The night before missing canoeist John Darwin ended his five-year exile by walking into a Central London police station, he received an e-mail from his wife begging him not leave her.

It is unclear what Anne Darwin meant when she wrote “Don’t leave me” to her husband just hours before he handed himself in to police on December 1, 2007. Investigators and the prosecution have struggled to solve the mystery of why Mr Darwin voluntarily gave himself up years after he went missing off the coast of Seaton Carew.

His wife is now on trial accused of six counts of deception and nine money-laundering charges after Mr Darwin staged his own death by abandoning his canoe in the North Sea.

At 11.26pm on November 30, 2007 she wrote an e-mail with the subject line “Hi” to the secret Yahoo account her husband had set up under his false name of John Jones.

“Hope you had a good flight and everything’s ok with your family. Don’t leave me… Did you manage to write the last chapter of your book on the way there,” she wrote. "Love you, missing you already. XXXXXXX.”

The e-mail sent on the eve of Mr Darwin’s surrender was just one of a number of loving exchanges read out in Teeside Crown Court today.

Once Mr Darwin had fled to Panama and his wife was still keeping up the pretence of his death in Seaton Carew near Hartlepool he wrote: “Love you lots. Get your bum over here fast. I got something here for you and it’s hot.”

In an e-mail Mrs Darwin sent her husband on October 10 2007 from her Yahoo account, she signs off: “I miss you so much XXXXX.”

In another missive sent on October 6, she tells her husband: “Love you XXX.”

The jury was told that Cleveland Police detectives accessed John Darwin’s john_jones_1850 yahoo.co.uk account and found a total of 1,012 emails, of which 923 were unread.

Police rules mean that officers could not open any unopened emails and so looked at the contents of just 89 messages.

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