Canoe wife 'dramatically changed her story after a phone call from her jailed husband'

Anne Darwin spoke to her husband from prison before dramatically changing her story about his ' disappearance' in a canoe, a court was told yesterday.

They had a series of telephone conversations to mark their 34th wedding anniversary last December after their plot was finally exposed.

Days later Mrs Darwin, 56, confessed to detectives that she knew about her husband's plot to fake his own death from the start.

Until then she had claimed that the first she saw of her husband following his disappearance at sea on March 21, 2002, was a year later in February. He had turned up, she said, out of the blue at their home in Seaton Carew, Cleveland.

Yesterday, as she entered the witness box for the second day, the softly-spoken doctor's receptionist again claimed that she had lied against her will.

It was then put to her that she had been in contact with the ' domineering' husband who had made her play a vital role in his £250,000 insurance scam and only then did she change her story.

The plot had unravelled after Mr Darwin walked into a police station in December last year, claiming to be suffering from amnesia.

Andrew Robertson QC asked her: 'It was decided between the two of you that he would take the major blame and you would see if you could get out of this mess?'

Mrs Darwin simply replied: 'No.' She denies six counts of deception and nine counts of money laundering and is using the 'unusual' defence of marital coercion. She must therefore prove her husband forced her to commit a criminal act against her will.

Her sons Mark, 32, and Anthony, 29, watched from the public gallery as Teesside Crown Court was told that on January 8 this year, after seven separate interviews, she admitted to police that she was in on the plot from the outset.

Mark Darwin (back) and Anthony Darwin (left) leave court yesterday after watching their mother testify

She insisted that her husband had forced her to play along with the deception to claim insurance and pension money.

'What John wanted, John got,' she said.

It was put to her that the five-year plot came crumbling down only after an 'almighty row' between the couple in their Panama bolthole. Mr Robertson asked: 'It is your opportunity now Mrs Darwin, everybody wants to know, what's the real reason John Darwin came back to the UK? What is the truth?'

She said: 'To be reunited with Mark and Anthony and pay back the money.'

The lawyer then asked her about emails the couple had exchanged in the months before she finally emigrated to join her husband last October.

'Domineering': John Darwin faked his own death to collect insurance

A tearful Anne Darwin during cross examination yesterday

In one, written just hours before her husband handed himself in to a London police station as a missing person, she wrote: 'Don't leave me.'

'When a woman says to her husband, "don't leave me" it suggests there has been a matrimonial tiff,' said Mr Robertson. Mrs Darwin replied: 'There was no tiff.'

Then he asked her why she wrote those words. She said: 'Because I was saying I could not even open a tin without him.'

She denied claims that she had lied and changed her story  -  saying that her husband was always by her side when the fraudulent insurance claims were made  -  to improve her defence.

She had carried off the deceit because she felt 'trapped', she told the jury.

Mrs Darwin, who wept when asked about the lies to her sons, claimed it was never about money.

The trial continues.

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