Original subtitles

I'm going to fake my death.

Don't let me down now.

Please, please.

I think my husband might be missing.

Where's the last place anyone would ever think of looking?

Next bloody door!

To be honest with you, Anne, this is pretty much case closed for us now.

I can now declare John Darwin missing.

presumed dead

pretending

you were dead is quite easy coming back to life is as everyone knows

slightly more difficult

My name's Craig Clark Darby.

I was one of the sergeants based out of West End Central Police Station.

On that particular day, a very junior officer came to me and said, Sarge, I

think we've got a bit of a nutter here.

There's a man here saying he doesn't know who he is.

We went down and there was this middle-aged male.

clean, not smelling, clearly had relatively new clothes.

He's normally what you see as a victim.

So I asked him who he was.

His reply was, I don't know.

So we're saying, well, we need a name.

And then it was like, ooh, maybe my name's John.

Okay, John, we need a little bit more than that.

And then it was like, ooh, maybe my name's John Darwin.

And then we put that through the police database, and then a lot of flags

started flying.

The database said this man was missing, presumed dead.

We phoned Anne Darwin, but she seemed to have a very monotone reaction to finding

out her long-dead husband was alive.

But we were not going to let the family know that we were incredibly suspicious

of this tanned individual who's just strolled into our front office claiming

that he doesn't know who he is.

Seton Carew was a very sort of small, sort of insular community, really.

It's halfway between Hartlepool and then the heavy industry of Teesside that you

can see on the horizon.

I am Zoltar, at your service.

At one point it was very grand, now it's sort of decayed elegance.

But there's some lovely, really large houses.

And, of course, in one of them, overlooking the sea, right on the

seafront, was where John Darwin lived.

John and Anne, they were just two ordinary people in fairly sort of

ordinary jobs.

She worked for a doctor's surgery.

He was a prison officer, and they had two grown-up sons who had both left

home. the kind of people you'd pass on the street every day and not look twice

at, really.

I was working for the prison service for 19 years when John Darwin disappeared.

He was always polite. He was never nasty.

He was just lazy.

For the hour that we used to get for our lunch, he used to just go in the staff

room, either watch the telly or go to sleep.

But he wasn't the only one.

He seemed to interact more with the prisoners than he did with the staff.

He'd sit and play chess with them, have conversations with them, play pool.

He seemed to be more comfortable with them than he was with his work

colleagues.

You did get the impression from him that the prison service was just a stopgap

for him.

because he had houses he rented out and everything else and as if he was trying

to make his money elsewhere.

While a lot of people would have been satisfied with Job as a prison officer

with a fairly decent income. He wanted a lot more. He wanted a property empire.

He saw an opportunity to buy up houses in pit villages around the area.

Property was fairly cheap compared to other parts of the country.

He boasted about being able to buy them on a credit card.

We were living quite happily and all of a sudden we got...

read letters of one company saying we hadn't paid our credit card bill

and they kept threatening us.

It was a nightmare to be living through and I couldn't see any way out of it.

I pleaded with him to declare bankruptcy and he just wouldn't hear of it.

They were in a massive financial hole.

They had all sorts of properties, all mortgaged, no tenants.

They had over £60,000 on credit card.

You know, they just didn't have enough money to service the debts.

They had two Rottweilers and they were buying dog food on credit cards.

He was still driving around.

in a Range Rover. That was costing him a fortune a month in HP payments.

But he didn't want to lose face.

We weren't thinking right. We weren't thinking as normal, rational people.

I thought I was worth more dead than alive.

And that was the truth.

Good morning. Well, it's a pretty mild start for most of us, actually.

And I think many of us should enjoy some pleasantly mild spring weather through

today as well.

John was on night shift, as I remember.

And then he didn't turn in.

Which seems out of character, totally out of character and strange that

somebody would do that.

All right?

Mrs Darwin had said she'd returned home from work, told us her husband had

phoned her or something and said he was going out to sea on his canoe.

I asked how, like, experienced he was, but it appeared that he'd really taken

up as a hobby this, like, let's go out on the canoe sort of thing, and

basically... He hasn't returned.

John Darwin had just finished a night shift earlier that morning.

