Episode 598 - David Leigh - John Darwin "Canoe Man" Mystery
John Darwin shocked the world when he faked his own death in a "canoe accident" and, with his wife's collusion, thought he'd pulled off a famous fraud... But determined work by acclaimed British journalist and writer David Leigh led to Darwin's discovery - in Panama. Now ITV is making a film of the so-called "canoe man" deception. This is the story of how David Leigh found Darwin and his wife.
Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast.
My name is Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained.
Very nearly Christmas.
You might well be hearing this across the Christmas season.
And if you are, and if you are one who celebrates Christmas, I wish you a very happy Christmas.
I wish you the best of the season and I wish you a good 2022.
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Keep them coming.
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I'm snowed under and with stuff at the moment.
And as you know, I'm coming up with the ideas for the radio shows and booking all the guests for the podcast now.
So it's been pretty full on.
And I'm kind of looking forward to just unplugging for a couple of days.
You know, I'm not going anywhere.
I haven't been anywhere for, I can't even remember.
You know, I'll be here.
But I just want to kind of turn my brain off for a couple of days.
That's going to be very hard for me because I don't know about you, but I'm one of these people.
I always like to be connected with the news and doing things because doing the news was my livelihood for years and years and years.
It's all I know.
But I'm going to try because I think there's an awful lot of stuff to avoid this Christmas.
I think we all deserve a break in every possible sense of that phrase, don't we?
But I hope you're keeping well and I wish you well and your family, if you have a family, at this season.
Okay, that's that.
Now, something different on this edition of the show.
I'm going to talk with David Lee, who did an awful lot of research and wrote about a man called John Darwin.
You will know that name, I think, if you're in the UK.
They call him Canoe Man.
He effectively, with the involvement of his wife, faked his own death in a supposed canoe accident at sea in the northeast of England.
It made all the headlines, and everybody believed that's what had happened to him.
But this man was eventually discovered out of the United Kingdom.
He very nearly got away with it.
The story of how he was discovered is astonishing.
And the story of this mystery, while it is not a story of ghosts or spirits or anything like that, it is an astonishing story.
And it's one that if you have an hour just to listen to something, maybe this is the hour just to listen to a narrative here.
Because the story of how this was plotted, how he was very nearly caught, recognized at one point, but got away with it then, the story of how this man managed this and what became of him and his wife afterwards is just so compelling.
So David Lee was the journalist who secured the scoop about this story.
There is now a book about this and there is about to be a film, a movie made of this that you will be seeing.
So that's why it's very topical now.
The story of John Darwin, anybody who's been around in the last 15 years or so in the United Kingdom will know the story of this man.
It is a good old-fashioned swindle story.
But, you know, the bad guys always get caught, and John Darwin got caught in the end in this elaborate fake and hoax that you and I, you know, we would never be dishonest enough to do something like that.
We'd never even considered it because of our upbringing, whatever our situation.
But, you know, not only would we not do something like that, most of us, you and me, wouldn't be able to plan it.
This man did.
And you'll hear that whole story on this edition.
So it's something that I've never put on the podcast.
I've got a number of interviews that I've done.
Over the last couple of years that have been broadcast or they've appeared in other places and I haven't released as podcasts.
And that's a bit of a shame.
So drip by drip, little by little, I'll slowly get around to doing that.
And we'll start with this one at this Christmas season.
See what you think of it.
If a mystery is not your kind of thing, it's a great mystery.
Totally understand.
The next edition of The Unexplained, we'll be talking about ghosts with Elaine Kelly.
But the story of John Darwin, I think, has just got to be heard.
But you decide.
Here is that conversation from my archives.
John Darwin was the man from the Northeast that the newspapers named Canoe Man.
He disappeared.
It was what you might call a good old-fashioned British swindle.
It was almost like something out of the 1950s, but it happened in the 2000s.
An astonishing case of a man who faked his own disappearance, aided and abetted by his wife, but unbeknown to his children, and for a period got away with it in a most spectacular way.
Now, such stories, usually they get found out, and quite often they're found out through the process of really good journalism.
And that is the case in this instance.
David Lee is online to us now from Miami, where he runs a news agency, accomplished journalist, man who's won many plaudits and accolades in this field.
And he was the man who effectively broke the story or broke what became the end of this story, the revelation that John Darwin was alive and something strange had been going on.
David Lee from Miami is online to us now.
David, thank you very much for listening to all of that.
Did that make sense?
It made perfect sense.
Hi, Howard.
Greetings.
Getting from the sunshine.
Well, it's sunshine here too, David.
I think we're both winning, both sides of the Atlantic, I hope.
It is a story that baffled, frustrated, and amazed me in equal measure.
There are few stories like this because it has almost a hint of mystique and stardust about it.
And the only story that I could think that even somewhat equated to it was the story of Ronnie Biggs, the great train robber, who, of course, disappeared for decades and eventually he gave himself up.
