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Canoe wife: I wanted to tell sons but he wouldn't let me
Paul Cheston, Courts Correspondent16 Jul 2008
The wife of back-from-the-dead canoeist John Darwin claimed that she wanted to tell her sons he was alive but that her husband would not let her, a court heard today.
Anne Darwin, 56, told police after her arrest that husband John insisted they had to clear their debts, the jury heard.
She admitted to picking him up from the beach after his staged disappearance and driving him to Durham railway station.
Then, after weeks away from home, he was smuggled back and lived in a bedsit next to the family's seafront home in the north-east of England.
She told officers: "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.
"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'."
She said she had allowed her husband to hear their sons' voices by putting their phonecalls on loudspeaker.
She added to detectives: "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." The transcripts of her police interviews were read to the jury on the third day of her trial at Teesside crown court.
Her sons Mark, 32, and Anthony, 29, who gave evidence against her yesterday, were in court again today. They sat at the back of the public gallery, out of the direct gaze of their mother.
Mrs Darwin has pleaded not guilty to 15 charges over a £250,000 fraud on insurance firms after the faked disappearance of her husband in a canoeing accident off the coast at Seaton Carew, Hartlepool, in March 2002.
Questioned by detectives, she initially denied jointly planning the disappearance and said that she was shocked when he turned up in February 2003.
But, in later interviews, she admitted she had not told the truth and that she had helped her husband stage his death.
She claimed they had thought he would only have to be away for two or three months, then he could come back and sort out the couple's ailing finances.
In the weeks after he disappeared he would phone her asking if he could come home. "I still had family staying with me. He was finding it hard. He was getting desperate," she told the officers.
Eventually they decided the time was right for Mr Darwin to come back. "He phoned me and gave me directions to where he was," she went on.
"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." Mrs Darwin described the staged death as "a ridiculous idea" and said that she had argued with her husband that they should have declared themselves bankrupt.
"But 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 explained.
"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."
She told police the huge air and sea search mounted to find him had taken her by surprise.
When he was declared dead and an inquest was held she was only required to answer questions and did not have to take an oath as a witness. "It was not easy but, as I say, John was very manipulative," she told police.
"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.
"I knew it was stupid but, once I set out along the road, it was difficult to turn back."
Yet after their arrests Darwin had sent his wife a loving message from his cell in Durham prison via the police on Christmas Eve. A prison officer told the former doctors' receptionist: "He asked we tell you that he loves you and said sorry for the mess he has got you into," the court heard.
Mrs Darwin has pleaded not guilty to six counts of deception and nine money laundering charges. The trial continues.
