Anne Darwin speaks out about helping her husband fake his death

In 2002 Ms Darwin had some heart-wrenching news that was splashed across newspapers.

Her husband John Darwin had died in a tragic canoe accident and she was left a widow.

At least, that was what everybody was led to believe. But Ms Darwin helped her husband fake his own death and she’s revealed in a new book, Out of My Depth, how she went from a housewife, to widower, to prisoner.

JOHN DARWIN’S DEATH

Nobody gave up hope in the search for Mr Darwin.

Parts of his disappearance didn’t add up but there was a determination to find the man who went missing from his canoe.

The rescue operation to uncover Mr Darwin proved unsuccessful, however the couple’s plan to convince people he was dead went off without a hitch.

“What the hell have I done?” Ms Darwin thought to herself as the search was carried out.

She first met Mr Darwin on a bus when they were going to school in the UK, she revealed in her book.

She caught his eye but he left school when she was 14 so she didn’t see him often except for at church some weeks.

Ms Darwin said she then got a job next to John’s house when she was 16 and he would visit her and ask her out regularly but she said no.

“I didn’t feel comfortable about going out with him and I didn’t feel good enough. I suppose I was a bit in awe of him,” she wrote in Out of My Depth.

Mr Darwin never gave up and she finally said yes to a date when she was 20.

They later married and had two sons.

Ms Darwin said her husband was always after a get-rich-quick scheme.

He started to buy properties but the money from the investments wasn’t coming in as he hoped and the debt started to pile up.

Ms Darwin said in her book she was worried about losing everything, but he didn’t listen when she warned him.

They were becoming desperate and he didn’t want to be seen as a failure and file for bankruptcy, and that’s when Ms Darwin said her husband’s ideas became extreme.

He even suggested crashing his Range Rover so they could claim insurance money.

Then there came a moment when the couple thought there was only one solution.

“From time to time he’s mentioned faking his own death, but I didn’t think for a minute he was serious,” Ms Darwin wrote.

“I assumed that sooner or later we’d simply have to file for bankruptcy. But John was serious.”

Mr Darwin began to concoct his death scenario, which allowed him to show up again some years later.

The plan was for Ms Darwin to claim his life insurance money and pay off their debts.

She didn’t want to go along with it, but her husband threatened it was either that or he would actually kill himself.

On March 21, 2002, Mr Darwin put the plan in action and Ms Darwin said she went to work, still shocked she agreed to it.

Mr Darwin pulled it off after spending days looking at weather forecasts so he could time it right.

He pushed himself into rough waves in the canoe and met Ms Darwin at a pick-up point.

He threw his paddle into the water and then took a train across the UK.

“My mind was in turmoil. I was frightened. I was being asked to do something I didn’t want to do and I didn’t know how to get out of it. I knew it was wrong, of course I did, and I knew I’d hurt everyone with the terrible lies I was about to tell,” Ms Darwin wrote.

THE AFTERMATH

Mr Darwin was presumed missing for five years, his two sons believing he died in a tragic boating accident.

After catching the train across the country, he eventually ran out of money and came home and secretly lived with Ms Darwin in 2003.

Around the same time she received a death certificate and was eligible to claim her husband’s life insurance, which helped clear the debts.

Mr Darwin was later recognised by one of the tenants living near the couple but the tenant didn’t tell police.

Mr and Ms Darwin decided to leave the UK in 2004 and Mr Darwin used a fake passport.

Ms Darwin revealed he went to a library and looked through records for an identity.

He found a baby who was born five months before Mr Darwin, but died just five weeks after being born. He used reference numbers to get hold of a birth certificate.

Mr and Ms Darwin visited Cyprus in Europe and then went back to the UK.

In 2006 they decided to move the Panama and looked at buying a house.

They posed for a photo with a Panamanian property agent which was put on the internet and would later unravel their lies.

The couple wanted to set themselves up in Panama and had grand plans to build a mansion with maids and animals.

