there, it was fully habitable, hot water, carpets, everything. And this woman had let them live their rent-free for 18 months during the time they said they were homeless. She's a very bright, intelligent woman, but she's not worldly. She's grown up on a farm. She's rarely been to the city. She's never spoken to a journalist. She's very, very nervous. And I say to her to try and persuade her, look, I believe that the walkers may have been involved in more wrongdoing than I've published about. I believe they may have stolen money from Tim's parents. And she says, oh, I know all about that. And I'm like, what? The woman is skittish, but eventually she agrees to meet Chloe. And it's very secret squirrel. She wants to meet in a service station off a motorway, several hours from London. And the first thing she says to me is, before I tell you anything, this will tell you everything that you need to know. And she poses me a plastic folder with a load of letters in it. The letters appear to be from Sally Walker to her mother and sister. One of these letters is addressed to her sister and it begins with, stop looking for the money, I've taken it all of it. Please don't go to the police because the police have a record of me. As in from her previous case with the estate agent Martin Hemings. And I'm scared that this time I will go to prison. And essentially it looks like a confession letter. The letter lays out how Sally stole money from the Hemings, how she borrowed money to cover her tracks and lost their home, how she stole 25,000 from Tim's parents. And then... Some time after that, I took 12,000 pounds from Mum's account. And the reason Mum hasn't been able to work it out is because I've been forging her bank statements. It ends with, this may not be much comfort to you, but I feel so much better having written this letter. She says, I'm sorry, I love you, I didn't mean to hurt you. There's no real acknowledgement of the distress she's caused. Chloe had been on the story for months by this point, and this document felt too good to be true. A confession letter? No way. Like, this is our big set up here, there's no way this is true. Most of the letters were written in what looks like Rainer's handwriting and did seem to back up the main confession. But the confession letter, the smoking gun, was typed, which made Chloe even more cautious. I end up speaking to, in the end, four relatives on Sally Walker's side and four relatives on Tim Walker's side. And some of these people are not that well connected with each other. It's not reasonable to think that these people have coordinated their stories. And the two sides of the family haven't seen each other in over 20 years, and they decide to come to London and meet each other for the first time. In a way, in material of whether or not that confession letter is true, and because it's typed and it's so convenient, a little part of me is like, yeah, I have eight witnesses who all corroborate the story that's contained in that confession letter. So in a way, whether or not the confession letter is true, those witnesses on their own were enough for me to publish. Chloe filmed this meeting. It's all part of a documentary that came out in December 2025 on the UK's Sky Network. It's really worth a watch. She tried again to contact Sally Walker's last Rainer win and win, sticking with that pseudonym for her public statements denied everything through lawyers mostly and also occasionally on her blog. In which she says, I never stole any money. I did not write that confession letter. I'm being attacked and it's been horrible for me and my husband essentially. He is dying from corticobasal degeneration. That is a fact. One day over the summer, Chloe was at a lake with her family. So I just got there and I got a phone call from the BBC saying, what do you have to say about Rainer win statement? And I was like, what statement? And they said, check out her website. She's published these medical letters and my heart sank and I thought, oh, imagine if I've got this wrong. Imagine if I've accused a dying man of lying about his illness. So I took a deep breath and I thought, okay, I'm going to go for a swim and catch my breath and then I'm going to come back and I had a phone call from my editor who said, have you seen the letters? And I said, yes, I'm not thought, either he's going to suck me here or and he said, I'm not concerned. Chloe and the observer had the letters assessed by a specialist. The specialist read the letter and he said to me, no, this is not a diagnosis here. This is a neurologist saying, I don't know what's wrong with you. I can't work it out. Some of your symptoms seem to be matching this condition, but there's also an acknowledgement that you've been around for too long for it to be this. So don't worry about it. Don't panic. Chloe, I should say, also talk to numerous neurologists and specialists in this condition herself, both when she began the reporting and then when Rainer posted these letters. The neurologist that I've spoken to says, these letters released by Rainer win do not amount to any kind of diagnosis. Now we come to what is possibly the most astonishing twist in this whole story. While Chloe was deep into her reporting, she learned that some years earlier, Rainer win, slash Sally Walker had written a novel. Only around 250 copies were ever printed and it was nearly impossible to track one down, but when Chloe finally got her hands on one, she couldn't believe what she was reading. It's about a couple who moved to a house in Wales and she gets a job doing the books for an estate agent and she steals lots of money and she's arrested and she flees to London where she gets alone from a rich friend of her husbands. The loan is put against her house and eventually they lose their home. I mean, wow. That's the fiction in case you're confused. That's the fiction. To Chloe, it read basically like another kind of confession, as well as I should note, basically a summary of everything she'd uncovered in her reporting. She acknowledges that she wrote the novel and she says it's crime fiction. It's like thanks for the genre, I could have worked that out myself, but it's obviously based on her live story. The novel is the true story and the memoir looks like it's made up. And that raises a big question. How was the salt path and alleged true story allowed to be published in the first place? How was it made into a film? Did no one do any due diligence here? I went to their publisher Penguin. I went to her literary agent. I went to the film producers. No comment from the film producers. I tried to get in touch with Gillian Anderson, Massifan. I said to her agent, glass of wine off the record, no. I didn't take the bait. The response from Penguin when it came was tucked behind a paywall in an industry magazine. And what it said was, we did our due diligence. We believed our author. No one ever raised concerns. But Sally Walker's niece told me that she had called Penguin twice to try and raise concerns, but she didn't know who