The alarm that he was missing was raised at 9.30 that night when he failed to

turn up for work again.

He was last seen heading towards the River Tees.

It became apparent Mr Darwin's canoe could have gotten...

into a shipping lane and then dragged under a boat and it could well emerge

over in Scandinavia somewhere.

You know, that was air theory.

People can only last so long when they're out at sea. It is a grave

situation.

One battered red canoe washed ashore, but not a trace of its occupant.

John Darwin, an experienced paddler who knew these waters.

He'd never ever mentioned canoeing to anybody.

He wasn't built like a canoeist. I mean, he could have been a secret canoeist,

but if you're a keen canoeist, it's something you would mention.

At her seafront home nearby, Mr Darwin's wife Anne was too upset to talk, but the

view from her windows, say police, is a constant reminder that she's living in a

kind of limbo.

It's very difficult for Mrs Darwin. The absence of Mr Darwin's body doesn't

allow her to draw a line under this incident and to move on with her life.

I've done a lot of family liaison work over the years.

Each and everybody are different.

You know, I mean, some people are, like, hysterical and break down and this and

that. You couldn't describe her as that.

She didn't break down a lot.

She did break down a couple of times. Not always.

Might have been on the end of a phone when I've been talking to her. She's

had, like, a few tears.

But I spoke to the lads and they were absolutely good, you know.

The dad had gone missing, he'd gone out in a canoe and he's gone missing.

I am concerned that the absence of his body may lead people to consider or

think that he has done a Reggie Perrin, as we know it from the TV series.

However, I must stress that all the evidence I have indicates that he's met

with a tragic accident in his canoe on that day.

My name is John Saunders.

I've been investigating life and health insurance claims for about 33 years.

When did you first hear the name John Darwin?

Well, John Darwin, that case came to us from an insurer and

we were suspicious because of the financial aspect, the fact that a man of

his age had suddenly gone back to canoeing.

In March, in the North Sea, strange activity.

And the wife was very suspicious.

The way she answered questions, the hesitancy, it just didn't ring true.

At the time, funnily enough, we had just done three claims of people disappearing

at sea.

Three British people, all of whom

Went to prison.

There were like new policies, putting a huge policy on risk on a Friday and then

disappearing on the Sunday at sea. That was a little bit obvious.

My reaction was, is this the fourth?

There was quite a few staff who said that they didn't believe that he

drowned.

Everybody was more likely faked his own death than that. From day one, that

was... the opinion of all the staff on the unit.

That day, he removed all his personal items from his locker.

That was John all over. He was that calculated.

He was that type of person. You could imagine him doing that.

We suggested surveillance had worked in other similar cases.

The claimant in each case, which actually was always the wife, did

eventually meet up with the dead person.

We thought that there was a good possibility in this case that would

happen.

So our report went forward and within days of the insurer getting our report,

the coroner sat.

The insurer then received a death certificate signed by the coroner, so

felt obliged to pay out.

His canoe was recovered together with other paraphernalia from the trip.

So, again, it was reasonable to assume that something untoward had happened to

him.

And critically, did the family want this? You're pretty certain of that?

Yes. If the family wished to be able to move on, the inquest process is a means

whereby they can do that.

sort of intent and purposes she was the grieving widow so much so that she even

marked the sort of anniversary with with flowers to commemorate her poor lost

husband i took a phone call from

a prison officer at home house who i used to go to school with right and

he says uh you never guess he said i says what's that like davy he says yeah

I've just banged down Satan. I've just seen John Darwin.

He then started walking towards the car.

And he says, I knew straight away that that was John Darwin because John Darwin

had a very strange gait when he walked.

Right?

I said, right, go then, David. And I submitted the statement.

And then I never heard anything else about that.

There was a few staff seeing him.

One of the girls had seen him around Hartlepool Marina.

I remember a staff, he thought he'd seen this black Range Rover.

And it was John Darwin with his two dogs in the back.

He was going one way down the road and he was coming the other.

But he said by the time he'd turned the car around to go after him, it had

disappeared.

Nobody believed him?

Did you know a prison officer had seen John Darwin?

No.

