True Crime Campfire - The Resurrection of Loserus: Canoe Man John Darwin

Episode Date: December 4, 2020

In every human civilization I can think of, we’ve had—y’know—rules. Granted, some of them have been silly, or downright wrong, and should have been scrapped. But by and large, rules help keep the weave nice and tight on the fabric of society. Without them, well, you’ve basically got The Purge. Nobody wants that, if for no other reason than all those masks would be creepy. Most people have no problem following most of the rules, but once in a while you get a person who thinks he’s above them. Whether because of arrogance, desperation, inspiration, boredom, or some combination of them all, these folks decide they don’t have to stick to the plan. The sky’s the limit for them, because they are such special little shooting stars. Sometimes that works out okay—we get our rebels with a cause, leaders who change our way of thinking, being, or governing. But just as often, we get a rebel without a clue, instead. If we’re unlucky enough, that can end in tragedy. If we’re lucky, we just get a good laugh, and a wild story like this one. Sources:https://www.theguardian.com/uk/canoehttps://social.shorthand.com/TheNorthernEcho/3gttWa568j/john-canoe-man-darwin-the-full-storyhttps://www.standard.co.uk/news/canoe-mans-lover-darwin-the-druid-is-psychotic-and-i-was-terrified-of-him-6659149.htmlhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Darwin_disappearance_caseDocumentary "Back from the Dead: The John Darwin Story" by Real Crime UKFollow us, campers!Patreon (join to get all episodes ad-free, at least a day early, an extra episode a month, and a free sticker!): https://patreon.com/TrueCrimeCampfireFacebook: True Crime CampfireInstagram: https://gramha.net/profile/truecrimecampfire/19093397079Twitter: @TCCampfire https://twitter.com/TCCampfireEmail: [e-mail] a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-campfire--4251960/support.

Hello, campers. Grab your marshmallows and gather around the true crime campfire. We're your camp counselors. I'm Katie and I'm Whitney. And we're here to tell you a true story that is way stranger than fiction. We're roasting murderers and marshmallows around the true crime campfire. In every human civilization I can think of, we've had, you know, rules. Granted, some of them have been silly or downright wrong and should have been scrapped, but by and large, rules help keep the weave nice and tight on the fabric of society. Without them, well, you've basically got the purge. Nobody wants that. If for no other reason, then all those masks would be creepy. Most people have no problem following most of the rules, but once in a while you get a person who thinks he's above them. Whether it's because of arrogance, desperation, inspiration,

boredom, or some combination of them all, these folks decide they don't have to stick to the plan. The sky's the limit for them because they are such special little shooting stars. Sometimes that works out okay. We get our rebels with a cause, leaders who change our way of thinking, being, or governing.

But just as often, we get a rebel without a crime, clue instead. If we're unlucky enough, that can end in tragedy. If we're lucky, we just get a good laugh and a wild story like this one. This is the resurrection of Loseris, canoe man John Darwin. So campers, we're in the pretty seaside town of Seton Carew in England. March 21st, 2002. This is our first British case, I think, isn't it? Yes, it is. Ooh, I'm excited. It was about 4.30 in the afternoon when John Darwin, a former schoolteacher and current prison officer, set out for a row in his canoe.

The water was calm that day, not dangerous in any way. One of John's neighbors was standing at his kitchen window, drinking a cup of tea, and spotted John in his red canoe. rowing out towards a little inlet called North Gare, what the locals like to call the Blue Lagoon. Later that night, John's wife Anne tried calling him at the prison where he worked, and got a shock. John hadn't reported to work that night. Hadn't called in either. At 9.30, Anne called the police to report John missing. Because he'd been last seen paddling out to sea in his bright red canoe, the Coast Guard was called in. They immediately launched a massive sea and air search and rescue operation covering 200, square miles, but they didn't find anything. No John.

Hours into the search, the searchers found his red canoe, wrecked just four miles away at the mouth of the river T's. Around 16 hours in, John Darwin was presumed dead by the authorities. The Coast Guard folks took it hard. They felt guilty that they couldn't bring John, or at least his body, back to his family. He and Anne had two grown sons, Mark and Anthony, and they were completely wrecked at the news of their dad's death. So that was it. Your husband, your father, goes out for a row one afternoon, and you never get to see him again. Worse than that, you can't even bring him home for a proper funeral.

