The canoe man: the untold story of what John Darwin did next
Twenty years after paddling out into the North Sea to fake his own death – deceiving even his own family – John Darwin now lives a quiet life in the Philippines. Gordon Rayner reports
Seeing him tap away at his laptop for hours on end every day in the front window of his house, the locals in his suburb of Manila have long assumed their aloof English neighbour is an author working on his latest novel. He rarely ventures out into the oppressive humidity of the tropical day, preferring the sanctuary of the home he shares with his much younger Filipina wife, Mercy May.
Two decades after he paddled his canoe out into the North Sea to fake his own death, this is where John Darwin’s journey has taken him, via Panama, prison and the divorce courts. And life is certainly quiet. He has few friends, he is not in contact with most of his family back in the UK; in fact, the only time he has drawn attention to himself locally was over a minor traffic dispute with a neighbour. “After that, everyone in our village started calling him The Briton,” says a local resident. “Because he’s British and strict.” Few of the neighbours have any idea that Darwin is the “canoe man” who pretended to have died at sea in order to access £250,000 in life insurance and other payments, after running up huge debts while trying to construct a property empire.
For a man to fake his death is not unheard of, but what made the case of John Darwin almost unique was that his wife, Anne, was in on the plot, agreeing that their sons and every other member of the family should believe Darwin had perished, so that they would display genuine grief. The Darwins then began a new life in Central America, living out an equatorial adventure far away from the chilly seaside town of Seaton Carew, County Durham, until the moment inevitably came, five years after John’s disappearance, when the couple’s lies caught up with them.
The extraordinary details of their deception caused an international sensation. Now aged 71, John Darwin has ultimately achieved his goal of a new life in the sun – but at a cost. His marriage to Anne has ended and he still has little to no relationship with his sons, Mark and Anthony, both of whom mourned him for years before learning that he had been alive all along. They remain in the shadow of their parents’ infamy: Anthony previously worked in insurance but had to change jobs, telling his mother it had become “too awkward to speak to clients”. He also changed his surname. John Darwin’s siblings are estranged from him too. “It was horrendous… a disgusting thing to do to their children,” says one close family member, adding that the shame brought on the family was harrowing for Darwin’s father Ronald, who died in a care home while his son was in prison. The relative recalls that Ronald “crumbled” following his son’s arrest. “He said, ‘Not my John, not my John.’”
Anne Darwin, 69, could not have taken a more different course in life since being released from prison 11 years ago. She has pursued a path of atonement, working as a receptionist at an animal shelter and living quietly in a North Yorkshire village, devoting her energies to rebuilding the damaged relationship with her sons and earning the right to be part of her grandchildren’s lives. She has said that in her village she is “left in peace”, and if people know about her past they don’t say so. When she wrote an autobiography, Out of My Depth, in 2016, she donated the proceeds to the RSPCA and to the RNLI, whose volunteers risked their lives to search for a man who was hiding on dry land.
When the 20th anniversary of John Darwin’s disappearance arrives this month, John and Anne, now living 6,500 miles apart, will no doubt wonder how different life might have been. “I have no sympathy for either of them,” says Tony Hutchinson, the former police detective who brought them to justice. “What they did to their family, to their sons, was absolutely despicable. And it was all to save face because they could have just declared themselves bankrupt.”
“For a man to fake his death is not unheard of, but what made the case of John Darwin almost
unique is that his wife was in on the plot”
It was on 21 March 2002 that Anne Darwin dialled 999 and reported her husband missing. “This isn’t like John at all,” she told the call handler. Her husband, she said, had not turned up for work as a prison officer. She told police that his red canoe was missing from the hallway, and said, “I’m starting to worry something dreadful might have happened.” Witnesses reported seeing John Darwin paddling out to sea earlier that day, a mile from his home in Seaton Carew, near the mouth of the River Tees. A paddle, and then his damaged canoe, would later be plucked from the water.
Anne Darwin knew that nothing “dreadful” had happened to her husband at all. She had collected him earlier that evening and driven him to a train station so he could disappear to Cumbria and pretend to be dead. John, convinced he was destined to become a property magnate, had racked up huge debts buying cheap houses; rather than declare bankruptcy, he had come up with the idea of faking his death to claim his life insurance. Less than a month after Anne called 999, he returned home and laid
low, growing a bushy beard and faking a limp to avoid being recognised when he went out. Whenever there was a knock at the door, he would vanish through a doorway hidden behind a wardrobe into a bedsit in the house next door, which the Darwins owned as a rental property. “One of my first questions to my mother [after she was convicted] was whether Dad had been standing on the other side of the wall during my visits,” Mark Darwin, who was 26 when his father enacted his plan, later recalled. “On the days when I would have been comforting her… Crying at all I had lost… I was devastated when she admitted that he was.”
When John Darwin “disappeared”, his other son Anthony, then 23, cut short a holiday to Canada, where he had been planning on proposing to his future wife at Niagara Falls. His parents had robbed him of happiness and replaced it with despair. Yet rather than turning themselves in as they saw how heartbroken their sons were, the Darwins pressed on. After an inquest declared John legally dead in April 2003, Anne received £90,867 from pension and life insurance policies, with another £137,400 from a mortgage protection policy. It enabled her to gradually sell off their 14 properties, which had been increasing in value. She and Darwin then decamped to Panama, where they bought a parcel of land with the intention of turning it into an eco-tourism destination. But a change in Panamanian law meant that they could only obtain long-term residency if they produced letters from the UK police testifying to their good character, which Darwin, living under the false identity of John Jones, could not do. It was time for him to come back to life.
