When Marlin Cruces, a 31-year-old Colombian, met his new neighbour in Panama
City in October, the Englishman seemed happy and settled.
“He was a cordial and well-educated man,” Cruces, a systems engineer, told The
Sunday Times. “He told me proudly his son also worked with computers.”
The pair met in the lift of the apartment block they shared and struck up a
friendship.
John Darwin invited Cruces to his flat, which he had bought for about £44,000.
It was immaculately tidy. A framed photograph of Darwin and his wife Anne
hung on one wall. Expensive new furniture filled the rooms.
Cruces burst out laughing. Darwin had stuck pieces of paper on the furniture
and labelled them in Spanish — “mesa” on the table, “silla” on a chair and
so on.
“He wasn’t one of those ignorant expats who expect everyone to speak English,”
Cruces said. “He really wanted to learn Spanish. He was a friendly and funny
guy.” This was a man planning to stay.
Darwin said that he had “retired” and was moving to Panama because his wife
had found a job there. He said he liked the hot weather in Central America
and would love to watch the annual canoe race in the spring, in which
contestants paddle the full length of the famous canal.
There was no indication that within weeks Darwin would abandon all he had
striven for, fly back to London and walk into a police station. Quite the
opposite.
When Anne arrived in Panama, the couple went to see Javier Quiros, a car
salesman. “They were very happy and were talking openly about their plans,”
said Quiros. “He said he was a big fan of Land Cruisers and wanted to get
one to drive around Panama.”
Darwin told Quiros he had been looking around Central America for a country to
settle in and had explored Costa Rica before deciding that Panama was the
place. It was no snap decision: he said he had been to Panama three times.
The couple paid $41,000, using a banker’s draft, on October 31 for the Land
Cruiser. Darwin had also acquired an expensive computer. “He had this
incredible laptop. It was one of the flashest that I had ever seen,” said
Cruces. “It must have cost at least $4,000.”
Money seemed to be no problem. As well as the flat, the couple had spent
$389,711 on buying a 480-acre estate near the village of Escobal in the
province of Colon.
The Darwins, some suggest, may have planned to turn it into a holiday resort;
it could certainly offer canoeing amid glorious tropical scenery. “They
planned to build a cable car from the hotel through the trees down to the
water, where you can kayak on the lake,” said Julio Nunez, a local police
officer.
After five years of being “dead”, after hiding from his own sons, after all
the pain and distress he had undergone, Darwin was poised for a new future
full of potential.
“They seemed a nice, normal couple,” said Cruces. “They would always be at the
supermarket mulling over the wines, or relaxing at home. They didn’t seem to
go out or have parties or anything.”
Yet weeks later Darwin threw it all away. Why?
This weekend Anne, who fled Panama in the tender care of a tabloid news
agency, put the blame for the extraordinary saga firmly on her husband.
Darwin, she claimed, had faked his death without her knowing; he had
reappeared barely a year later and “trapped” her into staying quiet. She
claimed that for years he had lived secretly, hiding in a bedsit at their
house in the north of England.
The reason he had returned to Britain last week, she claimed, was that he “had
had enough of being dead” and simply wanted to see his sons.
Darwin, who was charged with fraud yesterday and is in police custody, seems
to be giving a different account of events. He is understood to be putting
rather more of the blame on Anne, who some acquaintances said last week was
really the “one who wore the trousers”.
Police sources said that he claimed he did not remember taking his canoe out
to sea; that he had an accident and only “came to” months later; and that
when he returned home, his wife had already cashed in his life insurance
and, because they could not afford to repay it, they jointly hatched a plan
for him to stay “dead”.
The police are also investigating why Darwin made contact with them. One
theory is that his relationship with his wife had broken down because one or
both of them had had an affair. But no evidence of this has surfaced. He
had, however, previously been involved with a woman from Kansas whom he met
over the internet, his wife claimed.
Another theory is that they argued over money. Since Darwin was “dead”, it was
Anne who held the purse strings.