That's a hard burden to carry. But Anne and the boys were going to have to carry it anyway. Start that hard work of grieving and moving on with life. John Darwin, the man they'd loved and looked up to, was gone. But then there's this. Five and a half years later, on December 4th,000. 2001, 2007, a man showed up at the police station in nearby Cleveland, the English Cleveland, not the Ohio one, claiming that until now, he'd been suffering from amnesia. He'd just spent years not knowing who he was, but he'd come out of it now at last, and as he put it, I think you might have me down as a missing person. Okay. I'm sure the front desk guy at the police station was like, oh, this'll be good. So he asked him, Okay, sir, what's your name?

And the name that the calm-looking man standing in front of him said he'd forgotten until now? John Darwin. Collective gasp. So, holy shit, right? As you can imagine, the press went bonkers over the story. John's wife Anne said it was a miracle. A Christmas miracle at that. How festive.

I know, right? In an interview six months after John went missing, Anne had said, all I want is to bury his body. It would enable me to move on. It's difficult to grieve without bringing things to a close. As it is, I'm in limbo. Now, five years later, she had him back alive. No one could have ever predicted it. Their two sons were just blown away, ecstatic. But of course, there were a million questions. Where the hell was he all this time? How did he support himself? He didn't seem any of the worse for where, oddly enough, when he showed up at the police station he was clean, normally dressed, not malnourished or anything. He didn't look like Tom Hanks and

Castaway. And privately, the authorities were, shall we say, a touch, curious, right from the start. When a reporter asked him if he agreed with John's wife and that John's reappearance was a Christmas miracle, Detective Superintendent Tony Hutchison said, I don't know, I'm just dealing with facts. Yeah. But let's put a pin in that for a minute and get a little background on our boy John Darwin, a.k.a. canoe man, as the media would soon start calling him. He and Anne had moved to Seton Carew in 2000 and promptly bought 13 rental properties in a little resort town. They also bought a big, gorgeous house for themselves. John was a wheeler and dealer. In addition to his job

as a prison officer, he traded in the stock market and sold stuff at car boot sales. By all accounts, he was obsessed with kikka cash. Always hopping from job to job, hustle to hustle, looking for a bigger payday. Yeah, my favorite John Darwin hustles are breeding snails for fun and profit. I don't know why. Probably for food, I guess. I don't know. And making and selling garden gnomes. This man is nothing if not creative. But according to some who knew him well, he wasn't as clever with money as he thought he was. his and Anne's real estate adventure in Seton Carew started to go tits up pretty quickly. The rent they were charging wasn't enough to cover the mortgages, so they started sinking deeper and deeper into debt. Not only that, he apparently used credit cards to buy some of the real estate. Credit cards. Cheebus, crevas.

Did you want to go bankrupt? Like, just for funsies? Wow, that's a bad idea. Yep. So on that afternoon, when John Darwin paddled, out to see and disappeared, he was up to his eyeballs in debt. Some people now wondered, could it have been a suicide attempt? It seems like a reasonable question to ask.

Sure. But turns out, not so much. As the castaway now admitted to the investigators at Cleveland Police Station, well, it was a scam. He'd faked his own death. He said, I disappeared because I wanted to claim the insurance to tide us over.

Oh, boy. The insurance, life insurance, to be specific. A policy worth about 250,000 pounds. Enough to haul him and Anne out of debt and free them up to start a new life. Clearly, he'd gotten away with it up until now. So why had John decided to waltz into the police station and admit to all this? Well, we're going to get into that in a bit. For now, how the house?

hell did he pull this off? And who helped him do it? Where had he been all these years? Sitting in the interrogation room on Christmas Eve, John Darwin laid it all out. On that March afternoon, five years earlier, he said he'd paddle just far enough out to sea to be out of sight at the shoreline he'd pushed off from. Then he'd headed toward land. Meeting him there, in a parking lot, if I remember correctly, was Wifee Ann, because apparently, Apparently, her wedding vows had included the phrase, in sickness, health, and insurance fraud. We should all put that in our vows, really.