John Darwin didn't give Himself up, but he was found out.
Would I be right in making that kind of parallel with the size and shape of this story?
Yeah, I think so.
I think it was one of those very English stories, and it was one of those stories that just kept getting more strange and bizarre as it went on.
And obviously, it had the, I mean, Ronnie Biggs was Brazil, this is Central America, which was, you know, the whole bizarre thing about his wife suddenly upping sticks and telling her family and friends and other one she was going to live in the Central Republic of Panama, which for a 50-something-year-old woman who never had a great desire to travel, didn't speak Spanish, it was a very strange decision.
She was a widow.
She knew no one there.
So, you know, it was one of those completely bizarre stories.
Indeed, and you mentioned Panama, and most people, the only thing they know about Panama, I'm from Liverpool originally, so I can remember all of the flag of convenient ships in the port of Liverpool.
They all had Panama on the back.
So, you know, that's what we know about Panama.
So why anybody would pick Panama other than for reasons of disappearance and being less easy to find, there would be few reasons, I suspect.
But all of this that we're about to discuss went on more or less in plain sight, didn't it?
Yes, that was the strange thing.
I mean, it was John Darwin disappeared.
He went out.
He was basically facing financial ruin.
He built up this little property empire, told everyone he was going to be a millionaire.
And, you know, that did not happen.
It was the opposite of that, that he was going broke.
And he was such a vain man, rather than face what he saw the ultimate humiliation of declaring bankruptcy, he decided to fake his death, do a Reggie Perrin, basically.
So he went out in his red canoe one day, paddled off and disappeared off the face of the earth for almost six years.
So that was the story, and he got away with it for a long time.
But of course, he didn't paddle off to his death.
He paddled off a couple of miles down the coast where his wife later picked him up.
He sunk in a canoe and was taken to the train station, caught a train across the country and began his long disappearing act.
Do you think his background had anything to do with the fact that maybe more questions were not answered or asked rather at that stage?
I mean, this man had been a teacher, he'd been a banker, and he'd also extraordinarily, this is quite a combination.
He'd been a prison officer as well.
Yes, that's right.
I mean, it's difficult.
I mean, you know, there obviously was some embarrassment for the police because, you know, there was a massive search and then he literally moved back home, you know, within two or three weeks of disappearing.
And, you know, the search, he hadn't been declared dead.
He was a missing person.
And the police actually rang Anne at one stage, just after he'd come back to say, look, they wanted to have another look around the house.
But of course, they alerted, he was there.
They'd alerted her to the phone call and sort of gave him time to hot foot it down the road.
But I think it was that background.
I think the fact that it was a grieving widow and she played the grieving widow and Darwin played the grieving widow very, very well fooled everybody, including her own two sons, which was probably the most shocking part of it all.
But yeah, I mean, he was, you know, he was not a criminal.
He'd been, as you said, a teacher, a prison officer, financial advisor, and everything had sort of gone wrong for him.
And so, you know, the police had their suspicions, but because Anne was so convincing, they treated her very gently, which aided and abetted her husband very nicely.
What did the authorities, quotes, do about gathering evidence on his disappearance, discovering the specifics of it?
What happened to the boat?
What were conditions?
Like, you know, all of those things.
You know, if we were journalists at a news conference, we'd be asking those questions.
Well, that was the thing.
It was like a mill pond.
He went out and I spoke to quite a number of the guys involved in the search and they said, you know, it was a mystery.
It was like a mill pond.
And there were, I forget how many RNLI boats involved.
There was a Coast Guard spotted plane.
There were helicopters.
Even a warship was there and brought in.
And they crisscrossed miles and miles of open sea and there was nothing at all.
And it was just very, very strange.
And of course, what had happened is John had come into shore a couple of miles down the coast and then he'd sunk the canoe.
He'd sort of made holes in it and put rocks in it and pushed it out.
And that didn't come up, that wasn't discovered for some time.
One of the paddles, or not one of the paddles, the paddle was actually the first thing to be recovered.
I think it was about three or four days later.
And that was when really the search was called off.
I mean, they just said, you know, he's obviously gone.
He was heading off towards a busy shipping lane.
They thought maybe he'd been hit by one of the huge tankers or something.
So, you know, quite what was done after that, I don't know.
There were always suspicions.
It was odd.
And quite how deeply the police had investigated his finances, I don't know, because they would have quickly discovered he was in a very, very bad way.
I mean, that is something that just doesn't add up, isn't it?
Because my father was a police officer, and he was a lovely but very suspicious man.
Where he's still here now, God rest his soul.
Those are the kind of questions I think he would be asking.
It's the kind of thing that you automatically do.
Somebody goes missing, what's the circumstances?
What have they been into?
Are they in financial or other trouble?
Would be the thing.
And it looks as if police were not able to join up the dots on that one at the time.
No, that's true.
And, you know, as you say, police officers, like journalists, are incredibly suspicious of everything.