Despite the “confession” of Anne, many questions remain about the incredible
tale of the canoeist who came back from the dead.
Who was the real instigator of the plot? Could Darwin really have lived
unnoticed in a small town for years? And were his sons totally unaware that
their father was alive?
DARWIN was always an oddball.
His aunt Margaret Burns recalls a troublesome boy. “He used to brag about
getting one over on other kids. He used to tell tales on my kids,” she said.
His most notable characteristic, however, was an obsession with money. “John
was brought up in an atmosphere of money, money — money matters above
everything else,” she said. Even at his mother’s funeral, he was talking up
his investments.
After Darwin married Anne, a local girl, he moved to Durham from Blackhall
Colliery, where he had grown up a few miles north of Hartlepool, and worked
as a teacher, then in a bank, at the same time dabbling in shares and
property. In 1997 he and Anne set up a firm called Eagle Enterprises, and
their house, as subsequent owners discovered, had 15 telephone lines.
But if Darwin was hoping to make a killing on the stock market, it didn’t
work. Investigations have revealed that Eagle Enterprises filed no accounts
and lasted little more than a year before being dissolved.
Darwin sold his properties in Easington, Durham, and in 2000 he and his wife
moved to the seaside village of Seaton Carew. There they bought two
adjoining properties, Nos 3 and 4 The Cliff, one arranged as a house with
flats on the top floor, the other converted into bedsits.
They were shown round by Adrian Meggs, who owns a nearby pub.
“He seemed the quieter of the two,” said Meggs. “It was she who seemed to run
things.”
Darwin was still stretched for money. He had borrowed at least £130,000 to buy
the adjoining houses.
Having given up on teaching and banking, he had become a prison officer. A
colleague who worked at Holme House prison in Stockton-on-Tees recalled a
“bit of a crank” who dressed badly and droned on.
“All he ever talked about was his money and his stocks and shares. Then he
went into property,” said the warder. “He was absolutely useless as a prison
officer.”
Darwin was earning about £22,000 a year. He had “lots of credit cards”, Anne
said last week. “We were struggling to make payments. There were
late-payment fees and bank charges that absolutely crippled us.”
In mid-March 2002 Darwin put in a request to be allowed to work part-time. Was
it genuine or intended as a red herring to put people off the trail? Either
way, he was about to clock off altogether.
At about 9am on March 21, Brian Smettem, a tenant of Darwin’s, spotted him
with a canoe. “I saw him carrying the canoe across the road. That was the
first time I’d seen him go out in it. I never even knew he was interested in
canoeing.”
It was a calm day and the water was “like glass”. But Darwin disappeared
almost without trace. When he failed to turn up for work, the prison tried
to contact his wife. But she was not at her work as a doctor’s
receptionist.
Even Darwin’s aunt found this suspicious. “She said she’d been delayed going
to see friends in Durham. I would just like to see who these friends were.
Was she in it from the beginning?”
Only at 10.30 that night was Darwin reported missing.
Locals were highly suspicious. “Nobody believed he was dead,” said his former
prison colleague.
Meggs observed: “I always said, from the day he went missing, he’d turn up on
the beach in Spain. I only got the country wrong.”
A Royal Navy ship, an RAF helicopter, a police spotter plane and six RNLI
lifeboats and three inshore lifeboats were involved in a search that cost
£60,000. First a paddle turned up; then the remains of the canoe. But no
corpse.
Darwin’s father was deeply upset. He would spend his days walking up and down
the beach, searching for his son’s body, according to Darwin’s aunt.
And what about his wife? She claims she really believed he had died, though
she obviously had some doubts. “I suppose I didn’t want to believe that he
might have actually done it,” she said.
To some, Anne appeared to take his “death” with unusual calm. Smettem
recalled: “After he went missing, she just seemed her normal self.”
Mervyn Donnelly, another tenant at the time, said: “She was very quiet but
otherwise seemed normal. I thought she was just putting on a brave face.”
