John Darwin disappearance case

The Price of Life: In Search of What We're Worth and Who Decides
by Jenny Kleeman
Published 13 Mar 2024

There are plenty of British fraudsters too: Paul Early, who was supposed to have died at sea but who John found hiding under a bed in Bournemouth; Anthony McErlean, who was supposed to have been killed by a cabbage truck in Honduras but was spotted shopping in Sainsbury’s in Kent. And of course there’s John Darwin, aka Canoe Man, the most famous of them all, the debt-ridden prison officer who was supposedly lost in the North Sea during a kayak trip near Hartlepool (it was actually a kayak) in 2002, before his wife, Anne, claimed on his £250,000 life insurance policy. He lived in a bedsit next door to Anne for a while before secretly moving back in with her; then they moved to Panama. When John was closing in on him in 2007, Canoe Man turned up at a London police station pretending to have lost his memory. The truth was revealed when pictures of the Darwins, taken in 2006, were spotted on the property website movetopanama.com.

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For five years, they had allowed their two sons to believe their father was dead. The story has prompted countless podcasts, at least five books (including one by Canoe Man himself and another by his now ex-wife), a BBC Four dramatization in 2010, and a four-part prime-time ITV miniseries in 2022. But John practically yawns when I mention it. ‘It’s probably one of the most boring ones,’ he sniffs. ‘Do you think people would be surprised if they knew how un-unique John Darwin is?’ I ask. ‘Why don’t people know about how widespread this kind of fraud is?’ ‘There aren’t that many convictions. There have also been several convictions that have not been in the newspaper.’

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Duped: Double Lives, False Identities, and the Con Man I Almost Married
by Abby Ellin
Published 15 Jan 2019

DelVecchio, “The Rank Order Consistency of Personality Traits from Childhood to Old Age, a Quantitative Review of Longitudinal Studies,” Psychological Bulletin 126, no. 1 (2000): 3–25, http://psycnet.apa.org/record/2000-03445-001. 12. Telephone interview with author. 13. Ibid. 14. Tanith Carey, “Anne Darwin, ‘Canoe Widow’: Deceiving My Sons Was Unforgiveable,” The Guardian, October 10, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/uk/canoe. 15. “500K (pounds) Recovered from Wife of Canoe Fraudster John Darwin,” Mirror, February 14, 2012, https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/500k-recovered-wife-canoe-fraudster-684683. 16. Carey, “Anne Darwin.” 17. Email interview with author. 18. Damien Gale, “Kim Philby: I Got Away with Treachery Because I Was Upper Class,” The Guardian, April 4, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/apr/04/kim-philbys-stasi-tape-reveals-secrets-of-his-success-as-cold-war-spy. 19.

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“The hubris is reflected in the idea that you could pull off a complex ruse like faking your death, and getting family members, law enforcement, and the state to believe it. Most of us fantasize but don’t go through with it because we have morals, and also are perhaps daunted by the logistics.”13 One of the more notorious death fakers was John Darwin, a British ex–prison officer who, after mountains of debt, “disappeared” in a kayak accident on March 21, 2002. His two sons thought their father had been swept out to sea, but his wife, Anne, knew the truth.14 She collected hundreds of thousands of dollars from insurance and pension funds and helped him hide.15 After four years of living in a tiny flat in Seaton Carew, County Durham, England, John stole the identity of a dead baby named John Jones, and the couple moved to South America.

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Anne went to jail for three and a half years, and later claimed that her husband had victimized her. He was a narcissistic, controlling, and manipulative man, she wrote in her 2016 memoir, Out of My Depth. But what was his excuse? “The second bit of compartmentalizing and rationalizing is, I think, what sustains somebody like death faker John Darwin, whose initial motivations were indeed financial, but kept it up for seven years,” said Greenwood. “He told himself the story that his family would be better off without him, and that while his children did think he was dead, they were adults living their own lives, so it’s not as if he abandoned them as babies.”17 At a secret trial held at MI5 headquarters in Mayfair, London, in November 1952, eleven years before the truth finally came out, Kim Philby convinced his interrogator that he wasn’t a Soviet agent partly by stuttering whenever he was asked a question.