Ms Darwin went back to the UK in 2007 to sell her home and had plans to visit Panama again later that year.

Ms Darwin’s colleague then became suspicious when she heard a phone conversation between Mr and Ms Darwin and a police investigation began.

It had been five years since Mr Darwin faked his death and he came up with a new plan to end it all.

Their dream life in Panama was no longer as changes to visa laws meant their identities had to be verified by UK police.

Mr Darwin decided he would walk into a police station and claim he had amnesia.

Ms Darwin told him he was crazy and nobody would believe him.

THE REVELATION

“I thought he’d lost his marbles and couldn’t see how he’d ever get away with it. But I also said that if he was intent on doing it, then he should,” Ms Darwin wrote.

But his return would soon unravel all the lies that had been told over the past five years.

There were already some suspicions, starting with Ms Darwin’s colleague, and later when she gave her sons one of Mr Darwin’s books, which was published in 2003, after he supposedly died.

Mr Darwin thought he and his wife could live happily ever after in Panama once he could take on his own identity again.

If they were found out, Ms Darwin planned to say she only discovered the faked death after she made the life insurance claims. Ms Darwin admits there was no better plan.

“He thought they’d [the police] would believe his story and would just be glad to get him off their hands as quickly as possible,” Ms Darwin wrote.

On December 1 2007 Mr Darwin, then in his 50s, acted confused as he walked through a horde of Christmas shoppers back in the UK.

When a shop assistant asked if he was OK he said he lost his wife and children.

A security guard walked him to the police station and Mr Darwin told police “I think I might be a missing person”.

Journalists caught on to this miraculous story of survival and he was probed with questions about where he’d been and what he remembered.

Reporters also tracked Ms Darwin down in Panama, including David Leigh, who went on to write Out of My Depth with Ms Darwin.

She was questioned as to why she was still in Panama and had not returned to the UK to see her husband.

Leigh later asked Ms Darwin if she knew her husband was alive the whole time and she of course denied it.

There were suspicions he faked his own death due to financial problems and Ms Darwin was working with him.

“People can think what they want, I know the truth,” she told the reporter.

Ms Darwin wrote in her book that Leigh filed his story but wrote a note on the top that said “not for publication: This is what Mrs Darwin is claiming — but she’s obviously lying through her teeth”.

Following Leigh’s article, a source emailed him the picture of Mr and Ms Darwin posing for that picture with the property developer in Panama.

It was all over and the couple’s secret double life was about to be exposed.

THE ARRESTS

Leigh wrote in the book that Ms Darwin’s story is heart-wrenching and one of “extreme regret, remorse, shame and finally, redemption”.

After the photo was revealed there was a warrant for Mr Darwin’s arrest.

Police had already started looking into the couple’s financial records before Mr Darwin returned after they were tipped off by Ms Darwin’s suspicious colleagues.

On December 8 he was charged with obtaining life insurance money by deception and making and falsely obtaining a passport.

The next day Ms Darwin was arrested at the Manchester airport in UK and faced charges over obtaining life insurance money by deception.

They were both convicted of fraud and in 2008 Mr Darwin was sentenced to six years and three months in prison while Ms Darwin was put away for six years and six months.

“I knew the situation in which I found myself in was my fault and, other than John, I had no one else to blame,” she wrote.

“But was that really who I’d become? A pathetic, weak woman, unable to make any of my own decisions in life and able to be bullied into doing things, which I knew were wrong in every respect, by an overbearing husband?”

In November 2010 Ms Darwin told her husband their marriage was over and he tried to convince her otherwise.

She was then released from prison in March 2011.

Divorce papers were served and Mr Darwin went on the marry his new Filipina wife.

“After years spent out of my depth, not knowing who to confide in besides my increasingly delusional and unpredictable husband, or where to turn, it was only when I hit rock bottom that I turned my life around,” she wrote.

“It’s never too late to start again.”

Originally published as ‘I helped my husband fake his death’