On December
1, 2007, he
walked into a
police station
claiming
he had no
memory of
where he’d
been for the
past five years
A house divided: where the couple lived
36 • The Sunday Times MagazineT
he day was clear and
the sea calm when
John Darwin set off
in his canoe from
Seaton Carew on the
Co Durham coast
on March 21, 2002.
Neighbours had seen
him leaving home
that morning and then paddling off from
the shore, headed towards the mouth of the
River Tees, a busy shipping channel. When
his wife, Anne, returned from work that
evening she noticed Darwin’s car in the
driveway, yet he wasn’t at home. She called
the prison where he worked and was told
that he hadn’t shown up that day. It was
then that she spotted his canoe was absent
from the hallway.
Anne reported her husband missing that
evening and a large search operation began.
The following morning a double-ended
paddle was retrieved from the sea but there
was no trace of Darwin. Four days after he
disappeared the search was called off and
it was assumed he had drowned and been
swept away to the deep. It would take six
weeks for the smashed canoe to wash ashore.
“That was a devastating blow,” Anne
said at the time. “I just believed there must
have been an accident. It was difficult to
do anything or get on with my life.” In
the intervening years the grieving widow
continued to work as a doctor’s receptionist
and was supported by friends and family.
More than five years later, however,
Darwin returned from the dead. On
December 1, 2007, he walked into a police
station in London claiming to have
amnesia. While he could remember his
name and that he had lived in Hartlepool,
he said he had no memory of where he’d
been or what he’d done for the past five
years. His last memory was of a holiday
in Norway in 2000. Believing it to be June,he asked the police officer why all the
Christmas lights were up.
The media sensed a cracking story —
but had little idea just how crazy and
sensational it would be. Enter David Leigh,
a British journalist living in Miami.
At 5am the day after Darwin resurfaced,
Leigh was woken by the buzz of his mobile
phone. The Daily Mail wanted him to find
Darwin’s 55-year-old wife, Anne, who had
emigrated to Panama only a few weeks
previously. Leigh, who worked as bureau
chief of a news agency in Miami, was just
a three-hour flight from Panama City.
By the time he and a photographer friend,
Steve Dennett, touched down, they were
well ahead of rivals in the British press pack.
Thanks to a tip-off, Leigh knew where Anne
lived, though he wasn’t optimistic he would
find her. “I was sure that a woman whose
husband had just come back from the dead,
after nearly six years, would be on the first
flight home,” recalls Leigh, 57.
But she wasn’t: instead Anne was hidden
away inside her flat. After 40 minutes of
knocking, Leigh finally got a reply. “I couldn’t
believe it when suddenly this little voice
says, ‘What do you want?’ I turned to Steve
and said, ‘Oh my God, she’s in there.’ ”
Leigh convinced Anne to let him in,
and as they talked he noted her strange
demeanour. “It was a very stilted
conversation. I was expecting her to say,
‘I’m overjoyed, I can’t believe the news, this
is the day I always dreamt about,’ and she
did all that but not in a way that was at all
convincing,” Leigh says.
Anne told him there were a number of
obstacles blocking her return to the UK and
she had an air of desperation about her. At
one point he said to her, “ ‘Perhaps I can help
you,’ and she replied, ‘You can’t. Nobody can.’
It was such a weird thing to say,” Leigh says.
Conscious that their competitors were
closing in, Leigh and Dennett persuadedThe couple with their sons,
Mark and Anthony, in the 1980sNos 3 and 4
The Cliff in
Seaton Carew,
where John
Darwin used
the secret door
below to move
between the
propertiesSecret
doorFake
cupboardJohn’s hideaway
at No 4
Anne’s bedroom
at No 3Anne that her best course of action was
to move to a hotel and tell them the story
of her life. Leigh did not know it then, but
the move marked a turning point in both
their fortunes. It would balloon into the
biggest scoop of his career, lead him to
forge a close friendship with a convicted
criminal, publish two books recounting the
whole shocking tale and result in a new
four-part ITV drama, starting tonight. For
Anne, it would eventually lead to jail.
Tucked away in the hotel in Panama,
Anne told Leigh about her life — her first
meeting with Darwin as an 11-year-old
schoolgirl, their wedding day, their decades-
long marriage and his disappearance. She
said that a year after her husband went
missing, believing he was dead, she made
a number of claims on life and mortgage
insurance policies he had taken out. The
payouts totalled almost £250,000. Then, in