And there were certainly a number of police officers who were very dubious about the whole story.
When Anne was missing, she was asked to provide a photograph of John so they could help with the search and whatever.
And she said she didn't have any photographs of him, which was totally bizarre.
I mean, I don't know anybody in the world who doesn't have at least one photograph of their wife.
Not even a wedding photograph.
Not even a wedding photograph.
They'd hidden them all away.
They'd discussed it and planned it.
But why that didn't raise more alarm bells, I don't know.
I mean, I think they were just very gentle on her.
And there was certainly a certain amount of embarrassment that more hadn't been done.
And in the period after his disappearance, what was she doing?
What was Anne Darwin doing?
Playing the grieving widow, basically, and she did it very well.
She started off, I think she was, without doubt, she was totally against the whole crazy scheme from the outset.
But, you know, John was a very overbearing man.
You know, she had her first real love.
And he basically called the shots and he persuaded her to go ahead with this.
She begged him not to.
And then she told one very big lie, my husband's missing.
And from there, it was just an avalanche of lies on a daily basis.
And it got so deep that, you know, every single day of her life was, she was just lying to everybody, playing the grieving widow, and she got good at it.
I don't think she ever enjoyed it for one minute, but she convinced everybody, including the two grown-up sons who were in a terrible state.
You know, some people can do these things and most people can't.
You know, if I found a bag of crisps, it's my upbringing.
If I found a bag of crisps in Tesco's car park, then I would take the bag of crisps back into Tesco's.
But obviously, he was able to do this and not feel too much about it, supposedly.
There must have been signs, do you think, in the research that you did into this case?
There must have been some signs that this man was capable of things that perhaps most of us are not.
I don't know.
I mean, it's such an extraordinary thing to do.
He was a very clever guy and he planned it all very, very well.
And he covered his tracks very well.
And as most people know, he even created a fake identity for himself.
John Jones.
John Jones, he borrowed the plot from Freddie Forsythe, Day of the Jackal, found a name, the Christian name that matched his and the surname, which was very common, someone who was born in the same year as him and died when they were a child.
And he was able to, he obtained the birth certificate.
And using the birth certificate, he basically created a whole new identity.
And that was part of the deception.
As you say, it is straight out Day of the Jackal, isn't it?
You find the birth certificate of somebody who's died, which the main character did, the would-be assassin in Day of the Jackal.
And you get hold of that, and you become that person effectively.
And in that era, it was easier to do because you couldn't check everything online, and police stations and registers of various kinds were not connected in the way that they are.
But this was not that era.
This was closer to now.
I mean, it's not even 20 years ago now.
And he was able to pull this one off.
You have to have more front than Margate, as they say, I think, to be able to achieve this.
More front than Seton Carew.
Exactly.
A place that nobody had heard of before.
I certainly haven't heard of it.
But it was shockingly easy for him and actually led to a change in regulations.
But by getting a birth certificate and then joining the library with that birth certificate and one other bit of identification, fake bit of identification, he got to know the librarian.
The librarian, after some weeks, vouched for him, which enabled him to get a passport.
And once he'd had the passport, obviously he was able to go and forth of somewhere new to live.
Okay, I think it was.
Shockingly easy.
Shockingly easy, but then sometimes people with hindsight, which as they say, as you know, in America, hindsight is 20-20, with hindsight, people say, well, you know, that's pretty obvious.
But at the time, people can be blindsided, which they were.
So, David, we got to the point where he pulled this off.
Not everybody was without suspicion, but most people seemed to be.
And Darwin played the role of the grieving widow par excellence.
The amazing part of this is that it was so well planned that they had twin homes side by side, back to back.
He was able to live next door in one of them, incognito, for a period, before moving back next door with her.
Is that correct?
Yes, more or less.
I mean, the fact that he, as I mentioned earlier, he had this little mini property empire, which he thought was going to make him a millionaire.
He decided to buy these two grand Victorian houses on the seafront, three and four, the cliff seat in Carew, and didn't want to buy them.
They were already, you know, the finances were creaking at the seams.
And he thought this would enable him to finally make his million.
Now, it was coincidental because when he bought them, I don't think he was aware that there were connecting doors between the two houses.
The one number four had been turned into bedsits.
And I think there were about 12 or 13 rooms.
And then one of the rooms actually opened, it had an opening onto number three.
And it always had a passageway, a door which opened to the passageway on number four.
So initially they were just bedsits and used by tenants.
And he was a very bad landlord.
He was always Losing tenants.
But when he decided to do his disappearing act, he thought, well, this is perfect.
The room with the adjoining door in number three was actually vacant.
And he horrified Anne by, well, first of all, by saying he was disappearing, but then saying, I'm coming back and I'm going to live in that room.
And he would spend some time in the room.
He would spend some time when Anne was alone, which was most of the time, she could unbolt the door and he could come into number three and spend the nights in the marital bed.
