It was one of the most controversial missing persons investigations in British history that earned the fraud husband and wife worldwide notoriety.
Twenty years ago, John Darwin faked his own disappearance in a kayak off the northeast coast of England, sparking a massive but ultimately unsuccessful search and rescue mission.
Presumed dead and the search quashed, John was actually being held in a studio waiting to claim insurance, benefits and pension to pay off alleged debts of £700,000 in a sneaky scam.
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But that was just the start of the web of deception woven by John and his wife Anne – even swindling their own sons Anthony and Mark.
(Picture: ITV)
the the Chronicle reports that John got himself a passport using someone else’s name and went to Panama, where Anne later joined him.
While it is her husband who will go down in history as the infamous ‘canoe man’, Anne Darwin will have his shocking past brought to light thanks to new ITV drama The Thief, His Wife and the Canoe.
The scam finally broke when John walked into a London police station and told officers he hadn’t known where he had been for five years. However, after an investigation was launched, the lie was exposed when a picture of John and Anne posing at a real estate agency in Panama surfaced.
In 2008, John Darwin was jailed for six years and three months after admitting eight charges of deception, his wife Anne was sentenced to six and a half years in prison for fraud and money laundering.
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What happened to Anne Darwin?
In jail, Anne told John she wanted to separate, a move he was apparently furious with. When she left prison in 2011, it is claimed that John sent Anne a photo of herself bearing a copyright mark, apparently implying that it was his property. When they finally divorced, John cited “unreasonable behavior” as the reason.
Anne has started writing a book about what happened, called Out of My Depth, with proceeds going to the RSPCA. Anne maintains to this day that she was forced into the “false death”, a scam by John.
Talk to The Guardian in 2016, Anne explained: “John could also be persuasive. He told me, ‘I’ll just have to disappear for a few weeks and we’ll have the money.’ It got out of hand.
“The deeper you get into these situations, the harder it is to get out. If I had any idea it would have lasted more than a few weeks, there is no way I could have accepted and subjected myself to years of torture. But once it was done, and he made me lie that he was gone, I couldn’t get out of it.
According to a Daily Mail report, at the start of this year Anne was living in a village not far from Middlesbrough.
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