Canoe son: I FORGIVE YOU, MUM
It was the cruellest part of the bizarre ‘canoe plot’ – how Anne Darwin lied to her sons for FIVE YEARS that their father was dead. Now there’s a final astonishing twist
HUDDLED together on the windswept pier, Mark Darwin and his younger brother Anthony stood protectively on either side of their mother Anne. The three gazed out at the North Sea before Anne, openly weeping, threw a wreath of red roses into the choppy waters.
As it bobbed out into the distance, they returned to the family home just yards from the seafront at Seaton Carew in County Durham, where Anne laid out a selection of her late husband’s belonging for their sons to choose as mementoes.
‘I fingered my father’s watch, his onyx cufflinks, memories engulfing me as I touched them,’ says Mark of that day in 2004. ‘And then I remember breaking down.’
His father, John Darwin, had disappeared during a canoeing accident two years earlier and been declared dead. This was a final act of remembrance from his grieving widow and sombre-faced sons.
What Mark could not have known as he comforted his mother was that behind a wall dividing the house from the one next door stood the ‘dead’ man himself. Or that their poignant memorial to John Darwin was no more than another chapter in the cold-hearted charade which would become one of the most compelling court cases of the 21st Century – a macabre five-year hoax which transfixed a nation and left two sons bereft.
No wonder Mark and Anthony swore they would have nothing more to do with their parents or that, as they told The Mail on Sunday at the time: ‘We don’t want to see them. Ever.’
Yet today, standing side by side for our exclusive photograph, Mark Darwin, the elder of the two boys, curls a loving arm around his mother’s shoulders. There has been a most unlikely reconciliation.
‘Never, then, would I have ever dreamed I would be happily posing with my mother,’ he says. ‘What I have gone through to get to a stage where I can forgive has been tough. It’s taken deep thought and a difficult process of accepting her faults.’
Anne has just written a book about the whole extraordinary episode, which saw both parents jailed – a book in which she heaps most of the blame on her former husband John.
Her sons, meanwhile, have kept their counsel, trudging a long, slow route towards some semblance of forgiveness. This is the first time that Mark, 40, has agreed to talk since that first outpouring of anger in 2008 when, finally, the truth was known.
‘The man in this photograph is not the same one who felt all that bitterness and fury,’ he says. ‘That gets you nowhere, you have to let it go. But where we are now is the result of nine hard years of work at building bridges.’
His story of fury and forgiveness is particularly astonishing and he is by no means certain that other people will truly understand what he and his brother have been through.
Yet it is also a poignant account of how, for the sake of his family and maybe his own sanity, he has worked to rebuild a relationship which had seemed so catastrophically destroyed. MARK’S ordeal began in 2002 when, mired in mortgage debt on their home and on an array of rental properties nearby, John and Anne Darwin risked everything on a plan of barely imaginable stupidity. John would fake his death in a canoe accident so that Anne could fraudulently claim his £250,000 life insurance.
They had spent recklessly, but John, a former chemistry teacher turned prison officer, was determined to keep up an appearance of affluence, including a £700-a-month rented Range Rover with personalised number plates.
On March 22, Mark’s uncle Michael phoned him at work to tell him John was missing after taking out his canoe alone, and Mark returned to Seaton Carew to support his mother.
‘How did she seem? Like a woman who was devastated that her husband was missing. She was frantic. I’ve thought about it many times. There was nothing amiss. Nothing to alert me.’
Throughout the following weeks, as coastguards found nothing, Mark came to think that his father had suffered an angina attack and flipped his canoe. He fretted that his dad had been alone when he met his death. Looking back now on the deception, he still cannot fathom how his mother allowed him to continue grieving.
‘When the truth was revealed I was furious that she let me imagine the horrors of my father’s death, while all the time she knew exactly where he was. Alive and well and camping out on a beach at Silloth, 100 miles away.
‘I was dragging up old memories – Dad buying us rabbits, laughing with us, desperate to believe he was still alive. But she never cracked once. She played the role of heartbroken wife perfectly.’
When no trace of John’s body was found, Anne finally came into the insurance money. And then, somehow, for the next five years, she continued the fiction while John lived a shadowy existence in their home, sneaking next door when visitors, including his own sons, came round.
In 2006, the couple began a new life in Panama where they bought land. John had manufactured a new identity for himself by distastefully adopting the name of a dead child – a style of fraud made notorious by the Frederick Forsyth novel The Day Of The Jackal.
The following year came the most bizarre twist of all. Realising they would be unable to claim Panamanian citizenship (which would have protected them against future legal claims from their British insurers) they decided to return to the UK.
John would simply return home, and walk into a police station claiming he had suffered from amnesia since his disappearance in 2002.
Which is what he did, believing naively that all would live happily ever after. And, with an equally breathtaking lack of compassion, John assured his wife that their sons would be thrilled to welcome back into their lives the father they had mourned for so long.
Of course, the whole charade unravelled. A photograph emerged which showed the smiling couple posing alongside an estate agent in Panama. They were convicted of fraud and John, who pleaded guilty, was jailed for six years and three months for his crime.