That was just truly amazing that he could do that.
And again, you do question the police.
They searched, obviously, the house thoroughly.
They went through it.
They took everything away, computers and whatever.
And they were aware of the passageways.
They were put in because they were a fire hazard or to prevent a fire hazard, they put these passages in.
And there was over four stores, four stories.
And the ones on the second and third floor had been blocked up many years ago, but the ones on the first floor and the fourth floor had remained open.
They were just bolted.
But why the police didn't take a better look at that?
I don't know.
They obviously searched the rental properties he had around the area.
But why more attention wasn't paid to the house next door, I don't know.
And he was living right under the noses of everybody, including tenants.
And one of the tenants at one stage, actually, one of the tenants at one stage, he grew this, his disguise was basically just had a long, shaggy beard and grew his hair long.
And it wasn't much of a disguise.
And he pointed to one of the tenants one day, he said, don't I know you?
And he said, no, no, I don't think so.
And that was it.
And he got away with it.
And again, he worked at the prison, homehouse prison.
And driving past one day, one of the fellow prison officers saw this guy who we convinced was John Darwin with a long shaggy beard and unkempt hair, reported it.
And Anne was asked about it.
And she said, oh, it might have been John's cousin.
He looks a bit like him.
So it was.
Sorry for love.
No, I know.
It is funny.
It's almost like a black comedy, really.
I mean, it's, you know, the fact he was doing it.
And every time he walked out, he just put on this big old coat and a hat and shades.
And he had this sort of stage limp, and he would just shuckle up the road and disappear if he needed to.
How long did he get away with this for?
Well, he got away with his vanishing act for getting on for six years.
I mean, he was at home for a long time, from two or three weeks after disappearing.
He moved back in, he was there.
And then he started to think, look, I need to live abroad if I'm ever going to have my life back in the open.
And that, of course, is where Panama comes into it.
They have quite a plan for Panama, which we will talk about.
But the Sherad in Seton Care, how long was he able to sustain that for?
Well, it was three or four years that he did it.
I mean, he had various trips away.
He went over to the States once.
He went to Gibraltar.
One stage, he was going to buy a boat and sail around the world.
But he was there under everyone's noses for several years.
You know, if you're going away on trips, if you're going to America, then presumably a taxi is going to pick you up to take you to the airport.
Or, you know, those sorts of things happen where you have routine worker day connection with ordinary people.
It's amazing, isn't it, that nobody, apart from that one tenant, noticed.
And of course the person who spotted him, you know, who'd known him at the prison.
He wasn't a man with a large circle of friends.
He wasn't particularly popular in the prison service.
He wasn't one for going down to the pub for a pint.
It was basically just Anne, and I think they had a very small circle of friends.
So I think that let him live unnoticed by so many people because he wasn't a character who was widely known.
And in the meantime, I know we say that Anne was in many ways a victim of this or was swept along by that tide, if we want to put it that way.
Maybe that's a little inappropriate to use a nautical reference, but you know what I'm saying.
But she was able to follow up on all of this.
And when she was asked, I saw somebody who looked like John down the road, you know, that's his cousin.
You have to be pretty quick and you have to have a certain devious mindset, I would suspect, to come up with that so fast.
I think so.
And also there was a time when a body was washed up the coast and then she gets a call from the police saying, I'm sorry, Anne, we found a body.
It might be John.
And she's, oh, my God.
And then she puts the phone down and she turns round and she says to John, they found a body.
They think it's you.
And so it's astonishing.
And, you know, her claim was, well, you know, I hope it is him because then I'll be able to at least move on with my life and I'll get some closure.
So, you know, she played that role very well.
Was the plan then disappear, cash in the insurance policies, pay off the debts, or disappear, cash in the insurance policies and beg her off?
Well, the plan, the immediate plan was to pay off the debt.
And that didn't happen for a while because for that to happen, they needed to have an inquest and he declared dead.
And it was without a body.
That needed the consent of the then Home Secretary, which was David Blunkett.
So that took a long time.
But once that was done, the debts were paid off, that's when they really, all the money was coming in, all this lovely money, and it's right, what are we going to do to have our lives?
And that's when they started looking abroad.
Um, how much did they get, David?
How much money?
Well, roughly, it's it's I think it was the word is good after because they well, don't forget they paid off, he was able to pay off the mortgages and everything else.
So, I think I think the round sum was about a million pounds he had.
Um, they had, you know, if he'd been declared bankrupt at the time, obviously, he'd have had nothing.
But by faking his death, he ended up with getting on for a million, which was a nice, tidy figure.
We mentioned Panama before why.
One, it's a tax haven, and also it's a place with notorious secrecy, as we know from the Panama papers, etc.
So it's debatable whether he ever planned to come back or not.
There was a change in the visa.
I know we're talking about Panama in a second, but there were a change in the visa requirements, which meant he couldn't stay there as John Jones.