In sickness and health and in doing crimes together, if the need should arise. John was wearing all black, like a ninja, because of course he was, and carrying a packed duffel bag full of clothes and toiletries. Before he jumped into the car with Anne, he pushed the canoe back out into the water. It would be discovered all wrecked to hell by the searchers later. He told the detectives that Anne had dropped him off at a train station about a 40-minute drive away,

and there began a bizarre five-and-a-half-year adventure, if you want to call it that. First, John went to a registrar's office and got his grubby little mitts on a dead stranger's birth certificate. He chose the one for John Jones, who had died in 1950 at the age of five weeks, poor pumpkin. Why him? Well, he liked the idea of using the name John. He said, you know, if I was walking down the street and somebody yelled out John, I'd be likely to turn around, so I wanted that same name. Pretty clever. Plus, the little boy had been born around the same time he had, so the age was about right.

And he said he picked a dead person because he didn't want to ruin anybody's life. Aw, how nice of him. Ain't he a peach? Just one thing about that, though, John. Um, what about your son's lives? You absolute hemorrhoid? Because guess what? John's sons? Totally in the dark about this thing. They literally thought their dad had gone missing, and during ground at sea. And both John and Anne, let him think it. So while John is strolling around town, picking up dead kids' birth certificates and whatnot, his two grown kids are drowning in grief.

Ugh, y'all are going to hate this guy. You have no idea. And unsurprisingly, when they found out about it years later, this also dug up some really gross feelings for the real John Jones's siblings. I mean, think about it. They lost their baby brother decades ago when they were just kids. It was a wound that it had scarred over maybe but never really healed, and now they had to deal with those feelings again, thanks to this asshole. Yeah, the big lie about grief is that it goes away with time, but grief waxes and wanes with time. Sometimes it feels like you lost that person yesterday and the world is caving in, and other

times it feels like you can breathe. I cannot imagine having my grief excavated for such a frivolous fucking reason. Yeah, that's horrible. So, we told you Anne dropped him at the train station. He got his new birth certificate, blah, blah. So he took the train to the Lake District and laid low there for a while. Reports vary as to how long he was there. Some say a couple weeks, some say more like a month, and boy, did he seem to enjoy his new role as Guy on the Lamb. He started dressing differently. He grew a big old beard. He started walking around with a cane and a limp, for God's sake. Like a hat pulled down over his face

Like dude calm the fuck down You're not Jason Bourne Okay You're a dufous thief Who's chosen to upend your entire life And put your kids through hell For 250 lousy grand Like he's not even getting that much money out of this

Right God you utter and complete bell end That one by the way is for our British fans I think I'm going to toss in a few of my favorite British burns For this one because it just seems appropriate Yeah the Brits have the most concise and brutal taunts. I love them so much. Absolutely. Bell End is one of my favorite. And knob end as well. They're both great. Dick jokes, both of them, it fits. Yes, exactly.

He called Anne on the regular to ask if the coast was clear for him to come back to seat and Karoo and join her. Had the hype about his disappearance died down enough? Eventually, Anne said, yeah, coast is clear, and she drove out to the Lake District to pick up her newly bearded hubby. She said he was so fully inhabiting his new identity by then that at first she didn't recognize him. Join me, will you, in an eye roll at that, campers? Okay, I feel better. And by the summer of 2002, he was cozily ensconced back at home with his wife. Now, how did they manage that without somebody noticing?

I'm so glad you asked. They built a flippin' secret passageway in their house, is how. This has now shifted. from bargain bin born identity to bargain bin Sherlock Holmes Absolutely See the thing is they owned the house next door to theirs These were like nice big row houses

So they were all connected And before they pulled this little caper Anne and John had built a secret door To the attic of the adjoining house The door was hidden behind a false backing in a cupboard And it led to a lovely little Peekroofed attic bedroom with a view of the sea John could sit up there

play computer games, and gaze out smugly at the water, thinking about how bloody clever he was to have pulled this off. Most of the time he just hung out around the house with Anne like usual, but any time friends came by, he'd just pop off to his secret hideaway. Sometimes, though, he didn't bother. If somebody he didn't know came by, Anne would just introduce him as the handyman. For some reason, that just cracks me up.