Six months later, Anne spoke publicly about her loss. “All I want is to bury
his body,” she said. “It would enable me to move on.”
In February 2003, according to her account, she answered the door to find her
“dead” husband standing there. “He had a beard, he was dirty, he was so
thin, he looked like he had been living rough,” Anne recalled. “He smelt
dreadful.”
She took him in, cleaned him up and fed him. After the initial shock and care,
any normal person would have been bursting with questions. How had he
disappeared? Where had he been? What should they tell their sons?
But Anne apparently barely reacted. “When I asked him where he’d been, he said
it didn’t matter — he was home now,” she said. When she wanted to report
what he had done, he “threatened to say I’d been involved from the
beginning”. This, she claimed, left her “trapped”.
Whether through coercion or her own volition, she began to go along with the
grand deception, even agreeing not to tell their sons, Mark and Anthony,
that their father was alive. She kept it secret even when Anthony married
that year.
In April 2003 an inquest recorded an open verdict and formally declared that
Darwin was dead. That day, Anne claims, Darwin was a few miles away, sitting
in his own house.
The life insurance paid out. The mortgage was cleared. The prison service
coughed up about £66,000 for Darwin’s “death in service”. His debts were
erased — and his wife was left in possession of two substantial properties
and a pension from the prison service of £8,000 a year.
THE adjoining houses now came into their own. An internal doorway, hidden
behind a wardrobe, linked the Darwin’s home in No 3 with a bedsit in No 4.
Darwin scuttled between the two, hiding whenever anyone came to visit Anne.
The police discovered the doorway on Thursday during a search of the Darwins’
property. “The police spent two hours looking at the door,” said John
Duffield, the present owner. “It is set back almost 18in into a cupboard and
shaped like half a coffin.”
When the police removed the cupboard they discovered breeze blocks that had
been put in to disguise the passage between the rooms.
Darwin spent much of his time reading and playing computer games. It was,
naturally, difficult to venture out.
“When he went out he would disguise himself sometimes by taking a walking
stick and walking with a limp,” said Anne. “When it was cold he would put on
a woolly hat and pull his collar upwards. But during the summer months he
could barely get out . . . there were always lots of people about.”
If the deception did continue for four years, as Anne claims, it was a
remarkable feat. Seaton Carew is a close-knit community of 6,500 people,
among whom many had their suspicions about John’s “death”. Did nobody wonder
who was the stranger hobbling along the beach? How was Darwin never glimpsed
through the curtains?
Last night Gary Hepple, who bought the bedsit house from Anne, revealed that
John, clad in his woolly hat and stick disguise, had been there when he was
shown around the property. “I would never have taken the bloke for her
husband,” he said. “I assumed he was some sort of caretaker and remember
hoping he wasn’t one of the fixtures.”
The former tenants are stunned that Darwin may have been in their midst all
along.
“It’s amazing to think that he could have been just a few yards from me all
the time I was there,” said Smettem yesterday. “I could so easily have
bumped into him.”
But Smettem pointed out that Anne may have become worried about exactly that.
“She told all the tenants to leave about three years ago. She told us the
building needed renovating, but it looked all right to me. It just needed a
bit of decorating here and there.”
For Darwin it was a twilight world of the undead. “He didn’t have a life; it
was an existence,” said Anne. They decided to go abroad, and he allegedly
applied for a passport and got one in the name of John Jones.
Anne claims he “sent off an application [form] and he got one. It was as
simple as that”.
This weekend, immigration authorities in Panama said they had no record of any
movements involving a John Darwin or a John Jones using a British passport,
suggesting that he may have been travelling on more than one other passport.
Police are investigating his use of another alias, John Williams, which came
to light after a Cornish fisherman spoke of an encounter with a man he
recognised as Darwin from pictures released last week.
As time went on, the couple began to grow cocky. They travelled to Cyprus, but
decided against buying land there. When a former prison colleague reported
that he had seen Darwin in Seaton Carew in 2005, Anne brushed the claims
aside. She said it must have been Darwin’s cousin, “who looks just like
him”.
