As the grieving widow of a husband lost at sea, Anne Darwin gave the performance of her life. It earned her £250,000.

At Teesside Crown Court, she attempted an encore. This time she was playing the wife so weak that she could be bullied into criminality by a husband who had already pleaded guilty to his part in the scam. The audience - a jury of nine women and three men - were unconvinced.

The curtain came down yesterday on the extraordinary drama of the back-from-the-dead canoeist. Its leading lady, who had betrayed her sons and removed her wedding ring, was left with 15 convictions for fraud and money laundering and a 6½year jail sentence.

Although ostensibly the star of the show, John Darwin was in the wings for much of the time, having “drowned” after taking his canoe out to sea in March 2002.

Anne Darwin's performance of a lifetime

Trial for fraud and money-laundering revealed an elaborate five-year-long deceit that fooled many people

Multimedia

• The police tapes

• Pictures: the great canoe fraud

BACKGROUND

• John Darwin's money-making schemes

• Canoe man and Bond boost Panama tourism

• Darwin wife: I wished he had drowned

It was Anne Darwin who took centre stage. In the weeks and months that followed her husband’s disappearance, visitors to the family’s seafront home in Seaton Carew, near Hartlepool, often found the doctors’ receptionist in contemplative mood. She would sit by the large bay window, gazing silently at the waters that had claimed her husband of 28 years.

Her life was in limbo, she explained six months after “the tragedy”, because the view was “a daily reminder” that his body had not been found. Her quiet fortitude seemed admirable: “I think John has met with an unfortunate accident in the sea and has died. That’s the only way I have been able to cope with it.” The former convent girl convinced everyone. Her deception began with the emergency services, which devoted 36 hours - at a cost of £150,000 - to the search for the missing man and his red kayak, Orca.

She hoodwinked the police who investigated her husband’s disappearance and the coroner who recorded an open verdict at his inquest 13 months later. Her two adult sons, themselves devastated, worried that she wasn’t eating or sleeping enough. Her colleagues thought she looked so drained when she returned to work that they told her to take more time off.

In a sorrowful voice, Mrs Darwin chided an insurance company representative for getting her dead husband’s middle name wrong. In a police statement weeks after John vanished, she told police officers that although a competent canoeist, he never could quite perfect the Eskimo roll.

The court heard that she tossed roses into the sea on the anniversary of his death “to bring some form of comfort to Mark and Anthony”. It was all an elaborate fiction, a web of lies and deceit spun to make money.The truth finally emerged on December 1 last year when Darwin, for whatever reasons, strolled into a London police station looking, for a dead man, remarkably tanned and healthy.

The game was soon up for his wife. As she flew home to face the music, extraordinary details emerged of false passports, hidden passageways, offshore bank accounts and clandestine global travel. It was the story of a couple who had lived beyond their means and then faked a man’s death to avoid the shame of financial ruin.

It began in Seaton Carew when in December 2000, the Darwins bought a pair of Victorian houses in the former fishing village for £170,000. No 3 The Cliff was to be the family home while the adjoining property at No 4 housed bedsits to be rented out.

John Darwin, who once boasted to a relative that he would be a millionaire by the age of 50, had unsuccessfully attempted a range of money-making enterprises from breeding snails to playing the stock market.

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