One guy who came by to repair some drywall said later that he was just blown away by how, like, bossy and arrogant this lady's handyman was. He seemed bizarrely involved in the decision-making about the job and kept quibbling about price, which was weird, since it supposedly wasn't his house or his money. Basically, the dude was walking around like he owned the feck in place. Imagine that. So, do we think they were acting out some kind of gross porn fantasy with his handyman thing? Or... Damn it, Katie. I'm, okay, I'm sorry, but I mean, the question kind of asks itself. Doesn't it?

I suppose it does. And I'm sorry to have to burden you all with this, but apparently he and Ann did have a rather vigorous sex life, which is impressive, really, for people who'd been together since they were teenagers. He had a tendency to send her sexy emails, apparently. If you ask real nice, maybe I'll read you one later. You know, it's a little treat. Please don't. I'm going to. Ugh.

Anyway. You can't stop me. All right, fine. Here we go, marching inevitably torn to this sexy email. It's coming. Despite the secret room and the handyman trick, John's return to Seed and Carew didn't exactly go off without a hitch. I guess he felt like the beard and the limp and the cane were enough of a disguise

because for a while, he pretty much came and went as he pleased. He even spent time in the library, which is just bonkers to me. One time, a former colleague from the prison spotted him and thought he recognized him, but when he mentioned it to Anne, Anne managed to smooth it over. Oh, oh no, that's his cousin. Everybody says they could be twins, ha, ha, ha. Yeah, and at one point one of their neighbors saw him and just straight up confronted him. Like, um, aren't she supposed to be dead?

And John looked him dead in the eyes and said, don't tell anyone about this. And it must have been a death stare because the guy was so freaked out, he didn't tell a soul. So damn, right? That's some powerful stink guy right there. Yeah, but all this to say, we're not exactly dealing with a criminal mastermind here, are we campers? Not so much, no. One of my favorite of John's boneheaded moves was to get a passport using his fake birth certificate and use his and Anne's home goddamn address on the application.

Just, wow. You go through all the trouble to get a fake identity and then you just deadass use your home address on your passport. Well played, man. Smooth. It's astounding to me that this wank stain didn't get caught. sooner. It really, really is. I can't imagine why he didn't, but anyway, we'll find out, I guess. One of the big questions in this case is whether Anne was a willing accomplice or a reluctant one. After he turned himself in, Anne said in an interview that she thought it was a terrible idea. She had tried to talk him into filing for bankruptcy instead, but John wouldn't hear of it.

She said, he could be very manipulative. Regardless of whether she wanted to do this damn thing or not, Anne was certainly an active participant. She pushed to get her husband declared dead and a death certificate rushed through. She quickly filed for the insurance claim, his pensions from his teaching and prison officer jobs, and a bereavement grant from the government. All told, it added up to about a quarter of a million pounds.

She had to write letters to various agencies to get this money, but Anne insisted that she didn't really write them per se. John wrote them and then had her correct his shitty grammar and spelling. She said, well, he was good at maths and I was good at English. Teamwork makes a dream work, I guess. Maths. I love that. She insisted that he manipulated her into all this. She said, he would treat me like a second year pupil that he used to teach.

But, I mean, she was a grown-ass woman after all. She was letting her son's grieve for their father. Yes. I have a really hard time with that. Yes, me too. And it went deeper than just the insurance fraud. They also put the funds in offshore banks under fake identities. And this is rich.

When the cops confronted him on that later and pointed out that, you know, it was money laundering. John said, I disagree. Oh, okay. You know what? You can't disagree on a fact, my dude. That's like somebody coming inside, shaking their soaking wet umbrella and saying, wow, it's really raining hard out there. And some cheese for brain saying, I disagree.

Well, you can't disagree with that. It's fucking raining. Look out the window. It's not bird tears. It's rain. Maybe it is bird tears. You don't know. It's not. It's rain. Serenity now.

Oh, man. But I digress. In 2004, two years into this ridiculous farce, Johnny Boy decided he wanted to expand his business empire and follow his dreams for adventure. And he chose for this next phase of the keeper. Kansas, Dorothy. Why Kansas? Well, while he was up. there in his attic room, unable to go out and carouse in the wild streets of

Seton Carew, John had gotten into this online fantasy RPG called Asheron's Call. Oh my God, one of my friends was obsessed with that game. When they pulled it off the market, I thought he's going to have an aneurysm. He was like in mourning. Oh, my God. It was one of those games where you can play with people from all over the world, and lots of people have made real-life friendships and romantic relationships in the game. John played a druid, which is really kind of hilarious. He does not strike me as the crunchy nature-loving healer type, especially since he allegedly drowned. Yeah.