So I think the plan changed as it went along.
And he realized the only way he was going to be able to continue his life would be to come back, claim amnesia, reinvent himself as John Darwin.
And he thought he'd just be able to, everyone would say, okay, that's great.
Off you go.
And he thought he'd go back to Panama.
Sadly, we'll get into that in the next segment here.
I just want to zero in, though, on the procedural elements of this, the things that have to happen when somebody disappears in mysterious and difficult circumstances.
You know, there has to be an inquest.
That inquest has to make a determination.
There was an inquest.
The sons were put through this.
The kids were put through that, believing that their dad had died.
What a terrible thing.
Yes, it was a terrible thing.
And this is the most shocking thing of the story.
People can't quite believe that a mother could do that to her own sons because for any of this to have happened, for the money to be paid out, there had to be an inquest.
So Anne put pressure on the local police of the agent officer.
I think the boys were asked to help and see whether there's anything they could do.
The coroner was called and she was just saying, look, my life's a limbo.
I can't carry on like this.
And eventually the coroner sought the approval of the home secretary.
There was an inquest.
The boys were there.
I think John was hiding in the room next door as they all, you know, they left to head for the inquest.
And John was probably peering out the window at them as they drove up the road.
Insurance companies, anybody who's ever, sure you have, David, I certainly have, ever tried to make a claim legitimately on an insurance policy knows that analogies with blood and stones come very easily to mind.
It's difficult to get them to pay up quite often unless it's an absolutely open and shut case.
Were the insurance companies the people who were paying out all this money?
Were they asking any questions?
I think they were.
I mean, they were very, the Darwins were very suspicious of a couple of cars that were often parked across the road.
And, you know, John was a prisoner in his own home for most of the time because he was so worried about going out.
But I don't know exactly what they did, but I'm sure there must have been some investigations because as you rightly say, they like taking your money, but they don't like paying it out.
So they had this ingenious scheme that they drew up.
If John was out and he was coming home and Anne had seen the cars or she had someone at home, she would leave the curtains drop down.
And if she had a visitor, then she would tie the curtains back so they had this sign he could see from the outside.
And if he saw that, then he'd just shuffle off in the other direction.
So they really had it all planned out.
It was almost like I had an image in my mind there of the escapees in World War II at Colbitz prison camp.
You know, it was all timed, timed out and planned out every move by the looks of it.
And to be able to sustain that for a week is one thing.
For a month or six months is another.
For years, you have to have wheels of steel to do that, I would think.
I think so.
I think Anne became a nervous wreck every time the door rang or the phone rang.
You know, she would jump out of her skin.
I think she lived thinking at some stage, this is all going to blow up in my face.
It was a lot easier for John because he was just sort of there.
He wasn't lying to anyone because he wasn't talking to anyone.
He was just living this sort of nomadic lifestyle, whereas she was the face of the deception the whole time.
So which again prompted the decision to move abroad because they thought that would be the only way they could ever get any freedom and have any sort of normal life again.
And before we talk about in the next segment the life in Panama, talk to me about the move to Panama.
Did they just pack some bags and disappear one day or was it all, I mean, did she, it was only her for the outside world's consumption, but it was the two of them, of course.
How did they pull that off?
Well, John had been looking at starting a new life overseas.
You know, he subscribed for all these magazines and was looking at Spain and he looked at America, Canada, all these different places.
And then when he started doing some research on Panama, you know, because of the secrecy in particular and the fact it was a tax haven, he was sort of, aha, this is it.
This is where this is the ideal place to go.
So they booked a holiday, Mr. John Jones and his friend Anne Darwin, and they snuck off via Newcastle Airport, flew to Central America and began looking at properties.
And they decided it was ideal.
And they had this dream of, they had a new flat in Panama City, which they eventually bought.
And then they bought this big parcel of land.
And so, yeah, they basically flew back.
And then John, they flew back two or three times over the coming year.
John eventually stayed there, and you know, she told her boys, I'm moving to Panama.
And they said, what are you playing at, mum?
And she said, look, I've had enough looking out of the window every day.
The spot where your dad died is just, you know, I'm never going to get on with my life if I don't do something drastic.
And so she quit her job at the doctor's surgery where she worked and packed her bag, sold the houses and left for Panama.
They looked at places to buy.
They found a little apartment in a city suburb, two-bedroom apartment.
And then they started, John had this dream to build this big eco resort basically.
And it was crazy because they ended up buying a parcel of land which had toucans and howler monkeys and all sorts of crazy snakes and wild animals.
And it was a jungle.
And this British couple who'd done a bit of rose pruning in the back garden said, we're going to turn this into an eco-resort and run it with paying guests.
And it was just so absurd to think that they could do this because, as I say, it was just a wild jungle with wild animals.
So anyway, they ended up buying the land as well.
And then what happened?
There was a change in the law.
So he was living there as John Darwin.
Sorry, sorry, John Jones.