to speak to. She called the switchboard. She didn't get through to anyone. Somebody eventually said to her, send us the letters, but she felt there was no context to the letters. She was scared when she gets sued. And in the end, she just never went anywhere. But nobody took it seriously enough to say to her, can you come and meet us? We want to hear your story. Like, she didn't feel that she was kind of listened to. It's easy to imagine a publisher believing they've done what's required of them. They do, generally, trust authors to tell the truth, especially when it's a memoir. I think it's fair to expect publishers to be investigative journalists, you know, go down the whales and start digging and stuff like that like I did. Still, there's a striking disclaimer in the salt path, specifically about its health claims, as if someone somewhere was at least a little concerned. And the bigger picture here is, as is often the case, that there was money to be made, lots and lots of money. And here's the thing, Chloe's investigation has done nothing to dampen that. Here's the rob, though. My investigation put her book back up at the top of the charts. My dad, I published and he was like, I had no idea about this book. I went straight out and bought it. I was like, Dad, but that's what people were doing. People who would have never read the book were like, this is fascinating. What is all this about this book? They ran out and bought it. And so she's got a fourth book that was ready for publication just a couple of months after my initial article was published. And Penguin said, because of the distress the author is going through, we've made a decision to delay publication. And now the book, you can pre-order it. And it's got a date set for October 2026. I mean, why would Penguin pull the book? Because the truth is, people still want to read Rainer Wind. Even if many of them know, it's not a real name or story. And maybe that's the real paradox at the heart of this tale, that the memoir may not be factually true, but it speaks to something people want to be true, something they need to believe. And on some level, might speak to a truth, I guess, that goes beyond facts. She has maintained all the way through. The books that I wrote are the true story of minor mosquins, which is essentially your truth, my truth. What is the truth? This is my truth. There's a difference, of course, between emotional truth and actual truth. That's important. I think there's a problem when your truth bots up against facts. And, you know, on the one hand, there's the public interest issue of people like John, the man with corticobasal degeneration who contacted me and said, you know, I was given hope. And when somebody who's dying is allowed to believe that they may have a lot longer left than they actually do, there's a real danger there that the short time that they've got, they waste. Because they think they've got more time and then this window closes and they're not able to do the things that they needed to do, the things that were important to them in the bit of time that they had. So you could potentially be robbing people of something really important. Memoir specifically feels like one of the last honest places. These are deeply personal stories told from the heart. In the modern world, I think we know that we're being lied to. We've got clever to disinformation around us, right? Politicians lied to us, some of the media lies to us, I'm a woman and the beauty industry lies to me, the health industry you're being lied to everywhere and we're kind of savvy to this, but you pick up a memoir and you're not expecting it from that and you kind of open your heart to a story. And I think when that ends up being lies, then I think it's another kind of assault on truth in modern life and I think that matters. By creating her own version of events, Rainer Wynn didn't just shape her own truth. She erased other peoples. What her family and people like Rose Hemmings, the wife of her former employer would say is that her version of events has cancelled theirs, their truth. And so they felt really gaslit by her story because they think it's not true and she's made a lot of money out of it. She's made millions. Sally Walker, still going by the name Rainer Wynn, has a big contract with a publisher, an active public speaking career, and lives in a 12-bedroom house in Cornwall. She's a producer on that film with Jason Isaacs and Jillian Anderson. She's even in a band, a folk group called Gig Spanner, who she tours with, putting her words to music. I'm sure plenty of people in the UK are upset with her. She may even be cancelled in certain crowds. But Rainer Wynn is still performing, still publishing, still beloved by many readers. There are still people that support her and Moth, who really still see them as victims, as vulnerable people who are under attack. And there are quite a few people like that. And she says on her website, she thinks all the messages of support that she's had. And I've also been attacked, you know, for being an unscrupulous journalist, for going after her personal story when that's not important. Part of what I'm trying to get at, the ultimate sort of core of the onion that I'm unpeeling, is who is Rainer Wynn, who is Sally Walker, who are Tim and Sally? This couple, who are they really? And I think I've got a version of them told to me by family, and a version of them told to me by people that used to know them and have known them since they become famous. If this story has intrigued you and you want to go much deeper, look out for Chloe's new podcast, The Walkers, The Real Salt Path, from Taurus Investigates and The Observer. It's a deep and thoughtful culmination to all her reporting on the Salt Path mystery. Chloe feels, or at least hopes, that she has finally done with this story. There's just one final it she loved to scratch, if given the chance. Really, I would love to interview her and to talk to her and sit in a room with her and understand how she squares all of this, but yeah, she's declined by invitation. Camillean is a production of Campside Media and Audio Chuck. It's hosted by me, Josh Dean, and was written by me and Joe Barrett. It was produced by Joe Barrett. Our associate producer is Emma Siminoff. Sound Design and Mix by Tiffany Dimack. Theme by Ewin Lattermuyon and Mark McAdams. A production manager is Ashley Warren. Campside's executive producers are Vanessa Gregorioires, Matt Cher and me, Josh Dean. And finally, if I can ask a few favors before sending you on your way today, please rate, follow, and review Camillean on your favorite podcast platforms to help spread the word. I know everyone says this, but it's true. Ratings and reviews really do help. And if you have any feedback tips or story ideas, you can email us at CamilleanPod at CampsideMedia.com or leave us a message at a special number we've set up. 2021 743-8368. Add a plus one if you're outside North America. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next week. I think Chuck would approve.