That's a good point. I hadn't thought of that. He met a woman named Kelly Steele in the game, and they really hit it off. As friends, anyway, I don't think there was anything romantic between them. Kelly was married herself, and by all accounts, had a happy family life with her truck driver husband and daughter. That said, though, John did hide their friendship from Anne, and he told Kelly he'd lost his wife to cancer. And as they worked together to slay the dragons and whatnot, John and Kelly got to talking about their interests. John confided in his new buddy that he had dreams of buying a cattle ranch someday, and Kelly asked him if he knew how cheap land was in Kansas, and, well, the rest was history.

They started talking about going in together as business partners on a ranch, with John as the silent partner. Kelly would run the day-to-day operations, and John would provide the startup money and share the profits. So he wanted her to do all the hard work, and he'd still reap the profits. Sounds in character. Yeah. Kelly found a fixer-upper 20-acre ranch and farmhouse nearby, and John sent her 25,000 pounds for a down payment. And then, with his fake passport in hand, he told Anne he needed a break and took off for Kansas.

I don't know what Kelly was expecting, exactly. As a typical American, she probably assumed her new British friend would have an accent like Prince William and be classy as heck. That's what we all think. Those of us who've never seen any British reality TV anyway. Watch a couple episodes of Jordy Shore and the bloom falls off that rose real quick. Oh my God. She was not prepared for John Darwin, or John Jones, as he called himself. She got a bad vibe off him the minute she met him at the airport and it was all downhill from there. He seemed nervous at first, a contrast to the persona he'd shown during their

online conversations. He was planning on staying with Kelly and her family while he was there, and she'd prepared her daughter's room for him. A few days into the visit, she went to get him for dinner, and he was standing in his room with the door wide open, stripped down to his underwear. Kelly was completely appalled. Her 11-year-old daughter was running around the house, and she said, look, I don't know how you do things in England or whatever, but here we don't get undressed with the door

open in somebody else's house. Yeah. Okay, for the record, Kelly, that is not how they do things in England. I can assure you of that. In fact, and my British husband back me up on this, that's probably one of the most un-English things I can think of to drop Crowe in front of strangers, unless it's part of a sketch comedy show or something, right?

So we can't really blame that on Great Britain, okay? That's just this creep. Looking back, I suspect Kelly would say that this was the beginning of the end of their relationship. She took him to a hotel after that. And as soon as he got settled in, John started talking about wanting to stay in the U.S. and become a not-so-silent partner in the cattle ranch. In fact, now he wanted to live at the ranch with Kelly and her family. Oh, goody!

The old adage about guests and fish starting to smell after three days, rings particularly true here. Although I imagine the shelf life of one John Darwin is more like three hours, three minutes. three nanoseconds? Yeah, the last one for sure. And very quickly, Kelly's neighbors came to hate him like poison. He was rude and arrogant. He was weird as hell. He gave people

the hebes. And he and Kelly started to butt heads repeatedly about the plans for the ranch. The place was definitely a fixer-upper. It had a fallen down old farmhouse and everything and it was going to need a lot of work. And the thought of having to do that work with this creepo at her side was looking less

and less attractive. So finally, after a few awkward and annoying weeks, Kelly just straight up asked him to leave town, like an old-timey sheriff. Just, dude, go home, at least until the renovations are done. And he went, fortunately, flew back to Seton Carew with his tail between his legs.

Probably his pants around his ankles, too. I'm kidding. Just, dude, keep your clothes on. Okay? Nothing tanks a good business relationship like getting slapped in the eyeballs with old man ass. Nobody wants that. Now, the deal wasn't dead at this point. He'd still invested quite a bit of money in the ranch, and he still wanted to be involved. So Kelly was continuing to work on fixing the place up, just without him there. She was hoping he'd keep his distance and stay the silent partner, but unfortunately for Kelly, that is not John's style. About a month after he got back to England, John started stewing about all the money he'd put into the ranch. He thought Kelly was taking too long to do the renovations, so he started bombarding her with emails, demanding his