And the change in the visa law meant that he had to have a letter from his local constrabulary saying he was a person of good nature, of good character, I should say.
And of course, he could never get that because John Jones was dead.
So he was in a pickle.
He wasn't going to be able to stay as John Jones.
So he said to Anne that, you know, Anne had just sold up.
She'd all the life belongings on a boat over to Panama.
And he basically told her, I'm going to have to go back.
I'm going to have to reinvent myself as John Darwin.
And she said, well, how on earth are you going to do that?
And he said, oh, I'll say I had a bump on the head and been suffering from amnesia and I don't remember anything that's happened from the year 2000.
This is now 2007.
This isn't 2007.
And so she said, this is crazy.
You're never going to get away with this.
You know, we've just moved here to start our life and now you're going back.
And he said he was just convinced he could get away with it.
I mean, he'd fooled everybody once and I think he thought he would do it again.
So he walks into a police station and he does a Tommy Cooper clutches his head and says, don't remember anything.
And for almost no time at all, they believe him.
Well, this is the hit.
I mean, it was just three weeks before Christmas.
He walks in and the West End Central police station and says, I think I'm a missing person.
And the officers, oh my God, what have we got here?
And he said, I'm John Darwin from Seton Carew.
I think I'm a missing man.
So they said, all right, of course you are.
And I'm the Lone Ranger.
So they went and made some inquiries and were staggered to find there was a missing John Darwin from Seton Carew.
So then they rang the police in Cleveland and they said, we've got a strange one here.
This guy says he's John Darwin.
And the officer at the other end of the land said, I don't remember that case.
That's crazy.
He went out in a canoe and disappeared, but I don't think his body was ever found.
So what happened then was that they called, they got the numbers for the sons and they called Mark and Anthony, Mark first, the elder son, and said, I'm really sorry to trouble you, but we've got a guy here who says he's your dad.
And Mark says, that's crazy.
He's dead.
He died five years ago.
And they said, well, he's here at the West End police station.
Can you come in and see?
And so, you know, Mark was sort of totally, totally stunned.
And anyway, he gets to London.
He says, look, just go easy.
Whoever he is, he said, probably had a bump on his head or whatever, but he says he's your dad and remembers who you are.
And Mark walks in and there he is.
There's John.
And John acts all normal.
Oh, there you are, son.
Where have you been?
Where's your ma'am?
And, you know, Mark is just, you know, he's overjoyed.
He hadn't, you know, he thought his dad was dead and now he's back from the dead.
And he hugged his dad.
He's crying and he can't believe that this has happened.
And what are the boys in blue thinking?
Well, I think the boys in blue think this is odd.
They weren't buying the Mr. Amnesia story, but they didn't, you know, they had nothing.
There was no crime, no evidence of any crime.
So they said, well, eventually Anthony, the youngest son, turned up as well.
They said, well, take your dad, but keep a close eye on him and we'll be in touch.
And so, you know, John went off and stayed with Anthony in his house in Hampshire for certainly for a few days.
And then obviously there was a rather dramatic development.
Well, indeed.
And this is Enter David Lee, isn't it?
This is where you start getting involved.
Well, what happened is I got a call.
Everybody's chasing the canoe man and the canoe widow.
I got a call from the Daily Mail saying, in Mary saying, can you get to Panama for us?
We think the widow's in Panama.
And I said, okay, have you got any more information than that?
They said, no, Panama.
So I said, okay, so I get on a plane with a photographer and we get to Panama and we've got nothing to go on at all.
You know, it's proverbial kneeling a haystack.
And where do we even start?
And then out of the blue, I get a phone call from a colleague of mine On the Daily Mirror, where I used to be news editor, and this guy was my deputy at the time.
And he said, Have you got anyone in Panama?
And I said, Well, I'm here for the Daily Mail, so I obviously can't work for you.
And he said, Well, have you got the address?
And I said, No.
And he said, Would you like it?
And I said, That would be quite helpful.
And so I said, Well, look, this is the deal.
If you give me the address, I'll square it off with the mail.
If I get anything, you know, I give it to both papers because there's no way on earth I was going to find her otherwise.
So anyway, I got the address, I found her, went there thinking she's going to be long gone.
You know, her husband's just turned up after six years, she's going to be back home in England.
And we find the address and we spent knocking, we got into the complex where she lived and knocked on the door, nothing, nothing, nothing.
And I had nowhere else to go.
I said, I just kept persevering.
And then after about 40 minutes, there was this little voice said, what do you want?
And I turned around to Steve, my photographer, and I said, gee, she's in there.
This is crazy.
And so the bottom line is I eventually managed to persuade her that I was a nice guy and to let me in.
We should have a chat and I might be able to help her in some way.
And so, you know, she did.
And then we struck up a conversation and she told me, you know, yes, I'm delighted.
It's such good news, blah, blah, blah.
And it just didn't ring, nothing rang true at all.