That's frustrating. I didn't know that.

Detectives are expected to start interviewing a canoeist who went missing

five years ago off the coast near Hartlepool.

John Darwin says he can't remember where he's been.

Mr. Darwin walked into the West End Central Police Station in London four

days ago and declared that the police may be looking for him.

He was in apparent good health, tanned, well-nourished and dressed.

He went on to say that he had no recollection of what had happened in the

previous five years.

As soon as I heard he was back, I did think, con man.

Because not for one minute did I believe his story about amnesia.

That was just like, that was one for the unicorns and the fairies. I didn't

believe that at all.

There will be people out there who will know exactly where he has been, where he

has been living, and what he has been doing.

Certainly one of the biggest news stories of 2007.

It was massive.

Big questions being asked about John Darwin, who came back from the dead.

Is this a Christmas miracle?

I don't know. I just deal in the facts.

We were all waiting to see what had actually happened and where it had been.

It was like watching a television series that you couldn't quite believe. It

seemed so implausible.

It's like I say, it's like Angus and Christy show, you don't know what you

watch.

It began for me, really, a local contact rang me to say, you won't believe this,

there's a guy who's been missing for five years who's turned up in London.

You realise very early on, A, that's an extraordinary happening, and B,

something didn't add up.

You then go out the next morning to his address, his previous addresses, but the

most important aspect is how do we get to her?

I'll use the key to the story in trying to explain what had happened after he

disappeared.

Just six weeks before he reappeared, Mr Darwin's wife moved out of the home

they'd shared on the seafront. Police were there today trying to trace her and

interviewing the baffled man who bought the house.

There was some books lying around saying, teach yourself Spanish.

So we put two and two together and she was going to move to Spain. We thought,

lady of the twilight years, selling the house, bit of money in her pocket, off

she goes to Spain, go to suntan.

Enjoy the rest of her life.

I got a phone call from a British newspaper at 5 o'clock in the morning.

They woke me up at my home just outside Miami saying, can you go to Panama for

us?

But all the time I was thinking, this guy's turned up after five and a half

years missing. His wife will have...

flown back to england you know she would have been presumably overjoyed there's

no way in the world she's still going to be in panama days later why why would

you be we made our way to this um apartment block which was in a city

suburb called el dorado so i was just knocking on the door saying ann are you

in there i was there for about 40 minutes and then the

door opened and there's this small frame lady with a silvery And she said, well,

I guess you better come in.

And I said, well, why are you still here? Why haven't you gone back to

England? And she said, oh, this stuff I need to sort out with a visa and

whatever. And I'm thinking, is that more important than getting back and seeing

your husband? But I didn't push it. I wanted to try and gain her trust and get

as much of a story before she kicked me out.

I said, well, it's being suggested at home that maybe John faked his death and

you were in it from the start. And she got pretty feisty and said, that's

completely untrue. She said, I was devastated and heartbroken.

And that was it for day one.

Initially, she's telling the story that she didn't know he was alive.

And that runs for...

48 hours until we get this extraordinary call from a housewife in cheshire who

says i've just found a photo of john darwin and he was alive and you know

well with his missus in an estate agent in panama when she said she thought he

was dead it's the most honestly the most extraordinary we

call them ring-ins in the business and one of the most extraordinary ring-ins

ever

My phone goes and it's the night news out of the mirror and he says, Dave,

I've got something to tell you and you're not going to believe this.

It's a picture of John and Anne Darwin in Panama 18 months ago.

So she's lying through her teeth.

So I turned my laptop round and she just went white and I said, I'm sorry, Anne,

you know, the game's up. We know you've been lying.

She said, I guess that picture says everything, doesn't it? And I said,

yeah, I'm sorry, Anne, it does.

It wasn't the police or any journalists who solved the story. It was an armchair

detective, a lady at home who was very suspicious about it all. And she went on

to Google and she entered the words John, Anne and Panama, hit search and

then hit images and up popped that amazing picture.

They were just very excited about being in Panama and they were very happy.

in our opinion, a very nice couple.

The few times that we met them, they were always happy and, you know, getting

along very well.

I wish that had never been taken, but, you know, it was done in an instant.