money back. And when we say emails, we don't mean like, dear Mrs. Steele, as the deal we agreed upon is not proceeding to my liking. Please return my investment at your earliest convenience post-haste. Thank you, John. We mean shit like, I've employed a New York firm that uses mob tactics to collect on unpaid deaths. We mean shit like, I know a mob family in New York, the Giovanni's. We mean shit like, quote, things will happen and continue to happen unless you pay me the money. Oh shit, not things. Bad things. In one email, he said, they, they being this mafia-like debt collecting firm, have photos

of you, your daughter, they said she's cute, and your sister. Better inform your dear sister, too, as they will have to contact her if they can't find you. Some questions you may think about to pass the time. Why did my horse get sick? Was it Godfather 1 when that man's favorite horse got its head cut off? Do the brakes in my car need checking? Is the grass too dry around the house and barn? Oh, my God.

What's that noise outside? Be assured the debt collectors will visit you. Lock up your wives and daughters while you're in town. Let the nightmare begin. John. Let the nightmare begin. Holy shitsnakesh. He sounds like jigsaw. A pastier, less tactful jigsaw, to be sure.

Yeah. Oh, my God. Poor Kelly was so terrified. She started sleeping with a loaded shotgun next to her bed and a knife under her pillow. Oh, hell, yeah. She got a couple of huge dogs. She jumped at every noise outside her window, looked over her shoulder everywhere she went. I mean, maybe this guy was all talk, but how could she know for sure? Sure. Kelly and her family lived in fear of John for years until he was finally in custody.

She told news of the world that Darwin was the creepiest, oddest, and most frightening man I have ever met. Apparently, she never did give him his money back, and the property she bought with him sits empty. Well, good for her. You start threatening me and my family. You can say goodbye to your damn money. I don't blame her at all. And also, I'm sure the amount of work she put in to that place before he went psycho on her was worth more than he gave her anyway. Fucking bully, screw him. John's next big idea was to take to the high seas. Live as a boat guy.

Freedom, fresh caught seafood, salt air, international waters. All that stuff. Probably the last one, especially. Again, using his fake passport, he traveled to Gibraltar, where he got in touch with a boat salesman about buying a catamaran that he and Anne could live on. He wanted to buy a boat called the Bunara, originally built for an honest-to-god real-life princess in the 1970s. At the time it was built, it was about as good as boats got, but in 2002, it needed a lot of work. The boat dealer later said, the sort of boat he was looking at was definitely a boat you could happily go long-term cruising on, possibly around the world, and certainly disappear from society if you wanted to.

It's quite easy to do on a large boat like that. If John couldn't disappear on a remote cattle ranch in rural Kansas, then maybe he could do it on the ocean. So John and Anne haggled with the owners. They wanted to buy it, they said, but they wanted the new owners to do some more work on the interior first. And in typical John fashion, after he got back to the UK, he started sending them harassing emails. Of course he did. He's a one-trick pony. Some of them were so unhinged that the owners of the boat said,

it seemed like he was losing the plot. At one point, for example, he accused them of trying to pull the old boat switcheroo on him and Anne, give them a different boat and pass it off as the Bunara. A scheme as old as time. So unsurprisingly, the owners finally told John to, you know, fuck off. They weren't going to sell them. him the boat and they never wanted to hear from him again. Whomp, wamp. Well, so there went

Plan B. Damn, life as a dead guy was turning out to be harder than he'd anticipated. Couldn't be a cowboy, couldn't be captain of his own little pirate ship, and now here he was, back in his stuffy old secret room in Seton Carew. If it ever occurred to him that both of those things probably could have worked out fine if he just could have managed to, you know, not be a giant weirdo? He never mentioned it. I'm sure in his mind, it was all Kelly and the boat owner's fault. I mean, sending death threats, that's just a solid business tactic, right?

Everybody does that. While back in Seaton, Carew, John had another close call with a former acquaintance, despite his uber-convincing Gandalf cosplay or whatever, and figured it was time to figure out plan C. And it didn't take him long to come up with Panama. Why there? Who the hell knows? Anne later said he was forever looking at new things and new places on the the internet and one day he just came up with Panama. Seems like a good a plan as any.