But the old journalist thing of when you go into a situation like that, I was always taught by the old Fleet Street people who taught me, wonderful journalists, that, you know, people sometimes want to unburden themselves.
She didn't unburden herself to you, did she?
No, she was, no, initially she was just way more interested to know what I knew about the story and what everyone was saying at home.
I told her that other journalists were coming and they'd be on your doorstep and, you know, following your remove.
So I said, look, come and come to a hotel.
We'll get you away from the area and, you know, we'll help you get back to the UK.
So amazingly, she agreed.
And so we sort of disappeared into the night.
And then we're sitting there, we're having dinner and my mobile goes.
And I get a call from the night newser for the mirror saying, Dave, you're not going to believe this.
And so I moved away from the table.
And he said, we've just discovered a picture of John and Anne Darwin together in Panama 18 months ago, which completely blew their story, their lives to smithereens.
So I sat down, I thought, jeepers, how am I going to break this one?
And they told me they'd emailed the picture.
So I said, Anne, look, after we'd finished dinner, I said, I need to go back to the room.
I've got to show you something.
I'm trying to keep it sort of fairly low key.
And we went into my hotel room, opened my computer up, saw the picture, and I thought, oh my God, this is incredible.
And I said, I'm sorry, Anne, I've got something to show you that you're not going to be found very easy.
And I turned the computer around and she saw the picture of herself and John happily smiling in Panama 18 months ago.
And that was the moment her fantasy life came crashing down.
So is that the point at which she unburdens herself to you?
Well, no, it was a gradual process over the next few days.
She was telling me stuff.
She was still lying about a lot of things.
But we decided that she wanted to go back to the UK.
She didn't want to be a fugitive, which was a big relief to the police because they obviously didn't want to have to try and extradite her.
There wasn't even a bilateral treaty between the countries, so it would have been very difficult.
But then we flew to Miami.
We had a rather dramatic escape because a load of journalists turned up and we had this crazy car chase around Panama City and managed to lose people.
Scoop of Decade.
It was like something out of a movie.
It was all pretty crazy.
Scoop of the Decade, absolutely.
It was.
One of the awards I won was the Scoop of the Year, the London Press Club, and another award.
But anyway, we flew to Miami and en route back and we checked into a hotel.
And that's really when she unburdened herself and said, this is what happened.
And I said, we sat down and she said, well, what do you want to know?
And I said, well, first question's easy.
Where the hell was John all these years?
And please don't tell me he was hiding in the garden shed.
And there was a bit of a silence.
And she said, well, almost.
And then she told me the whole story about him living in the room next door.
Crazy, which was crazy.
And did she say to you, it was never my idea.
I didn't want to do this?
Well, yeah, for many months, she continued to say, I wasn't in on this from the start.
John only turned up about a year later.
I thought he'd drowned.
I was shocked, but he begged me not to do anything.
And he said if I said anything to the authorities, he'd say, I was in it from the start.
So she said, you know, for a year, well, she claimed that for a year, she was totally in the dark about where he'd been, which, as it turned out later, was not the case at all because she finally confessed.
There was a big confession.
Then we flew back to England.
She was arrested, dramatic arrest as we landed at Manchester Airport, which was all pretty crazy.
She was bundled off the plane by these officers with machine guns and it was all totally over the top.
And then she kept the pretense up that she only found out a year later for another month.
And then basically she cracked and said, look, okay, I've got something to say.
I was in on it from the start.
And then John, who'd been lying to police and continuing the lie about amnesia, had no real option but to do the same.
So he confessed as well.
And there's a trial, and the pair of them get jail.
And as you reminded me before we started recording this, she actually did more time than him.
That's correct.
I mean, John, the first sensible thing I think he'd ever done in his life, he actually pleaded guilty.
But Anne was told by her lawyers that she could use this very rare defense of marital coercion, which was basically saying that, you know, it was all down to John.
She was bullied and he was there the whole time bullying her and making her do things.
And it was a crazy defence and it never stood a chance because I think it'd only been used about half a dozen times in the previous 100 years and it's now been abolished.
But for that defence to stick, they actually had to be physically together at each time there was an offence made.
And of course they weren't.
Sometimes they're in different countries.
And so she had this trial, which was horrible because it put the boys through it again because the boys were called as witnesses and they gave evidence against her.
And they put, you know, that was a, it was horrible.
I mean, I sat through it and Middlesbrough Crown Court and day after day and her lies were exposed and whatever.
And then they were, you know, she was found guilty and she was given six years and six months where he got six years and three months because she denied it.
And I think had she put her hands up, which I begged her to do on the way home, I said, look, and it doesn't matter if you've lied to me, put your hands up, take your punishment if you want to have any chance of seeing the boys again and being forgiven.
And she said she would.
And she didn't.
And so, you know, as a result, she rolled the dice thinking there was a possibility she'd get off.