Later that year he set about buying a yacht through Solboat.com.
Under the name John Jones, Darwin expressed an interest in a large catamaran
lying in Gibraltar that was for sale for £45,000.
“He was quite a guarded character,” said Robert Hopkin of Solboat.com this
weekend. “He wanted all the ‘t’s crossed and ‘i’s dotted. He didn’t seem to
trust anybody.”
The deal fell apart in an argument over a detail that one would have thought
would be trifling for a man who was in effect on the run. On the boat was an
old barometer that was of sentimental value to the owners. They wanted to
keep it; but Darwin insisted it should be part of the deal. When he didn’t
get it, he withdrew.
It is possible he had also changed his mind about sailing the world. For in
2005 Anne visited Panama, and on August 12 a new company was registered
under the country’s secretive commercial laws.
Jaguar Properties Corporation listed local people as its officers; but in
reality it was a vehicle for the Darwins. They were beginning to form their
ambitions to buy property and build a holiday estate in Panama.
Last night it was alleged that the Darwins had made their sons shareholders of
the company without their knowledge.
In March this year, Anne sold 4 The Cliff for £160,000. The other property, No
3, had been transferred into the name of Mark, her eldest son. In October it
was sold for £295,000, and Anne moved to Panama. Her son sent the money to
her.
Anne had, however, become too blasé about the arrangements. She had made so many
odd whispered phone calls at work that one of her colleagues had become
curious, reawakening the old suspicions that Darwin had never died. The
police were tipped off.
WHEN Darwin returned from the dead in London last Saturday, announcing that he
was a missing person suffering from amnesia, his sons hurried to the police
station.
Anne claims her husband had concocted the story so that he could see them.
“John desperately wanted contact with the boys again and thought he could
pick up the pieces of his life,” she said.
But was he trying to pre-empt the police investigation by claiming amnesia? Or
to get revenge on his wife — perhaps for not allowing him enough control
over their money? It remains unclear.
In the digital age, however, the world has become a very small place to hide
all your traces. A curious member of the public was so intrigued by the
story that she Googled the words “John, Anne, Panama”. Up popped a picture
of Darwin and his wife in the Panama office of a property adviser. It was
dated July 14, 2006 — and the great deception rapidly began to unravel.
Beth Anne Gray, a Panamanian lawyer, was due to meet Anne the day the picture
emerged, on a visa-related matter. When her client arrived she was far from
the confident woman in whose name she had set up the shell company.
“She was in a complete state. She really wasn’t very coherent,” said Gray. “It
wasn’t the same person I’d seen before.”
Events now moved at a startling speed.
Anne had already become embroiled in a tabloid feeding frenzy. An American
news agency, Splash, was first on the scene in Panama and signed her up. She
gave an interview to the Daily Mail in which she expressed her surprise and
delight that her husband had returned from the dead. The only problem was
that it appeared on the same day that the Daily Mirror had the picture of
her in Panama with John more than a year ago.
Caught in such an awkward situation, Anne decided she would give the papers
her “confession”. Now the agency has her ensconced in Miami while police
await her return.
In the aftermath of their mother’s confession, the couple’s sons issued a
furious statement. “How could our mam continue to let us believe that our
dad had died when he was very much alive?” it read. “At this time we want no
further contact with them.”
They then went to ground, fuelling suspicions about what they knew and when.
This is one of the key remaining questions. Could their parents possibly
have kept the secret from them for four years?
At present the police are keeping an open mind about whether they knew of the
deception.
“They are both witnesses, but they are not under any restrictions,” said a
spokeswoman. “We are not watching them or anything.”
Last night it was reported that Mark was travelling to Cleveland in
anticipation of an interview with detectives.
The police are keener to speak to Anne. “As soon as she reaches British soil,
we will speak to her,” the spokeswoman said.