He used Anne's email to send off some inquiries about properties for sale and soon after he and Anne flew to Panama to look at them. The real estate agent said they seemed nice, normal, happy to be there. Panama is gorgeous, so I'm not surprised it charmed them. The property they were looking at was in Escobar, 481 acres of beautiful untouched land. No running water, no electricity, only one road going in and out. It was rustic as hell, but John and Ann seemed to think it was perfect. They bought the land for 200,000 pounds. They told the real estate agent they were planning to build an eco lodge.

Don't ask, I don't know, sounds boogie as hell, for tourists. They were moving forward full speed ahead. They bought an apartment there, they sold their property in Set and Carew, and sent for their stuff. Anne went home to say goodbye to their sons, who, by by the way, still thought their dad was dead. Just let that sink in for a second. So it seemed like they may have finally hit upon a plan that would work, a new life they could actually pull off, and they were ecstatic. They were having so much fun that they agreed to be in a few photographs together. When the real estate agent snapped one on their last day there, though,

and said casually that it was for his website, Anne's heart dropped into her shoes. John had shaved off his beard, so he was by no means incognito. But I mean, how do you say to a complete stranger, delete that? That's just going to make you look more suspicious. So they let it slide. And then, just before their property was due to arrive from the UK, John took a flight back to England. He said he missed his sons. And on December 1st, he walked into the Cleveland police station, saying he'd been suffering from a fugue state for five years, and had only just gotten some of his memory back. One of the first things the police noticed was how tan and healthy he looked and how nice his

clothes were. It was all extremely suspicious. I get the impression that they didn't buy any of it, not from minute one. So, of course, as word got out about the return of the canoe man, Anne was immediately inundated with attention from the press. British reporter David Lee found her first, hold up in the new apartment in Panama. Interestingly, Lee said she wouldn't come to the door for like minutes and minutes. He just kept knocking and knocking and knocking and finally she opened up.

She was probably just hold up and they're like, maybe if I ignore him, he will go away. When he gave her the news that her husband was alive, Anne seemed shocked but happy, she gave Lee an exclusive interview. Oh, it's a Christmas miracle, blah, blah, blah. Oh, man, you absolute acorn. Unfortunately for her, it didn't take long for the photos of her and John and Panama to surface. Photos that were taken, mind you, 18 months before he claimed his memory came back. When David Lee confronted her with the photo of the two of them with the realtor, she seemed, quote, visibly distressed.

She finally said, I guess that picture says an awful lot, doesn't it? Yeah. Anne returned to the UK shortly after on the same flight as the reporter, and on the way she told him the whole story, the real one. When she landed in England, the police took her off the plane and arrested her right at the airport. One detective called her a compulsive liar. She copped the whole thing under interrogation.

She said she never expected John's disappearance to get so much attention. Yeah, that's a really common blind spot for people who commit crimes and pull hoaxes. We said, I think, in our Scott Peterson episode that one of the reasons Scott made so many dipship mistakes was because he never expected Lacey's disappearance to get so much media attention. He expected it to blow over quietly, which, by the way, most of the time it would have back then. Lacey's case was really one of the first in this country that ever blew up the way it did. sure so he never expected Amber Fry to find out and go to the police and I think it just was all spiraling down from there with him I can only imagine what their sons Mark and Anthony were going through right about then at first they told the press that their father couldn't remember anything since the year 2000 so obviously it took a while to dawn on them that their parents had been pulling a scam this whole time but dawn on them it did eventually and as you can can imagine they took it big. They took it even bigger when they found out that their mom had used

them to launder money by transferring money to foreign bank accounts. They'd done that for her in total innocence, never realizing what was really going on. They used their kids to commit fraud while letting them believe that their dad was dead and their mom was in horrible grief. Oh my God. These people are the literal worst. Uh-huh. After that, the sons announced to the press that their parents were essentially dead to them. They planned to never speak to either of them again. Good for them.

God, those poor boys. We should be clear, by the way, the police thoroughly investigated the sons and found that they had nothing to do with the scam. But there's a bonkers little postscript to that story, which shows that no matter how much we may hate it, we are always our parents' children on some level. After his dad came back to town and he realized he'd been lied to for five years, one of John's son, I don't know which, cleaned out his flat and left without warning. Yep. And he left a notebook full of coded messages for his girlfriend and directions for her to get to London City Airport.