“In 2010 Anne told John that she wanted to divorce him. He told her not to be ‘daft’. ‘Abuse,’ she wrote, ‘can take many forms’”
On 1 December 2007, Darwin walked into a police station on London’s Savile Row. “I think I might be a missing person,” he told the police. News of the revenant’s return made headlines around the world. Anne (who had stayed in Panama) professed to be astonished and delighted. Unfortunately for the Darwins, a curious member of the public found a photograph on an estate agency website showing them together in Panama in 2006. The game was up and both John and Anne were charged with fraud.
John Darwin pleaded guilty, but Anne denied the charges, using the defence of marital coercion. Her two sons gave evidence for the prosecution, and she was sentenced to six years and six months in jail. Her husband was given a shorter sentence of six years and three months, on account of his guilty plea. Mark and Anthony disowned their parents after the trial, saying, “We don’t want to see them. Ever.” But in the years since, there has been a degree of reconciliation. Over the years Anne has gradually rebuilt a relationship with her sons; Mark, now 46, wrote to her after she began her sentence, and later started visiting, but it would take two years for Anthony, now 43, to make his first visit. That day, his wife asked Anne: “How could you do this to your sons?”
In her 2016 book, she went some way to answering this: “Abuse can take many forms and quite often the victims themselves don’t realise what is happening until it is too late,” she wrote. “I had no self-confidence and low self-esteem, and didn’t have the courage to do the right thing.” Today, Anne plays a full role in the lives of the four grandchildren she now has by her two sons – she has even been on holiday with them – though her damaged relationships may never be fully repaired. As Mark puts it: “I love my mother. Just not in that childhood, all-encompassing way.”
For John, it’s a very different story. By all accounts, Mark is the only close relation who has, so far, attempted to make peace, having visited his father in prison and maintained long-distance contact. “I have come to believe that having him alive, and in my life, is much more preferable to his loss,” he once said. Anthony had no desire to contact his father. Other members of the family, too, will never forgive.
One of the least surprising turns in this tale is that John and Anne’s marriage didn’t survive the deception. In 2010 Anne told him she was going to divorce him. He told her not to be “daft”. After they were both released from jail in 2011, he sent her a photo of her across which he had put a copyright symbol, suggesting ownership of her. He was served with a restraining order. During their 37-year marriage, Anne claims that her husband cheated on her with at least two other women. He boasted in a 2012 memoir about once being seduced by the parent of a child he was teaching, and described having sex with her in the classroom, “the sound of my hips slapping against her flesh”. He later told a US journalist, “Women are my drug.” Seemingly unable to believe that Anne could want to be parted from the man who signed emails “Sexy Beast”, John also suggested to the journalist that his ex-wife had been turned into a lesbian by Tracie Andrews, a murderer with whom she became friends while in prison.
When meeting women online, Darwin described himself as “John from England with blue eyes”, and he travelled the world to pursue sexual encounters. “Nothing surprises me with that guy,” says former police detective Tony Hutchinson. “He is a narcissist and I could imagine him thinking he was gorgeous to women. In his first police interview he was arrogant and egotistical.” One woman Darwin met online was Filipina motherof-three Mercy May Avila, who, at 48, is 23 years younger than him. In 2015, less than two months after they first met in person, they married. Contacted for this article, Mercy May replied that her husband would only speak in return for payment. Darwin’s neighbours say that his dream of a property empire remains alive, thanks partly to the energetic entrepreneurship of his wife, who has a market stall selling clothes, a mobile phone repair shop and a storage business. Still, their neighbourhood in Manila is hardly nirvana: the couple’s three-storey property, worth about £12,000, has floor-toceiling metal grates on the outside of every floor, so that it seems closer to a prison than his gabled former home in Seaton Carew.
When John Darwin was once asked by a US journalist if he had regrets, he said: “Don’t do the crime, and if you do, don’t come back. It’s easy to fake your own death. It’s damn difficult to come back.” Although he might not want to admit it, there are whispers that he may have a yearning to return to live in Britain. Former friends have reportedly claimed that he has asked them to find him a job in the UK, and he has complained about the smog, pollution and relentless heat of Manila.
Certainly life would be rather less anonymous if he did return. In Seaton Carew, John Darwin’s name and notoriety live on. The Staincliffe Hotel, next to his former home, has a restaurant called the Darwin Room, as well as the Canoe Bar. On the windswept beach where the story began, dog walker Brian Lawson, 56, says, “When you mention Seaton Carew to anyone who’s not from the area they’ll always bring up the canoe man. It’s a story that will get passed down. It was a caper, a bit of a laugh, no one got hurt, apart maybe from his sons – that part of it was well out of order.”
A longer version of this article appeared in The Daily Telegraph. Additional reporting by Dan Olanday and Claudia Rowan © The Daily Telegraph Group