'Secret e-mail' sent day before canoeist handed himself in

The faux-widow of canoeist John Darwin admitted that the plan to fake her husband’s death was “stupid” and “ridiculous” but she claimed in police interviews heard today that she had been manipulated into taking part in the insurance scam.

Anne Darwin, 56, claimed that she had argued with her partner and suggested that they simply file for bankruptcy to end their debt problems.

“But he just wouldn’t hear it,” she told police officers. “He said we had both worked hard all our lives and he didn’t want to lose everything he had worked for.

“He was not violent, but could be very manipulative,” she said. “He had a way of making me feel quite small.

“I used to say he treated me like a second year pupil that he used to teach.”

The transcript of interviews with police were read to the jury at Teeside Crown Court today. She told them: “I knew it was stupid but, once I set out along the road, it was difficult to turn back.

“I wanted to tell the boys. I knew they were suffering, but he couldn’t do it.

“John kept saying: ’I will say you are party to it if you tell anyone. We have to clear the debts, then maybe we could move on’.”

She added that, soon after his faked death, her husband had begged her, in tears, to come home earlier but that she was minded to leave him in his hiding place.

“I still had family staying with me. He was finding it hard. He was getting desperate,” she said.

Eventually the time was right for Mr Darwin to come back: “He phoned me and gave me directions to where he was. I wanted to leave him there. I didn’t want to go and pick him up, but I couldn’t leave him.”

The mother-of-two denies six counts of deception and nine money laundering charges linked to insurance payments received after her husband’s disappearance from the seafront at Seaton Carew, near Hartlepool, in March 2002.

The jury heard today that Mrs Darwin had commemorated the first anniversary of her husband’s supposed death by returning to the site of his disappearance and throwing a floral tribute into the ocean.

Irene Blakemore, Mrs Darwin’s best friend, told the jury that she had also been betrayed by the lies. She regularly comforted the faux-widow as she pretended to be mourning her husband, including that occasion one year after his disappearance.

“She had taken some flowers, roses, to throw in the sea at North Gare,” Mrs Blakemore said. “I believe she kept one on her bedside table.”

“She appeared quite calm but I wasn’t surprised that she was not weeping and wailing because she came across as a quite self-contained person and not one to make a fuss. There was a kind of numbness,” she said.

David Waters, QC, defending Mrs Darwin, asked Mrs Blakemore in cross-examination: “You look upon yourself as a very loyal friend? You must feel very let-down and bitter?”

“Yes. Very hurt. Devastated,” she replied. Mrs Blakemore discovered that she had been lied to for more than five years when her father telephoned her to say that he read on Ceefax that Mr Darwin had returned from the dead.

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