On the morning of March 21, 2002, prison officer John Darwin was spotted in his canoe, entering the water at the seafront in Seaton Carew, Hartlepool. When he failed to report for his night shift at Holme House prison that evening, his wife Anne phoned 999 to report him missing. She feared that “something dreadful might have happened” to her husband, she told the operator.
But Anne knew that a tragedy had not befallen John. He had not been swept away during an ill-fated canoe trip - he was very much alive. She had in fact picked him up in her car earlier that night, then secretly driven him to Durham railway station, so that he could go off grid in Cumbria until it seemed certain that he had been lost at sea. The whole scheme had been cooked up by John, part of an elaborate insurance fraud that would ultimately go off the rails in spectacular fashion.
