➤The Sunday Times Magazine • 372006, more than four years after her husband
disappeared, she took a holiday to Panama,
which inspired her to relocate there.
Leigh pressed her on why she wasn’t now
dashing back to be by her husband’s side.
She told him her goods were being shipped
over from the UK and she needed to stay in
Panama in order to sign for them. She also
had to sort out her immigration papers.
Leigh’s suspicions grew. “You’d just drop
everything and go, wouldn’t you, if that
happened to you?” he says. He questioned
Anne further, asking whether the couple
had experienced any financial problems.
She abruptly shut him down, telling him
it was none of his business.
“It was obvious she wasn’t being truthful,”
Leigh says, “but I had a great story because
everybody wanted to hear from her.”
When his interview was published the
next day, it dominated the news. “Secret
life of Mrs Canoe” and “Yes, I did pocket
the life insurance” ran the headlines. In
England, Darwin’s two sons, Mark and
Anthony, aged 32 and 29 at the time,
enjoyed a euphoric meeting with the father
who, for five years, they had believed to
be dead. They quickly filled him in on key
events from the intervening years and were
eager to know where he had been all that
time. They weren’t the only ones. The
police and the life insurance companies,
who had paid out after Darwin’s inquest,
would soon be chasing answers too.
In Panama, with the interview out of the
way Anne was much more at ease and had
lunch with Leigh and a walk on the beach.
“I think she thought, ‘Oh, that was it,’ ”
Leigh says. But later that day the story took
an astonishing twist: Leigh received a photo
that a reader of the Daily Mirror had
uncovered online. The image showed Anne
and Darwin together, smiling alongside an
estate agent in Panama, and it was date-
stamped July 14, 2006 — 18 months earlier.
The implication was damning. Not only
had Anne known her husband was alive
long before he resurfaced, but here was
proof that he had visited Panama with her.
Leigh told Anne that he knew she’d been
lying. “She sat there for ages and then she
broke down,” he says. The image had sent
“her fantasy world crashing down”.
Once she had had time to digest the
implications of the photo, she gave an
account closer to the truth. “She hadn’t
told anyone the truth in nearly six years,
not even her sons,” Leigh says. “Every day
she’d been living a lie, and once she started
speaking it just came pouring out.” Yes,
she revealed, she had known for some
time that her husband was still alive.
But where had he been living all that
time? “Please don’t tell me he was hiding in
the garden shed,” Leigh asked her in jest.
Nothing could have prepared him for her
response: “Well ... almost.”
Unbelievably, while everyone had been
grieving Darwin’s loss, he had been at homewith Anne in Seaton Carew. She went on
to explain that in the 1990s Darwin had
visions of himself as a buy-to-let landlord
and had set about building a mini property
empire. Within a year he acquired 12
properties with the easy credit then
available from banks. In 2000 he purchased
two more properties in Seaton Carew,
Nos 3 and 4 The Cliff. No 3 would become
a home for him and Anne, while No 4 was
earmarked as a buy-to-let investment. The
houses were adjacent and had a warren
of connecting doors and corridors — a
structural quirk that would, in time, take
on huge significance.
The 2000 property deal left the couple
saddled with a hefty mortgage and Darwin,
a prison officer and former teacher, was
soon drowning in debt. Anne urged him to
declare bankruptcy, but he was delusional
according to Leigh. “He had this ridiculous
Range Rover with a personalised number
plate and the monthly repayments on the
mortgage swallowed up his wages,” Leigh
says. “He was living beyond his means and
it was all for show. He’d told everyone he
was rich; he had this big car and his mini
buy-to-let empire. He convinced himself
he was going to be a millionaire. That’s the
reason he decided to disappear, because
he couldn’t face what he saw as the
humiliation of being declared bankrupt.”
December 2001 was a pivotal time:Darwin took out an insurance policy
that would pay £50,000 if he had a fatal
accident and told Anne that he would
rather fake his own death than face the
shame of bankruptcy. When Anne
challenged him, she was emotionally
blackmailed by the man she had known
since she was a young girl. “It’s either
that or I do it for real,” he told her,
according to Leigh.
Despite those threats, Anne told
Leigh that when Darwin disappeared she
genuinely believed he had drowned and
that she had made insurance claims in
“good faith”. She also said that when he
showed up at her door a year after his
disappearance, she urged him to go to
the police. He refused and, she alleged,
threatened to tell them she had played a
role in his disappearing act if she pushed
him on the matter.
She admitted that she and Darwin
subsequently lived under the same roof
as man and wife while plotting a new life
in Panama.
When Anne had visitors, Darwin
would scuttle back to No 4 through the
connecting doors — one of which was
coffin-shaped and hidden behind a
wardrobe. He was effectively a prisoner
in his own home and would pass the day
reading, on the computer, watching TV
PREVIOUS PAGES: ALAMY, GETTY IMAGES, REX FEATURES, SPLASH NEWS. THESE PAGES: ALAMY, EXPRESS SYNDICATION, LES WILSON, MIRRORPIX or doing odd jobs around the house.
Clockwise from top: John leaving magistrates’ court in December 2007; Anne
under arrest the same month; the Daily Mirror exposes John’s “resurrection”