Read Anne Darwin's letter in full

The sons of the couple jailed last week for a £250,000 life insurance fraud revealed yesterday that their mother had written to them from prison pleading for their forgiveness.

Anne Darwin, who has been given a six-and-a-half-year jail term for her role in covering up the scam, in which her husband feigned death in a canoeing accident, wrote: “I hope that one day you will find it in your heart to forgive me and Dad.”

Mark and Anthony Darwin spoke of their sense of betrayal at being allowed to continue believing for six years that their father had died at sea. In reality, their parents had claimed a life insurance payout and moved to Panama. The father, John, was sentenced to six years in prison.

Anthony, 29, an insurance broker, said: “It’s bewildering. Nothing seems real any more. They have tarnished all the good times that came before. I can’t ever forgive them for putting us through the torture of mourning.

“They were in it together and they deserve the sentences handed down by the judge. They’re as bad as each other.

“Dad told one nasty lie and disappeared and said he was dead but she lied for six years, she was the face of the lies and she kept lying even when the evidence was so overwhelmingly against her. She dragged us through hell by forcing a court case.”

He added that his father would suffer in jail because he was once a prison officer. “He should have thought of that before he committed the crime,” Anthony told The Mail on Sunday.

Mark, a 32-year-old software engineer, said: “It’s been hard knowing who to trust except ourselves. I feel like I’ve been living in the twilight zone. I have been had completely and I feel bitter about it. It will take a lot of time to come to terms with what they have done. At the moment I want nothing to do with them.”

Anthony also spoke about having participated in a wreath-laying ceremony at the pier in Seaton Carew, Teesside, in an attempt to reconcile himself to his father’s death. Anne Darwin had accompanied her sons to the end of the pier as they paid their final respects.

Now Anthony believes it is possible that his father was watching the event from the family home. He said: “It was the pier to the right of our house, and thinking back now, you could probably have seen exactly what we were doing if you had been stood at the bedroom window. I wonder if he was watching,” he said.

The brothers, who are understood to have received £85,000 for the interview, say that their mother never let her guard down. Mark, recalling the moment he heard of his father’s disappearance, said: “I felt sick to the stomach. I drove home immediately. Mam was in the doorway of the drawing room. She looked distraught. Like a person who had lost her husband. She said, ‘I think I have lost him, he has gone’.

“I gave her a hug for what seemed like ten minutes. We were both crying. We stood there in each other’s arms and she was sobbing uncontrollably. I had never seen her in this state.

“Her eyes were red and her nose was running. My heart went out to her . . . This was the most horrific part of the whole nightmare for me, the most heartbreaking moment and the most difficult thing I had ever had to deal with.”

Mark added that during the period that his father had been living in the family home in secret, there had been nothing to arouse suspicion – although his mother had kept his clothes until the inquest was held.

“It seemed poignant at the time but I suppose he may have been wearing them,” he said.

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