There was no forewarning that that was going to happen. When you say you wish

it had never been taken, does that mean that you wish you'd never been caught?

No, no.

I knew that it would all come out eventually.

And when you get into a situation like that where you just get in so deep, you

can't find a way out.

I said, look, well, you went on this from the start? And she said, no. She

said, I thought he had died in the accident, she said.

And about a year later, he turned up on my doorstep, hoping that he'd been

declared dead and I'd got the insurance money.

Journalistically, it was amazing to have such a great story.

But, you know, from a human being point of view, I mean, it was like her life

was collapsing in front of her.

She said, my boys are never going to forgive me. I can't believe I've lied to

my own sons.

She knew that her fantasy world in which they'd been living for the last five and

a half years had come crashing down.

The Daily Mirror, the next day I put canoes, this and Panama.

And that changed everything.

It was clear that he was suffering from many, many things perhaps, but amnesia

was one of them.

My main concern was that he might run away.

And let's be right about it, he'd done a canny job for five and a half years, so

I wanted to make sure that he didn't do it again.

So it was then a case of getting him arrested.

I knew what prison would be like.

I served as a prison officer.

But I didn't expect to be treated so harshly by the courts.

But that's another story.

It is five years since he went missing and five

days since he apparently came back from the dead.

But tonight, John Darwin is under arrest and being taken back to his hometown on

suspicion of fraud.

He'll be turning up here at Kirk Leitham Police Station at around midnight. It

really has been a day where the riddle has started to unravel.

In the first couple of interviews, everything was no comment from Darwin.

We didn't hit him with the Panama photograph, maybe until the third

interview.

I said, well, who's in the photograph? And he said, oh, well, the little fat

one's me.

But even at that point, he still wasn't admitting everything.

Absent from all this is Anne Darwin.

She's thought to be holed up with journalists telling them her story.

It's a story that detectives here in Cleveland will be waiting to hear as

soon as she finally returns home.

You know, I said to her, look, you need to go home and put your hands up and

confess to it and beg forgiveness from the boys.

Alone with her thoughts, Anne Darwin checked in to fly home, her secret life

over.

How are you feeling?

armed police officers and took the former doctor's receptionist into

custody.

A very emotional statement released just in the last hour from Anthony Darwin,

their son. It appears to be on behalf of his brother Mark as well. They say, how

could our man continue to let us believe our dad had died when he was very much

alive?

And at this time, we want no further contact with them.

During the journey back to Hartlepool, Mrs Darwin was pale, drawn and very

quiet, which is understandable.

The weather in the UK at that time was obviously cold and wet and was a far cry

from what Mrs Darwin had been used to.

She said in the early interviews, he went out in his canoe, as far as I was

concerned he died, and it was a year later he turned up at the house looking

bedraggled. she's trying to like basically say i've got nothing to do

with this

by

the time we involved this investigation and darwin has sold the house when we go

and see the guy who's purchased the house and it was just a treasure trove

there's all sorts of communications

There's a post there from Panama.

There's a post there in the name of John Jones.

It turned out that within a fortnight of him going missing, he's presented

himself at the library and he's joined the library under the name of John

Jones.

You know.

So you've got the library card of John Jones, we've got the passport with John

Jones, and the passport is obviously John Darwin, because from the photograph

it's Darwin.

But the address is the cliff.

Obviously he's living with Anne.

The CPS have authorised Cleveland Police to charge 57-year-old John Ronald Darwin

with offences of attaining a money transfer by deception and making an

untrue statement to procure a passport.

We were giving him a chance to sort of give his version of accounts, but, you

know, once you start with one lie and that's collapsed, you're just going to

get found out and just... The whole thing just unraveled.

I treated the crime as basically borrowing the money of the insurance

companies.

I thought it would relieve myself of the financial burden and I thought it would

relieve both of us from the emotional burden.

Yes, I came up with the plan and the plan was simply to claim on the

insurance money.

And was Anne in on this plan? Was your wife plotting it with you?

Was it his idea?

Yes.

And what did you think to it?

I didn't like the idea at all, and I told him that on several occasions.

Far better to go down the route of bankruptcy rather than trying to fake a

death.