And she ended up paying a very heavy price.
Of course, this is all history now.
The boys disowned the pair of them, didn't they?
They did.
And they put out a very strongly worded statement saying that they couldn't believe that parents could do this to them.
They called Anna some very nasty words.
And they were totally heartbroken.
They were shocked.
The worlds had been pulled apart for the second time.
And they disowned them.
And Anne went to prison, disowned by virtually everyone.
And I built up a relationship with her.
And I wrote to her and I said, but just stay strong.
I was worried about her.
I mean, she was in a bad way and she'd been abandoned by everybody.
And she got so low in prison that at once said she thought about taking her own life.
And she really had sunk to the bottom.
And I went to visit her when I was in England.
I went to visit her.
And she kept writing to the boys, begging for forgiveness.
And eventually, Mark wrote back and went to see her, still not forgiving her, but it was, you can't imagine the joy she had when her son went to see her in prison.
She kept begging for forgiveness.
And then Anthony did the same.
And ultimately, they forgave her.
So if they can forgive her, then who is anybody to say that she shouldn't be forgiven?
I mean, John, meanwhile, just was arrogant, never really said sorry, was sending letters to strange pen pal women and whatever, and just causing more and more embarrassment.
And indeed, he now lives in the Philippines, doesn't he, with a new wife?
He's married in the yes, he married Mercy May, who runs a market stall in Manila.
Anne did the best thing in the world when she was in jail.
She took the decision to leave Anne.
Sorry, she took the decision to leave John, divorce him.
And when he got out, he ended up going to the Philippines.
He married this, got remarried.
And Anne got a job working for a local charity, the RSPCA.
She kept a very low profile.
She was more, you know, she was so happy and relieved that the boys had led her back into her life.
And, you know, she was, the both boys both have kids, so she was a grandmum.
And she's rebuilt that relationship.
And today she's in touch with them all the time.
She sees them.
She's been on holiday with them.
And whether they'd ever totally forgive her for what she's done, I don't know.
But she has a very close bond with them again.
And, you know, she's forever grateful to be given a second chance in life.
You wrote her story with her.
That was published in a book.
How was that received?
Yeah, I mean, it was interesting.
Anne's a very private person.
And I said to her, look, I've been asked to write a book.
Do you want to do it with me?
And I said, this could be your one chance to just have your say, tell your story and then move on with your life.
And so she took the decision to do it.
And it was very painful for her, reliving all the things she'd done, all the evil things she'd done.
But she got it all out in the open.
And I think it was very cathartic for her.
So she's picked up the threads of her life.
Yeah, she's now retired.
She lives in a very quiet existence.
I still speak to her every couple of weeks.
We have a chat and she's happy.
She's got her sons back and that's more than she could ever possibly have imagined.
What an astonishing story.
Now, you run a news agency, don't you, in Miami, the mega agency.
Does life appear tame now from where you are after all of that?
Well, it's one of those stories that you, you know, they come along probably once a lifetime.
It was such a great story.
And I've covered, I worked in London.
I was news editor of the Daily Mirror for 12 years and head of news at The Express for three.
So I've covered just about every story going, you know, from wars, the Gulf Wars to the death of Princess Diana.
But when it comes to, you know, audacious, shocking stories, it's just nothing that's ever come close to this.
It was just astonishing day after day.
Thank you for telling me the story and your story as connected with it, David.
That's very, very kind of you.
And thank you to Mike Graham, my talk radio colleague, for helping to oil the wheels and make this happen.
David Lee in Miami, thank you so much.
Thank you, Harold.
David Lee, and an astonishing story of Canoe Man.
There is, oh, David, just before you go, there is an anniversary, isn't there, coming up?
Yes, it's actually next week, 10 years since Anne walked out of prison.
So I can't believe it's 10 years since, you know, this, well, it's more than obviously because she went to jail for six and a half years, but she got out after three.
So, yeah, 13 years since I got on a plane to Panama and this all came out of the woodwork.
We're all older and wiser.
David, thank you very much indeed.
David Lee, the story of John Darwin, look out for it on a screen near you, coming soon, as they say.
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You know, I'm being pushed and pushed and pushed and pushed to go video with it all, and I just kind of still believe in the value of the words.
And I still believe, and some of my radio colleagues from, you know, Capital Radio, other places, they also believe, that once you start putting pictures in, and sometimes it's, you know, bad Zoom video from somebody's kitchen, you're thinking about the pans on their shelves, or what a funny shirt they're wearing, or how their hair's styled, or what a funny, you know, what a funny pair of glasses they might be wearing.
You're not thinking about what they're saying.
That's my view, but I might be out of step and you can tell me.
But lots of things that I have to think about in the coming year of 2022.
But it's always exciting, isn't it?
So until next we meet.
My name is Howard Hughes.
This has been The Unexplained Online.
And please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm, and please stay in touch.
The next podcast is with Elaine Kelly, by the way.
