The wife of "back-from-the-dead" canoeist John Darwin played her role in defrauding £250,000 with “superb aplomb”, a British court heard today.
Anne Darwin (56) convinced insurance companies, a coroner, and her sons that her husband had died in a canoe accident, Teesside Crown Court heard.
She denies six counts of deception and nine of money laundering that related to her alleged activity following Mr Darwin’s disappearance in March 2002 from the sea by their home in Seton Carew, near Hartlepool.
Andrew Robertson QC, prosecuting, told the jury: “They [the couple] were at risk of being made bankrupt - the shame and embarrassment of which neither of them wished to face. Out of this dire financial situation, seeds of this fraud were born.
“The initial idea may well have been John Darwin’s rather than Anne’s but, in the Crown’s submission, it was a scheme in which Anne Darwin not only played an equal and vital role but it was a role which she played with superb aplomb.”
Mr Robertson said the plan to stage Mr Darwin’s death and then claim insurance and pension money was simple.
“It was obviously going to require a considerable amount of guile, convincing pretence, persistence and guts on the part of Anne Darwin to see it through,” the barrister said.
“Her role was a positive one. John Darwin, after supposedly disappearing, had simply to keep his head down so the falsity of his disappearance would not be rumbled by anybody."
Mr Robertson said Mrs Darwin was always aware that her husband was alive.
She convinced various insurance companies that Mr Darwin had drowned while canoeing, he said, adding: “She also convinced the local coroner, the police and, most poignantly of all, her own children.
“She convinced them herself that their father was dead and that they would never see him again.”
Mr Robertson said Mrs Darwin’s defence was an unusual one of “marital coercion”.
Mr Robertson said: “It is the Crown’s case that she and her husband, John Darwin, obtained over £250,000 by means of this fraud, and by the time the fraud was uncovered she had transferred the funds to Panama in South America where she was then living.
“The funds were invested in land, property and foreign bank accounts in her name.
“You will see in due course how she and her husband, John, worked a complex web of transactions between various bank accounts making the finances all the more difficult to trace, before finally putting them beyond the jurisdiction of our English courts in that foreign land," the prosecution counsel said.
PA