Canoe wife: 'My husband forced me to lie to my own sons - I wanted to tell them he was alive'

The wife of back-from-the-dead canoeist John Darwin claimed she was desperate to tell her sons he was still alive but that he blackmailed her to keep quiet, a court heard today.

Anne Darwin told detectives in interviews after her arrest that she wanted to tell her family the truth when her husband returned home and urged him to come clean.

But Mr Darwin warned her that if she opened her mouth, he would say she was involved in the £250,000 life insurance scam from the very start, the jury heard.

Transcripts read out to Teesside Crown Court revealed how Mrs Darwin, 56, admitted to officers that lying to her own children was 'extremely painful'.

Mark, 32, and Anthony, 29 have already told the jury how their mother's lies 'crushed their world' and left them feeling betrayed.

They were both in court again today to hear how she claimed she wanted to end their 'suffering' but sat at the back of the public gallery to stay out of her eyeline.

Asked in one interview whether the most difficult deception was pretending to her sons their father was dead, Mrs Darwin admitted: 'That is extremely painful, always has been.

'I wanted to ring and tell everybody, but he wouldn't let me do it. 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".'

'Betrayed': John and Anne Darwin's sons Mark, left, and Anthony, right, arriving at court today

Mr Darwin vanished after taking his canoe into the sea near to their home in Seaton Carew in 2002 and was declared dead a year later.

But unbeknown to his own sons, it was all a scam so that he could claim on his life insurance and their own mother was lying to them.

She had dropped off her husband at the train station the day he supposedly vanished, then weeks later picked him up from the Lake District where he had been living rough.

From then on, he laid low in the bedsit next to the family home and assumed a pseudonym and disguise so that the scam would not be rumbled.

'I found myself leading a double life. I accept I am an adult and I had a choice and, in hindsight, I wish I had taken the proper choice,' Mrs Darwin told police.

In early interviews, she had completely denied helping to plan the disappearance in 2002 and claimed to be shocked when he turned up alive in 2003.

But passages of later interviews read to the court reveal how she changed her story to claim she had been forced into the insurance scam by her husband.

Rumbled: John and Anne Darwin pose for a picture with an estate agent in Panama in 2006, four years after the canoeist was thought to have disappeared

Mrs Darwin then admitted faking his death was a 'ridiculous idea' and said she had argued in vain that they should declare themselves bankrupt instead.

'He just wouldn't hear it. He said we had both worked hard all our lives and he didn't want to lose everything he had worked for,' she said.

'He was not violent, but could be very manipulative. He had a way of making me feel quite small. I used to say he treated me like a second year pupil that he used to teach.'

Her husband had thought he could disappear for two or three months and then come home again, she told officers.

When he carried out the plan to fake his death, he repeatedly phoned her asking to come home and she refused, the court heard.

'I still had family staying with me. He was finding it hard. He was getting desperate,' she said.

In the dock: Mrs Darwin admits she led a double life

Eventually, she gave in against her better judgement because he was so upset and went to fetch him.

'He phoned me and gave me directions to where he was. I wanted to leave him there. I didn't want to go and pick him up, but I couldn't leave him. At one point, he was literally crying on the telephone. I couldn't see him hurt,' she said.

In her police interviews, she also admitted the inquest into her husband's death was 'quite a difficult ordeal' but again placed the blame on him.

'It was not easy, but, as I say, John was very manipulative. From the day he came home, I tried to persuade him to come clean.

'He couldn't, he wouldn't and, if I tried, he would say I was in it from the start.'

She told police: 'I knew it was stupid but, once I set out along the road, it was difficult to turn back.'

Yet after their arrests, Mr Darwin had sent his wife a loving message via a police officer on Christmas Eve, the court heard.

'He asked we tell you that he loves you and said sorry for the mess he has got you into,' a prison officer told her.

It also emerged today that the couple wrote intimate e-mails to each other, with Mrs Darwin using the account set up in her husband's fake name of John Jones.

One was sent from Panama by her the night before he walked into a police station in London and blew his own cover, the court heard.

The jury was also told how Mrs Darwin poured out her heart to a journalist who tracked her down to a flat in Panama, where she and her husband had been planning to start a new life.

She said: 'I said a lot more than I intended. It all came tumbling out. I was just so relieved it was all out in the open.'

Mrs Darwin, a former doctors' receptionist, denies 15 charges of obtaining money by deception and money laundering.

She is using the defence of marital coercion, claiming she was forced to go along with the scam by her husband.