And what did you do?

I took the canoe out.

And... Paddled out to sea and... So you did actually physically paddle out to

sea?

Yes. And where did you paddle to?

South.

I can't remember what you call it.

I had made my wife, basically told her that she had to agree and

she picked me up.

What did you do with the canoe?

Push it back out to sea or...?

I just pushed it out to sea.

So he's basically gone out at Seaton Crow, opposite his house, on the beach,

paddled round to the North Gare, got out, and Ann Darwin's picked him up. And

from there, she's driven him to the railway station at Durham, and he then

gets a train to Newcastle, gets a train to Carlisle, stays

in a B&B.

But he realised that he couldn't stay in the hotels because he didn't have

sufficient money.

So he then goes and buys his camping equipment and starts living on the

beach, basically.

And I think he might have done that for a couple of weeks, but he obviously

started feeling sorry for himself.

And she picks him up, brings him back to set and crew.

The Darwins lived a bizarre double life.

Mrs. Darwin stayed in the family home, but they also owned next door. It was

converted into bedsits.

And this is where Mr. Darwin lived.

It was a nightmare, but fortunately we had a gravel driveway, so if cars

approached, we could hear them come.

He built a tunnel of love connecting him to the wife and life he gambled in his

desperate bid for cash.

So whenever anybody came...

John Downwood just, like his own private Narnia, scuttled through the wardrobe.

If Anne's relatives appeared or the police appeared, I would take my coffee

upstairs.

I would simply go along the corridor into another room.

You get loads of the hindsight people coming in and going, oh, well, it was

obvious from the beginning, and why did you not do this, and why did you not do

that?

There's always somebody who has a quirk about it, like, did you not have a look

in the wardrobe tonight, did you not see the little old... Hindsight can often be

a stick that's used to beat people with.

And I certainly didn't look in the wardrobe, shall I say, but that wasn't

my job.

i was put like somewhere along the investigation i mean i didn't know at

what stage did they look in the wardrobe i mean i didn't know obviously we could

say to him well when you when you went the house did you not like seeing the

wet footprints running up the carpet well you know it's very difficult for

like a family liaison officer to say it as like somebody who was presented to

them as a grieving widow well actually i don't believe it i think it's fake

I'm not sure I'd have done anything different to what Ian did.

He fell into a very nice routine, really.

He could go out.

He used to walk along the seafront and they had a code with the curtains.

If the curtains were hanging straight down, he would know that there were

people in the house and sometimes his own sons.

So he shouldn't come back until the coast was clear again.

I did walk back from Hartlepool one day and my heart nearly stopped because in

front of me was my brother and father.

walking towards me, closer than we are together here.

Luckily, they didn't recognise me.

Some occasions it was quite scary.

If I went to be in Kew at Stockton, for example, with Anne, there were always

lots of staff there because it was right next to the prison.

I think he did think.

Not that everybody was stupid, just that he didn't think anybody else was as

clever as he was. There's a sort of subtle difference.

I mean, I've had everybody say, well, you must have known he was still alive,

and this, that and the other.

We are professional investigators,

right? We've got to work with evidence.

The reality was, there wasn't anything in 2002 to suggest it was anything

other than what it was. Yeah.

you might have had suspicions one thing that evidence is something totally

different he was looking for his own piece of utopia and

it certainly wasn't skittling into a bed sit through a small door and see through

we need to know where both mr and mrs darwin have been both in europe

and north and south america

He'd been a teacher, he'd worked in a bank. How has somebody like him got a

false passport in the name of John Jones?

Well, I actually posed the question, has he done a Day of the Jackal?

Because I got a few sort of funny looks from some of the detectives. That's a

look in that Frederick Forsyth novel.

The protagonist goes to her graveyard and takes the identity of her baby.

I said, look, just humour me and just check within a 20-mile radius for any

deaths of children in two years either side of Darwin's date of birth who've

died.

Within an hour, they'd found the John Jones in Sunderland who died as an

infant.

He told me they'd travelled quite extensively.

He would go from one airport somewhere and Anne would go from another and

they'd meet up and go on holiday.

I travelled the world quite freely, really.