Now, if that ain't a John Darwin move right there, I don't know what is. It's like this whole family are Jason-born wannabes. They just can't help themselves. But obviously, I cannot blame the poor dude for skipping town. I'm just not sure he needed to do it in quite such a dramatic fashion. Like, I think if at any point in your life, you think, I think the solution to my problem is a coded message notebook and you are not a fully fledged spy. Just cross that off your list. You don't need a coded notebook.

You don't. Perhaps the cheese has started to slide up. off the cracker at that point. Just saying. So, all of this begs the question. Why did Darwin come home at all? They weren't getting away with it. So what the hell?

Okay, so Darwin's official line to the police was that he'd always intended to pay back the money once he'd settled all his debts. But then, you know, amnesia and whatnot. But then his memory started to come back, he said, and he was missing his boys. Mm-hmm. Sure,

The far more likely explanation is that John had gotten wind of the fact that a police investigation had been quietly launched back in September of that year. On one of her short, John's back to the UK to put the house up for sale and take care of shipping their stuff over to Panama and stuff, an acquaintance of Anne's had overheard her talking to John on the phone. And then she got to thinking about all that life insurance money that Anne had collected after John's death. and then she got to thinking about how Anne was planning this out of nowhere move to Panama and she put two and two together and got this bitch is lying and so is her asshole probably not dead husband and she called the police and apparently there were a few other tips as well including one about you guessed it that picture the realtor had taken of Anne and John on their first trip to Panama

so he was being investigated he most likely realized it and decided that his best bet was to try to get ahead of the game. So he came up with this absurd amnesia bollocks and flew home. Did he expect to get away with that? Probably. Arrogant people usually do. So like I said earlier, John claimed he'd always intended to pay the money back. But we have our doubts, as did the police.

He sure moved an awful lot of cash around offshore banks for one thing. That, plus all the cash he dropped on potential, cattle ranches and boats built for 1970s royalty and Panamanian property sure doesn't seem like he was skrimping and saving to pay back the insurance companies now, does it? Yeah, I call bullshite. And so did the Crown Prosecutor. John was charged with obtaining life insurance money by deception and making untrue statements to obtain a passport and ended up sentenced to six years and three months in prison. Anne was charged with fraud too and got six years and six months.

They both had the damn nerve to appeal their sentences, but they were both shot down. I think they got off easy. They should have been charged with devastating the hearts of their poor kids and sentenced to being fired out of a cannon into space. That's what I think. And wherever you are, Mark and Anthony, if you ever hear this, we are so sorry that your parents suck this much.

You did not deserve any of this, and we hope you're doing well. So Anne and Loseris are both out of prison now, of course. John is remarried to a woman half his age just out of interest and living in the Philippines and God only knows what he's up to now because people like John they never stop scheming so we might not have heard the last of him

the Crown Prosecutor actually managed to recover the money they stole by the way by selling off some of their Panamanian property and I love this apparently John's father always suspected that he'd faked his own death in fact shortly after John went missing Mr. Darwin Sr. told the police there's something not right about this.

There's more going on than it appears. He knew what his kid was, didn't he? And his auntie felt the same way, too. When John reappeared claiming amnesia, she told the media, to be honest, I don't believe he ever got wet. I love his auntie. I think she was also the one that said

that he wasn't as smart with money as he thought, too. Correct, yes. Ante throw in shade. She's an agony aunt. Anyway, this story has inspired several soap opera plots, novels, and TV movies as well. And, okay, Katie, I promised to read you one of the sexy emails, Johnson Ann, while he was in Panama, and she was back in the UK, right? I know you've been on the edge of your seat, waiting. Whitney, I would rather, and I cannot emphasize this enough, die, than sit through an entire email written by the

this Lifetime Movie Reject. Okay, well, I'll only read you one line. Thank God. Or maybe two. But I think it really encapsulates the spirit of the thing. So John wrote, Well, you sexy beast. Imagine it in Austin Powers' voice, and it won't be so horrible.

Well, you sexy beast, I am standing on the balcony in the nutty, typing this to you. Just hope the mosquitoes or other bugs don't bite, or at least not in a certain place. Don't want it all lumpy, L-O-L. I think we'll leave you with that. So that was a wild one, right, campers? You know we'll have another one for you next week. But for now, lock your doors, light your lights, and stay safe

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