In the face of overwhelming
She played the role of heartbroken wife perfectly The fury at what they put me through will taint my life for ever
evidence, Anne opted for the arcane defence of ‘marital coercion’, blamed her husband and pleaded not guilty. The result was a sentence of six years and six months. ‘IT WAS a cruel act of betrayal that no parents should ever inflict upon their children,’ Mark says today. ‘The pain and suffering it caused me and my brother is indescribable. The horror of the discovery, my sheer fury at what they put me through, is something that will taint my life for ever.
‘How the mother I loved could let me go through that is unbelievable. That my father should inflict such thoughtless pain upon me, all for money, is overwhelming at times.
‘One of my first questions to my mother was whether Dad had been standing on the other side of the wall during my visits. On the days when I would have been comforting her. Crying at all I had lost. I was devastated when she admitted he was.
‘How, I tortured myself, could a mother let her son endure such grief, pour out his agony, reminisce about the father he loved, knowing not only that he was still alive, but standing inches from me?’
As Mark relaxes on the sofa of the Hertfordshire home he shares with wife Flick, 39, his sons, Max, five, and baby Joe, two-and-a-half, he smiles as his sons play fight over the Lego and scatter their toys. ‘Could I do what my parents did to them, my sons, my flesh and blood? Never,’ he says. ‘Never, ever.’
How, then, is his mother now once again a part of his family life?
‘I have forgiven her,’ Mark says slowly. ‘To some degree. But I will never understand. Nor forget. I’ve even got over, to some extent, the gnawing need to know why. Why do it to us?
‘Nothing can describe the kick in the teeth I felt when I discovered she had been in on the entire thing.
‘And while she has said sorry, she never told me details. Everything I learned – and each piece of information came as yet one more emotional punch to the stomach – I learned through the media or at her trial.
‘Do you know, it wasn’t until day one of her court case that I discovered she had actually been in on it from the very start. Up until then she let me believe she only got involved when, a few weeks after Dad’s “death”, he turned up on the doorstep.
‘But then sometimes I feel I don’t want to ask. Maybe I’m afraid of more lies.’
His feelings towards his father, now married to a new wife in the Philippines, are more complicated.
‘I have given this a lot of long, deep thought,’ he admits. ‘My father died. I had to learn how to live without his comfort, compassion and love in my life. Then, suddenly, he’s back.’ Mark pauses, then leans forward. ‘I have come to believe that having him alive, and in my life, is much more preferable to his loss. No, it doesn’t negate what he did to me. Yet I feel fortunate that he is alive.’
Is he even prepared to forgive his father. ‘Perhaps,’ he admits. ‘But at least I have my family,’ again he pauses, ‘not intact, never again intact. But they are present. They are alive. Do I feel the same about them? No. No, I don’t. But the love is there. It’s just… different. I love my mother. Just not in that childhood, all-encompassing way. Do I trust them? Yes, I do, but only in so far as it wouldn’t adversely affect me.
‘And I would certainly never trust them on financial matters.’
Mark’s brother Anthony, 37, has been less forgiving. He still refuses to speak to John and has a more watchful relationship with his mother than Mark has. ‘I took a dif- ferent view,’ Mark says. ‘I talked to Flick and I knew I had to see my mother, at least speak to her about what she had put me through.’
His initial visit, while his mother was being held in Low Newton Prison just after her trial, was short, stiff and formal. At subsequent visits there were tears, profuse apologies and some headway was made in allowing Mark to fathom the magnitude of what his mother had done.
Today, Anne, 63, lives in a small flat just outside York. She took a business course while in prison and now does secretarial work for the RSPCA.
Mark says: ‘Now we have normal conversations, the sort of ones mothers and sons do. If one of the kids is sick, I will ask Mam what she thinks I should do. We try to stay on safe subjects, though. That said, what she did isn’t an elephant in the room. And believe it or not, we can even, at times, joke about it. In a black humour sort of way.’
It is tempting to believe that Mark has blocked from his mind much of his mother’s behaviour, so strong is his desire to rebuild their relationship. And it is certainly to his credit that he has worked at it tirelessly.
He has relied heavily on the support of his friends. ‘Without them, this would have been immeasurably harder,’ he says. ‘I will be forever in their debt.’
There was another milestone earlier this year when, for the first time, Mark invited Anne to come with them on a family holiday to Spain. ‘It was my idea to invite Anne to spend a short holiday with us,’ says Flick. ‘And since Anne is single and doesn’t want to go on holidays alone, I thought it would be nice to ask her to join us for five of the ten days we were away.
‘Anne babysat the children a few times so that we could have a few meals out. I felt we all relaxed together. And I felt we all bonded that bit more.’
Mark continues: ‘I want my children to have a good relationship with their grandmother. But yes, of course, in time I will have to explain to them what she did. I need to do it before someone else in the playground does. How they will feel then is another matter. But I trust the kids around her. And that is important.
‘Ultimately, I blame my mother and father equally for all they inflicted upon me and my brother.
‘I think my father was the originator, the driving force, and she got caught up. But she could have come clean. She could have stopped it all. And she should have pleaded guilty. After all, she was.
‘The holiday was a tentative way of beginning to involve her again in my family. A slow reintegration into my life. It’s been a long road.
‘I wouldn’t wish this journey on anyone. But I’m hoping we will get there in the end.’
At times we joke about it ...in a black humour way