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Missing canoeist's wife 'coerced' to stay quiet

by Dave Keating | July 16, 2008 at 11:28 pm

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The trial of the wife of a British man who faked his death in order to reap life insurance payments is really getting fascinating. The woman lied to her sons and told them their father was dead, and then tried to go to South America to join her husband. Now the wife is claiming she was coerced into going along with it. But the husband is claiming that he was coerced by her to do it!

A woman whose husband faked his death in a canoeing accident told police she was desperate to tell her sons that their father was still alive but that he blackmailed her to stay quiet, a court heard yesterday.

Jurors at Teesside crown court heard transcripts of Anne Darwin's police interviews in which she claimed that if she spoke out, her husband would say she was involved in the £250,000 insurance deception from the beginning. She described lying to her sons, Mark and Anthony, as "extremely painful".

Yesterday it emerged that on the night she reported John Darwin missing to police in March 2002, she picked him up from the beach where he had "disappeared" and drove him to Durham station.

Asked in one interview whether the most difficult deception was pretending to her sons that their father was dead, the 56-year-old said: "That is extremely painful, always has been ... I wanted to tell the boys. I knew they were suffering, but he couldn't do it. John kept saying: 'I will say you are party to it if you tell anyone. We have to clear the debts, then maybe we could move on'."