Visited the United States quite a few times.

Stayed with some friends of mine in the Bronx.

That was quite exciting.

Hello, my name is Panama.

Panama was a nice

place. It had a nice temperature.

Some people don't like it hot. I like it hot.

They bought 250 acres and announced that they were to open a new business.

Incredibly, that business was going to be a canoe school.

Advice from a man who knew all too well of the opportunities that particular

skill could offer.

John's pipe dream was to have an eco resort.

They were going to develop and it was nothing but jungle and there were wild

animals there and monkeys and dangerous snakes and whatever.

I mean, they'd pruned a few roses back at Seton Carew, but the thought of John

and Anne Darwin getting to grips with machetes in the jungle is just so

absurd.

When you got away with...

what seemed like the perfect crime.

Why did you then come back, walk into that police station?

It may seem bizarre to most people, but I'd always intended to come back.

I knew I would have to pay the money back.

I think why he came back is always going to be a bit of a mystery and I could

never get a straight answer out of him.

For a man who plans everything, who was always trying to think two or three

steps ahead, it is, I think, the bit of the mystery that we might never unravel.

I have two sons, and I wanted to be part of their lives again.

All of the money did not belong to John Darwin.

It belonged to Anne Darwin, because John Darwin was dead.

If at any time she decided, I don't want to live with you anymore...

He really was in his canoe without a paddle It has been

reported that she did have a boyfriend out in Panama she did It was

me She knew I was coming back she expected me to

go to prison for two years Even though I was going to take all the blame. Yes

Our top story, he made me do it. The claim from the back from the dead

canoeist's wife in court facing deception charges.

The former doctor's receptionist has entered not guilty pleas to a string of

deception and money laundering charges.

It emerged she and her husband... When John Darwell gets to court, he just

pleads guilty.

And she pleaded not guilty.

And Darwin is using a legal defence called marital coercion, i.e. she

wasn't, she claims, acting under her own free will, but under the will of her

husband.

I just didn't have the confidence to stand up against John and not take any

part in it.

I sat through the trial and saw her torn to shreds in the witness box.

Why, the prosecution asked, did she never tell the Darwin sons their father

was putting her into a difficult situation and asked for their help if

she was being compelled to do as he wished?

When John Darwin turned up from the dead, it seemed first as

an amusing story.

However, there is no doubt that this was a callous and calculated fraud.

Remarkable story of lies, deception and greed ended today in jail sentences for

him and the wife who helped him do it.

For being the brains of the fraud, John Darwin was sentenced to six years and

three months and Darwin will serve six and a half.

That came as a total shock.

Yes, I deserved to be sentenced, but I just wasn't prepared for that at all.

Tonight, the mother of all liars, Anne Darwin is jailed for the quarter of a

million pound con that crushed her son's lives.

A bit of me feels really sorry for Anne.

For a lot of people, if it wasn't for the boys, would have said, well, good on

you, who cares about, you know, however wrong it is, ripping off an insurance

company, but actually there was, like, collateral damage there, and I think

people found it very hard to understand how a mother could do that for such a

prolonged period of time to her own children.

She was the public face of that deception.

Ann Darwin was on stage for five and a half years and she played that with

summer plum.

All John Darwin had to do was keep out of the way, go through his door into

Narnia.

When I committed the crime, I had 14 houses.

The house we lived in was a seven bedroom.

I've lost all of that.

How come you're living in Easington, John? Thank you very much.

My sons, I'm on probation with them.

My wife, well, I should say near ex-wife, won't speak to me since she's

come out of prison.

I have no feelings at all for John.

I don't.

bear a grudge. I have no bitterness towards him.

But I just have no feelings for him whatsoever.

I think he always felt that he was destined for much better and bigger

things. And maybe it was like a rebellion against a mundane lifestyle to

suddenly think, actually, I'm going to have an adventure.

In the hotel next to where the Darwins live, there is now a Panama restaurant,

a Darwin room, and a canoe bar.

You are known worldwide.

Unfortunately, yes.

For somebody who wanted to fake his own death and escape everything, he loves

the limelight.

He's the one-off for which we should all be eternally grave.