The search for the truth about the couple’s movements will continue, with
police from the Serious Organised Crime Agency now involved in
“international inquiries” into the network of bank accounts that the couple
set up.
With John having been charged with obtaining insurance payments by deception
and illegally obtaining a passport, some of the hue and cry will die down as
reporting restrictions are imposed. However, few would bet against more
twists and turns in the case of the dead canoeist.
THE QUESTIONS THAT REMAIN UNANSWERED
What happened during John Darwin’s “missing year”?
By Anne Darwin’s account, her husband came back from the dead in February
2003, almost a year after he had gone missing. So where had he been? She
said he looked as though he had been living rough. “He was an absolute mess
- he was so dishevelled,” she said. But police will want to know where he
was and how he supported himself.
How did he secure another passport?
Anne Darwin says her husband applied for a passport in 2004 in the name of
John Jones, using their home address. But new applicants for a British
passport must provide a birth certificate. Renewals must be accompanied by a
current or expired passport. Photographs must be validated by a suitable
witness. Was Darwin really able to short-circuit the system so easily?
Did his sons really not know he was alive?
Anne Darwin says her sons desperately missed their father - yet she says she
did not tell them he had faked his death. Was she really so hard-hearted?
Last week the sons were initially overjoyed at their father’s return, but
when his deception was revealed they said that “at this present time” they
wanted “no further contact” with their parents and disappeared. Are the
Darwins telling a distorted version of events to protect their sons?
Why did John Darwin come back to London?
Anne Darwin says her husband returned to London last weekend because he had
“had enough of being dead” and was desperate to see his sons. Yet the couple
had invested much time and money in creating a new life in Panama. They had
ploughed nearly £250,000 into a property investment. So why did he not wait
for his sons to visit their mother in Panama or contact them secretly?
Was Anne Darwin involved from the start?
She has claimed that her husband talked about faking his death. Yet when he
disappeared she failed to mention this to the police. She claims she later
failed to tell anyone he had returned because her husband “threatened to say
I’d been involved from the beginning”.
VANISHING IS EASY IF YOU STAY OUT OF TROUBLE
EVEN in an age of mass surveillance by CCTV and other electronic means, people
in Britain can still “disappear” and live in secret.
“Invisibility takes a lot of effort, but it is possible, as evidenced by John
Darwin,” said Simon Davis, director of Privacy International.
“If you are happy to eke out a living, and as long as you don’t harm anybody,
you can do it.”
Those seeking anonymity have to abandon many of the trappings of modern life,
but they can survive on cash earnings from casual work and self-employment.
They can get medical treatment, at least in an emergency, without proof of
identity. Darwin, of course, was able to survive financially thanks to his
wife.
If the authorities are not actively looking for a person, the 4.2m CCTV
cameras that operate in Britain are of little threat to the disappeared.
“The reason why Darwin got away for so long was that there was no one looking
for him anymore. So there was no need for anyone to go through CCTV records
and put out a search warrant for him,” said Michael Parker, a spokesman for
NO2ID, a surveillance pressure group.
Even when a person is sought, the sheer amount of surveillance material
available can be a problem. Professor Nigel Gilbert, an expert on
surveillance at the University of Surrey, said: “The more surveillance data
we have, the harder it is to identify the correct bits.
What we are doing with data is we are doubling the size of the haystack when
it comes to searching for the needle.”
Where staying hidden becomes more difficult is when an individual either
commits an act that draws attention from the police or other authorities, or
attempts to obtain documents to support a false identity. A new passport
requires a person to produce a birth certificate and other documents such as
a driver’s licence.
Experts estimate that in Britain there are thousands of people that have gone
missing or assumed new identities to escape “difficult lives”.
Many may live in big cities rather than out-of-the-way places. “In London, you
have a certain anonymity, whereas in a small town, you’ll be asked
questions,” said Davis. “As long as you don’t come into contact with law
enforcement authorities, you should be fine.”
Abul Taher
