Britain: The strange case of the ‘missing canoeist

Britain is tuned in to a real-life soap opera, said James Macintyre in the London Independent on Sunday. A missing canoeist, presumed dead for five years, recently showed up in a London police station, claiming amnesia. Within 48 hours, though, his story was exposed as a hoax. Apparently, John Darwin, 55, faked his death in 2002 by punching a hole in his kayak and letting it wash ashore. His wife, Anne, “seemingly devastated,” collected the insurance money, paid off their debts, and set about arranging a new life for the couple in Panama. Police say Darwin actually spent most of his missing years hidden by his wife in an apartment accessed through a secret tunnel under their Durham County house. The whole charade, police say, was a scheme to get rich. Darwin’s elderly father, Ronald, told reporters that John always had “ideas above his station” and was “in a bit too much of a hurry to make money.”

It was the very sensationalism of the story that undid the Darwins, said Gill Smith in the London Sunday Mirror. With all of Britain mesmerized by the tale when Darwin first resurfaced, everyone became a sleuth. On a whim, one reader of the Daily Mirror Googled the Darwins’ names. Within seconds, she had found a photo of the couple on a Panamanian real estate Web site—dated July 2006. She called the authorities, and the game was up. Police promptly arrested Anne Darwin in Panama, where she confessed to abetting her husband’s fraud. She went on to claim that she never told the couple’s two adult sons that their father wasn’t really dead. “My sons are never going to forgive me now,” she sobbed. “They are going to hate me.”

Do we believe her? asked Natalie Clarke in the London Daily Mail. The assertion “that she and her husband deceived their own boys, making them grieve for a father who wasn’t dead,” is monstrous. Her remorse seems utterly genuine, but remember, “she acted the role of grieving widow for five years with not a single person suspecting her.” Yet the police really do seem to believe that the sons were kept in the dark. And the sons are reportedly so furious that they are not speaking to either parent. Still, parts of Anne’s story do not add up. She admits that her husband proposed faking his own death, but insists that she truly believed he was dead—at least, until he turned up 11 months later and she began hiding him. Now she, too, has been arrested, and it will be a miracle if she doesn’t join her husband in jail.

The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

So why did Darwin come back at all? asked Richard Woods in the London Sunday Times. Had the couple simply absconded to Panama as planned, the fraud might never have come out. Anne claims that John “had enough of being dead” and wanted to reconnect with his sons. That seems unlikely, given that he was willing to skip one son’s wedding to preserve the fiction of his death. Instead, police suspect that the Darwins got wind of an investigation. Anne had been making “odd, whispered calls at work,” raising colleagues’ suspicions. Claiming amnesia, then, could have been a last-ditch attempt to spin the story. Unfortunately for the Darwins, in the Internet age, it’s almost impossible to hide.